A little more on getting sorted today. Yesterday I suggested that one good reason for seeking healing was that we need it. We are broken, we are imperfect and the best thing would be for us to seek out God’s healing touch. Today I want to suggest another good reason – you can decide for yourself whether it’s better than yesterday’s – and that is we need to get whole for creation’s sake.

There are a couple of major themes in Romans 8 – our sonship in Christ and creation’s eager wait for restoration. In verse 19 Paul suggests that there is a link between the two. Here’s what he says: ‘For the anxious longing of the creation waits eagerly for the revealing of the sons of God’. Normally we interpret this ‘revealing’ as the sons of God – that is, those who follow Jesus – being revealed to creation as those whom God has called, renewed, restored etc. It is the creation that gets to know about our status in Christ and then gets to be a part of that restoration itself.

But what if there is another way of reading this verse? Is it possible to read it as not just creation getting to know who the sons of God are, but that the sons themselves keep getting more and more revelation about who they are? That this revelation of their status as the adopted sons of God grows within their hearts until it finally dawns on them who they truly are and that propels them into creation as agents of God’s mission in this world?

I would link this thought with the Gospel accounts of Jesus temptation in the desert where satan (or Jesus’ own inner voice if you prefer a non-supernatural view) challenges who he was – ‘If you are the Son of God’ (Matt 4:3). This challenge to his identity as a son of God, if successful, could have scuppered God’s plans, for Jesus could have easily retreated from the scene feeling quite mixed up on the inside about his role in life. Knowing who he was was crucial to his participation in God’s mission.

The same is true for us, I believe. The more we know ourselves as God’s children, God’s favourites, God’s loved and valued sons and daughters, the more dangerous we will be in God’s great mission to restore the Kingdom. And in my experience the thing that gets most in the way of m understanding of who I am is my stuff – the lies I have believed about myself many years ago.

Is this true for you?

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