He really is.
We just sang a song by a gentleman named Eugene Clark.
Nothing is impossible when you put your trust in God.
Gene Clark was a gifted musician on the keyboards and composition, but he came down with a crippling,
severe form of arthritis and spent the last years of his life confined to his bed in Lincoln,
Nebraska.
His hands gnarled, other parts of his body as useless, dictating the compositions that
came to his mind and to his spirit.
One of those, the one we have sung tonight, nothing is impossible with God.
Think of the courage, the confidence that was in the heart of such a man to write a
song like that when he was absolutely crippled in body, but he knew something.
God was on his side.
Many of us have prayed for the Meisner family.
Pastor Meisner and his family served the Lord at the Midway Community Church here in St.
Paul.
Their 13-year-old daughter, Michelle, as you may have read in the newspaper, was found
unconscious on the first day of school.
As she was getting ready, she became unconscious and slipped under the waters of the bathtub.
And they did not know how long she had been in that condition when they finally discovered
that she was unconscious and below the waters.
She was in a deep coma.
They were able to get her heart started, but she never came out of that.
As you probably read in the paper Thursday or Friday of this last week, Michelle went
home to be with the Lord.
When you go through something like that, how do you believe that God is on your side?
Because it sure doesn't seem like it.
I mean, if God had answered the prayers of thousands of people across the country and
awakened her from her coma and healed her, and she could have resumed school, then we
would have said, well, certainly God was on their side, but she died.
That does not negate the truth that we see in Romans chapter 8 in our study, that in
fact whatever our circumstances, God is on our side.
Let's read again our full text beginning in verse 31 of Romans 8.
What then shall we say to these things?
If God is for us, who is against us?
He who did not spare his own Son but delivered him up for us all, how will he not also with
him freely give us all things?
Who will bring a charge against God's elect?
God is the one who justifies.
Who is the one who condemns?
Christ Jesus is the one who died.
Yes, rather, who was raised?
Who is at the right hand of God who also intercedes for us?
Who shall separate us from the love of Christ?
Or tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword?
Just as it is written, for thy sake we are being put to death all day long.
We were considered as sheep to be slaughtered.
But in all these things we overwhelmingly conquer through him who loved us.
For I am 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
thing shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.
God is for us.
We can look at the circumstances of life like Jacob did and we can say all of these things
are against me.
But we can look at the same circumstances from the biblical perspective and say God
is for me like David did.
Here the apostle says if God is for us, and by the way he is, who can be against us?
He gives to us in this text five proofs that God is for us.
The first proof is that he delivered up his son for us, verse 32.
He did not hold him back, sparing what is precious, but delivered him over to be killed
and sacrificed for our sake.
If God was willing to do that for us, will he not be willing to give us all things in
Christ?
How do we know God is for us?
Because he went to the extent of even delivering up his only beloved son for our sake.
Then in verse 33 we see the second proof.
It is that God declared us righteous.
Who can possibly successfully bring a charge against us?
Who can bring us into court and press charges?
Who can call us in for accounting and be successful at it?
Well Satan of course would try, but he has no legal standing in this court.
The very one who possibly could press charges against us is the same one who has already
rendered the verdict on our behalf and he has said, righteous, you are justified.
I declare you right with myself.
And God has the right to do that because his son has paid for the sins that we have committed.
Therefore he can justify us.
There is no double jeopardy in God's courtroom.
We know that God is for us because he has declared us righteous in his son.
And then we know that God is for us thirdly in verse 34 because he has received our advocate.
The one who could condemn us and judge us is Jesus Christ because the Father has committed
all judgment to him, John 5 22.
But that very one who is the judge, Jesus Christ, is the same one who died for us, who
rose again and who is now at the right hand of God not as our judge but as our advocate.
And so the only one qualified in the whole universe to judge us is the very one that
is appointed as our intercessor, our advocate.
And he stands before God as our defense.
How do we know God is for us?
