On October 19, 2014, Luella and I walked over to the emergency room of Jefferson Hospital. I had experienced some minor symptoms and my physician said, "Just go to Jefferson, they'll take care of you." I thought they were minor, and it would be a quick visit. We sat in the emergency room that Sunday afternoon watching the Eagles. In those days, that was the best place to watch the Eagles, the emergency room! And they finally took me back into the examining room and before long, there were representatives from five different departments of the hospital, in my examining room.
My Kidneys Were Dying
It didn't make any sense to me. What I didn't understand was that my kidneys were dying, and I didn't know it. Had I waited another week or so, I wouldn't be with you today. That ten days of the hospital were very, very difficult. For some reason, my body went into full body spasms; they were very painful and terrifying. The first thirty-six hours, I just screamed. I thought when they finally let me out of the hospital that I was on my own, only to experience, in the next two years, six surgeries.
If you have a surgery every four months, you don't recover before you have the next surgery. And I was growing weaker and weaker and weaker. I can remember one morning sitting in my chair, so weak, I could literally not get out of the chair, and trying to make sense in my mind how is it that God would give me the widest gospel platform I've ever had in my life and yet render me weaker than I'd ever been in my life. Now, I haven't shared my story with you so you would sympathize with me, but as an illustration of something that's very important to understand-that we live in two worlds.
The one world is this gorgeous world of God's grace. How could it be that we are the receivers of his great and precious promises? How could it be that he's present with us? How could it be that he unleashes his power on our behalf? How could it be that we have every spiritual blessing in Christ Jesus? It's a world so beautiful, so gorgeous, it defies human description! Yet we don't just live in that world. We live in a world of pain and loss, heartache and betrayal, where shocking unwanted things become part of our experience, where our bodies don't work the way they should work.
Our minds don't work the way they should work. Where loved ones turn their back on us and walk away. There are moments in life where it's hard to reconcile those two worlds. Where you cry out, "God, where are you? Do you hear me? Where are your promises? Why? Why? How long?" Well, that's the world that our passage this morning speaks into. If you would turn in your Bibles to Romans 8, beginning with verse 18, that's page 944 in your church Bibles. I was trained by Phil Ryken never to call them "pew Bibles."
He didn't like how that sounded! So they're "church Bibles." And I will read this rather long passage to you. Romans 8, beginning with verse 18. For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us. For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God. For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of him who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God.
For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now. And not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies. For in this hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what he sees? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience. Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness. For we do not know what to pray for as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words.
And he who searches hearts knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God. And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose. 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. And those whom he predestined he also called, and those whom he called he also justified, and those whom he justified he also glorified.
What then shall we say to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us? He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things? Who shall bring any charge against God's elect? It is God who justifies. Who is to condemn? Christ Jesus is the one who died--more than that, who was raised--who is at the right hand of God, who indeed is interceding for us. Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or danger, or sword?
More Than Conquerors
As it is written, "For your sake we are being killed all the day long; we are regarded as sheep to be slaughtered." No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor 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. Amen and amen! In case you haven't discovered it in my reading, this passage is intended to be a treatise on how God meets you, by his grace, in the darkest moments of the human experience.
First, we have "Preparing Grace," preparing grace. That is verses 18-25. Verses 18-25 are in the Bible because your Lord loves you, and he doesn't want you to live with unrealistic expectations ignorantly. He wants you to understand the nature and function of the world that you now live in, the world that he has ordained would be your address. And there are provocative descriptions of this world "subjected to futility." Wow! There was no futility in the garden, was there? Not one second. But our world is crushed by futility.
In pains of childbirth; that's that acute pain. Some of you have been in moments of emotional, spiritual, physical, acuteness of pain. "In bondage to corruption," that corruption here means decay. Isn't it a shocking reality that everything that is now alive is in the process of dying? What a reality. So God wants you to understand that this is the world that is your address, and because it is, fasten your seatbelts, suffering is a universal human experience. Notice in verse 18, Paul doesn't argue for the existence of suffering.
He knows he doesn't have to-he assumes it. Because, if you live in this world that is broken and fallen, falling apart under the weight of its fallenness, groaning itself, the physical world, waiting for redemption, that fallenness will enter your world. That means that suffering is not a sign that God has forsaken you, that he has forgotten you, that you just don't happen to be one of his favorites. And I love the fact that the Bible is very honest about suffering. You could argue that the blood and dirt of the fallen world splashes across every part of the Word of God.
And the New Testament is very specific about why we suffer. I'm going to give you five reasons that are in the New Testament for those of you who are taking notes. First, you suffer because "You live in a fallen world." And because of that, it will become somehow, someway, part of our experience. If you're not suffering now, you will someday. And if you're not suffering now, you're near someone who is. Secondly, "We suffer for our spiritual growth." This is 1 Peter 1:3-9. You've never heard anyone ever say, "I had three of the easiest, most comfortable years of my life, and I learned so much."
