Romans 8

So there are a couple of ways of going through the world: you can and follow after the things you can see and touch or you can try and pick your way after Jesus, even though you can't see or touch Him and the ways that you know Him will feel counterintuitive a lot of the time. Because when Jesus came He brought a new law, one that offered an escape from sin and death, and by this new law, you can feel your way after Him. But to make the law live—we are the life of the law—we have to follow it and fill it, we must walk by faith and hope, following after things we can't see or touch. 

Because if you model your life after the things you can see and touch, then that's it, that's all you're becoming, physical and material and tangible. And those aren't bad, God is in those things too. But, like God, you're more than that. You are beyond the touchable, and you have to make place for those unseeable things in you, you have to follow after them to become them. As you fill the law with life, so it fills you with life and peace. To neglect this side of yourself is to reject the best of God's gifts, to refuse his law. You can't make God happy when you're forgetting the most important parts of yourself.

Because you're not just tangible, you're also intangible. You're not just body, you're also spirit. And because you are both of those things, there is space in you for the Spirit of God, and making space for that Spirit, that's how we make ourselves God's. It's how we become His kids. Because you don't have to stand in front of God as a slave—you are His child. You get to go to Him and say, "Dad. Daddy." You get to inherit what He is, just as Jesus did.

And if that requires suffering, as it did with Jesus, then we'll do that together, and we'll be glorified and become gods together too. Because whatever hurt you're going through right now—and it might be big, at some point it will be so big that it looms over you, so that you can't imagine life outside it's shadow, and you can't imagine walking around it or climbing over it, so the only option seems to be to curl up under it—but no matter how big your hurt is, it isn't anything compared to the good that is coming for you. And that doesn't make your hurt small, your pain is real. It just means that there's an entire scale you don't have access to yet, but you will if you hang on. Hang in there, because there's good beyond anything you've experienced, anything you can conceptualize.

But even though you can't experience it yet and you can't conceptualize it, there's something in you that reaches for it, that will know it when it approaches. Because, right now, it's like all of creation is holding is breath, waiting for the light and glory and liberty of the Lord to burst out from behind the shadows we live under. 

For now, we're saved by hope—hope in things that we can't see, but that we know enough to wait for, to hold our breath for. And while we wait, we will be healed, slowly, so slowly, through our clumsy prayers. Which doesn't at all mean that things go well for us, because, let's be honest, a lot of this sucks. But we know—we know, because we've seen it—that all things works together for the good of those who love God, those who stumble after him. We are called and redeemed and justified and glorified, not once, but over and over again, with every rising sun, with every granted breath. 

He loves Jesus, but he asked Jesus to suffer pain, to suffer all, to give up and give all, for us. Do you think God is holding anything back? After that?

And if God is with us, who can stand against us? 

So what can to separate you from God's love? Exhaustion? Heartbreak? Violence, physical or emotional or spiritual or sexual or racial? Fear or despair or hunger or distraction or pettiness or pride or mental illness or addiction? Because those things are coming for you, make no mistake. But through God we are more than conquers of them. Because I'm convinced, none of these things—not death or sickness or heartbreak or failure at work or at school or broken relationships, not things that are happening or the things about to, not distance or time—none of this can separate us from the love of God.