Romans 8:28

I’ll be in Tanzania all week and I would appreciate your prayers as I travel and spend time with a pastor there. I’m not sure that I will be able to post these on FB after today, so if you are reading from there, consider hitting the subscribe button at the bottom and you’ll get it by email every morning. This week I’ll be posting on Mon, Wed, and Fri. If I can post any reflections from Tanzania I will.

I thought it might be good to spend some time in Romans 8:28 this week,

“And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to His purpose.”

Let’s break it down phrase by phrase.

“And we know…” It is interesting to read this within the context of the verses you studied last week. In verse 26 we find, “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.” So, there we find something we do not know, but here we find something we can know with absolute certainty. If we sum it up, we can say we can know with certainty that our entire lives are in God’s hands.

Let me encourage you to get this verse down deep into the core of your belief system. You and I need to know what Paul is about to say so that when difficulty comes we can fall back on these words. If we wait until the trouble or sufferings come we will find ourselves struggling to learn it, but if we catch on to this now we can find victory even in the midst of trial.

“…that for those who love God.” What Paul is about to say isn’t true of everyone—it is true of Christians. It is interesting that Paul chose to use those phrase—he only uses the phrase “love God”three other times in his writing, but if we take a look at them we might understand better what he is saying here.

1 Corinthians 2:9-10, “But, as it is written, “What no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man imagined, what God has prepared for those who love him”—these things God has revealed to us through the Spirit. For the Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God.”

1 Corinthians 8:3, “But if anyone loves God, he is known by God…”

1 Corinthians 16:22, “If anyone has no love for the Lord, let him be accursed. Our Lord, come!”

When you read these verses, you come to understand that when Paul speaks of those who “love God,” he is talking about those who are Christians. It isn’t that some followers of Jesus love God and some don’t—if you are a follower of Jesus you’ll love God.

Think about what he has said in this chapter—in 8:7 he speaks of those who are in the flesh and says they are hostile to God, in 8:8 he says they cannot please God, in 8:15 he speaks of our being adoptedby God and able to cry out to Him calling Him Abba! Father!, and when you come to 8:18 Paul says he considers the sufferings of this present time to not be worth the glory that is to be revealed to us…how can he say that unless we love God?

We will pick up with the next phrase tomorrow.