Romans 8:28-39
More Than Conquerors
Romans 8:28-39, "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 predestinated
to be conformed to the likeness of his Son, that he might
be the firstborn among many brothers.
And those he predestined, he also called; those he
called, he also justified; those he justified, he also glorified.
What, then, shall we say
in response to this? If
God is for us, who can be against us?
He who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for
us all-how will he not also, along with him, graciously give
us all things? Who
will bring any charge against those whom God has chosen? It is God who justifies. Who is he that condemns? Christ Jesus, who died-more than that, who was
raised to life-is at the right hand of God and is also interceding
for us. Who shall separate
us from the love of Christ?
Shall trouble or hardship or persecution or famine
or nakedness or danger or sword? As it is written:
'For your sake we face death all day long;
we are considered as sheep to be slaughtered.' [Psalm 44:22]
No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved
us. For I am convinced
that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither
the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height
nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able
to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus
our Lord." [NIV]
"Romans chapter 8,
we moved through a lot of groaning last week.
Chapter 8 has brought us to the point where we are
no longer subject to the law of sin and of death, because
the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set us free
from the law of sin and death. And Paul tells us about a higher law that is
now a reality within our lives, [for those of us] that have
come to Christ and asked forgiveness.
And he goes as far to say that we are given the Spirit
of adoption whereby we cry 'Abba, Father', the
words of emotion, Abba, the words of position, Father,
recognition-and that we're joint-heirs with Christ. And then he goes on to tell us that creation is groaning and travailing,
that the believer is groaning, that even the Spirit of God
groans within us. Because
when we're sealed with the Spirit, it says that, we're given
the down-payment, the first-fruits, the engagement ring, the
earnest. Something
changes in us forever, and we're ruined for this world. We can no longer be happy in this world once
the Spirit of Christ comes and indwells us.
We are ruined for this world.
Haven't you noticed that you can't go do the same things
you used to do, if you've tried to do that?
Hope you haven't. But
if you have, you realize 'I can't do that anymore, that is
a bummer, I can't do that.' I remember struggling when I first got saved,
back and forth, and the things that I used to do that would
put me in a stupor, that would inoculate me to my surroundings
just became heavy on my heart and I thought 'Lord, this is
wrong!-and I hope you don't come till this gets straightened
out'-and you're just ruined for this world, you're not happy
with this world anymore, because he gives light to us. The idea is, spiritual light. In Ephesians it says "Anything that doth make
manifest is light", we see things about ourselves we never
saw before that need to change.
And that's the Holy Spirit working.
We've been brought from the kingdom of darkness into
the kingdom of light, so part of that light, part of what
we see now-he's taken our hearts of stone, he's given us hearts
of flesh. We watch
the news, we find that tears will come to our
eyes, we see injustice, we see suffering, we see things
that are so wrong, and our hearts are broken, because he's
brought us into the light. We look at the world and everything that's going
on and there's a groaning, there's something that's deep within
us that was never there before-and it's because we're longing
for that other place. We've
been given the down-payment, we are longing for things to
be straightened out, we're longing for the day when they'll
be put in order, when Christ comes and he takes up his throne.
Not only that, the very Spirit of Christ is groaning
within us, because he's got to deal with us every day.
Imagine being the Holy-that's the dead give-away there-Holy
Spirit, and having to live in us, every day, and put up with
our struggles and our selfishness, and our angry thoughts. And he has to deal with all of the stuff that
goes on inside of there, even
if we don't let it to the surface.
He's mingled with it there, he lives with it.
And he is groaning, though, with things that are too
deep to be uttered in human language, things that we are not
able to vocalize, because we feel them.
We feel, 'I know Lord this is wrong, I don't have the
power to change it of myself, Lord, I know I need to be more
like Jesus, Lord, I don't want to die a cranky old man, I
want to be like Jesus, and I don't have the power to change
myself, and I always fall into this thing, and change seems
to be coming so slow Lord, I need your power.' All of that is going on in an inaudible language
that we can't put into human words, even deeper than that,
and it says that "God knows the mind of the Spirit" as he
prays within us and through us on our behalf, and that it's
according to the will of God. Now not only that, it's going to tell us later
in the chapter, Jesus Christ is always making intercession
for us. So we have the Spirit of God within us groaning,
offering prayers to God on our behalf that we can't say in
human language, and they are prayers that are proper, and
according to the will of God.
And then at the right hand of God, Jesus Christ [Yeshua
haMeshiach] where he
ever lives and makes intercession for the saints-this is a
great prayer program. You're
keeping at least two parts of the Trinity busy all the time,
and they're talking to the third part of the Trinity about
those problems. And
you know, in one sense, it's a great consolation to me, because
just kind of for me having a refresher course, coming back
to Romans 8, I'm being reminded-"Wow, Lord, even when I don't
have time, even when I'm on the run, Lord if I keep that sense,
if I look to you, you hear my prayer Lord, you hear my prayer
when I'm driving to church, you hear my prayer when I'm wrestling
with a difficulty, you hear my heart when I'm visiting someone
that's sick and I don't know what to say, Lord.
