We have Hope

I appreciate you praying for me as I go to that. Our foundation is small and it's an opportunity for me to ask questions. You guys have been doing this a long time and give me some ideas about how to be able to help and deal with the problems that we face and the issues we face with our foundation. I want to start with a moment of prayer, if you would please. We open the Bible, Father, because we know here you have given your wisdom to us. Wisdom that's not speculative, wisdom that allows us to be able to face the life and the circumstances that we find ourselves in. We know in this book are the words of life because they're from you. So what we ask is that you would open our minds and our hearts to how you want to guide us and direct us and that the words that are spoken here would be yours and that they would be powerful, powerful to shape and direct us that we might become more faithful in our service and obedience to you. In the name of Christ we ask this, amen. This section in chapter 8, verse 18 is connected, as all of these are, with the preceding section. There Paul is talking about how life comes through the Spirit of God and how the Spirit set him free from the law and death and how our human nature is caught up in the fleshly pursuits of life and our human nature is controlled by sin and death so that we're not free from that grip of death on our lives. But when we receive Christ as the Lord of our lives, and this is such a key ingredient, the yielding and submission to God and his authority, when we yield to the authority of Christ, then the Spirit of God comes in our life and everything changes. Then we're not any longer controlled by our sinful human nature but instead controlled by the Spirit. The Spirit gives us life. The Spirit allows us to be able to be connected to God in a way that we wouldn't otherwise. And no one can really belong to Christ without having the Holy Spirit in their life. This is not a matter of an addition to your Christian faith. It is an essential ingredient in your faith. It's an essential ingredient in your walk with Christ because it is the Spirit of God who helps us to be able to understand what God wants and to give us guidance and direction in our life. Now he says we have an obligation because the Spirit is in us, not to be controlled by our human nature, but to live according to the Spirit. If we're controlled by our human nature, then the Spirit is not able to use us because those who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God. If you did not receive the Spirit, it makes you slaves again to fear. But you received his Spirit, you received the Spirit of sonship, and by him we pray Abba Father, this word of personal connection and intimacy with the Father. The Spirit himself testifies with our spirit that we are God's children. Now if we are children, then we are heirs, heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ. If indeed we share in his sufferings, in order that we might also share in his glory. Now it's that connection that Paul starts with in verse 18. He says, he's just talked about sharing in the glory and the sufferings of Christ. I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us. Paul has talked a lot about the suffering that a believer goes through. He talked about back in chapter 7 about how difficult it was to be able to discern exactly what God wanted and to do exactly what he wanted. I know in my mind what the right thing is, but I cannot bring myself to do the right thing all the time. And I struggle with this because the thing I want to do, I end up not doing. The things I don't want to do, I end up doing. Who can deliver me from this was his sort of cry of desperation. Now this kind of internal spiritual suffering is part of what he's talking about. He's talking about also the external suffering that comes to believers in the day in which Jesus was, in which Paul was writing. These people who were trying to live out their faith, but in the face of hostility on all sides so that there was a danger to them simply in accepting and beginning to live this life of obedience and submission to God. But he reminds them, whatever difficulties you face, the rewards that God has for you because of your faithfulness will far outweigh those. So when we get caught in the middle of trying to live according to what God wants for us and we run into the difficulties, we must stop and remind ourselves that this is a long term process, a life long, a life given life long in obedience and submission to God. And what is going to come to us is far greater than anything we would suffer in this world or in the experience of trying to be obedient to God. The present suffering is not worth comparing. He talks about it saying when you weigh what God has in store for us after this life is over and you look at what it's cost you to be able to follow God, then you know that the price you pay is nothing compared to what you're going to get. The sacrifice is something you give of value for something of greater value. He's holding up before us that the sacrifice we have in obedience to Christ is very small compared to the great gift that God has in store for us. Now Paul moves from talking about this personal experience for himself to broadening the picture of what God is at work doing. He's not only at work doing, working in your life and in my life and in the lives of human beings in this world, but the great task that God has called us to is a part of a human, an enormous picture of what God is doing. I'm not sure how the story that we're talking about using in our church deals with this, but here Paul deals with what he sees as the story of God, what might be called in that book the upper story, what God is at work trying to do. And he broadens this beyond the individuals and the church and human beings to say that we are a part of something that is tremendous. You remember he started in the book of Romans by talking about the role that Adam played. And Adam, because of