All Things
Romans 8:31-32 · Mike Doyle · May 12, 2024
Romans (2022-25), No. 073
Holly Hills Bible Church
https://www.hollyhillsbiblechurch.org/teaching/messages/49261935131703

Transcribed from the recording by SermonAudio, so expect the occasional misheard word.

So I must admit that as I studied this week, how do I say this? I found myself reviewing a lot. And when you get my verses for today, you know, start out with what shall we say to these things? Well, that's nice, but we gotta know what these things are and why they're such spectacular things. And so it forced me to really back up a little bit and go through, And that's why Jim read 28 going forward. And I want you to concentrate here on the words that are highlighted because these are the words that belong to God.

This is what he did. This doesn't have anything to do with what you have done. This is what he did. And so when you start out in 828, we find out that we are the called according to his purpose. He did the calling and he has a purpose. And then we find out that he foreknew. Not only foreknew events, but he foreknew people.

He also took those people that he foreknew and he predestinated them to be conformed to the image of his son. And why did he do that? So that he would be, Christ would be the firstborn in stature among all brethren. And then in 30 he said, and those he predestinated, he did that. He called, he did that. Those he called, he justified, he did that. And those he justified, he glorified. He did that too.

So, you get to the verse that says, well what, What then shall we say of these things? And the first thing that Paul writes is if God is for us, who against us? He didn't spare his own son. He who did not spare his own son, but delivered him over for us all, how shall he not with him also give us all things? who shall bring a charge against God's elect, it was God who justified.

So God elects. or chooses, he draws, he calls. For his purpose, he foreknows persons and he predestines. So I thought we'd take another look at each one of these words. Election means he chose us out. Everybody in this room, whether you're aware of it or not, God specifically elected you and chose you. And it's His divine, sovereign purpose that He would come and call you, elect you, choose you, put you in a position where you can be called elected of God. And when did he do this? The word of God said he did it before you were ever even born, ever even created. Courtney this morning was oogling and goggling over his new grandson. He was called that little guy who's this big.

God has chosen him and called him before he ever came into creation. And then God does the drawing. The general drawing mentioned in John 12, 32, and I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men to me. An irresistible drawing of which Christ mentioned, no man can come to me except the Father which has sent me draw him, and I will raise him up on the last day.

We talked a lot last week about the calling, The verse says, moreover, whom he did predestinate them he called. Whom he called he also justified. And he did it all for his divine purpose, having made note unto us the mystery of his will, according to his good pleasure, which he has proposed in himself.

Ephesians 1.9. This is all God's doing. for knowledge, he knew persons in Christ before creation. We've talked about that a lot.

Predestination has nothing to do with predestining people to salvation or not, but it has to do with those that God has determined he will do with them after he's called them. He has a purpose. These words are more concerned with that to which men are divinely appointed than to men themselves.

God's foreordination or predestination precedes all history. All history. We were in Sunday school class this morning and we were talking about sins and out of First Timothy and I was sitting there thinking, It's appropriate for Paul to write Timothy and talk about sins because the law identifies them, but really the focus of us as believers is on this person, God, and what he does. As foreknowledge recognizes certain future events, predestination makes these events sure.

There's nothing that's gonna go on in your life that God hasn't determined ahead of time. Nothing. So, 180 times now, in the New Testament, There's a new word here that we don't usually get involved with. As I was going through the predestined, et cetera, et cetera, I found that in my research, none of these people that I looked up would spend any time with the word glory.

And I thought to myself, well, gee, that's the purpose. God does everything to glorify himself. And that word is used 180 times in the New Testament and it's a major point of reference to bear on the glory of Christ. So let's spend some time with that. Significance is given to the glory that he had with the Father before the world was. You see that in John 17, five. The glory which John testifies to and was manifested in the incarnation. the glory of the transfiguration, the glory of the resurrection, and the glory he now has in the heavenlies. It's glory.

When all this glory is estimated, it will not be too difficult to understand why he is called the Lord of Glory, and what is meant when it is said that when he comes again, it will be with power and great glory. So if I were to ask you, well, what is God's glory? What does it mean? Well, God in his essence, you can say that the definition I've heard is, and probably used several times, is that it's the sum total of God's intrinsic attributes.

You know, we, Tuesday and Wednesday we've been studying Acts and on Wednesday we're studying Pauline Dispensationalism and we went through the part where Stephen was stoned to death and saw the glory of Christ in the heavenlies. Paul saw the glory of Christ on the road to Damascus and probably spent three years involved in beholding that, his glory, while he was in the Arabian Desert learning. So glory is God manifesting himself full on.