You hear my heart when I'm standing in the middle of
a funeral service, and there are no words to say.'
And what a great comfort comes as we remember that,
that there's a remarkable work of God going on in our hearts
by the Holy Spirit, praying, with a language that we can feel
and groan, but we can't say.
Creation groaning, the believer groaning, and even
the Spirit of God in our hearts groaning, offering those things
to God in a perfect way, and according to his will.
Great plan, I like that. So that's where we left off, verses 26 and 27,
"Likewise the Spirit also helpeth our infirmities, for we
know not what we should pray for as we ought.
But the Spirit itself maketh intercession for us with
groanings which cannot be uttered."
Now that's a great consolation.
If I get down to pray sometimes, I run out of stuff
fast, I am a novice when it comes to prayer, I don't know
how to pray. You're
plagued with the same thing, don't look at me so strange. [chuckles] I
determine to do it, and you know, if you're like me, you get
up, you set yourself aside, you try to pray, you start seeking
God, and the next thing, you're thinking 'Inspection's due',
and then think 'Wait!, how did I get from heaven to?...you
know the human mind is funky, you know, it just, from generation
to generation of degeneration, we've kind of got the last
end of the gene pool here from Eden, in our generation.
And you know that if you turn the 11 O'clock news on,
boyng, you're wide awake, if you read your Bible at 11 O'clock,
you go 'Oooh', you know, there's a spiritual exercise.
And yet in all of that, God is working within us in
a remarkable way. "He that searches the hearts", the Lord, "knoweth
what is the mind of the Spirit, because (in that) he maketh
intercession for the saints according to the will of God." Now that's a consolation, particularly, as we
move into this next verse.
Verse 28, "And we know that all things work
together for good to them that love God, to them that are
called according to his purpose."
That's great plaque material.
Isn't it? That's great plaque stuff. This is the verse that we love to quote to other
people and hate to apply to our own life.
Somebody comes, their life is falling apart, they're
going through all this trouble and we say 'All work together
for the good' and they feel like slugging us, you know.
But what about when everything's falling apart and
we're struggling, we're in our difficulty, and we look up
at the plaque on the wall and we rip it down! 'All things work together for the good', we
hear our own voice say. "And we know"-that is, intuitively, it
comes from the root oeda,
we know, this knowledge is imparted, it's not learned by experience,
we know. Very important. Not, 'And we see' all things work together for
the good, because we don't.
So many times, we don't understand.
'Lord, why are you allowing this to happen?'
'What is going to come out of this?' 'Maybe
in a busy world of 6 billion people you've overlooked me today,
so I'm just reminding you, I'm here, and if I was you'-like
he has a suggestion box open-'I would never do this to my
kid.' We don't always
understand. It doesn't
say 'And we feel.' Some
of you are like that, people come in for counseling, 'Well
I feel this, and I feel that, and I feel that this happened,
and I felt this way', and I think, 'I don't do any of that,
don't talk to me about that, I don't do that.
Some people, particularly if you have gifts of word
of knowledge or word of wisdom, you have those sensitivity
gifts, you know, those are great things when they are in the
Spirit, but on the other side of the coin, those are the things
that haunt you too. 'Well
I feel that and I feel this.'
Well so what. I
teach the Bible, I don't care what you feel.
You have to put it through this grid [he must be holding
up a Bible]. We're not saved because we feel saved, we're
saved because we're
saved. I get up in the morning, and if I have a headache
and the kids are screaming and the house is crazy, I don't
feel like a Christian. [I
love to see he has days like that too.]
[laughter] I feel like a grouch. If I get up in the morning and the house is
quiet and the coffee is already perc'in and the birds are
singing and the sky is blue and I go outside and sit there
with my coffee and my Bible, I feel like a Christian.
[laughter] That has nothing to do with whether I'm a Christian
or not. But some people,
that's where they want to go, all the time.
'And we feel that all things work together for the
good.' Well we don't feel that, that's a problem.
"And we know"-intuitively, not most things-"all things."
This is not a verse for unbelievers.
This has nothing to do with people talking about the
universal Fatherhood of God, it has nothing to do with that.
"All things work together for good for those who love God.who are the called ones according to his purpose."
He's talking about the believer, God's children.
And I'll tell you the tough thing about it, in some
sense, it's a bitter pill. Because the very problem with the verse, for
me is, I do know that all things work together for the good. But he doesn't give me the two year plan and
the five year plan and the ten year plan when that happens
to me. That's what bothers me about it. Life is falling apart, you're rushing to the
emergency ward, something's going on, and somehow in the middle
of that, you know this verse.
'OK Lord, somehow, I know, that's what it says.
All things are working together for the good.
