The Ministry of the Holy Spirit in Prayer

One verse today, and it's not because you're slow learners. It's just such a great verse that it takes some focus to get your arms around what God is doing. So I wanna start with different versions of this verse. And you'll see in a minute why they matter.

The New American Standard says that we know that God causes all things to work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to his purpose. The New King James says that we know all things work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to their purpose. You see the difference? The difference is what's the subject of the sentence?

Or the Weymouth says, now we know that for those who love God, all things are working together for good. For those, I mean, whom we, with deliberate purpose, he has called. And Kenneth Weiss does it, I think, even better. He says, and we know that with absolute knowledge, that for those who are loving God, all things are working together, resulting in good, for those who are called according to his purpose.

So, it's interesting, why would all these different translations actually say a different thing? Because they do. New American Standard says a different thing than King James does. And so, this is my first attempt at a diagram. So, if you had the diagram, you could say, if you said, you know, an ordinary sentence has a subject, a verb, and a direct object. If the subject was all things, working together for good. Well, if you study the Greek a little bit, you find out that really the subject of this sentence should be God. And the reason is is because God and together are singular, and all things are plural, and the subject and the verb have to match in terms of number.

You translate Romans 8.28 correctly in the King James users, the issue centers on the words all things work together. And those four words are actually two Greek words.

The word for all things is panta. Its form is neuter plural. This means it could be either the subject or the direct object. Am I lost already? No. Because the verb is works. The verb is synagre, I can't pronounce it, which is present singular and thus he, she, or it works together. There has to be a singular person or a singular he, she, or it in the subject line.

So God works all things together. So does the writer of King James, Not know what they're translating, no. I think that if you looked at it, maybe they didn't study English grammar, I don't know. But it isn't that all things work together just because they work together. There has to be something or someone behind the things working.

And so the best translation, the subject is he, and it's a reference to God. and it makes punta, panta, all things, the object of the verb. Thus, our translation should read, we know he works all things together for good. We know that. So the point is that God is the one who can, and as a matter of fact, does work all circumstances together for the good of his children. It teaches us the personal involvement of God in the lives of his children. Some Greek texts actually have the word God in them, serving as the subject of the verb. They would read God works all things together. What's interesting is, you know, we have a aging population here, and we're all have some sort of medical thing going on.

And how many times do you wake up in the morning and it's like, is God working that? Is that one of those things? Can you ever say, well, that one thing, God isn't working out, you know? Because I don't feel it. Or like Donna said to me, maybe this morning, she says, you ever notice that when you can be walking in the spirit and things are fine and then some pain hits you and right away you get self-centered about it? Because it's my pain, you know, it's all about me. But if you understand, that it is God who works all things together for good, it begins to change your focus. And your focus has the idea of, the context is, we live in a world of sin and suffering. That's a given.

Romans 8.18 says, the sufferings of this present time. You know, I don't know anybody my age that doesn't suffer somehow physically. Everybody suffers. No matter how old or how young you are, there's something going on that causes them to suffer. Verse 20 speaks about the whole creation is subjected to futility. It just isn't working out like it was designed. 8.22 says there's a lot of groaning in the creation. a lot of groaning in believers. And it talks about the Holy Spirit.

These verses really are a transitional link from the work of the Spirit in us to the bold challenge and the conclusion of chapter, of this chapter 31 and 32. The challenge is this, if God is for us, who can be against us? It's kind of one of those, oh, I kind of conclude, no, it's a challenge. If God is for me, is there anybody that can thwart that? And the answer is no, no. So, look at the chain of thought here.

First, There's a reference in the opening words to the previous clause which traced the value and comfort of the Spirit in helping our infirmity, because we didn't know how to pray like we should. For he, when we know not what to pray for as we should, he comes along and he intercedes for us with unutterable groanings according to God. He informs us what we should pray for accurately. Secondly, on the other hand, there are more intimately a groundwork that follows.

