Copyright © 2002 by Stephen S. Bilynskyj
One of the questions I wrestled with this summer was what text to choose for this first sermon back with you. I wanted a message both to sum up some of what I’ve experienced and read about and to set the stage for further messages. I prayed about it and God answered my prayer quite clearly: He had our family hear this particular text preached for three Sundays in a row as we attended various churches. By the third time I had gotten the message, so here it is.
Part of my summer reading was in the doctrine of providence. That is the term for God working in the world and in our lives. You might say providence is the answer to the question, “What in the world is God doing?” The short answer of verse 28, the somewhat surprising answer, is “everything.” God is at work in it all.
The key of the verse is “work.” It is actually “working together.” The Greek word is “synergy.” According to the apostle Paul, there is a divine synergy in everything that happens. It all works together through God’s providence.
Believing that God is working all things together for good can be pretty difficult after a summer of devastating fires, ongoing recession, and cruel child abductions. Another war is brooding on the horizon and people are out of work. 13 million people are on the brink of starvation in southern Africa.
Whether or not what’s happening in the world, disturbs you and makes you wonder about God’s providence, believing that everything is working together for good is hard just on the personal level. Too many things happen to us that seem purposeless. You lose a job. Your marriage breaks up. You have a car accident. You fail a class. Your child gets in trouble at school. You get cancer. Your retirement fund is wiped out. How in the world can all that work together for anything good?
Before we go any further, we have to take note of the fact that Paul anticipated all these objections to belief in providence. As we read on in the text we hear very plainly the truth of what St. Chrysostom said, “When Paul speaks of all things he mentions even the things that seem painful.” The conviction of God’s providence over our lives does not rest on everything going well. As a matter of fact, providence counts on the fact that many things in the world and our lives will go terribly wrong. It’s O.K., because God’s providence assures that all will go right in the end.
This summer we watched the video of the remake of “Ocean’s 11.” I like this sort of story, clever men pitted against impossible odds, bringing off the completion of a complex and beautiful plan. The film stars George Clooney who assembles a team of eleven smart crooks, including Brad Pitt, Matt Damon, and Carl Reiner as an aging con man. Their plan is to simultaneously rob three Las Vegas casinos.
A large part of the film’s fun is the tension that builds when things go “wrong.” The leader Danny Ocean has a fight with Brad Pitt’s character and bows out of the scheme at the last moment. Reiner’s character has a heart attack right in the middle of the heist. Ocean is captured and is taken to a back room for a beating. You’re sure disaster is just around the corner. And yet it turns out that all the wrong turns are in reality part of the plan. In the end it all works out. Ocean walks away with $160 million dollars and Julia Roberts. Not too bad.
Providence is the work of God which assures us that all the wrong turns and disasters of our lives are in fact part of His plan. He has foreseen them all and planned accordingly. As dismal as circumstances might become, His genius is working it all toward a good ending. We can rest assured that all will be well.
However, we must be clear about what God’s good ending is. We get confused about providence when we fail to grasp the real purpose of all God does. That’s why verse 28 is so careful to say that those who will realize that God works everything for good are just those who are called according to His good purpose.
We get confused because the great divine purpose behind our lives has little to do with most of the things that agitate us so much. Ultimately, God is not overly concerned with whether we can pay or bills or have enough to eat. In the end He isn’t really too worried about our health. And over the long haul, He doesn’t much care whether you and I live in peace or in a world constantly at war.
Verse 29 tells us that the providential purpose of God is something completely different from our everyday needs and concerns. The purpose for which He predestined us is “to be conformed to the likeness of his Son.” In other words, what God is planning for you and me is that we will be like Jesus. Everything else that happens to us is only a step on the way toward that goal.
You see, God’s purpose for us goes beyond where we are right now, because He wants to make us more than what we are right now. Verse 29 goes on to say we are to be like God’s Son “that he might be the firstborn among many brothers.” That means we are to be so like Jesus that we too can be God’s children, sisters and brothers of His only begotten Son. The process of providence, described in verse 30 as predestining us, calling us, and justifying us, ends with glorifying us. God intends you and I to be glorious, to be His own marvelous sons and daughters. That’s His purpose.
While staying with our friends Jay and Jan in Wheaton at the beginning of August, we went to see a few of Jan’s paintings in a local gallery. She pointed out the one she thought was her best, a huge sepia-toned watercolor of a lily. But then Jan began to complain about how much she thought it still needed, how she would have liked to keep working on it, adjusting the color just a bit more, adding another wash, redoing it until perfect. In her love for her work, she could just not let go until it was everything she wanted it to be. This text reminds us that God loves you and me in the same way and more. His providence is often mysterious and painful because He will not let go until we are everything He wants us to be. All our troubles are the art by which He shapes us into perfect objects of His love.
