Sermon: Sunday, 23rd February, 2025
Speaker: Geoff Murray
Scripture: Romans 8:28-30
‘And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.’ (Romans 8:28)
How can we have confidence that God really is working all things for our good? God is the author of salvation therefore we know where we’re headed and what the end result will be.
R C Sproul : The foundation for the comfort and certainty of future joy is God’s plan of redemption.
1. God Initiates our Salvation
We have grounds to believe God is working all things together for our eternal good ‘…For those God foreknew.’ How do we understand that? Is it simply a knowing of the future? Is it simply a knowing who will believe in Jesus and then predestining on that basis?
Well, I don’t think that for two reasons:
1. It wouldn’t make sense of the fact that everything in Romans 8:29-30 is God’s doing; ‘he foreknew, he predestined, he called, he justified, he glorified.’ If there was a sense with foreknowledge that God saw ahead of time that so and so was going to believe, this passage wouldn’t be so dominated with God’s actions. It wouldn’t make sense of the calling either. If foreknowledge is God looking into the future and seeing who would believe in him, the calling wouldn’t be necessary and would be redundant if they were going to do all the believing themselves anyway.
2. There is a way of foreknowing being used in the Bible which speaks about God’s active choosing of people. One such example is Amos 3:2 ‘You only have I chosen of all the families of the earth;’ Does God not know all about the nations? Of course he does. There is another knowing at play here. And it is a choosing, a calling out from among the world those who will be his.
As is the case of Jeremiah 1:5 ‘Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born I set you apart;’ Before the foundation of the world, before you existed, God chose you to be his. Predestined – not only foreknown but this led to us being predestined.
Predestination is that, if you’re a Christian, before the foundation of the world God so authored and ordered your life in such a way to lead you to faith in Jesus and to be made like Jesus. For all those in Christ, God’s plan for you is to be conformed into the image of his Son, to be made like his Son. We are made in God’s image, sin distorts that image and in Christ we are being remade into his image, renewed after the likeness of our creator.
What is God’s will for my life you might ask? God’s primary will for your life Christian is that you live like and look like Jesus. And so what is God’s will for my life especially in suffering? It’s that you would be like Jesus.This means that the every moment, every millisecond of your life, the good, the bad, the ugly isn’t a matter of indifference, it isn’t a matter of non-importance, it isn’t coincidence, it isn’t happenstance, it is God pushing you and directing you to the end for which you were saved to be made like Jesus. So God is not only choosing you before the foundation of the world but is so authoring your story to lead you to put your faith in Jesus and be so made like him!
Then we have this peculiar language ‘… that he might be the firstborn among many brothers and sisters.’
What Paul means is that Jesus is eternally the Son of God and through faith in him we are adopted into his family and we have the immense privilege of being sons and daughters of God and as we are brought in through faith in the Son of God. That as we’re adopted and brought in, Jesus then has countless brothers and sisters.
This concept of firstborn is very common in the Bible where among brothers you’d have the firstborn which wasn’t always necessarily how we’d use it as a literal firstborn but rather meaning supreme, above all, greatest. And as we are brought into the family of God, welcomed in through Jesus and Jesus alone, of course Jesus is supreme among us, of course he is most worthy among us! It is only through him that any of us are children of God and therefore what is left except worship and praise?
Then there are those who are ‘called’. Known as that effectual call of God whereby he convinced us of our sin, our need of Christ and enabled us to embrace Christ by faith. That moment we believed on Jesus there was a stirring of our souls, a drawing to himself was that moment we were called unto him to believe on him. We didn’t just wake up one day and decide, ‘Do you know what? I think I’ll be a Christian.” No, we were drawn to him to believe in him.
‘No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws them…’ (John 6:44)
We didn’t wise up and put our trust in Jesus, we didn’t drum up faith within ourselves, no we were drawn, we were called by the Father, it was him who called us!
Those whom he called he also ‘justified’. Justified is one we hear often, but what does it mean?Well, it’s a statement God makes of us, it’s a position we stand in whereby we are declared righteous in his sight as if we hadn’t sinned at all and in fact as if we had kept the law entirely. When we put our faith in Jesus our sins and the record attached to it are cancelled out and the righteousness which belongs to Jesus is given to our account.
It is to say, having been called and thus enabled to put our faith in Jesus we are then justified, we are declared righteous in God’s sight as if we had kept the law perfectly. You and I whose faith is in Jesus stand before God today justified, declared righteous through faith in Jesus and our union with him.
Friends, who got the ball rolling in the story of your salvation? God! How does this apply to our live? It results in humility.
‘For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith – and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God – not by works, so that no one can boast.’ (Ephesians 2:8-9)
2. God Completes our Salvation
Now there is much we don’t know about our glorified bodies and life when Jesus comes again, but if we just stick to what is in our passage, we read in verse that we will be ‘… conformed to the image of his son.’ So we can focus on one aspect – being made like Jesus.
‘Dear friends, now we are children of God, and what we will be has not yet been made known. But we know that when Christ appears, e shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is.’ (1 John 3:2)
Here it is spoken of in the past tense as if it has already happened. We see it in Isaiah 9 and the promise of the wonderful counsellor; ‘…the people walking in darkness have seen a great light.’ it was ultimately a future event but it was spoken of in the past because its coming about was so certain.
