davidbowerkingwood

When you accepted the Lord as your personal savior a number of truly significant and permanent things happened to you. Although these changes were not visible to the human senses they were real and became the most important things about you.

The number one most important thing was you were declared justified before God and became reconciled to Him; you were given the righteousness of the Lord Jesus Christ and declared free of all condemnation.

The full ramifications of that will not be fully known or realized until a future point but that in no way negates the fact that it really happened and it happened to you. You became a new creation, not just a new and improved old you but an entirely new creation.

What’s more you were secured in your new position by no less than the power of Almighty God; there is absolutely nothing you or anyone else can do, or not do that will change that reality.

This is the message of the balance of Romans 8 and should be a sure source of praise and thanksgiving for all who have been so blessed.

In verse 14 Paul tells us “For as many as are led by the Spirit of God, they are the sons of God.” This is a truly wondrous fact to consider; we are not just God’s people, we are not simply God’s friends, but we are God’s children. We have become part of God’s family, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ.

This is enormous and beyond our ability to fully imagine; it is a new reality that we know is true because God has told us it is true. Do we feel it to be true? Probably not, what we feel is a wonder that God could even love us; there may be times when we don’t even love ourselves as we reflect on our many failures in life.

That is why it is so important we operate on our knowledge of God’s word and not our feelings; our feelings will usually be a treacherous guide to the realities of life.

In verses 18 – 25 Paul starts with the assurance that “our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us.” I have no doubt that God has a glorious future planned for His children.

The Lord does not say a great deal about that future but I compare His silence to the difficulty one would have trying to describe a modern city to a native who knew only his mud hut and the area around it. There would be no common vocabulary available that could convey the amazing sights the native would see when he got to the city. I suspect there is no earthly vocabulary that could even begin to describe the wonders of heaven.

We will finish Chapter 8 in Part 3