Romans 8:28

“And 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. 29 For those whom He foreknew, He also predestined to become conformed to the image of His Son, so that He would be the firstborn among many brethren; 30 and these whom He predestined, He also called; and these whom He called, He also justified; and these whom He justified, He also glorified. 31 What then shall we say to these things? If God is for us, who is against us? 32 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?”

Oh, how I love these verses.  I have found such comfort in them many, many times.  As I go through life, striving to follow God’s plan, I have found many joys and many sorrows.  Haven’t we all?  One day things seem as if they couldn’t be any better and the next we wonder how we will continue.

Life isn’t easy - Plain and simple.  Anyone who tells you otherwise is a liar.

Thankfully though, for the Christian, there is so much hope.

Romans 8:28 is one of the most beloved and far-reaching promises in the Bible, other than our promise of salvation, that I can think of. 

"And 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."

This guarantee more than any other in the Bible has helped me to put my trust in God when things seem like all hope is lost; when life will seem meaningless and the anguish and wickedness of this fallen world will seem like an ever rising tide of despair and sadness that will soon drown out even the slightest glint of happiness.  Hope!  That is what I find here.  Through all of the evil that I see – Hope in God and faith that His word has never failed me before.  I remember that his promises have always been kept from the beginning of time, so why would now be any different.  Although life may seem pointless, hopeless, and full of despair – I hold fast to “all things” and put my faith in the word of God – That the good, the bad, and the absolutely terrible will turn out for good.

When we turn on the TV, possibly look outside our own doors, or possibly right in our own homes, we see the wickedness of a world drenched in sin and the spoils of a people who aren't following Christ.  Why must it be SO hard to trust in our Father in times such as these?  It is so much easier to give up faith in this promise that God made to us.  How can children being killed, people dying of disease, communities that are destroyed by horrific natural disasters, men and women killing each other in battle, the world economy plummeting in desperation, and many other terrible events in both the public and private lives of every one of us be used for good?

I must say that I haven’t been able to find one person who can say just exactly how each one of these things can be used for good but I know one that does know… God knows.  These events and things weren't part of God’s original plan for humanity but sin brought them into the world.  When sin entered the world everything changed.  God doesn't find delight in these events any more than we do.  He grieves along with us.  He longs for the day that all will be made right again.  He has us in His hands and He is giving mercy and love just as He always has.  God is there.  God rejoices with us and weeps with us.  God is with us in the joys and the sorrows.  God is offering His promises still to anyone who is willing to accept them; His promises of salvation, reward, and yes – even His promise that He will use all things for the good of those that love Him.

Be careful not to mistake destiny for mere chance.  “All things work together for good,” does not mean that these “things” will simply work themselves out by some power of chance.  This is meaning that God will make all things work together for good.

Also, don’t mistake the ultimate outcome for the original circumstance.  God is working to bring about something that is good.  God isn’t just bringing good out of the “good” things but “all things.”  Paul wasn’t saying that “all things” are good.  The things I listed above are obviously not good things.  Paul is telling us that God promises to turn all things for the ultimate good for those who love Him.

Notice though that God does not put a time frame on this promise.  He does not say how he will work all things for good.  He does not say it will be good right now or that it will be good in a few weeks.  He does not say what kind of “good” this is.  I would say that each situation is indeed different and that God works in mysterious ways.  It isn’t always for us to know.  We may not know how, when, or even why but we can know for a certain fact that God WILL keep His promise.  We can also know that He will not do it on our time frame but His and when He does do it – it will be perfect.

Thank God for his promises!  Thank God for this promise!  I cannot begin to tell you the times that I have had to remind myself of this passage.  It isn’t always easy to do this.  It is so easy to get caught up in the noise of everything around us and because of that it becomes very easy to stop listening to God.  Many times we all need to just stop and listen to God.  Think about the situation and remember the promises that God has made us.

Now I want to take a different look at this.  I want to step away from the promise itself and instead focus on who the promise is made to.  Who did God promise that He would work all things for good? 

First of all, this promise wasn’t given to everyone.

All things do not work together for good for every person.  God does not say that He will turn all things around for good in everyone’s life.  This promise is given with two very important requirements.

1)      You must love God.

2)      You must be called according to His purpose.

So what Paul is telling us here is essentially, if you do not love God, this promise does not apply to you.  You could say that for someone who does not love God and hasn’t been called according to His purpose is foolish to be optimistic about the final outcome of a situation.  Those who do not love God should be very pessimistic because things are not going to work together for that person’s ultimate good.