the sin of Adam, has led all of us down the road where we reject the authority of God over our lives. And because of Adam, sin has entered the world and polluted all of our lives beyond our own ability to correct that. Now he comes back to take a bigger view of what God is at work in the world doing. The creation, verse 19, the creation waits in eager expectation for the sons of God to be revealed. Paul now introduces the idea that our salvation is not a matter between me and God. It's not even a matter between me and other people who are also followers of God. There is in what God is doing something more enormous than even human beings. For the redemptive work of God is now, in Paul's vision, affecting all of the created order. All of the animals in this order, all the ground in this order, the vegetation in this order, all of the created order are in some way affected. The creation waits in eager expectation for the sons of God to be revealed. Now he means by this, he's already told us that we're adopted into the family of God and are sons of God. But here he introduces another idea that seems to be consistent throughout this. In the Christian life, there is a tension, a tension between what you have right now and the promise of what God said he was going to give to us. It's the now and not yet. We have received this adoption into the family of God. And yet we know, from what Paul talks about in chapter 7 of Romans, that even though we've given our lives to God, when we sit down and try to figure out how to live, we find that our mind, while we know the right thing, we're not able to do it. While we want to do the things that right, we end up doing the things we don't want to do. There is not yet a completion to this experience we have with God. We've started on this journey, but it's not yet complete. Now he talks about being the sons of God, those of us who are followers of Christ. When we get into heaven, there is going to be some sense of completion or fulfillment to the journey that we've started on. Now he says that all of the created order is waiting in anticipation of the time when all of us will be brought into the kingdom of heaven. Finally, all this world is over. Everything's passed. The created order is affected by the sin of Adam. And by our faithfulness and obedience to God, in some way it will bring redemption and healing even to the natural order in this world. It is an act of God that our obedience to him affects everything that he planned to do in all of this world's history. He broadens this out to something far greater than what we could imagine even for ourselves. In verse 20, he continues that. For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it in hope. All the created order, whenever Adam's sin was affected, if you remember in the story back in Genesis about how all this took place in the Garden of Eden, that whenever Adam and Eve sinned and the Lord came to bring them judgment, it also affected their relationship with the world, the physical world that they were living in. And God's judgment affected that. Then God said to the woman, what have you done? The woman said, the serpent deceived me and I ate. So the Lord said to the serpent, because you have done this, cursed are you above all the livestock and the wild animals. You will crawl on your belly and you will eat dust all the days of your life. And I will put enmity between you and the woman and between the offspring and hers and he will crush your head and you will strike his heel. To the woman he said, I will greatly increase your pain and childbearing. With pain you will give birth to children. Your desire will be for your husband and he will rule over you. To Adam he said, because you have listened to your wife and ate from the tree about which I commanded you, you must not eat of it. Cursed is the ground because of you. Cursed is the ground. The sin of Adam had an impact far above what was simply the people who were involved in this. In some way a curse was placed on the earth, the world, as a result. Through painful toil you will eat of it all the days of your life. It will produce thorns and thistles for you and you will eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken. For dust you are and to dust you will return. What the story in Genesis talks about is the fact that God created a world like he wanted it to be. Not only the man and woman who were in the garden were like he wanted them to be, but the garden was like he wanted it to be. And Adam and Eve's sin in some way caused God to turn and say to the created order, now you have been damaged because of this man's sin, because of these people's sin. You are damaged and I place a curse on you. This is what Paul is referring to. That the sin of Adam, he started now talking about that and how it's affected all of us. Now he broadens this to say not only was the sin of Adam a great impact on the human race, but it's had a powerful impact on all of the natural order. In his discussion, the created order was subject to frustration. That's the translation that's here, I don't know if some of you have a different translation, but it's the idea of frustration. Sometimes that's translated confusion. Sometimes it's translated as corruption. There is a problem that the natural order has as a result of the sin of Adam and Eve. The creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice. In other words, it wasn't anything that the created order did to cause this to take place, but by the will of the one who subjected it. This is not Adam. As a result, this is not Adam who made the curse. If you look back at the story in Genesis, it was God who made the curse. He's the one that subjected the natural order to the consequences of Adam's sin. Because you have sinned, I am going to make sure that your sin affects all of mankind. And God says, I'm going to make sure that your sin also affects the natural order. God is concerned about the environment and about the world. But here, the picture that Paul