When the Present and Future Meet

I wanna start this morning by making an admission, and some of you may know this already. Indeed, mom and dad are here, so they definitely know this, but I'm not necessarily a very good saver in some ways. You know, I think financially, I'm okay, but in other ways I'm pretty lousy. And one of my biggest weaknesses is snacks. Snacks.

I live by the philosophy, eat them if you've got them. Now my brother Dirk, who lived with me for a while here on the Gold Coast, he lives by the motto, save it for a good moment. Now this was never more poignantly displayed than when we were little. My brother was so disciplined, he's a doctor, so that makes sense. Right?

Very disciplined. That he would actually save his lollies that mom would lovingly give each of us for morning tea. He would save that, bring it home, and put it in a little Tupperware container. And he would save that for a good moment, whenever that was. Me, on the other hand, I would devour and inhale my lollies every morning tea, and then very often would beg my brother to have some of his stash as well.

Now clearly his delayed gratification was in very stark contrast to my own sense of immediate gratification. Eat them if you've got them. But my brother, his anticipation, his joy was having these fine fruits of his waiting at a time that was perfect. It was also more than simply the pleasure of having those lollies, it was the pleasure of having those lollies at a good time, the anticipation of waiting for that moment. And again, that moment was a variable, an unknown variable.

It could have been at a soccer match that he was watching, or when he had friends over, he could share with them, or whatever. There was no guarantee of a good moment coming. There was no way to measure what that moment was ahead of time. But my pleasure was so fleeting. It was here today, gone today.

It was only ever tied up to the lollies themselves. But for him, there was a greater pleasure, you could argue, because it was not only the lollies, it was the moment and the waiting as well. In a similar way, this morning we're going to talk about the Christian life. And it is a life of holding on to promises that are in part now received, but will only be really completely received and enjoyed at a future moment, a future time. This morning, we're going to look at Romans 8, and we're going to read from verses 18 to 27.

And we're going to read from verse 18 to verse 27. This is the apostle Paul who writes, for I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us. For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God. For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of him who subjected it in hope, that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God.

For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now. And not only the creation, but we ourselves who have the first fruits of the Spirit, we groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies. For in this hope, we are saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what he sees?

But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience. Likewise, the Spirit helps us in our weakness. For we do not know what to pray for as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words. And he who searches the hearts knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God. So far, our reading.

Our passage this morning comes in the chapter which really is a turning point in the whole argument to the letter of Romans that Paul writes. We see that up until this point, the apostle Paul writing this letter has been explaining and talking about what it means for God to have saved humanity. What does it mean for God to have saved humanity by sending His Son Jesus Christ to die on the cross on behalf of sinners like us? Now in chapter eight, like I say, it's halfway in the letter and it's changing. It's actually turning to explain how this salvation impacts our lives.

Not only how it's happened, which has been chapters one through to seven, but what it means for us now. And so Paul here in our passage is talking about the implications of this truth. What does it mean for Jesus to save us? In verses 9 and through to 11, he says that we are no longer controlled by our old nature. We are no longer controlled by our old nature, the sinful corrupted nature.

But he says, our spirits and our most central existence has been made alive. And we've been made alive to live as children of God. In other words, a person who has become a Christian is like an orphan who has been adopted into a loving family, he says. Being powerfully and joyfully swept up into the arms of a loving father. It's actually the strongest image we get in the Bible of what salvation looks like, to be adopted into a family.

But now we get to verse 18, halfway through chapter eight. And in this passage that we just read, Paul goes on to flesh out what this adoption means. And he goes deeper still, and he begins explaining what the salvation on the cross really means for our life now. Again, you may have come this morning with all sorts of heartache and all sorts of baggage and frustration. You might just barely be holding things together.

And friend, I wanna say that this message this morning is for you. In verse 18, Paul starts with the application right up the front. Right up the front. He says in verse 18, I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us. I consider that the present sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing to the glory that is to be revealed to us in the future.

In other words, what does believing in Jesus Christ mean while we are still experiencing pain, while we still mourn, while we still grieve, while we still feel hopeless, while we still feel overwhelmed. Well, Paul says, there is no need to mourn. At least not for very long. There is no need to be lost in despair because our present sufferings can't hold a candle to the glory and the joy that our future awaits. Thomas Aquinas, a famous theologian a long time ago in the twelfth century, put it this way.

