Please turn your Bibles to Romans chapter 8.
Romans chapter 8, beginning with verse 12.
Words of our God.
Apostle Paul said, Not to the flesh, to
live according to the flesh.
For if you live according to the flesh,
you will die.
But if by the Spirit you put to
death the deeds of the body, you will
live.
For all who are led by the Spirit
of God are sons of God.
For you did not receive the spirit of
slavery to fall back into fear, but you
have received the spirit of adoption as sons,
by whom we cry, Abba, Father.
The Spirit Himself bears witness with our spirit
that we are children of God.
And if children, then heirs, heirs of God
and join heirs with Christ, provided we suffer
with Him in order that we may also
be glorified with Him.
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 decay 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 firstfruits of the Spirit, groan
inwardly as we wait eagerly for adoption as
sons, the redemption of our bodies.
For in this hope we were 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 hearts knows what is
the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit
intercedes for the saints according to the will
of God.
And we know that for those who love
God, all things work together for good, for
those who are called according to His purpose.
For those whom He foreknew, He also predestined
to be conformed to the image of His
Son, in order that He might be the
firstborn among many brothers.
Let's pray.
Holy Father, we believe in the Holy Spirit.
Father, we pray that Your Holy Spirit would
make Himself known.
Father, we pray that He would not make
Himself known with mighty acts.
Father, we pray that He would make Himself
known in this place by convicting us where
we need convicting, by encouraging us where we
need encouraging.
Father, by pointing us to Jesus Christ.
And Father, we pray that above all things
You would glorify Him today.
And we ask all of this in Jesus'
name.
Amen.
You may be seated.
So are they brothers?
I stepped back and listened to that question,
for it seemed about the 500th time.
My wife and I had just returned from
Russia, where we had gone on the first
of two trips, where we were in the
process of adopting two one-year-old orphans
in a Russian orphanage.
And on the first trip, we had gone
to Russia and had driven out to this
orphanage, walked into this place that was the
vilest and most disgusting place I had ever
been, the most squalid place I had ever
seen.
And we had seen these two boys, atrophied
muscles that were atrophied from lack of use,
who were in cribs that they had never
been removed from, in a room that they
had never been out of.
And we appeared in court in Russia, and
through translators said to the judge, We will
be parents to these boys.
They will become our children, and we will
become their mother and their father.
And then we had to return to the
United States of America and wait for all
of the legal process to be finished for
us to receive the word that we could
come back and pick up our sons.
We had two photographs of these two boys
that we would show to people when we
returned home.
We had Maxime, who we would name Benjamin,
and Sergei, who we would name Timothy.
And we would show their pictures, and people
would inevitably ask us, So are they brothers?
And my response would always be, Well, they
are now.
And the person would always come back with,
Yes, but are they really brothers?
And my response would always be, Yes, now
they are really brothers.
And the response would come back again, Yes,
but you know what I mean.
And I did know what these people meant.
What they meant was, Do they share the
same DNA?
Do they share the same blood type?
Do they share the same parental heritage?
Do they share the things that, after all,
really matter?
And as I thought about this more and
more, reading through the book of Romans, and
the book of Ephesians, and the book of
Galatians, and indeed the entire New Testament, it
slowly began to dawn on me that I
was answering the exact same question that the
Apostle Paul is answering everywhere throughout his epistles.
Are we brothers?
When Paul is dealing with the issue of
circumcision, this is not just a discrete issue
taking place in the first century in one
particular church, or two particular churches, or 400
particular churches.
It is an issue that sums up the
whole sweep of the storyline of the Bible.
If you don't understand, Paul says, what it
means to be in Christ, and how in
Christ circumcision is fulfilled, how in Christ God's
purposes are summed up and fulfilled, you don't
understand what God is doing through the Gospel.
So that when Paul is able to write
about the fruits of the Spirit, for instance,
he is not talking about something sweet and
sentimental.
He is talking about an act of warfare.
So that when God has said in the
Old Covenant, I look at Israel, Israel is
a vine, a vine that seems useless because
she will not bear fruit.
You move into these last days, and you
have Jesus of Nazareth standing and saying, I
am the vine, you are the branches, and
you will bear fruit.
Paul writes and says, if you don't understand
the unity of the congregation, you don't understand
the war.
You don't understand the triumph.
You don't understand what God is doing by
summing up all things in Christ.
Notice what Paul does here in verse 12.
He starts off, so then, brothers, writing to
this congregation at Rome.
