I heard that Dad preached out of Romans last week. And it seems that more and more people are either referencing Romans or preaching from it. And I think God is trying to get people back to the basics. We have a really confused church culture today, and we really need to strengthen ourselves on the main points of the gospel and what it truly means to be a Christian, and the Book of Romans does that.
The last time I was here, I preached out of Romans 8, and it is considered the richest chapter in Romans, perhaps the richest chapter in all the Bible. I have a Father’s Day sermon that I prepared from this chapter, and I decided not to repeat it because it was just a few months ago. Instead, I’ll add that to our Facebook page so you can read it if you’d like. But it talks about what it means to be a child of God and is from the verses between what we read from last week and what we’ll read from this week.
Today, if you have your Bibles, let’s turn to Romans 8 and read a pretty lengthy set of verses from 18-30. As you’re turning there, I’d like to read to you something from Our Daily Bread.
Professor E. C. Caldwell ended his lecture by telling his students, “Tomorrow, I will be teaching on Romans 8. So tonight, as you study, pay special attention to verse 28. Notice what this verse truly says, and what it doesn’t say.” Then he added, “One final word before I dismiss you—whatever happens in all the years to come, remember: Romans 8:28 will always hold true.”
That same day Dr. Caldwell and his wife met with a tragic car-train accident. She was killed instantly and he was crippled permanently. Months later, Professor Caldwell returned to his students, who clearly remembered his last words. The room was hushed as he began his lecture.
“Romans 8:28,” he said, “still holds true. One day we shall see God’s good, even in this.”
There are so many people who want Romans 8:28 without suffering. I am one of them. But life happens. Hopefully, not as tragic. But even in tragedy, we have hope. Even in mourning, even when things happen that force us to not be able to have the words to express in prayer to the Lord. We have hope. Let’s take a look at our verses today, beginning with verse. 18.
Scripture: 18 Yet what we suffer now is nothing compared to the glory he will reveal to us later. 19 For all creation is waiting eagerly for that future day when God will reveal who his children really are. 20 Against its will, all creation was subjected to God’s curse. But with eager hope, 21 the creation looks forward to the day when it will join God’s children in glorious freedom from death and decay. 22 For we know that all creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. 23 And we believers also groan, even though we have the Holy Spirit within us as a foretaste of future glory, for we long for our bodies to be released from sin and suffering. We, too, wait with eager hope for the day when God will give us our full rights as his adopted children, including the new bodies he has promised us. 24 We were given this hope when we were saved. (If we already have something, we don’t need to hope for it. 25 But if we look forward to something we don’t yet have, we must wait patiently and confidently.)
26 And the Holy Spirit helps us in our weakness. For example, we don’t know what God wants us to pray for. But the Holy Spirit prays for us with groanings that cannot be expressed in words. 27 And the Father who knows all hearts knows what the Spirit is saying, for the Spirit pleads for us believers in harmony with God’s own will. 28 And we know that God causes everything to work together for the good of those who love God and are called according to his purpose for them. 29 For God knew his people in advance, and he chose them to become like his Son so that his Son would be the firstborn among many brothers and sisters. 30 And having chosen them, he called them to come to him. And having called them, he gave them right standing with himself. And having given them right standing, he gave them his glory.
If you’ll notice, Paul talks about groaning in two instances here but is for basically the same reason––to be free creatures as God intended. We groan and yearn to be the people we know we want to be and the people God wants us to be, yet we are still in this cursed world, in this cursed body, and even all creation groans to be set free from this curse.
In addition, being in this cursed world, we have needs and hopes, and desires. We have struggles and pain. And we often cannot put words to the needs and prayers we try to pray to God. Are we left alone? Does God put his hand to his ear and say, “I can’t hear you. I can’t understand what you’re saying. I can’t help if you don’t make sense.”
No. The Holy Spirit prays on our behalf with groans that cannot be expressed in words. Yet in the end, all of this is not useless. God uses our cursed experiences for our good.
This set of verses begins with “18 Yet what we suffer now is nothing compared to the glory he will reveal to us later.” This is a great hope, and a great promise. Well, I guess you could say that the promise is both good and bad. It tells us that we have a glory that God will reveal later in Heaven, but it promises us that until then, there will be suffering.
