Pastor David Jang (founder of Olivet University) underscores—through the thread that runs across Romans 8:18–27—that Christian suffering is not a futile expenditure but the very road by which we draw near to the glory that will be revealed. Salvation “in hope,” he argues, is neither naïve optimism nor self‑suggestion; it is a future‑facing confidence rooted in the sure promise of the Kingdom of God, even when that promise is not yet visible. Thus a believer is not one who knows nothing of pain, but one who reads pain by a new set of coordinates. Reality aches, yet the end is good. When this trust holds, endurance ceases to be the art of delay and becomes the muscle of faith.
He first calls for a conversion of sight. The same hardship yields utterly different narratives depending on the horizon we choose. The world’s toil often feels like aimless repetition, but Pastor David Jang reads the believer’s suffering as “time rendered meaningful within the horizon of promise.” In this frame, hope is not a spell to bend outcomes but a posture of joining the drama of salvation that God has already set in motion. Hope is the spiritual sense that anticipates and tastes what has not yet been experienced; that sense grows from eschatological assurance. Hence Christian endurance is “a waiting whose reward is assured,” yet the reward is no wage for services rendered—it is the glory of God’s own presence. Suffering and glory do not negate each other; they interpret each other. Suffering does not conceal glory; glory discloses suffering’s meaning.
Romans 8 is distinctive in refusing to confine salvation to the individual. Paul declares that creation itself groans. Pastor David Jang (Jang Da‑wit) interprets this groaning as the labor pains of cosmic restoration. Groaning is not the sigh of defeat but the signal of birth. As human sin disordered the world, so divine restoration exceeds personal rescue and presses toward the re‑creation of all things. This perspective prevents faith from shrinking into private consolation. Faith is a public imagination capacious enough to embrace the whole created order; salvation is not “my ticket to heaven,” but the communal and cosmic event of “our new heavens and new earth.” Consequently, Christian ethics widens. We do not ignore environmental ruin; we answer creation’s cry through persistent, ordinary choices—reducing waste, choosing care, and restoring an ecology of shared life. Such practices become precursors of eschatological hope. To listen for creation’s groaning is to participate in God’s own heart, which invites the world into the freedom of glory.
At the same time, Paul says believers groan inwardly. The paradox that those who have received the Spirit’s “firstfruits” still groan is an honest diagnosis of life lived between the “already” and the “not yet.” Pastor David Jang counsels us not to escape this tension but to honor it. A spirituality that counterfeits the joy of completion ahead of time is thin. The more we have tasted the Spirit’s consolation, the more sharply we feel the misalignment of bodies and world that are not yet redeemed. Yet this groaning is not despair; it is grief with a direction. To wait for “the redemption of our bodies” reaches beyond private bodily healing; it names a shared expectation—the maturation of the Church, Christ’s body, and the world’s shalom. Waiting, therefore, is not passivity but participation. Prayer, service, witness, and solidarity become the grammar of that waiting.
Here Pastor David Jang raises to the surface a central note of the gospel: the Spirit’s intercession. Often we do not know what we ought to pray or how we ought to pray—not because our wills are merely weak, but because our sight is genuinely short. Yet the Spirit intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words. This truth frees prayer from contests of eloquence and systems of logic. Prayer’s power does not rise from our phrasing but from the faithfulness of the indwelling Spirit. The Spirit purifies desire, covers ignorance, and rearranges reality within the will of God. Intercession is not an esoteric technique; it is life breathing in rhythm with the Spirit. One can pray in silence and worship with tears. What the Spirit’s intercession guarantees is not “faultless petitions” but a “true connection with God.” And when connection is restored, the agenda of life is re‑ordered: not that we obtain all we desire, but that we love more clearly what God desires.
The reality of such prayer is verified in the ordinary. On campuses where competition is the daily air, those who trust the Spirit’s intercession are not rattled by comparisons. Another’s victory is not my defeat, and failure is not my identity. A person of hope refuses to be defined by outcomes. Tasks are treated as worship; relationships, as calling. Thus a tight schedule need not harden the heart. Time management becomes less a compulsion to control than an ordering of love. Amid the shards of research and assignments, club work and part‑time jobs, the Spirit connects our fears and longings to God’s will and aligns them. Where alignment comes, delay‑driven indecision recedes and panicked haste is quieted. Peace arrives not as a warm mood but as the order of right relationship.
