Romans 8:18 Sermon: Present Suffering and the Glory to Come
Few verses in all of Paul's writings carry the concentrated weight of Romans 8:18: "For I reckon that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed in us." In a single sentence, the apostle holds two realities in deliberate tension — the raw, undeniable pressure of suffering in a fallen world and the staggering magnitude of a glory yet to be disclosed. Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, who preached through Romans verse by verse at Westminster Chapel across more than thirteen years, understood this tension not as a theological abstraction but as the load-bearing beam of Christian endurance. His sermons on this passage — including "Why This Present Suffering," "A Share in the Glory," "We Shall Be Like Him," and "Paradise Regained" — constitute some of the most searching and consoling expositions of this text available to modern readers.
Romans 8:18: The Foundational Reckoning
The first word Paul uses in verse 18 is decisive. "I reckon" — in the Greek, logizomai — is not the language of sentiment or optimism. It is the language of reasoned calculation, the kind of rigorous accounting a mathematician or a physician applies to data. Dr. Lloyd-Jones was emphatic on this point. The comfort Paul offers the Roman Christians is not a vague feeling, not an emotional uplift, but a conclusion drawn from the whole weight of the gospel he has been expounding across the preceding seven and a half chapters.
This is a critical distinction for the contemporary reader who is looking for the meaning of Romans 8:18. The verse cannot be extracted as an isolated piece of inspiration. It is, in Dr. Lloyd-Jones' precise phrase, a deduction — the logical endpoint of everything Paul has argued about justification, the power of sin and death overcome in Christ, the indwelling of the Spirit, and the reality of adoption into the family of God. Strip it of that context and the verse becomes a wishful slogan. Restore it and it becomes a load-bearing pillar of Christian assurance.
The Sufferings of This Present Time: The Diagnosis
Before the verse can yield its comfort, it demands an honest reckoning with suffering itself. In "Why This Present Suffering," Dr. Lloyd-Jones confronts the charge that the biblical message is irrelevant to modern crisis — a charge that, as he observed, every generation reissues with fresh confidence. His response was characteristically direct: the sufferings of this present time are not unique to any century, because they arise from a cause that has not changed. The fundamental disorder of the human condition, rooted in the rebellion described in Genesis 3, generates the same species of suffering in every age: enmity, moral corruption, physical decay, and the shadow of death.
Paul's phrase "the sufferings of this present time" encompasses more than personal pain. In Romans 8:18-23, he widens the frame dramatically to include the entirety of creation, which "groaneth and traveleth in pain together until now." The creation itself is described as having been subjected to vanity — not willingly, but by reason of the one placed over it. Because man as the lord of creation fell, creation fell with him. Dr. Lloyd-Jones took this not as poetic hyperbole but as literal theological reality, grounding it in the curse pronounced in Genesis 3 and the observable disorder of the natural world.
"The world is in sin. It is under the wrath of God... the wrath of God is upon all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who hold down the truth in unrighteousness." — Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Why This Present Suffering
This diagnosis is uncomfortable. It cuts against the grain of every therapeutic and political account of human difficulty that promises relief through better systems, better education, or better self-understanding. But Dr. Lloyd-Jones' point was precisely that a comfort built on a false diagnosis will always collapse under the weight of actual suffering. Christianity does not soften the diagnosis. It delivers a more radical solution.
The Logic of Incomparable Glory
Having established the reality and cause of suffering, Paul introduces the counterweight: a glory so vast that suffering, measured against it, registers as not worthy of comparison. This is not the language of minimization. Dr. Lloyd-Jones was careful to note that Paul does not dismiss the sufferings — he acknowledges them fully. The logic operates on a different level entirely. It is not that suffering is small, but that the coming glory is categorically, incomparably greater.
The glory Paul refers to is the "glory which shall be revealed in us" — a phrase Dr. Lloyd-Jones unpacked in "We Shall Be Like Him" with remarkable precision. This glory is not merely something the believer will observe or receive; it is something that will be revealed in and through the believer. The resurrection body, fashioned like Christ's glorious body, is the horizon Paul has in view. The redemption of the body — which Paul calls the adoption, the full inheritance of sonship — is the completion of a process already underway in the regenerate soul.
In "A Share in the Glory," Dr. Lloyd-Jones develops the astonishing scope of this promise: the Christian will not merely witness Christ's glory as a spectator but will be conformed to it, participating in it as a co-heir with Christ. Romans 8:17 is the bridge — "if children, then heirs; heirs of God, and joint-heirs with Christ; if so be that we suffer with him, that we may be also glorified together." Suffering and glory are, in Paul's framework, inseparable realities in the experience of the believer.
Creation's Groaning and the Scope of Redemption
One of the most arresting aspects of Dr. Lloyd-Jones' exposition of this passage is his treatment of the creation's participation in both suffering and redemption. Romans 8:19-22 describes the whole of creation as eagerly awaiting the manifestation of the sons of God — craning its neck, in the vivid image Dr. Lloyd-Jones used, for the moment when the redeemed are finally and fully revealed in glory.
