It was one of the good blessings of many men. Okay, Brother Smiley, we're ready to hear your speech. If you would, turn to Romans 8. We're working our way through this wonderful epistle of Paul, and we're belaboring Romans 8 because it's so critical to understanding really the core message that Paul has. He wants his audience, people he had never met in person, he's heard about, of reputation, the church in Rome. The Bible doesn't specifically say how that church originally started, but he writes to these people to make sure they have solid apostolic doctrine, and he explains the great doctrine of justification, deliverance from wrath, those things that are handled in the earlier chapters of the book, and he wrestles in Romans 7 with this idea that you are not going to live as a Christian in a way that pleases God through mere rules keeping based on your own resources. You're just not good enough at doing that. Paul tried it. He had perhaps as much skill as anybody could possibly have at doing that, and he failed miserably. And he ends up saying, look, we're going to need more power than we have. if we're going to please God in our daily lives. And so you get to Romans 8, and he says this in Romans 8.13, just to back up to something we've looked at before to help set the stage for moving forward in it. Romans 8.13 says, for if you live after the flesh, you shall die. He's not talking to unsaved people. They're dead already. He's talking to Christians who will make a choice at the fork in the road to orient their lives toward the flesh, you're going to experience death. It's the same thing he said in Romans 6.23, the wages of sin is death. That's for a believer. They will do that. An unbeliever can only do that. A believer is going to face death. But if you through the Spirit, and that's the key, through the Spirit. Paul said in chapter 7, I find a law in my members that makes me unable to do that which in the inward man I want to do. I see the law of God, I see the righteousness of God, and it's right, and I want to do it, and I try, but my, you know, there's a war, a conflict between my flesh and in my mind, and I'm losing this battle. How will I overcome it? Well, he finds another law, and that's the law of the Spirit. It's going to be the power of God, through the ministry of the Holy Spirit in our lives, to enable us to overcome the flesh, to live in a right way. And so that he can say here, if by the Spirit, not by own resources, not because you're frankly a, when you boil it down, just a modern Pharisee. You have a different rules, a list of rules than they were looking at, but you're trying the same method and it won't work. Rather, through the power of the spirit, you mortify the deeds of the body, you shall live. What does that mean? He's contrasting death with life. He said earlier, chapter five, and I've gone back to this verse a few times, but it's so critical to understanding his writing. 517 says, if by one man's offense, that man of course is Adam, death reigned by one. He wants life to reign in the lives of believers. And it's not an automatic. So every Christian has eternal life. They do. Not every Christian enjoys the benefits in this time of their eternal life. Eternal life isn't about duration. It's about quality, and it's about now. The emphasis is always in the New Testament on laying hold of eternal life in the moment, not just that it's some future concept. Now, we'll talk about the future in a moment, and that's intended to be a great motivation to change our lives in the present, but it's not that we're waiting to get eternal life. That part's already accomplished and available. So he says here, much more, reading Romans 5.17, much more, much more than how through sin death reigns, much more, they which receive abundance of grace, you see where that might have said, they which try harder, they which have more spine, they which have more fortitude than those other people that may be at the other end of the pew. He doesn't say that. They which receive, not earn, not get, receive abundance of grace. Well, whatever that grace is, I need a lot more of it. And I'm going to tell you this, it will overpower, it will supersede death. And of the gift of righteousness shall reign in life by one Jesus Christ. It's not merely that Christ provided a substitutionary atonement. He provided a substitutionary life. And to enjoy the benefits of that life, powered by the Holy Spirit, is what Paul's goal is, so that we may reign in life. And as he's going through that in Romans 8, he says your thought life matters. matters a great deal because in the opening verses of of Romans 8 he makes this statement that to be carnally minded is death Romans 8 6 but he contrasts that with being spiritually minded which is life and peace and it gives you a great clue into this reigning in life your thought life matters and it's why when he gets to Romans 12 he'll have a parenthesis in 9 10 and 11 to deal with with Israel and we'll look at that but you can almost in your reading just to make sure you see the continuity go from 8 to 12, where he'll open up and he says, you need to be renewed in your mind, renewed in your thinking, your thought life, because it's such a core part of this being spiritually minded and in reigning in life. Well, we got through last time around verse 18. And I want to start with just to give to start a couple of verses back before we moved to 19. Verse 16, the Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit that we're the children of God. This is not the primary basis in the scripture for assurance of salvation. The primary basis are very simple verses like Romans 3, 16. Someone says, how will I know if I'm a Christian? Have