Recap and Background

Welcome to this last episode of Series 2, where the whole teaching that Paul gives about the power to live the Christian life effectively, comes to a dramatic, powerful and strong conclusion. I hope that many of you will have had the opportunity to go through the different episodes in Series 2 and see how Paul talks about justification, our status with God, and our future hope for eternity; how he talks about the power of sin in Romans 7; and then, in Romans 8 which we have been looking at in the last two episodes, he goes on to give us some wonderful teaching about the role of the person of the Holy Spirit in the life of the believer. This is incredibly important in Paul’s thinking. He never believed that Christianity could be lived out properly just by human effort. He always understood that God gives his dynamic, powerful Spirit to every single believer. If only we could enter into this reality and draw on the power of the Holy Spirit, we would live effective Christian lives.

In the last two episodes, we have looked at how the Spirit guides us, leads us, and empowers us and also how the Spirit gives us a profound sense of connection to God. The Holy Spirit reveals to every believer that we are adopted into God’s family. That strange and wonderful revelation comes to us - we are connected to God, that God is our Father and we can call him Father. We can pray to him, our Father, as Jesus commanded us to do in his teaching. Paul has been talking very wonderfully about the work of the Holy Spirit. But then at the end of that passage he talked about the challenging issue of suffering and difficulty in the Christian life. He explained that living as a Christian does not take you above life’s problems, does not get you out of the suffering that other people experience. In fact, we have our own suffering, which is the suffering of being the followers of Christ, and some of the difficulties that we face as disciples - the opposition and the struggles and the sacrifices that we have to make.

In the last episode, Paul spoke very clearly about these issues, explaining that the whole of the created order is not functioning as God intended it to. Creation itself is suffering. We suffer in this world, and the Holy Spirit helps us in our suffering. The main point Paul made in the last episode is found in Romans 8: 18 where he says,

“I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us.”

Romans 8:18, NIV

Here, he sets our experience in this world against our future experience in eternity. Paul has his eye firmly on the eternal world, where he believes that Christians will experience great rewards, great satisfaction, great joy, and great peace as they enter into eternal life with God himself.

Good in All Circumstances

We now come to a very famous and well-known passage, where Paul summarises how we should view our lives and our struggles today. I trust that you will find this teaching very helpful and very practical. Whatever the circumstances of your life, you can be encouraged by the things that Paul tells us in this passage.

“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 predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brothers and sisters. And those he predestined, he also called; those he called, he also justified; those he justified, he also glorified.”

Romans 8:28-30, NIV

The key verse here is verse 28. We are told that God works for our good in all things. What does Paul mean by ‘all things’? He means all circumstances that we go through, good or bad. That is a very dramatic statement. In other words, there is no circumstance that we can go through in which God cannot work ultimately for our good, even though those experiences may be incredibly difficult.

Let me give an example from Paul’s life. He wrote the book of Romans with the full intention of coming to Rome. He had never been there before. When he finished writing this letter and he sent it off from where he was staying at the time in Greece, to Italy, Rome, he had a plan of how he was going to get there and it was going to take him some time. But between writing the letter and meeting the Romans, these are the things that happened to Paul: he went to Jerusalem in Israel, and when he was there the Jewish people attempted to murder him in the Temple compound, and he was only saved from death by the intervention of Roman soldiers. Secondly, a few days later, the Roman soldiers moved him from one city to another and there was an assassination attempt planned on the journey. It didn’t materialise. Thirdly, when he got to another city in Israel, Caesarea, he was imprisoned for two years. When he got out of prison, he took a sea voyage in order to get to Rome, and experienced astonishing storms that were so severe that the boat went off course, and ran aground on the island of Malta, and the ship broke into pieces and he nearly lost his life in a shipwreck. All things work together for good. The ‘all things’ in Paul’s experience were all these terrible things that actually happened to him. When he went to Rome, they probably said to him, ‘Well Paul, do you really mean these words you said?’ (bearing in mind all the things he had suffered) and he said, ‘Yes, God is sovereign in all circumstances, God will work them for good.’ Very often, we don’t know how God is going to do this, and at the time we experience these difficulties, dangers and disasters they feel terrible; God can feel far away.

