When I was a little boy, I was much like other little boys, there were certain things that made me afraid. When my mom placed me in my room at night, I was sure that there were monsters on the back side of my bed. The way my room was configured, my bed was about 1-1/2 feet from the wall on the left side and there was a window there. It was the perfect set up for a monster to climb into that window and hide in that small space behind my bed. Then, when the lights went out that monster had the perfect chance to claim me as their hapless victim. I know for 3 or 4 years I slept so close to the right side of my bed that one arm hung over the side. To this day, my right arm is several inches longer than my left. If I heard a bump, zoom, I was out of the bed and into mom and dad’s room.
During that time, I remember a recurring dream of someone chasing me. I was running but in slow motion. Something or someone was right behind me and it was obvious that they were going to catch me. I was in slow motion, they were flying. I would wake up breathing heavy, heart racing, scared to death!
But over the course of time, I grew out of those fears. By my teen years I wasn’t afraid of some monster. I was more afraid of what my peers thought of me. I was afraid they wouldn’t accept me. The more I think about it, the more I realize that throughout life, the things you fear shifts. While your nightmares as a child are about monsters and ghouls, as a person in mid-40s it might be that you will have lived your whole life and never accomplish what you had hoped as an idealistic twenty-something. In your 70s you are thinking about who will take care of you when you can’t take care of yourself. What is it that you are afraid of in the stage of your life you are in right now? (pause)
Honestly, there is a whole lot of fear beneath what Paul writes in Romans 8. Now understand what I mean by that. Paul is addressing the fears of his Christian readers. He is saying "There is good news for those who are Christians!" He tells us we don’t have to be afraid of God’s wrath, because "there is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus." He has comforted us by telling us about the abiding presence of the Holy Spirit. You don’t have to be afraid of wandering aimlessly through life, you have a friend and guide. You don’t have to live hopelessly because in Christ you always have hope. And this morning in verses 26-30 he wants us to recognize that if we are in Christ, we are plugged into God’s purpose. Paul challenges us to not be cowards, but to live life with boldness, confident that God has a destiny for us, and assured that He is working to direct us toward His ultimate purpose for our life.
(Read Romans 8:26-30)
Now I realize that this passage is deep water theologically. There are a lot of pretty heavy words and concepts in these verses. And honestly it would be easy to get pulled under by the weight of the many unanswered theological questions. But if that happens, we’ve missed Paul’s point. This passage was written to serve as a lifejacket, a few words of assurance to carry us through the times when the swirling torrents of life threaten to drag us down. Out of these verses this morning we need to notice 4 reasons that Paul tells us not to be afraid.
1. You Are Not On Your Own.
Honestly, when I look back at the prayers I have lifted up in my past, often they were pretty lame. I go through spells when I write out my prayers, and I have looked back at my prayers 10 years ago, and they scare me. I asked for things that honestly it would have been bad if I had gotten them. They seemed important to me at the time. I had relatively pure motives in asking for them. But because I am human, limited in my capacity to know the future, or even much about the present, my prayers were faulty. I thank God He hasn’t always given me what I wanted.
But Paul says that we don’t have to be afraid to pray. We don’t have to fear that God is going to mess up and give us something we shouldn’t have. (Read vv. 26-27) The Holy Spirit, God Himself who takes up residence in our life, is interceding on our behalf before the throne of God. Our prayers are not subject to our own limitations.
In Chicago there is a father/son athletic team who regularly compete in the Iron Man Triathlon. It is a grueling event involving swimming two miles on open sea, biking 100 miles, and then running a 26 mile marathon. It takes incredible conditioning just to compete in this event. And Ricky Hoyt has finished the competition several times even though he is totally, physically disabled. That’s right, he can’t run, he can’t swim, and he could never think about pedaling a bike. But he finishes the course because his father, Jack Hoyt carries him through the course. Jack swims the 2 miles pulling a boat. He bikes 100 miles carrying his child. He runs the 26 miles pulling a specially made cart.
You know, on our own we are all a whole lot like Ricky Hoyt. There’s no way we could make it through the grueling rigors of life anywhere near where we should be on our own. But Paul says you don’t have to be afraid of that. You are not alone. The Holy Spirit is regularly lifting your prayers before the Father, and interceding on your behalf so that your prayers remain in accordance with God’s Will.
2. You Are Loved Unconditionally By The One Who Is With You.
The idea that you are not alone is not necessarily a comforting thought. Laying in my bedroom as a little boy, the thought that I wasn’t alone scared me to death. But really what was scaring me was that I was afraid that those monsters didn’t have my best interest in mind. They wanted to eat me! So when my fear overtook me, I sought the companion of someone who I knew had my best interest at heart. I ran to mom and dad.
Now the fact of the matter is, there are a whole lot of people who are not so sure they are comforted by the fact that God is always with them. It is typical at some point in life to wonder if God always has our best interest at heart. That is often the way we think when we choose to disobey God. We think that God is trying to hold out on us. Or when we go through hardship we wonder if He hasn’t forgotten about us. Surely if God was with us, He wouldn’t let us go through such difficulty and pain!
From Paul’s perspective, that’s the wrong way to look at it. By faith, Paul says "we know" that God always has our best interest at heart, and He is always working to bring about good in our lives. (Read v. 28) That verse has been an anchor for generations of Christians who have struggled through hardship and trials. It doesn’t say that everything that happens is good. But it does say that no matter what does happen, good, bad or indifferent, God can and will use it for our good, if we allow Him. Notice the truth of this promise. Not all things work out for the good for all people. But for those who love God, and have been called according to His purpose, even the worst of times can bring good in their life.
