Christ Life In Us Rom 8:37-39 The Love of God, which is in Christ Jesus Our Lord

Well, good morning. Well, I have the privilege of doing the last three verses in chapter 8 today. All right, so the very last sentence in verse 39 of chapter 8 is this sentence, the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord. You know, you look at that and you think, wow, it doesn't seem like it gives us a whole lot of new information. But the more you look at that, I think the more you realize that this is telling us the truth about the God that we worship.

We have one God in three persons. And, you know, we struggle with that. It's a hard... But what this is going to tell us is that everything... And Christ said this many times. He only did what he sees the Father doing. Jesus Christ cannot act outside of God's love is basically what this verse is telling us. We'll see a lot more.

So here's my attempt at trying to capture this idea. And being an engineer, I like diagrams. So this idea of being in Christ. So what does that mean? What does it mean to be in Christ? If I say I'm in this auditorium, you say, okay, you're inside a building, right? So what does it mean to be inside a person? Because God is a person. He tells us he's a person. Father is a person, the Son is a person, the Holy Spirit is a person.

So this says the love of God is in Christ Jesus. So taking the idea, if you take Christ Jesus as being this circle, that's all that Christ Jesus is. Not that I can, I should have an infinite circle if I was doing this right. So Christ Jesus, and it says that God's love is contained totally within Christ Jesus. And that's an amazing thing, because what it's going to tell us is, people say, the Bible never teaches that Jesus Christ is God. But you begin to read the details, and you say, well, wait a minute. This verse alone tells us that all of God's love is contained totally within Jesus Christ, or within Christ Jesus. Just an amazing statement.

And the Greek word is this word, ien, it's in union with. So God's love is in union with Jesus Christ. And you also could say, the love of God is in a living union with Christ, and Christ can never be outside of God's love. All of Jesus Christ and all of God's love are there simultaneously, 24-7.

He never acts outside of that. It's interesting that this is a closing statement in Romans 8, this statement. So actually we're going to see, we're going to back up, we're going to see that he kind of gives us more detail about that. But just an amazing statement that God's love, and we're going to see God's love is talked about as contained in other things, but Jesus Christ contains all of God's love. So no one can ever say Jesus Christ is not God. He is all of God, all of his love, all of his attributes.

Okay, with that in mind, for background, actually Mike kind of covered this last week a little bit. There are some questions, I'll just put them all up there, like three questions that are presented in 31, 33, and 35 versus 831, 833, and 835. So the three questions, Mike covered two of them last week. So the first question is, what shall we say to these things, or all of this? And what he's referring to, he presents a list of tragedies, you'd say, or trials, or impossible situations for the Christian, and he says, you know something?

That's not gonna affect you one bit. And so he answers that question, and Mike talked about it a little bit last week. And then he comes down to 33, and he says, And remember, this is kind of a rhetorical kind of thing. He puts like a straw man up, if you will.

He says, who can bring a charge against God's elect? Since God created all things, has created everything in the universe, is there anything more powerful than God that can bring a charge against anything that God has done or wants to do? And the implied answer is no. And then lastly, for ours, speaking of this wonderful love of Christ, He says, another kind of rhetorical question, who will separate us from the love of Christ? Or some manuscripts have the love of God. So what he's trying to point out is here, he's going to have a list of things that by human standards we'd say, that's terrible. This person suffered. He died. He starved to death. He was beaten to death.

And many Christians were historically, we live in a pretty unusual age. when we can come here and worship on Sunday, and nobody really comes after us. But there were time periods when you couldn't do this. And actually, our brother Miles, who lived in Canada during COVID, they could not assemble. The government said you will not assemble in churches, period.

If you do, I'm not sure how they enforced it, but they said that. So, I mean, it can happen. They can say, well, you can't be here, or you'll suffer consequences. So Paul's going to go through this list. He actually has two lists he's going to go through, and we'll cover both of them. He'll talk about things that are things that man, we can't control, but God can control. And he's going to say, you know, those things cannot affect you.

They can never separate you from my love. my love in Christ Jesus, they can't do it. So here's some other thoughts about that last statement. So Merriman says you could rephrase that last statement, who will make Christ stop loving us? So he's, another thing is this like this rhetorical kind of thing you're saying, can you think of anything that can cause Christ to stop loving us? And the answer is no, you can't. Who is, In this case, who is speaking and possibly an event, a traumatic event or a person that causes you this problem? Is there something that's going to happen to you to separate you from the love of Christ?

