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SERMON MANUSCRIPT — August 30, 2026
Rev. Dr. Stephen Loch Bowie
Third Presbyterian Church
“All things? Really?”
Romans 8:28
James 1:2-4
I want to ground our thinking this morning in two powerful declarations from
God’s message to us in scripture. The first is from Paul’s letter to the church at
Rome. The other is from the book of James. James, the brother of Jesus, who
led the church in Jerusalem for many years, and who met with Paul on at least
three occasions to do some serious sorting out of what it meant to be a
follower of Jesus Christ. I’m going to focus on the first and look for support
from the second.
And I’m going to ask you to stand if you are able as a token of our respect for
God’s word to us.
Now, listen to the word of God for you:
We know that all things work together for good for those who love God, who
are called according to God’s purposes. (Romans 8:28)
My brother and sisters, whenever you face trials of any kind, consider it
nothing but joy, because you know that the testing of your faith produces
endurance, and let endurance have its full effect, so that you may be mature
and complete, lacking in nothing. (James 1:2-4)
I don’t know about you, but I found joy this week in doing many of the things I
usually do — driving, shopping at Schnucks, walking Pippa, even falling asleep
— while accompanied by the voice of Dolly Parton. I listened to her music,
1
read bits and pieces about her life, and remembered again why she held such
a place in our culture, whether or not you are a fan of country music.
Dolly was a sister in Christ. She helped people in her hometown, her home
state, and around the world because that’s what her parents taught her — and
what following Jesus taught them. She leveraged her talent for
transformation. She made herself available — to the rich and the poor, the
weak and the powerful — in order to respond to God’s call to be salt and light.
And isn’t that what we are all called to do and be?
Let’s pray.
Prayer
Gracious God, again we find ourselves beholden to you for the gifts that
abound in people who take up the challenge of Christ to be salt and light in
the world. Who, like Christ, make themselves available to both rich and poor,
to the weak and the powerful, in order that they might respond to your call to
be redeemed.
Without shame we could say: we want to be like Dolly, who strove to be like
Christ.
Help us now to respond to your Word — to hear, to rejoice, and to obey. And
may the words of my mouth and the meditation of all our hearts be
acceptable in your sight, O Lord, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.
Romans 8:28 has helped me deal with the question another country artist,
Kris Kristofferson, asks in the song: “Why Me?”
Why did I have to buy a car that needed major repairs the day I drove it off the
lot?
Why did my father choose to leave my mother to raise us on her own?
Why didn’t You keep me safe from those and other harms?
Kristofferson’s song asks the question from another direction:
Why, Lord, did you see fit to choose me to follow you?
2
As life happens, bad things, as well as good things, happen. We are given the
gift of navigating them all. Knowing Christ doesn’t spare us. But it gives us a
way through.
I propose that we dissect this verse a phrase at a time with some simple
questions:
We know – How do we know this?
that all things work together for good – what does this mean or look like?
for those who love God,
who are called according to God’s purposes. (Romans 8:28)
We Know
Paul uses a word and a tense that he has used several times before this in
Romans: οἴδαμεν (oidamen) — “we know.” He uses it in the form of a perfect
tense: a completed action. He’s saying this is settled knowledge in the family
of Jesus. We haven’t just discovered it. It is a certainty.
He says it to the church at Corinth: “we know in part.” Handel includes it in
Messiah: “I know that my Redeemer liveth.”
Look back two verses and he uses its opposite. “We don’t know. We don’t
know how to pray ought.” So the Holy Spirit overshadows our attempt, assists
it like the catapult that launches a jet off the deck of a carrier, and sometimes
with that kind of clamor. It’s not within our power to do this thing, believe into
this knowledge ourselves, but it is within our power to let that power be at
work in us. As James says, we can “let it have its full effect.”
That all things work together for good.
The “all” here is really all! Panta! Think Pam Am. Pandemic.. Panacea.
Pantheon.
3
Work together for good
There is a direct echo between the Spirit helping us pray and things working
together. There has to be. Because it is the same Spirit that motivates the
working. The working of prayer and the working of things toward the good.
Working toward the good. That’s the meaning. Working toward a life-giving
outcome. An outcome that bears fruit, helps us survive trauma, endure the
pain. Because it doesn’t erase the trauma. It gives us the capacity to move
through it.
