A Purpose Amid Our Pain
September 18, 2022
Preached by Noah Gwinn
Scripture Reading
Romans 8:28-30
28 And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose. 29 For those whom he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, in order that he might be the firstborn among many brothers. 30 And those whom he predestined he also called, and those whom he called he also justified, and those whom he justified he also glorified.
In John chapter 17, Jesus is praying to the Father just before he’s arrested and eventually taken to the cross. He prays for those who would come to believe in him, and he says of these people – of us – “But now… these things I speak in the world, that they may have my joy fulfilled in themselves” (17:13). He’s echoing something he said to his disciples 2 chapters earlier, “these things I have spoken to you, that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be full” (John 15:11), which is really echoing the words of the Psalmist hundreds of years earlier when he writes, “in your presence there is fullness of joy” (Psalm 16:11).
Jesus himself prayed that you would have his joy fulfilled in you. That you would possess in your life a happiness, a delight, that transcends your circumstances. Is that your experience? The Bible tells us that there is an unstoppable, indestructible joy that can overwhelm your grief, your stress, your anxiety, your loneliness, and your pain. Let me ask you again, is that your experience?
The Apostle Paul wrote Romans chapter 8 to real people just like you and me who really experienced grief, loneliness, and pain, and struggled to feel the joy that Jesus wants for his people. And this chapter is all about living in a world full of these realities. Do you want indestructible joy? Do you want unshakable assurance? Do you want loving comfort? Then Romans 8 is for you.
But before we dive in, let’s pray. Heavenly Father…
INTRODUCTION
From the time that it was built until 2004, the tallest building in the world was the Petronas Towers in Malaysia, standing at 1,483 feet tall. But one of the things that this structure is most famous for, in addition to being one of the tallest buildings in the world, is that it has the deepest foundation of any structure in the world. The foundation for the Petronas towers goes 400 feet into the ground, which for those of you who have a hard time conceptualizing height, is deeper than the height any building in Harrisburg (which doesn’t say much) and is about as deep as the height of the Space Needle in Seattle or the CN tower in Toronto (Canada’s tallest building). If those still don’t mean anything to you, a 400-foot foundation would be deep enough for about enough for 16 adult African elephants standing on top of one another.
The reason that this foundation needed to be so deep was because both the building is huge and the ground that it sits on top of is not very secure at all. The point is that big structures require big foundations – especially when the soil around them is volatile.[1]
What we have in Romans chapter 8 is a huge promise that is intended to give us indestructible joy. But a huge promise, like a huge building, needs a deep foundation, especially when the world we live in, like loose soil, is volatile. We’re going to look at the foundation and the promise of indestructible joy in 3 parts – we’ll deal with the bad things we experience, the good things we experience, and the best things that are yet to come.
A PURPOSE FOR THE BAD THINGS (v. 28)
We’re going to start here by talking about how there is a purpose for our bad things. If you haven’t already, please turn with me in your Bible to Romans 8. If you’re using one of the Bibles in the pews, that’ll be found on page 888. Once you get there, find verse 28 – we’re going to camp out there for a little bit as we get started.
28And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose.
This verse introduces the huge promise of our passage. And we don’t have to wonder who this promise is for. The verse tells us that this promise is for those who love God, for those called according to his purpose. This isn’t supposed to confuse us or make us worried if we love God enough or anything like that. Paul here is just identifying that this promise is for Christians.
So for Christians, those who love God and are called according to his purpose, all things work together for good. The ESV, which we use here at church, translates the phrase “all things work together for good,” but other translations actually highlight how active God is in this process. You may see examples of this in the footnotes for this verse, such as “God works all things together for good” or “God works in all things for the good.”
Regardless of the way it is translated, notice that the text doesn’t say “favorable things work together for good”, or “some things work together for good,” or even “most things work together for good.” But for Christians, we can be certain that God works all things – all things – together for good.
Now, it would be very easy for me at this point to give an illustration about someone who endured a toxic relationship faithfully and honored the Lord in the whole process and is now happily married to a spouse who loves God. Or to talk about someone who didn’t get the job they wanted, but then was given something even better. It’s easy for us to think in these terms, saying things like “well God kept me from that relationship because he has a better one for me in the future.” Or “God kept me from one career move because he has a better job for me in the future.” But these illustrations would not be helpful because that’s not the promise. The promise is not that God allows bad things, or keeps us from bad situations so that he can give us better circumstances.
