Suffering and the Glory of God - Part V
February 10, 2008 3:19 pm Chapter 8, Romans, Sermon-TextsPart 5 of the “Suffering and the Glory of God” sermon series. Part 5 is an exegetical treatment of Romans 8:29 addressing the theme of God’s good purpose in conforming believers into the image of Christ. This sermon was originally preached February 10th, 2008 at The Resolved Church in San Diego, CA.
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February 10th, 2008
Pastor Duane M. Smets
Suffering and the Glory of God - Part V
Romans 8:28-30
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. 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.
Introduction
Good morning. Today we continue our Suffering and the Glory of God series and come to our second sermon from verses 28-30 of Romans chapter 8. Let’s read them and pray.
Oh Lord my God, you are the great potter, a masterful sculptor…would you make us like soft clay today. Use these moments and these words to take each of us and mold us and shape us into the image of your Son, Jesus Christ. Conform today. Take our torn and tattered and misshapen and marred images and administer the gospel to our souls that we would be made new. Behold, you make all things new and beautiful through the salvation of Jesus. May Jesus shine brightly today. May the sense of thanks and adoration and commitment to him abound in us. Amen
Today we are going to pick up that word “purpose” from verse 28 along with the second half of verse 29. We’re leaving “called” and the first half of verse 29 until next week. So all you who anxious for me to talk about predestination, don’t worry we’ll get into it thick next week. So we’ll deal with purpose today, what it is to be conformed to the image of Jesus, and how everything is about him. I have three main questions today. Why would anyone want to be like Jesus, what of him and his image are Christians being conformed to and what is the connection between that and suffering?
Purpose
Last week we dealt mainly with the phrase “for those who love God all thinks work together all things for good.” I left off the word purpose because verse 29 defines what that purpose is, it defines what the “good” is, that God is taking the seemingly bad things, the suffering things, and working them together for. But before we talk about that what is purpose?
Ayn Rand says it is one of the three ruling values of human life. Richard Dawkins, the famous Atheist says it is purely genetics. And the Dali Llama along with Abraham Maslow conclude that purpose is purely relationship with other human beings. Purpose is big business today. Rick Warren’s book “The Purpose Driven Life” was on the New York Times best seller list for 4 years and sold over 25 million copies. Last year’s big business strategy was a book and documentary called “The Secret” where purpose is found in something called “the laws of attraction” where a pursuit of your desires actualizes them.
Purpose sounds like a common thing. Like the purpose of scissors is to cut something, usually paper. But if you take it a step back, like this text of the Bible does, and like the cultural explorations of supposed expert, purpose becomes much bigger thing then just a functional thing. It becomes a question about the meaning of life and apparently quite a lot of people are searching for this. One of the biggest things people ask and wonder is, “What am I supposed to do with my life?” Suffering can seemingly cloud the answer to that question even more. The feeling when suffering strikes and you ask, “What am I supposed to do now, how do I even go on?”
There are answers to those questions, the questions of purpose. What is purpose? Purpose here is intended design. It is like taking the events of our lives and saying there is an architecture to them. There is a specific framework that connects them together and the result is purpose. Architectural plans are drawn up for the building of buildings and here in Romans there is an architectural purpose for our lives. Conformity to the image of Christ.
Conformed to the Image of His Son
So the great and sweeping statement here is that every single experience of suffering, every trial and challenging thing that you go through in your life has one great architectural purpose if you are a Christian, and that is to make you like Jesus.
To be “conformed” you could also translate it “fashioned” into the images of God’s Son. It’s a unique word. In the next chapter Paul will use a pottery analogy. Any of you ever take pottery when you were in high school? It was that really easy guaranteed “A” class. J In Jeremiah 18, the Bible says this,
“1 The word that came to Jeremiah from the Lord: 2 “Arise, and go down to the potter’s house, and there I will let you hear my words.” 3 So I went down to the potter’s house, and there he was working at his wheel. 4 And the vessel he was making of clay was spoiled in the potter’s hand, and he reworked it into another vessel, as it seemed good to the potter to do. 5 Then the word of the Lord came to me: 6 “…can I not do with you as this potter has done? declares the Lord. Behold, like the clay in the potter’s hand, so are you in my hand.”