And the implied answer is no. So Paul will then make three more statements in the last three verses here, three emphatic statements about this impossibility of you being separated from Christ's love. Okay, here they are. The first statement is, Paul's gonna list these overwhelming experiences, and Mike went through them last week, I'm gonna go through them briefly again, that could happen to a believer, but they will not separate him from the love of God.

The next, he will assure us about God's love because of our wonderful union with Christ and his conquering power. And then thirdly, Paul's gonna tell us of our absolute assurance in Christ over all adversaries. There's not one single adversary out there over any created thing. So he's gonna basically shut the door on any possibilities that something can change your position in Christ.

And you can kind of think about this. If you're back maybe in the first century and you're a believer, and you're running for your life, so to speak, you have no food, no clothing. We see in the description of Paul's life, He didn't have an easy life, right? He was beaten numerous times. He had no clothing. He spent day and night out in the wilderness. He had no food for many times. So he had a life that was constantly being chased.

But what Paul's presenting here is that even though we have those adversaries against us, our future is secure in Christ Jesus. Okay, so today's verses, I'm gonna kind of build up to this, I'm gonna go back to last week first. So last week, we had one of these questions is, who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will tribulation, distress, persecution, famine, nakedness, peril, or the sword?

Just as it is written, for your sake, we are being put to death all day long, we are considered as sheep to be slaughtered. What's interesting is you look at that verse, there's 36, then 37 comes along, and it says, and you have to kind of scratch your head for a second, then it says, oh, by the way, you're overwhelming more than conquerors to them who loved us. And you say, well, wait a minute, you just told me, you just told me, verse 36 says, and it's a quote from the Psalms, it says, for your sake, for God's sake, speaking of Israel, you're being put to death all the day long.

That doesn't sound like I'm much of a conqueror, right? I'm being put to death? You're considered as sheep for the slaughter? You know, God's thought process and man's thought process are diametrically opposed many times from scripture. We say, well, I can't think that way, Lord. I'm being hunted down. I'm naked. I'm persecuted. But you're telling me I'm more than a conqueror? And he says, yes, I am. And so this is Newell's comment to this. Wow, that was great. He said, what a wonderful book is the Word of God, the Bible.

Sheep for the slaughter, name themselves as more than conquerors. I'm going to be slaughtered, but I'm more than conquerors. You say, are you got something loose in your brain? Are you deranged? And actually, Christians are deranged because we have put our faith totally in the person and work of Jesus Christ, all our eggs are in one basket. If he is not truly God, we're fools. We're totally fools. But we're not fools. He says we're more than conquerors. So the Bible is an interesting book. A book that man would never write. Only God would write that book.

So my verses for today are the last three here. So Paul comes to a conclusion in these verses. He says, for I'm convinced. So we have this list one. That wasn't bad enough for list one. Here comes list two. He said, I'm convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other created things will be able, and here's the last phrase we have, will be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord." Pretty fitting closing to this little section of his word in Romans 8. Just an incredible section.

So let's kind of back up and we're going to go through this. So I want to start off with verse 37. I want to cover kind of the meat of the verse first. So if you look at this verse, You observe that the main subject and verb are we, are overwhelmingly conquerors. That's the main thought from this verse. So we, Paul includes himself, Paul says, I and all believers, those who put their faith and trust in Jesus Christ, are overwhelmingly conquerors.

And if you're kind of into, who's into sports shoes? Who has Nikes? Raise your hand. I had Nike running shoes. I know Mike had some. I had so many, I'd hate to tell you how many Nike shoes I had. I bought too many shoes. Anyway, everybody had a Nike. Well, Nike liked the idea of Nikeo, which is the last part of this. For instance, it's Hyper, Nikeo, Victory or Conqueror. That's where they got their trademark for their shoes.

Anyway, it's overwhelmingly conquerors to gain a surpassing victory, to utterly defeat our enemies. And its present tense, it says, and this is what's kind of opposite to our intuition, it says right now, 24-7, every believer in the Lord Jesus Christ is overwhelmingly conquerors.

So what you're gonna ask me is, well, why not I'm just slaying those dragons left and right? All those bad guys out there, I'm just, you know, But he looks at the big picture. He looks at the big picture. It's eternity that he's concerned about. That's his view. God's view is eternity.

