Romans 8:28 follows immediately after “the Spirit himself interceding for us with groans that words cannot express” in verse 26, and “the Spirit interceding for us in accordance with God’s will” in verse 27, because verse 28 shows us what the result of these two intercessions is.
The result is something that could only come from Spirit help too, because it certainly isn’t anything we could come up with naturally or by human will and wisdom. Imagine knowing with absolute certainty “that in all things God works for the good of those who love him.” But that’s exactly what Paul is saying the Spirit’s intercession on our behalf is for: it’s to bring us to the point of total trust in God, no matter what happens to us, good, bad or ugly.
Thanks to the Spirit, then, what would normally be a source of anxiety, confusion, anger, estrangement and even bitterness at the senselessness of what’s happening to us and to others – it no longer is for us. Not that we have no emotions at all, or no fury at injustice; it’s that we have no fear, no consuming desire for revenge or vindication, just simple trust in the God we love that he works everything to our benefit.
To the Spirit there’s nothing better he could want for us than that, to the point of groaning in ways we can’t even imagine that we’ll grasp it too. That’s because when Jesus asked his Father to give us the Spirit, what we “received was the Spirit of sonship” (15), whose great desire and skill is “testifying with our spirit that we are God’s children” (16). He desperately wants to get it through to the deepest part of our being that in God we really do have an “Abba, Father” (15) who never fails us.
Tough to believe when suffering for no fault of our own, or being unfairly accused of a wrong we’ve never done, or having something horrible happen to us or to others that makes no sense. But in the fog of our despair the Spirit’s groaning on our behalf for us to realize that “in all these things we are more that conquerors” (37), because we are the children of a loving God. The Spirit is on constant watch in us to help us grasp that “Nothing can separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord” (39).
But it’s not only trust in our loving God that the Spirit is interceding on our behalf for; he’s also interceding for us “In accordance with God’s will”….(next blog)
Buck To Basics 