Because he has received to his right hand the one who is our advocate.
And he stands there as the perfect propitiation or satisfaction for our sins.
God is for us.
He's not against us.
Now we come to a fourth proof, these we studied last week.
The fourth proof that God is for us is that he assures us of victory, verses 35 through
37.
You and I are not guaranteed a life that is without its difficulties, its sorrows, its
disappointments.
Indeed, suffering is to be expected.
As he says in verse 36 in quoting from Psalm 44, for thy sake we are being put to death
all day long.
Psalm 44 was written at some point in Israel's history when there was a reversal in the nation.
They were really under pressure.
And he is saying in that verse in the context of Psalm 44 that loyalty to God was extracting
from them a terrible price of suffering and persecution.
And the Holy Spirit now takes that verse from Psalm 44 and puts it here.
And he says that if you and I are going to be faithful servants of God, if we are going
to be loyal to him in life, then it's going to cost us something.
We're going to suffer.
But in all of those sufferings we have been given victory.
Now he suggests some of the sufferings that we might face.
There are at least seven here in this inventory of possible experiences.
By the way, on your own you may want to go to 2 Corinthians chapter 11 and there see
that the apostle Paul is really writing about his own story because all of these things
he experienced himself.
In the first place he mentions tribulation.
Who shall separate us from the love of Christ, he says.
Shall tribulation?
The word means troubles, pressure, the distresses of life.
Are you in distress tonight, Christian?
Understand that that distress of soul, that trouble that you feel, the pressure that is
within you that you may even feel like is going to burst you, that is not going to separate
you from the love of Christ.
God's still on your side.
God is for you.
He talks about distress in the next noun.
The word here is hardship.
It comes from a Greek word that means narrowness.
The idea is being hemmed in, pressed and crowded in by your circumstances.
Have you ever been that way in a crowd maybe?
Perhaps getting out of the metrodome after one of the games over there.
Everybody's trying to exit through your door, right?
All at one time, and you feel like you're just a little bitty piece of dust that's
being squeezed between all of these people.
That's the thought here, being narrowed in.
When I think of this, one illustration comes to my mind.
When I was a youth pastor out in Spokane, Washington, you do lots of strange things
as youth pastors.
You wouldn't do if you were in your right mind.
We took the kids at camp one year up to a cave about a half an hour north of the church
camp that we had.
It was not a cave that was open with guides and so on.
They had lights that you turned on and you went down to the cave yourself.
We took these kids down to the cave.
On this one occasion, we saw this opening that went off in that direction where it was
dark and foreboding.
A couple of us decided that we would explore that little branch of the cave.
I got my flashlight and I started back into this hole.
It was a fairly good size at that point.
It better begin to get narrower.
Finally, instead of being just hunched over, I was down on my knees.
It wasn't too long until I was down on my elbows going like this, trying to find out
where this thing was going to lead me.
As I was shining my flashlight, suddenly the cave roof just went like that down to the
floor.
There I was right up against the end of that branch of the cave.
The first time in my life I heard claustrophobia.
I wanted to get out of there so bad because everything had narrowed in on me.
I could just see at that moment a great earthquake hit the Pacific Northwest and rocks would
fall behind me.
Here I would be hemmed in.
That's the feeling here.
Even when I talk about that, I get that feeling in my stomach.
He says when you get that feeling like all of life is collapsing around you and you're
in narrow straits and hemmed in, God is still for you.
He talks about persecution.
All who live godly in Christ Jesus will suffer persecution.
It doesn't matter if you're on a junior high or high school campus or if you're
in an office at work or wherever you are.
There will be those who will attack you if you dare to live godly in Christ Jesus because
our world does not like godliness.
It's just like light that exposes what's happening in the darkness around.
Oh, there will be some who will pat you on the back perhaps, but there will be those
who will come at you and go for the juggler.
Persecution.
But when it's for God's sake, for thy sake, he says we're being slaughtered all the
day long.