It says we are hyper-conquerors. We're coming off as conquerors in every difficulty. It may not seem, and this is, once again, it doesn't seem that way. It doesn't seem like we have the victory. When we, maybe we share quietly about the Lord Jesus, and someone says, I think that's trash. There's no God. No, he doesn't exist. We carry on, we believe that there is.

It says, we are to know that the divine, therefore infinite power, has been engaged for us in conflict. And then what's cool is, you know, why are we conquerors? How can we be conquerors? It's only because our Savior is a conqueror. And that word is used of the Lord Jesus. In John 16, 33, it says, in the world you'll have tribulation, but take courage, I, Jesus, have overcome to KO the world. So Jesus is a conqueror. We're in Christ, so we're a conqueror too.

And once again, it's not, don't think that Christians have any, as was pointed out by Jim, we don't have any ability to be conquerors. We bring, in the balance wheel of what we bring, we bring zero to the table. Christ brings it all. We bring zero. We bring our faith. We bring nothing. We are overwhelmingly conquerors through ourselves, through Him who loved us. It's not through any human energy of any kind that we're more than conquerors. Okay, so that's the last part of verse 37. So then the first part of verse 37 is this list of things we talked about.

So here's this list of things that would give you a bad, you'd have a bad day if you had all these happen at the same time, right? Seven overwhelming events. Tribulation. The first two remind me of the Star Wars, you know, Trash compactor, you guys are always smiling, the trash compactor, you guys are familiar with when, who are the stars in Star Wars, Luke and I don't know, the rest of the gang, you know, it starts to come in, it's squashing in like, and it's gonna squash in like that. Well these first two words talk about that, tribulation, this pressing, and this narrowing, that place got narrower and narrower, pretty soon, you know, That's what those words talk about, this tribulation and distress. Persecution by your enemies. Famine, want of food is spoken of. Paul talked about this a lot. He went without food many times. Nakedness, you didn't have enough clothes, you're freezing to death without proper clothing. And peril, you're in danger constantly, your life is in danger on the road many times. and you're constantly in danger of the sword. I was thinking, well, we don't have swords too much, but that's kind of come back in vogue now, right? People are stabbing each other. In our world now, you go on a train, people stab each other, kill each other. I mean, you know, it's a bad place out there, right? It's an awful, terrible place out there.

Life has not changed from when Scripture was written. All these seven difficulties are there. But it says we're overwhelmingly more than conquerors, because God's not just looking at This life here, he's looking at the eternal scene. Where will we be with him? We'll be with him in glory. This is our earthly scene. The eternal scene is what he's looking at.

Okay. So this last sentence is one long sentence in the text. It says, for I'm convinced, and here's our second list, right? That neither death nor life nor angels nor principalities nor things present nor things to come no powers, no height or depth, I may have switched something there, nor any other creative thing will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus. So a couple observations.

This seems to be an additional list added on to the previous list of these overwhelming events. And then lastly, he ends it up here, this list, he says, oh by the way, There's nothing that was ever created by God that can ever separate you from my love. And there's a scripture that talks about plucking you out of God's hand. You can't be taken out of God's hand. That's a beautiful picture.

Okay, so let's look at this. So here's my pictorial representation of 38 and 39. If you've been around for a while, this is something I like to do. If you don't like this, I'm sorry. Anyway, here we go. So I'm going to take the verse and just put it, I like bubbles and diagrams and stuff. So here we go. For, or indeed you could say, I am convinced. So Paul is convinced. And then we have our list.

Death, life, angels, principalities, things present, things to come, powers, height, depth, or any created thing. This long list of things will be able, It's future tense. They can't, in some time in the future, affect us. They don't have the power. Any of these distresses have no power over you to separate us. You can't depart from that. You can't be pulled apart from that.

From the love of God, this love comes from God as a source, and it's in Christ Jesus, our Lord. This is the love. This love is our union with our living Savior. So that's kind of a pictorial representation of that last two long sentences at the end there. So let's just look at the details here. And there's some neat things to see here. This convince is a pretty strong convince. This isn't just like, let's say, I'm trying to think of something that may be white.

You're convinced that chocolate ice cream is better than vanilla ice cream. How strong are you convinced that chocolate is better than vanilla? Are you really convinced? Do you put a thousand dollars on that, a million dollars on that? I don't know, I'm being kind of silly here, but this is a super strong, Paul is really convinced.

