Home » Romans 8 » Page 2

Tag: Romans 8

He Presents Nothing but the Flowers (Prayer)

This quote relates to my recent post, God Fixes Our Prayers On the Way Up:

Christ’s prayer takes away the sins of our prayers. As a child, says Ambrose, that is willing to present his father with a posy, goes into the garden, and there gathers some flowers and some weeds together, but coming to his mother, she picks out the weeds and binds the flowers, and so it is presented to the father: thus when we have put up our prayers, Christ comes, and picks away the weeds, the sin our our prayer, and presents nothing but flowers to His Father, which are a sweet-smelling savour.

-Thomas Watson, All Things for Good, p. 23

All Things for Good?

I often marvel at creation. I am amazed that I am privileged to be a part of this part of the tilt-a-whirl that we call Earth. I’ve seen a beautiful bride, who I in no way deserved to marry, walking down the aisle with her eyes on me of all people. I’ve seen the birth of two beautiful daughters. I’ve seen God’s wonders in my own life and the lives of others around me. And I’ve seen darkness. I’ve seen friends suffer. I’ve felt my own pain.

In the past month and a half I have seen my father’s last remaining brother die. We have had a miscarriage. My youngest daughter has broken her arm. And a dear, dear friend (and congregant) is in the hospital with double pneumonia.

All the while I have been preaching through Romans 8. And, lo and behold, I find myself in verse 28:

  • Romans 8:28 ¶ And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose.

I had a rough day at work today. That rough day was capped off by my fifth straight day visiting the hospital. My friend’s pneumonia has not gotten better. My soul aches for her. I usually leave hospitals finding myself encouraged by the faith of those whom I visit. But tonight was tough.

Then I drove home. I walked in the door and looked at my beautiful children, one with a full length arm cast. They were watching the movie Madeline. I came home just in time to hear Louis Armstrong singing,

I see trees of green,
red roses too.
I see them bloom,
for me and you.
And I think to myself,
what a wonderful world.

I see skies of blue,
And clouds of white.
The bright blessed day,
The dark sacred night.
And I think to myself,
What a wonderful world.

And I thought to myself, ‘Is it really?’

Like all other Americans, I watched in horror as the pictures came in from Oklahoma just days ago. I’ve read stories in the past week about Gosnell’s murder-mill, about a man who tricked his girlfriend into taking a pill that would kill their unborn child, and about the precious lives of children lost in Oklahoma. And I ask myself, ‘Is it really wonderful?’

It is, and it’s not.

That’s the only conclusion one can come to. We do see tress of green and red roses too. We do see them bloom for me and for you. But we also see dead trees and shriveled roses. We see thorns and briars. We see cancer and calamity. Over the same ocean we see both hurricanes and sunsets. And each, the good and the bad, leaves its own distinct impression upon the soul.

In the extreme, we have billionaires living lives of posh luxury and children dying of hunger in the Sudan. In the mundane, in our normal experience, we have good days and bad days. We have wonderful days and terrible days. This world, and our lives are a mass of contradictions – birth and death, childhood and adulthood, love and loss, sunshine and storms, wrath and grace.  Our lives are wonderful and our lives are terrible.

But that’s not only the story of our lives, it is the story of Jesus Christ. We find our own story in his. In his life we see hunger, thorns, nails, the spear and the cross. But then there’s that pesky empty tomb. There’s him ascending into heaven with the promise, ‘Lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age.’ We see pain and death, we see resurrection in glory.

I tire of the endless platitudes – ‘it’ll all work out’, ‘everything happens for a reason’, ‘things will work out in the end.’ Give me someone with some real bones in their body, who will say, ‘life is horrible, and life is beautiful.’ It is both, and thank God it is both, because God is working all things together for the good of those who love God and are called according to his purpose.

Outside of Christ you have no reason to think it will work out. Inside of Christ, the good and the bad, the beautiful and the ugly, the magnificent and the horrific – all of it – is being woven together into a story in which the climax is this: Your Savior will look at you and see someone like himself. We will be like Jesus.

  • Romans 8:29 For those whom he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, in order that he might be the firstborn among many brothers. 30 And those whom he predestined he also called, and those whom he called he also justified, and those whom he justified he also glorified.