This type of person is described to us in Romans 2:5, "Because of your hard and impenitent heart you are storing up wrath for yourself on the day of wrath when God's righteous judgment will be revealed." So basically, this person’s life and all that comes with it will ultimately turn to wrath, not good.  The things that this person does not thank God for by turning them into means of worship will one day be this person’s own condemnation.  The times of pain, sorrow, and gloom for this person without their trust in God will store wrath for the Day of Judgment.

We must remember that no matter how a person may appear in this life – rich, poor, happy, or sad – if this person does not have love for God and is not called according to His purpose, all things they experience will not lead to everlasting good, but instead to endless misery. 

Now that is a hard truth that you won’t hear very many people say.  Here it is again – "Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind” (Luke 10:27 a) and, “For those who love God all things work together for good” (Romans 8:28 a).

In contrast, “Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love” (1 John 4:8) and therefore cannot claim the promise of Romans 8:28.

That honestly just isn’t what we as imperfect people like to hear.  We want to be told that this promise extends to us no matter what.  We would like to believe that no matter what, all of life’s horrible moments are being worked for our good and not for our condemnation.  So what must be true of our hearts for this to be true of us?  I am going to really focus on “love for God” now and plan on doing a more in depth follow up on being “called” by God later.  I can’t even begin to talk about love though without at least talking a little bit on the call of God on our lives.

What must we do?  First, Paul tells us that we must love God.  What does that mean?

Well, this isn’t talking about the ups and downs that we go through in our love for God.  This doesn’t mean that if you REALLY love God at the moment that something bad happens that it is going to work for your good and if you don’t love God enough that the ultimate outcome will be bad.  We know that this isn’t what God means by the clarification at the end of the verse: "those who are called according to [God’s] purpose."  This calling isn’t something that can be taken from us.  It isn’t something that happens over and over.  This is the calling that is the once and for all work of God that calls us from our fallen lives of sin and death into eternal life and saintliness.  It is what frees us from the dominion of Satan to our freedom in God and ultimately leads us from being enemies of God to loving God.

This calling that leads to faith and love is permanent for someone who is truly saved.  Love for God is the true mark or someone who has been saved – forever.  Now as I said before and is the case with every relationship, our love for God is going to have instances of greatness and instances of weakness, BUT for those that are called to the saving grace of Christ, love for God is what characterizes their very being.  It is the constant state of their hearts – no matter how weak or how strong. 

Take note that the promise that Paul records for us isn’t that all things work for good for Christians occasionally when their love for our Creator is at it’s strongest or that things won’t work for the good of Christians whose love for God is weak at the moment.  Paul is saying that for Christians - those who have been called by God and whose hearts have been brought from hostility to worshipful love for God - all things we encounter in life WILL work for good - not just some of the time - ALL THE TIME!

What is love for God and what is not?

If you ask someone, “Do you love God?”  They will most likely answer with a quick, “Yes.”  Especially for those of us who live in the Bible Belt regions.  But what does it really mean to love God?  How can you know if you really do?

Well, here are some things that love for God isn’t or at least the core of loving God is not these things.

Loving God does not mean that we are supplying him with anything that he needs.  The way we love one another is different than the way that we love God in this way because God doesn’t need anything from us.  He doesn’t need us to provide clothing, food, shelter, etc.  It all belongs to Him anyway so we really don’t have anything to offer him like this anyway.  We are reminded of this in Acts 17:25 when Paul said, "Nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mankind life and breath and everything." God is fundamentally unlike us.  God is the single source of all things we can see and can not see.  God doesn’t have any needs.  God doesn’t need to be assisted or improved.  There are no imperfections to fix or shortages to provide.  We do not love God by furnishing his needs in any way because he doesn’t need anything. So, instead of providing him with something to show our love, the quintessence of our love for him must be in the experience of receiving.

Secondly, loving God is not simply a love for His gifts such as our forgiveness, pardon, rescue from eternal torment, promise of a pain-free eternal life, etc.  In our love for God we will treasure these gifts and be grateful for them, but we do not only love God for these gifts.  We love and treasure God himself for who He is, not what He gives us. God’s gifts are cherished, desired, and valued to the point that they lead us to God and show us the very nature of God which causes us to love Him all the more.  Our love for God should be the innermost focus of our affections to Him, not to our love of the things He gives us.

