(Psalm 44:20-26; Romans 8:31-39)

“Therefore, since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have gained access by faith into this grace in which we now stand. And we rejoice in the hope of the glory of God. Not only so, but we also rejoice in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope. And hope does not disappoint us, because God has poured out his love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, whom he has given us.” (Romans 5:1-5)

“The law was added so that the trespass might increase. But where sin increased, grace increased all the more, so that, just as sin reigned in death, so also grace might reign through righteousness to bring eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.” (Romans 5:20-21)

“Sin shall not be your master, because you are not under law, but under grace.” (Romans 6:14)

“Now that you have been set free from sin and have become slaves to God, the benefit you reap leads to holiness, and the result is eternal life. For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.” (Romans 6:22-23)

“While we were living in the flesh, our sinful passions, aroused by the law, were at work in our bodies to bear fruit for death. But now we are released from the law, having died to that which held us captive, so that we serve not under the old written code but in the new life of the Spirit.” (Romans 7:5-6)

“Therefore there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, be-cause through Christ Jesus the law of the Spirit of life set me free from the law of sin and death.” (Romans 8:1-2)

“We know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose. For those God foreknew he predestined to be conformed to the likeness of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brothers. And those he predestined, he called; those he called, he justified; those he justified, he glorified.” (Romans 8:28-30)

What, then, shall we say in response to these things? God is for us. He has not abandoned us to our sin, he has not abandoned us to our enemies, he has not abandoned us to our failures, he has not abandoned us to those who would condemn us—he has given us his Son, Jesus Christ, and in Jesus he has given us new life. Whoever else may abandon us, whoever else may give up on us, whoever else may turn on us, God says, “I will never leave you nor forsake you.” God is for us; who can possibly be against us?

Of course, this doesn’t mean people won’t try. They try every day. But God is for us—God who is at work in everything for the good of his children. People may try to be against us, but they can’t outsmart God; in the end we will say with Joseph, “You meant this for evil, but God intended it for good.” In the end, even our enemies will be used for our blessing and growth.

People will still accuse us of things—sometimes even dreadful things. Some of them will probably be true, since we know we do still sin. Others won’t be, and those accusations will come precisely because we’re not guilty of anything. The more we follow Christ, the more we will make some folks uncomfortable, and some of them will deal with their discomfort by opening fire on us. One of the best ways to do that is by making an accusation, because people who hear an accusation will tend to start off assuming it must be true; it puts us in a bad light with our community whether it’s the least bit fair or not. Paul knew this well for the ridiculous array of charges that were hurled at him over the years. And yet he says, “Who will bring any charge against those whom God has chosen?” Why? “It is God who justifies; who is to condemn?” Remember, he says, who holds justice in his hand; whatever this world may say, the only verdict that ultimately matters is God’s, and it is God who has declared you innocent in Christ.

Indeed, Jesus is standing right there at the Father’s right hand as our great high priest, bringing our prayers to the Father and interceding on our behalf; the one who died for us and rose again for us is our advocate. Anyone who wanted to turn the Father against us would have to turn Jesus against us—and can anyone or anything make him stop loving us? No, says Paul. We suffer, but it doesn’t mean that Jesus doesn’t love us. Just look at Paul’s own example. In his list in verse 35, he had suffered every one of those things except execution, and he’d already faced the threat of that; he could testify from his own experience that not one of those things had in any way served to separate him from Christ. If anything, they drove him closer to the Lord.

It isn’t enough to say that God will get us through tough times; it isn’t enough to say that he will help us endure trials or opposition or oppression. No, not only are trouble and hardship, persecution and danger and all manner of suffering unable to separate us from the love of Christ, we don’t merely hang on through adversities, we prevail over them. Indeed, it isn’t even enough to say we conquer them, for that doesn’t go far enough—in Christ we are more than conquerors, because God doesn’t just leave the adversities we face in life as defeated bad things in our past. Rather, he takes our trials and sufferings and he uses them to bless us and grow us, turning them to our good. From those black roots, he grows beautiful flowers.

To this, there are no exceptions. There is nothing, absolutely nothing, that could ever even conceivably cut us off from the love of God, which he expressed in giving his Son Jesus Christ for us so that he might redeem us and call us his children. There is nothing that could ever undo what God has done for us in Christ, and nothing that could ever make him even think about changing his mind about that. Nothing in our existence—nothing in life, and not even death. Nothing in the spiritual realm—not angels, and not devils. Nothing in time—nothing we’re doing now, nothing anyone else is doing, and nothing we or anyone else will ever do. No powers of any sort—spiritual, political, cultural, military, religious, judicial, or any other kind you might want to name. Nothing in all creation, no matter how high or how low you want to go—even if you could go all the way to Heaven or Hell. Not anything, anywhere, anytime, anyhow, can separate you or me or any one of God’s people from his love.