When it's for God's sake, it's worth it, isn't it?
Stand alone if necessary and experience persecution because God is for us.
He talks about famine, going hungry.
Some of us could use a little more famine than we enjoy now.
No, not really.
Not this kind of famine because this is the kind of famine where you're really starving
to death, where there's nothing to eat.
But God is for you, he says, even in that extremity of physical need.
He talks about nakedness, being without adequate clothing.
He talks about peril, danger, and threat.
Terrorism.
One of the big concerns of missionaries going to the foreign fields these days is terrorism.
Missions are having seminars now to tell their missionaries how to deal with terrorists and
to explain to missionaries what the mission's policy is regarding terrorists, should they
be taken hostage.
That's the word here, peril.
It's terrorism.
In the midst of terrorism, God's for us.
And then he talks about the sword.
That, of course, is how Paul died, according to tradition, beheaded in Rome.
The idea behind the sword is execution.
The apostle says, if it gets to the point that we are executed, remember that God is
for us.
He has assured us victory.
Notice he says in verse 37, in all these things, we overwhelmingly conquer through him who
loved us.
Now wait just a minute.
How do you call an execution a victory service?
Or if a Christian in Ethiopia or in some other part of Africa, Mozambique or wherever over
there, if a Christian starves to death in the famine, how is that victory?
Go back to Hebrews chapter 11.
At the end of the chapter, he summarizes and he talks about these people had all these
marvelous experiences of deliverance.
And then he talks about the other group and the suffering they endured and the persecution
they had and the executions that they went through.
I just love it how he puts in parenthesis there, of whom this group, the world, was
not worthy.
But how do you call that victory?
He says these all died in faith.
Is that victory?
Folks, if we measure our victories only in terms of what we see in this world, then we
have misunderstood what victory is.
We have to be careful how we define the victories that God gives us.
Sometimes we see them in this life.
There are times when our faith is rewarded.
There are times when God raises the little girl out of the coma and she comes back to
enjoy life.
But there are times when God takes the little girl.
But I want you to know that in eternal terms, that is as much a victory as when God answers
the prayer and restores the life.
We have to learn to define victories in terms of eternity, in terms of the big picture of
what God is about and what God is doing.
God is sovereign.
He is bigger than all of the experiences of life that may come to us.
And He promises us that in all of these things we overwhelmingly conquer, even if we are killed.
Yes.
For then we have gained the final victory.
Death is not a defeat for the Christian.
It only takes us to the presence of the Lord, to heaven.
Oh we've got to keep that in mind.
We overwhelmingly conquer through Him who loved us.
And that's in the present tense.
We continually overwhelmingly conquer.
That is a present tense, continuous experience of the Christian in all of these things.
And the means of our victory is Jesus Christ, Him who loved us.
He is working in our circumstances, bringing about victory, the ultimate victory.
He assures us of victory.
We may not see it in the specific experience that we're going through, but in the end
we shall see it.
We'll see the victory.
Just turn back to Psalm 118.
I was reading this recently and it meant so much to me.
I jotted it down here as a cross reference to this fact.
Psalm 118 verses 5 through 9.
Psalm 11 says, From my distress I called upon the Lord.
The Lord answered me and set me in a large place.
The Lord is for me.
I will not fear.
What can man do to me?
The Lord is for me among those who help me.
Therefore I shall look with satisfaction on those who hate me.
It is better to take refuge in the Lord than to trust in man.
It is better to take refuge in the Lord than to trust in princes.
Even leaders, even those humanly speaking who should be able to come through for us,
can fail us.
But God won't.
He's for us.
And He assures us of victory.
The overwhelming victory in the end is ours through Jesus Christ.
And there is nothing in heaven above or in hell below that can keep that victory from
coming.
It is ours in Jesus Christ and it was assured by His resurrection from the dead.
Now if He were still in the grave somewhere over in the Holy Land, and we went over and
on our tours of the Holy Land could see the grave of Jesus, then we could not have this
verse in the Bible.