This is not a peripheral point in the passage; it is central to Paul's argument. The creation did not sin willingly, but it was subjected to vanity as a consequence of man's fall. And because its subjection was bound to man's condition, its liberation is equally bound to man's redemption. In "Paradise Regained," Dr. Lloyd-Jones traced this cosmic dimension through the prophetic literature — the Isaianic vision of the wolf dwelling with the lamb, the cessation of predation, the restoration of a creation no longer red in tooth and claw — as the literal fulfillment of what Paul calls the "glorious liberty of the children of God."
"You and I have never seen the world that God made... when we really see this glorified universe, we'll forget all about the [earthly] highlands. It's nothing. Not worthy to be compared." — Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Why This Present Suffering
This cosmic eschatological dimension is what separates Paul's account of hope from every secular or philosophical alternative. Dr. Lloyd-Jones' survey of competing frameworks in "Why This Present Suffering" is a pointed exercise in comparative epistemology: politics, humanism, science, eastern religion, philosophy — each is shown to terminate in bankruptcy, unable to supply the diagnosis, the solution, or the horizon that Paul sets before his readers. Only the biblical gospel, grounded in the character and purposes of a God who made the world and will redeem it, furnishes what Dr. Lloyd-Jones called "the only hope amidst the sufferings of this present time."
Romans 8:18 and the Christian's New View of Time
Perhaps the most practically transforming insight in Dr. Lloyd-Jones' exposition is what he identifies as Christianity's gift of a new view of time. "This present time" in Paul's phrase is not a permanent or ultimate category. It is, relative to what is coming, a transient state. The non-Christian knows only one kind of time — this present time — and therefore clings to it with a tenacity that explains much about the modern refusal to contemplate aging, suffering, or death. The Christian, by contrast, has been given access to a second temporal register: the glory that is to be revealed.
This recalibration of temporal perspective does not produce passivity or indifference to present suffering. Rather, it produces what Paul himself describes in the following verses: a groaning that is expectant rather than despairing. The Christian groans — Dr. Lloyd-Jones insisted that the absence of this groan is evidence of something defective in one's Christianity — but groans as one who is waiting for the adoption, the redemption of the body. The groaning is oriented toward a promise, not swallowed by a void.
What Romans 8:18 Means for Those Carrying Real Weight Today
The searches surrounding Romans 8:18 tell a revealing story. Thousands of people every month look for the meaning, explanation, and commentary on this verse — with queries like "Romans 8:18 meaning," "Romans 8:18-23 explained," or "how does Romans 8:18-25 give you hope." These are not academic queries. They are people carrying weight — grief, illness, economic pressure, relational fracture, existential disorientation — reaching toward a verse they have encountered somewhere and sensed might have something real to offer.
Dr. Lloyd-Jones' sermons on this passage are, in this respect, remarkably suited to that search. He does not offer comfort on the cheap. He begins where the searcher is — in the reality of suffering — and walks methodically through the gospel logic that undergirds Paul's reckoning. The comfort that emerges is not inspirational in the sentimental sense. It is theological, which means it is durable. It is the kind of comfort that, in Dr. Lloyd-Jones' phrase, "you have got to take... in the terms in which the Bible offers it."
To approach Romans 8:18 devotionally without the doctrinal architecture Paul has built is to reach for a conclusion without the premises. The verse yields its fullest meaning when read in the light of the whole argument — justification, adoption, the indwelling Spirit, the certain return of Christ, the resurrection of the body, and the renewal of creation. These are not decorative additions to the verse's comfort. They are its substance.
Listen to Dr. Lloyd-Jones' Sermons on Romans 8:18
Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones preached on Romans 8:18 in multiple contexts across his ministry. Each sermon approaches the passage from a distinct angle, together forming one of the most complete expository treatments of this verse available. All are freely accessible at MLJTrust.org:
"A Share in the Glory" (Romans 8:17-18)
Dr. Lloyd-Jones examines the inseparable connection between suffering with Christ and being glorified with him, establishing the logic of co-heirship that grounds Paul's reckoning in verse 18.
"Why This Present Suffering" (Romans 8:18-23)
A wide-ranging exposition delivered in an evangelistic context, this sermon sets the full biblical diagnosis of human suffering against every secular alternative before presenting the gospel hope in its cosmic scope.
"We Shall Be Like Him" (Romans 8)
Dr. Lloyd-Jones takes up the glorification of the believer — the redemption of the body and the transformation into the likeness of Christ — unpacking what Paul means by "the glory which shall be revealed in us."
"Paradise Regained" (Romans 8:18-25)
This sermon traces the cosmic dimension of redemption — the deliverance of creation itself from the bondage of corruption — engaging the Isaianic and New Testament eschatological vision of a renewed world.
Explore Dr. Lloyd-Jones' Complete Romans Series
Romans 8:18 sits within the longest and arguably most significant expository series Dr. Lloyd-Jones ever preached. His systematic exposition of Romans — spanning more than 350 sermons delivered across thirteen years at Westminster Chapel — is widely regarded as one of the great monuments of twentieth-century Reformed preaching. The full series is freely available at MLJTrust.org, where over 1,600 sermons can be listened to, downloaded, and shared without charge.