In a couple of posts back, we established the fact that when we give our lives, our hearts and our everything to Christ not just by repeating the words of the preacher, but by the renewal of our mind and all, we have then been adopted as sons of God or as children of God because we become led by the spirit.

Now if we are children, then we are heirs—heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ, if indeed we share in His sufferings in order that we may also share in His glory. – Romans 8:17 | NIV.

For the purpose of this post, I will bring out a few things from the above passage. It says IF we are children of God then we are heirs of God. Who is an heir? A person who inherits or has a right to an inheritance. Rephrasing that passage, IF we are children of God then we inherit or have the rights to inherit (since a lot of us don’t know our rights, we don’t inherit) everything that belongs to God. Now what belongs to God? I’ll let you answer that yourself. The passage continues to say we are co-heirs with Christ, if indeed we share in His sufferings, we may also share in His glory. In essence, we should expect to suffer the kind of suffering Jesus suffered so that we can share in His glory.

Now what were Jesus’ sufferings? Well Jesus was not broke, He fed over 5k people more than once. It was also never reported that He had any kind of sickness or the other. His suffering was not any of these things. His suffering was as a result of Him saying the truth and people refusing to accept it. (In depth study of Jesus’ sufferings will be in another post.) Twice I made sure I capitalised the ‘IF’ because I believe that it is the most important word in the passage, it’s the deciding word on whether you go forward or stop there. Are you a Child of God according to the standards of Romans 8:14?