Five Stages of God’s Work in our Life

Paul says underneath it all we need to be sure that we know, deep down in our hearts, that God will turn everything round for our good. Part of that is changing our character through suffering. God is always interested in our character. If you have experienced some great trauma or suffering in your life, then you need to know God is sovereign over that. He is working in your life; he is working in all things that happened to you, and he will also work within your character and draw you closer to him. Paul explains this process:

“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. And those he predestined, he also called; those he called, he also justified; those he justified, he also glorified.”

Romans 8:29-30, NIV

Paul speaks of five stages of God’s work in our lives. Firstly, God foreknew us. That means he knew about us, and he had a plan for us, even before we came into being, even as we were in our mother’s womb. Secondly, God ‘predestined’ us. This word means that God had a plan for our life, including a plan for us to have the opportunity to hear the gospel and be saved, and then a plan for our life after we were saved, that would ultimately lead to us being conformed to Christ, becoming like Jesus Christ in character and life. This is an important point. Paul believed that if anybody was going to be saved two things had to happen. Firstly, God had to bring revelation to that person. We don’t understand the gospel fully on our own, through thinking about it; we need revelation, God’s initiative. He opens our minds.

Secondly, we need to make a decision to respond. God’s initiative in salvation was spoken of by Jesus in John 6:44, “No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws them”. God draws us. Predestination is God’s opening up the opportunity for us to be saved, and then it is our responsibility, with our own will, to respond and to say ‘Yes’ to God. God foreknew, God predestined, God called.

Thirdly, God calls you to himself when you hear the gospel. Maybe that comes through reading the Bible, through hearing someone’s testimony, to hearing someone like myself preaching about Jesus. Maybe it comes in a dream or a vision, when God reveals himself to you through the person of Jesus Christ, or through other symbols and dreams. But God calls us. I wonder whether you have heard that calling of God. If you are a Christian now, you will remember that time when God called you. He spoke to you, he drew you to himself. You understood the message. But if you are not a believer today and you are listening to this, God is speaking to you and calling you, even as I am speaking to you today through the words of the Bible.

Fourthly, God justified. Here Paul goes back to the theme of earlier chapters, to the end of chapter 3, chapter 4 and the beginning of chapter 5, when he speaks about justification. God now sees you as a believer - you have turned away from your sins, are right with him, in a right relationship with God, freed from guilt, and enabled to live a new life.

Finally, God will glorify us. That is a reference to the second coming and the resurrection of the body which is the time when the whole of our life is completely redeemed; we are set free from the power of death, and bodily decline, decay and disease. We are clothed with a physical body at the time that Jesus comes, and we are completely redeemed from this sinful world. Paul describes this as a time when we are glorified.

So, here we have the five steps in that process of God drawing us into his family. God foreknew us. He knew us before we were even born; he had a plan for us. Secondly, God predestined us. He decided that he wanted to make himself known to us. Thirdly, God called us. He called us through the gospel message about Jesus. Fourthly, he justified you when you believed and fifthly, he will glorify you in eternity.

Not long ago I visited a man who was in the last stages of dying, and we spoke about the themes of this passage. He said to me that the only thing that was left for him was to be glorified. God had done everything else. His life was coming to an end and he was waiting for that moment of glory when he would be completely redeemed. All else was done. Isn’t it wonderful to think of God’s purposes for your life? Your Christian faith is not just some random process; you are not insignificant; you are not unknown to God; you are not unwanted by God - you are part of his plan, part of his family. He has a particular plan for you and he knows about every circumstance of your life. All things that happen to you he can turn for good, even the most desperate circumstances that you may well experience.

Four Questions

“What, then, shall we say in response to these things? 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 then is the one who condemns? No one. 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.’ 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.”