He said, God destines for us an end beyond the grasp of reason. God destines us for an end beyond the grasp of reason. In order to flesh this out, the apostle Paul then goes on and he sets up a series of comparative statements. Three of them. He goes and he does, you know, what happens in those infomercials that you see during the day.

You know the infomercials I'm talking about, before and after things that happen there. Those cheesy infomercials that uni students love watching when they're meant to be studying. And you watch them because, first of all, you're procrastinating, you don't want to study, but then you feel too guilty to go out. So then you're sort of just huddled in your house somewhere and you're watching these boring commercials. Anyway, I can speak from experience obviously.

Now, these infomercials, you get the before and the after pictures. Those before pictures are always grey, you know, like they look just really, really shabby, and then when they sell the product, it's so beautiful and bright and sparkly. Well, we get a little bit of that in our passage this morning. Paul makes three comparative statements. In verse 18, we've already touched on, Paul begins by comparing suffering with glory.

Okay? Suffering with glory. Verse 20, if you have a look there, he compares frustration with hope. And then in verse 21, he compares bondage or slavery with freedom. And he says, at this point, God is in the business of moving people from the existence of suffering, frustration, and slavery into glory, hope, and freedom.

That is what the gospel is about. That is why Jesus came. That is why Jesus died for sinners. He says, all of creation up until now is subjected to frustration. It is looking for something with thirst.

Its broken hearts, however, will be healed. A time when injustice will be met with perfect justice. A time where there will be glory, hope, and freedom. Now let me explain this for a minute. This hard to grasp concept.

Let me try and put some bones on it. If you're a mom or a dad, you've probably witnessed this. There's a moment when your son or your daughter realises for the first time what it means to read. Think about it. Learning to read, I don't know if you remember, but it was really hard work.

There's so much practice that has to go into it. And we've got teachers here that might be able to explain it to us about teaching those of that sort of age. Not many of us would say that we started learning our ABCs with great joy. We did it because the teacher told us to. We practised because mom and dad made us sit at the kitchen table and read to them.

We had no idea what it felt like to be able to read, what it meant to form these hieroglyphic symbols into something that's communicable, something that is understandable. Once those symbols took on meaning, our imagination became awakened as we started putting words into sentences, and sentences into paragraphs, and into stories. Once those symbols took on meaning, it brought out some incredible emotions as we read. Who of us here, when we started reading, however, knew exactly what we were getting ourselves into? None of us.

No one. We had no frame of reference for what it meant to put our hearts and our minds to this task. The Christian life is kind of like that. And I'm primarily speaking now to people here this morning who have never made this decision, who are flirting with this idea perhaps of a genuine commitment to Christ. You may hear and you may have heard and you may know that Christianity holds some vague good thing for you.

That something about Christians has this hope of a future that is fantastic. A glory and a hope that is extraordinary, but you have no real frame of reference for it. You have no inkling of why or how this will feel. But like reading this morning, the more we interact with this concept, the more we deal with it, the more we investigate it, the more we work with it, the more we grow in our relationship with God, and the more real this hope and this fabulous joy becomes. Like a child who finishes reading their first sentence and recognises the vowels and the syllables that form these messages, a Christian, to a certain degree, comes to a moment where they realise and they recognise the glimpses of this joy, of this freedom.

Like a bright, warm light streaming through cracks in a broken wall. And these glimpses, even as Christians that we don't always have fully, these glimpses of the joy, these glimpses of the hope, of the freedom. It's like that smell of crayon or that smell of chalk or that Palmolive soap that brings back the nostalgia of a long forgotten memory. It's what Christian writer C.S. Lewis often described as home when he wrote about the Christian life. Home.

Christians being homesick for a place they've never been to. Homesick for a place of glory, hope, and freedom. Something that they haven't experienced fully, but they know. Oh, how they know that it's there. We move down to verses 22 and 25.

And Paul begins explaining this concept in the next passage by saying that the whole of creation, the whole world, in other words, is groaning for renewal. The whole world is groaning for these things. He mentions that currently, the entire created universe is waiting in anticipation for the day that God fixes everything. It's an amazing thought. It's an amazing thought to think that the animals, the plants, the flowers, the trees, the fish of the sea are waiting with us for this renewal.

And what is this renewal centred on? What triggers this redemption? It is actually the redemption of mankind. Like the attention that is drawn to a crown, have you ever seen those magnificent royal crowns that have the big diamond or big ruby in the centre? And everything sort of draws towards that.

