I'm sure you will allow me a moment
to say what a great joy it is
to be back again in Toronto.
I counted a privilege more than I could
tell you to be here during this week.
So many of my dearest friends are in
this city and I'm deeply thankful to God
for the opportunity of renewing fellowship with them
and of being here in this place again.
And I want to say to you that
I am grateful for your presence here this
evening and for the opportunity of ministering to
you in these evenings.
During these three evenings, I want us to
approach the same subject, but really from three
different directions and in three different aspects.
The subject is the subject of Christian assurance
or Christian certainty, what the Reformers would have
called the perseverance of the saints, or some
of our forefathers would have described as the
security of the believer.
It is the theme that the Apostle Paul
is expressing in his letter to the Philippians
in chapter 1, verse 6 of that letter,
for example, when he says that he is
persuaded or certain that the God who has
begun a good work in them will carry
it on to perfection until the day of
Christ Jesus.
It is the theme that we were reading
about this evening in Romans chapter 8, where
more broadly the Apostle speaks to us about
the final triumph of God's purposes for his
people when he says that nothing in heaven
or earth or under the earth, nothing in
the present or the past or the future
shall separate us from the love of God
which is in Jesus Christ our Lord.
It is that great ringing certainty which has
been part of apostolic and biblical Christianity down
through the generations, which I think our present
world and perhaps the church in the contemporary
world greatly needs today.
It needs no deep insight into the world
in which we live to see that it
is a world riddled with many kinds of
insecurity and uncertainty.
Let me give you one or two examples.
Just a little while before Christmas we were
planning in our congregation in the center of
Glasgow to have an evangelistic visitation of homes
in the city center.
Now like many cities throughout the world we
are repopulating the center of Glasgow and there
are something like eighteen hundred homes within our
parish area which is the commercial heart of
the city of Glasgow.
And we were planning to send teams of
people out to seek to contact these new
people who have arrived on our doorstep.
Many of them, most of them, the young
upwardly mobile people, the yuppies of the modern
generation.
Some of them very able, some of them
very wealthy people.
And we were going out to meet them,
take the gospel to them.
Now a great problem was not that we
couldn't get people to go.
Our great problem was not that we were
not aware of the need for helping and
training people to do this.
Our great problem was that every single home
in our parish has such a security entry
system that you cannot even get in touch
with the people.
Now when I was a student in Glasgow
and we were doing similar kinds of visitation
in the tenement blocks of the city, you
could go up the stairs and knock on
the door and they would answer the door
and welcome you in and you could tell
them about Christ.
But there is a sense of insecurity abroad
today and people prefer to lift the telephone
and say, I'm sorry it's not suitable.
And we have scarcely been able to contact
one of them.
Let me give you another illustration.
Just in the autumn as we call it,
or the fall as you would call it,
I was in Spain in Barcelona at a
conference of Christian doctors from all over Europe.
Many of them came from Eastern Europe.
And one day I sat down at lunch
across the table from a very eminent European
psychiatrist.
And as we talked together about his work
and about what was happening in the Eastern
European situation, he said, we are overwhelmed, I
think deluged was the word he used, by
people whose lives are riven with insecurity in
almost every form.
People who have shaken off the yoke of
Marxism and Communism and are desperately insecure.
Just the other day, before I came away,
I read in the London Times a quotation
from the President of Russia, Boris Yeltsin, who
said, the only thing of which I am
certain is that nothing is certain.
Now in the light of all of that
and of what you inevitably are aware of
in the insecurity in people's lives today, let
me read you the text that you'll find,
and it would be a good idea if
you find it yourself in Romans chapter 8
verse 28.
Let me read you that text and then
ask you a question.
We know, Romans 8 verse 28, we know,
says the Apostle, not we think or it
is our opinion or we would like to
make this suggestion, but we know beyond all
shadow of peradventure.
We know that in all things, not just
in the pleasant things or the things we
can understand or in the acceptable circumstances that
touch our lives, but in all things, God
works for the good of those who love
him, who have been called according to his
purpose.
That's the text and here is the question.
Do you share the Apostle's conviction this evening?
I mean by that, is that the ground
and foundation of your life as we gather
together in this church building in the early
weeks of 1993, is that the basic conviction
of your life, the foundation on which everything
else is built, we know that in all
things, God works for the good of those
who love him, who have been called according
to his purpose.
Because if you do share it, you will
see that it makes an enormous difference to
your life.
If you are able to look back upon
the weave of the circumstances of your past
and to have this absolute assurance that the
hand of the eternal God has been weaving
his purposes throughout all manner of circumstances and
doing so for your good, it gives you
an altogether different kind of peace about the
past.
