Suffering Produces…Hope
Text: Romans 5:1-11
Grace, mercy, and peace be to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.
When he was only 7 years old, his family was forced out of their home. He actually had to go to work to help support his family. At age 9, his mother died. At age 22, he lost his job as a store clerk. He wanted to go to law school but his education wasn’t good enough. At age 23, he went into debt to become a partner in a small store. Three years later, his business partner died, leaving him with a debt that took years to repay. At age 28, he asked his girlfriend of four years to marry him. She said no. He eventually did get married. At age 41, his four-year-old son died. Only one of their four children lived to adulthood. At age 45, he ran for the senate and lost. At age 47, he ran for vice-president and lost. At age 51, he became the 16th president of the United States of America. His name was Abraham Lincoln. Many consider him to be one of the greatest presidents our country has ever known.
None of us enjoy suffering. We don’t seek it out. We don’t wish for it. But we also know that there’s something about suffering that forges a strength we don’t get anywhere else. Suffering often produces qualities that we may not develop in other ways. Paul says it this way, “Suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope.” The conclusion is that suffering produces hope. But it doesn’t do that directly. It comes in stages. First producing endurance, then character, and eventually hope. “And hope does not put us to shame” (or in some translations, “hope does not disappoint”).
As Christians we can be certain of any number of things that we read in the Bible. We know God created the world in just six days. We know Jesus was the Son of God who walked on water and fed the five thousand. We know Jesus died and rose again from the dead. We know that He will one day return to judge the living and the dead. We know that we’re going to heaven. We take these things on faith. Sometimes though we come across things in Scripture that are harder to take on faith. Today’s text is a perfect example of that where Saint Paul says that “we rejoice in our sufferings.” Why are we to rejoice in our sufferings? This is a little hard to swallow because it just doesn’t make sense. But it’s true. As Christians, we rejoice in our sufferings.
When the Apostle Paul wrote about suffering, he spoke as one who knew suffering. In 2 Corinthians we hear him say, “Five times I received at the hands of the Jews the forty lashes less one. Three times I was beaten with rods. Once I was stoned. Three times I was shipwrecked; a night and a day I was adrift at sea…in toil and hardship, through many a sleepless night, in hunger and thirst, often without food, in cold and exposure.” Not exactly the life we would imagine for a man of God, is it? Where was the comfortable home he deserved? Where was the divine protection he needed? Paul didn’t receive these things. Yet he was the perfect picture of a man suffering for his faith. He never complained. Instead, he did the opposite, “Through [Jesus] we have also obtained access by faith into this grace in which we stand, and we rejoice in hope of the glory of God. More than that, we rejoice in our sufferings.”
It’s contrary to our human nature to rejoice in our sufferings. This is the exact opposite of what we want to do when confronted by problems, trials, and suffering. Surely Paul doesn’t mean that Christians, who face persecution for standing up for what we believe, should rejoice? He can’t mean that we should rejoice when diagnosed with cancer, does he? Celebrate when losing a child? Throw a party when let go from a job? Shout for joy when the myriad setbacks of life come our way? Suffering can mean many things to different people, but whatever it is that makes life hard for us is suffering; depression, disillusionment with life, divorce, loneliness, split families, pain, loss of vision, the loss of our personal freedoms. All of the above can be classified as suffering and none of them really give us cause to rejoice. All of these are terrible things to go through, and not one of them makes us happy.
We especially don’t want to rejoice if we think that God is somehow behind what’s happening to us. In the book of Job, Job’s friends ask what he’s done wrong. In the account of the man born blind the first question asked is, “Who sinned, this man or his parents that he was born blind?” In both cases the people think the men obviously sinned against God in some way, or else all these bad things wouldn’t be happening. It’s a very common thought and feeling.
