Before Galaxies, Your Sanctification

By now, you’ve probably seen the new Webb space telescope images recently released from NASA. In one snapshot of glimmering, sparkling specks are entire galaxies that have existed since the Lord spoke them into being. The photos are breathtaking and hard to comprehend from where we sit in our homes on this planet in this one universe living our little lives. I looked at the pictures on my phone while sipping coffee this morning. The vastness of the universe boggles my mind. I stared at the photos, thought about all that space, all those unexplored places that I don’t even have words for, and then I washed a load of laundry. Paid some bills. Worked on an article. Read a book to my son before bed. How can there be so much that we aren’t even aware of?

I’ve been studying Romans for the past four months, and as I’ve worked through the first several chapters and grappled with true human depravity, it has been a relief to see God’s provision for us in Christ. And of course, a relief to know that chapter 8 was coming up soon. Romans 8 is a go-to passage when we need encouragement and reminders that the Lord loves us. Paul gives us the deepest kind of encouragement about what Christ’s work on the cross gives us. Freedom. We are neither condemned by God nor separated from His love in Christ. I read in a commentary yesterday that there are no imperatives in Romans 8—no commands. Just promises kept and still being kept by God.[1]

One of the best-loved promises of Romans 8 is verse 28. “And we know that for those who love God, all things work together for good, for those who are called according to His purpose.” We love verse 28 for what it says about the things in our lives we can’t explain or change. We use verse 28 to patch together our understanding of suffering in this world. For many of us, we believe we can endure hardship as long as it means something. It can’t be for nothing, so we cling to the truth that God will work “all things for good’ in our lives. I remember being with a friend many years ago when she learned of her husband’s infidelity. She collapsed to her knees in grief, crying out, “Lord you must use this for good in my life! You must be glorified in this. Don’t let it be for nothing!” Verse 28 is a comfort when life is unbearably hard.

But have you read that verse in all its context? Paul ends chapter 7 by saying we must suffer with Christ in order to be made complete in Him. He then compares our present trials to our future with God in heaven, the glory of which eclipses whatever sorrow we might carry on this earth. He reminds us that the Spirit is interceding for us, praying perfect prayers for us in accordance with God’s perfect will for us. And you know what God’s perfect will for us is? To be conformed into the image of His Son. Paul words it this way: “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 among many brothers” (Rom. 8:29). On the heels of our comforting promise that all things will work for good is the truth that God has always planned for His people to be sanctified and molded into the image of Christ. Think about that for just a moment. Before the foundations of the world as Paul words it in Ephesians 1, before—well, anything—the Lord had planned not only to save His own, but to sanctify them. Before He spoke all those shimmering and mysterious galaxies into existence, He planned to make you His own and to make you like His Son. The Spirit is praying for that. Jesus is praying for that. They pray perfect prayers for your endurance and sanctification to the Father who had always planned it. So is there any way that God won’t accomplish His good work in your life? He will do it. He is doing it. And, as all of the New Testament writers assure us, He will likely use hard things to do it. The things we need to make sense and to mean something.

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Two weeks ago, I started sleeping through the night without pain for the first time in two solid years. Most of what I’ve written over the last couple of years is a reckoning of pain and God’s goodness. How can the two co-exist? How can I live with one and hold fast to the other? Do they cancel each other out? Many times, I’ve sat up through the night with gritted teeth and searing pain, praying for this to mean something. I want to Romans 8:28 this pain somehow. Mean something.  And then, one morning two weeks ago, I woke up to the sun streaming in through the bedroom window, and I realized that something was missing. It was pain. And I’d slept the night through. I can’t explain it, really. Am I healed? I don’t know. But I am suddenly free from the suffering that has dominated the last 24 months of my life. Relieved from it, I suddenly see the gift that it was. What if I hadn’t had to lean so hard on the Lord these last years?

Though there’s no need to seek out suffering, I’ve definitely seen patterns in my life of trying to escape anything that causes discomfort. It’s not wrong to seek treatment for illness or to better a difficult situation, and we should pray and act to those ends. But we shouldn’t seek to avoid the dependency God may be teaching us in our trials. To avoid the trial by whatever means possible may cost us the intimacy gained by leaning hard on Jesus when we hurt. The times I’ve suffered the most acutely have been the times I have known Christ the most intimately, have clung most tightly to Scripture, have prayed the most often, have depended most deeply on the Spirit to pray for me. While I don’t want to relive the pain of the last two years, I wouldn’t trade the ways God has shaped me through it for any earthly comfort.

Trials come in all different forms. For some of us it’s illness and physical pain. For others, it’s grief, loss, death. Or broken relationships, deferred hopes, persecution for the faith, financial distress. Here’s what I know from Romans 8 about the present sufferings of this life. They are not simply things God will rescue with a silver lining. No, they are the very things He will use to keep His before-time promise to make you more like Jesus. The hard thing you are enduring right now is a tool in the hands of a faithful God who has promised to sanctify you. He will do it, Christian. Before there was light and dark, day and night, earth and sky, He planned to sanctify you. He’s doing it right now. The universe may be larger than the human mind can comprehend, but the God who created it all is committed to who you are becoming in Christ. Before galaxies, your sanctification.

The hard thing you are enduring right now is a tool in the hands of a faithful God who has promised to sanctify you. Share on X

[1] Tony Merida, Christ-Centered Exposition: Exalting Christ in Romans (B&H Publishing: Nashville, TN, 2021), 121.
Photo by Jeremy Thomas on Unsplash