finished up, if we could, through verse 25, and then we
talked about how the Spirit helps us in our weakness. But tonight,
I wanted to continue in that vein of thought and talk about
the Holy Spirit, just as a way of reminder, and we'll start
ramping up the reminders in the coming weeks, but on the 17th
of May, which is a Saturday, we will be having a conference
on the person of the work of the Holy Spirit. It will be an
all-day conference, and then the Lord's Day will be normally
as it is in John, and then after service we'll have lunch, and
then we'll have an open panel for discussion and Q&A after
that, or during that, if we can. But tonight we see in verse 26,
let me back up and start in verse 18, and then read down through
verse 27. 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 eagerly await
adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies. For in this hope
we are 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
those who love God All things work together for good for those
who are called according to His purpose. And I'm going to stop
there because I want to talk about those things next week.
There's a couple of correlations that we need to recognize in
the context of this, and I wish I had something with some language
here because I just struck me to check a construction here.
But that's okay. If I don't get it right, I will
fix it next week. But I want you to see that Paul
is talking about the suffering that we are going to experience. He talks about the fact that
this suffering is not worth comparing to the future glory. We talked
about the tree a couple of weeks ago and how creation, though
it does suffer, is still groaning inwardly. In the same way that
it cannot be seen, we also are groaning inwardly. So much so
that at times we seem to lose our hope. Because it's very common
for us to put our hope in that which can be seen. It's natural
to put our hope in that which can be seen. If we're hungry
and we see no food, nor do we see means to buy food or obtain
food, we can be a little bit hopeless in the idea that we
may ever have food. The same thing is true with clothing
or money or health or whatever it may be that we seek. But Paul
comes to this end of this and he comes to this place where
he says, for in this hope, And in this hope in verse 24 is that
we are saved by the finished work of Christ and in this finished
work of Christ we have the hope of the finished work of Christ.
So that we now can, though we suffer in our bodies, look toward
the day when our bodies will be restored to a state that they
will never suffer again. Imagine the mind being clear
and free of sin. Imagine the mind being free and
clear to worship. Imagine the heart and the body
and the affections of our being. Imagine the illnesses and the
pains and the aches and the frustration. Just the awareness of our physical
presence, whether it be, do we look good enough? Is my hair
right? Did I brush my teeth to the point
of, am I important in the world? Have I made an impact on the
world? Why am I even here? To, I feel the arthritis in my
knees, ankles, and eyeballs. Oh my, when will this ever end?
Whatever it might be, We do groan inwardly. As I mentioned a couple
of weeks ago, we also groan inwardly because of the persecution that
we have in the fact that we are God's children and are not of
this world. But the point that Paul is trying
to say for us here in brief is that we have hope that one day
not only are we saved and justified because of Christ spiritually
and judicially, we also shall be saved physically. And we will
escape all the walls and the weariness of this world, and
we will stand before Christ with Him as He is, glorified in all
perfection. For we shall share in His glory. That's why Paul finishes this
out when he talks about it in verse 28 through 30. where he ends with, he also glorified. But we'll talk about that, as
I said, next week. So we hope in that which we cannot
see. Not only can we not see it physically,
we cannot see it mentally. We cannot put in our mind's eye
what glorification will be like. We cannot put in our mind's eye
the idea that one day we will have the freedom from all this
because, let's just put it this way, if we were to take a piece
of paper and to write out a list of things that we wish we were
free from in this world, We would really just want those things
to be away from us so that we might enjoy the things that we
can see, that we understand, that we can apprehend, and our
conscious can hold fast to in our mind's eye. Man, it would
be nice to have a yard without weeds. It would be nice to have
children who never disobeyed. It would be nice to have a body
without sickness. It would be not, you see. And
so we would put that in the so-called vernacular of our present visible
life. But we cannot see what it's going
to be like, even in our imagination, when we are glorified before
the Father. We cannot see. And because we cannot see, we
hope in that which we cannot see. As Peter would say that
we love Christ, though we cannot see Him, though we have not seen
Him, we still do not see Him, we rejoice with a joy that is
often inexpressible. I sort of feel that way. My family
in the last week have really had very little expressive joy,
but our joy is in the resolve knowing that that which is unseen
and that which is eternal is our absolute hope. That God has
purposed all these things for our good and that God has established
us in Christ so that we cannot be lost. So therefore, as we
mourn the death of someone dear to us, we are the only ones groaning
for those who go before us to be with the Lord no longer groan
whatsoever. Now they have anticipation of that day of glorification.