So when you think about that, we've been glorified. We've been called, we've been justified, and we've been glorified. It says, he who is crowned with glory and honor is bringing many sons to glory. So what he is, he's bringing us too. Christ's own petition is that believers may behold his glory, John 17, 24.

We all think about going to heaven. Think about, I get to go and behold his glory, unencumbered. I can see him full on. that they will share that glory as asserted by the apostle when he wrote, if so that we suffer with him that we may also be glorified together. Now imagine God thinking and determining and foreordaining that each person in this room at some point will manifest all of his own glory through you. Imagine him doing that.

We think so small when we think about, well, I get to go to heaven. Expand your mind to think about, I'm gonna be glorified and you're gonna be glorified with Christ. When Christ who is our life shall appear, then shall you also appear with him in glory. You are gonna do that.

The believer's body is even gonna be changed from a body of limitations to a body of glory, even like his glorious body. So verse 29, as we talked about last week, he foreknew, he foreordained to conform us to the image of his son. This conforming to the image of his son is the whole issue of glory, that he might be the firstborn among many brethren. So great significance has been seen in the description of a believer as one called according to God's purpose. If I would think about what is God up to, and I grow to the point where I really do understand that I have been called to be glorified by God. That's my destiny and it can't change because he's gonna do it. So I'm gonna be and you're gonna be conformed to the image of Christ.

It indicates a divine sonship that is to be realized on part of the one who is saved, a sonship patterned after the very image of the Son of God. That purpose of God is defined in the context which reads, them he justified, and whom he justified, he glorified. He glorified. It is the highest place that God could give a human being. There's nothing more than that, to be conformed to the image of Christ.

Lewis Barry Schaeffer said, salvation from its beginning, in the eternal counsels of God, down through the provision of and exercise of redeeming grace, and on its consummation in glorious fashion only by God, with the same purpose ever in view, namely that it should redound to his eternal glory. Do you see how you being glorified redounds to God's glory? He manifests himself through you. When people will and human beings will see the glory of God in you, it redounds to God. J.B. Stoney said, any believer, if he were asked, would say that Jesus is in glory.

But there is more than that stated here. It says, now is the Son of Man glorified. What is here is that the Son of Man is glorified. Man is put in a position that he never occupied before. In the eye of God, there are only two men now, either the lost man, Adam, or the glorified man. In God's eye, you are a glorified man. Nothing can satisfy the love of God but that you must be in keeping with his own son. Think about God's attitude about that.

That's where he's headed. That's what he has in store for each one of us, to be glorified just like his son. He wouldn't be satisfied with anything less than that. So the Father has accomplished all this in his mind, concerning us and much, much more prior to creation. Then he accomplished all of it for us in the Son through his death, resurrection, and ascension. And now, today, 2024, he is accomplishing it in us by his Spirit for his Son. All will be actually completed in us at the rapture, just a few finishing touches at the Bema, Myles Stanford.

So, now the question, what shall we say to these things? What can you say? Since God is for us, who is against us? If you look at that phrase in the Greek, you can scratch out is, in both cases, it should read, since God for us, who against us? Salvation lifts the saved one to the heights of heaven. with the reference to eternal abode and transforms that one into the image of Christ. To have made any being like Christ is the most consequential undertaking in the universe. It represents the limit to which even infinity may go. It is this distance between the abysmal depth of a lost estate and conformity to Christ in heaven, which not only exercises divine attribute of grace, but measures it completely.

Lewis Sparrow Chafer. The thought of Paul is not in the form of a hypothetical condition, as if it were a question whether God was for us or not. His thought is, in view of the fact that God is for us, who is and could be effectively against us so as to do us harm? That's what this question is. It dares you. It dares someone. God's for us. Bring it on, those that are against us. Because the God of the universe is for us. That is, since God is for the saints on their side, who can harm them?

Kenneth Weiss. The question is, what shall we say about that? And my question to you is, what will you say about those things? What do you think about those things? If you think about them and contemplate them and mull them over, they're overwhelming, that God would do such a thing. And it leaves you in a position where you cannot be vulnerable to anything but what God has done.

So, the conclusion is that God is for us every step of the way. The creator of the universe, the upholder of all things, the redeemer God himself for us, therefore the challenge who is against us. Paul knew as none ever has known that the power and malignity of Satan and his hosts, they're against us, but not effectively. The persecuting energy of the world system is against us, but not effectively. And the relentless activity of your sin nature is against you. but because of what God has done and what he has determined, they're not effective. They're there, but they're not effective.

