“Not only that, but we ourselves who have the Spirit as the firstfruits—we also groan within ourselves, eagerly waiting for adoption, the redemption of our bodies.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

As a pastor, I’ve done a lot of funerals. Now, by virtue of pastoring churches with a number of young families that aren’t mostly gray-haired, aging congregations, I haven’t done as many as some guys who have been in ministry as long as I have, but I’ve done my fair share. There is a kind of groaning that comes with age. Some of it is, of course, physical and audible. But a bigger part is existential. We know we are slowly dying (or perhaps quickly dying depending on circumstances), and we long for relief from it. Not the relief of death, but something entirely more substantial than that. We long for restoration. Well, this is part of the Gospel’s good news. Let’s explore it some today.

Let me give you a quick peak behind the curtain out of the gate here. While we’re slowly working out through Romans 8, I’m studying my way through Romans 10. Writing a blog from scratch takes somewhere between 45 minutes on the short end and upwards of a couple hours on the longer end. Writing from total scratch as I often do on Fridays takes longest.

Because of that, I typically try to write myself a little bit on a blog sometime before I sit down to do the main writing. These take the form of the hook paragraph you see in the email if you subscribe. That gives me enough to go on so that when I sit to do the actual writing sometime later, I have a basic idea of where I’m going that day.

These generally get written down as I work through each chapter whether that’s where I am in the actual writing or not. There have been some seasons when I’ve been only a passage or two ahead of myself. Lately, thanks to a couple of non-writing trips (and I’ve got another of those coming up in a few weeks), I’ve gotten pretty far ahead on those. Thus we’re in chapter 8 while I’m in chapter 10.

All of that is to say, I first wrote the introduction for today’s blog more than a month ago. When I was reflecting on this particular verse someone specific came to mind. I thought about Bea Goodman.

Mrs. Bea, as most everyone who’s not family calls her, had then fairly recently gotten the news that her heart was in pretty bad shape and that given the laundry list of other things going on, she likely didn’t have very long to live.

Now, while some people might react to that news with sadness or anguish or fear or anger or some other understandably morose emotion, that is not what Mrs. Bea said. Instead, she looked at her daughters who were there with her in the hospital and somewhat tauntingly said, “See, I told you I was dying.”

That might sound like a strange reaction, but not if you understood Mrs. Bea. Knowing her a little better would help you see why she came to mind when I read this verse. Look again at what Paul wrote here: “Not only that, but we ourselves who have the Spirit as the firstfruits—we also groan within ourselves, eagerly waiting for adoption, the redemption of our bodies.”

Paul has been talking about how creation itself is groaning for our redemption. This is because creation will experience freedom from the stifling, debilitating effects of sin in conjunction with our experience. This intense longing for redemption, to have things restored to the glory they once held, is not, however, something that is somehow limited to the natural world. We experience this longing ourselves in our own bodies.

You’ve likely seen this in the people around you. You’ve perhaps been near someone struggling under the weight of some physical malady that seemed to plague them without letting up. They groaned for relief. Sometimes that groaning was just emotional, but I suspect that it was at least occasionally verbal. More than watching another person go through something like this, you’ve probably experienced it yourself. You’ve hurt…for weeks…for months even, and felt like there was no relief available. You groaned for that which you could not find or obtain on your own.

What Paul is saying here is that as followers of Jesus, all such groaning is not only understandable, it is right and proper. If Jesus didn’t come walking back out of that tomb on the third day, and if God’s eternal kingdom in which all things will be fully and finally restored isn’t waiting for us at the end of this age, then all such groaning is pointless. That brokenness, that pain, that agony is just how the world is. Groaning is just meaningless sound that doesn’t contribute anything to the suffering. It’s better to suffer in silence than to force others to join in your pain with you.

But if Jesus is alive, and if God’s perfect kingdom is something coming our way, then while the groaning still doesn’t add much of anything to the world around us, it is at least understandable. We are longing for that which we have been promised and will one day have. We are aching with eagerness for the day when “He will wipe away every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; grief, crying, and pain will be no more, because the previous things have passed away.” We do indeed “groan within ourselves, eagerly waiting for adoption, the redemption of our bodies.”

Mrs. Bea longed for the redemption of her body that Paul was talking about here. She had been struggling under the weight of a body that was broken in an increasing number of ways for a long time. More than once in the eight years I’ve known her she faced some dire-seeming medical diagnosis that she was sure was finally going to be the one that brought her the sweet relief of freedom from her mortality, and a reunion with Jesus and her late husband and friends who had passed before her, things she was even more sure of than her next breath that she was stepping into when her eyes closed on this life.

She asked her children more than once especially in recent months why God wouldn’t just take her. Was He upset with her? Was she being punished for some reason? Over and over again they would patiently reassure her that, no, none of that was true. God is the author of life she had long known Him to be, and He would take her a step closer to her eternal home in His perfect timing.

And make no mistake: her confidence in her destination was absolute. She spent many, many long years following Jesus, pursuing Him through prayer, pursuing Him through an active engagement with His word, pursuing Him through the context of the body of Christ. She had spent a lifetime doing the daily, often seemingly mundane work of growing and strengthening her faith. She was a much beloved member of her community because of the faithful, beneficial, relational investment she had made in it not simply through all the good she added to it, but through the good she accomplished through her kids and her grandkids and her great-grandkids, a great many of whom are actively, faithfully serving the Lord and the advance of His kingdom, continuing the legacy she started. Mrs. Bea has had a generational impact on this community. Her legacy is one that will absolutely continue and multiply whether she is here or not.

Well, Mrs. Bea went home to be with Jesus this past Saturday. She finally got her wish. I’m going to play a role in celebrating her life tomorrow afternoon. So, the hook I wrote over a month ago, thinking about Mrs. Bea, wound up falling on the day before her service because she finally got to go be with her Lord like she wanted. God’s timing is something we don’t often pay much attention to, but sometimes it’s hard to miss just how good it really is.

Mrs. Bea isn’t groaning anymore. She is sighing in relief; eternal relief. She’s not fully complete quite yet. She’s still waiting for her new body that will be fit for eternity, but all of the pain and agony and frustration of recent years, of nearly a century’s worth of journeying through a world broken by sin has come to a sweet end. She closed her eyes on this life and opened her spiritual eyes on Jesus.

Our groanings and longings for our adoption, the redemption of our bodies will indeed come to an end one day. If our hope is in Jesus as Mrs. Bea’s unquestioningly was, while the day won’t be easy – no death is – those we have left behind and who understand what’s true as we did will be able to rejoice more than they will mourn. Their mourning will turn to dancing. They’ll know even as we did that the separation of death is only a momentary one ahead of a much, much longer reunion. So groan, but groan in hope. And if you can’t do that, then reevaluate what you believe so that you can. Jesus is waiting.