They may have somewhat an anticipation of when the saints are all together,
but it is not a longing as though something is missing. It is an
absolute joy. So even when we have joy that
is inexpressible this side of heaven, we still, just the same,
because of the hope that we do not see, we have joy. And the
same thing is true with the power of God and the work of God. Though
we do not see what glory will be like, though we do not have
a visual sense of what glorification shall be like, though we cannot
imagine what it will be to be free of all of our problems and
suffering, we cannot see Jesus this very day, and in the same
way we cannot see the work of God supernaturally for us on
our behalf. Likewise, the Spirit helps us
in our weakness. That's one of the elements I
think that we need to pay attention to in this text. We cannot see
the Holy Spirit. God is Spirit. He cannot be seen.
He cannot be touched. He cannot be embraced. But God
the Father, of course, God the Spirit, but Jesus Christ, God
the Son, is indeed in a flesh, a glorified body that is far
beyond our comprehension. But that in our intimacy with
Jesus Christ, we can see the work of God Himself. For Jesus
is our God and our Savior and our King. But the Spirit helps
us in our weakness. Now, sometimes we think of help
this way. Sometimes we think that someone can help us, like
if we're asking help with the laundry, hey, would you help
with the laundry? That means you're going to take a piece
of this task and you're going to accomplish a piece of that
task. And I don't know about you, but we have had at times
a lot of dirty clothes. And there was one particular
time, not too far into the middle of the Actually, at the end of
the summer last year, we found ourselves with every machine
in the local laundromat running for five solid hours trying to
get everything called up for what we wanted was some room
cleaning. And when I said, take all your
clothes and put them in the hall, I didn't mean clean ones. And
so children, as they begin to dump their dresser drawers into
the hallway, with no differentiation of what was clean and what is
dirty, we decided to wash them all. Well, we had to labor together
in that venture. Not only did we have to gather
them up and sort them, but load them into the car and into the
back of the trailer and on the backs of mules and donkeys and
oxen and everything else that we could do so that we could
get them to the place where we could spend 750 billion dollars
and quarters and five years of our lives to get them going.
The humidity was ungodly. It was like the waiting room
for Hell, I guess. It was awful. But everybody had
a part. And we had help. And every child,
sweat bowling down their face and crying and wondering when
life would ever come to an end to take them away from this agony.
Everyone had a job. If it was nothing but putting
coins in, the coins went in. If it might have been changing
from this washer to that one because this one wasn't draining,
or this dryer wasn't hot, or whatever it might have been,
everybody worked. And they all helped. Same thing
would be for yard work. Same thing would be for anything
else, whether it be algebra or you name it. The Spirit doesn't
help us that way, though. The Spirit, when it says helps
us in our weakness, is not coming alongside us when we're tired
and giving us a pep talk. The Spirit of God is not coming
alongside of us and giving us supernatural physical strength
to maintain the race. The Spirit is not helping us
to become something that we are not so that we might do something
in our own flesh. As a matter of fact, the Spirit
helps us when we cannot. Because the Spirit does for us
what we cannot do in the flesh. grants us repentance. The Spirit
gifts us faith. The Spirit empowers us to have
peace. This is not the Spirit saying,
come on, you can do it. This is not the Spirit saying,
here's the tool you need. Let me leave it in the bread box.