And the groundwork is, we know with absolute certainty. Notice in verse 26 and 27, we don't know. But when you get to 28, it starts out, it says, we do know. This isn't something we need to investigate. We already know. for the present and in a striking and connected manner, the purpose of God in this epistle. We know what it is. We know what to pray for. We don't know what to pray for as we should, but we do know with absolute knowledge that God works all things together for good. We know that. Every Christian knows that. That's the sense.

The chain of thought is therefore complete from his own purpose all the way to eternity. It starts now for eternity. And what's the end game here? What is God gonna do with everybody here? He's gonna glorify us. So everything that he does in your life personally is focused on that end, to glorify you with himself. John Darby said it really cool.

We've seen the spiritual man feeling according to God the burden of corruption on creation, but not knowing what to ask as a remedy, Yet if we do not know what to ask for, we don't know that for those that love God, all things work together for good, even to those who are called according to his purpose. For we have now brought before us, not the state or the condition that we're in, things through sin, but the purpose of God as regards to the objects of that purpose.

You're the object. In the midst of the state of things and bringing them to glory. So it's important, I think, for us to have in mind that where we're going and who's gonna, maybe put it this way, who's gonna get us there? It isn't you. You couldn't save yourself, let alone get yourself the glory. So here comes the Lord with a distinct purpose, which we'll talk about in a second.

And he says, I have a purpose for you, it's to glorify you, and I'm gonna work every single minute detail in your life for that purpose. No matter how you view it, no matter if you understand it or not, I'm telling you, and you know, this is what I'm doing. It's like trying to tell my son sometimes, this is what I'm doing. He's, yeah, Dad.

And we know with absolute knowledge that all things work together, resulting in good. We know. We know for certain. Not experience. How do you know it? Number one, God's word said it. And for a lot of believers, that's enough. For a lot of other believers, that isn't enough. They need to have verification. They need to feel it. They need to have an experience.

Oh, I know it's true because this happened in my life. We know it and are absolutely sure of it only because God said it and the Spirit of God confirmed it in you that it's true. So you live by faith. If you take this apart, the ones, who are these ones? There's a definite article. These particular certain ones. The loving ones. The ones doing the loving right now. That's you.

God. identify who God is, masculine, singular, and all things are plural. So what do we know? We know that we are the loving ones of God, and we'll see how that works in a second, and that all things work together for good because we love him, because we belong to him.

He works together, everything, everything, to get it, to show us that he's got a goal in mind. And boy, I hate, the word goal isn't good enough. You know, goals can be achieved or not. When God says this is what I'm gonna do, he means it, and it is gonna happen.

So, this word know, again, to know for certain, we know, without experience, we know with absolute knowledge. The familiar verse starts with the words we know. Paul used this expression over two dozen times, and when you see that expression and you start reading through Paul's epistles, he's gonna say things every once in a while, well we know, we know, It expresses a truth that's well known amongst believers, that they all know. We all know for sure that salvation is by faith in the person and work of Christ.

We don't have to be taught that, we already know that. John writes in his epistle, we know that the Son of God has come and has given us understanding that we know him, that is true. and we are in him, that is true. Even his son, Jesus Christ. This is the true God and eternal life. We know those things.

We don't have to be taught them. We don't go to Sunday school to learn what John writes here. We already know that because somebody early on taught it to us and we believed it. Believers are traveling to glory along with a blessed company that can say, we know, in an infinitely higher and surer sense.

I've noticed here since I've been here over the years that when you sit down with someone and say, you know, I have a problem, if they're biblically sound, you know what they're gonna say to you? Well, we know. Let's go in God's word and take a look and see what he says about that. And you know, invariably it's, we know this, right? We know this, yep, we know that. So you can trust God. We know we can trust him. So, now, what do we know?

That all things work together for good. Well, now you gotta find out what good is. Good is an interesting concept. You can't define it by what you think good is. You have to define it by what God defines it. It's not as humanity defines it. Because we may think good is the fact that we live in America. Or good is the fact that our opponents aren't gonna win, I'm gonna win. Or good is because I have a great family. Whatever it is that's earthly bound, good is I got a new car. That's how we define good in terms of things. The expression for good indicates the direction God takes all events. He has a direction. God is the only source of absolute good.

