“So you have not received a spirit
that makes you fearful slaves. Instead, you received God's Spirit
when he adopted you as his own children. Now we call Him, 'Abba,
Father.' For his Spirit joins with our spirit to affirm that we are
God's children. And since we are his children, we are his heirs. In
fact, together with Christ we are heirs of God's glory.” Romans
8:15, 16
About 11 years ago, I bought a little
pink picture frame at the annual warehouse sale at the Lighthouse
Book Store in Fredericton. It was an inexpensive frame made of
flexible plastic, and didn't even have glass to protect the photo,
just a flimsy plastic film to cover it. The frame had these words on
it: “Princess, I'm a King's Kid!” I was a young single mum at
the time, and it was helpful to be reminded whose child my daughter really is and
who my helper is. So for years, that frame hung in her room with a
sweet picture of her in a tree smiling out from it.
On opening night at the new shelter
building in March of this year, I heard the most beautiful exchange.
One of our guests, after seeing the space, remarked to us, “This
place is fit for kings” to which someone replied, “That's the
point. You guys are kings.”
And so this theme of royalty, along
with a common curiosity with David's question, “What is man that
thou art mindful of him?” have been tumbling around within me for
years. We are royalty, of course, because we are adopted as sons and
daughters of God, Romans says, but why through the death of Christ?
Why the need for a blood sacrifice? It has helped me to think of
Jesus' royalty becoming our legacy like this: royalty is passed from
generation to generation “through the blood,” as we say. When
that precious vial was broken open by the spear that day on the
cross, the royal blood poured out. When our wounds are touched by
the blood of King Jesus, it becomes a part of us, we are changed,
infected. We are valuable, worth a king's ransom—or a King's
sacrifice, as it were. The King's blood the price of our adoption
and the means of our claim to the inheritance because it becomes our
blood too, a part of us.
Not long ago, I prayed with a woman who
had just spent a night working on the street. As I prayed, I asked
that she would know her worth as a child of the King. After she
left, I wondered if I should have phrased it that way, knowing that
men assign a value to her body every night she's out. I wondered how
it sounded to her to have someone pray about her worth. Shallow or
insensitive, maybe? But the fact of the matter is that the value
placed on her on the street is nothing, hollow, but her true worth is
invaluable. She is loved by the King and is worth immeasurably more
than any of us can conceive. We all are, because of the royal blood
that transforms us into adopted sons and daughters.
With this in mind, I see people in a
new way, and servant-hood becomes something different. The other
day, I heated up some pasta and had lunch with a king at the Outflow
table. We are serving royalty.
Chanelle Morgan