God loves us in Christ. He loves us as we are in Christ, and as we will one day fully be, and nothing wrong with us now can change that. He loves us in the work of Christ—he shows his love for us in that while we were still completely ruined, sinners unable even to want to repent, Jesus died for us. God loves the world in this way: he gave his Son, so that whoever believes in him will not perish—absolutely not—but will, for certain, have eternal life. Nothing you can do, nothing you will ever do, can change that, undo that, or modify that in any way, and neither can anything the Devil or anybody else can do. That’s how big God’s love is, that’s how big his grace is—big enough to swallow anything else and never change a bit. Our hope is in Christ alone, and that means our hope is absolutely certain, because he is absolutely faithful. This is the promise of the gospel for you, this day and every day, now and forevermore. Amen.

(Genesis 3:17-19, Isaiah 43:16-21; Romans 8:18-30)

In the wilderness. In this between. As Christians we live in tension, for we are still in this world, but we do not belong here. We have given our allegiance, our obedience, our whole lives to a king we have never seen and cannot see; we have become part of a reality that is at odds with the reality of the world we see. We are surrounded by the present, but we belong to the future; we are out of phase with time and this world.

And in that, we suffer. We suffer because this world suffers, because evil and cruelty run like a thin red line through every human heart, snarling our communities and cutting across our lives. There are none innocent and none who are not victims, none who are not oppressors and none who do not bleed; and if we follow Christ we suffer more, and will suffer more, because he calls us to stand down all our worldly defenses and lay down all our worldly weapons. We are to resist the world, but we do not fight it on its terms; and sometimes that means we get hit hard.

If we focus on our sufferings and our trials, if we set our minds and our hearts on the things of this world, then we will be miserable; we’ll see everything in life through the lens of our anxiety, pain, and disappointment. If our hope is for this life and the rewards of this world, then our souls will always be in pawn to our circumstances, our lives driven by things outside our control. Our only paths to happiness will be to try to avoid suffering and conflict and any trials that might be too great for us, or else to attempt to dominate and control everyone around us in an effort to squash any threats before they get too close; but either way, we end up spending all our energy in ultimately fruitless efforts to prevent bad things from happening, and thus unable to pursue what is good.

As Christians, while we’re called to live in the present, we are not to live for the present. Our lives have a goal and a purpose which goes beyond this time, and indeed beyond this life altogether; we are called to live toward the future, in the light of the future, and to see all our circumstances—struggles and opportunities, pleasures and sufferings alike—in that light. Our sorrows, our groanings and our pains are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us, which is already ours in Christ Jesus; they are temporary, they will end, but his glory is eternal for he is eternal.

For now, our pains and struggles serve to remind us that we are not who we were created to be; and as we see the groaning of the natural world around us, both in the violence we do to it and in the violence it does to itself—the weather we’ve been having lately is an excellent example of that—we see clearly that the world as a whole is not how it ought to be. The frustration and pain of the created world, and the frustration and pain we experience as part of this world—if we face them honestly—drive us to recognize that we need a better hope than the election of another politician, even one with really cool posters, or the passage of another bill. We need a hope that goes beyond what we can see; we need more than to be fixed up a bit, we need to be made new.

The challenge is that hope doesn’t make things easier. Indeed, knowing that we have this hope, having the Holy Spirit at work in our hearts, drives us to groan, because we have the first fruits of his work, and we long for the whole harvest, for the fulfillment and the full experience of our salvation; what we have already makes us yearn for what we have not yet known, and it increases our frustration at how short of that we fall, again and again. We hope for what we do not see, and this is hard, but this is also what makes our hope worthwhile; for as Paul says in 2 Corinthians 4, what is seen is passing away, it will end in dust and ash and a puff of smoke, but what we cannot see is eternal. Thus we know that our hope is worthwhile, and thus we are able to hold on and not lose heart.

To be sure, in our own strength it would be too much for us to hold on, no matter our motivation; but we aren’t left to do anything in our own strength, for the Spirit of God comes to our aid and gives us strength in our weakness. And note what strength Paul has in mind: “for we don’t know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit prays for us, even though we cannot hear his prayers.”