But in the midst of suffering, let us find hope. The great hope beyond any hope is that our future glory will be so great that it pales in comparison with anything we face now––including the great things.
I remember a few years ago, when we took a trip out west, and we went to Yellowstone, and the beauty there was just amazing. I can only imagine the explorers seeing this for the first time and trying to wrap their heads around it. Not only Yellowstone but The Badlands and The Black Hills. There were things there they had never seen or heard or imagined before. There were things there they could have never dreamed of.
We kind of take it for granted, but imagine being the first settlers coming through and seeing these giant mountains, these animals that they never had seen before like buffalo and elk and mountain goats. And then you come across these giant pools of steaming hot water and a myriad of colors. Then, at certain times of the day, you’d be startled when they’d spew this tremendous geyser of steam and hot water. How do you describe that? It was all just waiting there. And they had to imagine the adventure of what they were going to see next.
That’s the kind of glory that awaits us in Heaven, and God wasn’t even showing off when he made Yellowstone and the American West. Even in its pristine condition, Yellowstone is still cursed land.
Paul said to the Corinthian church, “No eye has seen, no ear has heard, and no mind has imagined what God has prepared for those who love him.” 10 But it was to us that God revealed these things by his Spirit. For his Spirit searches out everything and shows us God’s deep secrets.”
And that leads us into the next verse of Romans 8, which says, “19 For all creation is waiting eagerly for that future day when God will reveal who his children really are. 20 Against its will, all creation was subjected to God’s curse. But with eager hope, 21 the creation looks forward to the day when it will join God’s children in glorious freedom from death and decay. 22 For we know that all creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time.
And we believers also groan, even though we have the Holy Spirit within us as a foretaste of future glory, for we long for our bodies to be released from sin and suffering. We, too, wait with eager hope for the day when God will give us our full rights as his adopted children, including the new bodies he has promised us. 24 We were given this hope when we were saved. (If we already have something, we don’t need to hope for it. 25 But if we look forward to something we don’t yet have, we must wait patiently and confidently.)”
So if we go back to what I preached last time, we have become new creatures in Christ, but as new creatures, we are still warring with the flesh, or the old self because we are still trapped inside this cursed body that has a penchant for sin. About 20 years ago, Petra released their last album, and it’s called Jekyll and Hyde and the title track is taken from Romans 7 where Paul talks about the struggle he has, and we all have, with being a new creation inside an old sinful body.
Because of The Holy Spirit now living within us, having a taste of who we were meant to be, who we are being transformed into, what our new nature is becoming, we groan to be fully set free and be that person. We groan to be who we are meant to be. We groan to no longer have any sin in our nature. And how do we even know what we are supposed to be? We don’t completely know, but because of The Holy Spirit living inside of us, making us, little by little, into that new creation, we know that we are to be fully holy and perfect.
I might have used this as an illustration before, but there was a professor of mine at Elim who had a heart attack not long after I graduated. He has some medical training, and so in the middle of the night, he recognized that he was having a heart attack, and calmly called 911.
After the ambulance arrived, he saw a light that enveloped the back of the ambulance and saw an image coming toward him out of the light. He felt his spirit begin to leave his body. He lifted his arm toward Jesus. And when his spirit started to leave his body, all of the pain left, and he said he felt like “he was where he belonged.”
I haven’t heard that story in a few years before I was a pastor here, so I forgot some details, but that’s one thing I won’t forget. He felt as if he was where he belonged as if he was purposely made for that place. It felt like home to him. And he felt such peace.
The Lord said to him that it’s not his time, and his spirit went back into his body, and of course, the pain returned. But I’ll bet there’s not a day that goes by that he doesn’t think about that moment where he felt at home, what it was like for just a moment to be in that place where he was made for. I’ll bet he yearns for it in a different way, maybe a more expectant way.
I know that there are times in worship when I feel a sense of Heaven. We feel it here in church. We know the place where we’re meant to be and we long to be there and make that our permanent dwelling.
Psalm 84:10 says, “Better is one day in your courts than a thousand elsewhere;
I would rather be a doorkeeper in the house of my God than dwell in the tents of the wicked.”
So, we groan for the day in which we will be set free and dwell in our true home and be our true selves forever. But we have other groans too, don’t we? We groan not only for the life we wait for, but we also groan in the life we live in.
