In episode 3 of Read It Again, I look at Romans 8:28, the verse we reach for at hospital bedsides and gravesides. God works all things for good, we say, and we usually fill in what good means with our own hopes for how the circumstance resolves. But Paul defines the word himself, one verse later, and it is not the definition most of us are carrying. I walk through the three groanings of Romans 8, creation, believers, and the Spirit itself, before we ever get to verse 28, because that context is what makes the promise honest rather than a shortcut past real grief. What we find is a promise that does not depend on the circumstance turning out the way we hoped. It holds in the hospital room no matter what the diagnosis says next.

Interesting Links:

• Wright, N. T. (2004). Paul for everyone: Romans (Part 1). Westminster John Knox Press.
• World Vision. (2023). Bible verse search statistics.
• Schreiner, T. R. (1998). Romans. Baker Academic.
• Piper, J. (2011). All things work together for good. Desiring God.
• Osborne, G. R. (2004). Romans. IVP Academic.
• Moo, D. J. (2018). The letter to the Romans (2nd ed.). Eerdmans.
• Keener, C. S. (2009). Romans: A new covenant commentary. Cascade Books.
• Fee, G. D. (1994). God's empowering presence: The Holy Spirit in the letters of Paul. Hendrickson.
• Dunn, J. D. G. (1988). Romans 1-8. Word Books.
• Bible Gateway. (2026). Most popular Bible verses.

References to Bible Verses:

Romans 8:1; Romans 8:18; Romans 8:22–26; Romans 8:28–30

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Thank you for listening and welcome to the podcast. I'm your host, Jason McConnell. Let me ask you something. Have you ever heard this in a hard moment, in a hospital waiting room, at a graveside, maybe in a text from a well-meaning friend after some disappointment? "God works all things for good." Maybe someone said it to you.

Maybe you've said it to someone else. And on one level, the instinct behind it is completely right. The verse is there. The truth is there. God is sovereign. God is at work, and that's not wrong. But there is a question hiding inside that verse that almost never gets asked, and it is probably one of the more important questions.

What is the good? Because Paul does not leave that word undefined. He defines it in the very next sentence, and the definition he gives is not one most people carry into that verse. And once you see what he actually wrote, the promise gets much, much larger, and it becomes a different kind of promise, and that's what we're gonna talk about today This is episode three of Read It Again, a series where we take 10 of the most familiar verses in modern church culture and read them whole, not just the verse, but everything around it.

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Episode two puts us in a Roman prison cell with Paul, reading Philippians 4 verse 13, "I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me." And we found out that all things referred to the full range of circumstances Paul had lived through: hunger, well-fed, free, in chains. And it was not a promise that Christ would help him win.

It was Paul's testimony that Christ had sustained him through all of it. The strengthening was not a one-time power up. It was ongoing. It was relational.

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And Romans 8:28 is the theological ground that explains how that is possible. So what is God working towards? What does good mean when God promises it? Verse 29 answers that question, and I don't know that most people ever read far enough ahead to see it. Now, Romans 8:28 is another well-traveled verse in the New Testament.

On Bible Gateway, it consistently ranks in the top five or six most searched verses across the Bible. By one estimate, it gets roughly 33,000 searches a month, and that's, that's a pretty remarkable number. You find it at funerals, in grief cards, in pastoral counseling sessions, in hospital visits, in text messages sent at 2:00 in the morning when someone's world has just come apart.

It is the verse that people reach for when things go wrong, and the instinct behind that is, is good. It's not wrong. The verse is about God's sovereignty in the middle of the hard things, and that is exactly what people need when hard things happen. But there is a word in this verse, a single word, that I think a lot of people bring their own definition to rather than letting Paul define it.

And Paul does define it in verse 29. And the definition changes a lot about what that verse is promising. So let's read the verse. "And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose." So the key word here is good. What is the good that God is working towards?

If you have heard this verse your whole life, there is probably an answer already sitting in your mind, something like, "Things will get better. This will resolve. There is a positive outcome ahead. God will make it right in ways I can't see or feel." And, and that's kind of the default reading. That's the version of the verse a lot of people carry.

