From weakness to glory series—Week 1: Romans 8:18-25: ‘Spiritual first fruits’.
Today we begin a new sermon series for the Sundays after Pentecost – the Sundays in the Church year that focus on life with God by his Spirit.
The series is called ‘From weakness to glory’. It begins with weakness because our life begins in weakness, fragility and vulnerability. No matter how much physical capacity a person has, no matter what position of power they hold, all people begin by the same vulnerable process, in the same fragile state—a zygote—an initial single cell formed from a fertilized egg in their mothers’ womb.
Although everyone’s origins are from the same starting point, each one of us is unique. As a baby grows there is a fascinating unfolding of life. The Psalmist said in Psalm 139:
For you created my inmost being;
you knit me together in my mother’s womb.
I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made” (Psalm 139:13-14).
Next time you look in the mirror, stop for a while, and ponder. God has made you to be like no one else. No one else in the world has your DNA, your fingerprints. There is no other person in the world the same as you—God intended that this was so.
Yet our biological beginning is not the only thing common to everyone. We share another common beginning with all people—one of a spiritual origin. David confessed in Psalm 51: “Surely I was sinful at birth, sinful from the time my mother conceived me.” (Psalm 51:5). As flesh gives birth to flesh the sin Adam introduced into the human race is passed on as a part of our human nature from one generation to the next. This is a condition known by us all. It is an inseparable part of who we are and enters our personal reality at a point in our life where we are most weak and vulnerable—our very beginning—when we have no power within ourselves to resist the relentless power of sin, and free ourselves from it. This condition that we are born with is one of spiritual weakness—furthermore a total incapacity: we are born spiritually blind, unable to see the Kingdom of God, (2 Corinthians 4:4), spiritually dead, unable to revive our mortal bodies to eternal life (Ephesians 2:1), and spiritual enemies with God (Colossians 1:21), relentlessly opposed to him and his will. Being dead in our sins, we all fall short of God’s glory to a greater or lesser degree, and at the extreme end of the spectrum of walking by the flesh, we human beings carry out of the most atrocious wickedness.
God limits the age of human beings to limit wickedness on the face of the earth. Our next heartbeat is one heartbeat closer to our last. Throughout life we are vulnerable to illness, disability, physical incapacity. Our strength begins shrinking from age 30 so that as we grow older, we grow weaker. At different times in life, we struggle with pain and suffering. In senior years we steadily return to the frailty of our infancy. The words from the funeral rite come to mind; a paraphrase of Job 14:1-2: “We are all born weak and helpless. All lead the same short, troubled life. We grow and wither as quickly as flowers; we disappear like shadows.” Weakness is common to human experience, from basic colds to the most wretched of diseases.
In today’s reading from Romans, we hear that weakness is not only limited to human experience. All of creation is fragile and vulnerable. This planet disintegrates and crumbles, withers and washes away. Paul speaks of all creation groaning and in a state of bondage to decay. This does not only refer to human beings, but the rivers, birds, beasts of the field, vegetation, mountains and hills, sun, moon and stars—everything.
These obeyed God’s word from the beginning. God said: “Let there be…and it was so…and God saw that it was good.” (Genesis 1). He brings out the starry host one by one and calls forth each of them by name…not one of them is missing (Isaiah 40:26).
It was not the forests and fields, stars or seas, birds or beasts that rebelled against God. These are the innocent ones. But it was because of Adam and Eve that creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice. God brought two main consequences in life for Adam and Eve’s disobedience, when they brought corruption to God’s creation. The first is that man’s toil would now be difficult. God said to Adam: “Because you listened to your wife and ate fruit from the tree about which I commanded you, ‘You must not eat from it’, cursed is the ground because of you.” (Genesis 3:17).
In Romans 8 creation is personified as if it is groaning under the weight of human sin—the sounds of earthquakes and landslides, floods and glaciers melting, forests being felled and animals suffering are the groans of creation inflicted with human selfishness, exploitation and wickedness, while it is trapped in bondage to decay. There comes an end point where things can decay no longer because they have disintegrated completely. This is the message of the New Testament. The world and everything in it will one day come to an end: “The heavens will disappear with a roar; the elements will be destroyed by fire, and the earth and everything done in it will be laid bare.” (2 Peter 3:10).
The second consequence was hard labour for women in bearing children. God said to Eve: “I will make your pains in childbearing very severe; with painful labour you will give birth to children.” (Genesis 3:16).
In Romans 8, Paul portrays God’s creation as groaning like a mother suffering with the pains of hard labour. It is a picture of a fragile and suffering creation in which we ourselves know weakness and suffering. But against this portrayal of creation groaning as if in childbirth, Paul paints for the church a picture of hope—God’s bringing about for his people a new reality. For labour pains signal the near arrival of the long-awaited baby, and joy will be close at hand, that the newly revealed son or daughter will bring.