This is a word that Paul will use
in his epistles, that Peter will use in
his epistles, that Jesus will use, a word
that seems so meaningless to us because brother
in Christ has become just one of these
words, one of these phrases that we use
like traveling mercies.
It is something that we use, we understand
what it means, but it means really nothing
at all to us.
We don't see how radical this is.
So that every Christian single man knows what
it means when a Christian single woman says,
I love you as a brother in Christ.
That means, please stop calling me, and not
much more.
But for Paul, this is a radical idea.
He says, brothers, to all of the members
of the congregation, he says, brothers, you are
debtors not according to the flesh.
He is making it clear to the Roman
congregation that they are no longer enslaved with
the kind of language that he will speak
of that old order, an order that is
ruled, as he says to the Ephesian congregation,
by the prince of the power of the
air, so that I am obeying the passions
of this old order, so that I am
following along this will of the wisp all
the way until death.
He says, you are no longer living according
to the flesh.
You are now living according to the spirit.
You are now walking after the spirit.
And he says, this idea of brotherhood, it
is not just unity.
It is not the old liberal Protestant idea
of the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood
of man.
He says, this brotherhood has everything to do
with the triumph of Christ.
Jesus has conquered.
And how has he conquered?
Notice a little bit earlier in chapter 8
and verse 3 for God has done what
the law weakened by the flesh could not
do by sending his own son in the
likeness of sinful flesh and for sin he
condemned sin in the flesh.
He says, you are now liberated from that
old order.
You are liberated from that condemnation.
You're now walking in the power of the
age to come, walking according to the spirit.
And if you're walking according to the spirit,
he says this means that you are sons
of God.
And Paul unpacks exactly what this means.
He says, you are sons of God, so
you are no longer alienated.
Notice what he says.
He says, you did not receive the spirit
of slavery.
And he uses slavery and ties it to
fear.
You're no longer receiving the spirit of slavery
to fall back into fear.
You are instead now receiving the spirit of
adoption as sons by whom you cry, Abba,
father.
There is a restored relationship with God as
father that has everything to do with what
God is doing in this great cosmic warfare
that we are talking about.
When God, through Christ, crushes the serpent's head,
what is he doing?
He is undoing that alienation that we have
had from the garden itself.
When God, after all, sends away the man
and the woman out of the garden, away
from the tree of life, away from this
temple communion with God, places a flaming sword
in front of the gate, he says now,
in Christ, you are sons of God.
You are those who are able to cry
out, Abba, father.
You're those who are able to speak and
to look at God and able to commune
with God as father.
There's a restoration of this alienation, a restoration
of this communion, a turning back of this
alienation.
He says you are, all of you, therefore,
sons of God.
Now think about the way that the Bible
has used the language of son of God.
Think about, for instance, when God speaks through
Moses to Pharaoh and he speaks of Israel.
He doesn't simply speak of Israel as my
people or my nation.
He says you are holding in bondage my
son.
Let my son come out that he may
worship me.
Pharaoh is holding back the son of God,
the firstborn son of God.
God turns around and judges Pharaoh by wiping
out what?
The firstborn sons of Egypt.
And you move to the words of the
prophets.
So that, for instance, Hosea can say, out
of Egypt I have called my son.
There are those who will say when they
turn to the book of Matthew, the Gospel
of Matthew, where Matthew tells us about Jesus
being with his father and mother in Egypt,
returning in order that the words of the
prophet may be fulfilled.
Out of Egypt I have called my son.
And there are those who will say, well,
Matthew is a good guy.
He's just not a very good biblical exegete.
Because after all, Hosea clearly is talking about
Israel coming out of Egypt.
And Hosea is clearly talking about Israel coming
out of Egypt.
Matthew knows that.
Matthew is turning around and saying, and that's
exactly what I'm talking about too.
The Israel of God, the son of God,
coming out of Egypt, living and recapitulating the
life of Israel, he is the Israel of
God, the one who is raised from the
dead, the one who is anointed with the
Spirit, the one who receives the covenant promises,
the one who is able to look at
the father in the face and say to
him, I am your son and you are
my father.
Paul says, when you are in Christ, that
alienation, that sense of slavery, that is undone
because we are now in communion with God.
This is one of the reasons why we
should be so concerned as we are preaching
the gospel about the kinds of alienations that
we see in our own congregations between fathers
and sons.
When we have an era of people who
don't even understand what it is like to
cry out Abba father, when the apostle Paul
tells us the father, I bow my knee
before the father from whom every fatherhood in
heaven and on earth is named.