I don't know how, I don't feel like they are.
I don't see it. My
problem is, I'm getting confirmation in my heart by your Spirit,
I know that they are. But Lord, I wish that when you would do these
things you would fill
me in.' Now, as we move on, we're going to hear some
remarkable things. And
of course from God's perspective, because creation is groaning,
because the believer is groaning, he's placed his very Spirit
in our hearts to intercede on a level that we can't pray,
because of these things, because he understands the difficulty
we have in the midst of painful situations, even though those
situations are working together for the good.
He's going to talk about peril and the sword and suffering
and all of those things, he's going to bring that into play
because somehow all of this works together.
Only God understands that recipe.
You know, when you get up for breakfast, you want to
maybe sit down and eat some pancakes. But you only want to eat them when they're mixed
together in the recipe. You
don't want to eat the ingredients, eat a couple raw eggs,
eat some white flour, eat some sugar, eat some vanilla, you
don't want to sit down and eat those things not mixed together-it's
when they work together that they work together for the good,
according to your purpose.
Well God is the one who stands back, we're going to
hear things like "foreknow", "predestinate", "called".
Not that we understand all of those things as much
as we make believe we do. Those are divine understanding things, not human
understanding things. But
the idea is, from where God stands, he's going to talk about
us as called, justified, glorified, in tenses that say 'it's
already complete.' Where he is, it's done. It's an established fact. He's the God that calls things that are not
as though they were. He
sees the end from the beginning.
And here we are in time, God dwells in eternity [or
as Albert Einstein and David Hawking would say, 'God dwells
outside the physical realm of space and time.] And eternity
is even hard for us to imagine.
Again, it's not a time line, infinity in one direction
and infinity in the other direction, it's just outside of
that altogether. And yet here's this little, you know, if you
would look at eternity on a timeline, I mean, it goes on for
thousands, and millions and zillions of miles, what would
human history be in comparison to that?
Not even an inch. Not even a millimeter. And yet out of that little space there's all
of this noise and racket, explosions and war and all of this
pain and everything, coming out of that little spot.
But from where God stands, it's over like a snap of
the fingers, like that. Life
goes by like a vapor, he says, and it's gone.
And from where he stands, the ingredients of things
that he brings to bear on our lives, because we are the called ones, we're the ones who love God, when all of this
translates into eternity, and we stand there realizing the
cry of our hearts, Abba, Father, when we see him face to face-none
of those things that we endured here will seem significant.
"Our light affliction which is but for a moment.I
recon that the present sufferings are not worthy to
be compared with the glory that shall be revealed."
And Paul, he's taking us into that territory.
Now when he talks about all these things, he's been
through them-shipwrecked, beaten, left for dead, he's been
through it. He's got
nothing to lose at this point.
I haven't moved into this stuff yet.
I want to learn all of this stuff by a correspondence
course, I don't want to live there.
'Lord, I know these lessons, I read about Paul's life,
can't we just put them in my inventory and just move on to
something nice?' Well,
the truth is, all things do.
That can be a bitter pill to swallow.
'Lord, here I am at the hospital, Lord, here I am watching
my mom or my dad die, they're a believer, Lord, and why do
they have to spend these months in chemotherapy and pain,
and why do I have to watch it?
And why do I have to endure this Lord?
And why is my memory filled with painful scenes that
rear their heads when I least expect them to, when I was a
child?'.I don't know, I don't know by experience, I only know
intuitively that somehow God's signature is on all of those
things, and that one day, on the other side of all of this,
in hindsight, we'll see his embroidery, we'll see his weaving,
we'll see his wisdom. Paul is telling us, 'Now, search your hearts,
God's Spirit is moving there, groaning, offering you to God,
according to his will, "and
we know"-intuitively, there deep within us-"that all things"-are
taking us to that ultimate consummation-"all things are working
together for the good, for those that are called according
to his purpose."
Well, what is his purpose?
And he goes right on to talk about that.
Here it is. Verses
29-30, "For whom he did foreknow he also did predestinate
to be conformed to the image of his Son, that he might be
the firstborn among many brethren. Moreover whom he did predestinate, them he also
called: and whom he called them he also justified, and whom
he justified, them he also glorified."
So, I don't know if that helps us a lot.
Here we come to some of the major jousting territory
in the Church [i.e. the body of Christ], some of these ideas.
I know this, I enjoy these things, I enjoy feeling
like God's elect, I enjoy feeling predestined, I enjoy or
rest in the fact that God has always known me, I rejoice in
the fact that I feel secure.
I know this, that these things are not given to us
to cause division. I
know this, there are whole groups of people who sit in their
ivory towers and consider themselves way more theologically
correct than anyone else, and in the meantime they're not
winning anybody to Christ, they're not getting anything accomplished,
they're just so right, they're dead right [i.e. spiritually
dead]. And I know somehow
in all of this, God desires to give something to us as his
children that's a comfort for us.
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