paints is, this is God at work in the natural order. He has in some way placed a curse on all of the natural order. And in some way, our faithfulness to God is going to impact this, so that at the time whenever we are all gathered together and brought into what is heaven, have you heard the Scripture and saw how heaven is going to be? The trees will be there that produce their fruit twelve months out of the year. The water will be pure. In the pictures of heaven that we get in the Scripture, it is the ideal world. Not just in terms of the people who are there, but also in terms of the environment in which we would live. There is some way in which Paul is saying that the redemptive work of God in us is going to have an impact on the world. So that the natural order itself will be somehow or other transformed. He uses a different kind of language. Later he'll talk about that. We'll get to that later. But he uses the language of being set free. Like we are now enslaved by sin. That's how he talked about it. We're slaves of sin. We're not able to throw it off. We're not able to say I'm going to live the way I want to. In some way, the natural order is also enslaved by the consequence of Adam and Eve's sin. The creation was subjected to frustration not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it. This wasn't Adam that did that. It was God that made the curse. But by the will of the one who subjected it in hope. There he has a very strange end to this. When God subjected the earth to this curse, he had a plan for it. This is his grand plan. I'm going to begin the process to redeem mankind from the sin that's been committed. But I'm also going to redeem the natural order in which they live. So that when we get to that place where we're all in heaven together, we won't live in the world that's like this one. The natural order even that we're in will be transformed. A new heaven and a new earth. You read that in the scriptures. You've heard people talk about it. Not only is the plan for God something far greater than what we have now, and that's why he adds this word in hope. God subjected the natural order to a curse, but he has in mind even then that he was going to restore it so that there was going to be some great future, not only for us, but all the natural order around us so that God is going to make again a place exactly like he did before, except better. God's great plan because of Adam's sin was not to be destroyed. His world was not to be destroyed. He has plans for the world he made. He has plans for the people he made. And the great plan of salvation that he set out to accomplish, where he brings Christ into the world who dies for us, is not just for me alone, nor you, nor for the group, but it is a transformation of all of the world. Not just the people, but even the natural order. And that hope was with God from the very beginning. It's been a part of his plan. We often talk about salvation in our own lives and our hearts of human beings, but Paul sees it as a much greater dimension than just what happened to people. In verse 21 he says that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage. Now he talked about human beings being liberated from the bondage of the law. He talked about human beings being liberated from the bondage of sin. Now he talks about the natural order in the same kind of language. God is going to liberate the natural order from the curse that he gave it. It will be liberated from the bondage to decay, being tied to decay, and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God. So that the natural order itself will be set free in some way from the decay that we see around us. We won't have the same kind of world to live in that we live in now. It will be entirely different from that. Now he expands on this in the next paragraph, verse 22. We know that the whole creation has been groaning, as in the pains of childbirth, right up to the present time. He pictures the world, the natural order, in a very unusual way, as if it's alive, animated. As if the world is a woman in childbirth. Now I don't have any personal experience with regard to this. Some of you who are of the feminine persuasion would have more insight than we do. But I remember whenever Carol went to have one of our children, we went to Lamaze. And they taught us that there is no pain in childbirth, only pressure. And you didn't need to have any kind of shots. You just needed to learn to breathe correctly. And my job was to tell her when to breathe. I was the coach. Breathe. And whenever the pressure came, I was to help her breathe. And I was trying my very best. And she said, I don't know, and I don't care what they said, this hurts. The pain or pressure, as the Lamaze people said, was so intense for her that it was difficult for her to go without the pain medication. Writhing in pain, we use that language. Here he uses this of the natural order. This natural order is writhing in pain. I don't know what that means exactly. He may have reference to the natural disasters that occur, you know, the tsunamis, the earthquakes, the violent things that take place. He may see these as some evidence of the instability of our world. You know, our world is really, each continent is actually floating on the plates. That there is a sense of instability about the natural order. And we look at our country and we see, you know, it looks the same every day, but we don't know, through the millions of years it's been around, what changes have taken place in it. Paul describes the world, the natural world, as writhing, wanting to be able to see the final result of what God's great plan is for it. The whole creation has been groaning, as in pains of childbirth, right up to the present time. Now, not only so, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies. Now he moves from this image of the natural order being in such turmoil, to talk about our human nature. When we receive Christ, what he talked about at the end of chapter 7, the things I do that I