01-23-11 All Things Together For Good!

Our study of Romans chapter 8

brings us today

to a passage of Scripture that, if we allow ourselves to honestly hear what Paul is saying,

and if we seriously consider the possibility

that the words are true,

will impact our outlook on both our life

and our God

as profoundly as any truth we will ever encounter.

It is a passage I find difficult to teach,

not because it is confusing

or obscure,

but rather because it’s not,

and, because of the significance of what it says,

I fear I may fail to effectively lead our minds and hearts into the kind of relationship with the passage

that God intends for us to have.

If you have been following our study in recent weeks

you know we are studying the section of Paul’s letter to the Romans

written by him to equip the people of God

with the tools we need to handle the suffering and the pain that will be a part

of every growing believer’s life.

So far we have seen Paul offer us

4 truths that help to keep us strong when we hurt.

1. He began with strong words of assurance

that the glory to be revealed to us

will vastly exceed the pain we are currently experiencing.

2. He then told us that this world,

as it currently operates,

does not work as God intended.

It has been twisted,

and perverted,

and distorted as a direct result

of the evil introduced into it by our sin.

But the time will come,

at the return of the King,

when all of this will be brought into perfect, obedient subjection to our Lord.

And all the pain

and the suffering that flow from the evil that currently saturates our world will cease.

3. From there Paul brought his words of encouragement even closer to home

as he talked with us

about the battle we continue to fight

with all of the faithless

and godless thinking,

and feeling,

and responding that is so deeply imbedded in our physical bodies.

He tells us that we will one day

be given a brand new body,

one that cooperates perfectly

with the longings of these righteous hearts our God has created within us.

4. And then last week

we looked at the 4^th support for suffering,

given to us in Romans 8:26-27,

in which Paul assures us that,

when we call out to our Heavenly Father in our pain,

our assurance that He hears us

does not depend upon our ability to speak just the right words

in just the right way so as to be “acceptable” to God.

Our assurance of His hearing us

rests on the fact that He knows our hearts without our speaking a word,

and His Spirit can and will intercede for us as we cry out to our God.

And now this morning

we come to the 5^th and final support for suffering

given to us in this section of Paul’s letter.

It is found in Romans 8:28-30,

but before I read the passage for us

I want you to take a minute to do something

that I hope will help us get a little better grasp on what Paul is saying to us in these 3 verses.

I want you to answer a question in your own mind.

The question is this, “If you could, simply by choosing to do so,

remove one thing from your life,

what would it be?”

Some of you may answer that question

by focusing on some weakness that plagues your life.

Some of you may recall some person from your past

who wounded you deeply,

leaving behind emotional scars

that have tortured you ever since.

Some of you may select the loss of someone you loved.

Some of you may think of either a physical or emotional pain that plagues your life now.

But whatever it is,

it will be something that is bringing suffering into your life at some level.

And it will also be something that,

if we were to trace it back to its roots,

exists because of some form of evil that has impacted your life.

Even intense loneliness

that at first glance

seems to be morally neutral

is really the result of the isolation

and thick protective social barriers we construct between us and those around us

because of our sin,

and the fear it creates within us that if we let someone close enough so that they saw us honestly

they would turn away in disgust.

But whatever you choose as your answer,

I want you to use it as the backdrop

to what we will now hear Paul saying to us

in this 5^th support for suffering.

OK, it’s found in Romans 8:28-30,

and it reads:

ROM 8:28 And we know that God causes all things to work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose.

ROM 8:29 For those whom He foreknew, He also predestined to become conformed to the image of His Son, so that He would be the firstborn among many brethren;

ROM 8:30 and these whom He predestined, He also called; and these whom He called, He also justified; and these whom He justified, He also glorified.

Now, as we move into these verses

I need to let you know

that all three of these verses go together as a single unit.

Verses 29 and 30

provide us with the context in which Paul makes his statement in verse 28.

But let’s begin with verse 28,

And we know that God causes all things to work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose.

For us to begin to understand

the incredible power

of what Paul says to us from verses 28 through the end of chapter 8

we need to keep in mind that he has been moving our minds to these truths

for the past seven and a half chapters.

This remarkable letter began in chapter 1

with a picture of the human race without Christ.

