5/24/26 Romans 8:18-27 “You Are Never Alone!”

20 May 5/24/26 Romans 8:18-27 “You Are Never Alone!”

5/24/26   Romans 8:18-27       “You Are Never Alone!”

I believe that I am a very blessed man in many ways.  I have gotten to see things that many of you don’t.  Here’s what I mean.  I used to get to see many babies while they are still in the hospital.  I got to hold them for their baptisms.  I got to hear their wonderful questions during confirmation.  I got to know people who were in nursing homes.  I got to visit people in the hospital.  I got to try to comfort people during a death situation.  There aren’t many things about being a pastor that aren’t good.  But one of the things that I did struggle with is when I was in contact with some of our poorer people, not all but just a very few.  There are people in our neighborhoods that live in absolute poverty.  Someone once told me after they had visited such a home that they didn’t know people were that poor in our area.  Often times these people have one bad break after another. Others struggle because of their own fault of some sort and these are the ones who seem to try to stay as poor as the can.  Others are happy because they know that things will get better.  Many times I just wished I could help.  In today’s reading Paul is trying to reassure his readers that even when we do have troubles, there is a bright future.  Let’s see if we can see past our troubles into this great future Jesus has planned for us.

Tim Bond tells the story that happened many years ago at a football game in Madison, Wisconsin.  The Badgers were playing the Michigan State Spartans and there were about 60,000 people in the stands.  But the game was really lopsided.  It seems that the Spartans were mopping up the field with Badgers.  If you are a Minnesota Gopher fan, you are used to this as other teams have been doing this to them for decades.  Maybe they are finally getting out of that slump.  Anyway, back to the story.  Even though it was a terrible day for the Badgers, every once in a while, cheers of joy and applause could be heard throughout the stadium.  Tim wondered how this could be when the team was doing so poorly.   He found out that 70 miles away, the Milwaukee Brewers were beating the St. Louis Cardinals in game 3 of the 1982 World Series.  Many in the stands were listening to this game on their portable radios.  They were responding to another game, in another sport, in another place.  Sometimes it’s much better to be tuned into someplace else than where we are.  Sometimes the situation you are in is so bad that you want to focus on something else.  Many modern people live this daily.

This is where the audience of Paul was in Rome.  Things weren’t easy for these people.  Paul is addressing the Christians who are a definite minority at this time.  The Romans aren’t particularly fond of the Christians because as far as they were concerned, they were in the same league as the Jews and they hated the Jews.  This is shortly before Rome destroys the Temple so things hadn’t blown up yet.  The Jews don’t like the Christians because they consider us to be false plus we were taking membership from the Jewish population.  To make a long story short, these Christians were in a definite minority.  This wasn’t like our modern world where we try to support and nurture minorities.  In ancient Rome, they would just as soon kill them as deal with minorities.  It was a tough world.

This is what Paul is addressing in this first part.  The world is full of suffering and it is caused by Satan.  Paul doesn’t name him but the inference is there.  I don’t think that we like to get involved in spiritual warfare in our world.  It is so much easier to blame our suffering on lack of food rather than the evil forces that withhold food from its people.  This is Satan working.  The same can be said about the lack of medicine around the world.  Many diseases could be treated if only we were allowed to do it.  Even our government tries to stop these aid efforts or at least they don’t help out.  This is all the evil one working.  Whenever you see bad things of the world, it is the devil working.

Let’s keep this in perspective.  The world we live in today, the physical world we know, is the devil’s world.  God’s world is where we are going.  We are just visitors here for a very short time.  It’s up to us to make as big a difference as we can while we are here because Satan has no hold on us Christians if we don’t let him.  However, we will suffer for this because the devil will not make it easy for us.  That is what Paul is referring to in this first part.  Paul doesn’t dwell on this and I won’t either.  Just be warned that evil is just about every place you look.  The reason we worship in a sanctuary is because it should be a safe place from the devil, a sanctuary.  That is why I cast him out every Sunday or here on line before we start.

As we live our lives in this world we can do one of two things.  We can either do what Jesus has planned to help the world be a better place for us and help as many as possible to come to know the Lord or we can just give up because things are so bad and join the other side.  The first way of doing things gives us hope.  The second will only lead to despair.

Paul wants his people to live in the hope of tomorrow.  These Roman Christians are a minority.  They have been battling the government and the Jews.  Things are looking rather bleak for them.  They are also new Christians.  If you think about it, everyone in those days was a new Christian.  God put Paul in their midst for times like this.  Here was a man who knew hardship.  He had been shipwrecked, stoned, left for dead, imprisoned many times because he dared to do what I do every Sunday.  He proclaimed the Word of Jesus Christ.  And he did this with so much passion that can only come from one place.  The Holy Spirit was with him every step of the way.  Paul was not about to sit back and give up because things were so bad.  He didn’t even give up when he had been left for dead.  Paul was the real deal and through the wonderful guidance of the Holy Spirit, he wanted to make the world a better place for his people.  In this case his people were the beat-up Roman Christians.

For the most part we aren’t as beat up as Paul’s original audience.  However, we are more beat up than we like to think.  There is not one adult here this today that doesn’t have some sort of baggage whether it be recovering from a death or illness or empty nest or you just name it.  We all have struggles that we have to contend with every day.  For some it might be just getting the crop planted.  But for some strange reason we don’t give up.  We are never beaten.  We will find a way to get out of things, whatever they may be.