want to do, I don't do, and the things that I don't want to do, I end up doing, who can rescue me from this body of death, was his prayer at the end of that chapter. We're caught in this bind, even though we're the children of God, of not having the complete picture together. Have you experienced in your own walk with God how difficult it is to be obedient? Have you experienced for yourself to say, Lord, I'm going to read the Bible regularly, I'm going to pray regularly, I'm going to work for you, and find yourself trying to do that, but one thing after another crops up and you get disgusted with yourself, because you really can't do what you want to do and what you plan to do? This is what he talks about, about the present and the not yet. You have been adopted as children of God, he says, and yet there is something incomplete in our lives that is not yet finished. So he calls us the children of God, being adopted into his family earlier in chapter 8. We've been adopted in his family and we are the children of God. His Spirit testifies with us we're the children of God. We're heirs of God, co-heirs with Christ. All this is wonderful language, but he recognizes that even though that's true, there is yet something unfinished in our walk with God. So he uses this language to say, as we wait eagerly for adoption as sons, he talks about the adoption now, not in the present tense or past tense, but in the future tense. You have started this journey, but your complete adoption is not complete yet. It's like an adoption process. God has said, I'm going to adopt you into my family, and you can be sure that that's going to happen to you. And yet it has to go through the process of going to the courts and hearing the testimony and talking about all these things. And finally at your death, whenever you receive this new life with him, after this life is over, then your adoption becomes finalized. So we struggle with this idea that even though we're children of God and have the Holy Spirit within us, there is yet an unfinished task for us, so that our work and life in this world will always have this element of uncertainty. It will always have this element of failure. It will always have this element of struggle, because what has happened to us is really not complete. Just like the earth is struggling, so we are also struggling. Not only so, but we ourselves who have the firstfruits of the Spirit. Now you go back in the Bible and it talks about, in the Old Testament, about the firstfruits. And this was the gift you give to God. And when the first crop comes in, wheat or barley, you took it and gave it as sacrifice to God. First animal is born, you took that animal and you offered it as sacrifice to God. Your first child was born and you took the amount of money that would be for a slave and you took it to the temple and you gave it. You bought back your own first child. All of this was a way of acknowledging that everything belongs to God. He is the owner of everything and we give Him the first, like He's the owner. So whenever the first fruit comes in, you give it to the owner because He owns the land and you're simply a tenant farmer. So the firstfruits of the Spirit have come to us. The first taste of the Spirit. We've received that, but not the full package yet. We have the first spirit, but we ourselves who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, we groan inwardly. The struggle He talks about in chapter 7. The groaning of how can I do this, Lord? Why do I keep failing? Why can I not do what I said I wanted to do? And so I struggle with that. It makes it difficult for me to be able to keep going. I groan inwardly as we eagerly wait for our adoption as His sons. We wait for that time when finally we'll say, now the struggle is over and you're ready to enter into the family of God, complete and final. This then will be the redemption of our bodies. The body we have now will be transformed. Paul talks about this in Corinthians, says the resurrection body. The mortal cannot be in heaven. The immortal has to be there. And we take off this mortal body and we put on this immortal body. And there in this new body, we live in heaven with God. And there with the new body is the new world that we're going to be given. So that the life in this world is past us and the new one started. That's what he talks about when he's talking about this adoption. The redemption of our body as our bodies are now redeemed from the decay that causes death. And death will no longer be a part of this. For in this hope, we were saved. For in this hope, we were saved. The Bible uses the word hope to describe the promise of God that has not yet come to pass. Now we use the word hope to say, well, I hope it doesn't rain. We don't use it with any kind of certainty. It has an element of uncertainty in it. But when the word hope is used in the Bible, it's far different than that. God has said, I'm going to give you a new body. You don't have it yet, but I promised it to you. So I have the hope of a new body. Is there an uncertainty in that? No. Because God has said, this is what I'm going to do. And so we have hope. Not the hope that you have that it's going to rain. If circumstances come around, it might rain or it might not. That's not what he means. He means the promise of God that is not yet fully, completely given to you. You don't have it, but you have the promise of it. And so we live with the expectation that that will someday come to pass. So this is what he means by the word hope. For we eagerly wait for our adoption as the redemption of our bodies. For in this hope we were saved. God promised us that we would have this life with him forever. And this hope was what we wanted when we said to him, I will give myself to you because you promised me everlasting life. Life forever different than the life that I have now. This was the hope that we had. But hope that is seen is no hope at all. In other words, if I promise you I'm going to give you a new body and you already