Hey, how did this happen? The Spirit has not given us an
epiphany or some icon to see on a piece of toast or in the
sky or what have you so that we might be encouraged along
our faith. No, the Spirit helps us. For
Paul says, for we do not know what to pray for as we ought
to know. You ever been there? Isn't that
really the ultimate outcome of what suffering can do? How do
you pray? What do you pray for? Let me
share a little bit of my prayer life with you. It may change
your perception of me, but I imagine that most people, and they've
told me this, I've heard this through the years, think that
my prayer life is this majestic, awesome time with God whereby
I just cry out to God with the most eloquent, prayers and then
God sort of warmly speaks down softly to me through the text
of scripture or through my consciousness or or what have you but most
the time my prayer life is God can I please stay awake long
enough to pray. Lord can I please stay focused on my prayers. Throughout
the last week as we've had a lot of praying to do I find myself
up and up and up and when I wake up at night I'm always in this
mind. I need to pray for someone, and
there's never a time for me to figure out who to pray for. It's
always on my mind, and I always find that amazing. And that is,
of course, the work of the Holy Spirit as well, that He brings
things to mind that we might pray, that you might pray for.
But my prayer then is nothing but war, where my body labors
want to sleep, but I can't sleep because I've been awakened to
pray, or maybe I've just been awakened because some child has
yet to subside in the Xbox, or whatever it might be. Either
way, I'm awake. And the prayers start really
good. Oh God, Father. as I'm exhausted,
I'm laying here, please, on behalf of so-and-so, on behalf of so-and-so. Father, I pray for them, I pray.
Next thing I know, I'm thinking about the lawnmower, or whether
or not I locked the car door, or is the garage light off, or,
wait a minute, Father, please keep my focus. My prayers go
to God, help me pray. I need to pray. Please help me
pray. Then all of a sudden I start
thinking about all my sin. Then I'm not worthy to pray. Then
I'm so exhausted and I'm so sinful. Am I even born again? And then
I'm praying for my own salvation. Have you ever been there? Yes. This is the reality of prayer.
It is a war. Now that's when things are good.
That's when life is moving right along in a simple way. When things
are bad, it's even worse. Yes, if I... If I focus and I
pray out loud, it's okay, but that doesn't always work. You
sometimes can get put in places that you don't escape from, like
funny farms or crazy houses, if you just start talking to
God in the middle of certain environments. It's just not something
you can do. But even then, is it easy? No, it's not easy to pray. So
imagine these saints in Rome, imagine the stringent overbearingness
of life that these people were experiencing. Imagine Paul, that
the only thing that God the Holy Spirit revealed to him as he
went on his missionary journeys is that he would be arrested. Whatever you do Paul, you're
going to go there. There's one thing I promise you, you're going
to be incarcerated. You're going to be whipped, you're
going to be whatever. It's the only promise that God
revealed to Paul. But there was another promise
that God revealed to Paul. And that was that the Holy Spirit
would pray for us. God, the Holy Spirit, what does
that look like? We don't know. We don't have the appendix of
the works of the Holy Spirit over here. But we're going to
look at that come May. We're going to spend some time,
of the work of the Holy Spirit, how the Scripture contextually
and synergistically shows us the working of the Spirit of
God in many different ways. But what does it look like for
us today? What is the outcome there? How does the Spirit pray? There's only a few things that
we see here. The Spirit Himself intercedes for us with groanings
too deep for words. Does that mean that we're groaning?
It could be. Does it mean sometimes when we're
lamenting that it is actually God the Holy Spirit praying for
us without us even knowing? I don't know. Now, of course,
we see some abuse of these types of texts where people will say,
oh no, I was praying in the Spirit. That's not the point here. That's
not the reality of what Paul is trying to show us, that when
we can't pray and we're saying things we don't understand that
the Spirit is speaking. That's not true whatsoever. As
a matter of fact, Paul rebukes that type of thing for the church
of Corinth. He says that it shouldn't be
and that it's not normative. But here, there is something
more powerful happening here. And it's happening because We
see it in the Word of God. We don't feel it. We don't experience
it in some way that, oh, oh, I feel the Spirit now. He's praying
for me. We just let go and let God. No, we are trusting in it. And oftentimes, it's as we look
back, we see God was interceding for me. How does God intercede? I believe the Scripture teaches
us very clearly, God the Holy Spirit prays for us. That's an
amazing thing to think that God who is one, who is, not has,
but who is three persons, also uniquely God, independently and
perfectly and unitedly God. I hope I got all those right.
