02-20-11 God Is For Us!

ROM 8:31 What then shall we say to these things?...

I wish I knew how to teach the passage that we have for today

in a way that enabled it to engulf our lives,

and our minds,

and our hearts,

and our souls.

We will look at the words together.

I will do what I can do

to present it correctly from a teaching point of view.

But the power of what we will look at during the next few minutes

does not come from the academic content.

It comes from the underlying purpose

for which this content was given to us.

The last 9 verses of Romans chapter 8

were given to us to provide us

with a crystal-clear view

into the heart of God Himself.

Last week we took a few steps into this passage,

and at that time I told you

that those opening words, “What then shall we say to these things?”,

were words that linked this passage

directly back to verse 30 talking about our being chosen and called.

And that’s true.

But that isn’t the whole picture.

In the most accurate sense

these words, “What then shall we say to these things?”,

are words that point back

to the first 8 chapters of Paul’s letter to the Romans.

These final nine verses

are words that Paul uses

to make certain that no one who ever reads this letter honestly

can misunderstand what he has been trying to say to us.

What then shall we say to these things? If God is for us, who is against us?

Do you know what that is?

It is the continental divide in our understanding about our Creator.

When I was still in grade school

our family road the train one summer

from Seattle to Minnesota.

At one point on that trip

an announcement came over the PA system

telling us that we had just crossed the continental divide.

Then the person making the announcement went on to explain -

On the west side of the continental divide

every river eventually made it’s way into the Pacific Ocean.

On the east side

every river eventually made it’s way into the Atlantic.

Those four words

that we began to chew on last week,

those words, “...God is for us...”

are the continental divide

in our understanding about our God.

We all begin our journey

believing our God is against us,

making demands we cannot fulfill,

writing rules we cannot obey,

walling us off from the really good things in life.

He is a force to be reckoned with -

to be pacified through fervent religious activity,

or through good works,

or we see Him as a Being to be surgically removed from our lives

through the skillful use of razor-sharp intellect.

Or, at the very least, he is Someone to hide from

behind good times,

or hard work,

or social success and prominence,

or through drugs, or alcohol,

or passion relationships,

or behind any one of a thousand other hiding places.

But underlying all of these,

and the driving force behind them all

is our certainty that He is against us,

a Force to be removed at all costs.

And it is only right that we should feel this way

because we know ourselves well enough

to know that there really are some reasons why,

if this God really is there,

He just might have some valid reasons

for being AGAINST us.

But what Paul is doing in these first 8 chapters of Romans,

as He talks with us

first of all about why it was necessary for Christ to come,

and then, second, about the offer God is making to us through Christ,

and then, finally, about what we can expect to happen in our lives

and in our relationship with God

as a result of our submission to Christ,

is to bring us to this, the great continental divide of life -

the realization,

the truth that “...God is FOR us...”.

The One we have been running from,

the One we have worked so hard to appease,

or to hide from,

or to amputate from our thinking,

the One our spirit has feared most of all

is the One who, more than any other,

more than our parents,

more than our life partner,

more than our closest friend,

is the One who is FOR us,

on our side,

in our pain,

in our loneliness,

in our confusion,

in our sin,

always, FOR us.

And if we have heard correctly

what Paul has said to us in these first 8 chapters,

we will understand why Paul says what he says.

There are no hoops we must jump through,

no promises we must keep,

no changes we must make for God

before He will consider being FOR us.

There is a difficulty in crossing this divide, of course,

the same difficulty I think Jesus’ original band of disciples faced.

I mentioned this last week,

but I want to repeat it again today

because I see it as being so critical

to our understanding what was happening between Jesus and His disciples.

I have done a good deal of thinking the past few years

about those disciples,

and about why it took them 3 full years

before they could see Jesus for who He really was.

He exercised absolute authority

over every demon,

every disease,

every aspect of nature,

even death itself.

He took upon Himself both the right

and the authority to forgive other people’s sins.

