Suffering and the Glory of God - Part III

January 27, 2008 7:15 pm admin Chapter 8, Romans

Part 3 of the “Suffering and the Glory of God” sermon series. Part 3 is an exegetical treatment of Romans 8:26-27 addressing the theme of prayer and how God’s Spirit groans in us. This sermon was originally preached January 27th, 2008 at The Resolved Church in San Diego, CA.

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January 27th, 2008
Pastor Duane M. Smets

Suffering and the Glory of God - Part III
Romans 8:26-27

Introduction

Good morning. Today is the third sermon of our current series here at The Resolved Church, “Suffering and the Glory of God” and today we are dealing with veres 26-27 of Romans 8. Let’s read them and pray.

God, you are God, suffering is real, what you have promised and what you have done in your people through your Son Jesus is real and glorious. As we study these words today in your book, I ask that you would teach us about prayer by your Spirit, which is an enormous aid and assurance in the face of suffering as we anxiously the full display of your glory. Come Lord Jesus, Amen.

Today, we are moving on to the next verses in Romans chapter 8. The theme of suffering and assurance in the glory of God continues through to the end of the chapter as Paul, our author, unpacks reason after reason of why and how we know the glory to be revealed is for sure and it is worth it! It is my goal ever time I have the honor of standing before you to try and help you see that Jesus is worth it! Let goods and kindred go, this mortal life also, the body they may kill, God’s truth abideth still, his kingdom is forever! It’s all worth it, the only life worth living is the one with it’s sights set on the glory of God.

First let me show you how these verses fit in the chapter. The theme of Romans chapter 8 is, “You are this!” You are a Christian, if you embrace the provision of God’s Son, Jesus, then condemnation and guilt, a rebellious mind, being a spiritual orphan detached from God and his blessing and life and love…it all goes away! The one who comes to steal, kill and destroy will try and tell you that it’s not so, but Romans 8 stands in his way and says, “No, Christian, this is who you are…and suffering, suffering can’t even touch that.”

In the last two weeks we’ve looked at two evidences in which Paul says shows that the sufferings of this present age, this present era or stage in human history, is not worthy to be compared to the glory that is to be revealed. First, we looked at creation, how the creation itself, the trees and the mountains and the animals and the ocean, stands on it’s tippy toes with it’s neck stretched forward groaning for the day of God’s glory when all will be changed and futility and death and pain and suffering will be no more. Last week we looked at we ourselves, us Christians, eagerly long and wait and in sure secure hope, groan for our glory promised new bodies like Jesus’s, who rose from the dead, a body that doesn’t get sick, and hurt, and die.

This week our passage begins with the word “likewise.” Like creation, and like we ourselves, God’s Spirit too groans, he groans in us, anxiously and assuredly carrying us to the day of the full revealing of the glory of God. In the meantime there is weakness. And so God’s Spirit gives us assurance by helping us through prayer. In talking to some of you the about this series so far, one of the comments I heard was that you haven’t suffered much so far and it makes you scared. Verse 26-27 was written for you…because it tells us that we are not alone in our suffering, there is no reason for God’s children to fear because his Spirit is with us and comes to our rescue.

So we’re going to talk about prayer and the Holy Spirit today. If you are a Christian and you are going to make it through suffering you are going to have to learn something about prayer. Prayer is such a common thing but it is my goal to teach something from the Bible today so that it is not seen so common to you.

Prayer is so common in the spirituality loving culture of San Diego…and so few have never even truly prayed or even know what it means but just pray that bad things won’t happen to them or that God, if there is a God will help them get stuff they want. God starts to look a lot like a Coca-cola machine that spits out whatever you want when you put your dollar in. That’s not the right, idea of prayer in the Bible.

I grew up in one of those super strict Christian homes were we not allowed to listen to “non-Christian” music. And I hated that and I was always trying to get my parents to let me listen to the radio and not have to listen to the wanna-be Chrsitian music that was just copying everything else, so everytime a song came out with the word prayer in it I jumped on it. My parents let me buy two tapes growing up, M.C. Hammer’s “Please Hammer Don’t Hurt ‘Em” because it had a song on it that said, “You got to pray just to make it today, that’s why we pray, pray.” The other one was Bon Jovi’s “Slippery When Wet” album for it’s song “Livin’ on a Prayer.” J

So here’s what we’re going to do. First we’re going to hit up weakness and then we’ll hit up how the Spirit helps us in our weakness.