That is why the rest of our text is the greatest expression of confidence ever spoken. If this is God’s plan, through the artistry of providence to make us glorious children, then what have we to fear? As verse 31 says, “If God is for us, who can be against us?” This is doubly true, we’re told in verse 32, because His art of pain and suffering is not consigned to our side of the relationship. God didn’t spare His own feelings. He didn’t spare His own Son in order to justify and ultimately glorify you and me.
So providence implies the utmost confidence. If God through Jesus Christ is on our side, who or what can touch us? Not even our own sins will exclude us from God’s plan. Verse 34 explains that we cannot be condemned because Christ has died and risen, and He is sitting next to His Father, constantly pleading our case, calling for our forgiveness when we cannot even forgive ourselves.
With verse 35 begins the high point of our text. Paul asks us now to ponder the question, “Who shall separate us from the love of Christ?” He considers threats and dangers both present and past, “trouble, hardship, persecution, famine, nakedness, danger and sword.” In verse 36 he quotes Psalm 44 to show that God’s people have always faced such struggles. They are nothing new.
Then verse 37 starts out with a great negation which is in reality an affirmation. Shall any troubles of any sort separate Christ and His people? No! The purpose of God for us, His love for us, cannot be thwarted or stopped by any of it.
We’ve watched the heroic efforts of forest firefighters all summer, both in Oregon and around the country. While in Arizona I heard a radio story about a crucial piece of equipment for these men and women. Each of them carries a simple shelter something like a pup tent made of fiberglass and foil. If a fire should suddenly turn or spread so fast that there is no escape, these tents are their last resort. A firefighter can crawl inside and the reflective surface will ward off the worst of the heat and smoke as the fire passes them by.
On July 10 of last year, a rookie firefighter named Rebecca Welch saved two campers during a raging wildfire by sharing her one-person fire shelter. During the catastrophic “Thirty-Mile Fire” in Okanogan National Forest in Washington, Welch immediately and unselfishly shielded two civilians from the wildfire by taking them into her shelter with her.
The three huddled together under the cramped tent for 30 minutes, enduring intense heat and raining embers until the fire passed over them. They survived, even though Welch suffered second-degree burns on the right side of her body, the side that could not be completely covered by the shelter. The tent protected them and Rebecca became a hero.
That is how Paul expects you and I to pass through the troubles of this world. Confidence in God’s providential love in Christ is a shelter that will fend off the worst of the fires that burn around us. We may be burnt, we may endure pain, but we will pass through them with souls saved. And we will have the opportunity to become something better, something greater than we would have been had not the fire burned us.
“We are more than conquerors,” then says Paul, “through him who loved us.” Now he goes well beyond earthly troubles and makes the incredibly bold assertion that nothing, absolutely nothing, can come between us and the love of God in Christ. It doesn’t matter if it’s life or death, angels or demons, present or future, any power in heaven, high or deep. Not anything in all creation can touch us in the shelter of God’s love.
I quoted the Greek church father John Chrysostom earlier. In the fourth century in Constantinople, he preached so strongly against the misuse of wealth that he offended the ostentatious Empress Eudoxia. He was summoned before her husband Emperor Arcadius, and threatened with banishment if he did not cease his preaching. His response was, “Sire, you cannot banish me, for the world is my Father's house."
“Then I will kill you,” Arcadius said.
“No, you cannot, because my life is hidden with Christ in God,” came the answer.
“Your treasures will be confiscated” was the next threat, to which Chrysostom replied, “Sire, that cannot be either. My treasures are in Heaven, where none can break through or steal.”
“Then I will drive you from man, and you will have no friends left!” was the final, desperate warning.
“That you cannot do, either,” answered Chrysostom, “For I have a friend in Heaven who has said, ‘I will never leave you or forsake you.’”
Chrysostom was banished, first to Armenia and then further to Pityus on the Black Sea. He died on the way. But neither banishment nor death defeated his confidence. He knew that nothing anyone could do, nothing that could happen to him, would separate him from his heavenly Friend. He was just as sure as Paul is that nothing could take from him the love of God in Jesus.
Today, I invite you to join me in affirming again our confidence in Christ, your confidence that no one, nothing, not even your own failures, can separate you from Him. In Jesus you have a friend who will never leave you.
Amen
Valley Covenant Church
Eugene/Springfield, Oregon
Copyright © 2002 by Stephen S. Bilynskyj