Most of you are probably familiar with the term “helicopter parent”. But just in case you aren’t, this short video does a pretty good job of showing what that term means.
[Show “Copter Mommy” video]
Although helicopter parenting might seem harmless, it seems like we are seeing its impact more and more in our culture. This week I read an article by Indiana University psychologist Chris Meno who described how over-involved “helicopter parenting” is taking a toll on college students who are experiencing high levels of anxiety and even depression because they are unable to function independently of their parents.
Meno writes about parents who still treat their college-age children to the same full service parenting they have implemented since birth – paying bills, doing laundry, and even contacting professors about their child’s exams or insisting that a test be re-graded. In commenting on the high levels of anxiety and depression among these students Meno writes:
When children aren’t given the space to struggle through things on their own, they don’t learn to problem-solve very well. They don’t learn to be confident in their abilities, and it can affect their self-esteem. The problem with never having to struggle is that you never experience failure and can develop an overwhelming fear of failure and disappointing others.
At this point I know a lot of you are probably wondering what any of this has to do with our study in the book of Romans. Here’s how it fits. I think a lot of us have been misled into believing that God is a “helicopter God” – that He is constantly hovering over us to make sure that we don’t get hurt or that we don’t experience troubles in our lives.
Unfortunately that distorted view of how God treats His children has often been perpetuated by those who claim to be Christians. Certainly those who preach a “health and prosperity” gospel are guilty of furthering the idea of a God who only brings happiness and comfort to His children. But even within more orthodox Biblical Christianity we have sometimes been guilty of attributing certain sayings to the Bible which just aren’t there. For instance, how many times have you heard someone say something like this?
God will never give you more than you can handle.
The problem with that saying is that it’s not in the Bible. In fact, as we’ll see this morning, not only are those words not in the Bible, we can’t even find that concept in the pages of Scripture. About the closest that the Bible gets to that idea is in 1 Corinthians 10:13 where we are promised that we won’t be tempted beyond what we can bear and that God will always provide a way of escape from that temptation.
But God never promises to protect us from or to remove us from the struggles in life. In fact, as we’ll see this morning…
God loves me too much to
save me from all of my struggles
Go ahead and turn in your Bibles to Romans chapter 5. I’m going to read once again this morning, the passage that we looked at last week. You can follow along as I begin in verse 1 and read through verse 11.
Therefore, since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. Through him we have also obtained access by faith into this grace in which we stand, and we rejoice in hope of the glory of God. Not only that, but 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, because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us. For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. For one will scarcely die for a righteous person—though perhaps for a good person one would dare even to die—but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. Since, therefore, we have now been justified by his blood, much more shall we be saved by him from the wrath of God. For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son, much more, now that we are reconciled, shall we be saved by his life. More than that, we also rejoice in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received reconciliation.
(Romans 5:1-11 ESV)
As I mentioned last week, these 11 verses form a cohesive unit so we need to look at them as a whole. And when we do that find two big ideas there. Last week we looked at the first big idea, which is the foundation on which we will build the idea that we’ll develop this morning. Let’s take a moment to quickly review what we learned last week.
Our main theme was:
God’s love guarantees that
since He saved me, He will keep me
We then looked at two ways that God’s love guarantees that He will carry my salvation to its completion:
HOW GOD’S LOVE GUARANTEES HE WILL KEEP ME
1. All three persons of the Godhead – Father, Son and Holy Spirit - are involved in my justification:
2. Through the salvation He provides, God satisfies my deepest needs at every stage of life – past, present and future.
The very same love of God that guarantees that I will one day experience the fullness of my salvation is also the foundation for the second big idea from this passage that we’ll study this morning. That idea is primarily found in verses 3-5:
Not only that, but 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…
As I pointed out a few minutes ago, we can summarize the main theme of those verses like this:
God loves me too much to
save me from all of my struggles
This idea that we are to rejoice in our sufferings is certainly contrary to our own human nature. We don’t naturally rejoice when we face difficulties in our lives. So I think it’s important for us to answer two important questions that will help us to understand what Paul means here and then we’ll conclude by looking at some practical ways that we can actually benefit from our struggles rather than be defeated by them.