This isn’t “God doesn’t give us more than we can handle.” James also says
this: let no one say that God is testing you. That is not how it works. Stuff
happens. Life happens. Because of the freedom of creation, especially the
natural order – think forest fires and floods – trials come. The vein in the mine
runs out of coal. The relationship, that bond that we thought would last
forever, is broken.
Let’s take a moment to soak in this thought:
No testing has overtaken you that is not common to everyone. God is faithful,
and will not let you be tested beyond your strength, but with the way of testing
God will also provide the way out so that you may be able to endure it. (I
Corinthians 10:13).
We still don’t know the mechanism for this to happen. That’s because there is
no one way for it to happen. It won’t happen by magic. Not by opening the
mailbox and finding a check for a million dollars. That’s the one we dream
about.
When Paul went on his knees to God asking for something, a medical
condition, a handicap, to be taken away, it wasn’t. Instead he, and we, receive
this word:
My grace is sufficient for you, for power is perfected in weakness. So, I will
boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may
dwell in me. (II Corinthians 12:8b-9)
4
God will provide. God will make a way where there seems to be no way.
Whatever it is, it may not be good. But what we experience about it will work in
that direction, given time, and reflection, and prayer in words that we can’t
even understand.
For those who love God who are called
The love here is the kind of love that loves because the object of that love is
worthy of love. God who created us is worthy of our love. Love as
commitment, love which endures, love that loves regardless of the
circumstances. Agape love.
We are not the generators of this love. God is. It was generated from the
beginning of time in God’s intention to redeem the brokenness of humanity
through the offering of Christ for us. Christ on the cross accomplished every
iota of fulfillment that was needed to rectify that brokenness.
There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. For
the law of the Spirit has set you free from the law of sin and of death. For God
has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do… so that the just
requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not according the
flesh but according to the Spirit. Romans 8:1-4)
Not everyone has this. Love for God. Paul goes so far as to say that we were
chosen to have this love. We were chosen before the world began to have this
love. To be not only Christians – followers of Christ – but Christophers –
bearers of Christ into the world.
Turn this verse around and it reads,
For those who love God, who are called according to God’s purpose, all things
work together for good.
That ‘for’ isn’t a hurdle to clear before the promise applies to you. It’s not the
price of admission. It’s Paul describing who he’s talking to — the ones in
whom the Spirit is already, right now, doing what only the Spirit can do. Loving
5
God isn’t what gets you into this verse. Loving God is what it feels like from the
inside to already be someone this verse was written for.
This is a reason to rejoice. It is not a reason to brag about our status. Or to lay
it on someone who is having a hard time.
According to God’s purpose.
God’s purpose is to move us toward maturity and completion. Theologians
call this the “Golden Chain.”
God set apart those God called, and those God called, God put right with
himself, and God shared his glory with them. (Romans 8:30). A more formal
translation uses these words to describe a progression:
Predestination – Vocation – Justification – Glorification.
God shaped. God called. God justified. God glorified.
This is not a timeline. It is a declaration that your life is already held inside
God’s future. The good that God is working toward is not comfort, success, or
ease. The good is glory — the restoration of the image of Christ in us.
God causes all things to work together for good for those who love God, who
are called according to God’s purposes. (Romans 8:28)
Closing: Dolly Again
This week we’ve heard about many of the things that worked together for good
in the world of Dolly Parton.
She was able to come to peace about a broken relationship, with her mentor
Porter Wagoner, by writing and singing a song to him, for him. By praying at his
bedside as he lay dying.
She allowed a simple idea – making books available to children who may not
have one – come to completion and blossom a river of hope: the Imagination
Library. Millions of children, many of whom will never hear a Dolly Parton
6
song, have books in their homes because she believed literacy was a form of
love.
That’s Romans 8:28 in its widest frame: God taking ordinary human generosity
and letting it grow into a good that outlives the giver.
Two stories — one personal, one global — both whispering the same truth:
In all things, God is at work. Not making all things good, but empowering us to
live through anything. Not removing suffering but ensuring it is accompanied
by the presence of the Spirit. Not promising ease, but promising glory — the
restoration of Christ’s image in us. We place our lives — our wounds, our
hopes, our ordinary Tuesdays — into the hands of the Spirit, trusting that
mercy is already at work.
In all things. Every circumstance. Every season. Every breath.