you trusted Christ? That's always the assurance of salvation. But you may see in your life that God is working a work in your life recognizing, in humility, Romans 7, I didn't work it in my life, I couldn't do it by myself. And you would say, yeah, I see this, that the Spirit bears witness with my spirit that I am a child of God. See, that's an assurance. By the way, it's a personal assurance. We have a whole lot of bad teaching going on that's about whether or not you have assurance of my salvation. The Bible never says that I'm to look to figure out whether I have assurance of your salvation. Now, preach a gospel to a lost person, yeah, but if you tell me you're a Christian, and if I were to ask, how do you know that? You say, well, I trusted Christ and Him alone, because He died for my sins and rose again. For me to go beyond that is to judge another man's servant, which is what God has said not to do in this very book. So, I'm not called to figure out if you're saved, and certainly not on the basis of what you do or say in terms of your works. And yet, that's a prominent teaching. This is a personal thing where I can see in my life, yes, I've trusted Christ, yes, I'm seeing the Spirit bring change in me. Verse 17, he says, and if we're children, then we're heirs. Now, he doesn't build all this out here because it's such a pervasive teaching in the New Testament. Paul knows, and especially those who are Jewish in his audience, Jewish Christians understand being an heir. There's so much emphasis in the Old Testament on the reward, the inheritance, the rest, which then was physically in the promised land when he would, through Moses, bring people to the promised land. Of course, Moses didn't get to go and the generation died there. What did they do? They lost the inheritance. They lost the ability to be in the land. They did not lose their salvation. They did not go to hell. Romans 11 says that by faith they came through the Red Sea. But their faith didn't go far enough. It didn't take them to the promised land, but Joshua took them. They took conquest of it, and that was their inheritance. A picture for us of our inheritance, our rest, Hebrews will say in chapters 3 and 4, there still remains a rest for the people of God, and it's in the kingdom. When we're delivered in the kingdom, we're with Christ, ruling and reigning. Revelation says as priests and kings, chapter 1. So there remains this idea of being an heir. And he goes on, he says, not just heirs. This is important because he does draw a distinction. He says, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ, if so be. There's a there's a string attached to that part. See, Jesus is the first born in their cultural understanding would have the double blessing. You see that in some of the Old Testament blessings pronounced first born double blessing. he says co-heirs with christ you join with him in the double blessing if so be that we suffer with him that we may also be glorified together and the implication is with him so he suffered suffering is so foreign to us i think in not suffering in general anyone who lives long enough will have suffering in this in this life but suffering for being a christian is somewhat foreign to us in this country if you keep up with the source uh... I always forget the website. They send me emails all the time. It's something of the martyrs, but it's voices of the martyrs. Just for example, you'll see stories of heavy persecution going on around the world in this moment. They just don't usually have any stories about that persecution in the United States, because it's kind of foreign to us. And therefore, when we see suffering in the Bible, I think we struggle with grasping it. And Paul anticipates a suffering audience. He's writing to the Romans and shortly there will be heavy persecution there under a tyrant named Nero who will cause all kinds of destruction and blame the Christians for it as an easy scapegoat. And so to these people, you know, you realize some people when there's an option of suffering for Christ say no. They do. The whole book of Hebrews is addressing Jewish believers who, when an opportunity to suffer came, they accepted it for a long time, and at some point, some of them started saying no. He even says that some of them had stopped assembling for church, and they were going back, essentially, to the synagogue. So they had pushed back against the suffering, and he addresses that. Paul anticipates those who would share in Christ's sufferings. Paul doesn't give his resume here. He has a resume most people can't hold a light to, because if you're in your resume, instead of putting hobbies and interests, you put ways in which I physically suffered for Christ. Paul had a long, long resume, and you read about it in other places, being scourged, being shipwrecked, all kinds of things, having to escape persecution by leaving a town. He says those that would suffer with Christ, that they may be glorified together, they're going to be the joint heirs And he says something else too, I reckon that the suffering of this present time is not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed in us or to us that's coming. He begins to take a very future orientation to their thinking. It's been a marvel to me, and I guess at an earlier point in my life I struggled with this, why learn prophecy? It's divisive. That is to say, a lot of people just can't come to agreement about what the book of Revelation is about. I don't actually think it's that hard. It's certainly not the hardest book in the New Testament. But there is a lot of divisiveness to it, in the sense that people just can't agree. And so what's happened is, for a lot of