Romans 8:5-38

⁵Some people just think about themselves so they only do whatever makes them feel good. They let that bad part inside them be their boss and they do whatever it tells them to do. But other people think about God and his spirit and they do whatever the Holy Spirit tells them to do.

⁶If we let that bad part inside us be our boss and only do whatever makes us feel good, we will die. But if we do the things the Holy Spirit tells us, and let him control us, we will live happy, and calm and settled inside ourselves.

⁷That bad part inside us fights against God, so if we do whatever it says we don’t do the things that God says. If we are like that we can never follow God’s laws. If we live like that we can never make God happy.

⁹But I know that you aren’t like that any more. You haven’t let that bad part of you be your boss, but you have joined up with the Holy Spirit and now he lives inside you. That’s right. If people don’t have the spirit of Jesus Christ in them, they don’t belong to him.

¹⁰But Jesus Christ does live inside you. Yes, you did bad things, so your bodies will die, but God says that you are all right now, so his spirit makes you alive.

¹¹Remember that Jesus died but God made him alive again. And God will do that for you too. Your bodies will die, but after that God will make them alive again. His spirit will do that. He lives inside you.

¹²So, my friends, you don’t have to do bad things any more. You don’t have to do whatever that bad part of you tells you to do.

¹³If you do those things, you will die. But if God’s spirit is in you he can help you block that bad part of you, like you kill it, and then you will not do those bad things, and you will live.

¹⁴It is like this. God’s children are those people that listen to his spirit and follow him.

¹⁵God didn’t give you his Holy Spirit to make you frightened of him. No, he gave you his spirit to make you his children. You are not like a prisoner that has to work for a cheeky boss, and that boss makes him frightened all the time. No way. You have God’s spirit in you, so you can talk to God and say, “Dad, you are my own good Father.”

¹⁶And his spirit in us talks to our own spirits and he tells us, “That is right, we really are God’s children.”

¹⁷We joined up with Jesus Christ, God’s son, so we are part of God’s family now and we will get our share of all the good things that God gives to his son. But it is also true that we will get a lot of the trouble, just like they gave trouble to Jesus. We will get our share of that trouble and we will get our share of good things.

¹⁸But don’t worry about the trouble we get now. Later God will make everything so good for us that we will not even think about the trouble we get now.

¹⁹It is like this, everything in the world is waiting for that time when God will set everything right and show everyone who his children really are.

²⁰Do you remember that story about Adam and Eve? They went wrong, and after that God let everything in the world get messed up. It was people that went wrong, not the other things in the world, but everything else went wrong anyway, from the things that the people did.

²¹So now everything in the world is waiting for God to fix things up, so that nothing will go bad and rot away like it does now. And one day God will fix it all, and at the same time he will show everyone that we are his family.

²²We know that everything in the world now just dies and rots away. Everything has got that problem. Think about a woman, at the time she has a baby she gets trouble and has a lot of pain. Well that is a picture of the way everything in the world is now.

²³And we get trouble too. We are Christians and we have the Holy Spirit in us, but we still get trouble. God gave us that Holy Spirit to show us a little bit of the good that will come later. But right now we get pain and problems too. So we just wait for God to fix everything up and to really make us his family. Then he will give us new bodies, just like he promised us.

²⁴We are really sure that he will save us and fix everything up for us even though he hasn’t done it yet. But we know he will do it one day, so we just have to keep on waiting for it.

²⁶And we can be sure too that the Holy Spirit will always help us. We know that we are weak, and we don’t understand very much, so sometimes we don’t know what to pray for. But the Holy Spirit prays with us and talks to our Father for us. He even groans with words that nobody can properly say.

²⁷And our Father understands the Holy Spirit. God already knows everything that everybody thinks and the way everybody feels, so the Holy Spirit always prays for the things that God already wants.

²⁸And we know too that God picked us out to be his people, to love him and to do whatever he wants, so he makes everything work out good for us.

²⁹Long ago God knew about each of us, and he knew which of us will believe in him, so he decided to make us like his son. He sent Jesus to us. He is God’s oldest son and he is our older brother.

³⁰So after he picked us out he called to us to come to him, and after we came to him he told us that we are all right now, and he makes us really great, like Jesus.

³¹So as we think about all of this what do we learn? It is this. We are on God’s side. He is with us and nobody can beat us.

³²He really did a lot for us. He sent his own son to die instead of us. And he will not stop there, but he will give us everything else that we need.

³³God himself is the one that says, “You are good,” so nobody will be game enough to blame us and tell God, “They are no good.”

³⁴God picked us out to be his own people, so who do you think will get up an tell him to punish us? It will not be Jesus Christ. He is the one that died for us, and God made him come back to life, and now he sits up there with God in heaven and asks God to help us. He will not turn around and tell God to punish us. No way.

³⁵But sometimes things go wrong for us and sometimes we get trouble. Does this mean that Jesus Christ has stopped loving us? No way. Nobody can ever stop him loving us. Some people don’t want us to follow Jesus, so if they hit us and treat us rough, or if we get too cold from not enough clothes, or if we go hungry, can we think that he has stopped taking care of us? No way. Nothing will ever stop him from loving us. Maybe they reckon they will kill us,

³⁶like we read in God’s book, “Some people find out that we belong to God and they try to kill us. They reckon we are weak like sheep and they can kill us whenever they want to.”

³⁷Don’t worry about any of these things. We win every time. Jesus loves us all the time, so he helps us get through it all and win in the end.

³⁸I’m really sure that nothing at all can make God stop loving us. He loves us and takes care of us while we are alive, but if they kill us it doesn’t matter, God loves us. Those good spirits called angels, they will not stop him. And those bad spirits can’t make him stop loving us. Things that happen now will not stop him, and things that will happen later will not stop him either. No strong spirit anywhere can stop him from loving us. Nothing anywhere. Nothing way up in the sky, nothing way down in the sea, nothing anywhere can stop him loving us. We belong to Jesus Christ, our leader, and God loves us very much.