So again, it comes back to what we were talking about in Sunday school. One of the principles of grace is that we study. Why don't we study so we can find out, so that we can say we know? We study so that we can understand what God's goodness is, what he considers good. A non-believer would look at the cross of Christ and think it was a travesty.

To us, it is the most marvelous thing ever because it solved our problem. So God must be the definer of what good is. Dark things, bright things, happy things, sad things, sweet things, bitter things, times of prosperity, times of adversity. William Newell, he got them pretty much covered in that sentence.

Scripture is the only place that can tell us what good is and what it's not. So the word of God not only communicates to us the solutions to human problems, but it tells us in great detail precisely what those problems are. The last thing we ever want to sit down and talk about is our sins. But the Bible talks about them, and in precise detail, it lays them out.

It also gives you the solution, and it gives you the direction in where we're going. When we reflect on the innumerable things about us, forces seen and unseen, of the material, vegetable, animal worlds of man at enmity with God, anybody who doesn't understand what's really going on in the world needs to understand that man, in general, outside of the body of Christ, is at enmity with God. They're irreconcilable enemies. of Satan and his principalities and powers, in the uncertainty and even treachery of those near and dear to us. How many times in your life have you been betrayed? I've been betrayed a lot. I'm sure I've betrayed some of you. Our sin nature's just, you know, it's always hooray for me, always. I'll sprinkle a little of holy water on it so Bob can not look at it very closely.

Even the professed Christians, even them, and then ourselves, which we cannot trust for a minute. upon our unredeemed bodies, upon our general, complete helplessness to live this life that we've been called to live. Then God comes to us and says, hey, I'm working all things together for your good. In the middle of all that, I'm working all things together for your good. It reveals to us a divine providence that's absolutely limitless. In some of the circumstances we find ourselves in, I mean, I know in a time or two, I've said to God, how are you gonna get me out of this?

And this first comes back, well, I got this. I'm working together for good. All of these things, I'm working together, because I have a purpose. You've seen this before. Why do, All things work together for good to those believing lovers of God. So the question is always, why do I love God? Start at the top. God's grace, his love for us. We, hold on a second.

One John 4.10 tells us, and this is love, not that we love God, but that he loved us and sent his son to be the propitiation or satisfaction for our sins and moving down the results of God's grace is that we love him because he first loved us. As a result of his love and grace, we love him. When John 4, 19 says we love because he first loved us, to them that love God, John tells us in this epistle. That's why we love God, because he first loved us, not because you cooked it up. and then moving to the bottom of the circle, our obedience to him as a result of loving us, we will obey.

John 14, 21, he who has my commandments and keeps them is the one who loves me. Now, you and I don't live under commandments, the Mosaic law, but we do live under the principles of grace. And the principles of grace call us to a life that's impossible for us to live.

So what do we find out, how am I gonna do this? Well, I love God because he first loved me, and I want to obey him because I love him because he first loved me. Lord, you're gonna have to work this out. You're gonna have to put, and then he says, okay, I will cause you to will and to do of my good pleasure. Okay. And then he rewards me. John 14, 21, he who has my commandments and keeps them is the one who loves me and he who loves me will be loved of my father and I will love him and I will disclose myself to him. You know, we'd love to talk about the Bema Judge and all these wonderful things are gonna happen. You know, the biggest thing is the disclosure of the Lord Jesus right here, face to face. He's the prize. It isn't what he can do, it's him.

So when you make, when the circle is complete, we really realize that God loves me and I love him back because of that. And that I'm willing to obey him because I love him. And oh, by the way, he's gonna reward me for something he did. Typical of God. That's the way he operates.

So you can't work up love for God. But his redeeming love for us, believed in, becomes this eternal cause and spring of our love for God. I find it interesting how in conversations with people, where in that conversation is the love of God? Where in your prayer life do you just tell God you love him? And you recognize that even to say that, he loved you first. Oops, it doesn't help when you turn this upside down. I'm trying to punch it, it doesn't work.