I think that is a good biblical picture of being conformed or fashioned into the image of Christ. God is like a master sculptor and is able to take the hurts and the pains and the mistakes and the sins and the scars and he is able to do something beautiful and magnificent with it. He can make take all the bad stuff and reform and rework it, smoothing out the bumps and the rough edges. Where pieces have broken off pieces and we have become hard and brittle he can soften us and change us. God’s goal, his purpose in your life in everything is to make you like Jesus.
So often the question comes when suffering happens, “Why?” “Why is this happening?” This is the answer, to help make us like Jesus. And the path of Jesus was not one without its suffering. Jesus wore a crown and we must wear one too. Jesus gained stripes upon his back and so must we. Christians, my friends, do not venture to steal the goodness and grace of Christ and shun light and momentary afflictions that come along the way.
You will not grow and mature as a Christian if you don’t learn from the hard things of life. If you hold them at bay and only consider yourself a victim, you will only become bitter and angry. Welcome them for in them we come to know the sweetness of Jesus even more, his image is formed in us and there is great love to be had in having that image impressed upon us. God loves us and will do whatever it takes for us to come to truly know that.
God’s purpose for you life, in everything is to make you like Jesus. How do you discover God’s will for you life? By following Jesus closely and until you do you will stumble in darkness. God’s goal is to make you like Jesus through you clinging closely to him.
Some of you are in your sort of college years or shortly after college years and these are important forming years. Who you become in this time in your life is most likely who you will be for the rest of your life, so what things become important to you right now really matter a whole lot, how will you be formed or conformed? Will you be conformed to the image of Christ or the image of someone else? God’s intent is to use any and everything to make you like Jesus.
It’s not to make us gods. Don’t misread that. Yes, Jesus is God’s Son. He is God of Gods. God himself. But that is not what the image is here that God is conforming you into. Christianity is not like Mormonism where we can all become our own little gods and get our own planet someday to rule over. Our God is God over all and is not sitting off somewhere on the planet Kolob. You will not become a King of Kings and Lord of Lords like Jesus is but you will be conformed into his image and in that take on his character.
That is God’s one purpose he has in mind, to shape us into having the love, holiness, grace, and humility of Jesus. That is what the image of Jesus is. It’s not talking about giving us eternally divine attributes, those are God’s alone but rather the image is the moral nature of Christ, free from sin, solely dedicated to the worship and love of God.
Sanctification
Let me stop here for a second. When Jonathan Edwards preached he would work with the text first and then he would move to systematic theology or the doctrine of the text. I want to do that here. This is the doctrine of sanctification. That is a big word, sanctification. It means to sanctify or to set you apart namely from sin.
The root of sin in us go deep. From birth we begin our idolatrous downfall and begin worshipping ourselves and so many other things. My daughter is three months old and she thinks the whole world revolves around her. In many ways it seems like that, but she is wrong. Our life, our family’s life revolves around Jesus. You become a Christian at the point in which you recognize that and embrace the mercy of Christ. You recognize that you as a human being are a worshipper. As C.S. Lewis said, “the world rings with praise.” Lovers praising their love. Gamers praising their game. Artists praising their art. We praise, we worship, and all of us have be lead astray into worshipping the things in themselves rather the source and sustainer of them all, God himself. Everything in this life reflects God and ought to cause our hearts to leap with adoration and thanks and love toward him and they do not and we are vile and treasonous for it. And the beautiful image we are, in being made by God, becomes ugly and marred.