I’m here to tell you that you need to begin with Jesus Christ.  That’s what we are doing when we baptize our children.  We are giving them hope for the future.  It’s the same thing with Sunday school and confirmation.  We are trying to help them in the future.  This takes place in other areas also.  One of the things I have learned in the past few years is that some students, mainly boys, want to grow up and program computer games.  I always tell them that one thing they have to do is be really good at math.  They are usually quite surprised by this but I’m only trying to give them real hope for the future.

Sometimes when young people get married, they live with some dream like expectations.  They think and see things through rose-colored glasses.  They think everything will be great.  I have to try to help them see life as it actually is.  We live in a world of peaks and valleys.  Hopefully, we can get enough momentum on our peaks to get us through the valleys.  This is one of the reasons that church attendance is so important.  As we sit there on Sunday morning, we often don’t know the trial facing the person in front of us.  If you ever want to start a mission project, start right here in your church.  All you have to do is show up.  By showing up on Sunday mornings, you become a role model for the person sitting next to you who is struggling.  Then when you struggle you can look at someone else for support.  Jesus works through all who attend worship regularly.

You see Jesus was here for about 33 years and He got to see firsthand what we are like.  He knows that we are just like little children.  We are always doing the wrong things and most of the time we tell each other how great we are doing the wrong things.  Anyway, He knows how bad we can be so He sent us the Holy Spirit. This is the Sunday we celebrate Pentecost, the coming of the Holy Spirit.  This is the time when Jesus sent His Spirit back to live with us and in us.  This is what He promises in John 14.  To me this is very exciting.  We get to live with Jesus Christ inside us in the form of the Holy Spirit.  You can be living pretty large with Jesus inside of you!  The way I look at it, there is really not much more hope than having the Spirit inside me.

Of course, the reason God does this is that He loves us.  He wants us to survive the groanings of the world.  He wants us to have the strength required to make a difference.  The world has been groaning for over 2000 years.  It has been groaning since Adam and Eve were banished from Eden.  It was simple in those olden days to be strong enough to withstand the evil one.  They didn’t have vehicles that went 80 mph.  They didn’t have computers so you could talk to someone on the other side of the world.  They had to stay where they were at.  They had to actually talk to their spouses and families.  There was no choice.

It is much harder to be strong today in some ways.  We can hide our feelings by only using the internet or video games.  We can do things like what Sharon and I did one time as we traveled over 5000 miles in just 4 weeks.  We weren’t doing this to run away but you can see that it’s easy to put 1000 miles between you and your troubles.  With all the distractions, it’s easy for us not to talk to anyone but just be on a computer.  We think we don’t need strength that comes from God because we are so self-sufficient.  But we need His strength more than ever because of all these distractions that make us think we are self-sufficient.

Again, how does God provide us with strength.  He can really do it anyway He wants but He made a plan just for us.  It is the Holy Spirit for us.  When the Spirit first appeared to us it was in the form of wind and fire in a place where wind and fire like this were not possible.  The Spirit can go places we cannot.  It can do things that are impossible for us like lifting a car off of a person.  It can think thoughts that are totally foreign to us.  With the Holy Spirit inside you, there suddenly becomes nothing that is impossible.  This should not be a scary idea because God can only do things that are good.  And He wants to have His Spirit inside each and every one of us here today so that good works, impossible works can be done through you.  You are loved that much by God and you are that important to Him.

God will not be stopped.  God cannot be stopped.  He wants you to have the hope of the Holy Spirit as well as the strength of the Spirit.  Just these two things alone should make you want to shout for joy.  This is great stuff.  But our more than generous God isn’t done yet.  He gives us all this stuff so that we can have a future.  We talked about this last week when I asked if you were on a mystery trip or did you know where you are going.

You see, Jesus wants everyone to have a future with Him.  When you have the Holy Spirit, you have a future.  You have a future in this world and in the world to come.  These ancient Romans seemed to have no future.  People in Africa and other places today where there is tremendous persecution by lunatic Muslims seem to have no future.  However, they have the Spirit who keeps them together so they can have the hope and strength to withstand the onslaught.  They also help each other have a future which brings us right back to why it is so important to worship together regularly.

I was talking with someone who was being bombarded with Jehovah’s Witnesses.  This person couldn’t figure out why it had become so hard to follow Jesus.  With Jehovah’s Witness, who claim to be Christian but are not, you have to earn your way to heaven and anytime you try to do this, it gets really complicated.  It’s a false religion.  Anyway, they thought all they had to do was believe and they were saved.  I told them that they were absolutely right about that.  All you have to do is believe.  Believe in Jesus.  Confess your sins to Him, repent or turn from your bad ways and accept Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior.  It is so easy.  It’s the easiest religion in the world.  Don’t try to complicate it with any of the hundreds of false religions about false gods initiated by false prophets.  As I tell people, it’s easy to follow Jesus.  It gets hard when we don’t follow Jesus and follow the ways of sin instead.

People, Jesus sent us the Holy Spirit so He could be with us all the time.  We can be even closer to Jesus than the disciples because we have Jesus in us.  They only had Jesus with them.  This is the day that Jesus became in them.  This is the day that they first understood what this was all about.  This was the day that they went out on their own, no matter what the danger, and spread the great message of Jesus raised from the dead for the forgiveness of sin.  We can and do have the same thing.  Let the Spirit control your life.  Go where He tells you to go.  Say and do what He commands.  Your life will be infinitely better for doing this.  This life we have with Jesus in us is the greatest life there is.  Thank you, Jesus, for first loving us.   Let’s pray.