This is something that has everything to do
with the way we understand the gospel itself.
Paul says, you are not, you are not
alienated.
You are now sons, but it's not just
an issue of relationship.
Notice what else he says.
There's an issue of inheritance.
He says, if your sons, if your sons
of God, that means that your children of
God, and if your children of God, that
means that you are heirs of God.
You are joint heirs with Christ.
You're hidden in Christ so that everything that
belongs to Jesus now belongs to you.
There are some who will say you move
through passages such as Galatians 3.
In Christ, there's neither male nor female, slave
nor free, Jew nor Greek.
You are all sons of God.
There are some who will say, well, let's
make sure that we make this sons and
daughters of God.
After all, we want to include both males
and females in this.
Paul does include both males and females in
this, and Paul does not say you are
sons and daughters of God because if he
did, he would be sexist.
The men in the congregation could say that's
exactly right.
We're the sons of God.
We receive the inheritance.
You're the daughters of God.
You have the relationship, but no inheritance.
Paul says, no, I'm saying something more radical
than that.
The Jews in the congregation could say, yes,
we're the sons of God.
All these promises that were made, they belong
to us as the sons of Abraham.
And you Gentiles, you God-fearers who are
in Christ, you have a relationship, but you
do not have the inheritance.
Paul instead turns around and says, no, what
you need to understand is that your identity
is in Christ so that you are not
circumcised or uncircumcised.
In Christ, you are circumcised on the eighth
day.
In Christ, you are a Jewish offspring of
Abraham.
In Christ, you are one with a clean
heart and pure hands, able to ascend to
the mountain of God.
This is who you are.
And what it means for the congregation to
come together in a sense of unity is
to understand we are all receiving the same
inheritance, an inheritance that belongs to Christ.
This has everything to do with the triumph
of Christ in warfare.
You think of, for instance, Psalm 2, where
the anointed one of God, the nations mock
and the nations laugh.
And what is the promise of God to
his anointed son?
The ends of the earth are your inheritance.
Paul turns around and says, you need to
understand what Jesus receives as an inheritance.
This belongs to you in Christ.
And if it belongs to you in Christ,
then part of the unity of the congregation
as we move through this warring wilderness is
to understand that we have a common hope,
a common expectation, a common joy, a common
liberation because we are all receiving this inheritance
together in Christ.
And what does Paul do?
He turns around and says, you're heirs of
God.
And then he puts a very important clause
here, provided that we suffer with him in
order that we may be glorified with him.
Paul says, I don't want you to think
that this means that you're not going to
be suffering.
He says, no, I want you to understand
that what you need to see is that
you will suffer.
You will move through this present era bearing
the spirit of Christ.
You will suffer at the hands of the
principalities and powers.
But as you suffer with him, you will
also be glorified with him.
I think this is one of the things
that we missed so often communicating in our
churches.
And that might be one of the reasons
why so many of our church members are
drawn to TBN.
And to Joyce Meyer.
And to Joel Osteen.
Someone who is standing and promising some kind
of hope.
What we need to do is not to
turn around and say, yes, Joel Osteen and
Joyce Meyer and Kenneth Copeland are promising you
wonderful things, but they're things that just aren't
very realistic.
What we need to communicate is that we
are more committed to a health, wealth, and
prosperity gospel than Joyce Meyer and Joel Osteen
and Kenneth Copeland.
Kenneth Copeland is moving toward death.
Oral Roberts is looking worse than he did
30 years ago.
We need to understand and to communicate that
when we mean health, we mean resurrection from
the dead.
So that even if the doctor comes back
with a prognostication, this is cancer and you'll
be dead in two months.
We will pray as the people of God
for healing, but we will always have the
understanding that even if God should not choose
to heal this now, he will choose it
to heal it later.
He says you will suffer with him in
order that you may be glorified with him.
He says the unity of the church in
this present age, it needs to be maintained
by this common expectation, this common joy.
And part of our problem is that we
do not see it because it does not
seem realistic right now.
Paul says of course it doesn't seem realistic
right now.
You are now moving through the wilderness on
your way toward the receipt of the promises.
When my wife and I walked into the
orphanage, I immediately stopped myself from vomiting because
of the stench in the place.
As we walked into the room and looked
around at the squalor of it, when we
returned back on the second trip when they
told us you can pick up these two
boys, they're your sons now.
The thing that struck me as we walked
into the room, put the clothes that we
had brought for them, put them in our
arms and walked out of the room, the
thing that struck me was the way that
they reacted with such fear and such horror.
