Well, let's pray as we continue. Father, already this morning, I pray that we have been challenged with what it means to live faithfully in this world, what it means to be heralds of Christ and Him crucified, what it means to manifest your triumph in Him. And I pray Father, even as Bill prayed earlier, that we would learn all the more truly, all the more thoroughly to rest in you and to know that our God is for us. You are not some distant, remote deity that we need to appeal to through various means of ritual or plea or petition. But we are individually, and more importantly, together, the dwelling of the living God in the Spirit. That if we are sharers in Christ, then our lives are hidden with Him in you. And all that we are, and all that we know, and all that we do, all that our lives consist in, all of that is in a very real way being lived out by you. Because Christ in us by the Spirit is the engaging of our God in the very circumstances of life. However menial, however difficult, in a very encouraging way, you, our God, are suffering with us. And I pray that you will help us, even as we consider this last aspect of our vocation as your church in the world, to be priests and kings unto our God. that we will be strengthened in faith and encouraged, that you will grant to us through this understanding a renewed confidence to persevere. Even as Asaph in Psalm 73, as we heard, even though our flesh may fail, our hearts may fail, we may become discouraged and doubtful. You remain the strength of our heart and our portion forever. Be gracious to us, instruct us, but Father, not just for the sake of our understanding, but for the sake of our transformation, for the sake of our joy, for the sake of our peace, for the sake of the fragrance of Christ among us and on display in the world. We ask these things in his name and for his sake. Amen. I hope all this time that we've spent looking at the church's vocation hasn't been tedious, but I, at least in my experience, it seems that a lot of times Christians don't give a whole lot of thought to what it really means to be Christians in this world other than to, in some sense, be appreciative of the fact that we're saved and know that we've got to try to live a good life in view of the day of our death and our spirits going off to heaven and someday, who knows, the eternal state. But we tend to just kind of think in vagaries and generalities and we don't give a whole lot of thought to what it really means to be Christ's people in the world. And that's what I've tried to flesh out through these weeks as we've looked at both the internal life of the church, centered in these realities of holiness and unity, as we saw as two sides of the same coin. But then importantly, in the church's witness in the world, God has obviously left us here for a reason. Having come to faith and been gathered up in his life in Christ, there's a reason that we are still here, and not just individually, but collectively. And that's what I've been trying to flesh out, but I wanted to bring that topic of the church's vocation to a close today by considering this issue, as I mentioned, of the king priest, vocation, what I'm calling fulfilling the royal priesthood. So hopefully at this point we recognize that the church's vocation, and by vocation not vacation, vocation is a multifaceted calling. Vocation means a compelling, imparted calling, something that is imposed upon us or that comes upon us. It's not something that we actively seek or desire. It's not our talents or what kind of job we like or whatever. It's a calling in life. And the church has a very real vocation that God has imparted to it, but it's a multifaceted vocation, as I say here, all centered in the Christian calling to proclaim and manifest the new creational kingdom. This is what it is to proclaim Christ and Him crucified. This is what it is to preach the gospel. The gospel is not a formula for getting saved. The gospel is the good news of God's triumph in Christ that has inaugurated this new creational kingdom and a kingdom that will one day take everything into its grasp. So the church's calling simply then is to bear witness through its faithful engaged presence in the world, engaged presence in the world, bear witness to the gospel that we embody. If the gospel is the good news of new creation, we embody the gospel that we proclaim. And that means that our preaching the gospel isn't just orchestrated, intended episodes of sitting with somebody and handing them a tract or giving them gospel facts or whatever, our testimony of the gospel is the lives that we live. We embody the gospel that we proclaim as the beginning of God's new creation in Christ. So in our internal life, worship, outreach, The Church corporately and we individually as Christians testify to God's triumph by manifesting Jesus' life and rule as the glorified image Son and the Lord of the new creation. So that gets us to this last particular aspect of the Church's vocation, which is this priest-king idea. And when we talk about this, I know in my own experience talking with Christians, sometimes even non-Christians, but certainly Christians, when we talk about the priest-king concept, people almost always, their minds go to Jesus. He's the priest-king. And certainly as we read Romans 8, we see Christ Jesus who died, yea rather who's raised and is seated at the right hand of God is continually interceding for us. we do see the scriptures emphasizing Jesus as the king priest. If you think back even to Zechariah 6 and remember the physical prophecy of the prophet crowning Joshua the high priest and saying, behold, this