You become a Christian when you recognize you have not worshipped God as you ought and then you hear and see or taste the goodness of Jesus. God’s son, coming into the world and worshipping God, wholly, perfectly and then dying on a cross for idolaters. You hear that and something happens, you plead in your heart for him. It is a cry. You cry out to Jesus and say save me! Perfect worshipper, Jesus, save me, cover my sin and make me like you! And Christ does, he responds with overwhelming mercy towards us. That is the moment in which you become a Christian, it is the moment of justification. You get right with God for the first time, you worship. God becomes your God.
But you’ve been an idolater for a long time and it is going to take a long time to weed all those idolatrous tendencies out. So a process begins. The process of sanctification. Sanctification is glory begun in us, the process of God conforming us into the glorious image of Christ.
Now I say all that to say this, sanctification and suffering go hand in hand. Suffering and the glory of God is an extremely practical thing. When things don’t go the way you want them to or expect that they will, whether it is a really big serious thing or a small annoyance and inconvenience, here is what you ask yourself: What is God trying to teach me through this, what of the glorious image of Jesus person can I become more like through this?
So some examples. Say I am mistreated. Maybe you get slighted at your job, something is just not going well at your job, I don’t think I’ve ever worked at a single place where there is not a lot of “talk” that goes on about the boss or the way the place is run. What is it that makes us so discontent or angry, we’ll it’s usually pride isn’t it? I’m told that my generation changes jobs more frequently than any other ever has. Why? Because we think we are better and deserve to be treated better and have better answers and ideas.
Think of in these situations of how much the humility of Jesus. The image of Christ, who did not consider equality with a God a thing to be grasped but took the form of a servant. He wore a cheap robe, was poor, though he was the king of the universe and then he was crucified. He was wiser and stronger then everyone he encountered and he humbly held it in so long and did not swerve on his journey to the cross. So few people are truly humble these days. How we need to be conformed into the humility of Christ. We are all so proud and need the humility of Christ.
How about another example. You are a parent and you are trying to teach your children that they need to do their homework and they don’t want to. They don’t want to sit down at the table and work on it, they would rather do a hundred other things and get cranky and whine about it. What do you need in that moment? Patience and it does not come easy. This happens in all kinds of relationships all the time, between husband and wives, between family members, between friends. People you love, who love you try your patience.
What comes easy is frustration, giving up, maybe even anger. But think of the patience of Christ, his image, how longsuffering and patient he is with us, how we continually make mistakes and he does not give up on us, think of how patient he was with Peter, who denied him three times and after Jesus rose he lovingly drew him in and told him to go be a pastor his church. We are all so impatient, we want we want and we want it now…we need the patience of Christ so much.
Maybe one more example. How about self-control? It’s one of the fruits of the Spirit. In this world there are many lures. Lures to take us away from keeping God first. There are sexual lures, whether it is the internet or someone who is not your spouse. There are substance lures to abuse drugs or alcohol. There are laziness lures to not work or be responsible to take care of the things you need to take care of. There are lures against being disciplined and keeping our word.
There are all kinds of lures and one of our biggest needs is self-control. Think of the image of Christ in this. Think of his self-control. In his temptation sequence in the desert he exercised self-control to not abuse his power and to stay dedicated to his mission, he didn’t give in to the lures of food, death, or false praise. We all give in and lack self control, we need so badly to have ourselves controlled by the Spirit of Christ.
This is the sum of it. Every suffering thing is an opportunity for you to learn something and to draw closer to Jesus and become more like him. He is the image of the invisible God, perfectly holy, is the person we all long to be and fail at being. In and through faith in Jesus the bad things, the hard things of life are turned for good and his image is formed in us. Your biggest need and my biggest need is to become like Jesus. Everything in life is about him.
The Preeminence of Jesus
And this is my last point for this morning, the preeminence of Jesus. We’ve answered the question of what Jesus and his image God is conforming us to and how it relates to suffering, but my last question is this, why Jesus? Why would anyone want to become like Jesus? Why Jesus?
