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I love Romans 8 – I love reading it, I love preaching on it, I love exposing people to its message of life in the Spirit and freedom from sin and being more than conquerors in Jesus Christ.

However, when I read it through I have a confession to make, and that is to ignoring – or at least glossing over – part of the text. If we take a truimphalistic view of Romans 8 (which as evangelicals we can tend to do) we can end up interpreting its message through a rather restricting lens and miss out on the majesty of what the Bible is saying to us. This happens when we allow the colours of triumphalism and spirit-filled living to seem very bright on our palette of understanding while other colours get painted rather darker.

So I’ve deliberately divided the passage in this way because it means we have to wrestle with the message it contains – and that is always good for us, even if it’s uncomfortable. So lets start with the way the passage is structured.

The first part of the chapter is all about life in the Spirit, about living with the confident assurance that there is no condenation coming our way. Skip to the end of the passage and we find the last part is about being more than conquerors in our Christian lives. The middle, then, comes as a surprise as it gets us thinking about suffering. And not just our suffering as a human race, but the suffering being felt by the whole of creation. Animate and inanimate alike are groaning and frustrated, hurting and cheesed off!

two major themes

Two things come out of this passage very clearly – suffering and glory <ppt>

• suffering – about the reality that we suffer and creation suffers
• glory – about the reality of what will happen in the future

This morning I want to simply talk you through the text and let it speak for itself.

Paul starts with a comparison.

<ppt> :18 I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us.

Our present sufferings may be persecution, or pain, or misunderstanding or loneliness. Whatever they are, they figure large in our thinking.

Even if I do something minor, like stub my toe, <ppt> my whole body feels in pain for a few minutes. The pain dominates my being until it subsides.

The phrase Paul actually uses is “the sufferings of the now time” and if anyone could talk authentically about pain, he could!

• He had suffered physical torture (he’d been neaten and whipped),
• mental anguish (he worried about the churches)
• and deep loneliness (there were times when everyone abandoned him) –
• and all for the sake of declaring Christ.

So Paul knew all about pain BUT … he asserts that ‘even though our pain seems huge – seems to dominate our experience of life – it’s still minuscule compared with the glory that will be revealed!’

The glory that is going to be revealed will be so wonderful, so life-liberatingly delightful that the life-dominating pain we experience now will be like a pin-prick on the hide of an elephant. Utterly insignificant!

Now exactly where will this glory be seen and felt? <ppt>

• Will it be revealed to us – like seeing an image on a cinema screen where we are the spectators? No
• or will it be revealed around us as if we are taken into some new world order? No,
• This glory is going to be revealed in us! <ppt>

Just as the suffering is felt in us now, so the glory will be revealed in us then!

In 2 Corinthians 4:17 Paul says that these sufferings of ours are ‘light weight and momentary’ but the glory to be revealed will be ‘eternal’ and will ‘far outweigh the hassles of our present experience’

So in the mean time, in the here and now, we have to live with suffering. And it’s not just us who are going through the mill

<ppt: creation is waiting>

19 For the creation waits in eager expectation for the children of God to be revealed.

The Bible is making an important link here – that the sufferings of this life are not only a matter for us human beings. They are also a matter for creation itself.

The picture Paul is painting here is an amazing one. It’s as if the whole of the cosmos is waiting on tenterhooks to see who God’s children are going to turn out to be!

A huge, cosmic transformation will one day take place and we, the people God has made, will be the ones that creation marvels at

• and because they are marvelling at us, creation will consequently be marvelling at God himself
• because he’s the one who brought about the transformation!

But what about now?

Creation is frustrated!

20 For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope 21 that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay

The fact that things decay is evidence of a creation in pain.

• When I see something going rotten or a society reduced to chaos and disorder, It’s a picture of a created world that’s hurting.

So how can we grasp this idea of creation being frustrated? Consider a 10 year old boy.

• It’s July and he sees in some shop window a fantastic kit of Technik Lego. For this 10 year old, owning one of those is going to make life worth living. So at that moment he starts preparing for … Christmas!
• He’s grown out of the Santa Claus phase so he know perfectly well that all the presents he gets at Christmas come from real people – they don’t fall off the back of sleigh.
• From that moment on, every time Christmas is mentioned, he drops into the conversation that Technik Lego is the way to go. His parents feel like the couple on Outnumbered and know that they’re going to have to give in.

Now consider that boy. He is experiencing frustration (because he doesn’t have the Lego right now) but he is frustrated in hope (because he figures that one day (Christmas day) it may well arrive. He can’t guarantee it will arrive then (because it’s his parent’s decision) but he lives in hope.

That’s the picture the Bible is painting here. The cosmos is waiting in expectation of what God is going to do through his people but it feels frustration because it hasn’t already happened.