God is one being, three persons, that God the Holy Spirit could
even pray on our behalf. And you might think that's odd,
but did Jesus not pray for us? Did God the Son not pray in John
17? His high priestly prayer, as it's so eloquently pasted
in our Bible? The only reason we know that
that's the priestly prayer is because it says so right there in the
headings. But Jesus prays to the Father.
The Son in the Garden of Gethsemane prays that the will of the Father
be done. Jesus and the Gospel show us
how we ought to pray in this model prayer that He prays that
the will of God be done. And that is where our hope is. So the most effectual prayer
for ourselves is the prayer that God's will is done and we trust
in the will of God. And so therefore the most effectual
prayer for one another is not that we get all the bits and
pieces of making sure that we ask God rightly to get all of
the instrumentation done in our lives. Isn't that crazy? Sometimes
I think, Father, do this, and then do that, and then do this,
and then cause this, and then make this, and then change this.
And then this will happen, as if I set out the outline for
God to fix the problem, or to heal the body, or to change the
nature, or what have you. And ultimately, it's God's will
being done that we most desperately want and most desperately need.
And yes, we labor and petition on behalf of one another and
for ourselves. But when we cannot, we recognize
that the most effectual prayer that could ever be had is when
our Lord prays for us, as Jesus prayed, not just only for those
who have come, but those who have yet to come. Those sheep
that are not yet here in my hold, if you can, in that imagery.
so that if God the Son can pray, so can God the Holy Spirit. And
what better prayer than that for us? What better prayer? Now I know what some people say
when they hear me say stuff like this, or actually hear Paul,
it's not my words, it's his. When they hear Paul teach these
things, they say, wait a minute, wait a minute. We don't have
to pray ever again. The Spirit's just going to pray
and pray and pray. And we can just go about our
happy ways. But friends, the Spirit of God calls us to pray.
The Spirit of God, as we read the Word, as we are intimate
with one another, we call each other to pray. Isn't that an
example of Scripture? Someone who is sick, call the
elders to come and anoint them with oil and to pray. pray for
one another. Paul prayed, I bow my knees before
the Father from whom all families on heaven and earth are named.
And he prays that they may be filled with all the fullness
of God. Ephesians 3. And everywhere, really, in Paul's
writing, we see prayers of the New Testament characters over
and over again. We see all the apostles praying. We see our Lord praying as we've
already alluded to. And now we see the Spirit praying.
It's not that we don't pray, but it's that when we cannot
pray and we don't know how to pray, we can trust that God the
Holy Spirit will pray. What does that do for us? What
does that do for us? Well, it does a lot for me. It
does a lot for me because if there's one thing that has always
been beating myself up over, through the years, is that I
feel my prayer life needs more power. You ever felt that? I just wish I could pray better. That's not a bad thing to desire. Wish I could pray more often.
Certainly. We should be praying without ceasing. That's one of
the reasons I think that we have a real problem in our culture
about these time-out prayers, these ritualistic blessings,
these ritualistic prayers, these ritualistic introductions to
ball games, these ritualistic travel prayers, these things
like that. If we are communicating with God in our mind as we speak
to Him, I picked this up years ago in 2004 and I thought I should
just turn my thoughts to prayers instead of thinking how I should
deal with these things and what needs to take place and having
these weird conversations with people and getting angry with
them or being frustrated with them or being burdened by them
because they're fake. They're just hypothetical daydreams.