If you can look around you in your
contemporary life, however strange and mysterious, however painful
much of it may be, however it may
seem as if there is no pattern or
purpose that's visible to the human eye, if
you can look at that and say, I
know this evening beyond a shadow of doubt
that in everything God is working for my
eternal good and there is nothing outside of
that truth, then I tell you it gives
a different poise to the present and to
the way you live your life in the
present time.
And if you can look into the future,
all unknown, and say, come what may and
happen what will, whatever God has for me,
I know that to the very end of
my days he will be working together for
good in every single moment and every single
circumstance of my life.
Then I say you can face the future
with an entirely different perspective than otherwise would
be true.
So you can see how important this conviction
is and how relevant it is to the
modern world in which we live.
And I want to explore it just a
little and simply with you this evening.
I was saying to the people here on
Sunday evening because I was preaching at the
evening service here that this is one of
the best church buildings I know.
It has no clock that I can see
and that's a great advantage in a church
building, a great blessing.
Clocks should be banished from all church buildings.
That's a matter of theological orthodoxy but I
want to have mine here beside me.
I'm sure I've told you before, my family
used to say when I took my watch
off and laid it down, that's dad's most
meaningless gesture.
But I shall keep to my time whatever
it's supposed to be this evening.
Let me explore this text with you then.
Do you notice that as the apostle tells
us, God is working in all things for
the good of those who love him, he
is saying to us first of all that
God is universally at work in the lives
of his children and on their behalf in
all their circumstances.
By that I mean that there is no
area of life that is excluded from this
statement nor any moment of time.
In all things without exception God works.
Now of course there are circumstances in our
daily lives where we could readily recognize that
God was at work and many Christian people
have the habit of looking at certain areas
of life and certain experiences they have had
and they would readily acknowledge the hand of
God was upon me there and the Spirit
of God was moving there in my life
and in my circumstances and I can recognize
that.
But what the apostle is saying is not
that.
What he is saying is there is no
circumstance, there is no moment of time in
which God is not engaged on behalf of
his people to fulfill his purposes within them
and that includes circumstances that are profoundly painful,
experiences that hurt us beyond words to describe,
situations where we may feel that we are
crushed beyond possible bearing.
God moves in a mysterious way his wonders
to perform.
He plants his footsteps in the sea and
rides upon the storm.
In other words he is able to take
some of the profoundest storms of life and
use them as the chariot on which he
rides to fulfill his purposes in the lives
of his people.
Now that means that God is at work
in circumstances that I might think horrendously unlikely
that he would ever be engaged.
It means that he is at work even
when I do not desire him to be
at work in my life.
It means that he is at work when
I have no conception that he is at
work in my life.
It means that he is at work when
I cannot begin to understand how God could
be involved in a particular set of circumstances.
For example, you will remember how God's servant
Joseph went through so much trial and was
apparently in a situation where everything had turned
out to make his life bitter and painful.
And looking back on it on that day
when his brothers came to meet him in
Egypt, you remember the most embarrassing meeting of
a family that the Bible ever records for
us.
And his brothers come and Joseph looks back
upon these horrendous days and he says, You
intended it for evil for me, but God
meant it for good.
God is universally at work on behalf of
his children.
Now I think that must include even using
the folly and the failures and the sins
of other people which touch our lives and
affect us.
And we begin to ask, why has God
allowed such a thing as this to happen?
My dear Christian brother and sister, we need
to grasp that there is nothing in our
circumstances, there is nothing that flows out of
the hearts of evil men, but he is
able to turn their wrath to praise him
and to weave out of it something glorious.
I was visiting a family a few weeks
before Christmas time and they were finding it
difficult to get their little girl to sleep.
And the mother said to her, Now if
you go upstairs, uncle will come and read
you a story.
Uncle had never been consulted about this I
may say, but we went upstairs and she
had some of these marvelous fairy stories.
I actually came across somebody the other week
who was writing a PhD on the theology
of fairy stories.
Would you believe?
I really wished I'd been able to do
it because there is so much theology in
so many of these stories.
And the one that she wanted me to
read was Rumpelstiltskin.
You know the story of Rumpelstiltskin?
How the miller's daughter took straw and wove
out of the straw some gold.
And I really got into this as she
took up this ordinary rough stubble from the
floor of the miller's house and she began
to weave it and out of it she
wove gold.
I ought to tell you that by the
time I had really launched into it she
was fast asleep and was missing the benefit
of so much of it.
But I tell you I got the benefit
of it if she didn't.
