01-16-11 Too Deep For Words

We are going to return to our study of the Romans chapter 8 in just a few minutes,

but before we do I just want to offer a few words especially for those of you who are new with us.

I’m not sure what’s happening, or why,

but during the past couple of months

our little fellowship has been growing.

Typically this type of thing happens in the fall

when people return from their summer schedules

and get the urge to try different church fellowships.

It’s sort of the annual autumn Alaskan church shuffle.

I’ve never seen it happening this time of year,

but for whatever reasons

I am aware that we have some new additions to our group.

And before I say anything more,

let me put your mind at ease

by assuring you that I’m not going to ask you to stand and introduce yourself

or make yourself a visible target in any way.

But I do have something I very much want to share with you.

Whether or not you ultimately decide we are a good church fit for you

is a decision that involves a lot of factors

and we as a church will never do anything

to deprive you of the absolute freedom

to make that choice without any pressure from us whatsoever.

But there is, I think, one thing I can help you with in that process.

Some of you have made a move from where ever you were before

because your spirit was hungry for...well, for something,

and that hunger became intense enough

to motivate you to take some risks.

And during the short time you’ve been here

you’ve heard me telling you about a God

who aligns perfectly with the God you know deep within your spirit.

He is a God who never manipulates you,

never lashes out in anger,

never turns away in disgust,

a God who truly loves you with an everlasting love,

a God overflowing with compassion, and kindness, and grace upon grace.

You have been drawn to what you have heard,

but there is a fear within you as well,

or perhaps two fears.

One of them is that just maybe what you’ve been hearing is too good to be true,

that there’s simply no way the Gospel of Jesus Christ,

the GOOD NEWS of God could really be that good.

How could He love us like that?

How could He truly take us right where we are, just as we are

and wrap His almighty arms of love around us

and draw us to Himself?

And with this fear

maybe the best thing I can do

is simply to borrow the words our God spoke through His angels to the shepherds

on that hillside so long ago.

"Do not be afraid; for behold, I bring you good news of great joy ...” Luk 2:10

What your spirit longs for

is what your God is truly offering

and He gives it freely to all who will reach out to Him.

You know, I hope, how our God ends this remarkable book we study here each week.

In the 26^th chapter of Revelation He says,

..."It is done. I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. I will give to the one who thirsts from the spring of the water of life without cost.” Rev 21:6

And then, just to make sure we heard what He was saying,

just few verses later He says it again.

The Spirit and the bride say, "Come." And let the one who hears say, "Come." And let the one who is thirsty come; let the one who wishes take the water of life without cost.” Rev 22:17

That’s the deal He makes with us

and you can trust what He says.

And when you hear the truth as God Himself designed it,

when your spirit truly hears it

it will become the sunrise for your soul.

But there is another fear

that I think some of you may be wrestling with as well,

and especially if you have come out of a church heritage

in which the message of the grace of God

has been mingled with religious manipulation

based on guilt, or fear, or flesh-based ego motivations.

As you’ve listened to me during the past few weeks

you may have wondered if possibly you just happened to have tapped into the teaching

at a point where you’re hearing what your spirit hungers for,

but there’s no way it could last.

And each week you come

wondering if this is the week

when you’ll once again hear the return of those all too familiar religious themes

that fueled the fear, and the guilt, and the sense of failure within you.

And that fear, at least, I can help you with.

What you fear will simply never happen

and it won’t happen for two reasons.

First of all, it will not happen

because for it to happen I would have to deny

the most crucial truth of my own life -

there is only one thing that has ever had the power to change my own life -

my own personal discovery of the endless depth of my God’s love for me.

It is all I know, and all I have to offer.

I have seen the effect of religious manipulation,

I have seen the way it grieves and attacks the life of Christ within us,

and I will have no part of it.

And second, I simply cannot and will not tamper with the written Word of God,

and after teaching the Bible verse-by-verse for more than 40 years

I discovered long ago that if I treat it with respect,

in context,

there simply is no other message there than the message of the compassionate grace of God poured out freely on all those who come to Him.

And with that, let’s return to our study of that written Word.

Our study of the book of Romans

brings us this morning

to the 4^th of the 5 supports for suffering given to us by Paul

in the last half of chapter 8.

As we have moved through our study of this 8^th chapter

we have heard Paul tell us

that one of the evidences of the life of Christ within us

is the presence in our lives

of a measure of suffering that we will encounter

as a direct result of our union with Christ.

Some of that suffering

is an unavoidable element

of the rebuilding work our Lord does within our lives.

The truth is, there are some areas of our lives

that our Lord simply cannot reconstruct

without that reconstruction process involving a measure of pain.

And then there is the suffering that comes

when our Lord allows us to see a part of our world through His eyes.

