Completely, Unchangingly, ForeverText: Romans 8:26–39

Completely, Unchangingly, Forever

Text: Romans 8:26–39

Where We Begin Today

1. Today, for the first time, we are worshiping under the name of Traditional Worship. We felt the need to set aside a time to worship according to the church's traditional liturgy, rather than in the format our praise team has been leading, and we have been preparing since earlier this year to begin in the second half.

2. This is not about doing something new. As I mentioned briefly last week, this came out of a simple thought: in a time when Bibles and hymnals are not distributed the way they once were, we wanted to do something, in our small way, to support those who still publish them.

3. Right now they are always within reach. But I found myself wondering — as time goes on, will it become harder to get a Bible or a hymnal? That thought is what led me to think it would be good for us to worship this way. In time, we are praying about dividing our worship into two services, one traditional and one contemporary.

4. The passage we read together today continues from last week in Romans 8. This is a text where Paul's effort is unmistakable, a word that still gives us great strength and that still reads as living and active.

5. Paul writes this passage holding onto hope regardless of the circumstances he was in. And through his declaration that the Triune God is complete, unchanging, and forever on our side, this text shows us well how we are to believe, confess, and live out our faith.

6. And yet, for all the grandeur of that language, when we look at verse 26, Paul says that it is out of our weakness that we come to confess this astonishing grace and love of God. The Spirit helps us in our weakness; we do not even know how we ought to pray, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with sighs too deep for words.

7. Paul does not hesitate to use the word "weakness" about himself. In this verse — where the moment we acknowledge and accept our own frailty is the moment the Spirit intercedes for us with groans that cannot be spoken — Paul is describing something we would never have expected: a posture of life that belongs to Christians, the posture of accepting our weakness.

What Breaks Us Down Are Small Things

8. We usually assume that what makes life hard must be some enormous suffering, or illness, or failure, or loss. That is not wrong. But if we look honestly at our own lives, we find that the things that break us down usually begin with something far less dramatic.

9. These days I am working through several matters with the Annual Conference. One is preparing the legal documents required for the sale of a building. The other is the process required to receive an associate pastor by appointment. Both are necessary for the church, and both are moving forward according to procedure.

10. And yet, in the middle of work like this, my heart sinks at the strangest points. Not because the paperwork is difficult. Not because the process is complicated. It is that we are trying to move this forward as quickly and as seriously as we can — and when the attitude and the heart of those who must process the steps and provide the documents is different from ours, there are moments when we feel discouragement, even despair.

11. That gap, I think, really comes down to a matter of attitude — how we treat the person in front of us. Even when something matters greatly to us, the moment the person receiving it treats it not as service but as an exercise of leverage, or as an annoyance, the discouragement we feel is far heavier than we would expect.

12. Many of you have probably experienced something similar at your workplace or in your business. It is the same in marriage. You pour out your heart and your effort, and your spouse treats it as something light and easy — nothing makes a person angrier than that. Even without a major argument, when that indifference and that gap accumulate, it can later become a serious problem.

13. It is exactly the same between parents and children. The difference in temperature between what I expect and how the other person receives it can wound them, and sometimes it is we ourselves who are wounded by it.

14. What catches us off guard is this: being tested, being discouraged, finding ourselves in difficulty and pain — these do not usually arrive as some great event. They come in the most ordinary form, and they come again and again.

15. And what about the church? It is no different. If anything, there may be even more discouragement and more gaps here. Because we carry the name of a community of faith, expectations run high, and so the differences and the discouragement seem to be felt all the more sharply. This is not unique to the church — every community has relationships that wear us down.

16. There are also relationships we cannot avoid, ones we must keep facing because of the structures we are in. When I think about it this way, problems exist everywhere. What matters is how we understand the problem and in what manner we overcome it. To simply point at the problem and say that because of it I cannot belong to this community — that, I have come to think, is not a mature way forward.

