The Promise
Scott Bayles, pastor
Adapted from the book by Robert J. Morgan
In Robert J. Morgan’s book, The Promise, he tells the story of John Peterson. When John was a teenager he had a remarkable singing voice and was in high demand as a performer. His greatest ambition was to become a famous vocalist. “Only in singing did I feel competent and confident,” he wrote. “Here was at least one place where I could excel. I knew it, and I made the most of it.”
John became known as “the singing farm boy.” Local radio programs were featuring him and his future as a singer was bright. Then, one summer he found a job in a factory, working at a machine that made canvas wheat binders. It was a noisy factory, and John’s machine was especially loud. He couldn’t hear anything else; he could barely hear himself think. So he spent the whole day singing at the top of his lungs as he worked—all day, every day.
Too late, he realized that he was abusing and ruining his vocal cords. There was nothing the doctors or speech therapists could do. “I put such a strain on my faltering voice through overuse and inexperience,” he wrote, “that I damaged it beyond repair. When I realized fully what had happened, that my voice would never again be beautiful, I suffered such an emotional shock that it took months before I recovered. Singing, I had the power to thrill people, and suddenly it was all gone.” He was heartbroken.
However, John’s inability to sing forced him to pursue other talents that he had been neglecting. Peterson later wrote, “With my voice damaged, I turned more and more to writing and that talent was allowed to emerge and develop. What at first seemed like a tragedy was used for good, and the course of my life began to take shape in a quite unexpected way.” For those of you who may not recognize the name, John Peterson went on to give us such wonderful hymns as “Heaven Came Down and Glory Filled My Soul,” and “Surely Goodness and Mercy.”
I tell you that story to tell you this:
“We know that all things work together for the good of those who love God; those who are called according to His purpose” (Romans 8:28 HCSB).
I know there have been countless times when this verse has rung true in my life, and I’m sure there have been in yours, too. Let’s face it—bad things happen and they happen with unpredictable frequency and varying levels of intensity. Some are mere inconveniences; others are life-shattering disasters. But there is a promise—a single promise—in God’s Word that can meet every negative moment head-on, and given enough time, it will resolve our every problem. In Jesus Christ, we have an iron-clad, unfailing, all-encompassing, God-given guarantee that every single circumstance of life will sooner or later turn out well for those who love him.
Romans 8:28 is the promise that morphs us into resilient, cheerful people, whatever our temperament. It’s God darkroom in which negatives become positives. It’s His situation-reversal machine in which heartaches are changed into hallelujahs. It’s the foundation of hope and a fountainhead of confidence. Even our failures can become enriching and our sins redeemed. Even death itself becomes a blessing for the child of God. I want to explore this promise with you this morning because, as Charles Spurgeon once put it, “This is the best promise of this life!”
Like a precious jewel, this promise is multi-faceted reflecting the many colors of God’s grace and sovereignty. First of all, the promise begins with confidence.
• THE CONFIDENCE OF THE PROMISE
Notice the first two words of this verse: “We know that all things work together for the good of those who love God” (Romans 8:28 HCSB).
The words we know aren’t really necessary to the promise, and the verse makes perfect sense without them. If it simply read “All things work together for good to them that love God,” we never would have been the wiser and it still would have been a powerful truth. But the Holy Spirit, who doesn’t waste words, began the sentence with an emphasis not on what God is going to do, but on what our attitude should be about it—confidence.
We don’t hope, hypothesize, or hallucinate. We don’t postulate, speculate, or fabricate. We don’t toss and turn in anxiety. We know! We know God, therefore we know His power, understand something of His providence, and can trust His provision. It’s certain. For sure. Positive. Fail-safe. Inevitable. It’s God’s guarantee, and it can never be otherwise. Confidence is the companion of Christianity. John wrote:
“We know that we are children of God…” (1 John 5:19 NLT)
“We know that the Son of God has come and has given us understanding so that we know the real God.” (1 John 5:20 GWT)
“We know that when He appears, we will be like Him.” (1 John 3:2 NIV)
We know these things!
The apostle Paul said, “We know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ” (2 Corinthians 8:9 NIV). And, consequently, “We know that all things work together for the good of those who love God” (Romans 8:28 HCSB). We don’t know exactly what will happen from moment to moment, and we can’t call the plays in advance. But we know the final score is 8-28.
