Always secure

My disabled son had surgery this morning to remove a golf ball sized "stone" from his bladder.  The surgery was successful.  He will be in the hospital overnight and come back home tomorrow.  Taking him into surgery reminded me of the many months we spent in the hospital right after the accident iin 2002 and all the surgeries he required trying to repair his shattered skull.  In return this reminded me of numerous conversatoins I had during those months with a wide variety of people in which I assured everyone that my son had lost nothing that mattered, that he was secure and we had nothing to fear.  In most of those conversations I would refer to some portion of Romans 8:28-39. 

This is one of the most powerful and comforting paragraphs in the Bible.  All those people who love God and who are called according to his purpose, which is to say, all those who are children of God and heirs of God and fellow heirs of Christ who suffer with him (vv.16-17)---all those people, well God foreknew them all, that is, he decided before he made the world to enter into an intimate relationship of love with them and he predestined them all to be conformed to the image of his son.  All these people whom he thus predestined he called to himself by the work of the Holy Spirit through the gospel just like Jesus called four day dead Lazarus out of his tomb.  All these called ones he justified, that is, he declared them not guilty but perfectly righteous on the basis of what Christ did for them.  All these justified ones he glorified, that is, he placed within them the seed of eternal life which will come to full blossom on the day our great Savior returns.

Now in v. 31 Paul asks, in view of this enormous grace, this powerful and complete salvation, "what shall we say to these things?"  Then he launches into one of the greatest litanies of God's blessings upon his people beginning with the rock of security: "If God is for us, who can be against us?"  The fact is there are lots of people and demons against the people of God.  Paul's point is not that people and demons don't oppose us but that no one and nothing can successfully oppose us. 

However, the key verses that I went to in all those conversations and which I still regularly draw people's attention to is vv. 35-37.  It reads,  "Who will seperate us from the love of Christ?  Shall trouble or hardship or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword?  As it is written, 'For your sake we face death all day long, we are considered as sheep to be slaughtered.'  No in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us."  Paul's point is that if you are loved by Christ, then you have been given the best thing in the universe.  When you are loved by Christ, nothing and no one can take that away from you.  No trouble, no hardship, no persecution, no famine, no homeless, impoverished condition, no danger or threat, no war, nothing and no one can remove the love of Christ from the foreknown, predestined, called, justified, glorified, children of God. 

Jared has always been safe; he never lost and never can lose what really matters, because Jared is one of those people.  How do I know?  Because the children of God are all those who have trusted in Christ alone to save them and Jared expressed that faith in Christ from the time he was a teenager.  As Paul says in v. 36 by quoting Psalm 44:22 every true Christian should expect the bad things listed in v. 35 to happen.  It is what we are destined for in this life.  But every Christian should also be fully aware that none of it can remove that which is most precious to justified sinners: the love of Christ.  That is what Paul means when he says we are more than conquerors through him who loved us.  We will always and forever be loved by Christ, no matter what evil may befall us in this life.  So there is nothing to fear for we can lose nothing that matters.