TWO IMPORTANT QUESTIONS ABOUT REJOICING IN MY SUFFERINGS
1. What does it mean to “rejoice in my sufferings”?
The first thing we need to do is to define the verb “rejoice”. You may not realize it, but we’ve already run across this verb several times in Romans. This particular verb can be translated two different ways depending on whether it is used in a positive or a negative sense. Up to this point in his letter, Paul has used it in a negative sense and in each of those occurrences it has been translated “boast”:
You who boast in the law dishonor God by breaking the law.
(Romans 2:23 ESV)
Then what becomes of our boasting? It is excluded. By what kind of law? By a law of works? No, but by the law of faith.
(Romans 3:27 ESV)
For if Abraham was justified by works, he has something to boast about, but not before God.
(Romans 4:2 ESV)
In each of those verses, Paul was exhorting his readers not to boast in what they could do when it came to their salvation because that dishonored the God who had done everything necessary to make their justification possible.
When used in a positive sense, like Paul uses it 3 times in this morning’s passage, it means something more like “joyful confidence” and it is accurately translated “rejoice”. In a sense, this kind of rejoicing is boasting as well, but it is boasting in God and what He has done. It is the response to God based on our confidence in Him and His love for us. So we could answer our question like this. Rejoicing in my sufferings means…
• To have joyful confidence that God will produce something worthwhile as a result of my sufferings.
It is important to note what Paul is not suggesting here. He is not saying that we have to be happy about our suffering. He is not suggesting that we are to be Christian masochists who seem to enjoy the pain. Nor is he proposing that we merely “grin and bear it”. And he is certainly not encouraging us to merely pretend we are happy.
Instead, he is teaching us that we need to get our focus off our circumstances altogether and focus on God and what He is trying to accomplish through those circumstances. That’s is confirmed in verse 11 where Paul summarizes this entire section by exhorting his readers to “rejoice in God”.
Now that we have a better handle on what it means to rejoice in our sufferings, let’s answer the second important question that this passage answers…
2. How can I rejoice in my sufferings?
• Because what I know is greater than what I don’t know:
In the middle of verse 3, we find the key to being able to rejoice in our sufferings – it is what I can know for sure that enables me to do that.
The verb that is translated “knowing” in that verse suggests that this is a fullness of knowledge. It is that which is known “without a doubt”. Unlike experiential knowledge, which tends to be progressive, the kind of knowledge described by this verb is more of an intuitive knowledge that is given fully at a specific point in time. That is confirmed by the fact that this particular verb is found in the Bible only in the perfect tense. If you were with us during “Connections” last week, hopefully you will remember that tense is used to describe an action that occurred in the past that has continuing effects in the present.
Given what Paul writes about God pouring out His love to us through the giving of the Holy Spirit at the end of verse 5, Paul suggests here that we have been given this kind of knowledge through the operation of the Holy Spirit in our lives. But before we look at what we do know according to this passage, let’s first consider what we don’t know.
o What I don’t know: Why?
There are so many things we don’t know:
Why does cancer or some other disease hit one person, but not another?
Why do some kids rebel against their parents and others don’t?
Why does a tornado touch down in one town but not another?
Why does a drunk driver run the red light and kill someone else but walks away unscathed?
I could obviously go on because there is far more that we don’t know than what we do know.
But this passage makes it clear that even though what we do know may be far less that what we don’t know in terms of the sheer amount of knowledge we have or don’t have, what we do know is far more powerful than what we don’t know and therefore we can rejoice in our sufferings. There are four things that we can know for sure that Paul reveals in this passage.
o What I do know:
Suffering produces endurance
Let’s begin by defining the words Paul uses here:
The word translated “suffering” literally means “to be pressed or squeezed”. It is the same word that is commonly translated “tribulation” elsewhere in the New Testament. Paul uses it here to describe any kind of pressure that we face in our lives – whether that be a result of just living in this world or whether the pressure comes from being a disciple of Jesus. It is the same word Jesus used in John 16:33 when He said to His disciples: “In the world you will have tribulation.”