If we would live in the hope of God and the power of the Spirit, we must live in prayer and by prayer, so that the eyes of our heart can be opened to see what the eyes of the flesh cannot see; but this leaves us wondering what to pray. Worse, it leaves us wondering: if we pray wrong, does that mean we’ll miss out? Does our prayer depend on us being smart enough to figure out ahead of time what God’s thinking?

If that were so, it would pitch us right back into living by law, and of a particularly sadistic sort—for God to answer our prayers, we would first have to read his mind; but that isn’t how it works, because we do not pray on our own: the Spirit of God prays with us, and on our behalf. However uncertain our prayers may be, however prone we may be to pray for the wrong thing, however imperfect our understanding and our knowledge of God’s will, the Holy Spirit is always praying too, with us and for us, and always in perfect accord with the will of the Father.

This is good news; but it might not always seem like good news. Doesn’t that mean that the Spirit’s prayers for us will sometimes contradict our prayers? Very likely, yes; but honestly, that’s part of the blessing. I appreciate Luther’s take on this: “It is not a bad but a very good sign if the opposite of what we pray for appears to happen. Just as it is not a good sign if our prayers result in the fulfillment of all we ask for. This is so because the counsel and will of God far excel our counsel and will.” He’s exaggerating—Luther did that every once in a while—but he’s doing it to make a point: we can trust what God is doing even when he gives us the opposite of what we want, because he knows infinitely better than we do what is best for us.

Thus we have this ringing declaration in verse 28: those whom God has called as his own, to his purpose—which is to say, those who love him—have the assurance that in everything that happens, God is at work for our good. When he gives us when we ask for, or when he doesn’t, God is at work for our good. In joyful days, in times of great success, in seasons of failure and pain and trial, God is at work for our good. Even in our greatest sins—the sins from which he does not simply deliver us, but which he leaves as struggles in our lives—even there, God is at work for our good. That doesn’t mean it’s good if we sin—should we continue to sin that grace may abound? Not on your life!—but it does mean that not even our sins defeat God’s work in us. Of course, as Douglas Moo put it, “many things we suffer will contribute to our ‘good’ only by refining our faith and strengthening our hope.” Even so, we will be glad of all of it in the end.

God’s choice of his people is unstoppable, and it will end inevitably in glory. Some would take the word “foreknew” in verse 29 and argue that this just means God foresaw those who would choose to love him, and thus that everything that follows is his response to our action; but that doesn’t work—this word is much stronger than that. God knew us, not just what we would do, from before the beginning of time—he knew us, and he chose us, and he predestined us to be saved, to be transformed, to be made like Christ and to share in his glory.

And the rest follows like an avalanche: those whom he predestined, he called, and those whom he called, he justified, and those whom he justified, he glorified. Period. It is already done, it is all already done. God has acted, and that’s all there is to it; no one can stop his work, nothing can interrupt it—his plan is in motion, and its success is inevitable. Suffering along the way? Yes. Sorrow and grief? To be sure. Failure? We know it all too well. But are any of them permanent, any of them final? No. God allows them in his time and works through them in our lives for our growth; they’re growing pains, nothing more. We are in the wilderness, but this is not our final destination; we don’t make a home here, we look forward to the home that lies ahead. In Christ, we have the sure and certain hope of glory waiting for us, just over Jordan. The Holy Spirit is leading us there, and the Father is standing with open arms. Just keep your eyes on him and your feet on the road; he’s faithful—you’ll get there.

(Ezekiel 36:24-28; Romans 8:1-17)

Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. Therefore. You may have heard, as I have many times, that when you see a “therefore” in the Bible you need to look and see what it’s there for. So you look up the page just a little, and you see . . . what? “Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death! . . . I myself serve the law of God with my mind, but with my flesh I serve the law of sin.” So, therefore there is no condemnation? That can’t be right.

Of course, you might be objecting that I skipped something, and so I did: Paul’s exclamation, “Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!” But you know, that’s just sort of floating loose at the end of chapter 7—by itself, it doesn’t tell us how all this is supposed to fit together. It seems clear that his exclamation comes as an answer of sorts to his question in verse 24—Jesus Christ will deliver us from this body of death, and has delivered us—but then he’s right back into the negative: “I serve the law of God with my mind, but with my flesh I serve the law of sin.” (And no, contra the NIV, this is not “sinful nature”; Paul is talking about what we do with our bodies—how we actually act, vs. how we think we ought to act.) So what do we make of this?

