The Math Only Works If the Glory Is Real | Romans 8:18

You have run the numbers before. Probably not on paper. On the drive home, or at 11:40 at night with the laptop still open and next weekend's chart half built. What this has cost, on one side. What it has produced, on the other. The anniversary dinner you left early. The friendships that thinned out because you work every Sunday. And on the other side of the ledger, a room that sang, a few people who are different now, and a set of numbers nobody outside the building would be impressed by. You keep hoping the two columns balance. Some seasons they are not close.

Paul runs that same calculation in verse eighteen. He gets a different answer, and he shows his work. Romans 8:18. World English Bible. "For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which will be revealed toward us."

Consider is an accounting word. Paul is not feeling his way to this conclusion. He is reckoning. Which means the first thing to say about this verse is what it does not do. It does not tell you your side weighs nothing. Nothing cannot be weighed. Something has to be on the scale for the scale to matter.

One year Christmas fell on a Sunday and we ran the whole thing. Saturday services, Christmas Eve, and Sunday morning. Three separate sermons, and our creative team branded it the Trilogy of Christmas. If you ask my wife how that season went, the true answer is that I probably did not defend my family enough. That cost was real. I am not going to file it under lesson learned and move along. Paul would not either. He would put it on the scale.

What Paul does is not shrink your side. He enlarges the other one. Glory which will be revealed toward us. Not glory you go somewhere to look at. Glory aimed at you, arriving in your direction. He is saying there is a weight coming that makes the honest, fully counted, unminimized cost of this present time not worth comparing to it. Not because your column is light. Because the other column is heavier than the scale can hold.

What did this year actually cost me? Say the real number out loud in the car. Then say what I believe is on the other side of it.