Humanity sits at the centre of God's creation order. As Adam and Eve plunged creation into chaos through sin, the redemption of Adam and Eve's descendants will raise everyone up, everything up to the redemptive order. Now there is a common thread here. This redemption is relational. This redemption is built around one person and that is Jesus.

The Bible says that the person who has everything, the person who has everything in this world and who also has Jesus Christ has no more than the person in Syria who has nothing but only Christ. You can have all things and Christ or you can have nothing and Christ and you are equally rich. You are equally fulfilled. You have equal glory, hope, and freedom. So you can, in this way, receive some incredible promises that C.S. Lewis in his essay that he writes called The Weight of Glory.

It's an incredible, I think it was a sermon actually that he sort of preached. He says that there are five aspects to the redemption of a Christian. Five aspects of which what changes in us. He says the first thing is that we will be with Christ. We will be with Christ, he says.

This is part of the redemption of our lives. This is the future glory that he is talking about. And he says this is almost the important, the most important concept, the most important promise. To have Jesus is to lack nothing. Having Christ with us is to find our ultimate bliss.

And how is this bliss experienced? Well, it comes in these other four facets. We become like Him. We have Christ, and then we start becoming like Him. Our nature changes.

We become more loving. We become more peaceful. We become more joyful. We obey God more. Not only that, our external context changes.

We have glory with Him. We celebrate with Him. We feast. The Bible talks about that. We feast with Christ.

We celebrate life. We have things that are bountiful and peaceful in our lives. And then we rule with Him. We sit on a throne with Christ to reign over the created order. That is an incredible concept, an incredible promise.

We can celebrate and we can share hope and peace in all circumstances. This is the story of our redemption. This is what we can look forward to even as we are experiencing that today. The question is, how do we know that this is going to be true? If these are promises, if these are in essence sort of only in part received now, how do we know that this is true?

How can we trust this to be true? Verses 24 and 25 explain this to us. Paul writes, for in this hope we were saved. In this hope we were saved. Now hope, he says, that is seen is not hope.

Right? Something that you see is not hoping or longing for. For who hopes for what he sees? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience. In other words, how do we know that redemption is coming?

How do we know that that is taking place already? The Bible says, because we hope. That's quite revolutionary. How do we know it's true?

We know it's true because we hope. Now this is important, really, really important for us to understand. It is in sensing that things are not right, that we know a time is coming when things will be right. It is in the hoping for the perfect that we know one day we will see perfection. Now for our friends who are sceptical about Christianity, whether they are here this morning, whether they are their friends at work or at school or whatever, to be sceptical about a creator who has created everything is one thing.

But to them, I would ask this question, why do you know what is good or bad? Why do you know what is good or bad? Not how do you know what is good or how do you know what is bad, but why? Why do we so strongly have moral convictions?

It can't be that purely materialistic evolution has developed a moral soul. Survival of the fittest could not have constructed a moral conscious, a conscience that acutely knows when something is bad. Paul says, why do people hope for good things if these things have already come? That is not hope. To put it another way, if life on Earth is as good as it gets, why are we hoping for better?

If we are only carbon-based organisms living in a very lucky pocket of the universe, then why, why do what we have and what we experience right now, why is that not enough? You shouldn't have any expectation of anything better because this existence is an existence based on chaos and chance. But we don't really believe that. Not even our atheist friends believe that.

Not really. We see people everywhere wanting a fair go. We see people everywhere dreaming of a better tomorrow. We see people talking about justice. We see people talking about freedom, about hope, and striving for it.

But why hope? Why hope when chaos and chance is as good as it gets? Why hope and strive when all that you have worked for is going to die with you? Why strive for justice for yourself or others? Because, friends, because there is hope for something beyond us. And so I'll put it to you that even non-Christians, people that are not very convinced by the gospel and the message of Jesus, still cling to a supernatural hope beyond themselves.

Even the most hardcore atheist writers hold on to a power, that something will change their situation. That some things will set things right. Now they may call that luck. They may call that the universe, but I think we should call it God. We hope for something we don't yet have.

And for the Christian, you can know your redemption is coming, in part, because you know how deeply you sense something needs to be better. And this brings us to our last point this morning. The hope for redemption found in Jesus Christ is not simply a logical argument that I can explain to you right now and that you'll be able to say, that fits together and therefore yes, I believe that. It is something you must feel in your deepest part of your existence.