In Greek, there's a little particle called g, which gives the passages peculiar emphasis. Literally, it screams out, God for us. God for us. And now he talks about the proof. Here's the proof. He who did not spare his own son, but delivered him over for us all, how will he not also with him freely give us all things? How can he not? He spared not.

What that word shows is the infinite price of redemption. What did it cost God to do to glorify you? It cost him the most prized thing he had, which was his son, and he gave him over as the price of redemption to get you, to buy you out of the realm of sin. The measureless, unconquerable, is that the, I said, yeah, I guess that's what, love of God that would not be stopped at such frightful cost.

Didn't stop him. His own. His own, idios, one's own particular private possession. Take your most private possession, whatever or whoever it is, would you do this? Would you not spare your own son or your prized possession? Our Lord is the Father's very own private possession, infinitely dear to Him.

He delivered them up. We remember the same word in Romans chapter 4, 25, where he says he delivered them up for our trespasses. We know why, but unto what did he deliver them? When you think about it, you read about what the Lord Jesus went through, he went through mockings, people spit on him, they scourged him, they beat him up, and they crucified him. And all these by the men that he loved and to the awful cup of wrath that the fathers put on him at his hand where he turned away from him because he was made sin, the thing sin.

Yet God spared not his own son. So who are we as saints? You know, we are called saints that are part ones for God. We're just sinners who've heard the good news now concerning his son, and we simply believed it. That's the only requirement from God's side, just simply to believe him. Unbelief is a fearful gulf between the infinitely holy God and the awful guilt of the sinner, and it shrinks back. If you're living like Adam did in unbelief, what's the first thing you do? You go hide. You go hide. But God searches you out.

While faith, seeing Christ crucified, cries, God is for me, and passes gladly over the bridge God made, who spared not his own son, how shall he not also with him freely give us all things? The great gift, the unspeakable gift being made, all must follow.

How shall he not with him? When we studied Romans five, we went through this section called the much mores. God has not spared his son. What are all else to him? The point being this. He did the greatest thing. He did the best thing. Would he not also give you the lesser thing? That's the thinking behind this question. If he did the thing by giving his son, would he not listen to you when you solicited him in prayer and asked him? Sure he would.

All things from Miles Stanford. And I like this because it puts it in the perspective of taking the all things out of the realm of my desires that probably don't match up with his. I think that we are sometimes ready to say to the Lord, could you not have taught me without subjecting me to so much sorrow and humiliation? I can't tell you how many times I've said that to the Lord. This isn't right. This isn't the way. I planned it. The answer I've had is you could not be effectively taught in any other way.

The Lord knows the nature of the obstacle in me, which he has to overcome. A less efficient hand might think it could be dealt with in some easier way. All becomes the joy of knowing him more fully in the fires. Plus the Spirit's regulated and interspersed deliverances, deliverance and victories, answers to faith and prayer. continual progress in knowing the Lord Jesus and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of his sufferings. What God is after is to create in our heart a desire that won't go away that says I must know Christ.

I wanna know him and I don't care what it costs. I want to know him and why? Because he's glorified. I want to know him because God wants me to know him. So in closing today, I was looking at William Newell's things after Romans six, which he quotes, gracious souls discover. And I guess I've quoted these a lot of times because maybe they just make sense to me. He says, to hope to be better is to fail to see yourself in Christ only. Whoops. To be disappointed in yourself is to have believed in yourself. To be discouraged is unbelief. as to the Father's purpose and plan of blessing for you. God's purpose and plan of blessing for you is to glorify you with Christ.

To be proud is to be blind, for we have no standing before God and ourselves. The lack of divine blessing, therefore, comes from unbelief and not from failure of devotion. Real devotion to the Father arises not from man's will to show it, but from the discovery that blessing has been received from him while we were yet unworthy and undevoted. To preach devotion first and blessing second is to reverse God's order. and to preach law, not grace. The law made man's blessing dependent on devotion. Grace confers undeserved, unconditional blessing. Our devotion may follow, but it does not always do so in proper measure.

So when you consider what God has already done, that he called us and he purposed in us that we would be glorified with his son. When you start thinking about all of these other things that somehow go against the glory of God, they pale in comparison. So let's close. Father, how we do thank you today your plan for each one of us to make us like Christ, to conform us to his very image, to share in his glory. It's incredible for us to just entertain such a thought, but you tell us over and over, and we rest in the fact that you mean what you say, and we trust you, and we believe you, and we thank you, and we pray in your son's precious name, amen.