I should instead talk to my Father, who then in turn, when I don't
know how I ought to pray, is praying for us. So the Spirit
praying for us, interceding for the saints, it should give us
peace. It should give us peace to know
that even in our best days, the Holy Spirit's prayers are better
than ours. And in our worst days, when we cannot pray, God is still
praying for us. When we come to, when we come
out of that moment where we feel that we've been overcome by the
flesh, we can know that the will of God can be done for us because
the Spirit's been praying for us. And that brings me to the
second thing that it does for us. The Holy Spirit, He, intercedes
with the saints, look at the second part of verse 27, according
to the will of God. I don't know about you, but my
prayers are often a lot of what I desire. not necessarily bad. We see bad prayers and bad desires
in James chapter 4. We see what they do. They're
selfish prayers and prayers to fill up our materialism and prayers
to fill up our power and our ego. Everything that John says
in 2 John 2 says not to love the world and everything in it.
But here the Spirit prays according to the will of God. and only according to the will
of God. Where I might pray even wrongly. You ever prayed an imprecatory
prayer? If you pray imprecatory prayers,
it's a wrong prayer. Because Jesus says, pray for
your enemies that God would bless them. Paul prays for those who
shipwrecked their faith and destroyed the church's intimacy and ruined
their lives. What? That God may save their
soul. That God may grant them repentance.
It's interesting though, because sometimes when we pray, we like
to stick on the part, turn them over to Satan! Yeah, burn them!
I mean, you know, all the while that God has rescued us from
the domain of darkness, snatched us out of death into life, and
is patient with us, and the Holy Spirit prays for our good. Where
do I get that? Because it says it there. All
things work together for good. So God the Holy Spirit will never
pray against the will of God, and the will of God for the beloved
is for our good, always for our good. That's how we understand sovereignty.
When we look at the circumstances, we go, this isn't how I wanted
it, God. I had more plans. I had a future. I had something else I wanted
to do with my legs. Why did you take my legs? Or my eyes? Or my family? Why? No, this is for my good. This
is greater than what I could have thought of and asked for.
This isn't punishment for me. It's not discipline to prune
me into a place of standing in obedience. It is good for me.
It is a blessing for me when the Lord of Heaven, when God
does His will in my life that I see as negative. This is to
remind us that the Holy Spirit prays according to the will of
God. for us. It is the will of God, the outcome
of these things. Now, let me caveat this way. There are some people who will
take this mindset, as I said earlier, and say, well, I don't
need to pray now. Yeah, God's just going to pray for me. The same way people who are supposedly
born again in some way and they say, you know what, I'm just
going to murder and stab and kill and pillage because I can
do it. Because Christ died for my sins.
That's weird. It's absurd, we've already dealt
with that over here in what? Abraham. We dealt with it over
here in Romans 4 and 5. 6, 6-1 actually. We're not to do these things.
But there's another part where people see this and they say,
well, all that sin that I did, all that anger and hatred that
I have, it ain't my fault because it's the will of God. Yes. Yes. It is the will of God that those
who hated the Christ would nail him on a cross and kill him.
It is the will of God that he decreed before the foundations
of the world that the murderous hearts of the Pharisees would
take Jesus and kill him and murder him. It is the will of God that
Judas Iscariot would spend nearly four years with the Christ, all
the while being the very instrument of his arrest and death. It was
the will of God But none of those people belong
to God. And when we, listen to this,
are overcome with sin at times, as the beloved, we don't use
that as an excuse to say, well, it's just the will of God that
I'm stuck in this sin right now. Because the will of God by the
Holy Spirit causes us to hate our sin. And when our brothers
and sisters come to us with the Word, we're broken over our sin. And we may do it again tomorrow,
but by golly, today. Today we want freedom from it.
We want to be glorified, you see. We're not living our best
life now in this world hoping that we can just enjoy more and
more of the flavors of sensuality and debauchery. That's not. It
is possible, but it's not glorifying to the Lord. And so may I think, here's the
spirit And he searches the heart, he knows the mind, and he knows what is the mind
of God, and he intercedes on our behalf according to the will
of God. And even when we see calamity, listen to this, this
is the point I've been trying to make, and I'm running around
in circles, probably making a mess of what I'm trying to teach.