But He has conquered the final ultimate enemy, death, and assured us that the final victory
is ours through Himself.
And finally, we know that God is for us because He secures our position.
Paul carefully considered this matter of being separated from the love of Christ.
And he came to a decisive conclusion.
That's the meaning here, I am convinced.
This is something that Paul has carefully weighed in his mind.
And now he comes to a conclusion that has results that go on to the rest of his life.
He says, I am persuaded, I am convinced after carefully evaluating the whole thing, that
none of these things shall separate us from the love of God.
And notice that he gives ten realities for us to consider.
These include the extremes of existence.
He says, I am convinced that death can't separate us from the love of Christ.
That's the end of what is present.
We've talked about already the victory that God has given us.
Oh, I tell you, death is a terrible thing when it comes.
It separates.
Death is like a brass door that slams in your face.
And you no longer can see or talk with that loved one.
And there is no way for you to get over it or under it or around it.
It's just there to mock you in your loneliness.
But he says, death as cruel as it is, as powerful as it is, has been conquered.
And death cannot separate us from the love of Jesus Christ.
It cannot.
Though it take us away from this earth, this present scene, it cannot separate us from
the love of Jesus Christ.
And then he points to the other extreme.
He talks about life, likewise, whatever the present circumstances are in our existence.
He says it can't separate us from Christ.
Either way, Jesus Christ is with us, isn't he?
In this life, we say with Paul, for me to live is Christ.
He says, life, whatever it entails, whatever comes to me, and remember he was in bonds
at that point, writing to the Philippians from Rome.
He says, for me to live, well that's just Christ.
He knew the Lord was with him in that.
But then he knew that death meant being absent from the body and present with the Lord.
So you can't lose either way.
Either way, we cannot be separated from Christ.
Then he goes on to talk about angels.
We're assuming holy angels because he goes on to talk about principalities, which is
frequently Paul's term for the other side, for the demons, the angels of darkness and
of evil.
And he says that angels, or spirit beings, cannot separate us from the love of Christ.
Now of course, the good angels would not, but the evil angels cannot separate us from
the love of Christ.
Spirit beings do not have that capacity.
And then he mentions things present, including hardships.
And he talks about things to come.
So again, a contrast, the extremes.
The things present that we are going through, and then the things to come, the unknowns,
the potentials, the possibilities, the fears that sometimes come with all of that.
He says none of that in the future can separate us from the love of Christ.
Whatever comes to us in life cannot separate us from him.
Sometimes the devil gets us over a barrel when we talk about the future.
I don't know how about some of you parents, but one of the things that I experience is
this little voice in my ear from the enemy.
And it says, if you dare make a deep, thorough commitment to God, someday God is going to
test that.
And he's going to take away your wife, or he's going to take away one of your children
to see if you really mean it.
How many of you parents have ever experienced something like that?
Are you couples?
You know, many of you.
My friend, that's not the voice of God.
You recognize the voice when that kind of word comes.
It's the enemy.
Well, should we withhold?
Should we stand back and be cautious about committing ourselves to Christ and to his
Lordship?
Should we be careful about committing ourselves to him because of the possibilities of the
future?
And what may happen if we do that?
He says, whatever the future holds, things to come, in those things we are more than
conquerors and whatever it is, it cannot separate us from the love of Jesus Christ.
You and I can depend upon the love of Christ.
Should one of those things that we dread happen?
At that moment we must remember, as awful and as terrible as this is, it does not separate
me from the love of Christ.
He still loves me.
Things to come.
It cannot separate us from the love of Christ.
He talks about powers.
Possibly here he has in mind human governments.
As Paul was dealing with human governments in Rome, the place where this epistle was
addressed, was the seat of the greatest power in the world in that day.
But he says powers cannot separate us from the love of Christ.
He talks about height and depth, the extremes of space as we measure them, height and depth.
He says there is no way that we can be separated from the love of Christ.
We can't get that high.