Maybe you’ve even experienced it yourself. “Why Me? If God loves me, why does all this stuff happen to me?” If you haven’t, you’re among the minority. If you have, you’re not alone. In the Old Testament it happens over and over. Grumbling and complaining against God for perceived slights. Is God with us or not? That’s the question. And when we follow the story all the way through to the end, we find that definitively the answer is, YES! The Israelites discovered that the Lord was among them, and through God’s Word we discover that He’s with us as well.
God is with us, that’s one of the certainties we have as Christians. The uncertainty we have though is why should we rejoice in the face of such difficulties? Why would God tell us to do something that seems silly or impossible? Actually, Paul tells us why we should rejoice; we rejoice because suffering produces in us the things that God desires that we have as Christians.
It should be noted that rejoicing doesn’t mean that we need to smile when we’re suffering. It doesn’t mean that we can’t ask God to take our suffering away. Rather, we recognize the fact that God is using our suffering to produce good things in us. Remember what Paul said. “More than that, we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame.”
Endurance, or you might say perseverance, is the idea that when we’re afflicted with trials and temptations, when we suffer, our faith doesn’t lose its strength, but instead grows stronger. The truth is that faith generally languishes when it’s not tested. Just think about that week following 9/11 when Americans flocked to their local congregations. When you have nowhere else to turn, where do you look? You turn to Christ! In suffering, we’re drawn closer to Him. We’re drawn to His Word and to His Sacraments where we find the promise of His love and forgiveness, where we find the promise that He’ll always be with us. As God said in Jeremiah 29, “Then you will call upon me and come and pray to me, and I will hear you.” Endurance is knowing that God has heard your prayers. Endurance is clinging to the faith of your baptism, knowing that God will not forsake you, but He will bring you through the trials of your life.
Paul then writes that endurance produces character, and character is the Christ-like attitude that stands with Jesus and says, “Thy will be done.” As we endure the things that cause us to suffer, as we’re drawn back to God’s Word, our faith will grow, and we will find the strength we need to exhibit our Christ-like attitude to everyone we encounter during our sufferings.
What Paul finally says is that from character flows hope, “and hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.” Sometimes people don’t get this, but hope is not some sort of wish, hope is a certainty of Christianity. Hope is the knowledge that things will get better; maybe not in this lifetime, but when the new Heavens and the new Earth are created, we’ll live in a way we can’t even imagine right now. We have that hope because the Holy Spirit has been given to us, and He assures us that our faith in Christ is sufficient. We all struggle under our sufferings, some of them seem intent on destroying our faith, but you have the Holy Spirit, the one who brings you to faith and keeps you in the one true faith.
It’s the Holy Spirit who sees us through our trials and sufferings. It’s the Spirit that reminds us that God doesn’t forsake us and that God is among us. Among us in such a way that Paul says, “God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” That’s a certainty of faith that Christ died for us and now nothing that we suffer – not cancer, not depression, not loneliness, not the loss of a job, or even a child, nothing can steal the peace that we now have with God. “Therefore, since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.” God forgives your sins and you have peace with Him. And that peace means that God walks with you every step of the way; through treatment, through surgery, through middle school or high school, through old age, through grief, through mid-life crises, through whatever. The peace we have with God is ultimately what gives us peace no matter what the situation. For no matter what may happen in this life, whatever our sufferings, nothing can compare to what waits for us in God’s Kingdom – an eternity without any suffering at all, an eternity with only joy.
So, along with Paul, I say to you, rejoice! Rejoice no matter what you’re going through right now, for with Christ, nothing is impossible. He has called you to faith and then He strengthens your faith through suffering that you may grow in your perseverance, in your character, and in your hope. Your hope is not in vain and your prayers are not in vain for God is with you. How can He not be with us? He who gave up His own Son even though we are sinners, never gives up on us. So, rejoice! Rejoice that God is calling you to His side where you will find the endurance, character, hope, and comfort that is for all those on whom He has poured out His Holy Spirit. Suffering is never fun, but with God it is also never final. That’s the certainty of Christianity, and that is why we rejoice! Amen.
The peace of God which surpasses all understanding guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.
Leave a Reply