is the branch. This is the branch. He will sit and reign as a priest upon his throne. Well, that's a messianic promise, right? The branch of David, the one who is to come. And certainly the epistle to the Hebrews emphasizes this royal priesthood, this king-priest idea as it pertains to Jesus himself. But we tend, because of that emphasis, to localize that concept in Jesus. He's the king-priest, full stop. But my argument is that he is a king-priest precisely as true man. Hopefully, if we go all the way back to Genesis in the creation account, there we see the human vocation as a priestly regal vocation. So yes, Jesus is the king-priest in a singular way, but precisely because he is man consummately realized. He is the true image son, the true man. He is man as God created him to be, but for the sake of mankind. Jesus isn't just the glorified, exalted image son. He is the last Adam. So he's the beginning of a new human race. A human race that, if we want to put it this way, progeny for Jesus as a new Adam, not through physical generation as with the first Adam, but through spiritual generation, sons and daughters that are born of the Spirit. But if Christians share in the life, the person of Jesus by the Spirit, who takes what pertains to him, what belongs to him, what's inherent in Jesus, the Messiah, and imparts that and forms that and perfects that in us, if we share in the person of Christ, then we also share in the vocation of Christ. We share in the vocation of Christ. Well what is then this priestly regal vocation? If Jesus is the king priest but as true man and true man unto mankind, then it means that if he is king priest then we ourselves are also ordained to be kings and priests to our God. That's why I wanted to read the Revelation context. You have this one who is the son of David appearing as a lamb who is slain, again in a tacit way bringing together a regal and a priestly dimension. That one, as the result of his ability to realize God's design for the world, He has purchased with his blood men from every tribe and tongue and nation and people and made them to be a kingdom and priests to our God and they will reign on the earth." Well, what is that function then? As I say here, divine images. We talked about this before even in the creation account. An image in the ancient world served as an interface between a deity, a God, and the worshipper. So sanctuaries, you put an image in the middle of it or even if people constructed images that were interfaces in worship, that was what they did. They became a point of encounter and interaction between the deity and the worshiper. They served a mediatorial role in that sense. And so it is with man as image-bearer, man as image-son, Man's created to be lord of the creaturely lords. This is all in Genesis 1 and 2. Administering God's sovereign lordship over the creation, but also to be God's priest who represents his creation before him and bears back to him the creation's needs, exaltation, devotion, and worship. If man is the go-between between God and his creation, if man is image in that sense, the point of encounter and interaction between the deity and the worshiper. Man is Lord unto the creation. He is God in the world in that sense, administering God's lordship but also bearing the creation back to God. He mediates God's relationship down to the creation and the creation's relationship back to God. That's the regal priestly idea. That's the vocation for which man was created. If someone asks you, what is a human being? What's the purpose of a human being? Why are we here? Even if they believe in God, why did God create us? What's the point of all of this? Well, that's the answer. This is why God created us. So Jesus is the king-priest par excellence. He is the one who has fulfilled this human vocation of king-priest, but he has done so as first fruits. And this speaks now to this issue of inheritance. Remember we read in Romans 8, if we are sons of God, then we are heirs of God. What is a son? An heir, right? In the ancient world, a son, certainly a firstborn son, would have the right of primogeniture. He would have the primary part of the inheritance. But a son is an heir. Paul says, if we are sons, then we are heirs of God. Heirs in what sense? Joint heirs with Christ. What has Christ inherited? He has inherited that which is associated with the human vocation. if he's the king priest, he has inherited the creation in that sense, that role of lordship, that role of priestly mediator, that role of creaturely preeminence, and that is what we are sharers in. The early church recognized this. When they went out preaching the gospel, you can't find anywhere in the book of Acts where they were presenting a salvation formula as to how a person can get saved. What you see them doing is proclaiming the Lordship of Christ, which carries the implication that if he is Lord, then we need to come to him and own him and submit to him as Lord. There's the obligation of responding to the gospel. But if you read in Acts 17, where Paul is at Thessalonica, And they're proclaiming this gospel and the Jews who are furious about this create a big cacophony and bring in a bunch of people to create almost a quasi-riot to get the authorities fired up. And their charge against Paul and these other men with him is that they are seditionists. They are proclaiming another king other than Caesar. That was the charge that kept finding these individuals being arrested, imprisoned, persecuted, and ultimately even killed. The way the Gentile authorities were instigated against the early Christians, primarily by unbelieving Jews, was by