Weakness

“Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness.” It is interesting that Paul did not use the word “sufferings” here. Why did he switch words? Weakness and suffering are very similar. Weakness can be the natural frailties that just come with being human (Rom 6:18), it can also be sickness, tiredness, foregetfulness, frustrations, futiliies, decay…and all of it is related to suffering in one way or another.

But I think Paul switched words to emphasize the time tension that Christians experience between living now, where we are at the same time on this side of knowing Jesus and being adopted into the family, but still have yet receive the full redemption of our bodies and our deliverance from this age of suffering. Suffering still effects Christians, but not like it used to…now it may effect us, it may make us weak, but like Paul says in 2 Corinthians 12:9 there is a way through God’s grace that even when we are weak, we can be strong! And here we learn that comes through God’s Spirit who works in us.

We Don’t Know What to Pray for

Our weaknesses has this effect, verse 26, “we don’t know what to pray for as we ought.” Weakness effects our prayers. How?

Well first off, there is a ton of stuff we know we ought to pray for. Jesus tells us that we should daily pray for God’s kingdom to come, we should pray for people to believe in him and become part of his church, we should pray for ourselves and our church family for spritual strength against temptation and forgiveness for when we or those we love give in, and we should pray for closeness with God and conformity to his will, what he has told us in his book, the Bible. Everything in the Bible we should pray about.

The Bible is a big book, that’s a lot to pray about. But we know we ought to pray about those things. We often don’t pray about them, because we are weak, so the Holy Spirit convicts us and prompts us to pray about them, over and over again until we start to mature and develop discipline. But what is it that we don’t know to pray for as we ought?

We’ll talk about how the Spirit helps us in a second, but first look at the second half of verse 27, in verse 26 we don’t know what to pray for, but the Spirit does, “…because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to God’s will.” According to God’s will. So what the Spirit knows, is what the will of God is.

Now, I need you to think with me for a second. We know what God’s will is for us. He gave us 66 different books composed by 40 different authors over a period of 1500 years in order to tell us what it is. So God has clearly revealed his will for our lives in Scripture. What the Spirit knows, is what we don’t, the future, and how that revealed will, will work itself out in our individual lives.

That is why Christians throughout the centuries have long recognized that there are two wills of God. There is his revealed will, the Bible, and there is his sovereign will of how he has planned all of it to work out in the future. A revealed will and a sovereign will. The Bible does not have a God who does not know the future, history is not spinning out of control, God knows exactly what he is doing with it. God has a purpose and a plan for everything, nothing catches him by surprise, he is at work through his sovereign will to bring about his revealed will in your life and mine.

Now that is a big theological point and I hope you get it. If not, please come talk to me afterward. But the point is we are weak, we have a weakness. When, what is the context? This present age of suffering. So how does my weakness effect my prayers in this age of suffering so I don’t know what to pray for.

Here’s one example. Suffering strikes. Say I am diagnosed with cancer, what do I pray? Do I pray for healing or do I pray for the strength to endure?

Here’s another example. Suffering strikes. This last December, some of the members of our fellow Acts 29 churches in India went Christmas carolling, and 15 people were severely beaten. The next Sunday, the church met under police guard and protection because of threats. Do you not go to church in order to protect your family or do you take them and potentially lose them or risk them getting beaten?

A third example. You hate your job, you suffer at it 40 hours a week, your boss is a jerk, your fellow employees drive me crazy, and you don’t make nearly enough money. Do you pray for a new job or do I pray for things at work to change?

So often we think we know what we need but we are not very good judges of that. So often we pray selfishly or ignorantly asking God for things that we are not able to see will not be good for us. We so often don’t know what to pray. Or we go to pray and we fall apart.

Have you ever experienced this… You want to pray. You set aside time to pray and you go to pray and you can’t come up with a single word? Charles Spurgeon says that sometimes we “may be brought to a place where we don’t know how or what to desire” and experience a “heaviness of Spirit” or an “entanglement of thought” a “beclouding of the soul” where we “see the disease but the medicine is not known” and our hearts become “chilled and our hands numb.” Have you ever experienced your mind wandering in prayer and you start to think, “Why am I even doing this? Is this even real?”