Thanks be to God. Amen.
Rev. Dr. Stephen Loch Bowie
Third Presbyterian Church
“All things? Really?”
Romans 8:28
James 1:2-4
I want to ground our thinking this morning in two powerful declarations from
God’s message to us in scripture. The first is from Paul’s letter to the church at
Rome. The other is from the book of James. James, the brother of Jesus, who
led the church in Jerusalem for many years, and who met with Paul on at least
three occasions to do some serious sorting out of what it meant to be a
follower of Jesus Christ. I’m going to focus on the first and look for support
from the second.
And I’m going to ask you to stand if you are able as a token of our respect for
God’s word to us.
Now, listen to the word of God for you:
We know that all things work together for good for those who love God, who
are called according to God’s purposes. (Romans 8:28)
My brother and sisters, whenever you face trials of any kind, consider it
nothing but joy, because you know that the testing of your faith produces
endurance, and let endurance have its full effect, so that you may be mature
and complete, lacking in nothing. (James 1:2-4)
I don’t know about you, but I found joy this week in doing many of the things I
usually do — driving, shopping at Schnucks, walking Pippa, even falling asleep
— while accompanied by the voice of Dolly Parton. I listened to her music,
1
read bits and pieces about her life, and remembered again why she held such
a place in our culture, whether or not you are a fan of country music.
Dolly was a sister in Christ. She helped people in her hometown, her home
state, and around the world because that’s what her parents taught her — and
what following Jesus taught them. She leveraged her talent for
transformation. She made herself available — to the rich and the poor, the
weak and the powerful — in order to respond to God’s call to be salt and light.
And isn’t that what we are all called to do and be?
Let’s pray.
Prayer
Gracious God, again we find ourselves beholden to you for the gifts that
abound in people who take up the challenge of Christ to be salt and light in
the world. Who, like Christ, make themselves available to both rich and poor,
to the weak and the powerful, in order that they might respond to your call to
be redeemed.
Without shame we could say: we want to be like Dolly, who strove to be like
Christ.
Help us now to respond to your Word — to hear, to rejoice, and to obey. And
may the words of my mouth and the meditation of all our hearts be
acceptable in your sight, O Lord, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.
Romans 8:28 has helped me deal with the question another country artist,
Kris Kristofferson, asks in the song: “Why Me?”
Why did I have to buy a car that needed major repairs the day I drove it off the
lot?
Why did my father choose to leave my mother to raise us on her own?
Why didn’t You keep me safe from those and other harms?
Kristofferson’s song asks the question from another direction:
Why, Lord, did you see fit to choose me to follow you?
2
As life happens, bad things, as well as good things, happen. We are given the
gift of navigating them all. Knowing Christ doesn’t spare us. But it gives us a
way through.
I propose that we dissect this verse a phrase at a time with some simple
questions:
We know – How do we know this?
that all things work together for good – what does this mean or look like?
for those who love God,
who are called according to God’s purposes. (Romans 8:28)
We Know
Paul uses a word and a tense that he has used several times before this in
Romans: οἴδαμεν (oidamen) — “we know.” He uses it in the form of a perfect
tense: a completed action. He’s saying this is settled knowledge in the family
of Jesus. We haven’t just discovered it. It is a certainty.
He says it to the church at Corinth: “we know in part.” Handel includes it in
Messiah: “I know that my Redeemer liveth.”
Look back two verses and he uses its opposite. “We don’t know. We don’t
know how to pray ought.” So the Holy Spirit overshadows our attempt, assists
it like the catapult that launches a jet off the deck of a carrier, and sometimes
with that kind of clamor. It’s not within our power to do this thing, believe into
this knowledge ourselves, but it is within our power to let that power be at
work in us. As James says, we can “let it have its full effect.”
That all things work together for good.
The “all” here is really all! Panta! Think Pam Am. Pandemic.. Panacea.
Pantheon.
3
Work together for good
There is a direct echo between the Spirit helping us pray and things working
together. There has to be. Because it is the same Spirit that motivates the
working. The working of prayer and the working of things toward the good.
Working toward the good. That’s the meaning. Working toward a life-giving
outcome. An outcome that bears fruit, helps us survive trauma, endure the
pain. Because it doesn’t erase the trauma. It gives us the capacity to move
through it.