And it's perfect tense. So he was convinced in the past. God convinced him in the past. And this is a critical situation here. We're going to see, this is how God operates. How did Paul get convinced? Keep that in your mind. How was Paul convinced that this long list of things would not harm him? He couldn't be set. How did he come to that conclusion? Did he just all of a sudden wake up one night and said, Eureka, I'm convinced. Did it happen that way? How did that happen?

We're going to see that. He said, I found it. He's not searching anymore. He's settled about his conclusion. And the effect is still with me. I'm convinced. And you cannot budge me. You cannot change my mind. I don't care how long you talk. I will not relent. I am convinced about this. This is the most strong way you can say I'm convinced about a particular thing. So how did he get to that point? So here's the secret. You guys all know it.

In fact, there's not a person in this room, hopefully, you all were convinced at some point in your life, you wouldn't be sitting in this room, you wouldn't be a believer if God hadn't done this to you. So what happens is, passive voice. So what does passive voice mean? God takes his word, his holy word, and that word, he says, can convince you about who I am. He said, I don't care what you think I am. I don't care what, you can talk to all the scientists in the world.

In fact, actually, there's a, I don't know whether you watch YouTube a little bit. There's a whole revolution in science about the earth. They decided that it started at a point in time. It wasn't millions of years ago. The scientists are relenting. Many scientists are changing their minds because the science shows it. It's amazing. Go to YouTube and take a look. Just a neat scientist out there. Anyway, that's a sidetrack. But anyway, subject. I, Paul, received the action of the verb. So Paul was convinced. Paul has been acted upon by something outside of himself. And what was that? No great mystery here. God's word has acted upon Paul about the truth of this verse.

And that's exactly what happens to every believer. It's not because we're the smartest cookie on the block, that we went to this school and that school. It's because His Word, via the Holy Spirit, has convinced us of our need for Him, that we're a sinner. We need the Lord Jesus. That's what's changed the equation. And that's what He says. His Word will not return to Him void. It's His Word that changes hearts, changes minds.

So Paul was convinced about this whole list that follows here, death, life, and so on, not by some super-intellectual exercise, but by the very fact of God's Word. And that's all of what Bible study is about. That's why we're here. That's why we come every week, is to be convinced by God's Word about who He is and what He's done.

Just amazing. Okay, so here's the things that he's convinced about. And he uses himself. He goes to I. I is implied here. I am convinced, so he includes himself, personalized, about this list. And he goes through the list. I'm going to try to go quickly here.

Death or life. It's sort of the two ends of the spectrum. Think about this. God will love us when we die. It's like we die and say, well, what's going to happen next? I'm going to float around for a while. No. It says, absent from the body, present with the Lord. We leave this life. What happens? Do we just go off into space somewhere? No. We're, in human terms, we're face-to-face with our Savior, with Jesus Christ. Face-to-face. Pros is that word in the Greek. Incredible thought. No condition exists that can separate us from God's love. That's the first thing. Death and life.

And here's these, I'll call the unholy trinity here, angels. This kind of implies, if you look in scripture many times, you'll see angels, principalities, and powers. And many times that speaks of fallen angels, Satan and others, principalities, which are maybe, I don't know, demons. They're all not good guys. They're the bad guys.

It says, you know, that's not going to separate you from God's love. No supernatural being can separate us from God's love. And it goes on. Things present, things right now, things to come. Something's going to happen down the road that's going to change the equation, so to speak. No, it's not going to happen. Nothing present or future can change God's love for us. No force of any kind can remove us from his loving care. nor height or depth. You can't go.

You go off to the moon. I'll fly off to the moon if I could. These days, actually, you can. Maybe you will be able to. Maybe we'll get to ride to the moon someday. Go to the moon, hang out there. Can you escape God there? No. What if you go to the depths of the sea? You can't escape Him there. Space cannot separate us from His loving care. I got most of these ideas. I didn't put all my notes in as well as I should. This is actually from Macaulay and from Newell, kind of a combination of those guys. And then lastly, nor any other created thing. So he kind of says, if I've forgotten, Paul says, if I've forgotten anything, there's nothing that God has created that can drive a wedge between you and God's love and His redeeming people.