It is a pain that draws us into the battle,

a pain that causes us to reach out

and to allow our Lord to bring healing to others as a result of His life through us.

If we allow our Lord to open our hearts in love,

that love will at times bring pain into our lives

because when those we love hurt

we will hurt as well.

And some of the pain comes into our lives

because we are servants of our King,

involved daily in warfare with an enemy determined to destroy our ability

to illustrate with our lives

the grace and redemptive power of our God.

But then, as we have moved through this 8^th chapter,

we have seen that, as soon as Paul confronts us with the reality of suffering in our lives,

he follows it immediately

with 5 strong supports given to us by our Lord

to equip us to handle the pain.

Those 5 supports for suffering

are found in Romans 8:18-30.

We have already looked at the first 3,

all of which point us toward the future,

giving us the perspective we need

to help defeat the lies we are so vulnerable to

whenever we are dealing with pain.

We have heard Paul assure us that:

1. Our future glory will vastly exceed our present suffering. (It really is worth it!)

2. This physical world in which we live will one day be brought into total subjection to Christ. (We have been permitted to read the last chapter, and our side wins, and wins big!)

3. And this resistant physical body in which we live

will one day be replaced

with a brand new one that co-operates perfectly with the righteous longings of our already holy spirits.

From there, then,

Paul turns to the present

and offers us two additional survival tools

to help us handle the pain here and now.

The first of those two is found in Romans 8:26-27 where Paul says:

ROM 8:26 And in the same way the Spirit also helps our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we should, but the Spirit Himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words;

ROM 8:27 and He who searches the hearts knows what the mind of the Spirit is, because He intercedes for the saints according to the will of God.

Now, at first glance this may sound like a rather strange passage of Scripture.

Here is Paul talking about groanings too deep for words,

and about the Holy Spirit interceding for us in prayer,

and about God searching our hearts.

So what in the world is he talking about?

Well, the truth is,

when we keep the passage in context,

there is nothing mysterious or mystical going on here at all.

The passage is saying

exactly what it literally appears to be saying.

But let’s just take it a step at a time

so that we don’t miss what’s going on here.

And the first step

is for us to never loose sight

of Paul’s purpose for this section of his letter.

He is equipping us with the tools we need to handle pain

and one of those tools

is a clear understanding

of how this whole prayer thing works

between us and God.

When we’re hurting

the last thing we need

is to cry out to our God

and wonder whether or not He’s hearing us,

whether or not we are approaching Him

in a way that gives us clear access to Him.

Paul writes these verses

to free us forever from that concern.

Now, the opening phrase of these two verses is critical to our understanding of what Paul wants us to see here.

He begins by saying, “And in the same way the Spirit also helps our weakness...”

In the same way as what?

Obviously Paul is continuing on with an idea he began in the verses that precede this one.

If you were with us two weeks ago,

you will remember that, in this third glimpse of our future victory,

given to us by Paul in 8:23-25,

Paul tells us that this holy, righteous spirit

that our Lord has created within each Christian

will not always be frustrated in its ability to express itself

because of the pathetic way in which these physical bodies of ours

so often resist the life of Christ within us.

We will one day be given new bodies

that will provide us with perfect tools through which our spirits can express our love for

and our union with Christ.

Then, as Paul moves on to this fourth source of encouragement for us when we hurt,

he comes right back to this tension

that still exists between our inner spirits

and these physical bodies in which we continue to live,

and he says,

And in the same way the Spirit also helps our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we should...

He is saying that,

just as God will one day completely and permanently resolve this conflict

between our spirits and our bodies

by giving us a new body,

so right now,

while we still remain in these mistrained physical shells,

the Spirit of God helps us deal with the ignorance and wrong thinking they currently continue to contain.

You see,

when pain enters our lives,

when suffering comes in,

one of the things we want to know

is that we are not alone,

that our God is in this with us,

carrying us through the pain.

Nothing has the power to intensify suffering

like the belief we are all alone in our pain.

Nothing has the power to encourage us when we hurt

like the realization that we are not alone.

And when real suffering comes into our lives

we urgently need to know

that our God is right there with us,

that He knows

and He cares very much.

We need to know that,

even though our own stupid actions

may have caused our pain,

and even though our lives still don’t look

anything like what we really want them to look like,

and even though the truth is we are still very confused

about a whole lot of things about our God,

yet, right now, just because He loves us,

He is holding us securely in His mighty grip.

When our dog, Pepper, was still with us many years ago

nearly every night before I would put him in his bed

he would come into our bedroom

and end his day by curling up on our bed with us for a few minutes.

And I remember one night

near the end of his time with us

when his attempt to join us didn’t go as planned.

Pepper was getting rather old,

and he didn’t jump as well as he once did.

