Lately I’ve started to come to understand Romans 8:18-30, and particularly Romans 8:23 more than I ever have before. The biggest theme of the Advent season is one of waiting with expectation for the day when we celebrate the coming of our Savior into the world in the form of a baby. I’ve definitely been focusing much more on such a theme of expectation during this season of Advent than I have ever done before. That entrance of Christ into the world was revolutionary.
There are those events that take place in our lives that we look to as category shifters. We look at them by saying something like: “there was life before 9/11 and life after,” or “life before colonization and life after,” or “life before the day I met you and after,” etc. The birth of Jesus took that to an extreme. No other single event in history has caused us to completely change our calendar to express life before and after an event. Isn’t that incredible? And so it is now that we eagerly await the day when we celebrate his birth; the day history changed forever. But, for those who are followers of that very Jesus, we eagerly await something else as well.
As followers we eagerly await the time when he will come again, when the kingdom of God is brought to complete fruition. This too has become all the more evident this Advent season for me. So many places in scripture we see prophecies pointing to this baby, even referring to the very way that he would come, as a child. For hundreds of years they had been expecting this Savior! And now it is the same with Christians. For hundreds of years we have been expecting our savior to return to us. Paul tells us in the aforementioned passage that creation itself is groaning out for the future hope. Think about that for just a second. Creation is making a deep, inarticulate sound, in response to the pain and despair it is going through as it eagerly awaits the finality of the kingdom of God.
So it is during this season that I pray that as an individual who has experienced the moving of the Holy Spirit, that I can groan inwardly because of the pain of all of creation, longing to be restored to it’s rightful purpose. Not only do I long to groan, but I long to respond the way that Jesus did. If my faith is not revolutionary, something is deeply wrong. Faith in Christ is something that should be a category shifter. Our faith as believers in the savior that came into the world as a baby should cause us to create those same events that we look to as life changers. People should be saying, “there was life before Roland and life after Roland.”
You see, Christ never separated the spiritual from the social. Yes, his salvation is personal in the sense that we must believe in him and allow him to change our beings. But there is something else that happens with belief. Belief leads us to social action. In all of Jesus’ miracles, the miracle itself either freed the miraclee (ya, I just made up that word) to live in society in ways that they couldn’t have before, or Jesus miracles directly impacted a social situation or social thought process. Salvation meant a complete shift in some sort of social understanding. This Advent, I’m groaning. That groaning isn’t a selfish groaning, it’s a groaning for change in this world we live in; a groaning for the moment when the kingdom has completely come.
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