Just this tremendous way he ends this section, just tremendous. Okay, so now the very last phrase here, we'll be able to separate us. So the idea here is, We'll have the power. There's no power that can drive a wedge or separate us from His love. It can't change our relationship to the love of God. It separates the idea to pull apart or sever. It's a middle voice, and it's for our benefit. It can't disturb that love that God has for us. So then we get down to the very last part here, from the love of God, which in Christ Jesus is our Lord. Okay, so this last part here, and this is kind of a repeat of it a bit.

The love of God in Christ Jesus, for that to be true, He must be God. For God's love to be in Christ Jesus, He must be God, and He is God. So is the Holy Spirit. It's all wrapped up God's love is all wrapped up in Jesus Christ. You think of all his work he has done with man. Everything relating to man involved his son dying, rising again. And then the Holy Spirit focusing on his son, the Lord Jesus Christ. For us to have God's love, we must have a relationship with Christ. And this is interesting. This is kind of another little trap you can fall into. And people, you know, good Bible students have realized this.

But, you know, God, have you ever heard the term, you know, it's kind of popular now, I'm not into Facebook. We have a Facebook, Bonnie has a Facebook account, which we never look at. Anyway, whatever. Have you ever heard the term, And it's popular among young people now. I'm in a relationship. They'll put in their Facebook page. I'm in a relationship with Sam or Joe or Sally or Susie. It means they're dating maybe. In the old part, it's I'm dating this girl or whatever. What's interesting is God tells us from his word that he has already established a relationship with every single person on the planet.

And you say, well, I never asked for that relationship. He never told me about that. God never told me about that. He's established a relationship with me. How dare Him do that? How dare the God who created me establish a relationship with me? Well, you know, He didn't ask you. He just did it. In eternity past, God the Father and God the Son said, I'm going to establish a relationship with man. I'm going to do it because I love him.

So you're in a relationship, whether you know the Lord Jesus or not, with Him. The question is, will you respond to that relationship? So I have about five or six verses here that all talk about His love. If you notice in these verses, God's love is a relationship, just like human love is. I respond, as I love someone, they love me. As a response to my love, I receive love back, even more so with God. So let's start off here. 1 John 4, 9.

So this is gonna tell us the nature of love. By this, the love of God was manifest. Kind of a big word, it means to be broadcast, to be opened up, to be displayed. By this, the love of God was shown to be in us, that God has sent his only begotten son into the world so that we might live through him. So how was his love shown to us? He showed us by sending his son so that we might live through him.

And this one kind of, this is more for believers. Because the love of God has been poured out within our hearts through the Holy Spirit who was given to us. Okay, the next page, pretty familiar verses. And then just a tremendous verse. So how was God's love displayed? How did God establish His love for us? For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son that whoever believes in Him shall not perish but have eternal life.

1 John 4.10, and this is love. This is the nature of love, he's saying. This is what love is about. Just look at this. Look at this.

It's not, you know, I hear people say, I need to clean my act up. Let me clean my act up a little bit, and then I'll be ready to love God. I gotta work on some stuff. I gotta work on some of these bad things in my life. Does that verse say that? He said, clean up your act, and then I'll love you. I'm waiting for you to clean up your act.

It doesn't say that. It says the opposite of that. It says, and this is love. Not that we love God. He's not waiting for us to love Him. Isn't that amazing? He's not waiting for us to love Him. It says, but He loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation or satisfaction for our sins. Totally different. Read the Bible the way it says. Read the real version.

411 beloved if God so loved us we also ought to love one another just follows from that and then lastly Why do we love Mike? This is Mike one Mike's favorite verses. I love it, too Why do we love you know I wake up one day? I'm gonna love God today. I'm it's a good day I love God no no no no no no no He loved us first if he doesn't love us first.

We can't love him anyway I think this is tremendous, and actually this is the end of chapter 8, and I couldn't stop. I wanted to go back and I thought, well we've spent a year and a half now, Mike and I, and Miles decided, well let's go back and let's look at Romans 6, 7, and 8. So I'm going to attempt in two charts to give you a summary of 6, 7, and 8.

Fortunately, I have some good help. I have some Bible students that help me. Kenneth Wiest is the main guy here. So this is from Kenneth Wiest. I'm going to survey the last year and a half. So if you missed the last year and a half, you weren't here, hang on to your seat. Here we go. OK. Here's a summary of 6, 7, and 8. And we titled it Christ's Life in Us. So we start off.