We have promises like the one in 1 John 3, we have the promise of Philippians 1:6 which assure us of our destination, we will be like Christ, he who began a good work in us is going to see it through right to the very end.
What is that end? To be like Christ. To be made like him. To love God completely, wholly and perfectly as we always ought to have. To spend eternity serving him gladly. No sin to trip us up, no temptations to lead us astray, no selfishness or pride, no greed or malice, no lust or anger, we will love him as we always have wanted to, as we always ought to, as we often fail to do now.
We will be like Jesus and it will be glorious! Jesus said, ‘If you’ve seen me, you’ve seen the Father.’ (John 14:9) In other words, he is the perfect representation of what God is like to the world. Friends, in glory we will be like Jesus, in glory we will perfectly represent the Father’s beauty and goodness.
The longer I’m a Christian, the more I long for the new creation for more than just what God is going to do out there, though that will be glorious, but for what God is going to do in here as in a flicker I will be changed, in a flicker you will be changed. We will be made like Jesus and it will be glorious.
But we hear all that and for many of you here, I know it can be for me sometimes, it feels a million miles away and it can be hard to see how my life now can get to my life in glory. For now, we live in the tension spoken of of present suffering and future hope throughout this section of Romans 8, for the believer it is felt most keenly when it comes to being made like Jesus.
You and I walk in the days of the now and the not yet. We are declared righteous in Christ though the reality of our lives is often a mixed bag of the good Christ is working in us and the remnant of our sinful nature. We are sanctified, made holy but we’re also progressively being made holy. So much of our lives is marked by living up to the reality of our new identity all the while experiencing the tension that we don’t presently live up to it.
Do you find yourself despondent as you have a pattern of sin you’re all too aware of that won’t seem to budge?
Do you find yourself dismayed that after 30 years as a Christian, 40 years as a Christian you have still so long to go in your path of becoming more like Jesus?
Do you find yourself discouraged by what is often your knee-jerk reaction to things? Prone to flare up in anger? Prone to gossip? Prone to pride?
And you look at your life and you’re hanging onto these promises of future glory by the skin of your teeth wondering if you’ll get there.
Friends, your eternal future is a certainty that if you’re following after Jesus in repentance and faith no matter how ineffective you find your repenting, no matter how small your faith why? Because the certainty of your salvation is not found in you. The certainty of your salvation is found in God and in God alone.
As you look to to verses 29 and 30 who is the only actor? Is it you? Is it your perseverance and Godliness? Is it your faithfulness? NO! It is all to do with God. God foreknew, God predestined, God called, God justified, God glorified.
Your salvation is secure because your salvation is not based upon you and anything you ultimately bring to the table. It is based entirely upon God. And God never changes that includes his commitment to his promises, that includes his faithfulness to his people. That includes his commitment to you if you are his.
If your salvation is dependent upon you it is a very precarious position to be in. You are forced into the ‘He loves me, he loves me not’ pattern and you can never truly experience the rest God offers and provides. But as it is, your salvation is certain and sure if you are in Christ, why? Because it is God who is from beginning to end the author of your salvation.
It is secure, not simply because God is the author of salvation but, because of what is known as the golden chain. These are all like links in a chain and that chain is not broken. God foreknowing necessitates his predestining, necessitates his calling, necessitates his justifying, necessitates his glorifying.
There are not some Christians who have been foreknown but not predestined, there are not some Christians who have been called but not justified.
R Kent Hughes : All who begin will finish.
I don’t know about you, I often find myself starting things I don’t finish. Books, to-do lists, the text I meant to send 2 days ago. But God, God never starts something he never sees through.
Therefore as you stand in the place of having been foreknown, predestined, called, and justified, there is no doubt that you will also one day be glorified. And so as you wrestle with your own shortcomings, as you struggle to even imagine being perfected into the likeness of Christ, as you can’t see it currently, the invitation is to behold that reality by faith.
And to think of the context of this passage: present suffering, future glory that’s why we can count it all joy when we face trials of various kinds. Why? Because every grief you experience, every tear you cry, every unexpected and unwanted illness, every difficult relationship is producing something glorious, namely Christ in you.
You are tried and tempted in this life and you suffer why? Is this one big practical joke from a sick and twisted God? No friends, far from it. It is the fire he uses to refine you to purify you, to make you like Christ.
So as you suffer, as you grieve, as you mourn not only can you can sing with confidence and with hope as you look to the certainty of your eternal future, you can also look to your future hope in great joy and anticipation because you know where that future includes! You will be like Christ.
Friends, press on with confidence and hope though weighed down by your sin and your suffering, look to Christ and know that he is speaking hope to you even now. God is using your painful experiences now to shape and mould you into the likeness of Christ. And know this, what God starts he finishes. He isn’t giving up on you, he who began a good work in you will see it through to completion on the day of Christ. And on that day, we will be changed for we will be like him.
With tears in your eyes, with grief in your heart you can sing and live joyfully and triumphantly today, holding fast to the hope that we have for he who promised is faithful, he will surely do it.