We can't get that low.
And then if he hadn't said enough, he concludes by saying, nor any other created thing shall
be able to separate us from the love of God.
Now what does that include?
Well, when you consider the fact that everything but God is created, it means that there is
nothing in the whole universe that can separate us from the love of God.
Contrary to the opinions, even the convictions of some, there is nothing that can separate
us from the love of God.
We can't even separate ourselves from the love of God because we're a created thing
too.
There is nothing in the universe that is able to separate and sever that love relationship
and the love pouring into our lives from Jesus Christ.
Nothing.
It is impossible for you, for me to be rejected by God.
Impossible.
We can experience rejection in this world and we do, all of us.
And it hurts.
But we cannot be rejected by our Lord.
We can't be overlooked by Him.
We can be overlooked in this world.
And there are times we miss out on things that we've deserved or we felt we did.
But God is not going to overlook us.
There is no way for us to miss the destiny that God has purposed for us, which destiny
we've talked about before, our being glorified with Christ.
Oh my friend, God is for you.
He is for you in every respect of that term.
There is no way that you can measure that God is against you because He is for you in
Jesus Christ.
And nothing can separate you from the loving purpose and destiny that He has in mind for
you.
But the fact is there are times that we wonder if God does love us.
Sometimes our prayers aren't answered the way we prayed them.
Because things don't turn out like we anticipated they would or should.
And we say, but God, I thought you loved me.
Please keep in mind that the proof of God's love for us is not in our experience, but
it's in His Word.
The proof of God's love for us is not in our experience, but it's in what He says.
And if you and I go through an experience in which it seems as though God's love isn't
present, it's a lie.
Because His love is there.
We may not be able to see it at the moment.
Our eyes may be blinded by tears.
Our mind may be clouded by disappointment.
Our emotions may be covered over with grief and sorrow.
But Christ's love is there.
And that's why He says what He does in verse 28.
That all the things work together because God causes them to.
They work together for good, our good, and for His glory.
I hope tonight that whatever you're passing through, that you will understand this.
You will accept the security that God promises you as His own.
You as a child of God can never be anything less than that.
He keeps you.
He preserves you.
It does not depend upon your faithfulness.
Oh, we want to be faithful, but our security does not rest upon our faithfulness but His.
If we believe not, yet He abides faithful, says the Word of God.
Your preservation as a child of God depends upon the faithfulness of your Heavenly Father
who has caused you to be born again by the work of His Spirit into His family.
One day He is going to present you to Himself in glory, and you're going to be just like
the Son of His love.
As we said before, God is so pleased with His Son that He wants a whole heaven full
of people just like Him.
That's your destiny.
And nothing in heaven above or hell below can prevent you from one day stepping into
that glory that God has prepared for you.
Doesn't that make you want to be faithful now?
Doesn't that make you want to obey Him?
Doesn't that make you want to serve Him with everything you've got?
It does me.
Not because I want to keep saved.
Not because I want to do something to try to hang on, but I just want to serve Him because
He's done so much for me.
I want to give Him everything I am.
Everything I've got because of all that He's promised, all that He's purposed for all
of us who know and trust the Lord Jesus Christ.
Let's pray.
Right where you're seated, will you thank the Father?
Will you tell Him how grateful you are for the proofs that He's for you?
Your heart may be aching with some experience in which you have doubted His love.
You've wondered if you're going to be a conqueror in that instance.
Believe His Word.
Remember the proof of His love is not in your experience, but in His Word.
He says He loves you, and there's nothing that can separate you from that.
Father, I pray that all of us who are yours tonight will sense your arms of love around
us and may that melt those areas of life where we perhaps have been rebellious and resistant
to the will of God.
May your arms of love around us cause our struggling to cease.
May it cause the anxieties and the fears and the worries that we have been captivated by
to be stilled.
May we realize how sovereign you are and how definite your purpose is and how sure your
love is.
Thank you.
In Jesus' name, amen.