We do not despair. even in the darkest of things,
because we know that God's will is done in them, and that God's
will is done through them, and that the ultimate end of God's
will is to display His glory and prove the internal nature
of His countenance, which is righteousness. In chapter 9,
if you know chapter 9 of Romans, you know that these questions
are already in the minds of the readers of Paul. So is God unjust? What do we do with the sinfulness
of these people or the reprobate? What do we do with people who
are objects of destruction? Why is God not doing something
with them? How is His righteousness displayed in that? His patience
as He puts it all under the feet of Christ in the day of judgment. God purposes and uses and decrees
evil for His outcomes. So when we see people who come
and hurt us, we can know that it is according to the purpose
of God. Look at verse 28, and then we're
going to be done. The Spirit intercedes for the saints according
to the will of God. And there's so much more. Friends, there's
so much more we could talk about here. But for what we're trying to
do on midweek, we just need to move through the theological
principles. And we know You see, we've been
learning this, we taught this for, you know, for 35 minutes
now, we've been talking about this, but this is, and we know,
this is what I've been trying to say, that for those who love
God, all things work together for good. No matter what you
see, no matter what you think, the hardest day of your existence
is for your good. The hardest experience of your
life is for your good. And not just for your good, for
the goodness of the name of God. Everything. That's how we can
hear these words. Do all things without grumbling
and complaining. Count it all joy, my brothers,
when you face trials of any kind. And how many more do we see in
scripture? Rejoice. And again, I say rejoice. Those who love God. Now, there's
a lot of people who love God. Ask them, they'll tell you. Yep,
I love God. He's awesome. Big guy in the
sky throwing down pies. I love God. He's good to me.
What God are you talking about? I say this a lot. Because there's
always a God for somebody. Every human being in the world
has a God. People who say there is no God,
that's their God, no God. Sort of like when I was a kid,
my mom would come running through, who left all this stuff out on
the counter? And we would all just about in unison go, not
me! Who didn't put the milk back up? Not me! One day, we're walking
through there and my mom sits us all down and she says, I don't
know who not me is. But when I find him, I'm gonna
kill him. Not me. Why do we love God? We love the
God of the Bible. the God of Scripture that says
in the most heinous of days, He is sovereign over the day
of evil. He is sovereign over the tongues
of man. He is sovereign over the thoughts
of man. He is sovereign over the will
of man. He is sovereign over a leaf falling off a tree down
a mountain into a stream. He knows the number of heads
that fall from our hair, or the other way. How many heads are
falling off? Not me! That's what not me looks
like. He's one strand of hair with
a lot of heads. Anywho, you see a little turn
twister there. He knows everything. What else
does the scripture say? The birds that hit the ground.
the amount of sand that's on the seashore. God knows the depths
of the ocean and every creature that is there for in His sovereignty.
He placed it there. This is the God that we love
and the only way we love Him is because the Holy Spirit of
God has already shown us to Him because we've been made alive,
thus we see what God has done for us. We love Him because He
first loved us. No one loves God if God has not
first loved them. Now let me put this together
for you here. God's love is seen in this, that
He sent His Son to die in place of His people so that they might
become His righteousness. This is the love of God for His
people. It never began, it will never end. It is an eternal love.
Before we ever existed, God knew each of us intimately, divinely,
whatever that looks like. We will never understand it.
And He purposed to save us through the finished work of Christ.
And the only way we can love God is if God has first loved
us. And so we who know the one true
God and all the work of Christ, what He accomplished on the cross,
and for whom He did it, as the Scripture reveals, those alone
are the ones who love God. Otherwise, people have some minute
affection for some caricature being that they call God or some
historical figure that they call Jesus the Christ. But if it is
not the gospel of grace and the God that reveals Himself through
His Word by the Holy Spirit, it is not the God of Scripture. So therefore, there is no love
for this God if He has not loved us. Because people measure that,
oh, I love God, I love Him a lot. Do you? Our Lordship acquaintances
would like to say, oh, if you love God, I can tell you're doing
the godly stuff. You're not a smoker or a drinker
or an eye batter. You don't watch TV, you don't
own one, really. You don't paint pictures in your
house. Unless it's of a cross. But that might be idolatry, too.