So, we know that God causes all things to work together for good to those who love God, to those who are the called according to his purpose. And this is interesting because the called are not just people who are invited. There is an outward general call to salvation which is made to everyone who hears the gospel. God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son that whosoever, the call goes out to everybody, will, can believe on him and be saved. But then there's the Holy Spirit. who extends to the elect a special inward call that inevitably brings that person to salvation, you wouldn't come if you weren't called like that.

The external call, which is made to all without distinction, can be and often is rejected. We all know people that we really love and care about who have rejected the gospel. Whereas the internal call, which is made only to the elect, cannot be rejected. It always results in a conversion.

I remember Miles Stanford, we were talking about this subject one day. And I said, well, Miles, how do you balance this out? He said, well, it's kind of like this. You're walking down the road into glory and there's this big sign over heaven. And on the front of the sign it says, whosoever will may come. But when you walk through the gate and turn around and look at the back of the sign, you know what it says? Chosen from the foundations of eternity.

Still, my mind doesn't grasp that the way it probably should, but I do know this, that if God didn't choose me and choose you, we wouldn't have come. If he didn't choose one, there none would have come. None. Because you don't come to Christ because you all of a sudden got smart.

You come to Christ because the Spirit of God gives you the call specifically to you and you can't resist it. I think that's terrific, I'm glad. I would much rather trust God with that than myself. By means of the special call, the spirits irresistibly draw sinners to Christ.

Some of you that were saved as adults recognize that you were probably a bigger sinner than the kids you knew in kindergarten. He's not limited to his work of applying salvation by man's will. God wouldn't be sovereign if your salvation depended on your will, if he was limited by that. Nor is he dependent upon man's cooperation for success.

The Spirit graciously causes the elect center to cooperate, to believe, to have a change of mind, to come freely and willingly to Christ. I got saved at 35, that makes all kinds of sense in me. But I taught Sunday school for so many years with the little guys and I was pretty careful about when we got, when one of them said to me, well I wanna give my life to Christ. It made me be very cautious and careful about what they believed. And I wouldn't let any of this nonsense about receive Jesus into your heart and all that other contemporary stuff. The issue is who Christ is and what he did for you.

And it was always clear. I remember with Emoryn talking to her about it. She had it clear. She knew. And how old was she when she was baptized? Eight, nine, something like that? So kids know, kids know, and all the rest of this nonsense that you see about what salvation is is repenting and changing your mind and receiving Jesus into your heart and confessing. That's not what it is. It's believing who Christ is and what he did.

God's grace, therefore, is invincible. It never fails to result in the salvation of those who it's extended to. Miles Stanford said, God conducts his purposes in sovereignty of his mercy and love. If he did not do so, they would most certainly fail completely, man being what he is.

But the work of God is a moral one and he addresses himself to the conscience and the heart of his poor fallen creature and deals with him in a thousand ways which recognize his responsibility and awaken sense of it in his soul. Charles Coates says we cannot mentally reconcile sovereignty and responsibility and I agree with that. But we can spiritually. as seeing that the maintenance of both is essential. The Spirit alone can maintain the right balance of the two in our thoughts, and I'm sure as we go on we learn to attach the true value to each. neither letting ourselves off easily by enfeebling the thought of responsibility, nor stopping short of the depth of holy self-judgment that casts us all together upon the sovereign mercy and love of our Father. The Spirit of God does that. He does both of those.

Lewis Barry Chafer said to Ephesians 1-4, He, the Father, has chosen us in Him, the Son, before the foundation of the world. The will of man is guided by what he knows and what he desires. The divine method of reaching the will is by graciously increasing man's knowledge and by stimulating his desires.

While on the divine side of this method, there remains not the shadow of possible failure. The end is as certain as any eternal reality in God. On the human side, man is conscious of doing only what he actually does. He chooses an act of his own volition to receive the grace of God, the grace of God offers in Christ Jesus. By persuasion and enlightenment, God realizes his purpose to the point of infinite completeness.

Yet no human will has ever been coerced nor ever will be. That is really, explains it as simply as I could find. So, being predestined according to the purpose of him who works all things together in the counsel of his own will. As I said before, call here does not mean invited, as in Proverbs, for instance, unto you, O man, I call. For this would be an appeal to man's will instead of a description of those who are objects of God's will and purpose.

