What Does It Mean to Belong?
Heidelberg Catechism • Sermon • Submitted
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There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. For the law of the Spirit of life has set you free in Christ Jesus from the law of sin and death. For God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do. By sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, he condemned sin in the flesh, in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit. For those who live according to the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh, but those who live according to the Spirit set their minds on the things of the Spirit. For to set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace. For the mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God, for it does not submit to God’s law; indeed, it cannot. Those who are in the flesh cannot please God.
You, however, are not in the flesh but in the Spirit, if in fact the Spirit of God dwells in you. Anyone who does not have the Spirit of Christ does not belong to him. But if Christ is in you, although the body is dead because of sin, the Spirit is life because of righteousness. If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through his Spirit who dwells in you.
So then, brothers, we are debtors, not to the flesh, to live according to the flesh. For if you live according to the flesh you will die, but if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live. For all who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God. For you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received the Spirit of adoption as sons, by whom we cry, “Abba! Father!” The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs—heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ, provided we suffer with him in order that we may also be glorified with him.
Scripture: Romans 8:1-17
Sermon Title: What Does It Mean to Belong?
While Pastor Gary leads us through the book of Ezekiel when we gather in Corsica, I am planning to preach alongside the Heidelberg Catechism when I am preaching in the afternoons and evenings. We start today reflecting on the most well-known of the questions and answers, Q&A 1. As we turn our attention to this first part of Romans 8, one of the passages providing the foundation and substance of that answer, we will be focusing on what it means to belong wholly and forever to Christ, to belong to him for our salvation, and to belong to him as a community made willing and ready to live for him.
Brothers and sisters in Christ, we confessed a little bit earlier, “I belong—body and soul, in life and in death—to my faithful Savior Jesus Christ.” What does it mean to belong though? Most, if not all, of us would say we belong to our local churches. We belong to our families; whether or not we always like the ones we have been born or grown up in, we belong to them. We may belong to different companies, different committees, different circles of people that we call our friends. For us, belonging carries the idea of membership with others who share particular ancestry, traits, or interests. One dictionary defines belonging as being “proper, appropriate, or suitable;” that which belongs “fits in naturally or rightly to a specified category.”
When we look at the Catechism or what we came across in the text we just read in Romans 8, is this the type of belonging that is communicated when we confess that we belong to Christ? Do we belong to him like we belong to our local church membership, like we belong to the fan base and support of Corsica-Stickney or Dakota Christian, to Dakota Wesleyan or Northwestern or Dordt? Do we belong to Christ simply because the benefits package sounds great? I hope this afternoon that we can say our belonging to Christ is different from all of those things which we might belong to here on earth. The way some of us can be loyal to sports’ teams, hopefully our belonging to God is much greater than that. Belonging to Christ is much more than simply being set free from hell to live with Christ.
But I wonder if those things are the reality for how many people in the church tend to live our lives? It is easy to have this mindset that “belonging to Christ” simply required us to sign-up, through baptism, through public profession of faith in front of church—once we have done those things, we can firmly say we belong to Christ. We can come to him when we feel like we need him, we can celebrate him when something exciting happens, but for the most part, we do not need to worry about changing how we live. Hopefully that sounds kind of silly—it is true that belonging to Christ is very little about what we do, it is not about our work. Belonging is first and foremost about God’s claim on his people in and through his Son, but that has major implications on how we are to live.
Romans 8 began, “Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, because through Christ Jesus the law of the Spirit of life set me free from the law of sin and death.” Paul had just finished laying out through the end of chapter 7 what the sinful nature is, and how believers wage a battle to delight in God’s law yet have sin seeking to bring them down into its death. It is into that understanding that Paul tells the Roman church that though they are guilty of sin, their verdict comes back not guilty; they are not sentenced to punishment.