Christians, they say, well, we don't really need the prophecy anyway. That's for the ivory tower people, people that go to seminaries and whatnot. It's hogwash, and it's heavily destructive. Paul taught prophetic matters. to new believers. He didn't consider it graduate school. He considered it preschool. He considered it a place to start. Because when you have suffering people, you have to give them hope. You have to give them hope. And hope is rooted in the future. In fact, I had a little, and I'm going to read some of this to you, but I had a little quote. This is, there was a writer named C.S. Lewis, a Christian writer. He also wrote the Chronicles of Narnia and other books of fiction. You may not know this. This book is called Mere Christianity. It's an interesting book. I'm saying I agree with everything he says, but there's a lot of wisdom there. These were radio messages originally that C.S. Lewis delivered over the radio in the early 40s to who? What was happening in England, in London, in the early 40s? Bombings. Bombings. Yeah, the Blitz. What did they do? The BBC, which isn't the one that's the BBC now, said, you know, These people, they need some hope. They put C.S. Lewis on the radio when he was delivering these little messages, not complicated, not talking to people that read Greek and Hebrew. Hope means a continual looking forward to the eternal world. It does not mean that we are to leave the present world as it is. If you read history, you will find that the Christians who did the most for the present world were just those who thought most of the next. It is since Christians have largely ceased to think of the other world that they have become so ineffective in this. Aim at heaven and you will get earth thrown in. Aim at earth and you will get neither. He's dead on. So you look at what Paul says here. He says that the sufferings of this time, and that could be more than persecution, but it includes that. It fades when you compare it to the glory that's to come that God brings for His children. For the earnest expectation of the creature, now this is the creation, He's going to say something. He says it's not just that we're waiting for that time of glory, that future time of redemption. the whole creation. When you go back to Genesis 3 and you read what happens, one of the things is, we call it the curse, but it's not just Adam and Eve. There's a lot of ways in which they change. They change from the inside out. It's not outward stuff. They're expelled from the garden. But the planet changes. And indeed, Mars, the rest of the mature universe, changes in that moment in Genesis 3. And it groans in pain. And he says, the earnest expectation of the creation waits for the manifestation, the revealing. It's actually the word, essentially the word revelation, the apocalypsis. The material universe, the whole world even, is waiting for the revealing of the sons of God and all the glory that God will place on them. The world waits earnestly for that, because why? At that time, the whole world's going to be changed. He says, for the creation, I'm reading creation instead of creature, but I don't want you to think of this as like a being or an animal. It's the creation. For the creation was made subject to vanity or futility. That's what we call the curse. It doesn't work the way it should have. I've been to some of the wonderful national parks we have. I've went to the Grand Canyon twice. Everybody says I went to the wrong side. I'm not sure it'll make a big difference. What I saw was splendid. I've went on the trails at Mount Zion National Park, which by the way, if it says for an amateur, they've way written it down. It's more than amateur. But when you're there and you see all its beauty, if you said, God, this is so great what you did, God would say, you should have seen it before Genesis 3. See? You understand? So it's hard for us to even put our hands around this glory But the creation was subject to the curse, basically. Not willingly, but by reason of Him, that's God, who has subjected the same. And it says in Hope. The end hope attaches to what the creation waits for. Say, and this is where he introduces this notion, hope. It's why I read the C.S. Lewis piece. And look what he says about hope in a moment. But hope, my definition now, not C.S. Lewis, is when You are reoriented in your life, in this moment, around God's promised future blessings. Things future are so real to you that they are evidence today in your life. And that's Hebrews 11.1, which is not dealing with faith in the gospel. He's talking to Christians in Hebrews 11.1. He says how the future blessings of God should show reorient your life today. And that hope is what he's talking about, because the creation itself shall also be delivered. from this bondage of corruption. The creation will be delivered from the curse. Now, how does that happen? You know, when you're reading the scriptures in Genesis, something changes after, you know, in Genesis 3. But then, from there up to the flood, things are different, but they're not as bad as today. One of the things that was true is people are living longer. than they are today. Methuselah lives to be nearly a thousand years old, and the flood is timed to be in conjunction with his passing, right? And that's obviously not coincidence. God's timed this thing out. But after the flood, people don't live as long, and their lifespans shortly, or fairly rapidly, begin to decrease, and we have to get all into why that happens. But we're living in the post-flood world in terms of of our climate, in terms of the topography of the planet, because the flood wasn't just water. We have floods all the time. They're not like that. It was the