So you laugh. You've never heard that. But you hear people again and again who say, "I've been through the hardest things, and I learned, I grew so much." Suffering in the hands of a Redeemer is a workroom of grace. You suffer so that "You can bring comfort to other sufferers." This is 2 Corinthians 1:3-9. Paul says, "God, the God of all comfort, brings our comfort to us when we suffer so that we can bring comfort to other sufferers" (Paraphrase). It's not just that I don't own my blessing; I don't own my suffering.
Even that, the Lord wants to use so I can bring comfort to other sufferers. "You'll suffer for God's glory." Life isn't about my glory-it's about his. And this is 2 Corinthians 4, beginning with verse 7, "We have this treasure in jars of clay to show that the surpassing power is from God and not from me (us)..." And then Paul names all these perplexities, and he says, we always carry around "the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus also may be manifested (seen) in us." Your weakness puts God's glory on display.
Suffering Is Not in the Way
And then "We will suffer because of our faith." This is 1 Peter 4, beginning with verse 13. Now, here's what this means. I love being able to say this, "Your suffering is not in the way of God's plan," but I'm not done, "it's part of God's plan!" It's not an accident that you live in the world you live in. It's not an accident that in that world, you experience the things you experience. This means that your suffering is never meaningless. I hate when I hear people, in media, talk about "the meaninglessness of suffering."
We don't believe in fate. We don't believe in bad luck. We don't believe in karma. We don't believe in a God who's forgetful. We don't believe he lacks the ability to do what he promised. Your suffering has meaning! We know this from the message of the cross, don't we? What's the worst thing that ever happened? The death of the one perfectly righteous person who ever lived. What's the best thing that ever happened? The death of the one perfectly righteous person who ever lived. Same event. But not only preparing grace, "Intervening Grace," verse 26: Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness.
For we do not know what to pray for as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words. And he who searches hearts knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God. What sweet, tender, beautiful words. Paul wants you to know that you are never ever alone in your suffering because the Spirit of God now lives inside of you. And you know, if you've been through those dark moments, there are times when you don't know how to pray because you don't know how to make sense of what's going on.
There are moments when prayer seems too much to ask. Your mind doesn't form the words you want to say. You know what Paul says to you? "Groan! Groan! Groan!" Don't stop praying because you don't have theological things to say. Don't stop praying because you can't come up with a prayer that has a good beginning and a good middle and a nice end. Don't rehearse your prayer before you pray it, your Lord hears the rehearsal! Just groan! Some of my prayers in the hospital were screams. People wouldn't have known I was praying.
There are times when I prayed this three-word prayer over and over again, "God help me! God help me! God help me! God help me!" God, the Holy Spirit, filled in a paragraph of details from those three words and took them to the Father. How sweet, loving, and tender is our Lord. He knows your weaknesses. And he says, "Just come to me, just with all of your babbling, come to me, and I will carry your request to the Father." You should be saying inside of yourself right now, "Praise God! Praise God! Praise God!"
There I've helped you. Not just preparing grace and intervening grace, but "Unstoppable Grace." Let me read the next few verses, beginning with verse 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. 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. And those whom he predestined he also called, and those whom he called he also justified, and those whom he justified he also glorified.
Now I'm about to discuss with you one of the most misunderstood, misinterpreted, misapplied passages in all of the Bible, and it may have happened to you. You're going through something tough, and someone says, "Don't worry, all things work together for good." They smile and they walk away. As if this passage is teaching that this side of eternity, everything is going to turn out all right. Listen, there are ways that Paul Tripp will never be fully healthy again until I'm on the other side. I want to say this respectfully, "Joni Eereckson Tada is not arising out of her wheelchair."
It's not what this passage is teaching. And when you throw it at people that way, you set them up for frustration, disappointment and anger with God. A little bit of Bible interpretation here. Let Scripture interpret Scripture, and verse 28 is interpreted and explained by verses 29 and 30. What is the good that is promised to us here? "Redemption!" That's your answer. That nothing you go through can stop the march of redemption in your life. And with that march of redemption comes everything you need.
He Will Not Abandon You
Your God will not abandon you in your struggle. He will not abandon you in your weakness. He will not abandon you in your doubt because his commitment to you, according to this passage, is absolutely eternal! And he says, "Whatever I have begun in you in my redeeming grace, I will not stop until it's done, until it's completed." That's what it's talking about. Listen, the best thing in your life is not your job. The best thing in your life is not your 'nearly perfect marriage.' That was a joke; obviously not a good one.
The best thing in your life is not your children who, for some reason, choose to obey. It's not your nice house. It's not your artistic skills, not your ability to communicate. It's not any of those things. The best thing in your life is redeeming grace because the most broken thing in your life is you. What I need to be redeemed from is me. And this is a promise that nothing will ever stop that. It's beautiful. And even if I live weak the rest of my life, even if I live alone the rest of my life, even if my career crashed and never comes back the rest of my life, I'm redeemed!
I get up in the morning and get out of bed and wrap redemption around me and face life again. It's beautiful. Not only preparing grace, intervening grace, unstoppable grace, but "Providing Grace." "What shall we say then to these things (verse 31) if God is for us, who can be against us? He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things?" You know, when the unexpected, the unwanted, the hard, the difficult, the life-stopping or life-changing thing enters your door, you are flooded with "What-ifs."