I wish we could go around the room this morning and have people share how they’ve seen this work in their own life. We could find Christian people whose pain produced perseverance. We could find those who endured hardship and came to have a depth to their faith that they would never have known if life had been smooth sailing. There are in this room, tremendous testimonies for the truth of this verse. What it all boils down to is this: God loves you too much to let you suffer without purpose. So the God who is completely sovereign over everything takes the difficulties of this life and works them for good in our lives. That unconditional love of God carries us to the next verse.
3. The One Who Is With You Has A Plan For You. (v. 29)
Now this verse has been a point of debate for centuries. The question is, does it say that God has predestined the ones that are going to be saved? I don’t believe so. Two concepts are at work here. Foreknowledge and predestination are related but not the same. God foreknew everything that would ever happen. He knows everything. But foreknowledge does not mean that God causes everything that happens. However, the term "predestined" does talk about God causing something to happen. Predestination denotes an intentional act on God’s part. Now, with that difference in mind, read verse 29 again. (Read)
Substituting some words, this verse says that those God knows beforehand will respond to His call, He causes them to be conformed to the likeness of His Son. In context with the previous verse, we can say that He uses all things that we go through to do that.
The powerful truth of the gospel is that God loves you just as you are, but He loves you too much to leave you that way. He wants you to be just like Jesus. When we turn our live over to Him, we say, "God, you are my Lord, take my life and the mess that I have made of it and do something." And He does! Using the experiences that we go through, both good and bad, He starts shaping us through His Spirit, through His Word, through our interaction with other Christian people, teachers and advisors. And it’s not some arbitrary process. God knows exactly what He’s molding us into. He has a very well defined plan. He is making us into "the likeness of His Son." Honestly, it’s a process that is never complete in this lifetime. But the promise of Scripture is that it will be finished some day. Listen to 1 John 3:2 "Dear friends, now we are children of God, and what we will be has not yet been made known. But we know that when he appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is." That brings us to our fourth promise.
4. When He’s Finished With You, The Only Way To Describe It Is "Glory." (v. 30)
There are a lot of big words, theological sounding words there. We can explain them a little bit, but something that I want you to notice is that everything that is happening in this verse is the work of God in the life of the Christian. The Christian is not doing any of this. This is God’s work in your life. You can’t do it on your own. Nobody else can do it for you.
"Those he predestined" referring back to the previous verse of those who he caused to be like Jesus, "he also called." The biblical concept of "the call" is that God calls out through His messengers with a call to salvation. He wants to save us, and He calls out to the world with the message about Jesus. Maybe John 3:16 is the clearest and best know call from God. "For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life." Only God can call us to salvation, because only He holds the keys to eternal life.
Next it says "those he called, he also justified." The term "justified" means "made right." The best way to describe it’s meaning is to remember that if I am justified I am made "just as if I’d never sinned." Only God can justify a sinful person. Notice the last phrase. "Those he justified, he also glorified." There is a whole lot of meat in those verses, but the main thing I want you to notice is this. God is working on a process by which he is accomplishing "glory" in your life. It is His work to change you from a sinful human being into something that is glorious, that looks a whole lot like Jesus. That is a great end to the journey we are on in this life.
Several years back Pam and I went on a trip to celebrate our 10th anniversary. Some people watched our kids and we spent a couple of days in Gatlinburg, TN. Pam and I sometimes have different ideas of what is fun. We did a bunch of stuff that she thought was fun. One day I talked her into walking a trail. We walked a couple of miles to a falls. She liked that okay. But I had read that a couple more miles up the trail was an "Old growth forest." Neither of us knew what that meant, but I was game to find out. Pam wasn’t thrilled, but she came along, reluctantly. The second part of the hike was much steeper. After quite a while we came upon a huge tree. I said "look!" I was amazed at the size of the trunk. She said, "Is that all? I walked this far to see one big tree?" She was expecting Sequoia National Forest or something! She was tremendously let down, and a little perturbed that labor of her journey hadn’t been worth it.
I honestly wonder if that isn’t one of the fears that many people have. They wonder if it wouldn’t be easier to float through life, rather than beginning a journey that is not always easy, and is sometimes painful. But Paul addresses that fear by promising that the journey is worth it because of the glory that God has in store for us.
Part of Paul’s argument here is that we shouldn’t fear that. Romans 8:17-18 "Now if we are children, then we are heirs--heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ, if indeed we share in his sufferings in order that we may also share in his glory. I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us."
The good news is that the glory God has in store for His children will make us forget all about the difficulty of the journey. The truth that Paul uses to squelch our fears of the journey is this. When we make Jesus our Lord, we don’t have to be afraid of this life. We are plugged into God’s purpose from the time we give our lives to Him, and He is at work making us into the image of His Son.
You know, I haven’t had that recurring nightmare about somebody chasing me for years. No doubt there is some psychological reason that could be given. But I believe there is a spiritual reason. I don’t have any reason to be afraid anymore. And although there are times that fear rears its ugly head in my life, the words of Paul in Romans 8 give me courage to overcome all my fears. Remember, we are not on our own. And the one who is with us loves us unconditionally. And He is not figuring things out as He goes, but He is purposefully working in our lives to transform us into the image of His Son. And when He is done, it’s going to be glorious because the promise of God’s Word is that when He’s done we will all be like Jesus.