There is a type of polished “Christianity” that is purely positive and uplifting that, whether explicitly or implicitly, feeds us a lie that says that when you become a Christian, you will be promised better life circumstances. That the more you trust Jesus and the more moral you become, the more favorable your lot. But when the relationship doesn’t come, or if it falls apart, or the job goes to someone else, do you believe that your life is still good and that God is in control? Do you trust him? Or do you get bitter or angry at him? Do you begin to grow apathetic or cynical toward the Church? Do you experience the joy of Jesus when things don’t feel “good”?
So often we wrongly believe in a gospel of the cushy life in spite of the fact that Jesus tells us that in this world we will have trouble (John 16:33) and that to follow him means to take up your cross (Matt. 16:24). And many times, unfortunately, this verse is used as fuel for that fire. “All things work together for good,” – that must mean my life will be easy and I’ll put on my spiritual cruise control until I die and then get to heaven and life will be fine and dandy. But again, let me ask you, is that your actual life experience? As a Christian, have you experienced suffering? Some of you are in the throes of deep suffering even now. So what’s the answer?
As we begin to wade out of the murky waters of the false gospel of a cushy life, we begin to understand that God doesn’t promise us better life circumstances, but rather he promises a better life. I’ll say that again - God doesn’t promise us better life circumstances, but rather he promises a better life. What do I mean by that? Well, Paul isn’t ignorant of the real-life experiences and hardships that you and I encounter everyday living in a broken world. We said earlier that the Apostle Paul wrote Romans chapter 8 to real people just like you and me who really experienced grief, loneliness, and pain. And this chapter is all about living in a world full of these realities. How do I know this? Look just a few verses beyond our passage to Romans 8:35. “Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or danger or sword?” He goes on to say, no. Nothing can separate us from the love of God. But the point that I want to make with this verse is that Paul isn’t bringing up abstract threats here. He names tribulation, distress, persecution, famine, nakedness, danger and sword because tribulation, distress, persecution, famine, nakedness, danger and sword are real things that are a part of our fallen world. And yet in our passage we are told that all things – all things – work together for good for Christians.
Both the beautiful moments of happiness and fulfillment and the deep, true suffering that you experience as a human being are things that God is using for your ultimate good. When you become a Christian, you don’t get more favorable things thrown your way, or less unfavorable things thrown your way. But what you do have is a promise that both the sufferings and the sweetness of your life are instruments in the hands of God, and that is good news. You don’t have better life circumstances than non-Christians, but you do have the promise that your life will be good.[2]
But what does it actually mean for your life to be good? We’ll come back to that in just a minute.
A SECURITY FOR THE GOOD THINGS (vv. 29-30a)
Well, we see that God has a purpose for all things in our life, even the bad things, and that is our huge promise. Now we’re going to turn our attention to how there is a security for the good things in our lives. God gave us a huge promise, now here is the huge foundation – the good things are forever secure. How is it that? How does he ground his promise that all things work together for good for Christians?
Read verses 29-30 with me.
“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 among many brothers. 30And those whom he predestined, he also called, and those whom he called he also justified.” (We’re going to stop right there for now)
Why is it that all things work together for good for Christians? Because God is in careful control of every step of your way. Those whom God foreknew, he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son. This is what it means for your life to be good. It isn’t some sort of abstract set of favorable circumstances. God’s definition of good is so much greater and higher than ours tends to be.[3] A good life is one that guarantees that you will look like Jesus.
Now, there are a lot of big words in this verse. Some are more familiar than others but for the sake of getting everyone on the same page let me define some terms. Stick with me, I think this will pay off. We see Paul say here that God “foreknew.” If you take the word at face value, it simply means “to know beforehand.” But in the Bible, foreknowledge means something much deeper. Biblical foreknowledge is more like God setting his love and affection on you before the beginning of time. It isn’t that he knew about you, but that he knew you. He knew the deepest depths of who you are and set what we might call his “covenantal love” upon you – think about the kind of love a groom has for his bride.
“For those whom he [loved before the beginning of time], he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son.” Predestined is another big word, and all that it means is, literally, to set a destination ahead of time. It is predetermined, fixed, guaranteed. Now, I know that for some of you, when I say that word “predestine,” you may feel all kinds of ways. Christians have been debating many things about predestination for 2,000 years. But I’m going to encourage you to not be distracted by all of that. Paul uses this word intentionally, and he does it to comfort his readers, so let’s be comforted by this beautiful truth.