You know that's true. "How are we going to pay our bills?" "How am I going to talk to my children about this?" "How will our marriage survive?" There are all kinds of fears of provision that assault your heart. And so Paul speaks into that world, and I love the logic here. The logic is the cross. And Paul is like, he's sitting us down and he's saying, "Now listen to this for a moment, do you really think that if God harnessed the forces of nature and controlled the events of human history to give us his Son to live a perfectly righteous life on our behalf, to suffer a substitutionary death on our behalf, to rise out of that tomb on our behalf, to ascend to the right hand of the Father and his royal priesthood reign on our behalf, do you really think, if he did all of that, that he would abandon us along the way?"
What's the obvious answer? "No!" The giving of the Son is the ultimate guarantee that, in your toughest moments, you will have everything that you need. No, not everything you could imagine. No, not everything you desire. No, not your long want-list, no. But what your wise heavenly Father knows you need. Now, I want to add something else to our conversation here. I want to propose that perhaps it's often the case that the suffering is the provision. In one of those moments when I was sitting in utter weakness in my chair, I had a rather humiliating moment of recognition that much of what, in my Christian life, I had thought of as faith in Christ wasn't.
I was physically young for my age. People around me called me the "Energizer Bunny." I had the ability to produce a lot. And there was a lot of pride in my strength, my wisdom, and my production. And it was in those dark days when I began to learn what it really meant to rest in my Savior. And I began to understand that God didn't need me to be strong to use me. God didn't call me because I was able. He called me because He is able. If you read the history of Scripture, it's a chronicle of God using weak people, often people we would never think have potential.
You know why they do? Grace! I'm going to share something with you that some of you may have trouble believing, but it's absolutely true. In that period of rather abiding personal weakness, I wrote a book. And when I got the first copy of that book, I looked at it, and I began to weep. I called Luella down from the upstairs, and I said to her, "This may sound crazy, but I don't remember writing this book." And the first time, in all the books that I've written, I sat down while I was seated, and I read my own book cover to cover.
Infused With Grace
That's what God is able to do. And people have told me again and again that that book, of all the books that I've written, is just infused with the grace of God. Guess why? Because I was holding on to that grace with both hands. I can say this to you without hesitation, "People who know me know I don't like to suffer. But I would gladly go through that again to get what my Savior has delivered to me." It's beautiful! Preparing grace, intervening grace, unstoppable grace, providing grace, one more, "Inseparable Grace."
Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or danger, or sword? As it is written, "For your sake we are being killed all the day long; we are regarded as sheep to be slaughtered." No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor 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.
And all God's people said, "Amen!" "Amen!" I would love to say a whole lot about this last section, but I want to say there's a reason that this is the crescendo of this passage. Because one of the dynamics of suffering is you will be attended by condemning voices. He mentions condemnation here. The whisper of the enemy, "So where is your God now? Why you? Why now? Maybe God is punishing you after all. Maybe this is because you just have never measured up. Maybe you don't even know him." And perhaps the deepest of all theological questions is not, "Will I lose my salvation?"
The deepest of all theological questions is "Will God ever stop loving me?" Because if that's a possibility, close-up the doors; we have no hope. And if nothing in heaven or earth can separate me from the love of God in Christ Jesus, then my poor, bumbling, foolish responses to my suffering won't separate me from God's love either. Listen, there are two questions in the heart of every human being that's ever lived. The first one is "Will somebody love me?" Every human being is a person in search of love.
But the second question is even more terrifying, "Once they get to know me, will they still love me?" And the answer of the gospel is "Yes and Yes!" You see, you are never, ever, ever alone in your suffering. In condescending love, love you could never earn, achieve, or deserve, God meets you in your suffering. He meets you with His preparing grace, not wanting you to have unrealistic expectations. He meets you in his intervening grace, moments when you don't know how to pray, and says, "Just groan to me.
I'll carry your groanings." He meets you with His unstoppable grace, letting you know that nothing can stop the march of redemption in your life. He meets you with his providing grace, reminding you if he gave you his Son, won't he give you everything you need? And he meets you with the assurance that the love that you never earned won't be withdrawn because you don't deserve it. If you are struggling this morning with what has entered your door, I plead with you, don't run from your Savior; don't listen to those condemning voices-run to him.
He is in you and with you and for you. Maybe you're in this room and you would say, I don't know this God. I don't know his Son. And I surely don't know the hope of the grace that's in this passage. I would plead with you, don't leave this room before you do. There are lovely, knowledgeable people sprinkled throughout this room. Grab somebody and say, I want to know this, and I don't. There'll be people in the foyer. Grab somebody. Don't leave until the grace that has been described in this passage becomes yours.
Let's pray. Lord, how amazing it is that we can grab ahold of the grace that we have examined this morning and say, it's mine. It's mine. It's mine. Not because we deserve it, but because of what Jesus has done. May in the darkest moments of life, when we are the most confused, distressed, the weakest, may we run to You, not away from You. And we pray this in the name of the One whose name is above all other names, Jesus. Amen.