Never having seen the sun before, shadows were
terrifying to them.
They were wiping, trying to get the shadows
off of them.
The wind blowing into their face was disturbing.
They began to scream as the wind came
to their face.
And the thing that I noticed is the
way in which they were reaching back toward
the orphanage, wanting to go back to this
place of comfort.
And I was saying to both of these
boys, listen, you just don't know what a
pit that is.
You don't understand.
We're going to a place where there are
happy meals and things that you have no
way of understanding right now.
There's no way I can even communicate this
to you right now.
But what I need for you to do
is just to trust me.
You will never want to come back to
this place again.
But they couldn't understand it because this is
all they had ever known.
It seemed like home.
Paul says that's exactly what it is like
for those who through the Spirit of God
have been brought into adoption.
Those who are the sons of God.
He says you look longingly toward this way
of the flesh.
You look longingly toward this way of present
life because that's all that you've ever known.
And yet he says what you need to
understand, notice in verse 18, the sufferings of
this present time are not worth comparing with
the glory that is before us.
It's not just that they pale in comparison.
He says they're not even worth comparing.
So that when you're living in a world
that thinks that what it means to be
happy and fulfilled and satisfied is Paris Hilton,
you don't understand, he says, that there is
a glory that is coming upon the entire
creation that is hidden in Christ.
It is hidden in a mangled, executed, crucified
corpse that is raised from the dead in
glory and in power and is seated at
the right hand of God away from your
sight so that you can only see this
inheritance through the eyes of faith.
You see everything else around you through the
eyes of sight.
He says you don't understand that you gather
together as a people.
You gather together as a church and no
matter how there is warfare, no matter how
there is suffering, no matter how there is
persecution, no matter how there is wrestling with
these unseen powers and principalities in the heavenly
places, he says you have a unity together
precisely because you know you have triumphed in
Christ.
That's why Paul, when he writes to the
church at Ephesus and he says those of
you who were called the uncircumcision, who are
now the circumcision, you were alienated from the
promises of God.
Now you are fellow citizens, part of the
household of God.
He says God is building together one new
man, Jew and Gentile and the point of
what Paul is saying is not you all
need to get along so that you'll be
a healthy witness to the rest of your
neighbors, although that is true.
He turns around and says the unity of
the congregation both Jew and Gentile has everything
to do with a sign to the principalities
and powers, the rulers in the heavenly places.
What is that sign?
The sign is exactly what Paul says in
Ephesians chapter 1 that God is summing up
all things in Christ so that when you
have in the Ephesian church or in the
Roman church or in the Galatian church a
circumcised, genetically Jewish woman who is bowing in
prayer with an uncircumcised Gentile man who has
come to faith and they're all gathered in
the congregation confessing Jesus as Lord and they're
all praying through one mediator to the Father
and they're all hoping for the receipt of
one promise.
He says what are you doing?
You're a group of people coming before God
claiming nothing but Jesus Christ the seed of
the woman has crushed the serpent's head.
One mediator whose name is Jesus his kingdom
is being seen within these little ragtag communities
that no one envies that no one pays
much attention to but he says the cosmic
authorities pay attention.
They pay attention because they see this means
the end is here.
And what they see is that you are
sons of God.
That is royal language.
Kings and queens all things under your feet.
Notice what he says.
He says the whole creation is waiting he
says with eager longing for the revealing of
the sons of God.
When the church gathers together unified as the
people of God we are signaling warfare.
And we often don't see this.
Which is why we have churches that are
so uniform.
We have churches in which we have people
who are all of the same race who
are all of the same economic category who
are all of the same station in life.
We have services that are designed specifically towards
specific age groups so that you can have
in some congregations all of your young college
students in one service and all of your
senior citizens in another service.
And you divide and you split up everyone
all over the place.
We've designed a children's church experience where we
can take the children of the congregation and
segregate them out from the rest of the
people of God so that our children never
see their dad and mom on bended knee
crying out Jesus is Lord.
And we split up all of the aspects
of church life.
Paul says what you need to understand is
that the unity of the body is not
about the kind of unity that the age
of the flesh can maintain.
It is very easy to have an ethnic
Jewish caucus.
It is very easy to have a Scythian
caucus.
It is very easy to have a group
of white middle class upwardly mobile baby boomers
who can come together and all get along.
He says but what really demonstrates the victory
of Christ is when through the Spirit of
God those who have nothing in common but
the gospel gather together and receive one another
as brothers.
And receive one another as the future rulers
of the creation.