And I thought how gloriously true it is
that the hand of the eternal God if
you take that story and multiply it by
infinity and baptize it into Christ how gloriously
God takes the poor stubble that in our
lives seems so utterly useless and weaves it
into gold.
He is universally at work.
Notice secondly He is benevolently at work for
us.
We know that in all things God works
for the good of those who love Him.
Now let me just point out to you
that that is an affirmation about the goodness
of God.
It is not an affirmation about the goodness
of life.
And it's important to distinguish that because it
is one thing to say life has been
good to me.
Many, many people have said that to me.
I find many of our prosperous businessmen who
come to us in the center of the
city at lunch time during the week.
Many of them will say to me when
there has been success in their business Ah
yes Padre, life has been good to me.
But to say that is one thing.
To say on the other hand God has
been good to me is a quite different
thing.
And Paul's affirmation is about the goodness of
God to His people.
He says in all things God works for
the good of those who love Him.
Now that is the integrating factor in everything
that God is doing.
He is working universally in every circumstance, in
every moment.
But the unifying factor of His work is
that He is engaged in producing the good
of His children.
It is as though you gathered all the
rays of the sun in a glass and
focused them as you will know you can
do and bring tremendous heat to bear through
it.
God is gathering all His purposes together for
the good of His people.
Now it is that that runs right through
the whole of the Scripture as one of
the central testimonies about the character of God.
The psalmist says at the beginning of Psalm
73 God is good and nothing but good
to His people.
Now he says there were occasions in my
life when I began to doubt that, when
I was uncertain of it.
But it is the central conviction of Scripture.
It is the central affirmation of this text
that God is good and nothing but good
to His people.
And when He is at work on our
behalf, He is at work for our good.
Now there are several ways in which we
may be assured of that but one of
them is here in the 32nd verse of
this chapter that we read this evening.
It is one of the things that the
apostle cites as being in a sense the
ultimate argument upon which we may rest our
confidence in the goodness of God.
How do we know He is good?
The apostle asks.
Well, he says, here is the answer.
And it is one of these arguments from
the greater to the lesser.
He says, He who did not spare His
own Son but gave Him up for us
all, how will He not also along with
Him graciously give us all things?
If this is what the character of God
is like revealed in what He has done
for us in Jesus Christ, if He did
not withhold Him, now that is a phrase
that is packed very tight.
What it is speaking of is God the
Father not withholding His Son from all the
reality of sin bearing and of becoming our
substitute and our Savior.
He says, If God the Father has not
withheld His Son from us but delivered Him
up for us all, how shall He not
with Him freely give us all things?
His goodness is guaranteed to us, you see,
at Calvary.
Now that is one of the great importances
of having your understanding of what God has
done in Jesus Christ on the cross clear.
It makes an enormous difference to your daily
life and to your practical understanding of what
Christian experience is.
This is the God who is dealing with
me day by day.
He is the God who has not withheld
but has given up His only Son.
And in Him He has guaranteed to us
His goodness beyond our minds to grasp.
He is at work universally.
He is at work benevolently.
But notice also He is at work sovereignly
on behalf of His children.
We know that in all things God works
for the good of those who love Him.
Now the implication that is undoubtedly behind that
text is that only a sovereign God can
lay hold of circumstances of all kinds and
employ them for the good of His children.
It is an essential element in what Paul
is saying and he develops it through the
rest of the passage we read this evening.
It is the essence of God's character that
He is the sovereign Lord and there is
therefore nothing that He cannot employ to bring
about the purpose of the good of His
people.
Now that means that He not only has
an unlimited interest in our well-being, He
also has unlimited resources to do whatever He
desires for us.
Have you grasped this?
Is this the God in whom you trust?
The God who has unlimited resources of wisdom
and power.
That is what makes God's fatherhood different from
ours, you know.
You know what it is like to be
a father and your children live under the
delusion that you have unlimited resources.
In their very early days of wisdom too.
Very early days.
But most of their days they imagine you
have unlimited resources of all kinds.
But we find ourselves so often limited in
wisdom and we turn to God and cry,
What on earth should I be doing at
this point?
I went into a home a little while
ago and the father was saying to his
teenage son, Well, I've never brought up a
teenager before either.
And we know our limitations and our weaknesses.
My dear friends, God never suffers these embarrassments.
He has all the resources of the universe
with which to work for the good of
His people.
Now, if that is so, and it is
clearly what the apostle is saying, that God
is working universally, that He is working exponentially,
that He is working sovereignly on behalf of
His people.
We need to ask the question before we
finish.
Of whom is this statement true?
Who may say with the apostle, We know
that all things work together for good.
