Chapter 5
Will God help us overcome the failures we experience every day?
Yes, he has promised to help and to intervene in our daily lives. Conscious of our weaknesses, inconsistencies, and repeated failures, we realize that we are often our own worst enemies. We want God’s will, but we are also full of selfish desires. We wonder how God will protect us from ourselves. Paul answered this question by assuring us that God will step in and take care of us. In the person of the Holy Spirit, he will help us in our prayers. And as our heavenly Father, he will intervene in the circumstances of our lives.
He will help us in our prayers. One of the areas our weakness shows is in our prayer life. Even when we pray, we are plagued by conflicting emotions. Selfish, sometimes impure, thoughts flash through our minds while we are talking to God. Sometimes we don’t know what we should ask for. Sometimes we are so sick or weary that we can’t do more than say, “Lord, please help me.”
How reassuring to know that God understands and that his Spirit makes sure our prayers are acceptable and effective. “And the Holy Spirit helps us in our weakness. For example, we don’t know what God wants us to pray for. But the Holy Spirit prays for us with groanings that cannot be expressed in words. And the Father who knows all hearts knows what the Spirit is saying, for the Spirit pleads for us believers in harmony with God’s own will” (8:26-27).
The Spirit groans within us, and these groans are wordless. Through these groans, as he labors to purify us in preparation for eternity, the Spirit cleanses and revises the thoughts and desires of our hearts and presents them to God. The Father, who perfectly knows our hearts, receives these revised prayers and answers them. This is perhaps what Paul meant when he wrote: “Now all glory to God, who is able, through his mighty power at work within us, to accomplish infinitely more than we might ask or think” (ephesians 3:20).
He will work in our circumstances for our good. Though we blunder and fail, God intervenes in our circumstances to make sure his purposes for us are realized.
And we know that God causes everything to work together for the good of those who love God and are called according to his purpose for them. For God knew his people in advance, and he chose them to become like his Son, so that his Son would be the firstborn among many brothers and sisters. And having chosen them, he called them to come to him. And having called them, he gave them right standing with himself. And having given them right standing, he gave them his glory (romans 8:28–30).
In these verses Paul takes in all eternity—from the eternity before time began to the eternity after time ends.
Before God created the cosmos he planned our existence. We live as his image-bearers because he chose to make us that way. We are saved from our sins and destined for glory because God loved us from before the foundation of the world and chose us as his special people (ephesians 1:4–5). God’s eternal will is the reason for our existence and the ground of our salvation. He is not going to let anything prevent his will from being carried out—not the schemes of the devil, not the strategies of God’s enemies, not even the failures of his children.
Romans 8:28 is true. It has to be. It may be one of those passages that we don’t fully understand. Or it may be one that we think must mean what we so desperately want it to mean, and struggle when life’s circumstances don’t fit it, or God seems not to be working.
We may not always be able to see how, but God will intervene when necessary to make sure that his purposes for us are realized. In all of life’s circumstances God intends for us to become more like Christ every day in preparation for the day when we will be like him. “Dear friends, we are already God’s children, but he has not yet shown us what we will be like when Christ appears. But we do know that we will be like him, for we will see him as he really is” (1 john 3:2).
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