Imagine you are a parent and your child crawls up and your lap and asks you the kind of question you feel completely unprepared to answer – like “why does God let bad things happen?” How do you respond to a child trying to make sense of a senseless world?
You want to say the right thing and provide a meaningful explanation, but sometimes we don’t understand it ourselves.
Imagine you are in line at a funeral home to pay respects and offer comfort to a friend whose parent or spouse has just died. What will you say when you get your opportunity? Perhaps the death is tragic and untimely – how can you possibly offer any positive comment when your friend is heartbroken by a loss?
We want to offer some comfort and say something to ease the suffering, but as soon as we open our mouths we run the risk of spewing empty platitudes. We want to be positive and reassuring but our efforts to put words to our good intentions often fall short. So we end up with things like: “Everything turns out OK.” “It was all for the best.”
To make it even more personal, imagine you are sitting in a doctor’s office facing some devastating report. Imagine you have just received a phone call delivering some bad news. Imagine you are lying in bed at night tossing around in your head some worse case scenarios. What confidence will you have that everything really will be OK? What if things don’t work out for the best? Where will you turn? What will you pray for?
Here is a little gift from Romans chapter 8:
“the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groans that words cannot express.”
When we are at a loss for words, a loss of answers, a loss of hope, the Spirit living in us helps us and prays for us and intercedes on our behalf. When all we have is a sigh of exasperation or a groan of misery, the Spirit is able to translate it into prayer.
But Romans 8 gives us even more than an unspoken prayer. It puts words around a hope that we have in Christ. Romans 8 offers us a lifesaver of substance we can grab on to. The promises of Romans 8 can stand up to the worse that life can deliver. For those who need some assurance to share with others and more importantly and more personally for those of us – all of us – who need that same confidence for ourselves when things go sour, Romans 8 gives us hope in the face of the life’s ugliest attempts to drive us over the edge and into despair. That’s why Romans 8 is considered the most beloved chapter in the Bible.
All things work together for the good of those who love God. Now wait a minute. Isn’t that just another version of “everything works out in the end?” How is this any different? Well, I just recited a bad translation of that verse. Look at how it reads in our reading for today in verse 28. Do you see a significant difference in the words there?
We know that in all things GOD WORKS for the good of those who love him.
We don’t know thatALLTHINGS work for our good. We don’t know thatALLTHINGS have a happy ending. We don’t know that inALLTHINGS we will be successful. But we DO know that in all things, GOD WORKS for our good. That’s no clique. That’s no “polly anna”, rose colored thinking. That’s the truth. That’s a fact for those in Christ. If you’re memorizing the verse, get it right: We know that in all things, God works for the good for those who love him.
What was the worst thing that ever happened? An innocent man – a sinless, guiltless man suffering the consequences of a world history of sin. That was the worst thing that ever happened. No doubt about it. And God worked that horrible event for our good. If he can do that, and he already did it, then he can be trusted to work all things out for our good. His death is, in fact, our guarantee that God works for our good in all things. It’s in the cross that we see God working for us.
Moses – guilty of murder, a fugitive on the run in the hot wilderness, saw God speaking in a burning bush.
Hannah saw God working through her tears at Shiloh as she begged for a child in the face of infertility.
Elijah – abandoned and alone — heard God whispering in the cleft of a mountain amid thunder, lightning, wind and fire.
Bartimaeus, though blind, saw God at work from his place along the road.
The centurian at the cross saw God working when Jesus died in suffering and agony.
The thief saw God working for him as he hung on a cross beside Jesus.
If you can’t yet see God in the personal, often tragic, circumstances of life, keep looking and keep hoping. Because we’ve got a promise in our hands here. GOD WORKS in all things.
And if God is working for us, who can be against us? Paul is now beginning to push it a little further. Emptied of their power, all things fall by the wayside in defeat. Who can against us? Who has any power over us? Who will condemn us to a life of misery and isolation and grief? Will God condemn us? He’s the one that justifies us! Paul says. How about Jesus then? He’s the one who died for us, Paul says. He’s sitting at God’s right hand! They are a team – and they are FOR US!
Martin Luther loved those two words. He said they are the most important two words for the Christian who wants to know God and who wants to understand his presence in the Lord’s Supper. For you. God is for you. Never against. That makes us MORE than conquerors, or literally, SUPER conquerors, according to Paul.
If God is working for us in all things, if God is for us and nothing against us, then let’s take it one more step further. Who or what could ever come between us and God? Who could separate us from God’s love?
That’s a good question. And for the Roman’s enduring the first round of history’s persecution of Christians this was a very timely question. Paul’s list of separating calamities is taken right from a Roman Christian’s worry list: tribulation, distress, persecution, famine, nakedness, peril, or sword. These were not just the everyday frustrations of life. This was some of the worst suffering imaginable. Will these things separate them – us—from God’s love?
We feel the weight of that question with each honest question a child asks about God. We feel the weight of that whenever something threatens to deplete our supply of peace and hope. We feel the weight of that question every time life slaps us in the face and we face the man-eating lions in life’s arena.
And in our deepest movements of doubt, we fear what the answer might be. “Maybe this thing will be the thing that pushes me over and pushes me out. Maybe this time I’ve gone too far. Maybe this time, my luck will run out and I will finally get what I deserve.”
Paul begins this last promise from Romans 8 with three important words: I am convinced. That confidence runs through the whole chapter. You think your problem uniquely disqualifies you from the reality of this promise? The truth is, you can’t place yourself high enough or low enough to be excluded from this promise. You think the forces behind your problem are powerful and influential and could really hurt you? The truth is, You’re a super conqueror. You can be separated from your money, your family, your dreams, even your life. But you can’t be separated from the undying, unrelenting, unstoppable power of God’s love. Just when the separating forces are greatest is our bond with the Savior deepest.
If you believe that, or even if just want to believe that, let us claim this promise and let us live by the power of the Spirit in the confidence of this promise and let’s recite those two verses right now with the same boldness that Paul had when he wrote them:
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.