Larry Crabb, in his book “Inside Out,” emphasizes that our only hope for complete relief from hardship is to be with Jesus in heaven. “Until then,” he says, “we either groan or pretend we don’t.”
And these groans do not go unnoticed by The Holy Spirit. In fact, The Holy Spirit groans on our behalf.
Verses 26 and 27 say, “26 In the same way, the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us through wordless groans. 27 And he who searches our hearts knows the mind of the Spirit because the Spirit intercedes for God’s people in accordance with the will of God.”
In the Gospel of John, Jesus told his disciples, 15 “If you love me, keep my commands. 16 And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another advocate to help you and be with you forever— 17 the Spirit of truth. The world cannot accept him, because it neither sees him nor knows him. But you know him, for he lives with you and will be in you.”
My computer wanted to correct that last phrase, “in you,” to “with you.” The Holy Spirit is not just ‘with you,’ The Holy Spirit is ‘in you.’ Literally. As Christians, The Holy Spirit is in us, around us, poured out all over us inside and out.
He is our advocate. And He loves us and because he loves us, he intercedes for us with wordless groans.
Mary, not too long ago, shared something on Facebook where you see a picture of a letter board and at the top it says, “Dear Jesus,” and then a bunch of scrambled letters all thrown on there and falling off, and then at the bottom, “Amen.”
And underneath it is another letter board that has the letters on it spelled out, “Dear Child, I Know. I Love You, God.”
That’s the kind of God we serve.
“And he who searches our hearts knows the mind of the Spirit because the Spirit intercedes for God’s people in accordance with the will of God.” That means that God, the Father, searches our hearts and hears the Holy Spirit interceding for us even when we can’t express what we want to express to Him.
It’s easier to kind of let go, now, isn’t it? It’s easier to just lift things up to The Lord when we know he hears us––not only when we pray––but even when we can’t pray, he still hears us. He hears our hearts and he knows our minds. Jesus said that God knows what we need before we ask. So why can’t God intercede for us with wordless groans?
But our suffering and hardships are not wasted. Even God uses our hardships. Verse 28 says, “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.”
I mentioned that earlier at the beginning of this sermon with the illustration of the professor to his students. What amazing faith that professor had. I’m sure, though, that kind of faith did not come easy for him. I’m sure he had to decide to put his whole heart into that scripture and claim that promise for himself no matter how hard it was. I’m sure the devil tempted him to reject the promise, to think that God had forgotten about him. I’m sure it was a Job moment for that professor. But he had to choose to believe in the difficulty of the moment.
It’s easy to believe when things are going well, “yes, that verse is for someone right now going through a difficult time.” But when it’s you going through something hard, even traumatic, that verse still applies.
In most instances, the good that Paul is talking about is our character. There’s a saying by Rick Warren, “God is more concerned about your character than your comfort.” And there are variations of that, Derek Prince said, “God is more concerned about your character than your achievements. Achievements only have importance in the realm of time. Character is eternal.”
And The Message Bible, which I’m very careful of quoting because it’s not a translation, it’s a paraphrase. But it paraphrases Ephesians 4:22-24 nicely. It says, “Take on an entirely new way of life — a God-fashioned life, a life renewed from the inside and working itself into your conduct as God accurately reproduces his character in you.”
And that goes along with the rest of our verses. 29 and 30 say, “ 29 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. 30 And those he predestined, he also called; those he called, he also justified; those he justified, he also glorified.”
Another way in which God can turn bad things into good is simply being present and working at the moment. God “works for the good.” Sometimes God can take a bad situation and work it into a good one at the moment. Sometimes God can take what could end up becoming a disaster and turn it into, well, not a disaster. For example, last Sunday.
Last weekend, we went to visit a college in New Hampshire for Evelyn and had a pretty nice time. We took a huge loop and did something that the ‘Pirates Who Don’t Do Anything’ didn’t do. We went to Boston in the Fall.
Technically, it was still Summer, but close enough.
Anyway, on our way back home, somewhere West of Binghamton, we stopped for gas and some food and noticed this really odd sound coming from the front end. It wasn’t good, but we thought, “well, we have about 4 hours, I think it’ll make it home.”