Next, let’s look at the verb “produces”. That particular verb means “to work something out fully.” And the three times it is used here in this passage it is in the present tense, which indicates this is a continuous process for every disciple. Unfortunately, from our perspective, but fortunately, from God’s perspective, God is constantly using our sufferings to work something out in our lives. I think the idea that Paul is expressing here is that when a disciple goes through tribulation and suffering that puts pressure and squeezes him or her, the result is that God squeezes out of that person something that was already there, but that needed to be brought to the surface.
The first thing that is pressed out of us in our tribulation is “endurance”. That is a compound word that literally means “to abide under”. That’s why I’m glad the ESV uses the word “endurance” here and not the word “patience” that is used in some other English translations. This is not merely passive patience but rather a decision of the will to remain in the place where God has put us in order for Him to develop spiritual maturity in our lives.
So the first thing I can know without a doubt is that God is using the pressure of my tribulations to prove that I have the ability to remain where God has placed me so that He can make me more like Jesus.
Endurance produces character
The word translated “character” here literally means “approval through testing”. It was used in secular Greek to describe metals that had been put through fire in order to prove that they were genuine and pure. The idea here is that as we choose to remain under the pressure that God brings into our lives, our character will be tested and proven to be genuine.
Character produces hope
We’ve already talked about “hope” several times recently in our study of Romans and determined that it is not merely a matter of wishful thinking but rather that of “confident expectation.”
Paul doesn’t tell us here exactly how the proving of my character in tribulation produces hope, but if we consider that idea in the context of these entire 11 verses we have been studying the last two weeks, I think we can get a pretty good idea how that happens.
God takes me through tribulation to temper the steel of my faith and to show me that I am indeed a real, authentic, genuine, proven disciple of Jesus.
When my faith has been tested by the pressure and squeezing of tribulation and I am proven to be a genuine disciple of Jesus and not a fake Christian, that reinforces my hope that as a child of God I will one day receive the inheritance of a physical kingdom in which I reign with Jesus. That idea leads us directly to the last thing we can know:
Hope does not put me to shame
The idea here is that if we persevere through tribulation because of the hope we have in our future inheritance, we will not be humiliated as a result of trusting in God. As we saw last week, God’s love is the guarantee that if He saved us, He will also keep us. And one of the ways he has poured His love on us is by giving us the Holy Spirit, who is our guarantee that God will complete what He started.
Based on these four things that we can know without a doubt, we can be assured that God is working in the hard times of our lives to produce something beautiful in spite of what we don’t know.
I think you can see know why we summarized this passage like this:
God loves me too much to
save me from all of my struggles
God is using tribulation in my life to develop endurance and character and to reinforce my confident hope of a future inheritance by proving that I am a genuine, authentic disciple of Jesus. If God were a “helicopter God” who just hovered over us to protect us from everything painful in life, that really wouldn’t be love because it would actually hinder, rather than promote our spiritual growth.
So what can I do to make sure that I can benefit from the struggles in my life that God wants to use to make me more like Jesus? Let’s look at four practical things I can do.
HOW I CAN BENEFIT FROM MY STRUGGLES
1. Expect tribulation
In this passage, Paul assumes that every believer is going to experience tribulation in his or her life. That shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone since that is exactly what Jesus promised to His disciples:
…In the world you will have tribulation…
(John 16:33 ESV)
At other times, Jesus told His disciples that because the world hated Him, they were going to hate them as well if they chose to follow Him. And other New Testament authors like Peter and James also write about how trials and difficulties are the norm, and not the exception, for every disciple of Jesus.
Just knowing that we are going to face struggles in our lives helps us to better deal with them when they come.
2. Remember God loves me
When tribulation comes into our lives, we are tempted to think that we are experiencing those troubles because God no longer loves us. It’s easy to assume that God is either causing those problems or at least allowing them because He just doesn’t care about me anymore. But as we’ve seen over the last two weeks, because God loves us so much and wants us to become more and more like His Son, He does not exempt us from tribulation.