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But before we read verse twenty-eight in isolation, we kinda need to find out what is surrounding it, because Paul wrote this verse at the end of one of the most extended meditations on suffering in the entire New Testament, and that context is purposeful. But let's be honest about how this verse gets used, because in most cases, the people using it are not trying to mislead anyone.

There's nothing nefarious about it. They're trying to be comforting. The impulse is very pastoral. The love is real. But the version of the verse they are offering is not quite the one Paul wrote, and that gap has consequences. Now, the most common reading is essentially this: "God will make this work out okay.

The outcome is gonna be good. Whatever is happening right now, the diagnosis, the job loss, the broken relationship, the grief, whatever it is, God is gonna turn it around. Something good is coming on the other side of this." Now, in the prosperity gospel tradition, good gets defined even more specifically.

Health, wealth, restoration, breakthrough, the things you have been praying for. God works all things together for favor, for blessing, for a testimony you will be able to share on the other side of this hardship. And the verse gets applied universally, not just to believers, not just to people in a specific relationship with God, but to any hard situation anyone faces.

It becomes a kind of cosmic guarantee. Things will work out for you because God is good and God is in control. Now, here's where this becomes a problem in the pastoral context. When you tell someone who is suffering that God is working for their good and then the good they expected didn't, doesn't arrive, you have not just offered a verse.

You've actually made a promise the verse didn't make. And when that expected good does not come, the follow-on question is almost always, "Does that mean I do not love God enough? Does that mean I was not called? Is my faith insufficient?" Pastors writing about this passage have noted that deploying Romans 8:28 as an immediate response to acute grief can function more like a silencer than a comfort.

It short-circuits the honest process of lament before that process has had any room to actually breathe. Now, the verse also has a specific subject. I want you to read it again. "Those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose." Paul is not issuing a universal guarantee. He is making a specific promise to a specific people.

Strip that qualifier away and you have a fundamentally different statement. So what did Paul actually write, and what does good actually mean? Okay, I'm gonna delay some more.

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Before we get to verse 28, we need to spend some time in Romans 8 as a whole, because the chapter Paul wrote is not the chapter people usually imagine when they quote verse 28.

Romans 8 begins with an amazing declaration. "Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus." That's Romans 8 verse 1. This is a statement about status, about identity. What follows from that opening is Paul's extended account of what life in the Spirit looks like, not as an escape from a difficult world, but as a way of inhabiting a difficult world from the inside out.

And then Paul writes something in verse 18 that's worth stopping on. He says, "I consider that our present suffering are not worth comparing to the glory that will be revealed in us." Romans 8 verse 18. Now, notice what he does not say. He does not say the suffering will end anytime soon. He does not say God is about to fix this.

He says present sufferings are not worth comparing with what is coming. That is a statement about proportion, the, the final frame. It's not a promise that the hard season will be brief.

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What follows is one of the more vivid passages in Paul's writing. He describes three kinds of groanings. Now first, creation groans.

"We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time." That's Romans 8:22. The world itself is waiting. It, it's not as it should be, and Paul is acknowledging this. And then the believers groan in Romans 8:23. "Not only so, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption, adoption to sonship, the redemption of our bodies."

Now even those with the Spirit, even those who are, whoever, who are in Christ are still groaning, still waiting for something that has not yet fully arrived. And then the Spirit groans on our behalf. Uh, Romans 8:26, "In the same way, the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us through wordless groans."

God himself through the Spirit is interceding with a weight that does not fit into ordinary language. Now, this, this is a chapter Paul has been building through verses 18 through 27, a chapter about suffering, about longing, about waiting for a redemption that is, that is real but not yet fully here. And there's three layers of groaning, from creation, from believers, from the Holy Spirit himself.

Now verse 28 does not arrive to dismiss all of that. It, it does not say, "And none of that matters because things are gonna get worked out." It arrives as a declaration of confidence made inside of all of that groaning. After acknowledging the full weight of what believers are carrying, Paul says, "And in the middle of it all, God is at work.