great earthquake, and the formation of new mountains, and emptying out the water from beneath the ground, and all these things. So the world truly changed radically in the flood. And we're in that period of time, and when God reverses it, He will first get us back to basically what it is pre-flood. And that's this When Christ implements his kingdom, that first thousand years, the Bible, especially the Old Testament, says a lot about it. And he starts saying things like, if a person were to die at 100 years old, they would say, my goodness, he was young. All right. It'd be shocking for a person of natural causes to die at 100 years old in this time. Well, that's not true now. OK, but it will be as it reverses. And then when you get to Revelation 21, then you move into a new heavens and a new earth. Now everything is fixed. Now we'll look at the planet and see what God wanted us to see back in Genesis 2. But it'll be new. It'll be new. And so when he says that the creation shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption, the curse, into the glorious liberty of the children of God, our future is in this new kingdom, this new presence with Christ. and the whole creation will eventually be redone, and so the creation yearns for that. This idea, you see in the next verse, we know that the whole creation groans. It's the word used for birth pains. Jesus used similar terminology in the Olivet Discourse. You're reading through, and Jesus is providing the most comprehensive look at the future. He covers everything, Matthew 24 and 25, and he talks about birth pains. Well, birth pains precede the birth. which theirs, return of Christ, implements kingdom. These birth pains precede the new heavens and the new earth, and that's what it's looking forward to when everything is redeemed. So the creation groans and travails in pain together until now. Together with who? Together with us, because we wait for our bodies to also be made new. We're a new creature in Christ, but I still got the old body. I mean, my feet hurt, and my back, and some other things. That's going to change, see? So, verse 23, and not only they, but ourselves also. That is, we, which have the first fruits of the Spirit, we ourselves, grown within ourselves, waiting for the adoption to with the redemption of our body. Now, adoption, we talked about before, but I'll just mention again, it's Roman adoption. One of the big mistakes we can make reading the scripture is to see something from 2,000 or 3,000 years ago and take a modern concept and stick it in there. We understand adoption in our culture, but that's just pretty simple. People become legally the parents of a child. That's typically what happens. But in Roman adoption, it was a much bigger thing. You're becoming a legal heir of what the parents have. And at age 14, a young child, adopted or not, becomes a son in a legal sense. He now sits at the table with the father and is essentially in the decision-making process over the father's estate. But at age 25, he becomes the one that's actually in charge. That was the idea of Roman adoption, of being a Roman child. And we've been adopted by God, so now we're sitting at the table as it were at first, It's like we're age 14 like we're sons now, but but there's something later and that later when you inherit all the rights Know what he had said earlier. He said that we're heirs join heirs with Christ It's looking forward with that context of a Roman adoption and of us becoming essentially 25 years old and in inheriting what did Christ inherit everything and you see that clearly like in Hebrews 1 just the opening verses of that he's been appointed heir of all things, not heir of some things. We have the first fruits of the Spirit. That was indicated to us in verse 11 in this chapter. We don't have to look far to understand first fruits of the Spirit. We're indwelt to the Spirit of God. That's the first fruit in the life of a believer. And those who have that, we've grown looking forward to the redemption of our body. Sometimes people call it a glorified body, a resurrected body. You say, well, what will that be like? I don't know all of what it would be like. I know this, no pain, no suffering, no death, that's for sure. I know that Christ didn't have to knock on the door. You read Luke 24. When Christ comes to dinner, he don't knock on the door. He just appears inside the house, just saying, we're going to live in a heavenly, a new Jerusalem. We're being designed for where we will abode, where we will live. And I don't know what all that entails. I know what the Bible says about that city and its glory and how big it is and all of that. But just understand this is, you know, to use the Apostle John's words, we will see him as he is. We'll be like him. That's from first John. I'm just paraphrasing. That's what he said. Well, Paul goes on and says in verse 24, we're saved by hope, but hope that is seen is not hope for what a man seeth. Why does he yet hope for it? You understand hope is future. Paul, I want to show you how he uses hope, but hope is tied to the future. What's the three bigs that Paul would talk about, like in the Corinthians? He says faith, hope, and love. Those three, right? Faith and hope aren't the same thing. Hope almost always has a future orientation to it, but it never has an uncertainty element to it, like I hope it rains. When I was sitting down to be studious and make my notes yesterday for this evening's message, I was interrupted by the flash. We call that the Astros game. And if you watched it, you hoped they would win, even when they went to bat in the ninth inning and apparently had like one hit or whatever, two, the whole game. And you hoped against