A New Perspective for Old Problems: Romans Series #27

Most people do fine at the beginning of the Christian life. Sins are forgiven, heaven is ahead, and everything feels settled—we rejoice in what God has done in the past and in what He’s going to do in the future. Then problems show up. Job was right: “Man, who is born of woman, is short of days and full of trouble” (Job 14:1, KJV). Problems come in every color and shade—family problems, problems with children, problems on the job, health problems, emotional problems, the problems of tragedy and adjustment. 

All of us have to deal with the ordinary difficulties of daily life, and the question worth asking is simple: Does the Christian experience actually help with any of that, or does it just insulate us from the real world while our problems keep piling up regardless? Some people quietly expect that faith should function like a shield, deflecting trouble before it ever reaches them, and when it doesn’t work that way, they wonder if something has gone wrong with their faith itself.

Being a Christian does not insulate you from problems. It does, however, help you face those same problems in a genuinely new and different way.

Right in the middle of verse 18, Paul mentions “the sufferings of this present time”—an oddly candid thing to say in the middle of a chapter about victorious Christian living and the indwelling Holy Spirit. Look closer at the whole verse: “I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory that is to be revealed to us” (Romans 8:18).

That word “consider” is a mathematical term—Paul is saying, “I have done my spiritual arithmetic. I have weighed the alternatives and reached a settled conclusion.” It echoes what he writes elsewhere: “Our momentary, light affliction is producing for us an eternal weight of glory far beyond all comparison” (2 Corinthians 4:17).

Troubles never feel light in the moment, and they never feel like they’re going to end. But Paul has put every problem, every heartache, every trial we experience in this present life on one side of the scale, and everything waiting for us in glory on the other side, and he’s already reached his verdict: There’s no real comparison.

So what is it that lets us put a new face on old problems? The problems themselves don’t change—they’re the same kinds of problems people have wrestled with since the garden of Eden, whether physical, psychological, or spiritual. You’re not going to change the face of the problem itself. But coming to Jesus means you can face that same old problem with a new face of your own. In verses 19 through 27, Paul shows us three ways that knowing Jesus changes how we face what comes at us.

I. We Face Our Problems with Forward Hope (Romans 8:19–22)

Verse 19 and following: “For the anxious longing of the creation waits eagerly for the revealing of the sons of God. For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of Him who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself also will be set free from its slavery to corruption into the freedom of the glory of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation groans and suffers the pains of childbirth together until now” (Romans 8:19-22).

Four times in these verses Paul mentions the creation—this physical universe of ours, this beautiful world we see bursting with color certain times of the year. And yet we also see another side of it entirely: a creation in upheaval, in turmoil, marked by poverty and war. Look closely and this passage actually gives us three separate pictures of creation.

We See the Creation as It Was Created

Genesis tells us that when God finished His work, “God saw that it was very good” (Genesis 1:31). Not merely functional, not merely adequate—very good, the settled verdict of God Himself over every part of what He had made. We can only imagine what that original creation actually looked like—the colors, the sounds, the fragrances of a world that had never once been touched by sin, where death had no foothold anywhere and decay had no meaning yet as a word. There was no thorn on any rose, no predator stalking any prey, no disease waiting in any body.

Every relationship in that world—between man and God, man and woman, man and the ground itself—existed exactly as it was designed to exist, without friction and without fear. This is the creation’s original face, and it is worth holding onto, because it is the standard against which everything broken afterward has to be measured. Nothing about a corrupted world is “just how things are.” It is a departure from something that was, at one time, unmistakably good.

We See the Creation as It Is Corrupted

But something has clearly happened since then. Verse 20 says the creation was “subjected to futility” (Romans 8:20)—the very word Ecclesiastes uses again and again for despair, uselessness, and waste. Verse 21 speaks of “its slavery to corruption” (Romans 8:21). We can still catch glimmers of the original glory, but something has gone deeply wrong with the material universe.

We see it in decay and disease, in flood and flame, in blizzard and blight, in storm and sickness. One hymn writer put it simply: “Change and decay in all around I see” (“Abide with Me,” Henry Francis Lyte, 1847). And it wasn’t the creation’s own idea—verse 20 says it was subjected to futility “not willingly.” Something outside of it did the damage. That something was us. 

After Adam and Eve disobeyed, God told Adam, “Cursed is the ground because of you. . . . Both thorns and thistles it shall grow for you” (Genesis 3:17–18). Man’s sin brought a curse down onto the material world itself—suddenly there were dead things floating in the water, thorns waiting on every rose, weeds and insects choking the very garden Adam was meant to tend.

The Bible describes a creation on a downward spiral, exactly the opposite of what evolutionary optimism promises us. Things aren’t quietly improving on their own; they’re groaning under the weight of what sin has done to them.

Someone once pictured it as a bride in her wedding gown, watching her groom struck down before her eyes, standing there in her bridal white with the tears just beginning. That is the groan Paul describes in verse 22—“the whole creation groans and suffers the pains of childbirth together until now” (Romans 8:22). Listen at night and you can almost hear it in the wind moving through the treetops, in the calling of animals out in the dark.