Paul likens our current time of weakness and suffering to this—it’s as if all creation is groaning as in pregnancy and longing for the sons of God to be revealed to usher in a joyful new beginning. Our modern sensitivities like to make ‘sons of God’ gender inclusive and say children of God, but the original wording from Paul is ‘sons’—“the sons of God”—with a completely different meaning. Here Paul is borrowing from Old Testament theology by which angels are referred to as ‘the sons of God’ in Genesis (6) and Job (1:6 and 38:7). Why would all creation, groaning in bondage to decay, be longing for angels to be revealed? Because, just as angels heralded Jesus’ birth in the manger, they will herald Jesus’ coming again at the end of time when he comes to gather God’s chosen people, judge the world and set all things right. Matthew’s Gospel tells us:
“When the Son of Man comes on the clouds of heaven, with power and great glory, he will send his angels with a loud trumpet call, and they will gather his elect from the four winds, from one end of the heavens to the other. He will sit on his glorious throne. All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate the people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats.” (Matthew 24:31-32 and 35:31).
That is the Christian hope—that despite our spiritual and physical weaknesses, despite our groaning and longings, we await Jesus to come and finally bring an end to evil, and to take us and all believers in Christ to eternal glory. He has already won the victory over sin, death and evil, which have intruded into God’s good and perfectly ordered creation in the beginning. We see a snapshot of what that victory looks like in today’s Gospel reading, as Jesus went through all the towns and villages, teaching in their synagogues, proclaiming the Good News of the Kingdom and healing every disease and sickness. Jesus has broken these powers for us. He freed us from the powers of sin, death and evil not only for the world, but for us, on the Cross when he shed his precious blood. Through his ministry, Jesus gives a glimpse of the final victory we wait for, when Jesus will come in glory to make a wondrously and unimaginably new heaven and earth of which we will be a part.
It is in this hope we were saved, Paul says. Here, hope is more than a wish. Christian hope is eagerly awaiting, longing for, anticipation, expectation. When all around we see evil and corruption, weakness and frailty—Christian hope is to expect and eagerly await Jesus’ return when we and all believers will be brought into the freedom and glory of the children of God.
How do we come to have this expectation? Because, as Paul says in today’s text, God has given us his first fruits.
The first fruits is a rich image from the Old Testament (e.g Exodus 23:19, Leviticus 23:10-11) when the people God had rescued from bondage to slavery in Egypt entered the land God had given to them. They were to give to God the first fruits of their harvest. In doing this they were returning to God a portion of what was his anyway. They were surrendering the first of their crops in the trust that God would provide even more—a full harvest. The offering represented their trust that more was on the way and they would soon enjoy the full harvest to come.
But the first fruits of the Spirit are not our offerings to God, but God’s offering to us. God has made an offering to you. He has not only given you the first part of his Spirit, but all of the Holy Spirit, who lives in you. The Holy Spirit has come to bring us help in our spiritual weakness, bringing Spirit-filled life from spiritual death, giving you a new heart by which you love Jesus and his words of life. The Holy Spirit has removed your spiritual blindness and opened your eyes to see Jesus as your Saviour, like he did for Saul on the Damascus Road, so that we are no longer enemies of God but his children and friends through faith in Jesus.
Your Father in Heaven has given you his first fruits offering. How do you know? By confessing your faith in the Creed, by confessing your sins, by eagerly desiring to hear God’s word, the Spirit of God has gone to work in you and made his home in you. This Spirit-wrought faith is the assurance to you that you have the Spirit of God with you and much more is to follow—that although struggling with weakness you will see the final fullness of redemption: the resurrection of your body and Christ’s making all things new, when he comes again with his angels to judge the living and the dead, and he brings you to the heavenly homeland he has promised to give you.
It’s easy to see and experience weakness all around us, and in our own life too. We know this spiritual weakness all too well as we struggle against the sinful nature and the unseen spiritual realities that seek to destroy us. But while we are weak God is strong. You have a mighty God who came to earth in the weakness of the same human flesh as yours, to win the victory over sin, death and hell by shedding his blood on the Cross for all people, including you.
God has brought you to share in that victory, that your life begun in weakness may one day continue in sharing in God’s own glory. He chose you to receive his offering of the first fruits of his Spirit. By his invincible power, he destroyed the old Adam and created a new heart within you, in which you know Jesus and love him and his word. He will bring you to the land he has chosen to give you. God’s first fruits offering assures you that no amount of weakness and suffering, not even death itself can snatch away from you the glorious new future in which you share in the life and glory of God forever. God has given you his first fruits offering as a guarantee to you personally, that this will soon come. That is why Paul can say: “I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us.” Thanks be to God! Amen.
Pastor Tim Ebbs
St Paul’s Lutheran Church, Glenelg
Second Sunday after Pentecost, 2026
QUESTIONS FOR REFLECTION
“… the first fruits of the Spirit are not our offerings to God, but God’s offering to us. God has made an offering to you. He has not only given you the first part of his Spirit, but all of the Holy Spirit, who lives in you.”
- Why would Paul use the idea of “first fruits” to describe the Holy Spirit?
- How does the idea of first fruits connect the Old Testament harvest offering to New Testament salvation?
- How does the Spirit act as a foretaste or preview of what is to come?
- Why do believers still “groan” even though they already have the Spirit?
- How does knowing you have the Spirit as a “first fruits” offering from God change the way you view suffering or waiting?
- In what ways have you experienced the Spirit as a foretaste of God’s promises (peace, joy, transformation)?
- What does this passage reveal about the “already but not yet” nature of salvation, and give Christians hope for the future (resurrection, full redemption)?
- How can we live daily with confidence that God will finish what He has started in us?
- What habits or attitudes help us stay hopeful while we wait for full redemption?
- How can the reality of future glory shape our priorities today?
