I want to speak this morning from this passage in Romans Chapter 8. The last time I looked at these words of Paul to the Romans I concentrated in my thinking about the expression "all creation groans". When I went back to the passage again you can imagine why I was coming back and thinking about this and I noticed that Paul had something else to say here and so I've actually called this message "Standing on Tip Toe". The groans are there yes. One of the wonderful things about the Christian faith is that we can be real, we can acknowledge the pain, we can acknowledge that there are farewells. We can acknowledge that there are unfulfilled dreams and yet all is not lost. If we had no God, if we had no hope that comes from Him then we would have to gee ourselves up and get up in the morning and say "I'm getting better and better all the time and the world's a wonderful place and if I just hang on we'll get there". But we don't have to do that. We can acknowledge the pain, we can cry at a funeral. In fact last time I looked at this passage it was because I was preparing to speak after the funeral of a wonderful young woman snatched out of her 20s by a car accident and we were grieving. All creation groans and I didn't need to say to that congregation that morning "all creation groans" because we came there together. But we can do that together, we can be sad and we can acknowledge the pain but we know it doesn't stop there. Because if we look at this passage we see that the emphasis of what Paul is saying is about something more. It's about hope, it's about looking forward. And if I leave you with nothing else this morning I want to leave you with that expectation that you look forward with expectancy about what God is going to do in your lives individually and in this church.

The new RSV says in Verse 18: 'All creation looks eagerly forward'. But Phillip has a wonderful expression, he says: 'All creation is standing on tip toe to see what God is going to do in His people.' All creation is standing on tip toe. I don't know whether you've ever been in a large crowd and you've been waiting and waiting and waiting and you're expecting something to come down the road and you're sort of leaning forward and you're looking around like this, trying to see what's happening. I think the first time I remember that I was living in Perth and we went to see the Queen. It was in the 50s and you were standing and standing. I think we'd been there for hours, one of the times we went with our school and we were all in our school uniforms and we had to form a map of Australia or something on an oval, probably the WACA it was. Standing on tip toe waiting to see what would happen. I remember 10 years later in Adelaide standing on tip toe waiting to see the Beatles come down the road. A different kind of royalty. Maybe your experience more recently is to go to Forrest Place and to wait for the latest sporting heroes to come in and be given some kind of acclamation by the city. But that's the expression that Paul uses here. In the midst of the pain, in the midst of acknowledging that this world is not how we want it to be we are standing on tip toe, waiting to see what God is going to do. In other words we belong to a faith of hope, hope is hearing the melody of the future. Faith is dancing to it. I know I've read you those words before and people have responded to them but I couldn't help bringing them back again this morning. Hope is hearing the melody of the future. Faith is dancing to it. Hope is not some kind of wishful thinking, thinking that if only I could get my mind around this that it would happen. Hope is more than that. Hope is the essence of our faith. It means that we are believing that God has got things under His control and He is going to do what He wants to do in the future and He's not going to do it in some big abstract way, He's going to do it in us as His people, His children that He's working on. We are a faith, a religion of hope. If you think about the Negro spiritual songs "I'm on the Glory Train", "Swing Low Sweet Chariot". And some people say that hope in that sense is taking us out of the present predicament and insulate us in some way from the pain of the world.

So people talk about Christians talking about "pie in the sky when they die". Now we do believe that there is pie in the sky when we die or if you want to call it a banquet that's even better than pie. That's okay. In fact at that funeral service when I was looking at these words before, the young man who was married to this lady who died. They'd only been married about a year. He put these words in the paper: "We'll take a rain check on that dinner date. Save us some seats at the banquet". Isn't that a wonderful expression of hope? Hope is about knowing that it will all come together when God has things under His total control at that great banquet of life. And there are many of our songs that come out of the Hebrew expectation and the New Testament about the hereafter as being the great banquet. We'll have a lot more than pie and you can imagine what you want to have in that pie in the sky one day. But if that was all hope was it would be wishful thinking. It would be just looking to be taken out of the here and now to there but it's more than that. Hope is about understanding what God is doing here and now in my life with a future orientation but here and now. And that's what I like about that expression. Hope is hearing the melody of the future but faith is dancing to it. If it was just hope that was out there I could go on living my life with despair or with abandon, without any reference to what God was going to do but faith is the essence of how I live. Faith is the way in which I take that hope, that expectation that God has given me and I act. Faith is about taking that step, one at a time in the direction that hope calls me knowing I can trust God.