accusing them of being seditionists against Caesar's rule. But they also recognized that proclaiming the lordship of Christ was proclaiming his ministration as God's high priest. And you see this consistently throughout certainly the book of Hebrews, but even in Paul's writings. What does Paul say? We are to pray for all men and unto what end? For what reason? There is one God and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus. This mediatorial role of Christ and ultimately as it pertains more broadly to the whole creation. So just one other summary comment. These are all kind of foundational ideas leading to where I want to go today. We cannot separate Jesus kingship from his priesthood. And while this isn't the topic for today, this, I think, is an important understanding in answering those who want to argue, yes, Jesus is interceding as a priest for his people, oh, but his kingship is coming in the future. Oh, his kingdom is coming in the future. He will come back and become king. Right now he's just a priest, but he will become king. The scripture won't let you do that. We saw even in Zechariah that these two streams of messianic truth in the Old Testament. The priestly stream and the regal stream are shown to converge in the Messiah, certainly in Zechariah 6. So if Christ is a priest, he is a priest on his throne. You can't separate the kingship and the priesthood. They go together. And that's why, again, the writer of Hebrews can draw on Psalm 2 to prove his contention concerning Jesus' high priesthood. And I'm not going to develop that today, but if you look at him proving that Jesus did not take the priesthood to himself, he didn't seize it, but it was given to him by God, he supports that by referring to Psalm 2, you are my son this day, I have begotten you. Well, that's an enthronement Psalm. It has nothing to do with the priesthood. but he recognized that if God has set apart and ordained and recognized his son as king, that's the idea of you are my son, ask me, I'll give you the nations for your inheritance. I've installed my king on Zion, my holy hill, ask me and I'll give you the nations for your inheritance. If God has ordained the son as king, then he has ordained him as priest because the two are inseparable. So a couple implications of that. If these two cannot be separated, then they imply and interpret one another. In other words, Jesus is a priestly king, and he's also a regal priest. I'll leave you at this point to think about the implications of that or what does that really tell us, but it certainly flavors the way we understand Jesus' kingship if it's a priestly kingship. Are the rulers of this world priests in that sense? No. It also flavors the way in which he is a priest because he is an enthroned priest. This is really the heart of what Paul is getting at in that little section in Romans 8. He is an effectual priest because he is the enthroned priest. But the second thing that comes out of that is that we, in proclaiming the gospel, the lordship of Christ, we cannot do that without equally proclaiming and promoting his priesthood and his priestly ministration. If the gospel is heralding the lordship of Christ, it's also heralding his priesthood. So testifying to Jesus' lordship involves affirming in word and practice his mediatorial relationship with the world of men, but also, importantly, the wider creation. This is starting to get us into Romans 8. Since Jesus' status and vocation as king-priest are shared by all who share in his life, Christians bear truthful witness to Jesus when they fulfill their role as royal priesthood. How do we preach the gospel? By fulfilling our role as royal priests, priests and kings to our God. So those are the two things I want to look at, this thing of bearing witness to Christ's Lordship, and then secondly, the priestly idea, bearing the creation's lament. We've talked a lot about this thing of testifying to God's triumph in Christ, witnessing to his Lordship, and we saw that the main issue in testifying to Christ's lordship is testifying to the nature of his triumph and the nature of his rule, that he is a king of a different sort, that his triumph didn't come in the way that kings usually triumph. Recall again, Pilate, you're a king. You're a nobody. Where are your subjects? Where's your army? Where's your power? Where's your kingdom? If my kingdom were of this sort that you know, Pilate, that you understand, then my servants would be fighting. They would fight, just like all earthly kingdoms do, but it's not that sort. It doesn't work in that way. The kingdom was established. God set his son on the throne of Zion, his holy hill, by the son allowing himself to be put to death by the powers This is the King of the Jews as Jesus hung on the cross. So we talked about Lordship as set in the context of, again, suffering, yieldedness, a different way of looking at power. And so when Christians testify to Christ's Lordship and we speak truth to power, sometimes that means that there's direct verbal confrontation and challenge. You see in the book of Acts repeatedly, the Christians, the apostles, Paul himself, are speaking truth to power. Whether with the Jews or Paul with Felix and Festus and Agrippa, even appearing before Caesar, they are speaking the truth. But most of the time, speaking truth to power comes down to a life that demonstrates the radically different nature of Jesus' kingdom and reign. It's not a confrontation. It's not a direct challenge. It's living according to a different principle of power and kingdom. Recall again Paul in Colossians where he said that Jesus, by his death on the