And yet most of those who knew Him

never did accept His true identity,

and even those who were closest to Him

took three full years

before they could begin to accept

that this man just might be

God’s expression of Himself in human form.

Why?

It wasn’t because their concept of Jesus was distorted.

Who He was

and what He was doing

was clearly obvious to all.

It was because their concept of God was so distorted

that they simply could not put the two together.

How could God actually be nice?

How could He care so deeply about us,

about our pain,

about our needs?

How could He live in our presence

without recoiling at our moral offensiveness,

without shredding us daily

for the constant flood of faithlessness

that forever flows from our lives?

How could it be that His friendship,

His love would so deeply infiltrate our lives

that it became more precious to us,

more important than anything else,

more important than everything else,

more important than life itself?

And the battle those disciples fought

is the same battle each of us must fight-

the battle for the discovery

that our God is FOR us.

The Christian community talks so much

about the need for a walk of faith.

And by the time we get done with that concept of faith

no one is really sure what it is,

but we all know we really need to have it.

Hebrews 11:6 takes the mystery out of it.

HEB 11:6 And without faith it is impossible to please Him, for he who comes to God must believe that He is, and that He is a rewarder of those who seek Him.

The underlying issues

of every act of true faith

are always exactly the same -

our choosing to believe

that our God is there,

and that He will be good to me if I come to Him.

Sounds easy, huh?

There is nothing easy about it.

There is nothing more difficult,

and often nothing more terrifying for us to do

than to reach out to our God on that basis.

It’s all different than religion, of course.

We can reach out to God through an endless stream of religious activities,

giving Him what we think He wants,

or what we think He requires,

and never ever have to trust His goodness.

I remember my first act of faith.

I remember the terror that accompanied it.

I was 19 years old,

and I had a nice little future all worked out for myself.

And then this God began mucking about inside me.

He made it clear to me

that He wanted my life.

And He also made it clear

that His purposes for me

and His goals for my future

were nothing like what I had worked out.

He was going to ruin everything.

At the time I fought with the external issues-

would I give Him my life on His terms?

But underlying the externals

was the real issue that forms the basis

of every act of faith -

could I really trust this God to be GOOD?

Was He really a REWARDER

to everyone who came to Him?

And here in Romans 8:31

Paul is bringing us back to this same issue - “...God is for us...”.

And it is this discovery,

the acceptance of this,

the most crucial truth in all of human experience,

that God is for us

that provides the continental divide of life.

It is at this point

that the flow of our life

begins to move the opposite direction.

We’re not talking about great raging torrents of faith,

and trust,

and confidence in the goodness of our God.

We’re talking about little trickles here and there -

places where we begin to see His goodness

as we have never seen it before,

and places where we begin trusting that goodness

just a little bit

through hearing and obeying what He says,

not out of fear,

but because just maybe this God of ours is really truly FOR us.

But it’s interesting how little trickles

join with other little trickles,

forming tiny streams

that join with others

changing the entire flow of our lives.

Once we have finally reached that continental divide,

once we have finally accepted the thought

that the God who is,

the God who created all that is,

the God who created us

is GOOD,

and, at least as some level,

truly can be trusted,

it changes everything forever.

Remarkably,

there seem to be more than a few Christians,

who have not yet crossed this divide,

people who know they need God,

but who still don’t really like Him very much,

and certainly don’t trust Him

when what He says conflicts

with what they already believe.

Paul wrote the first 8 chapters of the book of Romans

to bring the people of God

to this great dividing line of life,

to the discovery of the truth of these four words, that “...God is for us...”.

And then, in these final verses of the 8^th chapter

he pulls it all together

so as to make certain there is no way

we can misunderstand what he has been trying to say.

And he begins with this:

ROM 8:31 What then shall we say to these things? If God is for us, who is against us?

OK, now I have spent the past few minutes

saying just two things:

God is FOR us,

and our discovery and acceptance of that truth

is the turning point for every person

who chooses to accept the truth of that statement.

But I’m not going to leave this

until I’ve done all that I can

to help us understand

why this is so hard for us.