It was late at night, and by the time we reached Owego, we stopped at a rest area and had a hard time stopping because I had to put the pedal to the floor for the brakes to work. By the time we reached Horseheads, I was doing everything I could not to fall asleep, so we got off the Arnot Mall exit and switched drivers. Diana had taken a snooze, and so now it was my turn to get some rest.
Wouldn’t you know, we got back onto I-86, and not long––I think it was as we were passing the airport––we heard a loud clunk and something up front fell off. The wheel was not straight by any means and she had a hard time driving.
She decided, in the wee hours of the morning, to not drive all the way home but stop at my dad’s mechanic in Erwin and have Caleb come from Dansville to pick us up. When we got there at about 3 a.m., the brakes did not work at all. But the truck came to a complete stop as if it was intended to stop nicely in the parking lot.
In fact, I didn’t even notice that the brakes went at that point, it just seemed like a natural stop. Diana turned the engine off, and that’s when we noticed the smoke. I didn’t think too much of it, but then I was reminded of the time my work vehicle’s engine was in flames.
So Diana got out, and she noticed the passenger’s side wheel was broken and leaning in at about a 75-degree angle, and through the tire rim was a glowing orange color like you would see in a steel mill, and that’s when we got everything out and called 911. By the time we did that, there were flames, and we were not sure whether or not the fire department was going to get there in time. Now, I grew up in the 80s; I had seen enough action movies and I could just imagine the whole thing catching on fire, exploding…and every other car in the lot and the whole building exploding too.
Thankfully, the fire went out by the time the fire department got there, and they did use a fire extinguisher on it because it was still pretty hot. And they left without any real hoopla. In fact, I have to say that I’m pretty impressed by how many firefighters came at 3:30 in the morning.
I still can’t figure out how that one firefighter that I’m pretty sure I graduated with got so old-looking…It’s only been 30 years.
Now, imagine: that fire did not start until after we parked. That fire ended before the fire department got there and before it could have become a disaster. But most importantly––or perhaps just as importantly––that wheel stayed on until we were safely at a stop. All of that waited until we were safely at a stop. That wheel could have come off while we were on I-86 and we wouldn’t be here today. We would no longer be groaning for our home in Heaven, either.
God works all things for our good.
Yes, sometimes there are tragedies where Christians don’t have that wheel stay on––like the illustration of the professor earlier. And we don’t know why. But somehow, God turned that tragedy for the good of that professor. And he turned what could have been a tragedy for us into a testimony.
There was a lot to cover in these verses today, and I wanted to stress that we yearn to be fully set free. We yearn for the day when this mess is all behind us. We yearn to be who we sense The Holy Spirit is making us to be. We yearn to be out of this world and into our home.
In the meantime, we have to endure hardships. But we do not have to endure those hardships without help. Not only is The Holy Spirit there to create us anew, but he is also there to be our advocate in times of trouble.
And when trouble comes, be assured that God will use that troubling for our good, and He will be an ever-present help in time of need.
Let me read to you Psalm 46 as we close:
1 God is our refuge and strength, an ever-present help in trouble.
2 Therefore we will not fear, though the earth give way and the mountains fall into the heart of the sea,
3 though its waters roar and foam and the mountains quake with their surging.
4 There is a river whose streams make glad the city of God, the holy place where the Most High dwells.
5 God is within her, she will not fall; God will help her at break of day.
6 Nations are in uproar, kingdoms fall; he lifts his voice, the earth melts.
7 The Lord Almighty is with us; the God of Jacob is our fortress.
8 Come and see what the Lord has done, the desolations he has brought on the earth.
9 He makes wars cease to the ends of the earth. He breaks the bow and shatters the spear; he burns the shields with fire.
10 He says, “Be still, and know that I am God; I will be exalted among the nations, I will be exalted in the earth.”
11 The Lord Almighty is with us; the God of Jacob is our fortress.
Prayer: Dear Lord, thank you for being an ever-present help in time of need. Lord, we all experience the groans of being held almost captive by this curse of sin. Lord, we pray that as we wait to be released, that you would send your Spirit to guide us and give us refreshing.
I pray that as we groan without the ability to express ourselves in this world of trouble, may your Holy Spirit comfort us and express to you the grief and need we have.
I pray that whatever trial we endure, may you use it for our good. In Jesus’ name, amen.
This is an updated edition of a post originally published on First Baptist Church of Watkins Glen
Featured Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay
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