When Jacob’s youngest son, Benjamin, was heading for Egypt on a dangerous mission, Jacob was overwhelmed with fear and foreboding. Notice what he said, “All these things are against me” (Genesis 42:36 NKJV). Now, notice Romans 8:28: “all things work together for good.” The first statement reflects how we often feel from a human perspective; the second describes how things really are from an eternal perspective. Whenever you feel like “all things” are against you—when misfortune or mayhem strikes—just remember the confidence of this promise: “we know that all things work together for good.” Following the confidence of the promise, we discover the completeness of the promise.
• THE COMPLETENESS OF THE PROMISE
This promise tells us not only that “things work together for good,” but that “all things work together for good” (Romans 8:28). All means all. It’s the biggest word in this verse. Not some things, a few things, a lot of things, good things, bad things, sad things, or funny things—but all things! There is no asterisk on the word “all.” There are no exceptions or exemptions. It’s neither hyperbole nor exaggeration. If it were not all-encompassing, it wouldn’t be worth the paper it’s printed on. All means all.
The unborn child who mysteriously dies in the womb days before delivery.
The sixteen-year-old girl lying in intensive care after being hit by a drunk driver.
The ruined vocal cords of young man who wants nothing more than to sing.
Every heartache, headache, tragedy and triumph.
God can bring good from all of it. And he promises to do so for those who love him. Remarkably, the “all things” of this verse even includes our sins and failures, when we place them at the foot of the cross. Sometimes we exclude those things, saying, “I know God can take the things that happen to me and work them out for good, but I did this to myself. I really messed up. I’ve ruined my home, my marriage, my life. I’ve failed my kids. I’ve yield to dark and terrible temptation. I lost my temper. I lost my job. I ran up that debt. This mess it mine alone and God could not possibly want to bring good out of this.”
But he does—if and when we bring our sordid messes to him, placing them at the foot of the cross in humble repentance. Looking back, I realize that some of my old sins—now confesses and forgiven—have resulted in good that I would never have imagined. Don’t believe me? Look at David and Bathsheba. David committed adultery, murder and conspiracy, yet it’s because of his sin that we have Psalm 51 (that beautiful prayer of repentance) and the marriage of these two adulterers brought forth the messianic line that lead to the birth of Jesus Christ.
God hates evil, but his purposes are not stymied by it. Whether in human history or in the individual lives of his children, God turns bad things inside out and uses them for good. It was the sordid life of John Newton that gave birth, after his conversion, to “Amazing Grace.” And God’s grace still amazes us, because even our hang-ups, sins, and moral failures are part of the “all things” of Romans 8:28 when nailed to the cross of Jesus. No promise could be more complete.
Now, in addition to the confidence of the promise and the completeness of the promise, Romans 8:28 also reveal the cooperation of the promise.
• THE COOPERATION OF THE PROMISE
There is a very important word in this promise that’s easy to miss if we aren’t paying attention—together. “We know that all things work together for the good of those who love God” (Romans 8:28 HCSB).
Romans 8:28, like the rest of the New Testament, was originally written in Greek, and the word used here in Greek is synergeo, from which we get our modern word synergy. Do you know what synergy is? Synergy is when two or more things, or elements, work together to achieve an effect that is beyond the sum of the individual elements. A good example is when two horses are hitched together they can pull more than the sum of what both could pull separately. That’s synergy—the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
There is an irresistible law of divine synergy operational in the life of every God-lover, working together all things to produce effects greater than and often completely different from the sum of the various elements. It all works together.
Dr. Handley Moule was a brilliant British Bible teacher and author who died in 1920. One time, he was called to the scene of a terrible accident at a British coal mine. Many friends and relatives of the victims of the cave-in gathered as Dr. Moule addressed them. He said:
“It is very difficult for us to understand why God should let an awful disaster happen, but we know Him and trust Him, and all will be right. I have at home an old bookmarker given me by my mother. It is worked in silk, and when I examine the wrong side of it, I see nothing but a tangle of threads. It looks like a big mistake. One would think that someone had done it who did not know what she was doing. But when I turn it over and look at the right side, I see there, beautifully embroidered, the words, ‘God is love!’ We are looking at all this today form the wrong side. Someday we shall it from another standpoint and we shall understand.”
Folks, even if your life, the world and everything in it looks like nothing but a tangle of threads, trust that all of those threads are working together synergistically and the picture on the other side is good—which brings us to the culmination of the promise.
