Title: Grace, Glory and Guts Part II
Text: Romans 5:1-5
Thesis: We can be joyful/happy because our hope comes through peace with God and that’s good because life is full of character building adversity.
Introduction
Last Sunday I told the story about a farmer whose donkey fell into an old dry well. The donkey brayed and brayed in despair and so much so that the farmer was beside himself as to what to do. The donkey was old and the pit was dangerous so the risk of rescuing an old donkey did not seem worth doing so he called his neighbors to come help him fill in the well which would silence the donkey and remove the danger of anything or anyone else falling into the well.
When the donkey felt that first shovel full of dirt splatter onto his back he knew this was not in his best interests and became even more agitated, braying all the more. But then the donkey grew silent. The farmer peered over the edge wondering what had happened. That’s when he saw that with each shovel full of dirt the donkey shook the dirt from its back and trampled the dirt underfoot.
Many hours and many shovel fulls later the donkey stepped over the edge of the well and trotted off.
The story of the donkey is a story of salvation but it also a story about adversity, perseverance, and hope… as evidenced in is our text today.
Today we will see how the text moves from joy in our peace with God and the place of privilege in God’s presence… to experiencing joy in adversity and the problems of life.
II. The Joy of Problems
We can rejoice, too [as well or also], when we run into problems and trials… Romans 5:3
There should be an abundance of joy going around in that life is full of all kinds of troubles and adversity. I read this past week about a man who was stopped by a policeman for driving his truck with a burned out taillight. The driver walked to the back of his truck, looked at the burned out taillight and began to weep. The officer tried to console him, “Don’t take it so hard; it’s just a minor offense.”
“That’s not what’s bothering me,” the man replied. “What’s bothering me is what happened to my wife and camper.”
Life is not always easy and God wants us to know that the way we relate to God affects the way we relate to life.
There is a certain tension between freely receiving unmerited grace from God and freely responding to that grace. We receive with joy the free gifts of peace with God and the privilege of access to the presence of God… and now we are to joyfully respond with values and virtues or attitudes and actions that reflect our new relationship with God.
This means that our relationship to God carries over in practical ways in the way we live.
I am a little intrigued by how the courtship ritual works today. First you get a FaceBook page and then where it asks about your relationship status you say, “I’m available” or “on the hunt” or “single” or whatever. You become a “clubber” and start club hopping. Then you sign up with a dating service that assures you that they will match you with the freakiest or funkiest or most frightening person on the planet. Eventually you connect with someone your family and friends do not approve of but you get married anyway and go on to celebrate your 75th wedding anniversary.
However, now when you begin to get serious about someone and are in a committed relationship with them you are supposed to go on FaceBook let people know your status has changed to, “In a relationship.” When in a committed relationship and Friday night rolls around you do not go trolling Larimer Square and LoDo. You contact the dating service and tell them you are off the market. Having received another’s love your attitudes and actions change.
The same thing is true about the Christian life. When you are in a committed relationship with Jesus Christ, your life changes. And the very act of living faithfully as a Child of God means we remain faithful to Christ through thick and thin, the good times and the bad times, the ups and the down, the rough patches and the smooth patches… you get the idea.
In Romans 5:3 our text says that just as we find joy and happiness in a relationship of peace and privilege with God, “We can rejoice, too, when we run into problems and trials, for they help us develop…”
There is considerable risk in all of this. I am reluctant to pray the God will give me more patience because I know that means God is going to send a bunch of crazies into my life. I am reluctant to pray that God gives me more love for people because that means God will likely send a bunch of impossible to love people into my life. So I am reluctant to pray for joy because God will likely send me some trouble. However our text says trouble is in fact a good thing for which we can be grateful.
The first thing that is a positive outcome of facing problems, trials, adversity and even suffering is God works in our lives to develop endurance or perseverance.
A. Adversity Produces Perseverance
“We can rejoice, too, when we run into problems and trials, for they help us develop endurance.” Romans 5:3
Someone wisely said, “Suffering and learning how to handle suffering cannot be learned from the pages of a book but only from living the painful chapters in our lives.”
Perseverance or endurance is the ability to hold on and hold up in a way that does not surrender or give up. It’s that old spirit of “when the going gets tough, the tough get going.” When we persevere we keep going and growing. We overcome.
In 1962 Victor and Mildred Goertzl published their book, Cradles of Eminence. The book is out of print but I found a used 1st edition hardcopy and ordered it and look forward to reading it. They settled on studying the lives of 413 famous and exceptional people. They were looking for something… a common thread that might account for why and how these 413 people excelled in life. Were they unusually intelligent? Did they have exceptional parenting? Were they afforded opportunities that most people do not have?