He has not stepped away. He has not lost the thread." And that's a very, very different verse than the one you get when you read it all by itself.

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Okay, so now read the full unit, Romans 8:28 through 30. "And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.

For those God foreknew, he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brothers and sisters. And those he predestined, he also called. Those he called, he also justified. Those he justified, he also glorified." Okay, most, most people seem to stop at the ver- end of verse 28, but verse 29 begins the word for.

A- and in Greek, this is a conjunction that is explanatory. Paul is saying here, "What I mean it, by good is this," and here's the definition.

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"For those God foreknew, he also predestined to be conformed in the image of his Son." The good that God is working towards is this: conformity to the image of Christ.

Christlikeness, being made to look more and more like Jesus in character, in love, in endurance, in faithfulness. So Douglas Moo, in his commentary on Romans, is pretty direct about this. The purpose clause in verse twenty-nine explains what Paul meant by good in verse twenty-eight. God intends to conform believers to the image of Christ and ultimately to glorify them, and that is the good, not comfort, not resolution, not favorable outcome in those circumstances you're facing, but rather transformation.

And N.T. Wright frames it, uh, kinda similar. The good in verse twenty-eight has an eschatological dimension. It runs all the way to the final glorification Paul describes at the end of verse thirty. This is not a promise about near term. This is a promise about the ultimate end, right? And then Paul does something remarkable in verse thirty.

He lays out what has sometimes been called the golden chain. Those God foreknew, He predestined. Those He predestined, He called. Those He called, He justified. Those He justified, He glorified. Notice that glorification is written in the past tense. He also glorified. That's the kind of confidence Paul has in the certainty of what God is working towards.

The chain is unbroken from before time to beyond time.

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God's purpose runs through the whole thing without interruption Now there's something important happening in the, the Greek of this verse 28 worth looking at. Let's take a closer look at that. And again, I will apologize ahead of time for my Greek pronunciation.

But the words translated into works together is synergai. I- it's a present active indicative, meaning it's ongoing, not past movement, but ... and not, and not a future point, but God is working continuously and presently in all things towards this end. So what does all things mean in this context? The same thing it meant when Paul used it in Philippians 4:13, the full range, hunger and plenty, health and illness, freedom and chains.

The, the things you would choose and the things you would never choose. In all of it, God is at work, and what he is working towards is the same in every circumstance, making you more like his Son. That is a different promise than the one most people carry into that verse. And that is a bigger promise because a promise that says, "Yeah, the circumstance will resolve to your favor," is hostage to the circumstance.

The circumstance has to cooperate. But a promise that says God is working in every circumstance to conform you to the image of Christ, now that promise holds regardless of the circumstance and what happens in it. It holds in the hospital room, whether the diagnosis improves or not. It holds at the graveside.

It holds in the long season that shows no sign of ever ending And I, I think one more thing worth noting here. The verse has a subject, those who love Him, who have been called according to His purpose. This is a promise for those in a living relationship with God, not a cosmic guarantee issued to every person in every situation.

That specifically is not a, a limitation on grace. It's a marker of the relationship. The promise belongs to those who are, in Paul's phrase, in Christ Jesus. Those are the ones the chapter began with in verse one.

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Okay, so let me try to bring all of this together and make it more concrete. First, notice how this verse connects to everything we have covered in this series up to this point.

In episode one, God told an exiled nation to build houses, plant gardens, and pray for the city that conquered them. He didn't promise the exile would be short. He promised His presence and His faithfulness inside of it. He was working towards something in the long season. Their restoration, yes, but also something in their souls that the, the fast path would not have produced.

And then in episode two, Paul learned contentment through the full range of experience: hunger, well-fed, free, in chains. He had not been given contentment at, at s- at conversion. He had been taught it through the cur- curriculum of hard circumstances, and Christ had been the continuous source of strength through every page of that circumstance, of that curriculum And then Romans 8 verse 28 is the theological explanation for both of these realities.