hope, but it didn't work. That's not the hope here. If it were the hope here, they would have won, and it would have been embarrassing for the Yankees. We put modern understanding of hope into this word, we get the wrong thing. Look at what Paul says in 4.18, if you just back up, he gives us a wonderful illustration of hope. Hope is always based on God's promised future blessings. In Hebrews 11, that we don't have time to work through all that, but it's just one example after another of people of God who reoriented their life in the present based on God's promised future blessings. And he points out in Hebrews 11, many of them never saw the fulfillment of those promises in their lifetime. They were so far future. John recorded in John 8 words of Jesus, read letters, that Abraham rejoiced to see his day. Abraham's looking forward to Messiah, but that's well over 1,500 years into his future. So, to just understand, hope may be a promise of God in the near future, like when Zacharias and his wife in the New Testament were told that they would have a son. We call him John the Baptizer. That was a future blessing, but not far off. Zacharias didn't believe it, and so he had He couldn't speak for a while, but you understand near term. Here's Abraham in chapter four, the prototypical example of faith in the Old Testament, because he has faith in Genesis 15 before the law of Moses even comes. And one of the things that happens is he was told he'd have a son. Look at verse 18, talking of Abraham in 4.18, who against hope, believed in hope. What's he talking about? Abraham was always a man of faith, but his faith grows in time, and it seems like early on he has a big failing in that God said, I'll give you a son, and he believed Him, but then he goes a few years, doesn't see his son, he ends up having this son through Hagar, and that's Ishmael, and that wasn't the promised son. That wasn't the blessing. Sometimes God gives a promise to us and we want to force a door open early and we're not seizing on what the promise was. But Abraham grew. You see that unfold between Genesis 12 and Genesis 22. He hoped against hope that he might become the father of many nations according to that which was spoken, that is spoken by God and recorded in Genesis. so shall thy seed be hoped against hope that is to take God at his word even when everything that you see says no that's what Paul would say elsewhere is to walk by faith and not by sight so God gives these grand promises the return of Christ a kingdom not in the cloud somewhere on this planet and then on the new heavens and new earth a kingdom where we'll be blessed where people will live forever, where war and evil are done away with, and you read the size of the New Jerusalem and what it looks like, all these marvelous things, and a lot of people are going to say, that's never going to happen. Look at the world today, and Paul says, hope, you're going to trust the one that told you what's going to happen, hope against hope. And that hope should change who you are today. And that's the key to the whole thing. The hope should change who you are today. That's why I said earlier, you know, prophecy is not just kind of pie in the sky stuff. We shouldn't talk about it. I would say it's essential to the Christian walk. And if you don't know prophetic matters and don't have a hope resting on what God's promised about the future, you're not going to be a mature believer. And you're going to have a lot of bad days when, frankly, you have no reason to persevere. But if you have hope, you have reason to persevere. Look what he says. He says, we're saved by hope. We're delivered by hope. This isn't, saved here isn't being a Christian. Saved here is the deliverance into that glorious future. And he says, but hope that's seen is not hope. Quit looking at what you see. Look at what God says. Some people get to the river Jordan and God says the land on the other side is yours and they won't go across it because they keep looking at the river. Another group of people don't look at the river, they look at the other side where the promises of God are and they cross the river on dry land. Two different ways to do it. Hope that it's seen is not hope. That's the river of impossibilities. But what a man seeth, if you see it, then he says, why doth he yet hope for? But if we hope for what we see not, that's God's promises, the fulfillment of it. Then do we, with patience, that's perseverance, wait for it. Perseverance, endurance. This is the call of the entire book of Hebrews, is endurance. Endure in the faith, even in the face of persecution. Endurance. Likewise, this is the key, right? Because you say, if we go back to chapter 7 and go on our own resources, the hope may not be enough. God's word is always enough, but it's being reposed in the mind of a person who has a weak flesh. And it's hard sometimes not to look at the River of Impossibility and just to look over at what's on the other side of the Jordan. And he says here, the Spirit helps our infirmities. Well, how? This gets misunderstood sometimes as only about prayer. It's much broader than that. The Spirit of God helps with our infirmities, a very broad word for weakness. It can be anything from sickness to persecution. It's a very broad word, and the Spirit of God, who's the one that's supposed to be leading us in our daily walk, that's the key to overcoming the flesh, will help with our weaknesses, our troubles, our afflictions, and He's going to help us pray. For we know not what we should pray for as we ought. We learn how to pray primarily, I think, through hearing other people pray publicly, but it's not always the best classroom. The best classroom is just being honest