Romans 8:31-39, NIV

What a wonderful passage that is! It brings to an end Paul’s great teaching in this second series. It starts with four dramatic questions. Having said all this about God, and his sovereignty over our lives, as described in verses 28 - 30, which is total. He has got everything in control from the very beginning of your life to the very end - everything that happens to you he knows about, he can deal with and can shape your life through everything that happens.

Having said that, Paul says rather dramatically,‘If God is for us, who can be against us?’ and the answer, of course, is nobody who is against us is as powerful as God. Who can bring any charge against those whom God has chosen? Nobody. When God justifies you and forgives you, nobody can accuse you of those sins anymore. No satanic power can come and take away the salvation that God has given you. No human accusation will ever take away the forgiveness that God has given you. Who is the one who condemns? Nobody condemns us, we are free of guilt. Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Nobody. No power, no human influence, no spiritual power, no demonic influence, no circumstance, no suffering, no war, no loss can separate us from the love of Christ. The forces of darkness do everything they can to undermine the confidence of Christians in their salvation. When Paul speaks of ‘neither angels nor demons nor any powers,’ he is speaking of spiritual forces that would want to undermine his gospel, and he wants the Christians in Rome, and us as well, to know the foundation upon which our faith is built. It is not a foundation that we built, it is a foundation that God built, that crosses all phases of time in your life, from the very beginning of your life to the very end, and all circumstances within your life, however difficult they are won’t separate you from God’s love.

In my experience, there are many Christians who frequently doubt the love of God, and some who are intimidated by their experiences of evil spiritual forces in their culture: witchcraft, shamanism, folk religion, non-Christian faiths. I was speaking to somebody recently who comes from Latin America and had experienced all sorts of dark spiritual forces before coming to Christ, and spoke to me about how it was difficult to hold on to these truths that we have in Romans 8 because of all those past experiences and memories, and different spiritual powers, and the knowledge that they are real powers. This passage is the answer to those kind of questions. We don’t need to fear the witch doctors and the occultists and the evil forces that are against the Church. We need to live good lives, but most of all, believe the things that the New Testament tells us about our salvation. Our security is guaranteed by Jesus Christ. Paul believed this most passionately. He really wanted to lay this foundation in the church in Rome. When Christians are hesitant, doubtful, uncertain about their salvation, filled with uncertainty about the things they have done in the past, then their Christian lives become very weak. We need to keep remembering: what is forgiven is forgiven, and what God forgives, he forgets; he never brings it back to mind. Our responsibility is to embrace the presence of the Holy Spirit in our lives today, to follow him and not slip back into old ways of behaving. But even if we do, forgiveness is available.

Paul is speaking here into an area of great spiritual battle in the Church. There is a great battle to understand the gospel in the first place, and Paul was dealing with that earlier on in the book of Romans. But there is also a great battle to hold on to the gospel, once you have received it, and not to drift away.

Reflections

So, some concluding reflections as we come to the end of this wonderful Series 2, where Paul has helped us so much on our journey of Christian faith, with so many truths that he has shared with us.

My first reflection is, that Romans 8 is a great chapter for you to study on your own. I would advise you to read it regularly.

Secondly, let us apply this truth about God being in control of our lives individually and personally. Which things in your life make you afraid? Which things do you feel are out of control and troubling you? We should be bringing those things to God and saying, ‘OK Lord, I can’t control these things, but I trust you with the words of Romans 8: 28, that ‘in all things God works for the good of those who love him’’. The work of the gospel in salvation is powerful and permanent and we have great eternal hope of glory at the end of our lives. Whatever your circumstances are, I am sure, that this passage has touched you and made you think again about your context. Can I encourage you to take hold of its truths? Think about them, meditate on them, study them, speak out these words aloud in times of doubt or difficulty or uncertainty or suffering.

Thanks for joining us for this episode and if you come back for the next one, we are moving on to a different theme in Series 3, when Paul addresses the important question of where the Jews fit into God’s purposes - a question that was very important for the Romans that he was writing to.