Well, in the first place, look back further, to 7:6: “But now, by dying to what once bound us, we have been released from the law so that we serve in the new way of the Spirit, and not in the old way of the written code.” Then look at the language Paul uses in chapter 8—and again, drop “sinful nature” out of the NIV and read “flesh.” “Flesh” here doesn’t refer to some nature within us; it means the life and the power of the old age, of our blighted, sin-twisted world, of which we as physical beings are very much a part. Before we’re saved, that’s the only frame of reference we have, and so everything in us is under the power of sin and controlled by the desires of the flesh. Even if we want to do what is good and right, we are only able to understand that in this world’s terms. The law can’t bring salvation because it’s powerless to change that: it can’t change the hearts of people who were born in sin, nor can it change their eyes and mindset to see themselves and this world differently. It can’t get people outside the flesh.

Now, when Paul talks about this in chapter 7, he sets the flesh in opposition to the mind or the inner being; but in chapter 8, he reaches back to 7:6 to introduce someone else into the argument. The mind cannot overcome the flesh, because the mind is set on the flesh, but in Christ it’s no longer just the mind vs. the flesh. Rather, if we are in Christ, we have been given his Holy Spirit, and now it is the Spirit of God versus the flesh; and that’s all different.

The Son of God became human—he became flesh just like us, but not under the power of sin—he lived the life of perfect obedience to God that the law required, and then he stood in our place to take the full condemnation for sin that the law required. In so doing, he stripped sin of its power to control us and condemn us, he gathered us to himself and put his Spirit within us, so that we might see with the eyes of the Holy Spirit, think with minds set on and shaped by the Holy Spirit, and so live in the guidance and power of the Holy Spirit.

Therefore there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, because in Christ Jesus by the work of his Holy Spirit we have been set free from the flesh. We were under the power of sin and the condemnation of the law, we were bound to this world with chains of our own forging, and there was nothing we could do about it; but he delivered us. He led us out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery, through the water, into the land between. We have not yet arrived at the Promised Land; we have not fully entered into the kingdom of God; but we already belong to it. We are already under his rule, and we are already experiencing his life and his power, even as we struggle with the powers of this world.

Which is to say, we stand in the same place the Israelites stood after Moses led them through the Red Sea: the wilderness. The land between, that separated the land of slavery from the land of promise; the place of testing and challenge, where we have to live by faith and we have to follow God because he’s the only one who knows how he got us here, and he’s the only one who knows how to get us where we’re going. People tend to want to use the law like a spiritual GPS, like it can give us turn-by-turn directions to the Kingdom of Heaven, but it can’t. Even for the Israelites, who received the law from the hand of God on Mt. Sinai, it didn’t give them directions to the Promised Land. They still had to walk by faith, and follow; which is why so many of them were never allowed to enter it, because they wouldn’t do that.

So how do we live in the wilderness? By the leading and the power of the Spirit of God. We learn to live as God wants us to live not by following a set of commands, but by setting our mind on the Spirit, and on the things of the Spirit. In our reading, in the things we watch, in the activities on which we spend our time, do we choose things that fix our thoughts and our desires on Jesus—because the Spirit of God always points us to Jesus—or do we choose things that focus our attention on the world and the desires of the flesh? Do we set aside time for intentional prayer—time to set our minds on the things of the Spirit and turn our hearts to the Lord? Do we make time to read the Bible, not hastily, as a duty, but thoughtfully, listening to the voice of God? These are questions we need to consider, because these are the habits that set our minds on the Spirit, or not.

If we set our minds on the things of the Spirit, the more we do that, the more we see the love and goodness and glory of God, and especially in the sacrifice and resurrection of Christ; and as the historian George Marsden put it, summarizing the great American preacher and theologian Jonathan Edwards, those who see this

will see the beauty of a universe in which unsentimental love triumphs over real evil. They will not be able to view Christ’s love dispassionately but rather will respond to it with their deepest affections. Truly seeing such good they will have no choice but to love it. Glimpsing such love, they will be drawn away from their preoccupations with the gratifications of their most immediate sensations. They will be drawn from their self-centered universes. Seeing the beauty of the redemptive love of Christ is the true center of reality, they will love God and all that he has created.

And in that, we will be motivated to change. God calls us to put to death the sins we practice with our bodies, but not out of a sense of duty, or determination, or fear of punishment—no, out of joy. “By the Spirit,” he says—the Spirit of God who rejoices in the Father and in Jesus Christ the Son, who fills us with the life and love and hope and joy and peace of God, who teaches us to see the desires of the world and the flesh in the light of his goodness and glory. By the Spirit learn to put our sinful habits to death, not grudgingly or regretfully, but joyfully and with anticipation, seeing them not as good things God is making us give up, but as things that are holding us back—that we want to get rid of to make room for something better: the life of God.