Living as One Who Belongs

When my husband and I first married, we had to work through that adjustment period of learning to live as one family unit instead of two adults independent of one another. With a vow and a ceremony, a white dress and a black tux, with a signature on a license and a lifelong promise, suddenly my money was our money, his house was our house, my bed was our bed, his car was my car, and even more surprising–my body was his and his body was mine (1 Cor. 7:4).

With the knitting together of two lives and possessions and habits and preferences came a belonging that had both tangible and emotional expectations. I expect my husband to act like he belonged to me, and I’m quite sure he expects the same from me. Belonging comes with strings that wrap us up together into one flesh, which I believe is as God intended with Christian marriage (Gen. 2:24, Eph. 5:28-31). It’s difficult to extract the selfishness from individual autonomy, but it’s beautiful to belong.

I’ve been thinking lately about the gift of belonging to God, and the deeper I dig, the more I believe belonging to Him should shape more areas of our life than we let it.

It is both a challenge and a comfort to grasp that when God transferred us from the domain of darkness to the kingdom of Jesus, we don’t function as our own sovereign beings (Col. 1:13-14). Though we make our own decisions, ultimately we are not autonomous. I am not my own person, and if you’re a believer, you’re not your own person. We belong to One who bought our freedom. And belonging has implications.

I don’t know if I’ve ever meditated on the impact that belonging has on every decision. Even the seemingly inconsequential decisions or actions have implications (though I’d argue nothing is inconsequential to God). How does belonging to God impact the way you watch TV? Eat? Exercise? Spend your time? Use your money? Read books? How does belonging to God affect the way you talk to others? Drive in traffic? React to criticism? Attend church?

If we belong to God, a people for His own possession, then there ought to be ripples of belonging that spread and span the width of our days and nights with reactions, responses, and decisions that are born of belonging to Him. We can’t split our lives into two sectors. We can’t read our Bibles and pray in the morning and then begin our day as autonomous people who work and play and rest and think without considering that we work and play and rest tethered to God.

We can’t split our lives into two sectors. We can’t read our Bibles in the morning and then begin our day as autonomous people who work and play and rest and think without considering that we work and play and rest tethered to God. Share on X

I brought up this absence of delineation between sacred and secular in Sunday school last week, and a helpful church member responded with a Latin phrase: coram Deo. “In the presence of God.” It’s what theologians in the past have used to express that our life is lived before the face of God.

I went home and researched the phrase, coram Deo, and its history. R.C. Sproul summed it up beautifully: “This phrase literally refers to something that takes place in the presence of, or before the face of, God. To live coram Deo is to live one’s entire life in the presence of God, under the authority of God, to the glory of God. To live in the presence of God is to understand that whatever we are doing and wherever we are doing it, we are acting under the gaze of God. God is omnipresent. There is no place so remote that we can escape His penetrating gaze.[1]”

Not only must we act and think as people who belong to God, we do so before His face for He is always present. Our patterns of work and worship and rest should follow the designs He has given us, and they should stretch into every part of our days and nights accordingly. Washing dishes, teaching Bible study, resting, changing diapers, driving the kids to school, designing buildings, installing air conditioners, going for a walk, working on cars, having coffee with a friend, studying for exams, working out at the gym, cooking dinner—every act of work and rest should glimmer with our belonging to God.

It’s not that I’ve never made decisions without questioning, “What would the Lord have me do?” or “What is the biblical response to this?” But I’ve saved that for the big questions, the ethical dilemmas, the gray areas. I’m not sure I’ve regularly questioned the mundane autopilot decisions of life by asking myself how belonging to God affects the next ordinary step. I’m so used to just acting and reacting as my own person, which I am not.

The apostle Paul words it succinctly: “You are not your own, for you were bought at a price. Therefore glorify God in your body” (1 Cor. 6:19b-20). Bottom line: you do not belong to yourself. You belong to God. That has implications for how you live. So how does that look in day-to-day, regular life?

It’s as simple (notice I didn’t say easy) as learning to think before acting or reacting. It’s examining why you do what you do. It’s shifting from acting without thought to thinking with the mind of Christ. It might look like this:

• As someone who belongs to God, I will remember I’m not sovereign and will go to bed at a reasonable time. The world doesn’t need me.
• Since my salvation was purchased with the blood of Christ, I will not react in anger to the driver who cut me off in traffic.
• Because I am a forgiven sinner-turned-saint, I will not demand that my children keep a law I never could.
• As a slave of Christ and not my desires, I will not indulge in thoughtless, excessive consumption of food or drink.
• As I have been transferred from darkness to light, I will not read that questionable book or watch that show with nudity no matter how good the ratings might be. Light has nothing to do with darkness.
• Because I belong to God and cannot be plucked from His hand, I will not entertain fears about the future. I can trust the One to whom I belong.
• Since I am sustained by Christ in all things, I will work with gratitude that He has given me talents and work, but I will not find my identity in them.

Anchoring your identity in belonging to Him means letting every detail of your life reflect that beautiful tethering of saved to Savior. It’s weaving a gospel strand into your thought patterns so that you don’t make decisions as an autonomous self-made man but rather as one whose hope is bound up in belonging to God.

It’s letting the gospel speak to every corner of your life, not just the churchy ones like what Bible reading plan you’ll follow or if you’ll attend the mid-week prayer meeting at church this week. It’s coram Deo, living all of life before the face of God. Belonging to God means living every important and non-important corner of life with integrity and for the glory of the One who made you His own. He is good and sovereign and too big to be relegated to only our “religious” decisions.

 

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[1] Source.

For further reflection:

Isaiah 43

Romans 8:9-17

1 Corinthians 6:12-20

2 Corinthians 6:14-7:1

Colossians 1:11-23

2 Timothy 2:19-26

1 Peter 1:14-16