Pastor David Jang adds a further insight: at the site of suffering, believers do not merely grow weaker—they grow truer. Suffering exposes our inability even as it deepens our taste of God’s goodness. Faith is not the avoidance of reality but the courage to confront it. Hope is not a rainbow but the memory of the covenant. Therefore he does not offer a thin mantra—“Do not be discouraged”—but addresses the causes of discouragement head‑on: an uncertain future, repeated failure, fractured relationships, pressures of health and finance. All of these are real. Yet over this reality stands a more solid one: the love of Christ. When Paul declares that nothing can separate us from that love, he is not exaggerating emotion. The cross and the resurrection anchor love as an event in history, not a passing feeling. The reality of that event grounds our present assurance. Assurance is not bravado; it is the gospel’s sobriety about what is truly real.
Ears trained to hear both creation’s groaning and the Spirit’s intercession grow keen to society’s pain. In a world where competition is structural, the cries of those who fall through the cracks; the innocent tears shed in war and disaster; the voices pressed down by prejudice and hate—all of these groans are overlaid by the Spirit’s groan. Those who hear that overlay refuse bystanding and become intercessors. Intercession is not a distant moral courtesy; it is solidarity that bears wounds up close. It does not promise quick results, but it practices a love that endures and does not forget. When the Church takes the world’s pain onto its own calendar, and when Christian students prioritize the campus’s weaker members, small restorations begin. These are signs that herald the new heavens and the new earth. God does not only call us to headline history; more often, he calls us to work with the Spirit in small places. Fidelity in small places is bound to the great story.
On the boundary of the “already” and the “not yet,” we often sway. Even after tasting the Spirit’s firstfruits, prayer can feel blocked, the Word can feel distant, and even the community can feel strange. Pastor David Jang urges us precisely then to trust the Spirit’s intercession. Faith is not ruled by the tides of feeling. The Spirit works whether or not we feel it. When the Spirit forms within us the groaning we cannot form, our gaps become conduits of grace. The valley of failure does not vanish, but it ceases to be a place of isolation. It becomes a school of God’s lowliness, a place where we learn to weep for one another, a gymnasium for the muscles of love. Suffering cannot destroy us. Suffering does not thin love; it thickens it.
Weaving these threads together, Pastor David Jang descends into the believer’s everyday. He proposes faith not as a grand slogan but as careful habit: prayer that tunes the day’s beginning and end to the Spirit’s breath; a temperate way of life that refuses to forget creation’s groan; a preferential care for the weaker members of the community; diligence that treats process with reverence rather than idolizing results; humility that extracts learning from failure; integrity that translates the gospel not only into speech but into life. Precisely because such habits are unexaggerated, they endure. Hope grows more surely from small, repeated practices than from shouted slogans. Habits shape time, time shapes character, and character finally composes our story. That story becomes the next generation’s hope.
As Pastor David Jang expounds it, the gospel of Romans 8 trains two gazes at once. One is the far gaze—toward the new heavens and the new earth, toward the last day when all creation will be invited into the freedom of glory. The other is the near gaze—toward the person beside me today, my field of study, the time and talents entrusted to my hands, the concrete needs of my city. The far gaze does not belittle the near, and honest nearness does not blur far hope. Where the two gazes cross, faith ceases to be an ideal detached from life and becomes the power that loves reality most deeply.
Finally he speaks as if calling each of us by name: You are not alone. Your groaning does not evaporate into the air. The Spirit within you, Christ at the right hand of God, and the Church throughout the ages groan and pray together. Inside this vast net of intercession, even if we stumble, we do not fall away. Therefore do not fear today’s suffering; attempt small restorations in desolate places; remain at prayer. Hope is not a conclusion assembled later—it is a habit that begins here and now. That habit renews our sight, sends our hands and feet to our neighbors, and refashions our language with the vocabulary of the gospel. Then we learn this: the glory to be revealed is immeasurably great, and our steps toward it are borne up, even today, by the Spirit’s intercession. And there is, truly, nothing that can separate us from that love.