From Groaning to Glory
Reflections On Romans 8:26-28
I was left speechless on Tuesday night. Crystal had gone to bed before me. I was spending some time in the backyard, taking in the heavy summer air after a hard rain, when the phone rang. It was Crystal’s Mom. She told me that Crystal’s younger sister, Candy had died. In that moment, I had no words. I sat awkwardly on the other side of the phone and said, “I am so sorry.” I hung up and wished I knew what more I should have said. Then, for at least 10 minutes, I sat silently in the dark before I came inside and shared the news with Crystal.
A lot of grief intersected with my life this week. One of my best friends is moving to another state, and I had what might have been my final dinner here in Charlotte with him on Wednesday evening. Summer is winding down, and soon it will be over, my daughters will return to college full-time, and my house will be a lot quieter.
Most days, we live willfully ignorant of all the grief and suffering in the world until it comes home to us. And why not? Who can bear it all? We are reminded more than ever how jaded we have become to the trials and suffering in the world: wars, genocide, mass shootings. If we focus too much on it, we might feel as if the world is coming apart at the seams. And in some ways it is.
This piece is based on the manuscript of a sermonI preached from Romans 8:26-39. I highly recommend you read the Scriptures for context. Sermon preached at New Hope Presbyterian Church, Gastonia NC, 07/26/2026.
Paul captures, possibly more than any other place in his writing, the whole of the human experience in Romans 8. He sets it up thus: “For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed in us. For the earnest expectation of the creation eagerly waits for the revealing of the sons of God. (Romans 8:18-19).”
God is up to something in the world, and we play a part. A part so important that the entire cosmos breathlessly waits for our big reveal. A divine conspiracy is afoot, and we who have been called to Christ, justified by God’s grace, are also being glorified.
And all of creation is groaning for our glorification because it was unwillingly subjected to futility, Paul says. Submitted to futility by human sin. As RC Sproul once put it: “The word futility is one of the ugliest words in the English language. Nothing could possibly be worse, nothing could possibly drive the human being to despair more quickly, more deeply than the idea that our pain, our labor, that these things are merely exercises in futility, meaningless, that the human experience is like the myth of Sisyphus, who uses all of his energy to push that gigantic rock to the top of the mountain so that as soon as he gets to the top the rock falls back to the bottom and he has been sentenced to push it back to the top again and again and again forever in a labor that is in vain.”
Is that all life is? Suffering to the bitter end with no meaning? That is what the nihilist says.
But Paul is emphatic in saying, NO! That is not all life is! Paul says that this suffering, our groaning, is pointing to something more meaningful and more purposeful than we can imagine—the redemption of the cosmos. This is just but an appearance of futility. It matters somehow, and only God knows how.
Somehow suffering and glory are dance partners. They are not opposite and opposing forces, they are in tension like facing dancers holding hands, pulling against one another as they dance in a circle.
Just three chapters earlier, Paul wrote: “Not only that, but we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us (Romans 5:3-5).”
There it is again, the Holy Spirit doing something in our hearts—pouring out God’s love. From today’s reading: helping us in our weakness… making intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered.
Because life does leave us speechless. And even when we aren’t speechless, we don’t always know what we should say or how we should pray. But the Spirit knows this. He knows all about our weaknesses. He works fully aware of the human condition. In our condition, we don’t always know what to pray because we don’t always know what it really is that we want.
This is part of the weakness the Spirit helps us with—we are driven by our desires even when we don’t know what those desires are. We are often driven by unconscious drives that we do not notice. So how can we know what to ask for?
Last week I tried an experiment on social media. I asked people to share what the would ask for if they could have one wish granted. Much like Solomon from our Old Testament reading today, who given the chance to ask God for one thing asked for wisdom. Ironically, he showed he already had wisdom just in the asking for it.
When I posted the question to social media, no one answered. And those who did said they would be afraid to ask for what they really wanted because they weren’t sure of the consequences. One person said, “I’ve read too many fairy tales and seen too many Twilight Zone episodes to even touch this one.”
Perhaps he was recalling the story of the “Monkey’s Paw” which was adapted for TV by Alfred Hitchcock in 1965. In it a couple is given a monkey’s paw from India. They may wish for anything. The wife wishes for money. The next day, their son is tragically killed in a work accident, and they inherit his insurance policy. Her request felt benign, but her desire proved deadly.
Even among Christians there is tension about what to say and how to pray, especially in times of suffering. For instance, I have heard Christians warn: “Don’t pray for patience, you’ll regret it!” The argument being that patience is learned through suffering, and no one wants to pray for that.
We ridicule and are ridiculed when in times where we don’t know what to do or say, we offer “thoughts and prayers.” To the world this is a cruel and meaningless gesture in the face of such great evils in our world.
But sometimes it is all we have….
Actually, all of the time, prayer is all that we have. While we may never understand the mysteries of prayer, the mechanics of it, we are told to pray. And here, we are told that God understands that even our most well-articulated prayers don’t really know what to say, but God knows what is in our hearts.
So we don’t always know what we’re asking for. We don’t always know what to say. But we know this. We know that God is not absent from the groan. God is not a bystander to the futility. The Spirit is in it, underneath it, translating it, carrying it, right now, into the presence of the Father, who already knows what we need before we find the words to ask.
And Paul will not let us stop there. He says something even harder to believe. Not just that God hears the groan. That God is working through it. All things. Not some things. Not the easy things, not the things that make sense to us. All things. Our groans on Tuesday night. This room’s groan, whatever you’re carrying into these pews this morning. The world’s groan, the wars, the doomscrolling, the futility that Paul says has a name older than any headline. All of it, somehow, being worked together. Not around the pain. But through it.
Suffering and glory, dancing. Pulling against each other, hand in hand, moving in the same circle. And I don’t know when the dance ends for any of us. I don’t know when the pulling stops and the pull finally gives way. But I know this. Paul knew it too, writing from his own losses, his own sufferings that made ours look almost small by comparison. He said the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing to the glory that is coming.
Not . Worth. Comparing.
Not because the suffering isn’t real or isn’t painful. It is real. It is painful. Candy is gone. My friend is moving. The world is groaning and so am I. But there is a glory coming that will make all of this look, in hindsight, like the labor pains before a birth. Real pain. Necessary pain. But not the final word.
Somehow. Only God knows how. But we know that he does.
From groaning to glory, we are not alone. We are never forsaken.