17. When Paul wrote this letter to the church in Rome, what they faced was surely not only the moments when enormous pain and suffering came crashing in. It was the daily disappointment, the daily discouragement, the daily exhaustion — things that pile up until the burden feels immense. It is into that situation that Paul speaks of the Holy Spirit.

The Question Paul Must Have Asked Himself

18. I imagine that before Paul could write about the Spirit this way, he spent a long time questioning himself, wrestling, working to understand. "Who exactly was this God I have believed in so fervently all this time? What was all this religious life I lived with such zeal, and what were the achievements I piled up?"

19. By the standards of his world, Paul was a man without a flaw. His lineage, his education, his zeal. Everything was arranged so that Paul could climb toward the heights. And then, on the road to Damascus, in the moment he met Jesus, he fell to the ground. He went blind. He had to be led into the city by someone else's hand.

20. What Paul realized in that moment was this: God is not someone you meet at the height you have climbed to. Rather, God comes to find you at the very moment you are weakest and most lacking.

21. In verse 26, Paul points to the fact that the Christian life — indeed, the very nature of the hope a Christian carries — begins with accepting weakness. This runs consistently through all of Paul's letters. God always comes to us in the midst of our weakness and our frailty.

22. This confession — that to carry hope is itself to accept weakness — seems to redefine the way we see everything. We normally think that hope comes from strength, that it must be built out of abundance to be possible at all. But Paul says that hope never comes from becoming strong. It begins precisely at the place where I admit that I am weak.

With Sighs Too Deep for Words

23. In verses 26 and 27, the Spirit helps us in our weakness. When we do not even know how we ought to pray, the Spirit himself intercedes on our behalf with sighs too deep for words. And God, who searches the heart, knows what the mind of the Spirit is.

24. Here the Spirit is not described as some force or energy. Paul confesses the Spirit as a person. And more than that, he portrays the Spirit as one who stands in deep solidarity with all the children of God.

25. In verses 23 through 25, we read that it is not only we who groan — the whole creation groans. To put it another way: within all the creatures we encounter, within everything God has made in this world, there is a deep longing for God to restore what has been broken, damaged, and torn down.

26. There are moments in life when no words will come. When someone you love suddenly falls ill. When you have to let someone go with no warning at all. When what is happening in your community, and in this world, is so overwhelming that you lose even the language of prayer. And here Paul says something astonishing. In that very moment, the Spirit joins our groaning with the Spirit's own groaning, too deep for words.

27. When prayer will not come, it is not that you are failing to pray. In that moment the Spirit is already praying for you, and all of creation that God made is continually interceding, praying that this pain and this hardship would be restored.

28. This is an enormous comfort, and it is a strength we ought to be living in. It is not that God hears our prayers only if we pray a great deal and pray hard. It is that God is always praying for us. Even when we are so discouraged and so broken down that we can do nothing at all, God is interceding for us through the whole universe. This is precisely the grace we receive by believing in God.

The Way God Wins

29. So how should we read verse 28 — that for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose, all things work together for good? It is a verse we quote often. But this word does not mean that God causes suffering, nor does it mean that the suffering we go through is itself good.

30. What it means is that the goodness of God is so overwhelming and so powerful that in any circumstance — even in circumstances that are agonizing and terrible — God is able to draw good out of it. The circumstance itself does not become good. It is that in the midst of all of it, God is still faithfully at work.

31. And where do we see the evidence of this? Look at verse 32. The One who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all — how will he not also give us everything else along with him? Paul saw the cross as the very thing that brings us to understand what true strength, revealed through weakness, actually is. We must remember that the way God wins runs in this direction.

32. In Christ, God does not work through divine violence or retaliation — not through any of the shapes we might imagine. Instead, God bore that violence in his own body and showed us a love that gives itself away. And with that love, God overwhelmed the powers of sin and death. Driving himself to the cross, and there dying to save us. This is how God works.

33. So when we say God is on our side, this is not sentimental comfort. It is a fact grounded in a price already paid. What would the One who gave up his own Son withhold from us?

