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“If you’re able, please stand.” Reading Rom. 8:28–39. “Thanks be to God.”
The secret to having confidence. E.g., Josh Kerr breaking the mile record - 3:42.66.[1] He broke a record that had stood for 27 years. He broke the previous record by just about a half-second.
He drew attention last March when he announced he was going to break the record. Called it “Project 222,” which meant running the mile in 222 seconds.
He had a lot of confidence he could do it. For the last months he was militant with his mindset, setting goals, controlling emotions. All good things. Certainly, this played a part.
In the end, he broke his own personal record by about 3 seconds. The WR by less than a half-second.
But the fact is, he’d been a great runner for a lot of years before 2026. Been a world champion, Olympic silver medalist. He’d run miles under 3:50 many times.
So, his confidence was rooted in…reality. A WR is always an ambitious goal, but for him, confidence sort of made sense.
Now if you or I said out loud, “Next summer I’m going to break the new mile record,” well, we’d just laugh at you.
Mindset, sleeping at altitude, putting in the practice time, space-age shoes and running suit? It doesn’t matter! There’s no way you or I are ever going to break that record.
My confidence would be rooted in…a delusion. Confidence can sometimes make you perform a little better than you normally are. But it can’t take a very mediocre runner and turn you into a world record holder.
Part of his preparation was answering every question he could think of about running this record mile: What if I think I won’t make it, what if I feel a pain in my body, what if I don’t feel well on race day,…
He answered those questions to gain confidence.
I say all this, because our passage is meant to give you a kind of confidence. But a confidence rooted in reality, not a delusion.
Confidence in something far more important than setting a mile record: Confidence to live the life you’re given. Every day. To the very end.
It arms us with confidence by answering some of the most important questions we can have.
We turn now to one of the great paragraphs in all the Bible. Romans 8:31–39 contains truth after truth after truth that is pure gospel—“good news”!
It summarizes the heart of the first eight chapters of the apostle Paul’s letter to the Romans, but it does it in a way that new light is shone on the gospel.
Over the next four sermons, we’ll look at five questions that Paul asks as he closes this greatest of all chapters in our New Testament:
God’s love for us is the top step on this ascending staircase. We’ll take two sermons on this final question.
These are five of the most important questions we can ever ask ourselves. Having the right answer to them is critical. If we are to know true peace—true confidence, true assurance in Christ—then we need to have the right answers to these questions.
We’ll look at the first two questions this morning: (1) Is God for Us? (2) Will God graciously give us all things?
Prayer: Camp Joshua and NCRTL.
Read Rom. 8:31.
One of the questions we can be tempted to ask is this one, “Is God for us? I mean, really. Is he really for me?”
If you don’t have a ready answer to this, it’s unsettling. Discouraging. Deflating. Romans gives us tons of ammunition to answer this question.
“What then shall we say to these things?” (Rom 8:31). This is technically the first question. But it will be answered by the five questions and answers we’ll cover over the next four sermons.
Looking back over the first eight chapters of Romans, Paul takes it all in and then asks us to consider what it all means. “These things” revealed in Romans 1–8 are a summation of God’s good news. “What then shall we say” in response to it?
What are “these things” from Romans 1–8 Paul has in mind?
“When then shall we say to these things?” That’s Paul’s opening question. His answer to that question is another question: “If God is for us, who can be against us?”
For the Christian, that “if” is really “since”: “Since God is for us, who can be against us?”
For us, if you take all “these things” from Romans 1–8, it is an emphatic statement that “God is FOR US”! Not because we are worthy or deserving or righteous. But because he has given us grace in Jesus Christ!
If you want to summarize what it means to belong to God and to have him as your Father, it means that “God is for us and not against us.”
If you look back at the Old Testament and want to summarize the ways of God with his people, it is that “God is for us and not against us.”
Psalm 56 is an example:
You have kept count of my tossings;
put my tears in your bottle.
Are they not in your book?
9 Then my enemies will turn back
in the day when I call.
This I know, that God is for me. (Ps 56:8–9)
The question is not, “Who is against us?” But, “Who can be against us?”
If you ask, “Who is against us?”, well, that’s a long list.
The devil who comes to “steal and kill and destroy” is against us.