For them and for us, people who recognize that sin stains us, that sin puts us so at odds with God, and that fair punishment would be our eternal death—Paul says you are free! No condemnation—the charges that have been fairly made against us because we have sinned have not stuck! How is that possible? Only because of Christ, only because of what Jesus did in taking on sin and its condemnation; he alone fulfilled what the law required of us. We belong wholly and forever to Christ—that freedom, that sentence of mercy never runs out. Believers go from being controlled, having the sinful nature as the dominant force in their lives to having the Holy Spirit breathe life into them. The Spirit of God changes us, changes our desires, changes who it is we want to serve in our lives. He gives us what really matters, “our spirit,” we read in verse 10, “is alive because of righteousness.”
Paul wrote to the church effectively telling them that they belong to God—they who have the Spirit of Christ in them, belong to Christ. The Greek word that he uses again and again in this passage is “eimi”—that is a verb that functions like English “to be” verbs. What that means is that for you to belong to Christ means that you literally are his. Think back to the start of the catechism, “I am not my own;” I am not independent, I am not living life on my own terms, I am not a person who freely does what I want, “but I belong to Jesus Christ.” That is for us to say, “I am his,” “we are his!” He shows us how to live, he gives meaning to this life that we live, he holds for us what is most important and most beneficial for this life as well as the life to come. This is the foundation upon which our lives are built—that they only have substance if Christ is in us and if we live unto Christ. That is where the understanding of our existence has hope.
To belong wholly to Christ means that we see our entire existence as part of the grander story of God creating and redeeming his creation. That hope is very much for us in this life and the change that happens—but it is also for the life to come. The second section of Heidelberg answer 1 emphasizes that “Christ has fully paid for all my sins with his precious blood and has set me free from the tyranny of the devil…all things must work together for my salvation.” Belonging to Christ has an understanding that he is our salvation, and it is only by him that salvation is possible!
In Romans 8, verses 3 and 4, Paul wrote “For what the law was powerless to do in that it was weakened by the sinful nature, God did by sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful man to be a sin offering. And so he condemned sin in sinful man, in order that the righteous requirements of the law might be fully met in us, who do not live according to the sinful nature but according to the Spirit.” Jesus died on the cross for the sins of humankind that we might be freed from death right now and not yet
Salvation, as told to us in Scripture and as confessed in the Catechism, is introduced to our lives at the moment we have received and accepted the grace of Christ; salvation is the process of hope breaking into how we live in every sphere of our existence. Salvation includes our being set free from sin and being washed clean, but it’s also that by which we are reborn and called to live to glorify God right now. Because Jesus became a man, put on the body that reflects sin but did not have or commit any sin, he was able to take upon himself what we deserve and so give us new life. His action of dying but then rising again allowed all authority to go to him, including the authority to send his people the Holy Spirit.
The authors of the Catechism intended for this to be a comfort for believers. As we live our lives, we would know how our salvation has happened, and we would know it to be true and sure. There is new life now but there is also eternal life to come—and we have no need to wonder if that is for us. Brothers and sisters, I want to ask you, can you and do you, believe it? “Because I belong to him, Christ, by his Holy Spirit, assures me of eternal life.” There is nothing that makes you or me different from anyone else in the world other than we belong to Jesus. Even when we belong to him, we sin and should continually confess that we have not obeyed God or given him the honor he deserves. Yet if we truly belong to him, we can be assured that we have eternal life. Until Christ comes again, we can have total confidence that we will live and rest in the presence of God forever. It may seem too good to be true, but we can be confident of this.
Where does this confidence come from? What we find in verses 10 and 11, “But if Christ is in you, your body is dead because of sin, yet your spirit is alive because of righteousness. And if the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead is living in you, he who raised Christ from the dead will also give life to your moral bodies through his Spirit, who lives in you.” The one who gave life back to Jesus is able and willing to give life back into us. The way this is written is such that those who receive life—the Spirit—it is for good, you cannot lose it. We did not do anything to get it, and in fact, we receive the life of salvation despite everything we have done.