34. In verses 33 and 34, Paul uses the language of the courtroom. Who will bring a charge? It is God who justifies. Who will condemn? Christ Jesus, who died and was raised, is at the right hand of God, interceding for us.

35. Look at this. The Spirit prays within us with groaning, and the Son intercedes for us at the right hand of God. From above and from below, the prayers for us never stop. The Triune God is completely, unchangingly, and forever on our side.

An Honest Confession from Your Pastor

36. Do you know what I encounter most often in ministry? The gap in expectations. There is an image of a church member that a pastor expects. There is an image of a pastor that church members expect. I have seen many people struggle in the space between them. And to be honest with you, I myself am often shaken in that same place.

37. There is a common illusion among pastors: that the pastor is always the one who gives answers to the congregation. But let me confess — I am always wrestling. I do not fully understand the church. Whether the shapes our faith takes today are truly delighting in God and praising him, or whether we are simply evaluating one another by what shows on the outside — I am often not confident at all.

38. And it is right here that Paul's insight holds me steady. What truly matters is not the level of expectation between pastor and congregation, but what kind of relationship each of us has with God. This is a question that must continue for a lifetime, for pastor and member alike.

39. And that relationship is not determined by how strong I am. It deepens by how honestly I lay my weakness before God. Paul's confession — that accepting hope is itself accepting weakness — is what humbles us. Pastor and member, both alike.

A Community Where Weakness Can Be Shown

40. Immigrant life is not easy. You know this better than I do. Among us Koreans especially, there is a culture of evaluating people by what is visible. Which school the children got into, what kind of work someone does, what kind of house they live in. No one has to ask; we all know. And under that gaze, we live pretending to be a little more all right than we are.

41. But must the church be that way too? If we spend all day out in the world pretending to be fine, and then come here on Sunday and have to keep pretending, then where on earth are we supposed to breathe?

42. I hope that our church can be, at the very least here, a community where weakness can be shown. A place where you can say that prayer will not come. A place where you can say your faith has been shaky lately. A place where you can say you failed, you are exhausted, you do not know anymore. The Spirit is said to help us in our weakness — and if we are a community where that weakness must be hidden from one another, then we are blocking, with our own hands, the very place where the Spirit would work.

43. And a community like this is not built by habit. Faith is never filled up by habit. It does not deepen simply because you have attended a long time. The church is built through the commitment each of us decides on for ourselves, within the leading of the God we have encountered. I hope that our beginning this traditional worship today carries that meaning as well. Not one more item added to the order of service, but a place where we resolve ourselves before God once again.

Nothing Can Separate Us

44. Finally Paul asks, in verse 35: who will separate us from the love of Christ? Hardship? Distress? Persecution? Famine? Nakedness? Peril? The sword? These were not abstractions. For the believers in Rome who received this letter in the mid-50s AD, they were the reality in front of their eyes. And when Nero's persecution came in the 60s, they would have held onto this promise even more tightly.

45. But in verse 37, Paul says that in all these things we are more than conquerors — through the One who loved us. He does not say we win by our own strength. He says it is through the One who loved us. And then verses 38 and 39, this astonishing final declaration.

46. Paul is convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor rulers, neither things present nor things to come, neither powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

47. Look at this list. Death and life. Things present and things to come. Height and depth. Up and down, before and behind, in life and in death — he has sealed off every possible direction. Which means these things are included too. The attitude of that person who wears you down. The paperwork that will not move. The discouragement that keeps repeating. Even the disappointment you feel in yourself. Not one of them can cut us off from the love of God.

Closing

48. Beloved. I hope that this first traditional worship service we offer today is not a place we gather in order to become stronger. I hope instead that it is a place we come carrying our weakness.

49. If prayer will not come, then sit there just as you are, with no prayer. The Spirit is already praying for you with sighs too deep for words. If something in you has collapsed, bring it collapsed. God is the one who draws good out of what is terrible. The cross is the proof.

50. And remember this. The Triune God is completely, unchangingly, and forever on our side. It is my deepest hope that our church would be built upon this confidence.

Let us pray.