06/09/2026
“It’s all things work together for good to those who love God.” And I said, okay, I’m sorry. But actually what the Greek says is not, “all things work together for good for those who love God,” it’s that “God works all things for good WITH those who love him.” And the phrase those who love him refers back to the previous verse where the people in question are the people who are caught up strangely, against their own will, perhaps, in the extraordinary dialog between the Father and the Spirit. And, and that then goes back to Romans 5:5, which says that God pours out his love into our hearts through the Spirit who’s been given to us, so that there is this bizarre, to us, bizarre dialog between the Father and the Spirit. And we’re caught in the middle. And the place where we are caught is the Christ-shaped place, the place of saying, “My God, why did you abandon me?” That’s why he says in the next verse that we might be conformed to the image of his son, that he might be the firstborn among many siblings. But so it’s, “God works all things with those who love him.” And we’ve resisted that “with” because we’re frightened of anything that looks as if we are adding to our own salvation. This is not about salvation, it’s about vocation. Yeah, it’s about who we are called to be in the present. We are called to be people who allow that agonized prayer to happen. And it happens either when something bad has happened to us or when something bad has happened to people that we love or people that we know about or people that we see on the news, whatever. And we simply have to hold on to it with the lament in the presence of God. And what Paul is saying is God is working with us because the Spirit is at work within us. So it’s a Trinitarian theology, both of suffering and of intercession and then of ultimate purpose, which currently we don’t see where that’s going.”
- N T Wright
