God Is Greater Than Your Past!Uzorak

The darkest funeral I ever attended was for a young man in his early 20s who had overdosed on drugs. His family members and friends were not believers in Jesus. Sitting in the back of the room, I felt the weight of the grief and despair without any hope. Even the pastor who shared that day struggled to offer hope to those who attended.

If you’re feeling hopelessness, despair, or grief, I want to do everything I can to lift that weight today. The next three days in this plan will unpack three promises we can claim between the past and the future. Those three promises occur in Romans 8:28-30; you can summarize them this way.

God is at work. God has a plan. God finishes what He starts.

The first promise is God is at work. Here’s what Romans 8:28 states -

“And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose.”

This verse tells us God is working all things together. The phrase “working all things together” comes from the Greek word “synergei” - the root of the English word “synergy.” In essence, Paul states that God is pulling together all of the diverse parts of our life. We serve a God who wastes nothing. While God is not the author of pain and suffering, He certainly won’t waste it.

Sadly, though, our focus in reading Romans 8:28 can become “all things working together,” while the subject of the verse is God. This verse isn’t about how God will work it all out for us one day. Instead, the verse says that God is working all things together today.

Paul states that we can know this with certainty. The word “know” is used in a factual sense. We know that 2+2=4. We know the law of gravity.

Here’s the problem: Many of us “know” God is working all things together, but there’s a big gap between the facts we know and the way we feel. Knowing the truth doesn’t eliminate the pain we feel.

We get messed up here. We struggle to see God bringing good out of our current season of pain, anxiety, and depression. What is this “good” that Paul describes in verse 28? It’s certainly not our best life now. If it were happiness, wealth, health, and prosperity, then my email inbox wouldn’t be full of people battling anxiety, fighting cancer, navigating divorce, and healing from abuse.

The “good” described here is not simply some payoff at the end of life. It’s not a carrot at the end of a stick that God is dangling. We see the good in Romans 8:29. It’s our conforming to the image of God - Christlikeness. That’s why some translations render this “our ultimate good.” In Colossians 1, Paul describes this as “telos” - a word that means completion, maturity, or wholeness.

God is at work in your life today. God is at work through the events of your past. And God is at work as you move towards the future. That gives us hope! One writer noted, “Romans 8 begins with ‘no condemnation.’ It ends with ‘no separation.’ In the middle, there is ‘no defeat.’”

God's power is more potent than your past, and He is at work today. You can trust that promise.

Tomorrow, I will unpack the second of the three promises in this passage. For someone who likes to feel in control, it’s been beneficial for me!