cross, made a public spectacle of the powers and principalities. He humiliated them. He essentially mocked them. he showed his triumph over them by his death on the cross. And then in Ephesians he says that Christ, through the church, bears witness to the principalities and powers in the heavenly places. They're speaking truth to power. The church, we often think, okay, speaking truth to power, you know, whatever political action or, you know, dealing with people's unrighteousness, going to people and confronting them or whatever. But the ultimate way is again by manifesting this reality of God's triumph in Christ according to the principle by which it operates. And Paul says in that way, the church is the testifier to the spiritual powers in the heavenly places that they've been defeated. that power doesn't work in the way that they know. It doesn't work through corruption, deception, the promotion of evil, expressions of power that crush and destroy and defile. It works in a different way. So this thing of testifying to Christ's Lordship is different than most of the time we tend to think. And another way in which it is larger than we think is that it involves our relationship with the non-human creation. And not just the powers and principalities in the world and the powers and principalities in the spiritual realm, but also the physical world itself. Jesus is Lord over all. and his Lordship pertains to the creation, not just to human beings, not just to the human world or to the spiritual world. So that means we have to perceive and order all arenas of our interaction in the world in terms of Jesus' relationship with the whole creation, the wider world, and his will for it. Not just how we interact with other people, but how we view the natural order and our relationship with the natural order and our responsibility to it. Just a summary statement here. Jesus' Lordship in the world is wise, loving, and nurturing in every way, working toward the creation's order, harmony, and flourishing. And that needs to be our perspective and orientation. So that's all I want to say about the Lordship side, except just to again emphasize that manifesting Christ's Lordship, which is our own regal role, has to do with manifesting His Lordship according to the way it actually operates, which is not the natural way we think. Recall again Jesus' disciples and John and James' mother bringing her sons and saying, hey, I want them to sit at your right and your left in the kingdom. And Jesus said, are they able to drink the cup that I'm going to drink? Yes, we are. We will drink your cup. He says, well, you will drink my cup. but it's not up to me to appoint those spots. My father ordains who will have those spots. But the other apostles are indignant. How dare you try to gainsay us and navigate around us and get the first and second spot in the kingdom. And then they're in the upper room arguing who's the greatest, who's the greatest. And Jesus says, the Lords of the Gentiles lorded over you. They call themselves benefactors, but they lord it over you. It's not to be that way among you. So proclaiming Christ's lordship in word and deed looks like doing power the way that he does it. And secondly, that lordship phenomenon or responsibility extends to the whole created order, not just to human beings, not just to government officials or whatever it happens to be. The second piece, I think, is the piece that's maybe a little bit new to us, and that's this priestly function, the priestly function. That's crucial to how lordship needs to be understood and administered. Jesus is the enthroned high priest, but he carries out that priestly ministration just like he carries out his lordship through the people that share in his life and likeness. And the first thing to note about Jesus' priestly kingship is that his rule is the ministration of love. The priestly function is a mediatorial function. And Jesus' kingship is the ministration of love—the divine, sovereign love that brought forth the creation and that zealously continues to work towards its good and final glory. As I say here, that more than anything shows the absolute distinction between Jesus' reign and kingdom and every other king and kingdom. Recall again when Israel wanted a king, Samuel was their judge. Israel's lords, Israel's rulers, were the judges once they came into the land. and Samuel's sons are unrighteous and the people are fed up with them and they say, we're done with these judges. We want to have a king. We want to be like the other nations. We want to have a king like the other people around us. And Samuel is indignant. He says, God is your king. And he goes to God and before the Lord and the Lord says, tell them they can have a king. It's not you that they've rejected. It's me that they've rejected. tell them that they can have a king, but tell them what it will mean for them to have a king. And he doesn't say, tell them what it will look like if they have a bad king. He says, tell them what it will look like if they have a human king. This is first Samuel chapter eight. God says, whoever you choose, I don't care who you choose. Even the great King David manifested this to a certain extent as well. The procedure of the king. This is what it will be, the one who you pick to reign over you, doesn't matter who you choose. He'll take your sons and place them for himself in his chariots, among his horsemen, and they will run before his chariots. He'll conscript your men to fight his wars. And he will appoint for himself commanders of thousands and of 50, some to do his plowing, some to reap his harvest, to make his weapons