Ordained Love

 

Text: Romans 8:26-39

Focus: faith

Function: to help people understand that God is for them.

²⁶Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness, for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with groanings too deep for words. ²⁷And God, who searches hearts, knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God.

²⁸We know that all things work together for good for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose. ²⁹For those whom he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, in order that he might be the firstborn within a large family. ³⁰And those whom he predestined he also called, and those whom he called he also justified, and those whom he justified he also glorified.

³¹What then are we to say about these things? If God is for us, who is against us? ³²He who did not withhold his own Son but gave him up for all of us, how will he not with him also give us everything else? ³³Who will bring any charge against God’s elect? It is God who justifies. ³⁴Who is to condemn? It is Christ who died, or rather, who was raised, who is also at the right hand of God, who also intercedes for us. ³⁵Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will affliction or distress or persecution or famine or nakedness or peril or sword? ³⁶As it is written,

“For your sake we are being killed all day long;
    we are accounted as sheep to be slaughtered.”

³⁷No, in all these things we are more than victorious through him who loved us. ³⁸For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, ³⁹nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Wow. This is a passage punched through with powerful phrases that we can hold on to during times of stress, pain and suffering.

Nothing can separate us from the Love of Christ.

I love that verse and if you don’t mind, instead of preaching the passage, I am going to do a quick rundown of the verses in this passage, a sort of short bible study.

He starts out speaking mysteriously in verses 26 and 27 about what I call the gift of a prayer language. It is one of the ways the Spirit manifests her power in the life of a believer and it is talked about in a few places in the New Testament.

There are times when I am deep in prayer and concerned about a problem or a situation and I break out into these groanings that are too deep for words. And according to the scripture, it is a mysterious thing whereby the Holy Spirit is directing us to pray the will of God in a situation that we do not understand, or one that troubles us deeply.

According to other scriptures in the New Testament, it might be an angelic or unknown to me human tongue. I don’t know if it is that or just gibberish, but I have seen some powerful answers to some prayers and when I pray with these groanings, I believe that somehow I have connected with the divine and I have a mysterious peace come over me.

It is one of the ways the Spirit moves. I don’t talk about it much because it is the least of the Spiritual gifts, but has been one of the most divisive.

Then in verses 29-30, he talks about how God has always been at work in our lives, even before we came to a place where we acknowledged our faith in Christ to lead us to that faith.

He speaks of how the Spirit was moving to lead us toward Christ and the life that Christ has given us to live.

I see this in my own life as the Lord from a very early age prepared me for a preaching ministry as I was the student representative my Freshman year of High School who introduced all the guests at the convocations and special events at my school and a regular basis. God had given me a public speaking voice even when I was a child. Those who God knew would choose to serve God can be lead by God even from their childhoods, predestined, as he says, to fulfill that ministry.

It brings us comfort in doing what God has called us to do because we know that God is the one who is behind the work and the outcome belongs to God, not us.

Some of us are simply prophets who will finally be understood on the day of judgment as they, like the OT prophets of years gone by called the people to repent of their selfish ways and love their neighbor as much as they love themselves.

But that whole passage about being predestined to God’s glory is wrapped up in the comforting promise that all things work together for the good of those who love God and are called according to His purpose.

The promise is based on the condition of loving God and being called out by God.

I suppose that is the importance of our confession, whether it be by voice or by baptism, we confess that we are called out by God to do God’s service. In the baptism ceremony, we celebrate that we are born to a new life that we are living for God instead of ourselves and I think those are the people Paul is referring to in this passage. Those who confess that Jesus is the way to the peace they have that gives them the strength to love others, even their enemies.

All things work out somehow to our good when we place our trust in God.

Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t a promise of a picture perfect life. The life we live will include trials, temptations and suffering. And in those things, God promises to bring us the Father’s peace. We are called to rest in God’s love for us.

He explains how this happens from the scripture in verses 31-34 and he proves that God is the one who is in charge.

I love the concept that God gives us here. God tells us that if the Father invested the life of His son for our salvation, if he went that far, won’t he complete the work that he did?

And of course, the answer is yes.

So we worry about being separated from God’s love and we don’t have to be worried.

He admits that we will have suffering, but then he tells us that in Christ, even in suffering, we are going to be victorious. It might mean that even if it is our death, somehow God is going to use it for God’s good purpose. And we live by faith resting in the fact that God is sovereign over the world and has called us to live our lives by faith in God.

He acknowledges sufferings to a great extent and then tells us that in all of these sufferings, we are victorious through Jesus who loved us.

God ordained love for us through Christ and Christ is the example of God’s love for us.

God symbolically gave God’s own self so that the revenge we feel is needed when it comes to sin and evil can be transferred on to God’s own self. 2 Corinthians 5:21 says he that knew no sin became sin for us that we might be the just followers of Christ.

Sin was transferred to him and then was killed on the cross so that we can be free from its power.

I don’t believe that God needed to do it that way, but that God did, symbolically, so that we can learn to live without fear of clinging to our own lives, but sacrificially for the glory of God that we too might show the love of Christ to a world that needs loving.

If God ordained for us to be loved, and God is all powerful, then in Christ, we are indeed loved.

In that love we love others.