The Help of the Holy Spirit

So we have this weakness, we don’t know what to pray, what we way we really need to pray for because of what is ahead, and we don’t always know exactly what things in Scripture to pray about for ourselves. But God does not leave us to our weakness to rot in it, he has given us his Spirit. The Bible tells us here that the Holy Spirit prays for us, “the Spirit himself intercedes.” That is prayer. To intercede is to go and talk to somone on behalf of another person. The Holy Spirit talks to God the Father for us.

Here is the picture, the Holy Spirit of God is the one who draws us to God, is the one who causes us to repent, is the one who gives us a new heart, gives us faith in Jesus and adopts us into the family, gives us the courage to call God the father our Abba Daddy, and now the Holy Spirit makes sure that our Abba Daddy hears and answers our deepest needs. In many ways Romans 8 is the Holy Spirit’s chapter.

It is from passages like this that we get the doctrine of the Trinity, that in the one God, there are three persons, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. They all work together and are all the one and same God, but each has different roles. Our brains can only understand that so much, but we’re not God and we don’t get the right to tell him he can’t be a Trinity and besides it is beautiful that within the Godhead himself there is a person, the Holy Spirit who is designated to make sure that the things that need to get prayed for get prayed for.

You’ll remember from times I’ve taught you before that prayer is the way that God works. It is the means that God uses for accomplishing his purposes and will. Nothing ever happens without God’s people praying. He didn’t need to do that, he certainly didn’t do that when he created everything, but now he has committed himself to working through prayer, so he has a way of making sure the things we really need get prayed for and that is through his Spirit.

The Holy Spirit is for us. He comes to our rescue. This word “help” is so pathetic because it is only four letters and the word behind it means so much more. It is literally to run to the aid of. It as if one person was trying to pick up a fridge or a piano themselves and another person ran to help and pick up the other end. Or to use a court analogy, say a person was too poor and could not afford a lawyer and so they began to try and make their case but they didn’t even know the rules of the courtroom. Then all of the sudden the best lawyer in town runs in and comes alongside the poor man and makes his case for him. That is the picture with this word “helps.” The Holy Spirit is our mighty help in prayer.

How the Holy Spirit Prays

Now if you are me, your mind immediately rushes to the how question or the experience question, what kind of prayer is he talking about here. So let me just try and deal with that quickly, almost to sort of just get it out of the way so we can really learn about how God works in us and for us.

I don’t want to spend a lot of time on but it’s important. Some would say, this part of verse 26, has nothing to do with us. These are not words, and the Spirit is just off somewhere by himself praying these things. Others go the opposite way and say this is just describing human experience in sort of spiritual terms, and if you are super Pentecostal you’ll probably say it’s talking about tongues here. If you don’t know what that means, don’t worry about it right now.

I don’t think it is either of those things. First, it doesn’t make sense for this just to be the Spirit off doing this with no relation to us. One, because that just doesn’t make sense. Later in Romans 8 we learn that Jesus is at the right hand of the Father praying for us, but that makes sense because Jesus lived and died and rose and then after 40 days ascended up into the clouds to go be with the Father. So that’s the Son’s role, not the Spirit. The Spirit’s role is in the heart of believers. Two, this passage clearly says that the Spirit is helping us with prayer that we do.

So that’s the first thing. Second, I don’t think this is just describing human prayer and trying to tell us all to go start making groaning noises or speaking in tongues or whatever. The point is we don’t know what to pray, and often how, and we need help and the Spirit helps us.

So here is what I think, I think it is both. The Spirit groans, but his groan is one that effects us in what and how we pray. The groan is with us or in us. It begins with God’s Spirit and is carried through by God’s Spirit and comes out in our prayer. Whether that is audible or inaudible non-words, in something like tongues or a literal groan or just an aching feeling when your heart arises to God and there are no words to be put to it…I think it covers all those things. But whatever it is, that’s not the main point, whatever it is, is just the effect of God’s Spirit working for us, which is the main thing and that is the thing which excites and inspires our hearts. So let’s move on and deal with that.

God Searches our Hearts

How does God know what you need in order to help us? We have such a great tendency to think that God is so distant, so far off, that he has no clue about what is going on in our lives and that he does not even care. But verse 27 says this, “he who searches hearts knows what the mind of the Spirit is.” 2 Chronicles 16:9 says the same thing, “For the eyes of the LORD run to and fro throughout the whole earth, to give strong support to those whose heart is blameless toward him.” God is always actively paying attention to his creatures. He’s not glued to a TV watching LOST on DVD all day.

