“including you who are called to belong to Jesus Christ”
– [romans 1:6]
we are called to belong
where do you belong?
willingly or not, each of us belongs to a lot of different groups. personally, i can be grouped with gen xer’s, with musicians, with pumpkin spice aficionados, with blues fans, and so on. sometimes i lean into these identities, wear them on t-shirts, and embrace them proudly. other times i go through a day without thinking of them much at all.
we are all grouped into lists such as these, and they can go a long way towards defining our identity.
yet in the midst of the fun and quirky identities we use to define ourselves, we often feel ‘lost in the shuffle’.
being a blues fan is fun in the moment, but it not enough to make me feel true ‘belonging’ (especially when they lose).
being gen x just means i happened to be born at the same time as a lot of people who watched the same tv shows.
these definitions may be accurate, but they don’t bring any fulfillment.
in his opening salutation to the church in rome, paul addresses a group of people to whom, on the surface, he didn’t belong.
he had never been to rome, and spent most of his life in a far realm of the empire. yet he immediately reminds them of what binds them all together. not their culture, not their generation, not their backgrounds, not their politics.
they were bound together eternally in Christ.
they belonged to something bigger than any other identities.
and they didn’t just belong, they were called to belong.
Jesus calls us to himself, and in Him we are never, ever on the outside.
we need never be lonely.
we need never be afraid.
we need never feel we don’t belong.
we are loved, and we belong.
we have a kinship that stretches through millennia, binding us to people like paul and the romans to whom he wrote this letter. despite languages, cultures, distance and time, we are bound with believers through history who were called to belong to Jesus Christ, and we are called to belong to every believer on the face of the earth today.
praise be to God that we are truly His, and His calling is eternal and unfailing!
~ jason soroski