• THE CULMINATION OF THE PROMISE
The culmination of the promise—what all things are working together toward—is good. “We know that all things work together for the good of those who love God” (Romans 8:28 HCSB). God’s purpose, plan and promise is to work out the events of human history and your life in particular in the best possible way.
Ultimately, this promise won’t see its true fulfillment until Christ comes again and ushers in the final day of darkness and total abolition of evil, when all of creation—every square inch—is flooded with the love, peace and joy of Jesus Christ. But in the meantime, God is always at work behind the scenes bringing triumph out of tragedy and hallelujahs out of heartaches. In short, he works everything out for good.
When terrorists, tumors, calamity or catastrophe strikes many of us are quick to question God, blame God or simply dismiss God. But what many people don’t realize is that without God there is no good. You see, we live in a fallen world. When Adam and Eve sinned, a curse fell over the human race and the world we live in—suddenly everything worked together for bad. And apart from God, everything still works together for bad. But God, in his infinite love and grace, is at work in your life and mine bringing good out of evil.
The truth is—evil doesn’t really exist of itself. Evil is just the absence of good. It’s like darkness. Darkness isn’t something of itself; rather, darkness is just the absence of light. When you remove the light from a room, it becomes dark. When you remove goodness what you have left is evil. God the Father, Jesus Christ, and his Holy Spirit are diligently working to fill this world with goodness. The Bible says, “Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of the heavenly lights, who does not change like shifting shadows” (James 1:17 NIV).
What happens to us may not itself be “good,” but God will make it work to our ultimate good, to meet his ultimate goal for your life and mine. As Charles Spurgeon once wrote, “Everything that happens to you is for your own good… Could you ask for a better promise? It is better that all things should for my good than all things should be as I would wish to have them. All things might work for my pleasure and yet might all work my ruin. If all things do not always please me, they will always benefit me.”
Finally, we need to realize that there is a condition to this promise.
• THE CONDITION OF THE PROMISE
Now we come to the fine print.
Romans 8:28 isn’t a platitude to be slapped on our backsides like a bumper sticker. It’s not for universal or wholesale distribution without conditions. It is precisely and solely for those who meet the requirement of loving God.
“We know that all things work together for the good of those who love God” (Romans 8:28 HCSB).
Loving God is the ultimate purpose of the soul. We’re made to love, and a life without love is a worthless life. And loving God is the highest duty and the greatest joy of our lives, both in time and in eternity. This is an observation often overlooked by the shallow and sentimental authors of most positive-thinking, self-help books. Most people want to believe that everything will work out in the end, that this too shall pass, that good will come of it (whatever it might be). But Romans 8:28 offers us the only basis for true optimism. And the condition necessary for claiming the optimism of Romans 8:28 is—loving God.
It’s the greatest of all commands. Jesus himself summarized all the requirements of the Old Testament by telling us to love God and love people. That’s the mainspring of our existence, and nothing in life works without it—including Romans 8:28. Unless you love God, you have no assurance that things work out in the end. In fact, you have just the opposite. The flip side of Romans 8:28 is—we know that all things will not work out for the good of those who do not love God!
Conclusion:
Do you love God? Have you been called according to his purpose? Do you even know what his purpose is? He tells us in the next verse: “For God knew his people in advance, and he chose them to become like his Son, so that his Son would be the firstborn among many brothers and sisters” (Romans 8:29 NLT). Here is God’s ultimate goal for your life and for the world in a nut shell—that you might become like Christ and that his eternal family would flourish and grow.
All that’s left now is the grand finale, and that’s how the chapter draws to a close. Through the pen of Paul, the Holy Spirit asks, “What shall we say about such wonderful things as these?” (Romans 8:31 NLT). What can we say? How do these wonderful things make you feel? Friends, when you love God and have placed your life in his hands you’ve got the most glorious promise of this life. You’ve got a real basis for genuine optimism. As David Jeremiah has said, “When we lay hold of this truth, it calms us down, builds us up, and sends us on our way rejoicing.”
Invitation:
Do you need to lay hold of this promise? Do you need the reassurance that all things work together for good? If you do, I want to invite you to put your faith in Jesus. Give him your heart. Give him all your love. Allow his promise to wrap around you like a warm blanket, and then know that all things work together for your good, because you love God!
