One of my friends begins nearly every conversation with the phrase, "You just can’t win.” "You just can’t win." One day recently he was wearing a long, long face. He had just gotten his car repaired, but some inebriated partygoer had slammed into it. He had just worked off his debts, but suddenly his roof had begun to leak. And he added to that a truly tearjerking account of how a relative had finally found a new job after a long period of unemployment, only to have that new employer go bankrupt. After I had listened to all of this, I was tempted to agree, "You just can’t win." "You just can’t win."
It does seem that life is set up for disappointment. Many of the things people give themselves to end up in disappointment. We put a lot of energy into some ventures, but they do not satisfy. They disappoint us.
You marry and have children, believing that there is going to be fulfillment and joy in those relationships. But one day you wake up to discover that the marriage is at best routine and that the children are not going to outthink Einstein or outleap Michael Jordan. That breeds disappointment.
You set your mind on rising to the top of your profession, so that you can be recognized and successful. But then you learn that your knowledge has become obsolete, that the college kid they just hired last week knows more than you do already. Disappointment and frustration.
You work hard and save your money, trying to prepare for those retirement years. But inflation takes the money and ill health steals the zest of those years. That means disappointment and frustration and sometimes bitterness.
And yet I’ve also noticed that there are also people who are able to live through all that disappointment with joy and excitement. There are people who, no matter how frustrating and disappointing it might seem, come out winners. They do not plead, "You can’t win." They do not complain, "Life isn’t fair". There are some who are able to reach down into some hidden resources and make sense of it all.
I have such a friend. I know a man who, though reasonably successful … not outstanding but at least reasonably successful … quit a secure job when he was in his late forties and returned to school to retrain and start on a new career. It wasn’t easy, paying the bills and hitting the books and being surrounded with all these bright and brash young go-getters in their twenties, but he stuck it out. He earned that degree, but then found that nobody wanted to hire him. He was too old in years, and at the same time too young in experience. So his first occasion for disappointment was that he couldn’t get a job. Yet it did not seem to get to him.
Finally that job opportunity did cane, and it was a tough spot. It was a task which involved taking over the messes left behind by several others who had had the job before him. It meant working long, hard hours for little pay and for very few pats on the back. It meant investing a whole lot of energy for very little immediate payoff. But he endured, he stayed with it.
After a few years, however, that job went sour, completely sour. My friend found that the people for whom he was working had just decided to get rid of him. That’s all. No charges against him, no wrongdoing, no question of his faithfulness to the job. They just didn’t like him. He challenged them too much, they wanted him out. And out he went. Fifty-plus years old and no job, no prospects. If anyone had had the right to turn cynical, this man certainly did. If anyone could have said, should have said, "You just can’t win", it would have been my friend.
I talked to him recently. He’s now working on a job with a six-month contract, with no guarantee that it will be extended. He gets very little salary. There are practically no visible results from his work at this point. It looks like a dead end. Any sane person knows that at his age, now getting close to sixty, he ought to plan for his retirement and take care of his financial security. In other words, he seems to be set up for another huge disappointment.
But do you know what he said? He said, "As long as I am where God wants me to be, I will not be disappointed." Hear that again, "As long as I am where God wants me to be, I will not be disappointed."
You say you can’t win? Oh, I think you can. Are you disappointed? It doesn’t have to be that way.
You see, the Bible says that when we suffer, suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us. That’s quite an equation, isn’t it? Suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us.
That seems to be my friend’s secret. Somehow he got hope, and hope does not disappoint. How does that work?
I
The first step toward a hope that does not disappoint lies in choosing how we are going to deal with suffering and adversity. If we want to be able to live with life-giving hope, if we want to avoid being disabled by disappointment, then the first lesson to be learned has to do with responding to suffering and adversity.
Now Paul has given us quite a formula; it’s a complicated string of propositions. He says that if you suffer, suffering produces endurance. And if you endure, if you stick it out, it will build character. And then if you have this strong, sterling character, you will hope. Suffering, endurance, character, hope.
The only trouble is that it does not always work out that way. For every person I know who has moved from suffering to hope, there are a half dozen who have gone from adversity to cynicism. For every person I know who has responded to setbacks with courage and determination and hope, there are plenty of people who respond by being defeated and by complaining at every turn. I’m afraid it just does not always work out that suffering produced endurance and endurance character and character hope. There has to be another ingredient.
Let me tell you about two people. One was a college professor of mine. This man taught ancient history at my university. He was so old that most of us thought he had probably interviewed Caesar personally. But he was an interesting and somewhat frightening soul.
For one thing, he was profoundly crippled. Some terrible disease had taken hold of his body when he was a teenager, and his scrawny legs and arms seemed to go in all directions. It was only with great difficulty that he got to the classroom and managed to teach at all.
But it was not so much his body as it was his spirit that worried me. My professor described himself as the second-worst Christian in all history. The worst Christian, according to him, was Frederick the Great, an eighteenth century Prussian king. But that’s another story. My professor described himself as the second--worst Christian in all history, by which he meant that he went to church only because there wasn’t anything else better to do with his Sundays, and because he enjoyed puncturing the pious pronouncements of the preachers. He especially loved to attack this particular passage of Scripture in Romans.