We have a future orientation to our faith. We talk about a second advent. The first advent we celebrate starting in the last Sunday of November this year leading towards Christmas. The second advent is the coming of Jesus again and we are looking to that. It is what giveth us our focus. Later on in this service we're going to celebrate communion. We celebrate communion in the way that Jesus told us. We look back but we look forward. We do it until he comes. It has a future orientation. But faith is the way that we live here in the life of our hope. Faith is what Abraham did. God called him to go out to a land where he didn't know where he was going. He didn't know what it would involve. He certainly didn't know all of the struggles and the patience he was going to need. But he obeyed God. That's faith. And if you read about the great heroes in Hebrews 11, each one of them is required by God to act on the basis of their faith. Now faith is having in our heads a lateral understanding of God because God is not irrational and the way he asks us to live is not irrational but it goes beyond that. In the passage that we're looking at here in Romans Chapter 8, Verse 18, Paul says: 'I consider' is the word for logical reckoning and I put in your notes a couple of other references in Romans and there are more than that to this word that we get our word 'logical' from. Paul is not saying it's some sort of irrational belief that I've got to have and therefore I can step out on faith but rather knowing the God who I know and knowing what he's done in my life in the past and knowing what he's promised for the future I can step out and I can take that step of faith because I can trust that God.

Habakkuk is one of the books that's meant a lot to me from verses from Chapter 2 where a promise that God gave me a long time ago about my reading and my speaking that he wanted me to do in the future. But sometimes I've had to go over to Chapter 3 and look at those verses at the end: 'Though the fruit tree does not blossom and the fruit will not come on the vine yet I will exalt in the Lord and I will exalt in the God of my salvation.' Faith says I step out without seeing where I'm going, my hope gives me a future orientation, know that God is going to work it all out but my faith says I will trust this God even though I can't see where he's taking me.

And Habakkuk also is the great book of that expression. 'The righteous people will live by faith'. Last week we talked about what it meant to be righteous, to have a great hunger and appetite for God's love and goodness and God's character in us. The person who has a great appetite for God, the person who is righteous who soaks themselves in the Lord is somebody who lives by faith and that great call that clarion call to faith, the righteous to live by their faith is what turned Martin Luther around, it's what turned Augustine around. It's that great text of Romans Chapter 1: 'The righteous will live by their faith'. Sure we come to God by faith, we know that we come into a relationship not by something that we've done but by something that He does in us and gives us but Paul says here and it's echoed down the ages and it's been discovered and rediscovered time and time again. We go on living our life by faith. We live because we trust God to work it out for us.

I don't know whether you're a person who has an optimistic personality by nature, some of us have it and some of us don't. But living our life by faith is asking God to turn us around so that it's not just personality optimism but it's God centered confidence that He can do something in the future. I have a couple of pictures. I think I've probably mentioned both of them to you before but pictures that are a test, a test perhaps about whether you are living your life by faith, whether you're thinking about the future of the church in the light of hope and faith. First of all I want you to imagine a stream, it's flowing down (maybe it's the one that's going through Bathurst at the moment), it's flowing down with great vigour. When you stand in that water in that stream do you stand to the flow of the water, stand with your back to the flow of the water so you that you just sort of get carried along helpless, or are you the kind of person who stands in the stream of life and says "this stream comes from the source, from my God. I am facing whatever He sends to me and I'm going to embrace it with vigour". Are you the kind of person who says: "I'm going to be tossed around by life and maybe I'll survive and maybe I won't or are you the kind of person with arms wide open to the future says: "God I trust you, you won't send me anything more or allow anything more to come to me than I can bear, you will give me the way out through temptation, you will give me the strength to cope with whatever comes into my life and I trust you with that future and I will step out with whatever you call me to be and to do".

Another way to think about that future orientation is this cartoon from Michael Lernig and again I've shown it to you before. (Microphone fading). I think it's a wonderful picture of how we can understand our orientation to the future. A person of faith who knows that God has hope in him (inaudible) ..the gate and says: "That gate leads me out into my future. It feels secure within a sense that that gate is beckoning me to my future". A person who is afraid of what God might bring to them, a person who might feel that God doesn't love them enough and trust their future in his hands will say: "No the gate is closed, I'm not going outside the gate. Everything out there is dark and scary. I'm staying safely inside the gate."

One of the families who couldn't be here this morning rang up to wish Neil and myself well and the verse they gave us was that wonderful one from Matthew 28 Verse 20: 'Go into all the world and preach the gospel, baptising them in the name of the Father the Son and the Holy Spirit.' Do you hear God calling you to open the gate and to go out into His world. Trust in Him because He says "I'm with you always". That's what our Christian faith is about. It's about knowing that God is in control and His call calling us out beyond the known into the unknown because it's His sky, it's His moon, it's His stars, it's His darkness because He is the light in that.