The world and its worldiness are against us—Jesus said, “If the world hates you, know that it has hated me before it hated you” (John 15:18).
E.g., yesterday someone from Planned Parenthood knocked on our door. She was encouraging us to vote and be concerned people losing their healthcare. I didn’t say much but told her we couldn’t support anything connected to Planned Parenthood.
Later I thought of all the things I could have said. She was a woman maybe around 30 who probably thought she was helping people. I thought later I could have asked her how she felt about the fact every year Planned Parenthood kills hundreds of thousands of babies. That number is staggering.
She was a black woman, so I could have added that 40% of those abortions are of black babies.
If we ask, “Who is against us?” Planned Parenthood is on that list. It’s complicated to make individual people into our actual enemies, but Planned Parenthood is certainly part of “the world” that hates us.
But sometimes “who is against us” is a more personal enemy. Someone trying to do us harm in some way—financially, emotionally, physically, professionally.
“Who is against us” is also this body of sin, this body of weakness. My sinful desires are against me, tempting me to think or do something that will ultimately hurt me. My body of weakness can feel like an enemy. Sickness and suffering can feel like my enemies have stormed the castle and taken over.
But again, Paul’s not asking, “Who is against us?” He’s asking, “Who can be against us?”
He’s saying something different: No matter who your enemies are—the devil, the world, personal enemies, sinful desires, a failing body—they will not finally prevail. Your victory is assured. You will gain your prize. Christ in you has won, and the end of the battle is settled.
Octavius Winslow:
God must be on the side of his people, since he has, in an everlasting covenant, made himself over to be their God. In a special manner, and in the highest degree, he is the God of his people. In the most comprehensive meaning of the words, he is for us. His love is for us—his perfections are for us—his covenant is for us—his government, extending over all the world, and his power over all flesh, is for us. There is nothing in God, nothing in his dealings, nothing in his providences, but what is on the side of his people. Enshrined in his heart, engraved on his hand, kept as the apple of his eye, God forms a mighty bulwark for his Church. “As the mountains surrounds Jerusalem, so the Lord surrounds his people from this time forth and forevermore” (Ps 125:2).
Octavius Winslow, No Condemnation in Christ Jesus[2]
Application: God is for you, not against you.
That’s one of those things we need to put on “play” in our minds and hit “repeat.”
“God is for me, he’s not against me. God is for me, he’s not against me. And if God is for me, who can be against me?”
Sometimes what keeps us from really believing this and living in the good of it is a particular aspect of our lives we feel was really different.
So we reason like this: Well, if God was for me, THIS wouldn’t be true. But it is true, so there’s no way God can be for me.
We hyper-focus on a single data point, as if it were the only thing that’s true.
Often what we need to do is Zoom out to take in more of the data.
Read Rom. 8:32.
A second question we can be tempted to ask is this, “Will God give me what I need? Will he give me what I truly desire? Or will he simply give me leftovers and meager portions to barely get by?”
It is hard to live well, the kind of joyful, thankful life we’re called to live, if we doubt God’s unending generosity toward us. Paul helps us to answer this question well.
Rom. 8:32: “He who did not spare his own Son…”
At times we talk about a parent wanting to “spare” a child some punishment or some consequence. Or a judge wanting to “spare” a criminal some punishment or fine.
But God is telling us here that as Judge and as the Father of his beloved Son, he did not “spare” him anything.
The full force of the wrath of God came down upon him. All on his “his own Son.”
“His own Son”
We see something similar in Genesis 22, when Abraham is told by the LORD to offer up Isaac.
He said, “Do not lay your hand on the boy or do anything to him, for now I know that you fear God, seeing you have not withheld your son, your only son, from me.” (Gen 22:12)
“Withheld” in the Greek Old Testament is the same verb as used in Romans 8:32. The same verb in a similar situation, a Father not sparing his beloved son, his “only son.”
We heard last week from Romans 8:29 that we were predestined to become sons, so that Jesus would be “the firstborn among many brothers.”
And a few weeks ago we looked our spiritual “adoption” from Romans 8:15–17.
It’s true there are many sons and daughters of God through our spiritual adoption.
But there is only one eternally-begotten Son of God, who was always a Son to God the Father and always will be.