of war and equipment for his chariots. He will take your daughters for perfumers and cooks and bakers. He will take the best of your fields and your vineyards and your olive groves and give them to his servants. And he will take a tenth of your seed and of your vineyards and give them to his officers and to his servants. He'll take your male servants, your female servants, your best young men and your donkeys and use them for his purposes. and he will take a tenth of your flocks, and you yourselves will become his servants. And then you will cry out in that day because of your king, whom you have chosen for yourselves, but Yahweh will not answer you in that day. This is the nature of all human rule, the procedure of the king, the use of power, resource, advantage, ultimately to my own perceived good." And that's again what Jesus said. The lords of the Gentiles call themselves benefactors. They're servants of the people, but they're actually overlords. They actually are servants of themselves. They lord it over you. But Jesus' rule is as a priest. It's the mediation, it's the ministration of love. That's the huge difference and part of that abuse, part of that procedure of the king, it's not just abuse of people, it's the abuse of God's creation. I mentioned we read Revelation 5 and that after 5 comes the opening of the seals and it's showing how God's going to deal with the corruption and the cursedness of the world ultimately bringing to this high point where the kingdoms of the world become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ. This is chapter 11 where that is said, but I want you to listen to what is said here when the seventh angel sounds. Seventh angel sounded and there arose loud voices in heaven. This is Revelation 11 15. The kingdom of this world has become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ and he will reign forever and ever. and the 24 elders who sit on their thrones before God fell on their faces, worshiping God and saying, we give you thanks, O Lord God, the Almighty, who was because you have taken your great power and have begun to reign. And the nations were enraged and your wrath came. This is not talking about the end of time. This is saying when God arose to become king, the nations rebelled against that. but your wrath came and the time came for the dead to be judged, the time to give to your bondservants their reward, the prophets and your holy ones, and to those who fear your name, the small and the great, and to destroy those who destroy the earth. It's interesting that it's put in that way. God's triumph in becoming king is on behalf of the creation, not just human beings. God rises up against the destroyers of his good creation. Not just that they abuse other human beings and that they disbelieve him and they rebel against him, but that they destroy his good creation. The God who has brought order and fullness to his creation, they work towards disorder and chaos and dissimulation, pollution, corruption. So Jesus is the wise and loving and gracious King whose mediation pertains to the creation as well as to human beings. So just as clearly we see in Romans 8, Christ's intercession, his mediation is on behalf of his people. Christ Jesus who died, ye rather is raised, seated at the right hand of God, continually interceding for us. But that's just one dimension of his ministration, even as God's designs for human beings serve his larger goal of creational renewal and consummation. The salvation of people is about the salvation of the creation, the redemption and renewal of the creation. So the Messiah is God's human priest on behalf of other humans, but with a view to the human, regal, and priestly vocation of mediating God's relationship with the wider creation. So his priesthood pertains to the entire created order, which means that he's presently exercising that ministration on behalf of a creation that is still languishing under the curse. What is Jesus' present priestly mediation? If it's on behalf of the whole creation, it's on behalf of a creation that is still groaning under the curse. This is Romans 8. But he is fulfilling that dimension of his priestly ministration through his people. So what Paul is getting at in Romans 8 is that Christ intercedes for his people that they should successfully carry out his intercession on behalf of the world under the curse. That's the essence of what he's getting at in that section in Romans 8. So his argument through Romans 8, as he kind of brings this whole thing to a head in that section of the epistle, he's speaking about the sonship that defines all those who are in Christ. There is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. The principle, the truth, the reality, the canon, the law, the Torah of the spirit of life has set us free from the Torah of sin and death. God condemns sin in the flesh of his son. So that now in the son, through the spirit, we can become sons indeed. Sharing in his life and the spirit, we are sons in the son. Therefore in the Spirit we cry, Abba, Father. We read that. You are not in the flesh but in the Spirit if the Spirit of Christ is in you. If anyone does not belong to Christ or does not have the Spirit of Christ, he does not belong to Him. By the Spirit we cry out, Abba, Father. The Spirit bears witness with our spirit that we are sons of God, and if sons, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ. So if we're sons in the Son by the Spirit, we're heirs of God, even as Christ is God's appointed heir. Well, what is that inheritance? It's the inheritance eternally ordained for man as God's imaged Son, which is the