My professor would say, "Paul obviously does not know what he is talking about, because suffering doesn’t produce endurance and character. Suffering produces fatigue and bitterness." You know what? He was almost right. Almost right. He was Exhibit A: adversity does produce fatigue and bitterness in many people.
But I have another friend. Outwardly, he looks much the same as my old professor. This second friend also had a crippling disease as a young man. There were times when his family did not know whether he would live or die. He came to Washington in his late teens primarily because they had decided that up in the little coal-mining town where they lived, there was practically no chance he would survive.
Here in this city he became involved with a group of Christian young people on a university campus. There was something unusual about this crowd. In a setting which values athletic performance and what we would today call sexiness, they loved him, though he would never win any trophies nor be featured in Mr. Universe magazine. In a city which values wealth and power, they cared for him, though there was very little potential for him ever to have either a big bank account or very much political influence.
I will make a long story short by telling you that what that group did was to love this man into hope. Though he could walk only with great difficulty; though he had to undergo numerous surgical procedures, and though he also was involved in several serious, life-threatening accidents, I want you to know that over time he became the spiritual sustenance of a host of people. Ambassadors, congressmen, the sons and daughters of senators, and just ordinary, hope-hungry people sought him out, trusted him, felt the hope that was in him.
Even today, though he is well along in years, his modest apartment is a magnet for people in all walks of life who simply need to breathe the atmosphere of hope. That hope does not disappoint them.
What is the difference, then? How can it be that one man takes the sufferings of this life and turns them into bitterness, and another one takes what by all rights should be disappointment and turns it into power?
How can it be that one person is blown away by disappointments and gets a hard, crusty edge on his life, so that for him it’s all one enormous downward spiral, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing?
But the other takes that suffering and fires it in a crucible, so that it produces endurance and character and hope, hope that does not disappoint. What is that difference?
II
Hear this word: "If we have been united with [Christ] in a death like his, we will certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his. We know that our old self was crucified with him so that the body of sin might be destroyed, and we might no longer be enslaved to sin ••• We know that Christ, being raised from the dead, will never die again; death no longer has dominion over him ••• So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus". Dead and alive again.
The difference, friends, is whether or not you have begun to live the resurrection. The difference, the crucial difference, in whether you’ve gotten past adversity to a hope that does not disappoint or whether you are still mired down in self-pity, is whether or not you have learned to live the resurrected Christ.
If you come to know Him … not know about Him, but know Him … and if you can begin to sense the power of His resurrection, then in you will be born a living hope that will carry you beyond every disappointment in your life. If you come to know Christ and feel profoundly all that His resurrection means, then you will discover something that will give you endurance and character and hope and fulfillment.
And something more as well. To know Him and His resurrection will give you purpose and power. Paul says that, "Christ, being raised from the dead, will never die again; death no longer has dominion over him... So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus." That means power!
As surely as I know anything at all, I know that those who know the living Christ live His victorious life. Despite disappointment, we choose to believe that God has won the battle in raising Christ Jesus from death. And therefore we have chosen to believe that God’s causes will not finally be defeated. If you know that, you can go on, proudly and victoriously, despite everything that looks like disappointment. Because hope does not disappoint. "Consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus." Power to keep going and to know you’re going to win. You are going to win!
Over in South Africa, a few years ago, it looked as though the suffering of the majority population would never end. The incredible complexity of the laws of apartheid, governing every facet of human interaction, seemed entrenched forever. But Desmond Tutu, follower of the risen Christ, would not be frustrated or disappointed. His principal weapons were a sharp mind and a heart devoted to prayer. Today apartheid is gasping its last breath. Oh yes, I know that there were many political circumstances in this and I know also that it’s not over yet. But I also know that Christians kept up the drumbeat for justice because they knew that ultimately God’s victory would be won.
How did they know this? They knew that hope would not disappoint them, because Christ is risen from the dead. They considered themselves "dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus." They had a hope that does not disappoint.
And for you and for me, having a hope that does not disappoint means that, believing that the risen Christ loves this city, we will not give up on its people. We will not write off our young men as nothing more than criminals. We will not discard the homeless or ignore the hurting or avoid those whose lifestyles horrify us. We will not hide in our homes, afraid to go on to the streets. But we will continue to work and to witness and to hope in the victory of the risen Lord. That’s a hope that will not disappoint.
Nor will we give up on one another. Some of us are struggling with relationships that seem to have died. But because Christ lives and gives us hope, we are going to go back and try again to let life come into that failing marriage. We are going to go back and open up to that difficult child or that unyielding parent, because we believe that the living Christ will not disappoint us. We are going to go stand beside a hospital bed or enter a prison cell or even go to an open grave, and we are going to keep on believing that God never wastes any of His creation. We have a hope that will not disappoint.
Most of all, we will not give up on ourselves. We will not allow ourselves to be suckered into materialism. We will not permit ourselves to be lulled into escape and indifference. We will not become depressed and frustrated in the face of monumental personal problems. We will never, never, never give in to the chilling grip of despair. For "what though this world, with devils filled, should threaten to undo us, we will not fear, for God hath willed His truth to triumph through us.” Hope doe not disappoint. Consider yourselves dead to sin but alive to God in Christ Jesus.
Because He lives, we can win. Because He lives, we are not set up for disappointment. Because He lives, we have a hope that does not disappoint.