Lastly, love for God is not what we do for God or what we are lead to do by our love for Him. Your love for God may lead you to do many wonderful things for His kingdom.  You may be led to move far away to a foreign land to spread His message to many lost peoples and to discard anything that leads you from His path for you, but moving away to be a missionary and purging yourself from anything that is not of God is not the spirit of love.  This is an example of the potential fruit of the love that you have for God.  When Jesus said, "If you love Me, you will keep My commandments," (John 14:15) he did not mean that keeping His commandments meant you loved Him.  The Pharisees did all they could do to keep the Law but that did not mean that they had love for Jesus.  Jesus was telling us that our love for Him would lead us to keep the commandments that He gave to us.  Our love for Him would be our centralized focus in life and because of that we would do all we could to work for His kingdom.

If we love God we should show it in our lives by attempting to keep the commandments that He has given to us.  We will not always succeed but we should always love Him.

Our love for God is for God, not what he gives us and not what he has promised us.  Our love for Him should be the essence of our heart and involve our spirit.  If we attempt to love God by our deeds we will simply be going through the motions of love without true love.  We would be hypocritical with our hearts.  We would say we love God but our hearts would be self-serving.  We would “love” God because we have been forgiven and won’t have to go to hell but we would not have love for God himself.  We would not love God.  We would love what he did for us and what he gives to us.

Don’t get me wrong – I love God for saving me, for his physical and spiritual blessings on my life, and for all that he has promised me, BUT we should love God even without any of these things.  He is our creator.  He is the Great I Am.  He is the one who loved us even when our spirits hated Him.  We do not love God as a “reward” to Him for being awesomely good to us!  We do not look at Romans 8:28 and say I will love God when He makes things good for me.  Romans 8:28 only applies to you if you love God.  We should love God because He is God.  Everything that comes from that love is a generous gift to us from God.  Don’t get the two confused!  God owes us nothing and we owe Him everything.

So how do we love God?

Trying to describe this is near impossible.  What words could be used to even begin to talk about the essence of the love of God.  To love God is to long for God himself beyond His blessings.  To love God is to cherish God himself beyond His blessings.  To love God is to appreciate God himself beyond His blessings.  To love God is to be fulfilled in God himself beyond His blessings.  To love God is to treasure God himself beyond His blessings.  To love God is to delight in God himself beyond His blessings.  To love God is to have reverence for God and to value God and worship God and praise God beyond His blessings.  None of these words even begin to describe our heart’s response to the glory of God when it is revealed to us.

We must see past the promise to God himself.  Look at creation around us and just be amazed.  Creation declares all around us the glory of God.  Look at all that God has done throughout the history of this planet to reveal His love, mercy, grace, and perfect plan.  Look to Jesus Christ and all that He was from the beginning of time well before He came to this Earth as a little baby - The sacrifice He made just by leaving his throne of glory and then how he lived his life as a servant to all and the suffering he endured.  See the compassion and righteousness fused with the wrath of God that was placed on the King of Kings who hung on the cross for all of us unworthy sinners.  See the ultimate supremacy and display of the highest glory in the resurrection of Jesus on the third day.  See how fully the Law of Moses was satisfied and the new covenant that welcomed in the age of grace to the all of humanity.

Look to the past, to today, and to the future and see God in all of these ways.  Remember that you were made for God and in his image.  Realize the completion of all of your desires.  See the most astonishing, fulfilling treasure in all the cosmos in Jesus Christ.  When you realize the magnificence of God’s glory, and when you cherish him with all your being, then the promise of Romans 8:28 is yours.  God will work all things together for your ultimate good.  He will do this because you love him and He loves you.

Join me as I pray another one of God’s promises this year – Deuteronomy 30:6 “And the Lord your God will circumcise your heart and the heart of your offspring, so that you will love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul, that you may live.”

I want to love God with all of my being.  I want my love for God to be my drive, determining factor, and goals.  I want to see Him for all that He is.

Turn this verse into a prayer for yourself, your family, and your neighbors.  Our families, communities, states, countries, and world need to turn to God with love for Him.  We are in very unsettling times and we all should look to God and remember his many promises.  Remember all of his promises including Romans 8:28, Deuteronomy 30:6, and 2 Chronicles 7:14, “If my people who are called by my name humble themselves, and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven and will forgive their sin and heal their land.”

Mark 28b-31

“Which commandment is the most important of all?” Jesus answered, “The most important is, ‘Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one.  And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’  The second is this: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.”