glory of the human vocation as king-priest. Psalm 8, Paul has this in his mind. What is man that you're mindful of him? You created him a little lower than the angels, but you crowned him with glory and honor. You set him over the works of your hands. And Paul says, if we are in Christ and if we are partakers in his suffering, this is what we talked about last time, sharing in his suffering by sharing in his life, by being him in the world, then we will also be glorified with him. And this will take us to the point where those that God calls, he has glorified them. If you are in the Messiah, you are already sharers in that glory. What glory? The glory of the true human existence, the vocation, the exaltation of man as king and priest. But again, this current Expression of that ministration pertains to a cursed creation that languishes and groans in subjection to futility, decay, and death. That's the creation on whose behalf we intercede as priests. That's the framework for what Paul is getting at in that section of Romans chapter 8, reaching its climax in verses 26 and 30. So what we have Paul doing here is addressing the Christian vocation, what our lives in the world are, what it is for us to fulfill our calling. Look again at this. I'll read a couple of verses here where he says, In hope we have been saved, but hope that is seen is not hope. For why does one hope for what he sees? But if we hope for what we do not see, with perseverance we eagerly wait for it. Same language, what else is eagerly waiting? The creation is eagerly waiting for the revealing of the sons of God. And we eagerly are waiting for our own revealing, the manifesting of ourselves in this redemption of our bodies. Eagerly waiting, eagerly waiting. And according to that, the spirit helps our weakness. What weakness? We don't know how to pray as we ought. But the spirit intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words. This is not a prayer language in tongues. This isn't a proof for tongues. This is the way in which God holds us and helps us as his priests. The Spirit who animates us, the Spirit who indwells us, bears us in our burden. As we bear the burden of a cursed world, the Spirit intervenes for us and carries that burden to the God who searches the hearts. and he knows what the mind of the Spirit is. Why? Because the Spirit is doing this according to God's own purposes and will. This is the triune God working to perfect his creation through his people. The Spirit is carrying what we can't even put into words – the agony, the burden, the pain of the world, the pain that even inheres within us. as also waiting for the day of the redemption of our bodies. We are subject to mortality, to decay. We are groaning within ourselves, Paul says. And that life, that priesthood of bearing the world's burdens back to God, which includes bearing our own burdens back to God, as we too suffer under the vestiges of this curse in our bodies and in the non-consummating of the life of Christ in us, It takes us down to the point where the spirit within us lifts those burdens up to God. And that mediatorial role, the spirit, in a sense, becomes the priest on our behalf. Jesus, who intercedes for us, gives us the spirit to mediate that relationship, that burden, that struggle between us and God, and lift those things such that God provides us what we need through the spirit who bears our burdens in that way. So this isn't about, sometimes you just get so frustrated with people, you don't even know what to do, and you can't even pray. Well, that's okay, the spirit will pray for you. That's not what Paul is saying. This isn't when sometimes things are difficult, the Spirit will shore you up. Paul is talking about how we do this thing of sonship in this life. This is what defines our lives. This is how we fulfill this kingly, priestly vocation in the present order of things. This is how Jesus is acting as a king priest on behalf of his creation in and through his people. This is what it is for us to be kings and priests to our God. Christ bears the creation's curse, but he does it through us. Yes, he reconciled the whole creation by his cross. This is Colossians. He reconciled all things to God, and yet Paul says here that he hasn't redeemed all things. How does that work? Redemption is about loosing from slavery or bondage. And so while the creation has been reconciled in its alienation, it yet still, in a sense, is chained in bonds. It's still bound. It's waiting for its own exodus. And Paul says we ourselves are in the same condition in our bodies. Our bodies are still chained to mortality, to death, to corruption. This is 1 Corinthians 15. Well, that's the situation in which we find ourselves, a creation that is yet unredeemed, and so that creation is groaning, and this groaning we're picking up and carrying and bearing ourselves in anticipation, sure anticipation, think again about Psalm 44, of the promised liberation and renewal that is to come. That's our priestly mediation. We grown in weakness, we grown with lack of insight, we don't understand how things are working. We look at a world and like Peter says, we tend to want to say, where is this? Where is this new creation? We look in the mirror and we say, where is this new creation? All things continue as they have from the beginning of the world. Where is the promise? Remember Psalm 44, Lord, where have you gone? Where have you gone? Why have you left us? So we groan in weakness and we don't know how to bear these things but the spirit within us intercedes and communes with the Father on our behalf and bears those burdens on our behalf and