It goes deeper than the mind into what is called the soul, the spirit. Verses 26 and 27 speak about the dynamic of how God relates to the spirit, and He does that through His Spirit, the Spirit of God. Paul says that this Spirit works in every single believer, every single person who has put their trust in Jesus Christ. And this Spirit of God is said to be an intercessor, a mediator.

Now I'll explain to you what that looks like, what it means to mediate or be an intercessor. That means that they're a middle man. In politics, an intercessor could be a translator between two prime ministers that are talking. So Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un had intercessors to explain what was going on. You hope those guys get it right when it comes to nuclear disarmament and all that sort of stuff.

Right? In law, an intercessor could be a lawyer that represents two parties. Whether that's people going through a divorce and then they're trying to settle assets or whatever. That is a mediator or an intercessor. Now the work that God's Spirit does on behalf of Christians is that He prays on our behalf.

The Holy Spirit prays on our behalf. Verse 26 says that He intercedes for us in groans that words cannot express. He speaks to God the Father on our behalf even if we struggle to explain to God what our desires are, what our hopes are, even when we don't know what our needs are. The Holy Spirit outlines those needs to God so that God the Father may act. It's incredible.

And that is a great comfort. But don't forget verse 27, especially this last clause here where Paul says, the Spirit intercedes for the saints in accordance with the will of God. This intercession is a two-way street. The Spirit speaks to God on our behalf, but God the Father speaks through the Spirit into our hearts and minds. The Spirit reveals God's will to us so that we may live the life that God wants.

John 16 verse 13, Jesus says it this way, when the Spirit of truth comes, this is the promise for Pentecost. When the Spirit of truth comes, He will guide you into all truth. He will not speak on His own, He will speak only what He hears, and He will tell you what is yet to come. So friend, why can we hold on to the hope of a future that is beyond earthly joy? A future that is indescribably glorious, indescribably joyful, and absolutely liberating.

Why can we confidently say that our present sufferings are not worthy? You cannot hold a candle to the glory that will be revealed in us through Jesus Christ and what He's accomplished on the cross because the very essence of God is speaking to your heart right now. To your soul right now. For those of us who believe this, we get this conclusion. Hold on.

Hold on. This hope, let it change your perspective on life. If you are struggling, know that these struggles will soon pass. That God is doing something even in the midst of these struggles. They are not wasted.

They are being used carefully to develop something in you that is precious, that is important for you, for others. Hold on. But for those of us who have never accepted the sacrifice of Jesus Christ, and you may have been a church goer for a very long time, His death on your behalf, His penalty for your eternal death, that has been paid, and so receive Him today. Receive Him today. If you sense the nearness of God tugging at your heart this morning through His Spirit, begin this journey with Him.

Don't let it slip away. Don't put it off for another week. Speak to a friend about this. Speak to me about this. Let someone know so that they can pray for you and they can help you with questions.

May God bless us. May God bless us with a deeper awareness of what lies ahead of us, a future that has and gives incredible perspective on what we are going through right now. Whether that is hard or really good. Let me pray. Father, we thank you this morning that we have this vision like sunbeams coming through a crack.

A ray of light seeping through a curtain of the riches, of the glories, of the freedom, of the joy, of the hope that awaits us. Oh God, we get so lost in our here and now. We get so swept up in our stresses, in our worries, in our concerns. We are racked by guilt and shame. We are overcome by pain.

Lord Jesus, let us run to You. Let us be found in You. And Father, we may have known about You for a very long time, but today might be the day that we truly lay our lives in Your hands. Lord Jesus, confirm that in our hearts. Pour out Your Spirit into us.

That You may reveal Yourself, that You may open up our eyes to truly believe. And then, Lord, as we wait, Holy Spirit, will You keep giving us that vision? Will You keep holding that out for us? Will You not let it dim and fall away and hide again behind the cupboard? Help us to see.

Help us to know. Help us to hold on to that. We thank You, Lord, for what You've done for us already, historically, two thousand years ago at that cross. It is available. It is not contingent upon how much we believe that this has happened.

It has happened. We can only and we should only receive. So, Father, we bring these things before You. We bring our lives before You. We take up this promise again, and we trust in Jesus Christ again for all that we need. Amen.