Here we all are, sitting in CHURCH,

with the guy up front

talking about God being good.

What else would you expect me to say?

That’s what I’m suppose to do.

But once we leave here,

or more likely even before,

our logical, rational minds

are collecting and organizing all of the “evidence”

that disproves what I have been saying.

If this God is really there,

and if He is really FOR US,

then how could He...

How could He have allowed my marriage to fall apart?

How could He have let that person die?

How could He have allowed those things to happen to me when I was growing up?

How could He have allowed me to have this problem I cannot change

and cannot escape?

If God is really for us,

how could He...

In response to those types of questions

I would say this.

First of all,

everything we currently hate

about the world in which we live

exists not because of God,

but because of our rebellion against Him.

The loneliness,

the disease,

the hatred,

the inability to understand how to love,

the corruption and dishonesty,

the cruelty,

and the blindness,

and the bigotry,

and the fear,

and that turmoil you have going on inside your right now for which you have no answers,

and even death itself,

all of it now exists

not because of God,

but because of our separation from Him.

This is the end result

of mankind’s bold experiment to claim this world for ourselves,

and run it without the intervention of our God.

Oh, I know we’ve got lots and lots of religion around,

telling people they should be nice,

and they should be good.

But religion is not God.

More often than not it is our hiding place from Him.

And at the very least,

when we begin our churning about the goodness of our God,

we must do so honestly,

acknowledging that what we hate most about our world

exists not because of our God,

but because of us,

and because of our fierce determination to keep Him as far out of the picture as possible.

Second,

Paul makes it clear

that the beginning of all correct understanding about God

starts not by our looking at the mess around us,

but rather by looking at how our God responded to that mess.

ROM 8:31 What then shall we say to these things? If God is for us, who is against us?

ROM 8:32 He who did not spare His own Son, but delivered Him up for us all, how will He not also with Him freely give us all things?

The beginning of all correct understanding of our God

is found in the recognition of how He responded

to our rebellion against Him

and to the endless flow of corruption that has resulted from that rebellion.

He did not spare His own Son, but delivered Him up for us all...

He enters our world,

He enters our lives right where we are,

both in the first century

and right now,

right here,

today.

And he begins by offering us Himself -

not His judgement,

or His condemnation,

or His wrath,

but exactly the opposite.

He offers us His compassion,

and His kindness,

and His forgiveness,

and His love.

He takes the penalty of our rebellion against Him onto Himself,

pays our moral debt in full,

and then extends to each of us

the offer of reunion with Him

and entrance into His love.

But it doesn’t stop there.

Having given us entrance into His love,

He than extends to each of those who come to Him

the invitation to allow Him

to walk with us,

and to work with us through each aspect of our existence,

bit-by-bit,

issue-by-issue,

one day at a time,

“...working all things together for good in our lives.”

And the comparison with which Paul brings home

the dramatic change that takes place

between us and our God,

as we enter into His love through Christ, is powerful.

He who did not spare His own Son, but delivered Him up for us all, how will He not also with Him freely give us all things?

We frequently may not understand what God is doing in our lives,

but Paul wants to be sure

we never misunderstand why He’s doing it.

Having already given us the most costly demonstration of His love for us

through the death of Christ for us,

will He not continue the demonstration of that love in our lives each day?

This is the only world available to us right now -

a world saturated to its very core

with consequences of man’s rebellion against God,

a world that inflicts deep wounds

into the lives of every person born into it.

When we come to our Lord Jesus Christ

He does not remove us from this world,

nor does He instantly wipe away

the affects of evil on our lives.

But His pledge to us, His certain promise

is that once He enters

we will never again have to go through the consequences of that evil alone.

He will now go with us,

giving us courage we never had before,

giving us wisdom beyond ourselves,

giving us hope and assurance that He will bring us through.

And even more than that

He gives us His promise

that He can and will take even the worst that we face

and reshape it for good in our lives because...

because our God truly is for us.

Though Paul doesn’t end here,

we have to for the day.

The next time we’re in this passage together we’ll complete the picture.