Romans 8:23 | You Are Not Unspiritual for Aching | Formation to Transformation

There is a pair of reading glasses living on your music stand now. You did not decide to put them there. They just started showing up, next to the capo and the pick you keep meaning to replace, because somewhere in the last few years the chord chart got smaller. Your knee tells you about the third song. Your left shoulder knows exactly which case you have been carrying since you were twenty four. You turn the wedges down one more notch every couple of years and you tell yourself it is the room.

Paul is writing about a body. Romans 8:23. World English Bible. "Not only so, but ourselves also, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting for adoption, the redemption of our body."

First fruits is a farming word. The first basket off a field that is still standing. Real grain, in your hands, out of the actual crop. Here is what to get right. You do not have a slice of the Spirit with more Spirit on the way. You have the Spirit. He is the slice. What has not arrived is not more of him. It is the harvest he is proof of. So the ache is not the absence of the Spirit. The ache is what having him does to you.

I finished a dissertation on worship a couple of years back, and I will say this plainly. I feel like I know less about worship now, after learning all the things, than I ever have. Ten years ago I would have answered your question faster and with a lot more confidence, and I would also have been far more uninformed than I am now. More did not settle me. More made me hungrier. That is this verse, running in a life.

Then Paul says the strangest thing in the sentence. We are waiting for adoption. Which is odd, because eight verses back he already told us you received it. Both are true. The paperwork is done. What has not arrived is the body. Not the escape from it. The redemption of it. The knee, the shoulder, the ears you have spent a career damaging on purpose for other people.

Name the one thing about yourself you have been calling a spiritual problem. Then ask whether it is the Spirit in you, doing what he does.