This is what they discovered: 392 of the 413 individuals had to overcome great obstacles to become who they were and to accomplish what they did.
The Apostle Paul lived a hard life. At one point he reflected, “Whatever I am now, it is all because God poured out his favor on me and not without results. For I have worked harder that any of the others. Yet it was not me, but God who was working through me by his grace.” I Corinthians 15:10-11
We can experience joy and even happiness in the face of adversity because know that without it we would never learn perseverance… we will never grow.
We refer to the act of persevering as building character.
B. Perseverance Produces Character
“And endurance develops strength of character…” Romans 5:4
The bible says, “When trouble comes your way, consider it an opportunity for great joy. For you know that when your faith is tested, your endurance has a chance to grow and when your endurance is fully developed, you will be perfect, needing nothing.” James 1:2-3
In I Peter 1:6, “So be truly glad. There is wonderful joy ahead, even though you have to endure trials for a little while. These trials will show your faith to be genuine. It is being tested as fire tests and purifies gold… and your faith is more precious than gold.” I Peter 1:6-7
Proven character is simply the result over time of the consistent exercise of perseverance.
Former newsman and broadcaster, Tom Brokaw wrote The Greatest Generation. In it Brokaw examined the lives of men and women who came of age during the Great Depression and World War II. And Brokaw properly honors them for having emerged from the refiner’s fire with strength of character and the will to make a better life for themselves, us and for a better world.
I enjoy watching the Discovery Channel series: Bering Sea Gold. The gold miners build homemade dredges which they float out off the coast of Nome, Alaska. The gold divers then vacuum gold up from the bottom of the Bering Sea.
When they clean their sluice boxes they can tell immediately if they have gold because there is what they call “color.” They then separate the color which may range in size from a fleck to a granule or to a nugget of gold. Then they place everything that looks like gold into a pan and heat it on a very hot fire which essentially burns off anything and everything that is not gold, i.e., all the impurities and dross, so that what remains in the pan is pure, refined gold. Before the gold was unrefined but after going through the fire it is refined.
That is what the word character means… character is like the metal that passes through the refiner’s fire. It is what is left. In the same way silver refiners heat the silver until all that remains is what they call “sterling silver.” After the fire the metal emerges stronger and purer. After adversity our characters emerge stronger than ever.
One of the upsides of adversity in the Christian’s life is that it builds Christian character. And our text says that character then builds or produces hope.
C. Character Produces Hope
“Character strengthens our confident hope of salvation. And this hope will not lead to disappointment. For we know how dearly God loves us and has given his Holy Spirit to fill our hearts with his love.” Romans 5:5
One of my favorite verses is Philippians 1:6, “And I am certain that God, who began a good work within you, will continue his work until it is finally finished on the day when Christ Jesus returns.”
When we live with the awareness that God is at work in our lives it puts everything else in perspective. If God is at work in your life then adversity has a purpose and through that adversity and trouble, God is at work developing your character. And as you discover the ongoing faithfulness of God is sustaining you through adversity you have a growing hope that God can sustain and keep you though this life and into the next.
At some point in our spiritual maturity we develop an unshakable faith and confidence in God’s faithfulness.
There is a story about a submarine that was rammed by a ship off the coast of Massachusetts. It sank immediately trapping the entire crew inside. Every effort was made to rescue the crew but it was futile. Near the end of the rescue attempt a diver heard a tapping on the steel wall of the sunken sub. He rested his diving helmet against the sub to listen more closely and as he listened he realized he was hearing Morse code. The tapping was repeatedly spelling out the question, “Is there any hope?” (Ben Patterson, The Grand Essentials) Our text says, “This hope will not lead to disappointment… for God has filled our hearts with his love.” Romans 5:5
This is a hope that believes that there is absolutely nothing that can separate you from the love of God.
“[Because] you are convinced that nothing can ever separate you from God’s love. Neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither fears for today nor our worries for tomorrow, not even the powers of hell can separate you from God’s love. No power in the sky above or in the earth below – indeed, nothing in all of creation will ever be able to separate you from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus.” Romans 8:38-39
This is the kind of hope forged by the character building of a lifetime of perseverance. It is the hope that grips the heart of the man, hopelessly trapped in a sunken sub, assuring him that God will not disappoint him.
When the Apostle Paul speaks of hope that will not disappoint, he is speaking of the hope of eternal life.
Conclusion:
The donkey experienced an unexpected grace when that first shovel full of dirt fell onto his back… but it was through perseverance and the trampling of shovel full after shovel full of dirt underfoot, hour after hour, that he developed the character to see and live in anticipation of the hope of life.