And then, too, he was going blind,

so his depth perception wasn’t always very accurate.

That particular night

he came trotting in to join us

and gave what he thought was a mighty spring

to launch himself up onto the bed.

But somehow he missed his jump

and came crashing back down,

catching his hind leg between the bed and the bedframe as he fell.

I was still in the bathroom

and came running in when I heard his agonized cries.

Though no permanent damage was done,

he was clearly in a great deal of pain,

and at first I was afraid he had broken his hip or his leg.

He stood there, holding his hind leg up,

and when I knelt down beside him,

he pushed his fuzzy little head into my hands,

and kept moaning pathetic little doggie moans

as he looked up at me through his foggy little eyes.

Everything about him said, “Please...please...please...I hurt! Can’t you make the pain go away?”

That is us with our God when we hurt.

Even the very young Christian

has tasted enough of the love of our God

to reach out to Him when pain comes in.

We need to know He is there with us in the pain.

We need to hear His voice

telling us He knows,

He cares,

He understands.

PSA 56:8-11 You have taken account of my wanderings; put my tears in Your bottle. Are they not in Your book?...This I know, that God is for me...In God I have put my trust, I shall not be afraid.

But the problem is

our conscious minds

really do not know the right things to ask for.

What we want to ask for, of course,

is that the suffering will stop.

But sometimes the suffering cannot end when we want it to,

because the purpose for which God allowed it to enter our life

has not yet been completed.

What He is seeking to accomplish in us

is not yet finished.

What He wants to communicate through us

has not yet been communicated.

What He wants to do in someone near us as a result of our pain

has not yet been accomplished.

And the truth is,

with most of us,

most of the time,

when suffering enters our life,

“...we do not know how to pray as we should...”

And when that happens,

Paul wants us to know

we don’t have to know!

Our hope of finding our God adequate in the pain,

and our assurance of finding His path

from where we are

to where He is taking us

does not depend upon us saying it right,

or phrasing it right,

or understanding what’s going on.

Do you know what Paul is really communicating to us in this passage?

He is telling us that prayer is not a game with God.

It is not some kind of tricky doctrinal maze

in which we must find

just the right words,

spoken in just the right way,

with just the right combination

of gratitude,

and reverence,

and petition,

and correct doctrinal perspective.

Prayer isn’t some kind of Divine game of Jeopardy

in which we have to come up

with exactly the right request,

phrased in exactly the right way

before He’ll respond with the answers we need.

Most of the prayers I have prayed in my life

have been rather petty, selfish little prayers,

doctrinally illiterate prayers,

prayers that are in every way inconsistent

with the work God is seeking to do in me as His child.

And yet, my God treasures every one of those ignorant prayers of mine.

The 5^th chapter of the book of Revelation

presents for us one of the most majestic

and awesome scenes found anywhere in the Scripture.

It is a scene that takes place in the very throne room of God Himself,

with incredible angelic beings

surrounding the throne,

and the air filled with the fragrance

of a special incense pouring from golden bowls being held by those who are there.

And then, in Revelation 5:8,

John tells us what that fragrant incense really is.

He says that incense filling the throne room in the presence of God

“are the prayers of the saints” -

all of those awkward,

groping,

confused little prayers of yours and mine,

all of them pictured as a sweet aroma to our Creator.

You see, every time we pray,

by the very act of praying

we affirm the most essential truth of our existence -

that we are created beings

in desperate, daily dependence

upon our Creator’s intervention in our lives.

The truth is,

every one of our prayers

will be prayed out of our flawed and often completely incorrect perspective

on ourselves and our God.

But by far the most important issue

is not WHAT we pray,

it’s THAT we pray,

for in the very act of prayer we affirm the truth.

And never is that more true

than when we hurt.

In these two verses here in Romans 8

Paul tells us that when we hurt

the Spirit Himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words...

In other words,

if all we are able to do

is to cry out to our God in groans,

than that is all we need to do.

If all we can do

is to cry out to our God

and say over and over again,

“Oh God!

Oh God!

Oh God!”

Then that is all we need to say.

He goes on to explain why.

He who searches the hearts knows what the mind of the Spirit is, because He intercedes for the saints according to the will of God.

In other words,

God doesn’t listen to our words,

He listens to our hearts.

When suffering enters our lives

the first thing we need to know

is that our God is in our pain with us,

and that we have direct access to Him.

To answer that longing

Paul tells us that as His children

we don’t even need words to communicate with Him.

All we need is a heart that reaches out to our Creator.

But there is a second question we need answered about our pain.

We not only need to know that God is with us,

we need to know there is purpose for it.

We need to know

that somehow our God can bring good

out of this evil that has intruded into our lives.

And the final support for suffering

given to us by Paul in this passage

answers that question.

We’ll look at what he says about this next week.