<ppt: creation will be liberated>

:21 .. [one day] the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the freedom and glory of the children of God.

The glory that will be revealed in God’s children will also be revealed in the cosmos.

The Bible’s megastory

Here the Bible doesn’t talk about us being lifted out of the world, but being transformed within it!

Western society has reduced ability to cope with suffering. >>>

The Bible takes for granted that evil exists in the world. It doesn’t say much about the origin of evil, it starts with the assumption that it’s here.

• and our culture finds that a difficult thought to swallow

E.g. Sept 11th, Al Qaeda destroys the twin towers and suddenly our politicians start talking about evil. Tony Blair talked about the world being full of evil and George Bush coined the phrase ‘an axis of evil’

It’s as if we thought the world had gradually got rid of evil and blow-me-down if it doesn’t raise it’s head again.

The Bible takes from granted that God’s good world has been infected by evil – and that evil causes us to suffer. Therefore one of the megastories the Bible is this: Suffering and evil are here – so what is God doing about it’?

Now the way we perceive the problem of evil and suffering is very much a modern thing. We put it in a box as ‘a problem’.

The ancient world was much closer to pain and death than we are. Every week in Rome people died in pain from diseases they couldn’t cure. Suffering was not something they could separate themselves from, like we attempt to.

When we look at the tragedies like 9/11 and the Boxing Day Tsunami of 2004 and as well as all the more recent tragedies The idea that evil and suffering are separate things that we can overcome and only see as ‘a problem’ is far too simple a model.

The world is much darker than that. It is more mysterious.

So when we use this simple model, we tend to separate a good God from an evil world.

We retreat into a model that says “God is up there” all holy all light, not able to touch or mess with evil. We are down here. Our job is to try to get in touch with him.

So salvation becomes all about leaving this world and going to God.

Using this model, people read the Bible as if it’s entire message is about ‘how do I personally, get saved’ – Anthropocentric – me-focussed and not about the mess the world is in and what is God doing about it.

So we’re suffering now, but know a bright future is coming.

22 We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time.

The Holy Spirit helps us to pray

23 Not only so, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption to sonship, the redemption of our bodies. 24 For in this hope we were saved. But hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what they already have? 25 But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently.

He uses two words to describe this period of time: groaning and hoping

• we’ve all done our fair share of groaning
• when I crack a joke – you groan
• when the car breaks down or the central heating packs up – we groan
• when I miss a train or catch a cold – we groan
• more seriously when arthritis means you’re living in constant pain – you groan
• or when a doctor says “I’m sorry but you have a cancer that will limit your life span” – we groan.

That ‘groaning’, it’s a sign of pain or heaviness – and we want to be rid of the burden!

• And too quickly we jump into insisting that God – must – heal
• (Don’t misunderstand me, I believe God heals and seen him do it – BUT)

• In our western science-dominated society we can assume we have a right to be infinitely healthy and eternally happy. … and expect God to provide that for us.
• Using that model, happiness is our goal, rather than holiness. Suffering has no place in that model

Q: We pray for healing – But what do we do when it doesn’t come?

• Complain to the management?!
• Accuse ourselves of not having enough faith?

Or do we sit alongside one another in our hassles or our pain, supporting each other and living in hope that one day it will all be over? Christmas day will arrive!

And along with that groaning there’s also longing for things to be different

• the Bible indicates that this longing is not just an idle dream or a false hope
• it’s a longing that will one day be fully satisfied!
• I’ll see Christ face to face.

This groaning story goes to a new level in v26

26 In the same way, the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for,

(any of us who have ministered to hurting people know this! Sit with a man whose world is imploding because of stress, or a woman who has just lost her baby – and I can almost guarantee you won’t know what to pray for!)

So what happens? v26

but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groans too deep for words (or through wordless groans. )

The Holy Spirit does the groaning for us! And if he does it, the Father instantly knows all about!

27 And he who searches our hearts (God the father) knows the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for God’s people in accordance with the will of God.

When we don’t know how to pray we can rest assured that our heavenly Father sees, hears, knows and feels our groans. In fact he’s right here within us doing the groaning!

Now this might beg a significant question.

If God knows so intimately the groaning – is that a good thing? How does he react to our wrestling with him in our pain and hassles? Is he going to criticise us? Is he going to condemn us for not living with the kind of faith we wish we had? If he for me or against me? Is he my advocate or my prosecutor?

This is where v28 comes crashing in

<ppt> 28 And we know that in all things [the suffering, we’ve been describing especially] God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.

In wrestling with the suffering and evil that is in this world, God is for you, not against you.

By His spirit he is with you not distant from you

He is your advocate, not your adversary!

>>>

Pray