We See the Creation as It Will Be Consummated

But this passage also gives us a picture of a consummated world still to come. Verse 19 says “the creation waits eagerly for the revealing of the sons of God” (Romans 8:19)—one paraphrase puts it beautifully: The whole creation is standing on tiptoe, waiting to see the sons of God come into their own.

Verse 21 tells us exactly what that means. The very same creation now enslaved to corruption will be “set free . . . into the freedom of the glory of the children of God” (Romans 8:21). Notice the order here—creation’s own release is tied directly to ours. It doesn’t get delivered on some separate timetable; it waits on us the way a whole household waits on the return of a son who’s been away too long.

When Jesus returns, it won’t only mean glory for you and me—it will mean glory for creation itself, delivered and renewed at last, released from the very curse it never asked to carry in the first place. The desert will blossom like a rose. The lion and the lamb will lie down together. Isaiah pictures it as a world so thoroughly restored that even the ground itself seems to sing.

That’s why creation is described as travailing, waiting for a birth still to come—because when God finally delivers His children, the whole material world is going to share in that same deliverance, and it knows it, in whatever way creation can be said to know anything, and it waits for it with the same certainty a mother waits out the final weeks before delivery.

What does any of that have to do with your problems? It means you can look at your own old, familiar problem with a genuinely new face—the face of expectant hope. Just as creation knows a better day is coming, you and I, as God’s children, can carry that same forward-looking confidence, because we understand that our problems fit inside a larger plan that God is already running.

No problem you’re carrying today caught God by surprise. He isn’t pacing the floors of heaven wondering what to do about it. He will take that very problem and work it into His plan, and when He’s finished with it, if you’ll face it with hope stretched forward instead of looking only at today with despair, He will do something in your life you never would have imagined on your own.

II. We Face Our Problems with Firm Assurance (Romans 8:23–25)

Verse 23 continues: “not only this, but also we ourselves, having the first fruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting eagerly for our adoption as sons, the redemption of our body. For in hope we have been saved, but hope that is seen is not hope; for who hopes for what he already sees? But if we hope for what we do not see, with perseverance we wait eagerly for it” (Romans 8:23-25).

Five times in these few verses Paul uses the word “hope,” and it’s worth pausing on what he means by it, because it’s easy to misread. Verse 24 says we are “saved in hope”—a clearer rendering than “saved by hope,” since Ephesians tells us plainly, “by grace you have been saved through faith” (Ephesians 2:8), not by our own hoping.

Hope here isn’t the cause of our salvation; it’s the atmosphere our salvation moves us into. Instead, being saved moves us out of hopelessness and into an entirely new climate of hope, the way a person moves out of a windowless room into open daylight.

Apart from Christ, Scripture says a person is “having no hope and without God in the world” (Ephesians 2:12)—no real future to speak of, whatever comfortable illusions might paper over that fact for a while. Once saved, you are taken out of that despair and planted permanently in hope, whether or not your circumstances have caught up with that reality yet.

But this isn’t a hunch, a wishful “maybe it’ll work out.” Paul is careful to define real hope in verse 24 as confidence in what we cannot yet see—“hope that is seen is not hope” (Romans 8:24), because nobody hopes for what’s already sitting in front of them. This is forward-facing, unshaken confidence in something certain but not yet visible. A better word for it here, then, is confidence. When trouble comes, a genuine Christian can face it with real assurance, for three specific reasons Paul gives us right here.

We Have His Presence Within Us

Verse 23 says we have “the first fruits of the Spirit” (Romans 8:23). We’ve already seen earlier in this chapter that when you come to Christ, God’s own Spirit comes to live in you: “you are not in the flesh but in the Spirit, if indeed the Spirit of God dwells in you” (Romans 8:9).

First fruits means the first installment of the harvest—proof that the rest of the crop is certainly coming, not a maybe attached to it. It’s a little like an engagement ring. The ring itself isn’t the wedding, but it’s a young man’s promise that the wedding is absolutely coming, and the woman wearing it lives differently because of what it guarantees.

That’s what the Holy Spirit is to us right now—not the fullness of glory yet, but the guarantee of it, already living inside us, already whispering assurance when we open God’s Word or hear a piece of music that stirs something we can’t quite explain.

That whisper is the presence of God confirming that everything is going to be all right, and it’s available to every single believer, not just the especially spiritual ones—it’s the birthright of anyone in whom the Spirit dwells at all.

We Have His Process Within Us

Verse 23 also says “we ourselves groan within ourselves”—not the groan of despair, but the groan of a process still underway. This is the same word Paul just used for creation’s own groaning a few verses earlier, as if to say our groaning and creation’s groaning are part of one connected ache running through everything not yet finished.

That groaning tells us growth is happening. We have God’s own promise that the very problems pressing in on us right now are being worked into the process by which He is patiently maturing us into exactly the children of God He intends us to become.

