Our vocation as God’s renewed people is to embody Christ’s covenantal-faithfulness for the sake of the wider world. Jesus’ crucifixion is the ultimate revelation of that faithfulness — fully loving God and fully loving people through sacrifice. Jesus’ cross and resurrection launched the New Creation. Therefore, Jesus’ cross becomes the pattern for our New Creation lives.

But what does that look like? Romans 8 offers us a mysterious, yet crucial answer. Here is the basic flow of Paul’s argument in Romans 8.

As people who are enlivened and led by God’s Spirit, we are adopted as God’s children. Being God’s children was Israel’s vocation. So Paul is saying we are now part of Abraham’s renewed family entrusted with their renewed vocation. As God’s children, we are co-heirs with Christ. This inheritance is our vocation. It is to share in Christ’s sufferings in order that we may share in his glory, which is his renewing and restorative reign over God’s world as the true image-bearer, the true human being.

We are adopted into Abraham’s renewed family as God’s children in order that we may share in Christ’s vocation — creation’s renewal through Christ’s and our suffering and his and our consequent glory and reign.

Creation waits for its liberation as the New Creation, groaning with labor pains. Within groaning creation, the children of God live and groan as well. And within God’s children, God’s Spirit — given as the firstfruits of their glory and reign — intercedes with groans. Creation groans. God’s children groans within creation. God’s Spirit groans within God’s children.

This is the core commission of Abraham’s renewed family as God’s royal priesthood — living in the midst of the world’s pain, suffering and groaning with the world, and transforming it into prayer that is in sync with the Spirit’s own groaning.

The image of Romans 8 is the cross. But rather than Jesus being on the cross, Paul is depicting God’s people on the cross, suspended in the groaning world, ourselves groaning and the Spirit groaning within us. All for the sake and renewal of God’s world.

And here’s the clincher:

“And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose. For those God foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brothers and sisters. And those he predestined, he also called; those he called, he also justified; those he justified, he also glorified.”

In all things, especially through our groaning, suffering and pain, God is working for the good of those who love him. We are being conformed into the image of his Son, living cross-shaped New Creation lives, knowing that the ultimate goal is to be glorified — sharing in Christ’s renewing and restorative reign over God’s creation.

In other words, we — who are adopted into Abraham’s family, who are enlivened and led by the Spirit, and who are patterning our lives after Christ’s covenantal-faithfulness through sacrificial love to God and others — are the umbilical between the groaning world and the groaning Spirit. The New Creation is birthed from this creation as we join groaning creation with the groaning Spirit through our own suffering and groaning.

As revealed on the cross, New Creation is birthed through suffering and sacrificial love. So the answer to Jesus’ prayer “Your kingdom come, your will be done,” required the wounds of the cross. Likewise, as we take up our cross and become the living laboring link between the world around us and the Spirit in us, we will be wounded in order that God’s New Creation may be birthed.