Heir. And the Hard Word Right Next to It. | Romans 8:17

Somebody put a sheet cake in the workroom for you once. Five years, or ten, or twenty. There were paper plates and a plastic knife and the senior pastor said something kind about faithfulness. And you stood there holding a paper plate thinking about a Tuesday four months earlier, when you sat in a chair in an office and heard something about yourself you have never repeated to anyone. Both of those happened at the same church. Both of them are yours.

Paul puts those two things in one sentence and does not apologize for it. Romans 8:17. World English Bible. "And if children, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ, if indeed we suffer with him, that we may also be glorified with him."

Watch the words stack. Children means you belong. Heirs means you inherit. Joint heirs means you inherit the same thing the Son inherits, not a smaller allotment set aside for staff. The Greek is synklēronomos. A co-holder of the estate. And then, in the same breath: if indeed we suffer with him. Paul is not saying the suffering buys the inheritance. He is saying the inheritance runs through a particular country, and the Son already walked it.

I almost lost my job about five years in. I stayed at that church twenty years, and there were five or six moments when I would have felt completely justified walking out, and the Lord never opened that door. The twenty years and the five or six moments were not two different stories. They were one story. The inheritance came through the road, not around it.

Most of us do one of two things with verse seventeen. We take the first half and skip the second, which gives us an inheritance with no road, and that version does not survive contact with a hard year. Or we take the second half and skip the first, which gives us a road with no inheritance, and that is endurance dressed up as faith. Paul refuses both. He hands you the whole sentence.

Name one hard stretch of ministry you would delete if you could. Now ask whether you would also delete who you became in it.