It was a horrible picture,

a picture of humanity immersed in the accumulated consequences of our own sin and rebellion against God,

a picture of us eternally, hopelessly separated from the love of our Creator.

Then, from there, after creating within us

the sense of helplessness and utter despair

that any logical treatment of the facts must bring us to,

Paul suddenly turned the spotlight onto Christ,

and began to reveal to us

the eternal peace with God

and entrance into His grace and His love

that our Creator offers

to all who come to Him through faith in Christ.

He talked with us about the great wealth

our God pours out on us through Christ.

He talked with us

about God’s careful program for breaking the bondage of sin in our lives.

He talked with us

about the intimate union

God creates between His Spirit

and our spirits in response to our faith in Christ.

He talked with us about the glorious future He has designed for us in the endless eternity ahead.

And each step of the way

we have seen our God drawing closer,

and closer,

and closer to us

until finally,

Paul brings us to the place

where he can make his summery statements about what has really happened between God and man

because of the work of Christ.

And the first of those concluding statements is this:

And we know that God causes all things to work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose.

And just so that there is no misunderstanding

about what Paul is saying in this verse,

let me state it as clearly as I can.

In this verse God is revealing to His people

the depth of both His involvement in our lives

and His commitment to us.

As you know by now,

this statement is made to us by God

in the context of our suffering, our pain.

That is the issue under discussion.

And it is that issue

that prompts Him to lead Paul to reveal to us this truth.

He wants us to know

that our pain is never ever without purpose,

that, even if it was caused by our own sinful choices,

or by the intrusion of evil into our lives because of the sinful choices of others,

God both can and will use it

for our greater good

if we will take that pain,

and the wounds and events that have caused it,

and bring them to Him.

But His commitment to us does not stop there.

He doesn’t just say, “And we know that God causes our suffering to work together for good...”

He says, “... we know that God causes ALL things to work together for good to those who love God...”

Using the issue of suffering as a spring board,

Paul goes on to reveal to us a whole new dimension to God’s involvement in our lives,

one that, given the hostile relationship that we all had with our Creator prior to our entrance into His grace,

none of us would ever have anticipated.

And we must make no mistake here -

this is not just some passive affirmation

that things will somehow all work out best in the end for the people of God.

This is a direct, active commitment of God Himself

to each individual Christian,

a commitment in which He tells us

that He will take everything that enters our lives

and not just give us the wisdom and strength to endure it,

but actually to reshape it into good within us as we place those things into His hands,

good that would never have existed

had these things not touched us.

It is a commitment based upon His absolute knowledge of everything in our lives,

and His intimate involvement with us

at the deepest possible level of our existence.

Now, it is important to note

that Paul does not tell us here

that God is always the source of the things that touch us.

We live in a world saturated with evil,

and every one of us will be affected by that evil at times,

evil that cannot be removed

until the return of Christ.

But God’s commitment to us

is that even though He is not the author of evil,

He both can and will reshape that evil

into good in our lives.

Historically, of course,

the greatest illustration we will ever have of this truth

is the crucifixion of Jesus Christ.

It was the evil intentions

of men and women who hated Jesus

that put Him on that cross.

Their sole purpose was to destroy Him,

to remove Him forever from this earth.

It was their hatred,

their jealousy,

their greed that drove them to their actions.

And it was this, the greatest evil of all time,

that our God used to bring into being

the greatest good - the offer of redemption and reconciliation to the entire world.

And now, through this statement in Romans 8:28,

our God makes it clear

that He has committed Himself to accomplishing that same redemptive pattern

in the lives of each of us who come to Him through faith in Christ.

Now, obviously, if we were ever to accept the validity of what God is saying to us here

it would have a profound effect

on the way we relate to the events that take place in our lives.

It doesn’t mean we wouldn’t hurt deeply sometimes.

It doesn’t mean we wouldn’t grieve over our losses.

It certainly doesn’t mean

that we wouldn’t fight against evil

whenever and wherever we could.

But it does mean that,

when the events in our lives

do not go as we would have wanted them to,

we can still face those events with hope,

knowing that in His time

our God can and will reshape evil into good in our lives.

Before we moved into this verse this morning

I asked you to bring to mind

one thing in your life that,

if you could choose to change,

you would.

I don’t know what you selected

in response to that question,

but I do know whatever it was

comes under the category of the “all things” mentioned in this verse.