“For those whom he [loved before the beginning of time], he also [set their destination before the beginning of time].” What is the guaranteed destination that God has set for those he loves? Conformity to the image of Jesus. This is amazing. Amid all of the real threats to our happiness and our peace – tribulation, distress, persecution, famine, nakedness, danger and sword – God ensures us that he has set a destination for us, and that destination, that end goal is for us to look like Jesus. If you are a Christian here today, you can be absolutely certain that God has loved you since before the beginning of time, and there is no suffering, no sadness, no broken relationship, no poor choices that can keep you from the destination that God has set for you. If you are a Christian you can be confident that the destination of your life is nothing less than looking just like Jesus. Take comfort in that! God is so bent on the goodness of your life that before you could even object, he set your course. But that isn’t the end of the line. Look at verse 30.
“For those whom he [loved before the beginning of time], he also [set their destination before the beginning of time, and that destination is looking like Jesus].” And all those same people, he also called. This calling means that the very Spirit of God has awakened your heart to belief and caused you to desire relationship with God. So for the Christian, God loves you, he has promised that he will mold you into the image of Jesus, he has awakened your heart to faith, and – keep reading – he justified you. This means that for those who God has awakened to faith and belief, you have the very right standing of Jesus. When God looks at you, he sees the righteousness of Jesus.
This verse has been nicknamed “the golden chain of salvation.” And it’s been called that because each link of the chain is unbreakable and cannot be separated from the others. You don’t have one without the other. Everyone God foreknew, he predestined. Everyone he predestined, he called, and so on. We can be confident that all things will work together for good for Christians because, as Paul writes in a different letter in the New Testament, “I am sure of this, that he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ” (Phil 1:6).
So the huge foundation for the huge promise is this – God’s intentional hand in salvation (what we might call his sovereignty)… God’s sovereignty over your whole story as a Christian is the very reason we can confidently say that all things – all things – will work together for good. God’s sovereignty is good news and it shows us that the good things we have in our salvation can never be lost, and that our indestructible joy is in his careful hands.
A CERTAIN HOPE FOR THE BEST THINGS (v. 30b)
In Romans 8 we see that God gives a purpose for the bad things, a security for the good things, and a certain hope for the best things. Take a look with me again at verse 30.
30And those whom he predestined, he also called, and those whom he called he also justified, and those whom he justified he also glorified.”
For those of you here today who were avid Sesame Street fans, you will remember the game they would play called “one of these things is not like the other.” It would go something like this: they would show 4 items on the screen. Three of them would have something in common, and the fourth item would be something totally different that had nothing to do with the other three. And the goal of the game was to identify what the item was that didn’t belong. So for example the four items could be an ice cream cone, a hamburger, a slice of pizza, and a hammer. Which one doesn’t belong? The hammer, of course! A hammer isn’t food. One more. The four items are a guitar, a piano, a jar of mayonnaise, and a trumpet. Which one doesn’t belong? A jar of mayonnaise! Mayonnaise isn’t an instrument.
In verse 30, Paul has set up for his readers a game of “one of these things is not like the other.” The four items are God predestining, God calling, God justifying, and God glorifying. Which one doesn’t belong? The answer: God glorifying. Why? In the context of our salvation, glorification is a future time when all of our sin will be done away with and we will be made perfect in body and in soul. Has this happened to us yet? No. As Christians, have we already been predestined? Yes! Called? Yes! Justified? Yes! Glorified? No. And yet God can speak of our future glorification as if it is as good as done. How can he do that? Because “he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ” (Phil 1:6). It will be done because God is sovereign over the whole process, start to finish.
I said that our three points for today would be to look at the bad things we experience, the good things we experience, and the best things that are yet to come. We’ve seen that God gives a purpose for the bad things, a security for the good things, and a certain hope for the best things. But it would be helpful to talk about what hope actually is. In our day and age, in English, hope can seem to be fickle. For example, I can say “boy, I really hope the Steelers win later today.” Do I know if the Steelers will win? Unfortunately, not. But biblical hope is something certain, it is something sure. It is a joyful expectation of something you know is going to happen. It's more like hoping for Christmas, and less like hoping that you’ll get a new iPhone from your parents for Christmas.
And in our salvation, we are hoping for a future day when all of our sin will be done away with and we will be made perfect in body and in soul. In our glorification, we see that we will have finally reached our destination, the destination that God set for us before time began. In our glorification, we will have finally and fully been conformed to the image of God’s Son.