have it, then you don't have a future hope. You have a present reality. So if God has promised us that this new life will be given to us, we have to wait until the time that it does. And we live with this hope. Now, remember, it's not a hope that says maybe it will happen and maybe it won't. But because we trust God and believe him, we have no doubt that that's actually going to happen. We could use this in talking, for example, with our inhuman relationships. If you have a child and the child wants to have a treat and you're at the store or you're somewhere else and the child wants a treat and you say, OK, whenever we get home, I'll give you a candy bar. You want the child to quit misbehaving and be nice because when you get home, you're going to give them a candy bar. If they start nagging you about the candy bar right then, you know that they're not willing to wait or they have lost confidence that you're actually going to do it. What God wants for us is to say, I'm going to give you this great life and he wants us to expect that it's going to happen and live as if it's going to happen, even though there is no evidence that it's going to take place. Why? Because of our trust in him. It is this hope, you see, that stands before us. Now, this hope that we were saved in, but the hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what he already has? But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently. This is the picture. God has promised us a new world, a new life, a new body, a new mind, a life completely free from the grip of sin, and a new world in which to live. You look around you, there is not much evidence of it being true. The world's in terrible mess. In your own heart, you want to do the right things, but you just can't seem to make it happen. And you keep looking at this, and you keep looking at the world, and it's easy to give up. But what he asks us to do is to trust him. I have given you hope. Hope based not on what you can see, but on the promise that I make to you. You look around sometimes, you think, well, the Christian church is dwindling in our country. It looks hard for us to be able to do the job God's given us. But every promise he's given us comes with this hope. He will do what he said. The gates of hell will not prevail against my people. There's no reason to be discouraged in a Christian life if you have hope. Not the hope that says, well, I think it's going to happen. But the confidence that God made this promise, seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness and everything you need will be provided for you. You can just list those hope, those promises over and over again. And when you accept those as realities, and you believe that they're going to come true, you don't have to see them. You just have to believe that the person that made the promise is reliable and has the power to deliver. And then there's no reason to be discouraged or depressed or overwhelmed because you keep remembering the promise that you've been given. You know why the kids, when you have them at the store where you're shopping for clothes, I mean, they don't want to do that. And they're acting up and you say, whenever we get through, I'll take you to get an ice cream cone. You know why they keep saying, Mommy, are we going to get an ice cream cone right now? Why don't we get an ice cream cone? I want my ice cream cone. You know why they keep doing that? Immaturity. You know why we get discouraged when we don't see the promise that God has made to us? Why, same thing. How does a person get mature? A child grows up and learns how the world works. How does a Christian get mature? By learning about God, putting into practice the things they do, so you learn how God works. And the more you know about how He works, the more confident you can become that the things He's promised to you will come to pass. How do you gain maturity? Finding out how God has acted in the Bible. That's why reading the Bible and Bible study is so critical to you. Experience. Presting God for something and seeing Him make it happen. Seeing it in the lives of other people help us. All of these are ways by which we can still hope even when everything seems hopeless. We live in a world where God has made great promises and if you look around you sometimes you'll see no evidence that they're coming to pass. Your only confidence comes because you know who made the promise and you believe He can do it. Let's pray. Let me ask you if there's something you think God has promised you that hasn't come true in your life. Maybe you've been upset about God about this. There's two elements here. One you have to be faithful and following Him. So you check on that first. Am I not living under the control of the Holy Spirit? Now I don't mean perfection because we already talked about the reality that that's not going to happen in this world. But am I still working at that? Is it my goal? And then if you know that you're trying to make that happen you have to trust God. I'll give you a discouraging and encouraging reminder. Jesus Christ when He lived on this earth started out with a great ministry, preached to thousands of people and in the last moments of His life He looked out off the cross and He had one disciple there and His mother and her friend. But He never doubted what the Father told Him and never complained, this is failing. He believed that if He did what the Father told Him to do everything He worked for would come to pass and now His name is spread all over the world. Don't get discouraged when you look around and it doesn't seem to be working for you. You may have to die before you see all the fulfillment that God promised, but it will happen. And so Father we ask that you teach us to live with hope, undying hope. No matter how big the difficulties are, no matter how bad it seems to us, give us this constant confidence that every promise you've made to us will be true. In the name of Christ we ask this, Amen. Oh yeah, right, right. Hi, good to see you.