Check your heart. I'll let you know if you become
an idolater. I'll tell you. Don't chew bubble gum. Don't
wear flip-flops. I mean, I'm being absurd now,
but you know what I'm talking about. We've all got those uncles
and aunts. You love God because I can see
it in your smile. You love God because I can tell. I can tell
you love God because you're so kind to people. You know what
I'm saying? I hear this all the time. Oh, so-and-so loves God.
They love God. You should see how they treat
their mama. I know charlatans that treat
their mama well because she pays their bills. Sure, a Christian ought to treat
their mother well. The Bible commands it. But even when we do, we're
not treated well enough to be warranted as righteousness, so
Christ treated His mother well. Never sinned. So it is His obedience
that is our righteousness. So God must love us in order
for us to love Him, and for those whom Christ has died, that is
what we're seeing there. All things work together for
good. Now get this, in closing. What about those for whom Christ
has not died? Is everything happening to them
just an arbitrary result of the spin of the cosmos dice? No. It is all subject to the sovereignty
of God's decrees and everything that happens. Solomon had a problem
with it. He says, why is it that so many
evil people have it good? Why is it that so many good people
have it so bad? Give me wisdom. Give me wealth.
Give me wisdom. I mean, women. He should have
had a double portion of wisdom. And then what happens? Solomon
has everything that any natural man would probably desire, and
then some, and it's sort of absurd, but even then, he said it's all
fruitless and worthless. Nothing matters. It's nothing. You die, you work, and then you
die. Even the evil people have good
days. What's the difference? The difference is that even those
who are reprobate, everything that happens to them, whether
good or bad, is by the sovereign decree of God. It is for His
purpose, get this, for our good. For the good of His people. Which
ends in glorification. It ends in being in His presence
forever. So, those who love God, all things
work together for good. For those who are called according
to His purpose. And that's where we'll pick up
next week. And I know I've sort of tap-danced around all this,
but I didn't want to really close that out because it would be
an hour for us to get through this. This is known as the Ordo Salutis,
or the Order of Salvation. I like to pack it into the teaching
here of the work of God through God the Holy Spirit. and the security, because what
does Paul tell us is our security? What does Paul say is the seal
of the believer? Is it baptism? Not a chance.
Is it circumcision? Read Galatians and see what Paul
says about that. Is it church membership? Nope. What's the
seal? It's the Holy Spirit. The Holy
Spirit indwells us. We are the body of Christ, sealed
by the Holy Spirit. We will be carried into glory. We will be kept forever by the
power of God. No matter what the picture looks
like, no matter how hard the road, He is faithful and He cannot
deny Himself. And that's what we need to keep
in mind as we continue this day. So beloved, as we close out this,
Be reminded with these words as I read them. For the purpose
of God, those who are called according to his purpose for,
and this is an explanation of what this looks like, those whom
he foreknew, he also predestined to be conformed to the image
of his son. in order that he might be the firstborn amongst
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." Then Paul asks a question. So that if God,
what shall we say then? 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? So with that, beloved, be at
ease. Rest, know that the work of God
is completing for you in Christ. Let's pray. We love you, Father,
because you have loved us. Lord, I pray that this teaching
has been a good reminder for us, a good opportunity for us
to just embrace the reality of the gospel and that we might
know and be secure and confident in the finished work of Jesus. was finished, took Calvary. The
Father will culminate at our glory. And no matter the amount
of suffering or pain or problems, whether it be our marriage or
our body or mind or whatever, Lord, it's all for our good.
So let us rejoice in these things as we look to that which is unseen,
as we see hope in the invisible. We worship you. We love you. We praise you for your ineffable
glory and love and kindness and redemption and so much more. In Christ's name, we pray. Amen.