Jesus Christ is the one and only Son of God who can say
“I and the Father are one.” (John 10:30)
John Murray:
God has many sons by adoption. But the Scripture allows no confusion to exist between the sonship of the only-begotten and the sonship of the adopted. No other but the only-begotten is the Father’s own Son and this is so because there is an eternal, incomparable, ineffable [indescribable] sonship.
John Murray, The Epistle to the Romans[3]
But despite this eternal relationship between God the Father and God the Son, it was this Son who was offered up by the Father!
“For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.” (John 3:16)
This is the Son who was “given up” for us all. He was given up to:
Octavius Winslow:
“Delivered him up for us all.” If any other expression were necessary to deepen our sense of the vastness of his love, we have it here. Who delivered up Jesus to die? Not Judas, for money; not Pilate, for fear; not the Jews, for envy—but the Father, for love!
Octavius Winslow, No Condemnation in Christ Jesus
“For us all”—vicarious atonement, substitutionary atonement. In our place. On our behalf.
“Us” are those swept up in God’s great plan of salvation in Rom. 8:29–30. But now we see the great cost required for that plan to be accomplished!
Paul’s argument here is from the greater to the lesser. The greater giving was giving "his own Son." The lesser is also giving us "all things." If he gave the Greater, how much more confident should we be that he will give the lesser!
So, we live confident that God will also “graciously give us all things.”
Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places. (Eph 1:3)
His divine power has granted to us all things that pertain to life and godliness, through the knowledge of him who called us to his own glory and excellence. (2 Pet 1:3)
“All things” needs to be interpreted in light of Romans 8.
So, we live receiving “every spiritual blessing” and seeing God even turn the hardest of things into good (Rom 8:28). And yet, this life will be a life of suffering as well.
Many prayers will be answered! But some will not.
But the “all things” God gives far outshine what we don’t receive and wish we did. In the end there will be “no comparing” what he gives with all the difficulties and unfulfilled desires (Rom 8:18).
“All things” required to bring us to our “glorification” will be ours (Rom 8:30). God will cause “all things to work together for good” for us (Rom 8:28).
“How will he not also with him graciously give us all things?”
Is God for us? Yes! Who can be against us? No one!
Will God graciously give us all things? Yes!
Josh Kerr’s famous mile. It required an immense amount of work and focus. But also, a confidence rooted in reality, not a delusion.
The live we are called to live also requires faith that God is for us, and “if God is for us, who can be against us?”
Before the Scotsman Josh Kerr there was “the flying Scotsman” Eric Liddell. Famously won the gold medal at the 1924 Olympics in the 400m. He then went on to give his life in China as a missionary, dying in a prison camp during WWII.
Liddell died on 21 February 1945, five months before liberation. Langdon Gilkey later wrote, “The entire camp, especially its youth, was stunned for days, so great was the vacuum that Eric's death had left.”
Liddell’s life required a confidence, a certainty in the questions we’re asking: Is God for us? Yes! Will he graciously give us all things? Yes!
In his only book, he wrote:
God's love is like a lake in the eternal hills. The gift of his Son is like a river flowing from that lake. Our faith is like a pitcher that draws soul-reviving, thirst-quenching, life-giving draughts from this river of love and life.
Eric Liddell, The Disciplines of the Christian Life[5]
If you’re a Christian, God is for you: lift your faith to him and drink deeply of his love!
Friend, if you’re not a Christian, the offer of salvation and grace are held out to you this very moment: lift your faith to him and receive forgiveness, life, and love in Jesus Christ!
Prayer and closing song (“God is For Us”)
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josh_Kerr_(runner); https://www.runnersworld.com/news/a71858125/josh-kerr-altitude-chamber-bedroom/; https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/for-the-first-time-in-27-years-a-man-set-a-new-world-record-for-fastest-mile-people-have-chased-the-goal-for-centuries-180989154/; https://support.runna.com/en/articles/16065587-josh-kerr-on-breaking-the-mile-world-record
[2] Available at https://www.monergism.com/thethreshold/sdg/winslow/No%20Condemnation%20in%20Christ%20Jesus%20-%20Octavius%20Winslow.pdf.
[3] Murray, The Epistle to the Romans (1997), 1.323.
[4] Murray, Romans, 1.326.
[5] Eric Liddell, The Disciplines of the Christian Life (Nashville: Abingdon, 1985), 89.
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