The second half of verse 29 gives us the answer, “in order that he might be the firstborn among many brothers.” The answer is that he might be first, that everything would be about him. “Firstborn” brings back the idea of first fruits we talked about a few weeks ago, “brothers” brings back the whole Jesus Family series we did a few months ago. So I’m not going to really go after those things but instead go after the theological point that is made here.
The theological point is that the whole reason why God ever saves anyone at all is this, to make Jesus look really good! It is for the sake of the honor and glory of Jesus. Your salvation as a Christian, your life really is not about you. It’s not. It’s about Jesus!
Maybe there some of you and right now you are like what? What the heck are you talking about that is nonsense. Of course it is, it’s my life. No it’s not. And here is the reason why, here is what makes the gospel so different and so unique. I hope you get this, because you could take this teaching today, everything I’ve said so far and miss the entire thing unless you get what I’m about to say. You could take all of this and just use it, the example of Jesus life and trying to be like him, you could take it and use it as a sort of self-help life improvement program and you would take the gospel and turn into a purely moralistic thing. And that is not what it is.
You see if everything is not about our God, Jesus, then it really is about you. You can end up with a really man-centered view of sanctification. And that is not the gospel. The gospel is not religion. As Tim Keller says, religion says, “I obey, therefore I’m accepted.” That’s religion, you are not earning the image of Christ by following the rules. The gospel is not moralism. It’s not just about making you better and you cleaning up your act. That happens along the way but that is not the ultimate and final goal and purpose. The gospel is Jesus plain and simple. It is him, he is great, he is good, he is strong, he is wise, he is loving, everything is about Jesus.
And if you buck at that because you think that is so selfish for God to make everything about him and his son. Let me teach you why that is a good thing. If I was to tell everyone to worship me and become like me you would rightly say that is wrong, because we all know I’m not that good. But if you are that good, if Jesus Christ really is that good and beautiful and lovely then it is the most right thing in the universe for God to command all to worship him and become like him…it would be wrong of him if he didn’t! Jesus is supreme in every regard! Everything is about him.
Until your heart is turned so that the goal of your life is to make Jesus look really good then you will still be caught in a trap of trying to gain approval or acceptance and you will run the up and down the cycle of failure and frustration. The whole point is that we are not great, but Jesus is. He is the firstborn and oh the privilege of calling him our brother! Jesus is great and I get to be in the family because he died for me. That is the gospel.
All suffering is about Jesus and is intended to point us toward him and his cross. Jesus is the gospel. All of history, all of life, all of the Bible is about him!
Conclusion
So let’s conclude. I said that this verse, verse 29 was the good purpose that was stated in verse 28, “God works together all things for good, for those who are called according to his purpose.” And I have argued today that Jesus, is the purpose, he is the good, that God is conforming his people into. So let me just take Jesus and import him back into verse 28 and 29 re-read them and see how it strikes you.
Verse 28, “And we know that for those who love God all things work together for Jesus for those who called to Jesus. For those whom he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of Jesus, in order that Jesus might be the firstborn among many brothers.”
Do you get it? The application today is simple. Put your life and your trust and your faith and your hope and your everything in Jesus. When you come to the table, lay everything down, surrender and quit making your life about you. If there are areas you know you have taken things off the table and made them about you, give them back. Say, “I’m sorry Lord, they were yours all along. Everything is about you and I don’t want it to be about me anymore. My life is a broken mess when I make it about me. Jesus you are Lord.”
Allow your heart to be conformed today. In these holy moments, when we approach the table and partake of the bread and wine, Jesus life and death taken at the cross for us, allow your heart to be like clay in God’s hands. Let him mold you and shape us as we repent and worship. Let the image of Christ be branded into your soul. If you are not a Christian and you want to become one today, the table is open to you…welcome to the family, along with all of us who continually lay down our lives at the foot of the cross we welcome you to lay your life down as well.
Let’s pray.