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Morning Devotion for the Season after Pentecost
`July 8, 2024
Reading: Romans 8:26-30
Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness, for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with groans too deep for words. And God, who searches hearts, knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God. We know that all things work together for good for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose. For those whom he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, in order that he might be the firstborn within a large family. And those whom he predestined he also called, and those whom he called he also justified, and those whom he justified he also glorified.
Meditation - Peter Vanderveen
Whenever I read a Biblical text, I consciously try to forget whatever I already know about it. I also try to put aside whatever it is that I’d like to find in it or what I believe it must be saying. It’s important to make the text strange so that I can hear it anew, rather than make it useful for my own convictions and predispositions. And, in the same manner, reading texts only to see how they must support Christian doctrines and dogma is a particularly deadly exercise. I start, then, with anything that surprises me or seems particularly fresh.
I’ve read these verses from Romans countless times. I remember Bill Clinton, at an especially fraught time in his presidency, quoting several lines at a Washington prayer breakfast. His referencing the Spirit interceding “with groans too deep for words” both transcended the heated political bickering of the day and gave the impression that he transcended all the sniping as well. It was a brilliant ploy, masterfully engaged. It was memorable. But what struck me today was something I had never noticed in this passage before: according to Paul, all the work, all the direction, all the passion comes from God and is done by God. Where is the omnipresent Christian “ought” in this text?
Here’s a simple question. When you think of Christian faith, whose faith is it? Yours or God’s? Paul describes the deep and abiding faithfulness of God to us – and not a word here speaks about our need to be faithful in (however tacitly) acknowledging God (however obliquely). The latter isn’t even mentioned. No obligations. No imperatives. No instructions under threat of judgment. Not even the demand that we go out and make the world a better place to live for everyone. It’s not that there isn’t a role for these things; but they are all vastly secondary to God’s actions on our behalf, stemming (yes) from the very beginning of time. And when was the last time you felt that your understanding of faith had this extravagant scope? We’re so often so busy talking out of ourselves and about ourselves that God and God’s infinite faithfulness is squeezed out. The great rhythm of Paul’s rhetoric is meant to startle us out of our blindness.
Standing merely on our own two feet, none of us can say that “all things work together for good.” Such an idea would be laughable or offensive. These words, however, can be said by God and about God’s intentions. They reveal the power and the beauty of the divine. And what a gift it is to believe that they rightfully address us and our lives, because of God’s faith.
Prayer
Keep our eyes open, O God, to the beauty that is always present, and blind us not to the ugliness which always threatens to spoil it. May we be continually prepared to see the goodness in humanity, and at the same time not be unmindful of the evil into which we so easily slip. We ask these things in remembrance of him who had the eyes to see both the goodness and the meanness in us.
Theodore Parker Ferris: Give Us Grace
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