In every circumstance, every one, including the ones that are genuinely hard and genuinely unresolved, the same purposeful God is at work. And what is He working towards? It's the same across all of them. You're being conformed to the image of His Son. The exile teaches something the homecoming would not have.

The chains teach something the open road would not have. The long season works something in you that the short season would have bypassed. This does not make hard seasons easy. Don't misunderstand me. Paul was not pretending the chains didn't exist, that they weren't heavy, that they weren't binding. The exiles were genuinely grieving.

The groaning in Romans 8 is, is real groaning. God does not wave a hand over it and declare it not painful. What God declares is that He is present in it, active in it, and purposeful in it, and that His purpose is not wasted even when the circumstances do not cooperate with what we hoped for. So second point here.

Let this change how you use this verse. Please let it change how you use this v- this verse. Please reach for it. Keep reaching for it. The instinct is absolutely right. God is sovereign. He is at work. But when you offer this to someone who is hurting, bring it-- bring the whole thought. God is working, and what He's working towards is they're being formed in the image of His Son.

That is not a smaller comfort than things will get better. It is a, a more honest one. It is ultimately a more durable one. It does not require the circumstance to resolve in order to remain true And if you are the person in the hard season right now, if someone has handed you this verse a- and you've been waiting for the good to show up a- as a resolved circumstance, and it has not arrived, the promise isn't broken.

Don't give up hope. The good may just be different than what you expected. God is at work in all of this. He's active and present and purposeful, and what He is working towards in you is to be more like Christ, more patient, more trusting, more dependent on Him rather than on the outcome. That is definitely worth more than a fixed circumstance, and it's the promise the verse actually makes.

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And third, then, and this is the most important one, honor the weight of it. Romans 8:26 tells us the Spirit intercedes with wordless groans. God Himself does not dismiss the heaviness. He enters into it. He groans in it on our behalf. Real comfort does the same. It does not silence grief or, or rush past the pain to get to the promise.

It sits in the weight alongside the person who is carrying it and, and then speaks the truth from inside that place. You know, we often, we often try to comfort people with words. We have to sit there when we feel like we have to say something to make them feel better. We don't. Just be present. Sometimes just sitting with someone inside the grief i- is, is enough The three groanings, Romans 8, are not a detour on the way to verse 28.

They are

the context that makes verse 28 honest. Let the groanings land before you get to the declaration.

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So let me bring this together. Romans 8 verse 28 is a heavily reached-for verse. The instinct to reach for it is right. It is a verse about God's sovereignty and suffering. But most people carry a definition of good into the verse that Paul corrects in verse 29.

The good God is working towards is Christ-like behavior, being conformed to the image of His Son, not comfort, not resolution, but real transformation. The golden chain that follows runs from God's foreknowledge to final glorification. This is the largest frame Paul could place around human suffering, but it is a frame about transformation, not about outcome.

Read it alongside the three groanings in Romans 8:22 through 26. Let them land. Creation groaning, believers groaning, the Spirit groaning on our behalf. And then hear verse 28 as a declaration made in the middle of all of that. Not a dismissal of the weight, a declaration of confidence. God is working. He has not stepped away.

And, and what He is working towards is worth more than anything a resolved circumstance could ever give you. Here's the takeaway. Romans 8:28 does not promise that things will work out the way you hope. It promises that God is working in all of it, and what He is working towards is making you more like Christ.

Isn't that better? Here's something you can do this week. Read Romans 8 verse 18 through verse 30 in one sitting. Let the groaning passages do their work before you get to verse 28. Then read verse 28 from that place and see what changes. See whether the promise feels smaller or larger when you hear it the way Paul wrote it.

And I'll leave you with the verse that defines the promise, Romans 8:29, "For those God foreknew, He also predestined to be conformed in the image of His Son." That is the good, and it is worth every hard season it takes to get there.

Until next time, keep loving your neighbors, dive into God's Word daily, and may the Lord bless you and keep you and fill you with His peace.

Take care, God bless, and I'll see you in the next episode