And Kenneth Weiss, he was a Greek scholar from Chicago, Moody Bible Institute. I think he was a mechanic, because he loves mechanics. He loves working things. He says, the mechanics of the believer's life are as follows. So you think, mechanics? Do I have like a wrench? Phil would love it, you know, a wrench. Sorry, Phil. OK, here's the mechanics, he says. OK. The mechanics are God's inner working in the believer's life. The very basics. What did God's basic work in a believer's life consist of? Christ is the sinner's substitute. He took our place, right? He was our substitute. When Vanya would go to the school, she was substitute. There's my substitute. Christ was our substitute.

But it's more than that. He also separated us from our sin nature and gave us this very life. So that's the inner workings we learn from chapter 6. And one of the key verses there was Romans 6, 11. Even so, consider, or I like reckon, you're an accountant. A picture of an accountant with a hat, the green hat, and he's writing down. Consider it, yourselves to be what? Dead to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus. Very deep, you know, a lot in there, but he says, you're dead. You're dead to the old sin nature from Adam. You can be alive to God. You can have my very life.

So we learn that in chapter six. But then we learned about the monkey wrench, back to the mechanical idea. The monkey wrench in the believer's life. So how can that go astray? You know what happens? You become a believer. You say, hey, I got this Christian life figured out. I know what to do. I'm going to go down to Larimer Square like Mike did. I'm going to witness down there. And that's a good thing. Nothing wrong with that. People need to hear about that.

But what happens is you begin to think that you're the key mover in all this. And you're not. The Lord Jesus Christ is the key mover. And things don't work as well. They slow down. They stop working. It prevents the Holy Spirit giving the believer victory over his sin nature. It has to be his life working through you. You can't do it. You bring zero. He presents it all. And some verses here. I actually left out a little part here, I realize. Vani was helping me and I cut one last part.

Anyway, Romans 7.18 says, for I know that nothing good dwells in me that is in my flesh, for the willing is present in me, but the doing of good is not should be in there.

Then Romans 7.24, wretched man that I am, who will set me free from this body of death?

So we learn there that we need Jesus Christ. He needs his very life. And so what did Jesus Christ do when he left? He talked about the Holy Spirit. And we learn that that's the dynamic of the Christian life. Chapter 8, all we've been studying in Chapter 8, talks about the Holy Spirit is the dynamic of the Christian life. He's a dynamic. He's a source of power. We just kind of like to, he's the operator, which might be a little bit of a push, you know, operator. You think of operators, I'm driving the train, I guess you could say that maybe.

The verse I like is when the Lord Jesus left and he said to his disciples, but when he, speaking of the Holy Spirit, comes, the Spirit of truth, he will guide you into all the truth, for he will not speak of his own initiative, but whatever he hears he will speak And He will disclose to you what is to come. So it's the Holy Spirit who's going to guide you, direct you. The Holy Spirit's not going to speak of Himself. He's going to speak of the Lord Jesus Christ.

So one last chart. One last chart. Okay. So I couldn't leave the topic of the Holy Spirit without a couple of little thoughts. Kind of repeating what we said before, he's a source of power in the Christian life. He's the operator. And just a couple of verses out of chapter 8 that occurred to me, the mindset. God talks about our mind. He's concerned with our mind. He wants a rational mind. He wants a mind that deals in facts, facts about himself. He says the mindset and the spirit is life and peace.

He says, however, you're not in the flesh but in the Spirit, since indeed the Spirit of God dwells in you. The Spirit Himself testifies with our spirit that we are children of God. And then one of my favorite ones from chapter 8, in the same way the Spirit, the Holy Spirit, helps our weakness, for we do not know how to pray as we should, but the Spirit Himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words.

Okay, so that's our quick summary of 6-7-8. Glad you guys were with us. Some were not. We have all the tapes from a year and a half, and we're going to start into Colossians next week. Miles is going to introduce us to Colossians, and we're going to start in that book next week. So let's pray.

Heavenly Father, we thank you so much, Lord. We thank you for your marvelous word, Lord. We thank you that your word is not like any human word given by man, even though it was penned by men that you guided, but it's a supernatural word that's promised to change our minds. We pray that your word would have its way, would convince us of, first of all, our need for you, and second of all, for a life that glorifies you as we allow you to live your life through us. We ask it in the Savior's name. Amen.