Notice what he says.
He says it's not just this common liberation.
He says this also means that you've got
a common frustration.
Notice what he says.
He says I know that the entire creation
will be set free.
The creation is in bondage.
He says and the whole creation is groaning.
It is in as in the pains of
childbirth groaning and screaming out for deliverance.
He says what you need to understand is
that God's original creation everything that you see
has now been shaped by a curse.
It's one of the reasons why as much
as we may resonate with intelligent design.
Intelligent design is not enough.
As a matter of fact intelligent design in
many ways proves too much.
You say we can look at the natural
order and we can see the design that
God has created in the universe.
Look at how God is so intricately designed
the human eye and that will tell you
something about the goodness and the order of
the designer of the creator.
Well, what do you do then when you
look at a perfectly designed bacteria that is
able and designed to sap the nutrients out
of a starving child in Africa?
What do you see about the designer when
you turn on Animal Planet and see a
python swallowing a pig?
We know through what God has told us
in scripture that the creation is disordered.
The creation is under a curse.
The creation is looking for that human rulership
where all things are under his feet.
The creation is groaning for that Paul says.
Groaning for the adopted sons to be raised
from the dead freed from all of the
penalties of death.
He says and that's not only the case
with the creation.
It's not only the case cosmically.
He says that is the case individually.
He says and you yourselves verse 23 not
only the creation but we ourselves who have
the first fruits of the spirit grown inwardly.
This is not something that we think about
when we think about the Holy Spirit.
When we think now about the Holy Spirit
we tend to think simply about people with
eyes closed and hands raised.
We think about joy and jubilation and giddiness
even so much so that that's the way
that we communicate what the Christian life is
about and yet Paul says the Holy Spirit
also produces groaning.
The Holy Spirit also produces frustration.
The Holy Spirit also creates within the Christian
a looking about and saying a world of
divorce courts and abortion clinics.
This is not the way that God intended
it to be and a longing for the
ruling authority of Jesus to be seen to
be experienced to be there Paul says that
kind of groaning actually creates unity within the
congregation because we have a common frustration.
He says you're groaning because you want to
see this over done.
You want to see this overthrown.
You're groaning together.
He says through the power of the spirit
too often.
We do not see this kind of groaning
within our congregations too often.
We see congregations that are groaning and they're
groaning about suffering.
Paul says you do not groan about suffering.
You do not groan about the glory that
you are experiencing as you move through suffering.
What do you groan about?
He says you groan along with the creation
saying how long oh Lord until Jesus's name
is the only name that is uplifted until
Jesus is the only king who is recognized.
He says this ought to be within the
spirit of the congregation so that we're able
to see and we're able to understand that
there is a war on.
We can see it.
We know it.
We understand that there's a pull toward the
age of the flesh.
We understand that there is this bondage to
decay and that ought to create within us
frustration.
It ought to create within us a sense
of being undone.
Please Jesus come.
He says through the spirit we intercede with
the spirit intercedes for us.
We know the will of God.
We are coming before God praying before God
through the will of the spirit as he
is working within us.
That is not just a prayer that is
somehow perfunctory.
That is a prayer that is often the
kind of prayers that we see in the
Psalms prayers that are full of weeping full
of groaning as I walked out this morning
to come.
Pastor Fred Zaspaul was outside my room.
He was sitting on a bench kind of
kneeled over.
I thought he was praying.
He had a little Bluetooth cell phone thing
in his ear that I couldn't see.
So I thought I was disturbing his prayer
time.
And I walked out and heard him say
well if you can get that taken care
of as quickly as you can that will
be just fine with me.
And I thought well that's one way to
say thy will be done I suppose.
And walked around and noticed he was on
the telephone and was frankly relieved.
But there are people in our churches who
pray exactly that way.
And there are people in our churches who
assume that the Christian life is exactly that
way.
Paul says the kind of unity that we
experience within the church is a unity that
is longing that is looking for something that
is not yet here and a unity that
sees what is here and is heartbroken about
it.
Because we understand and we see what the
point of everything is.
Notice what he tells us in verse 29.
For those whom he foreknew he's showing them
everything is working together for the good.
He doesn't say everything is good.
He says everything is working together for the
good.
Those whom he foreknew he also predestined.
All of us understand this in this room
but notice what he tells us.
What's the point of it all?
To be conformed to the image of his
son.
Why?
In order that he may be the firstborn
among many brothers.
Paul says what you need to understand as
you move through suffering as you move through
tribulation as you look longingly toward your future
hope that all of this is because of
Christ.