Well, quite clearly, he is not vague about
that either.
He is quite specific.
He is not saying, Everything will work out
perfectly alright for everybody in the end.
Because that is clearly not what either Paul
or Jesus or any other part of the
Bible teaches us.
He is quite specific.
I say, notice what he says.
We know that in all things, God works
for the good of those who love Him.
That's the first category or description.
Now, those who love Him, who are they?
Well, there are many of us who will
say, Well, of course I love God.
One of our businessmen said to me a
few weeks ago, I want you to know,
Padre, I've got nothing against God or the
Bible or the church or anything like that.
In fact, I'm very well disposed to it
all.
But this love in Scripture is a very
particular kind of love.
It is the love of commitment.
That's why in the Bible, marriage is the
reflection of it.
It is in marriage that you begin to
see something of the relationship between God and
the believer.
Jehovah is our husband.
And Christ is our bridegroom.
And the relationship is one of commitment in
love.
And now you will know that there are
certain kinds of profession of love that avoid
commitment.
I frequently find students who will come to
me in great distress and say, I have
fallen madly in love with this girl.
And I frequently, never being a matchmaker, but
I'm always delighted when I see this happen.
And I say, that's wonderful.
No, it's not wonderful, he said.
I declared myself to her and she said
to me, well now, I don't want to
get too serious.
Let's just be good friends.
And I said, what did you say?
He said, I said, I don't want to
be your good friend.
I want to be your husband.
And what he was wanting was to have
commitment.
And there are many people who profess to
love Christ and who are saying to Him,
no, I don't want us to get too
serious.
Let's just be good friends.
And the Lord Jesus Christ says, I do
not want just to be your good friend.
I want to be your Savior and your
Lord and your Master.
I want to be the husband and bridegroom
of your soul.
I want everything that there is of you.
Notice the second description of these people.
They are not only those who love God.
They are those who are called by God.
We know that in all things, God works
for the good of those who love Him,
who have been called.
Now, of course, you will be familiar with
the idea of this call in the Bible.
The Apostle himself knew it.
That is the call of God in the
Gospel.
When God called him by his name, Saul,
Saul, he said, and arrested him and drew
him to himself.
But you see, there is something more in
this word.
If you look at it in its context,
it is not just the call of God
in that more general sense.
It is the call of God in the
specific sense that a man or woman is
drawn to God.
It is not simply the invitation to be
saved.
It is God's determination to save us that
is expressed in this.
Notice what Paul says.
Verse 29, Those God foreknew, He also predestined.
Verse 30, Those He predestined, He also called.
Those He called, He also justified.
So this is not just a voice spoken
out into the dark.
This is the living God who actually draws
people to Himself.
It is what the Reformers called the effectual
call of God.
And that is what every believing soul has
experienced.
Every true child of God has known that
what actually was happening to me was not
simply that I came to Jesus as I
was.
Of course, I did.
Blessed be God.
But I have discovered since that I was
drawn to Him.
And that in His call, He has secured
me as Christ's.
And the last description, they are not only
those who love God, who have been called,
but those who have been called according to
His purpose.
Notice what the Apostle is saying to us.
He is saying that when God calls us
and draws us to Himself, what happens is
that He draws us up into His purposes.
And these are the purposes of which the
Apostle is so convinced and sure.
What are they?
Well, they may be summarized in this in
verse 29.
And with this, I close.
For those God foreknew, and He is expanding
on the idea of calling.
For those God foreknew, He also predestined to
be conformed to the likeness of His Son.
That is what God's purpose is.
There is nothing more glorious in the whole
universe than this, to discover that the living
God who is universally and benevolently and sovereignly
at work on behalf of His children has
this great aim in view that at the
end of the day, He is going to
present us faultless before His presence, changed into
the image of His Son.
Now that's why sometimes we may not be
able to understand God's purposes.
That's why we may not be able to
grasp what He is doing and say, how
in God's name can He, a heavenly loving
Father, be involved in this circumstance?
Ah, my dear friends, it is because He
has something infinitely greater in view than our
mere happiness.
He is changing us into the image of
His Son.
And one day, we will bless God that
all His purposes have climaxed in this, that
the glory of the Lord Jesus Christ will
be seen in our very face and character.
Oh, may God set our heart on that
this evening for His great namesake.
Let us pray together.
Our great God and Father, we bow before
You.
You are the Lord and there is none
beside You.
Great in Your wisdom and love and tenderness
and goodness, we thank You that Your love
is as great as Your power and knows
neither measure nor end.
Grant us to rest in it for Your
glory through Christ our Savior.