But Paul doesn't just say to us "You are to live your life in the basis of the hope that we have. You are to live your life by faith because the righteous live by faith." He actually gives us some clues in this passage about how we are to live that life of hope and how we can have the hope. He says in Verse 19: 'The whole creation waits for eager longings for the revealing of the children of God.' I've puzzled long and hard this week over that expression and then I discovered that if I did the usual thing that you're supposed to do and went on and read the rest of the context I would discover actually what it meant about the revealing of the children of God. When we come to Christ we come to Him on the basis of just putting out our hands and taking God's free gift of salvation. When we come to Him we know His love and His care and we begin a life, we begin a journey of trust in God, of having hope for the future, of knowing that He loves us and He will give us only the best for us. But we still only have a glimpse of what it's like. We still have only a glimpse of what He does in our lives to bring us healing. We still only have a glimpse of what He will fully do in us till the end of our life. So when it says that all creation is waiting, standing on tip toe for what God is going to do in his children, it's something of a promise. It says however wonderful it was to come to Christ the first time, however wonderful it was to know His salvation there's still much more. However much I may understand God is working in me and changing me and working in you and changing you, there's so much more to the end of our lives God walks with us, He takes us, He keeps on walking with us. And here in this passage, there's a wonderful expression of being children of God, knowing the relationship with Him, knowing what it means to be accepted and loved by God. In other words what God is doing in us now is just a slight glimpse a foretaste, what Paul calls the first fruits of what He is going to go on doing. We can trust Him in that, we can be sure He loves us and there are three ways to think about how we can be sure of how he loves us. Three ways that fit in very nicely with thinking about God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. God is Father, the God who promises, the God who initiates, the one who has said in His word these things are true, "I will never leave you or forsake you, I will be the one who will keep working on you, I will make my plans come to fruition for you, I will be the one who will complete in me". Whatever those promises are that you have heard from God and they're very precious to you, come from God the Father and we can trust him, we can read his word and we can know the truth.

And we know that in Jesus the son we have that absolute demonstration of God's love. Someone who gave his life for us. Someone who was vindicated, who was justified, who was victorious and rose from the dead. We can be sure of this God because He's the one who loved us enough to do that. And then in God the Holy Spirit we have the assurance. If we have the promises of God and His word, if we have there acted out in history the facts about Jesus and his death on the cross. We have the feeling the emotional the reassurance side of the work of the Holy Spirit. When we talked about this particular aspect in the Alpha course I remember the story, a friend of mine had a very difficult childhood, a father who was very rejecting of him. He'd worked all his professional life and had been very successful in trying to prove to his father that he could make it in this world. They'd come to Australia as immigrants and it had been a long struggle. But one day he said to me, "you know I didn't want to have a son, I only wanted to have daughters and particularly my first child I wanted to be a girl because I was scared that I would do the same thing to him that my father had done to me. Laid so many expectations on me that I could never meet them and I would fail and I would always feel bad about myself and it would interrupt my relationship with my father". But he said "I took that to God one day in prayer and I didn't really understand how it would happen but anyway God gaveth me a daughter first and I didn't have to face the problem there". But he said "One day, after my third child was born I was just playing with him on the bed and as I cuddled him in my arms I realised I loved him in a way that I'd never felt my father loved me." He said "I realised that in the answer to my prayer, God had given me a love for my son that was beyond any expectation that I could have." And then he said "I realised that that was how God loved me". It was the action of the Holy Spirit in his life reassuring him of God's love for him.

When Paul says: 'We are standing on tip toe to see what God is going to do with us in the future' we already have a whole lot of indications of how He is going to do it now in his promises, in His word, in the death of Jesus but in the way that the Holy Spirit brings that home to us in our hearts. And yet we live as people of hope and that's the hope we take to the world. We live by faith, trust in God to get over that edge knowing that He won't let us fall beyond what we can bear but still needing to take that step. And yet we live in a world where it isn't all right, it isn't all fixed up, where there is pain. The tension of God yes has brought us salvation, He has brought us all those wonderful blessings in our lives but we still know that it's not a perfect world. When we are people of faith we can live with that tension and here in this passage Paul tells us what to do with it. He says: 'The pain is the pain of knowing what should be but it isn't yet.' Being dissatisfied with what is here and now and yet knowing that there is something more. We understand that principle in our marriages for instances. If we know that there's some difficulty and we don't seek to talk about it with our spouse then we are basically saying "I have no hope for this marriage that it'll be any better than it is now". Or with our children if we know that there is a spelling problem, or some difficulty that they need help with, if we don't do anything but just say "Well all right, I'm just going to live with it as it is. This is the best that it can be, as good as it gets". Then we don't have hope. God says to us "The pain that you feel because things are not as they ought to be is not for you to just accept and be satisfied how things are. Pain is the message that tells you something ought to change and you need to do something about it". Some of us are so good at being patient, so good at sitting there and letting things happen to us that we don't take the actions we ought to.