And this is the amazing thing, when God looks into the hearts of believers he sees and hears his Spirit there at work. Read it again, “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.”

So this is how it works… God’s Holy Spirit, inside each of us who believe in Jesus, in the Bible all believers are saints, not just the ones the Catholic church has decided to call saints. So in every believer, every saint, the Holy Spirit is Sovereignly working to bring our lives and our person into conformity with God’s revealed will, the Bible. And all the timing and future plans and purposes and specific circumstances and events of our lives, including suffering, are known by God in his secret Sovereign will and every step of the way his Spirit runs in to help in prayer. That’s what we learned earlier.

The way he helps is by producing groanings in us or with us and when that happens prayer is born in our heart. Then, when God scans his eye out across the earth and into this room and peers into our hearts, he sees and hears the Holy Spirit’s groans in us and he answers the prayer. He sees how his Spirit has been working in us and where we are going and what the Spirit is doing in us. He sees the things we need to learn, he sees where we are failing, he sees the things that are good that he is accomplishing in us. And God the Father answers accordingly.

God works in us and we get the benefit, not only in the assurance that the way God has set it up is good and will take care of us, but we get the added benefit of the experience attached to his workings. We get the joy of not being left to misery and frustration and toil and pain and lostness, we get connected experientially to our heavenly Father through his real Spirit at work in us.

Conclusion

A big part of the intent of this passage is to explain to us how God works in us. Then the result of knwoing how God works and why he works that way, is that we get confidence. I’ll conclude with a list of confidences we this teaching of Scripture provides for us.

1. You can have confidence when you feel weak because you know that God is working for you, he is committed to working in you, though you may have no strength left. God has not left you to your weakness but has sent help.

2. You can have confidence if you forget to pray for things I know I should, the Holy Spirit will ensure that my heart will be affected with the things it needs to. Not to say you shouldn’t work on developing discipline and learn the Bible and how to pray the Bible, but the Holy Spirit will often bring things to your mind to pray about. Sometimes he will even intentionally forbid us to pray about certain things.

3. You can have confidence about your future because God’s Spirit knows the future will of God and is ensuring that your character will be formed through his prayer so that whatever comes you will make it through. If and when suffering strikes you don’t have to be afraid of falling apart, God will be with you.

4. You can have confidence that you can’t make a mistake with your life when you toil in prayer over some big decision. The Holy Spirit knows the will of God and he is inciting me to pray and decisions in accordance with it while he conforms my heart to God’s word. Oh how many hours of sleep are lost by fretting over decisions and the fear of the future. If you are God’s child you cannot make a mistake, he ensures by his Spirit his work in you.

5. You can have confidence because when you don’t have the words to pray, you can groan, God’s Holy Spirit is groaning in you and it is okay for you to let out a groan yourself. It may come out in many forms, whether it be tears, or silence, or a stammering tongue, or the trembling of your lips, or even a physical groan. That is okay and is often a sweet and calming salve to the soul.

6. You can have confidence because God is an amazing God in that he is able to look out from heaven and scan the hearts and lives of billions of people and see and know what is going on. God knows what you are going through and does not afflict and allow sufferings and weakness so that we may feel grief, but so that we may feel the joy of having our burden set free in the exercising of our faith.

7. You can have confidence because God is a wise God. The Trinity is a wonderful and beautiful thing. Jesus dies for my sin in my place securing the my place in the glory of God. Because of that his Spirit come to work in me now assuring me that I will get there and helping me in my weakness on the way. And the Father sees and hears me because of his Spirit working in me. The interaction and working together of the Godhead is beautiful and efficient.

8. You can be confident because God is real and powerful and is bigger than all our problems and weaknesses and sufferings. What better person to interecede for us on our behalf than God himself, His Spirit.

Let’s go to prayer. If faith in Jesus has never been yours receive it today and have your burden lifted. For believers, as we approach the table to receive Jesus body and blood in the bread and wine, know his goodness and cast all your cares upon him. He died to make all things new and gives you his Spirit so that your heart might be poured out before him. Let us worship our great God and Savior, let’s pray.

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