On Friday night, Christie and I were in Sioux Falls at Cornerstone Prison Church in the State Penitentiary. Some of you maybe have visited there or another prison church before. But you go there and they lead you through the gates, up and down stairs, through hallways until you come into a room that looks like a typical sanctuary. As you are walking in, you are walking side-by-side with inmates; when you take your seat, you are sitting right next to someone who has been sentenced as a criminal; when it is time to greet one another during the service and fellowship following—you are shaking the hand of and interacting with a brother in Christ. Their clothes are different—prison uniforms that say “inmate” or “maximum security” across the back. Their stories tend to be a bit different from most of ours. Yet they are brothers in Christ; we were worshipping with people who belong to him.
When we come to the end of our passage, Paul says “You did not receive a spirit that makes you a slave again to fear, but your received the Spirit of sonship. And by him we cry,
‘Father.’ The Spirit himself testifies without our spirit that we are God’s children.” That we, Paul and the whole church in Rome, and the whole church throughout all of history, and believers in Corsica, Harrison, New Holland, Armour, Geddes, Platte, Stickney, Aurora Center, and believers currently incarcerated in the South Dakota prison system—we are all God’s children. “We are heirs…of God and co-heirs with Christ.” We are brothers and sisters with one another, sharing in the benefit of salvation, that work that Christ accomplished, but also sharing now in suffering and his glory. Jesus Christ is our brother, we who are gathered here today, and he is also a brother to those men who are locked up.
The first answer of the Catechism ends on this note, that because we belong to Christ, “[He by his Holy Spirit] makes me wholeheartedly willing and ready from now on to live for him.” Whether it takes hearing it one time or hundreds of times, when we receive the promises that God communicates to us through his Word, his Son, and his Spirit, it becomes undeniable that we are called to new life and to do so together. In verse 12, Paul said, “Therefore, brothers, we have an obligation—,” and that obligation is defined in verse 13, “by the Spirit you put to the death the misdeeds of the body.” Because we belong to God—that belonging is already in place—we have a responsibility to get rid of the sinful nature and to live according to the Spirit.
Living according to the Spirit is in all things, in all of life, for all who he has chosen. God has come into our hearts and minds, but he also has entered into those of the prisoners we worshipped with. He has brought us and them to know and trust that we are his. Some of those men have killed people, some of them will never get out, but God has worked and is working in them; he has forgiven them of their past. They have received his grace, and are now looking to what kind of living he calls them to in the present and the future. If God can grow in the lives of inmates, how much more fruit shall he produce in our freedom?
When you can confess that we belong to Christ in such a way that it is the truth we hold so dear for our lives now as well as after we die to this world, then we are called to have no hesitation to the will of God. Our obligation to put the sinful nature in us to death may cause some pain, it may be hard to let go of some of the past—the pleasure, but the joy and peace we have in life with Christ far surpasses the pain and our former lives. We have a God who can transform any one that he wills, and we can know that he watches over every single action, every single minute detail. To experience his gift of grace, we live in the surety of sharing in his glory.
It’s amazing that the God who was before all things and who created all things, watches over us every single second of every day, and he knows exactly what the future holds too. Throughout all of time, he is unchanging and so are his promises. Our belonging to Christ is something that has been known in the presence of the Trinity before the foundations of the earth were laid. All the work that’s left for us to do is to open our eyes to see what’s going on and to open our hearts, our hands, and our feet to allow the Spirit to work through us for Him. Abraham Kuyper made that famous declaration, “There is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human life over which Christ, who is Sovereign of all, does not cry: Mine!” If we can say that we belong to him, and believe that our entire way of living is wrapped up in the risen Lord, then we cannot leave God out of any part of our lives! God exists and better yet, he faithfully lives, breathes, and interacts with his people inside and outside of church buildings, in those who have known him all their lives and those who meet him at their lowest point.
We do not belong to ourselves; our faith and our salvation have been given as a gift to us but it is then to resonate in all the parts of our lives. Belonging to Christ demands our faithful response, to turn to God and embrace his promise of grace in prayer and thanksgiving. Brothers and sisters in Christ let that sink in. The work of Christ, his choosing us, gives us freedom. Our freedom is to receive the promise that our Creator controls all things, that we can be sure of our salvation for this life and the next, and the promise that we are transformed to live lives of gratefulness. What a comfort, what a hope, what a joyful obligation, Amen!