I remember once in a church we had a list of problems that were coming through in some of the home groups and I said to my co-pastor at the time: "Oh I think those are things that people need to pray about". And he turned to me and he said: "Pray about them, they're things that we ought to do". And he had heard me say that praying was some sort of cop out, that when you couldn't act on something then you prayed about it. It's not one or other, it's both of those. Prayer, and that's why I love this quotation here at the bottom of your sheet: 'By means of prayer the believer sifts through the evil and the dislocation of the present in order to determine what must be altered if the rule of God is to be made concrete. Prayer becomes the expression of a holy discontent'. Last week we talked about a holy discontent about our own spirituality, here we're talking about a holy discontent that comes to us through prayer and contemplation about the world, about the present. Prayer is a stubborn unwillingness to leave things as they are. There's a subversive quality to it. I know that a number of you have had challenges in the last year or so that you have prayed for. Where you've prayed that you will sort out your job situation and give you the courage to change if necessary. And some of you have said it's hard to pray for that because what if God says "No". We're afraid that we won't get the answer we want or that we've things the desires inside of us are not God given desire and so we're afraid to pray. I know that some of you have been praying for children and the hard thing was to pray that God would give you a child because what happens if he doesn't answer. Prayer has a subversive quality about it. It says "we are not satisfied with how things are now, we will pray and we will trust God to answer in the way that He wants to. We are trusting him to know the right thing but we will ask because we're not satisfied with how things are now.

Are you standing on tip toe to see what God is going to do with your life? Are you standing on tip toe to see what God is going to do in the next few months, in the next years in this church? That's what Paul calls us to. He says "Yes, acknowledge the pain, creation groans, we groan". But he says "The Spirit groans as well". And the reason we are called to prayer is because we know that in prayer we meet the deep heart of God and when we groan we sometimes don't know what to ask for, we're afraid to put our prayers into concrete terms but the Spirit groans with us. We often quote that verse towards the end of our passage in Verse 27. 26: 'The Spirit prays with us'. But have you ever seen the context it is in before. 'The Spirit groans because we're groaning'. But then in Verse 28 and how many times have you quoted Verse 28 without knowing the context it comes to. It's been a marvelous revelation to me again this week to look at this. We know that all things work together for good for those who love God who are called according to His purpose. That's not a Pollyanna verse. It's not a verse, "Oh well all these things are happening to me, I'm a good Christian, I'll sit here and take it". That's a verse that comes at the end of the passage, it talks about pain and resisting the pain. Realising what God has got for us and stretching on and going out by faith. It's a verse that comes at the end of the passage, it says "Yes we groan, we don't like what's happening to us and when we don't like what's happening to us and we don't know how to pray, the Spirit prays with us." It's a verse that comes at the end of the passage about what God is going to do in his world. It's about looking to what God wants to do, standing on tip toe. We know that things are going to work for good at the in times, they're going to work for good here according to God's purposes. Next time you say that verse and you are reassuring yourself that God is in control remember His calling is through it to look to see what He is doing, to pray for what He wants you to do and He is calling you to a life of faith that steps out in what He wants you to do.

I can't think of any better way to finish than to read you again those verses but this time to read them from the Phillips translation where that expression 'standing on tip toe' comes through. Paul says: 'In my opinion whatever we may have to go through now is less than nothing compared with the magnificent future God has planned for us. The whole creation is on tip toe to see the wonderful sight of the sons of God coming into their own. The world of creation cannot as yet see reality, not because it chooses to be blind but because in God's purpose it has been so limited, yet it has been given hope and the hope is that in the end the whole of created life will be rescued from the tyranny of change and decay and have its share in that magnificent liberty which can only belong to the children of God. It is plain to anyone with eyes to see that at the present time all created life groans in a sort of universal travail and it is plain too that we who have a foretaste of the Spirit are in a state of painful tension while we wait for that redemption of our bodies which will mean that at last we have realised our full sonship in Him. We were saved by this hope but in our moments of impatience let us remember that hope always means waiting for something that we do not yet possess. Hope is hearing the melody of the future, faith is dancing to it and we are called to pray'. Let's pray now.

Our Father God, we know that you know where we are in our own lives. You know where we are as a church. You are the one who has called us into relationship with you and you will see through that relationship to the end of our days. We ask that you will show us where you want us to be dissatisfied with things as they are. Where you want us to pray and then to put legs under our prayers. We ask that you will show us where we need to wait for your timing. Though the fig tree doesn't blossom yet we will trust you we will exalt you because when we praise you we are no longer victims, but we are participant in what you are doing. Father thank you for your great promise. Thank you for your work here among us over the year and thank you most of all in anticipation of what you will do in the future. Amen.

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