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Articles, Bible studies, and sermons that contain Romans 8:28:
Romans 8:28-30
Excerpted from: The Christian Paradox (Part One)But at the end, Paul mentions that we become like Him through suffering. We do not get the prize at the end without going through the same process that He went through to be the heir of all things. If we suffer like Him, that is, for living godly in this world of sin—it does not say necessarily that we have to go through the same things that He went through or to the extent that He went through, but it does say that we have to suffer for being a righteous person or a person trying to be righteous and live righteously in this world. And so if we do, if we suffer with Him, then we will be glorified with Him. That is the program that we have joined and need to graduate from. That is the goal. The glorification is the goal because we have gone through all of this sanctification to be like Christ. And Paul puts the road or all the process into one simple word: suffering. Fantastic, right?
Notice the positivity here. When God calls and justifies us and puts us into the program of sanctification, He fully intends to see the process through all the way to glorification. It is a commitment so firm from God that Paul puts it in the past tense. "Whom He justified. . ." That we know, we saw it, that happened in the past at our baptism, right? "These He also glorified," also past tense. God is so positive that He can do with His power, that He can bring us to glorification from justification through that whole thing, He puts it as if it has already occurred.
Remember Jesus said, "No one can snatch them from My hand." That is kind of the same thing. He is so certain of what He can accomplish through His process of sanctification beginning with justification, that He says, "I will finish My job all the way to glorification." We know though, that glorification occurs at the first resurrection when Christ returns. That is when we shall be like Him. That is when we know from I John 3:2 that we will see Him as He is. And that is in the future, but God speaks about it as if it is in the past. It is done.
So salvation, then, is a process with a beginning, a middle, and an end. It has a past, it has a present, it has a future. It is justification. It is sanctification. It is glorification. God promises to be with us, guiding and helping us all along the way. And He speaks of it as a done deal. But we know that we are the weak link in all of this. We are the ones that could bring the process grinding to a halt because of our own stupidity and bad decisions. And the Bible does say, contrast to what the Protestants teach, that we can fall away if we reject Him completely, and willfully return to a life of sin. You will find that in Hebrews 6 and Hebrews 10.
Romans 8:28-30
Excerpted from: Free Will or God's Sovereignty?We have so much working for us—that the Creator would purpose these things so far in advance, and be interested in us as individuals from long before our births. This passage is also about those whom God has called according to His purpose. It likewise mentions God’s foreknowledge of those whom He calls. It says we are predestined to be conformed to Christ’s image, and that His predestination includes justification, which we saw in I Peter, as well as glorification.
Now, before we conclude that our part in the first resurrection is assured if we are called according to God’s purpose, we need to think carefully about what it means that He “also glorified” those whom He predestined, called, and justified. The glorification we think of first is our change to spirit in the resurrection when our bodies will match Christ’s glorious body. Plugging that glorification in here certainly makes it sound like our spiritual completion and resurrection were determined from the very beginning.
But there is another way to understand the glorification here that also answers the question that many have asked, which is why sanctification is not mentioned here.
In John 17:22, during His Passover prayer, Jesus says to the Father, “. . . the glory which You gave Me I have given them . . ..” Jesus gave glory to the disciples, even as He had glory while He walked the earth. It was not the glory of a luminescent body, but rather the glory of a life of absolute purity and truth. Christ gave glory to the disciples through His instruction and His overwhelming example. This relates to what Paul says in II Corinthians 4:6:
Drawing this all together, it means that those whom God has called into a relationship and who thus come into His presence, like Moses did, have been glorified in the sense that our lives begin to radiate the light of Christ’s life and truth. This is why Jesus said both that He is the light of the world, but also that His disciples are the light of the world (John 8:12; 9:5; Matthew 5:14; Philippians 2:15).
When someone has spiritual understanding upon which he acts, it becomes visible—there is a glory. To glorify someone can also mean to bestow honor on them, which also applies to all whom God has called and justified—it is a tremendous honor that has been given to us. We are already partakers of the divine nature, which is another way of describing this glorification. It is the initial stage of a future glorification, but it is glorification, nonetheless. Those whom God justified, He has also glorified. We shine as lights in a darkened world.
Romans 8:28-29
Excerpted from: Speaking the Truth in LoveWe are being created in God's image and to the image of His Son, but none of us, even on our best day, is a perfect reflection of God and His light. We must be transformed to overcome the natural distortion, the ripples of darkness from our carnality and prideful, selfish hearts. We could tie this right into Richard's sermon series on the "The Christian Paradox."
Our process of sanctification is a cleansing, transforming process where gradually, each and every day, our image is transformed through God's Holy Spirit to look more and more like His Son. Remember, a reflection is simply a reflection of light. Darkness cannot reflect.
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