It rarely feels like growth while it’s happening; it usually just feels like pressure. But pressure and growth, in God’s economy, are very often the same event seen from two different angles—the mother in labor and the mother holding her child are living through the identical hour, described from opposite sides of it.

We Have His Promise Within Us

Finally, verse 23 points us toward “the redemption of our body”—the glory still ahead. Right now we live with a body and a spirit locked in an uneven partnership, where the body too often dominates the spirit. One day that order gets reversed completely, and we will have bodies fully governed by the Spirit rather than fighting against Him.

That’s the redemption Paul is looking forward to, and it’s why verse 25 can say so simply, “with perseverance we wait eagerly for it” (Romans 8:25). Whatever your problem is, you can face it with confidence and patience together, because both rest on a promise that has already been guaranteed, not one still hanging in doubt.

There are people in every church carrying problems that would flatten most of us, and yet they endure with real confidence rather than collapse. Some are mistreated and slandered, and still rest easy knowing they will one day give an account before God for every idle word.

Some have buried people they loved deeply, and still live in victory rather than defeat, certain they will see those faces again. Some are watching their own health fail by degrees, uncertain whether they’ll recover, and yet they carry hope and even a kind of exuberance rather than despair, because they trust that whatever happens to the body on this earth, God will one day resurrect it whole. That is what it looks like to face a problem with firm assurance instead of grim endurance.

III. We Face Our Problems with Faithful Prayer (Romans 8:26–27)

Verse 26: “the Spirit also helps our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we should, but the Spirit Himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words; and He who searches the hearts knows what the mind of the Spirit is, because He intercedes for the saints according to the will of God” (Romans 8:26–27).

This is one of the most profound statements on prayer anywhere in Scripture, and if you notice, it’s a thoroughly Trinitarian picture of what happens whenever a believer prays.

The Spirit intercedes within us; the Father searches the heart and reads what the Spirit is asking; and all of it happens according to a will already settled in eternity, apart from anything we manage to articulate correctly ourselves. It gives us three simple, honest words to hold onto whenever a problem is too heavy to pray about clearly.

We Know Our Infirmity

The verse literally reads “our infirmity,” singular—not our infirmities in general, but our total inability in this one specific moment. Jesus said plainly, “apart from Me you can do nothing” (John 15:5), and every so often a problem comes along that proves that statement true in a way we can’t argue with.

Men used to running things, used to handling whatever comes their way, suddenly find themselves utterly helpless in the face of one particular trouble. That word “helps” in verse 26 appears in only one other place in the New Testament, in Luke’s account of Martha, banging pots in the kitchen while Mary sat quietly at Jesus’ feet, finally storming out to demand, “Tell her to help me” (Luke 10:40)—meaning, come alongside and share this load with me.

That’s exactly what the Holy Spirit does. When you have something you genuinely cannot handle, He doesn’t merely sympathize from a distance—He comes alongside, like an attorney standing with his client, and sometimes He carries your side of the burden as well as His own.

We Know Our Ignorance

The same verse says plainly, “we do not know how to pray as we should” (Romans 8:26). Try praying with real focus for a solid hour sometime, and you’ll discover exactly how ignorant you really are. We don’t know what’s truly best for us, and we certainly don’t know what the future holds, so we’re left groping in the dark for the right words even to ask God for what we need.

We Know Our Intercessor

Verse 27 tells us “He who searches the hearts” already knows exactly “what the mind of the Spirit is” (Romans 8:27), because the Spirit is interceding for us “with groanings too deep for words”—not a special prayer language, but simply prayer too deep and too honest to fit into any sentence we could construct ourselves.

There are burdens so heavy that no words we own could carry them, and that is precisely where the Spirit steps in on our behalf. One old poem captures the same idea from our side of it: “Prayer is the soul’s sincere desire, uttered or unexpressed—the falling of a tear, the upward glancing of an eye when no one else is near” (“Prayer Is the Soul’s Sincere Desire,” James Montgomery, 1818).

Sometimes that’s the whole of our praying, and it turns out to be entirely enough, because the Spirit takes even that and forms it into an actual petition before the Father. He knows what you actually need, even when you’re convinced you know it better yourself—even when what you think you need is a raise, or a different circumstance entirely. God knows the real need lies somewhere else altogether, somewhere you couldn’t have named on your own.

Whatever your problem is now, you can face it expectantly, confidently, and prayerfully. And when you don’t even know what to ask for, the Holy Spirit will take those wordless groans, those unspoken anxieties, and translate them into exactly the prayer God in heaven already knows how to answer.

A mother carries a child for nine long months through discomfort and pain she can’t shorten and can’t avoid. Then one day the waiting ends, and she looks into that child’s face, and every bit of that pain simply vanishes in the looking.

That’s not a small thing to say about suffering—it means the pain was real, and so is the vanishing. It will be worth it all when we see Jesus—one glimpse of His face, and every sorrow we’ve carried will be erased for good, the way a groaning creation finally goes quiet the moment its long-promised birth is finished.