God's first thought God's first purpose is the
glorification of Jesus Christ.
This is what brings glory to God that
every knee should bow and every tongue confess
that Jesus is Lord.
He says as you are moving through suffering
whether it's the big picture story of cosmic
suffering or whether it's the small picture of
your own individual suffering you need to see
that God's big plan is the glorification of
Christ and God's small plan is conforming you
individually into his image.
And if that's the case you can trust
him.
If that's the case you can withstand suffering.
The worst sin that I think I have
ever committed in my life that I'm aware
of had to do after my wife and
I had experienced three miscarriages.
And we had wanted children we had prayed
for children and we had become pregnant three
times and had suffered miscarriages after every one
of these.
And after the third miscarriage my wife was
upstairs in the bedroom crying herself to sleep.
I had a prescription I was going to
the drugstore to get filled and I sat
in the car and turned it on and
the radio announcer at that moment was saying
and in other news singer Madonna is pregnant
again.
And I stopped and said and how is
that fair?
That this godly Christian woman who would make
such a good mother such a glorious mother
to raise up these children in the nurture
and admonition of the Lord is crying herself
to sleep and Madonna is pregnant.
And that evening a friend of ours by
the name of Tom Nettles he's one of
my faculty members stopped by the house and
he prayed with us and he cried with
us and as he was walking out of
the door he turned around and said Russell
I want you to remember one thing God
knows exactly what it takes to conform you
to the image of Christ.
And it was as though I had been
hit in the face with a cup of
coffee.
And the conviction of God's spirit came upon
me right then.
To realize that God never promises us that
we are going to have the kind of
American dream storybook we expect.
God promises those who are in Christ the
end result.
The end result is that you're going to
be conformed into the image of Christ.
The end result is that you're going to
receive the inheritance of Christ.
The end result is Jesus says you will
rule with me.
The end result is that all of these
things don't have to do first and foremost
with you.
They have to do with what God is
overjoyed in hearing a number that no man
can number saying together Jesus Christ is Lord.
To the glory of God the Father.
Paul says you need to see this end
result and you need to allow it to
create as you move through this time of
warfare.
It needs to create unity among the people
of God.
This is why Jesus continually tells his disciples
it is not mine to give but you
will have the first who are last and
the last who are first.
The reason that James can write to the
congregation and say to the congregations you're mistreating
the poor.
Don't you know that God has chosen the
poor to be heirs of the kingdom.
The reason why Paul can write to the
church at Corinth and say don't you know
you will one day rule the entire cosmos
and you can't even make decisions within your
own little congregation right now.
We need to come into our church's understanding
that the faithful church janitor who is scrubbing
toilets to the glory of Christ will one
day be seen as one who is given
great and highly exalted responsibility.
While the mega church pastor whose name is
in lights may be last.
Those kinds of priorities those kinds of looking
to the future to shape who we are
right now that has everything to do with
the way that Paul says you move through
suffering because you see the end.
And as you move through suffering you understand
that those who are with you in the
congregation of the church these are not just
fellow church members.
These are those who are also united to
Christ.
These are flesh of your flesh and bone
of your bone and blood of your blood.
These are the brothers which is exactly why
the entire New Testament can say along with
the Apostle John if you do not love
the brothers and you say you love Jesus
you are a liar.
Loving the brothers is what it means to
be found in Christ.
I love the head so I love the
body.
Paul says as you move through this time
of suffering as you move through this time
of seeing all of these events that you
can't make sense of you need to understand
that they make sense only in Christ.
And you need to understand that whatever all
of the other temptations and all of the
other priorities you need to have in view
that day that final day when that final
accusation will be made in which God brings
his children before a watching cosmos and all
of the principalities and powers can say one
last time so are they brothers and the
voice that spoke over the Jordan waters will
say one last time they are now they
are now.
Let's pray.
Holy righteous Father we pray for churches that
we know Father that are fractured Father we
pray for relationships within our churches that are
almost satanic Father we pray for churches that
are not unified Father we pray that we
would see that as we move through this
age that one of the key aspects of
the warfare of the evil one is to
pit us against one another is to turn
our eyes off of our common inheritance to
turn our eyes off of this common groaning
and turn our eyes instead upon the trophies
of the age of the flesh Father we
pray that you would turn our attention to
the future that you would turn our attention
to a day that seems so unrealistic now
a day in which Jesus' name is the
only name and Father we ask that you
would exalt and glorify and uplift him we
ask this in Jesus' name.
Amen.