with God, but there will be times, because we tend to want to pray to God and tell God how he could fix it for us. God, I need you to fix this, and this is the way you ought to do it, all right? And if we'll be candid, you know, we don't always know how to fix it, and it's especially when we have no clue how to fix it. We just know it's bad, the Holy Spirit. We don't know what we should pray for as we ought, but the Spirit itself makes intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered." In other words, you can't hear it. You say, I can't hear it, what is it going to do for me? God's the one listening to it. He, God, in verse 27, the Father, that searches the hearts, see, He knows your prayer even if you didn't audibly make it. He knows what is the mind of the Spirit. The Father knows the mind of the Spirit. He's the one that hears the intercessory groanings of the Spirit on your behalf. What, just to fix your problem? Maybe to enable you to persevere in endurance. Maybe to strengthen you in wisdom. Maybe a lot of things. He knows your weaknesses, your infirmities. Because He, the Spirit, makes intercession for the saints according to the will of God. That's the way Jesus said to pray. According to the will of God. Wow. And we know, we'll try to cover this last verse and stop there, but it's a big one. I don't know why it's a misunderstood verse. I think it's because we actually don't like what it says. We know that all things work together for good. This word good is agathos in Greek. It can be something external that you see, but something internal that you don't see. A lot of times to work together for our good just doesn't match what we think our good should be because my good, would be having a new Corvette. I'll just be honest. I don't really care about the Astros, but I'd love to have a Corvette in the front of my driveway. I don't. My neighbor does. It reminds me every day I don't. And God may say, yeah, that's good, but that's not this good. You understand? God may say, you know what? If I let you work your way through a trial on the basis of the word of God, you will come out on the other end having better character, better perseverance and stronger hope than you had before. So we need to be careful about all good, because I'll hear that this verse go out, somebody's got a bad thing happening, and well, everything works together for good. That's true for some people. It's not true for everybody. And what's good is God looking at what His ultimate goal is, and you read the whole tenor of chapter 8, His goal is that the sons of God would be led by the Spirit of God into maturity with a view to their being a co-heir with Jesus Christ. There's nothing here about my Corvette that I want. Or whatever you wanted, right, in your driveway. Or those season tickets you wanted to the Astros or whatever maybe so just be careful here It's we know that all things by the way all things in Greek means all things Not some things they work together Wait a second You mean I'm gonna see some things that don't look so good work together with some things that God's doing and the proof will be in the pudding, but I may not always see it. For good to them that love God, that's the word agapao. We talk about agape love. It is a love of choice. It is not the love of emotion. It's not being, I'm just deeply in love. It's the love of choice. But what does the love of choice do? In this case, loving God, it's to, let me read it a little different way and let's see if it gives a different sense. All things work together for good to them that put God first in their lives. That's what loving God means. You don't believe that? Read what Jesus says, those who, this is in John's gospel, those who have my commandments and keep them, they're the ones that love me. Oh, well, that's different. I thought I could just fall in love with God and fall out of love sometime when I don't get my Corvette and fall back in love later, especially if I do, right? It's just not gonna work that way. He works together for good for those who put God first, This whole chapter is really about that. But it's about how you do that. Because He says you can't do it on your own resources. It'll be a power of the Spirit thing. And even when you're going through tough times, the Spirit's going to pray for you. It's all geared toward us becoming a mature believer, looking forward to something in the future, not grounded in finding peace and affluence today, which is the materialism. It's the religion of most people in our culture and too many Christians. It's for those who love God. To them who are called, That word means invited. Don't write a bunch of Calvinism into this. They're invited according to. According to means in alignment with or in harmony with. They're called, they're invited. Invited to what? This isn't about becoming a believer. He's already talking to believers. The call here is to put God first and become into maturity. It's to those who are invited in alignment with God's purpose. in harmony with God's purpose for us, again, throughout this chapter, especially the maturity of it. So, I'm going to pause there because these are all hard, I mean, this whole chapter is challenging, but they're all hard verses. But I wanted to end with that verse because it should be a wonderful blessing to us, but we do need to rightly understand it. He's telling us that all things are going to work together for good. To you, the Christian, that is doing your best, of the power of the Spirit in your life to put God first. And it won't always be easy, but the Spirit of God is going to pray for your infirmities. He's going to make intercession for you. God says, we've got this. We've got this.