There are no promises that it will all work out in this life. It might not. As my old pastor used to say, ‘Reverend Ike is dead.’ Indeed, he is. And we will die as well. But is the ugly the end of the story? If you want streets of gold now like Benny Hinn, then good luck. If anyone tells you that there is hope outside of the resurrection – Christ’s and ours, then they have already received their reward. Your best life now means that the life to come will not be quite so pleasant.

If you want all things to work together, then embrace all things. Let the black be black and let the rainbow be the rainbow, so long as, at the end of the day, you behold my Savior, and see him as he is, and find yourself  to be like him.

  • 1 John 3:2 Beloved, we are God’s children now, and what we will be has not yet appeared; but we know that when he appears we will be like him, because we shall see him as he is.

There’s hope for you. There and only there.

  • Habakkuk 3:17 Though the fig tree should not blossom, nor fruit be on the vines, the produce of the olive fail and the fields yield no food, the flock be cut off from the fold and there be no herd in the stalls, 18 yet I will rejoice in the LORD; I will take joy in the God of my salvation.

“God Fixes Our Prayers On the Way Up”

As I have been engaged in studying Romans 8:26-27 over the better part of a month I have often found myself confused by the commentators trying to explain the ‘groanings’ of v. 26.

  • Romans 8:26 ¶ 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.

However complex and beyond me the exact answer to the riddles may be, one truth stands out gloriously. As we pray, the Spirit helps in ways that we cannot comprehend.

In prayer our words, through the intercession of the Spirit, are, as it were, brought to the very ears of the Father. And he doesn’t always hear things the way we speak them. He hears them the way they should have been spoken, for in prayer not only do we speak to the Father by the Spirit, but the Spirit speaks to the Father through us and in our behalf.

A young man, a professing Christian, once came to me and confessed with great grief that he had not prayed in months. He simply didn’t know how to. His sins drove him away from prayer because he was ashamed. His inability to discern who God is, and what his will was for him at that particular time, drove him away. I saw a broken, confused young man who had forsaken the one thing he needed more than anything – communion with God through prayer.

Oh, what peace we often forfeit,
Oh, what needless pain we bear,
All because we do not carry
Everything to God in prayer!

The fact of the matter is that none of us really know how to pray. We have some sense of it, but we are always afraid that we are cut off from God on the one hand, or just getting it wrong on the other. That’s where the Spirit’s help comes in. I wish I could have shared this quote with that young man, but I had never read it. One of my pastors shared it years ago and I’ve always treasured it. In the book Praying: Finding our Way through Duty to Delight, by Carolyn Nystrom and J.I. Packer, Ms. Nystrom basically gives the best summary application of Romans 8:26 I have seen:

Some people get so entangled in the various dos and don’ts of prayer, so transfixed by the problem of sorting out what is our part and what is God’s part, so bogged down fretting over whether they, as mere flawed humans, should ask anything of a holy, almighty God, or conversely whether there is any point in asking since God will do what he wants anyway that they become paralyzed about praying…Don’t fret; just pray. God fixes our prayers on the way up! If he does not answer the prayer we made, he will answer the prayer we should have made. That is all anyone needs to know (pp. 174-175).

Don’t get into that position where you are paralyzed, like that young man, and you can’t pray. If you don’t have confidence in your own prayers, have confidence in the intercession of the Spirit. Have confidence that he will ‘fix your prayers on the way up.’ What greater comfort could he give us?

We have an advocate in heaven, Jesus Christ, our great Mediator; and we have an advocate on earth, yet more than on earth, dwelling within us, the Holy Spirit. We are covered from the bottom up. They are not speech writers always giving us the exact words to say. But they are editors presenting prayer to the Father as cleansed with the Savior’s blood and purified with the Spirit. Through the active obedience of Christ, we are counted as though we never uttered an imperfect prayer.

True prayers are like those carrier pigeons which find their way so well – they cannot fail to go to Heaven, for it is from heaven that they come – they are only going home! (Spurgeon, Hindrances to Prayer).

Prayer: Man Speaking to the Father by the Spirit, the Spirit Speaking to the Father through Man

Studying Romans 8, especially vv. 15 and 27, this passage from C.S. Lewis comes to mind.

From Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer:

I’ve just found in an old notebook a poem, with no author’s name attached…[it addresses] the haunting fear that there is no one listening, and that what we call prayer is soliloquy: someone talking to himself. This writer takes the bull by the horns and says in effect: ‘Very well, suppose it is,’ and gets a surprising result. here is the poem:

They tell me, Lord that when I seem
To be in speech with you,
since but one voice is heard, it’s all a dream,
One talker aping two.

Sometimes it is, yet not as they Conceive it. Rather, I
Seek in myself the things I hoped to say,
But lo!, my wells are dry.

Then, seeing me empty, you forsake
the listener’s role and through
My dumb lips breathe and into utterance wake
The thoughts I never knew…

Lewis comments,

But is he not right in thinking that prayer in its most perfect state is a soliloquy? If the Holy Spirit speaks in the man, then in prayer God speaks to God.

Lewis knows that he might be charged with something like Pantheism for such a statement. But this is not Pantheism:

In Pantheism God is all. But the whole point of creation surely is that He was not content to be all. He intends to be ‘all in all.’

(from Letter 13)

  • Romans 8:15 For you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received the Spirit of adoption as sons, by whom we cry, “Abba! Father!”
  • Romans 8:26 ¶ 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. 27 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.

It is ‘by the Spirit’ that ‘we cry “Abba, Father!”‘ It is the Spirit working in us to inspire our ‘groans.’ In this prayer God is speaking to God (the Spirit to the Father) through the agency of man and man is speaking to God (the Father) through the agency of the Spirit.

In Tony Sargent’s book, The Sacred Anointing, he severally refers to the practice of ‘reading the mind of the Spirit‘ in prayer. This is what the Father does (according to Rom. 8:27). And in some sense it is what we are to be doing in prayer as well. Anyone who has often led corporate prayer has a sense of this – you struggle with the Holy Spirit concerning what needs to be said in prayer for a given congregation at a given time. You do not simply want to be praying your own fleshly desires. You want to pray the will of God and the promises of God that are applicable to a given situation. You are striving that the Spirit would speak to the Father through you and that you would speak to the Father through the Spirit. That is what Sargent calls ‘unction’ in prayer, and we should all strive for it.

  • 1 John 5:14 And this is the confidence that we have toward him, that if we ask anything according to his will he hears us. 15 And if we know that he hears us in whatever we ask, we know that we have the requests that we have asked of him.

You get an inkling of this type of prayer in the book of Revelation. Eugene Peterson describes it:

At the end of the book he is still praying: ‘Amen. Come, Lord Jesus!’ (22:20). St. John listens to God, is silent before God, sings to God, asks questions of God. The listening and silence, the songs and questions are wonderfully in touch with reality, mixing the sights and sounds of Roman affairs with the sights and sounds of salvation – angels and markets and Caesars and Jesus…St. John lives on the boundary of the invisible world of the Holy Spirit and the visible world of Roman times. On that boundary he prays. The praying is a joining of realities, making a live connection between the place we find ourselves and the God who is finding us (The Contemplative Pastor, pp. 42-43).

Prayer, then, is making applications of the Scriptures to a given situation. It is reading the mind of the Spirit, revealed in Scripture, and applying it in a current context. It is the timeless Spirit speaking to the timeless Father concerning time. It is right now man, in his right now world, speaking the timeless Spirit’s timely word to the Father.

We Have Hope, But Hope Is Not In What We Have

[The Apostle] means simply to teach us, that since hope regards some future and not present good, it can never be connected with what we have in possession.

-from Calvin’s Commentary on Romans 8:24-25

  • Romans 8:24 For in this hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what he sees? 25 But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.

 

 

Snippets: I Will Not Believe In Something I Cannot See

Have you ever heard this one: ‘I won’t believe in something I cannot see’?

If the requirement for something being real is the fact that you can see it then:

1. You will never be consistent. You believe in air (and lots of other things you cannot see). Your eyesight is actually very selective.

2. You have made yourself into a god. You are all seeing and therefore all knowing. Reality is your eyesight and your eyesight is reality.

3. You have made the universe very small – much of it non-existent. You really believe that if a tree falls down in a forest, and no one is present to hear it, it doesn’t make a sound.

In short then, you are an inconsistent idolator who has made yourself very big and the universe very small.

  • Romans 8:24 For in this hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what he sees? 25 But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.