Do you look forward to that? You don’t have to wonder if it will happen, this verse tells us it is as good as done.
CONCLUSION
For a minute let’s return to the question from the beginning of the sermon. Do you have indestructible, unshakable, immovable joy? And if not, how do you get it? How do you actually experience indestructible, unshakable, immovable joy? Keep your finger in Romans 8, but turn with me to 1 Peter chapter 1. If you’re using one of the pew Bibles, this will be on page 953. I’m going to start in verse 3.
3 Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! According to his great mercy, he has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead…. 6 In this you rejoice, though now for a little while, if necessary, you have been grieved by various trials… 8 Though you have not seen him, you love him. Though you do not now see him, you believe in him and rejoice with joy that is inexpressible and filled with glory, 9 obtaining the outcome of your faith, the salvation of your souls.
The inexpressible joy that Peter talks about is possible because God has, verse 3, “caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.” God has caused us to be born again (v. 3), kept an inheritance for you in heaven (v. 4), and guarded our faith (v. 5). Both Peter and Paul draw a direct line between God’s intentional hand in salvation and the joy of Christians. We are able to have a joy that does not disregard our pain, but transcends our pain because our joy does not ebb and flow with our circumstances. Our pain is real, but as we progressively begin to believe more and more that “for those who love God all things work together for good” we are able to rejoice in the midst of our suffering and trust that all of the pain and hardship in our life is being purposed for our good.
We’re in a sermon series right now that is highlighting how the local church is God’s antidote for our anxious and apathetic age. So what in the world does this have to do with the church? Last week, Pastor Benjamin preached from Matthew 16 and discussed the cosmic story of the world in four movements: Creation, Fall, Redemption, and Consummation. We can think of that as the cosmic story of redemption because it is the big picture of the story. But today, as we look at God loving us long before we’re born and working in even our glorification after we die, we see that if you are a Christian, Romans 8 isn’t the cosmic story of redemption, this is your story of redemption.
But there’s something that I’ve been intentionally ignoring throughout this whole sermon until now, and that is that this isn’t primarily a story about individual salvation. Yes, this is truly your story if you are a Christian, but if you look at the passage in Romans 8, you see all of the plural language that Paul uses. Verse 28 – “we know,” “those who love God”… Verse 29 – “those whom he foreknew,” “manybrothers”… Verse 30 – “those whom he predestined,” “those whom he called,” “those whom he justified.” This is the story of God saving a people for himself. It is very easy for us to read this at an individual level, but it was never meant to be only that. Paul wrote this to a church, a group of believers, to be read aloud in community with others, to be studied in community with others.
So what happens when a community of people begin to believe more and more that “for those who love God all things work together for good” because of God’s intentional, careful hand in their salvation? They become a family, an army of rejoicers. I don’t know about you but a community of indestructible joy sounds amazing. I want in on that. Do you?
When you’re a Christian, it doesn’t mean that the circumstances of your life become better or inherently more enjoyable. But it does mean that you have access to a joy that cannot be touched by the sadness and pain that comes with living in our broken world. If you want the kind of joy that doesn’t ignore the reality of your circumstances, but is big enough to transcend your circumstances, come to Jesus. In Jesus, you are able to trust that there is a purpose behind all of the bad things that we see in our world. Again, it doesn’t ignore that there is real evil in the world, but it does recognize that nothing, even evil is able to thwart God’s purposes for your good. In Jesus, you are also able to trust that the good things that you experience in your union with Christ are never able to be lost. And finally, in Jesus you are able to see that the best things are yet to come. If you are a Christian, there is a day coming when you will be fully conformed to the image of the very Son of God. And in Christ, it’s as good as done. All that is required is that you come to him. All that is required is that you ask him to show you the way to indestructible joy.
Let’s pray to that end. Heavenly Father…
[1] I got this idea from John Piper’s sermon, Called According to His Purpose.
[2] This thought was inspired by Tim Keller’s sermon, A Christian’s Happiness.
[3] Timothy Keller, Romans 8-16 for You, 48.
Sermon Discussion Questions:
Jesus prays to the Father that Christians would have his joy fulfilled in them. Do you experience this joy? Why do you think that might be?
What are things in your life that don’t seem like they can be good? How does Romans 8:28 change the way you think?
How is it that seeing God’s sovereignty (his intentional careful hand, in control) in your salvation is supposed to give you joy? How is this kind of joy different than happiness?