This isn’t “God doesn’t give us more than we can handle.” James also says
this: let no one say that God is testing you. That is not how it works. Stuff
happens. Life happens. Because of the freedom of creation, especially the
natural order – think forest fires and floods – trials come. The vein in the mine
runs out of coal. The relationship, that bond that we thought would last
forever, is broken.
Let’s take a moment to soak in this thought:
No testing has overtaken you that is not common to everyone. God is faithful,
and will not let you be tested beyond your strength, but with the way of testing
God will also provide the way out so that you may be able to endure it. (I
Corinthians 10:13).
We still don’t know the mechanism for this to happen. That’s because there is
no one way for it to happen. It won’t happen by magic. Not by opening the
mailbox and finding a check for a million dollars. That’s the one we dream
about.
When Paul went on his knees to God asking for something, a medical
condition, a handicap, to be taken away, it wasn’t. Instead he, and we, receive
this word:
My grace is sufficient for you, for power is perfected in weakness. So, I will
boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may
dwell in me. (II Corinthians 12:8b-9)
4
God will provide. God will make a way where there seems to be no way.
Whatever it is, it may not be good. But what we experience about it will work in
that direction, given time, and reflection, and prayer in words that we can’t
even understand.
For those who love God who are called
The love here is the kind of love that loves because the object of that love is
worthy of love. God who created us is worthy of our love. Love as
commitment, love which endures, love that loves regardless of the
circumstances. Agape love.
We are not the generators of this love. God is. It was generated from the
beginning of time in God’s intention to redeem the brokenness of humanity
through the offering of Christ for us. Christ on the cross accomplished every
iota of fulfillment that was needed to rectify that brokenness.
There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. For
the law of the Spirit has set you free from the law of sin and of death. For God
has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do… so that the just
requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not according the
flesh but according to the Spirit. Romans 8:1-4)
Not everyone has this. Love for God. Paul goes so far as to say that we were
chosen to have this love. We were chosen before the world began to have this
love. To be not only Christians – followers of Christ – but Christophers –
bearers of Christ into the world.
Turn this verse around and it reads,
For those who love God, who are called according to God’s purpose, all things
work together for good.
That ‘for’ isn’t a hurdle to clear before the promise applies to you. It’s not the
price of admission. It’s Paul describing who he’s talking to — the ones in
whom the Spirit is already, right now, doing what only the Spirit can do. Loving
5
God isn’t what gets you into this verse. Loving God is what it feels like from the
inside to already be someone this verse was written for.
This is a reason to rejoice. It is not a reason to brag about our status. Or to lay
it on someone who is having a hard time.
According to God’s purpose.
God’s purpose is to move us toward maturity and completion. Theologians
call this the “Golden Chain.”
God set apart those God called, and those God called, God put right with
himself, and God shared his glory with them. (Romans 8:30). A more formal
translation uses these words to describe a progression:
Predestination – Vocation – Justification – Glorification.
God shaped. God called. God justified. God glorified.
This is not a timeline. It is a declaration that your life is already held inside
God’s future. The good that God is working toward is not comfort, success, or
ease. The good is glory — the restoration of the image of Christ in us.
God causes all things to work together for good for those who love God, who
are called according to God’s purposes. (Romans 8:28)
Closing: Dolly Again
This week we’ve heard about many of the things that worked together for good
in the world of Dolly Parton.
She was able to come to peace about a broken relationship, with her mentor
Porter Wagoner, by writing and singing a song to him, for him. By praying at his
bedside as he lay dying.
She allowed a simple idea – making books available to children who may not
have one – come to completion and blossom a river of hope: the Imagination
Library. Millions of children, many of whom will never hear a Dolly Parton
6
song, have books in their homes because she believed literacy was a form of
love.
That’s Romans 8:28 in its widest frame: God taking ordinary human generosity
and letting it grow into a good that outlives the giver.
Two stories — one personal, one global — both whispering the same truth:
In all things, God is at work. Not making all things good, but empowering us to
live through anything. Not removing suffering but ensuring it is accompanied
by the presence of the Spirit. Not promising ease, but promising glory — the
restoration of Christ’s image in us. We place our lives — our wounds, our
hopes, our ordinary Tuesdays — into the hands of the Spirit, trusting that
mercy is already at work.
In all things. Every circumstance. Every season. Every breath.
Thanks be to God. Amen.