God assures us that we are sons and through that he is working together with us. This is the 828 that is so often I think mistranslated. He says, and this is the NAS, we know that God causes all things to work together for good to those who love God. And really what Paul says is those who love God are working together with God towards the good that he has purposed. See, that makes better sense in the context, right? Because Paul is saying, We're wrestling, we're struggling, we're bearing the creation's groaning. We don't know how to do that. It beats us down. And he says, the spirit within you, the spirit of sonship intercedes for you and holds you in that. And he allows you to commune with God even in an unspoken way and to draw on God's strength. And Paul says, be assured that God is working these things with you. Together with you, he is working towards this good that he has purposed. working together for good with those who love God, those who are called according to His purpose. What purpose? The role of image sons, that we would fulfill this king-priest role as the fullness of Christ who fills all in all. That's what this is all about. We're fully assured we're working together with God in Christ through the Spirit according to His good purpose to sum up all creation in the Son, and therefore we persevere as bearing the world's suffering as priests and bearing our own suffering, knowing that this is the path of glory for the sons and for the creation. Paul's point is not just that, well, you know, like pledging to a fraternity, you got to let them spank you 20 times in order to get in. This is the path into heaven is to suffer. We just got to kind of go through it and put our neck in the yoke because someday we're going to come out the other side. That's not what Paul is saying. This isn't an ordeal to be endured or even instructed through. God's teaching us a lesson. This is how we learn some important lessons is by our suffering. This is the means by which the fruitfulness of Christ's triumph is realized in the world. How did Jesus inaugurate the kingdom? Through the suffering, unjust suffering, the ministration of love. And he says that's how the kingdom is testified to in the world, that's how the kingdom grows in the world, that's how God will ultimately sum up everything in his son. So be encouraged, nothing will separate you from the love of God that's in Christ Jesus. And think of how he ends 1 Corinthians when he says, immortality will swallow up mortality, incorruption will swallow up corruption. And he says, therefore know that your labors in the Lord are not in vain. The things we're suffering are not incidental. They're not punishment. What they are is the way in which the life of Christ is transforming the world. This is the way the kingdom grows. This is how God works. That's what Paul is saying here. And that's far more glorious in Romans 8 than the way that we've tended to just read it in a kind of trivial sort of way. He's trying to encourage these Romans who lived a very difficult life that this is what it's really about. Sons and heirs, we overwhelmingly conquer through him who loved us. That's what it's about. Well, let me close us in prayer. Then we'll do this closing song. Father, I always feel as if on the one hand, I say too much and on the other hand as if not nearly enough has been said. These are radical things. They are profoundly important things. These are transforming things. These are things that enliven and empower and encourage our faithfulness in the world. Because we truly are lights in the darkness. We truly are a new human community that operates according to new principles of life and human existence and power and love and relationships and faithfulness. And it butts us up against a cursed world that presses back, whether in the spiritual realm, in the heavenly places, whether in earthly powers and principalities, whether in a wider creation that's still groaning under the curse and meets us with opposition and hostility, thorns and thistles, whether it's the weakness and infirmity, the decline and decay of our own bodies, discouragement in our own minds. Father, help us to understand and to take True encouragement from Paul's pledge that though we are delivered over to death all the day long as sheep given to the slaughter, yet we overwhelmingly conquer because of him who loved us. And not just loved us remotely and at a distance or in some abstract way, but who has bound us up in a renewal that will take all things into its grasp. The love of God that will not let go of his creation. And as Christ is the exalted King over all, mediating on behalf of His creation, specifically through the people who are to be His fullness, may we take courage in bearing up. And Father, give us even a right kind of eagerness to bear the pain of the world, to be willing to live and stand in the place of suffering, of hardship, of injustice, And to know that even though we can't bear those things, and even though we don't even know what to say often, we are left in a place of absolute weakness. The Spirit within us carries those burdens to you. And in that fellowship of Father, Son, and Spirit, we can be assured that all things will be summed up in the Messiah, and that our labors in the Lord are not in vain. Give us courage and strength in these things. Give us meditative, contemplative hearts. When we find ourselves in places of weakness and discouragement, remind us of these things. And may we be ministers of these things to one another, each according to his need for his comfort. We ask these things in Jesus' name and for his sake. Amen.