And I also know that, with whatever you selected,

if you are a Christian,

you have a choice about what you can do with it.

The natural response, of course,

would be to allow hatred and bitterness against the one who caused your pain

to consume you.

You could even invest your life

and your energies

into trying to force them to face what they did to you,

and to make them pay for it.

If those are the choices you make,

then I need to share something with you

that you may not want to hear.

The person who is really responsible for the destruction of your life

is not the person who acted in evil against you,

it is yourself

because you are the one

who has chosen to let this evil become the central focus of your life.

These battles become all the more difficult

when the thing we would change if we could

is something for which we hold God Himself responsible -

some physical aspect of our life,

or the death of someone we loved,

or some other negative impact that was not the result of human intervention.

But with whatever it is,

we have an alternative choice to bitterness,

or to anger,

a choice that is rooted in the promise made to us by our God

here in Romans 8:28.

We can take what we hate

and place it into the hands of our God,

and ask Him to work even this together for good in our lives,

and then ask Him for eyes to see what He’s doing.

If this sounds simplistic

or if it sounds like some sort of little mental game where we just try hard

to look on the bright side,

let me assure you it is not.

There are places in His instructions to us

where our God talks to us about the great value

in focusing on the good in any situation,

but that is not what is going on here.

The offer our Lord is making us in this verse

is one in which He calls us

to the most practical, down-to-earth faith in Him we could ever have,

a faith that begins with our willingness

to face honestly that which causes us pain in our life,

a faith that then calls us

to believe our God is really there,

and really cares,

and can and will bring life out of death.

Now, it is a little dangerous for me to stop at this point in Paul’s comments

because there is an important context

in which this promise of our God is made to us,

a context that we find in verses 29 and 30.

But we won’t have time to look at that context until next week.

But even without the context

what God reveals to us in this one verse, verse 28,

will stand on it’s own.

Our God truly has made a commitment

to each of us who come to Him through Christ,

a commitment in which He assures us

that He not only feels our pain with us,

but He can reshape that pain

into tremendous good in our lives.

Now, I know that a truth like the one offered to us by our Lord in this verse

just cries out for illustration.

And at first I considered importing one from someone else’s life -

maybe talk about the Apostle Paul and his “thorn in the flesh”

or the great Christian hymn writer, Fannie Crosby, and her blindness.

But in the end I have decided to illustrate what I have been trying to say during the past half hour

by sharing with you

the greatest illustration of this truth from my own life that I have ever known.

I spent my entire childhood

in what I now realize was almost total emotional isolation.

I have a tremendous amount of respect

for the personal obstacles

that both my parents had faced in their lives,

but when I was growing up

neither one of them was ever able to enter my life on an emotional level

in a way I could receive.

From my childhood perspective

they appeared to feel nothing for me,

and I, in turn, felt nothing for them.

In fact, I simply felt nothing at all for anyone or anything.

I was not connected to my childhood world on an emotional level at all.

I didn’t realize there was anything abnormal about this

until I began to enter my adult years

and discovered that most people have a whole wealth of memories about their childhood,

whereas I have almost none.

It is the emotion of an event

that imprints that event onto our memory,

and because I felt almost nothing

I remember almost nothing.

As I entered my adult life

I did so without any healthy idea

of how to connect emotionally with the people God brought into my life.

In fact, more than that,

I had a “life rule” imprinted within me

that told me other people cannot and will not connect with me on an emotional level.

But the most remarkable thing began to happen

when my Lord Jesus Christ entered my life

and began His reconstructive work within me.

He took this great emotional vacuum within me,

brought it out into the open,

and then used it as one of the most powerful motivational forces of my entire life.

He used it to give me a longing and a hunger

to learn how to connect at a healthy emotional level

with the important people in my life.

It has had a profound impact

on the way I have approached my relationships with Sandee and with Joni.

It drove me to discover

how to listen to another person,

how to allow them to share themselves with me,

and even, (and this was the really tough one),

how to risk sharing myself with them

when I felt safe enough in the relationship to do so.

Would I trade the emotional climate of my childhood if I could?

Yes.

Would I trade what my God has done within me

because of that emotional climate?

Not for anything in the world

because, you see, my God

“... causes all things to work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose.”