Just a moment ago, we read part of John 16:33 where Jesus promised that all His disciples would have tribulation in their lives. But in that same verse, He also gave us this assurance:
…But take heart; I have overcome the world.
(John 16:33 ESV)
God is not caught off guard by our troubles. In many cases He actually brings them into our lives in order to accomplish His purposes in our lives. And one big reason that we are able to endure during those times is the fact that Jesus has promised that one day, because He has overcome the world, our perseverance through these trials will be vindicated and that, as we saw earlier, we will not be put to shame.
3. Avoid the tendency to flee
When the Biosphere 2 was constructed in the early 1990’s the scientists there discovered an interesting phenomenon. The trees inside the Biosphere grew much more rapidly than they would have in their normal environment. But the problem is that the trees consistently fell over before they reached maturity. After careful examination, the scientists overseeing the project concluded that they had neglected one critical factor in the maturation of these trees – wind.
When a tree grows, the stress of the wind causes a tree to develop what is known as stress wood. That stress wood helps the tree to position itself for optimal sun absorption and to put down deeper roots. Without that outside stress a tree will not thrive in the long run.
In a sense we’re like spiritual trees. Without the outside stress of tribulation in our lives we won’t thrive well in the long run. Unfortunately, however, when we get into a difficult situation, our natural tendency is to flee or to ask God to remove us from that difficulty or trial. Certainly there are times when that is going to be the appropriate response. Sometimes we get into trouble as a result of our own stupid decisions and to the extent it’s possible to extricate ourselves from those situations, it’s usually wise to do so. And there are certainly examples in the Bible where Jesus removed a person from tribulation by healing him or her in order to bring glory to God.
I also want to make it clear that it’s certainly not inherently wrong to ask God to remove us from tribulation, During “Connections” this morning we’ll see that Paul did that at first when it came to his “thorn in the flesh”.
But if it is true that God loves us too much to save us from all of our struggles because He wants to use them to develop spiritual stress wood in our lives, then perhaps we’re often too quick to try to remove ourselves from our trials or to pray and ask God to remove them.
I know it’s somewhat clichéd to say, but it is absolutely true that God is more interested in making us holy than He is in making us happy; and He is more committed developing our character than our comfort. And let’s face it, there are some things that can’t be learned from a sermon or a Bible study, or a book. They can only be learned as our suffering produces endurance and proven character and hope. So let’s make sure we don’t prematurely short circuit that process by trying to flee the situation before God is done developing us as He desires.
But how exactly do we know when that point is? At least in part, we can get a handle on that if we…
4. Ask “what” or “how”, not “why”
Another tendency when we face tribulation is to ask “why”. “God why did I get cancer?” “God why did my child rebel?” “God, why did I lose my job?” “God, why can’t I pay my bills?” But, as I pointed out earlier, most of the time those are questions for which we will never get an answer and so the more we keep asking those questions the more frustrated we become.
What we need to ask instead is “what” or “how”. “God, what character trait do you want to develop in my life through this trial?” “God, how do you want to use these circumstances to make me more holy and more like Jesus.” I think that if we are genuine in asking those kinds of questions of God that He delights in giving us answers. We just need to spend enough time with God that we can hear God when He gives them.
We began this morning by talking about helicopter parents who think they are doing what’s best for their children by hovering over them and protecting them from any kind of struggle in their lives. But as we’re seeing in our culture, while those parents certainly have the best of intentions, the results are proving that approach ultimately keeps their children from maturing into independent, well-functioning adults.
God is far too wise to be a “helicopter God”. He knows that the struggles that we go through in life are actually good for us. They help us to develop endurance and proven character and the kind of hope that will never put us to shame. So it’s certainly not a surprise to learn that…
God loves me too much to
save me from all of my struggles
But it’s up to each one of us to allow God to use those struggles to develop some spiritual stress wood and put down some deep roots that will permit us to stand firm until the end.