So called in Romans 8.28 is illustrated in 1 Corinthians 1.24 where Christ crucified is declared to be a stumbling block to the Jew, to people whose thought was religion, and foolishness to Greeks, those whose life lay in philosophy. First Corinthians 124 says, but to those who are the called, both Jew and Gentile, Christ is the power of God and the wisdom of God. So they're called according to God's purpose.

It's a good thing it says purpose. Have you ever had that thought? Lord, it's a good thing that you're doing all this, because if it was left up to me, I'm in big trouble. Purpose. Purpose means an intelligent decision which the will is determined to accomplish. The Greek word prothesis is used 12 times in the New Testament, this word purpose. And there must be a lot of other words translated purpose, because I see it everywhere in the New Testament.

As to man, the word indicates what he is entirely unable to carry through, as in Acts 27.13.

When a moderate south wind came up and supposing that they had attained their purpose, they weighed anchor and began sailing along Crete, close to the shore. They thought they had it wired. What happened to the boat? It wrecked, but their purpose was good, but the boat wrecked.

In believers, their purpose is carried out by divine grace, even though we have lots and lots of human failures. In 2 Timothy 3.10, Paul refers to Timothy in the manner, life, and purpose, and faith. which Paul has shown at Ephesus, but as he says, by the grace of God, I am who I am.

Raise your hand if you live like that. By the grace of God, I am who I am. What the word of God tells you you are. and what you have and where you are is only by grace. There's not one single thing that you can stand before God and say, well, you got 99, I got this one. No. All of it is by his grace alone, his unmerited favor. So God's word displays The believer from two viewpoints, Chester McCauley, from the human side, Paul is looking at those who love God. From the divine side, they are those who are called according to his purpose.

The word purpose here is important for a couple of reasons. First, it is the key to the following verses that tell us what that purpose is, and for the next two Sundays after this, that's all we're gonna be talking about in the next four or five verses. What was God's purpose in the calling? What is the after? The second, its meaning is very clear. It means a thought or a plan before a preselected purpose, a perfect design. I know sometimes I wake up and think, I don't get this perfect design business because it isn't going too well.

But the stress of the verb in Romans 28 is the divine ability to take a multitude of events, blend them into something that is called God's purpose or good purpose. in the fullest sense of the word. So God takes what looks like a morass to us, and all of these tangents and all these things that are working out, and he brings them all together, and he's working towards this one goal. God takes all the events of life and blends them into something very beautiful.

In closing, I want you to understand how important this is to you and me. If I understand this, we will view all the events of our life in a unique way. His sovereign ability to do this becomes a source of stability for us and assurance no matter what comes our way.

One of the things that we old people think about is we get to go home soon. All my friends who are not believers, you know what they think about? Dying. Going home and dying aren't the same thing. This does not mean, of course, that when we sin, God will cancel consequences of our actions. I know you were hoping that's not gonna happen.

The believer who doesn't understand and believe this, this truth, can only behold the unpleasant, irksome, and often unhappy events of life and display all kinds of human viewpoints, responses, reactions, that destroy all possibility of God's goal, which is Christlikeness. The instructed believer, on the other hand, sees the same unpleasant events, and yet beholds the master's hand of God in them. They are all viewed as part of the good and gracious plan of God's design to make believers like himself.

Now, that purpose is not merely express divine desire, but a fixed and a vast will. God made this decision. that itself subordinates necessarily all things, submerge all opposition, affects its object. God's purpose in regard to the called, his elect, arises out of his desire, as well as being according to his infinite wisdom. God is love and acts according to that nature. Out of his infinite holy desire arose his purpose. If you reverse the order, you have a God of the fatalist and not of the Bible.

Let's close. Father, how we thank you for the grace that you have extended to us, that we live under. I think it takes us a while sometimes, and you must teach us your plan and how we're to pray, but we do know some things. And we do know that you have an end in mind for us. And we're thankful for that. And we also know that you work every single minute detail in our life to carry out this loving purpose that you have for us. We're thankful, dear Father, and we pray in your son's name, amen.