Alba 8-29-2021
PEACE, HOPE AND GLORY
Romans 5:1-5
A large, two-engine train was making its way across Colorado. While crossing the mountains, one of the engines broke down. “No problem, we can make it to Denver and get a replacement engine there,” the engineer thought, and carried on at half power.
Farther on down the line of course, the other engine broke down, and the train came to a standstill in the middle of nowhere.
The engineer needed to inform the passengers about why the train had stopped, and always trying to look on the bright side of things, made the following announcement:
“Ladies and Gentlemen, I have some good news and some bad news. The bad news is that both engines have failed, and we will be stuck here for some time until the additional engines arrive. The good news is that you didn’t take this trip in a plane!”
Well in our scripture text today there is both good news and bad news. The good news is that we have hope no matter what happens. The bad news is that we can expect tribulation. But again the good news is that even then, we can have hope.
Lets turn to Romans 5:1-5. "1 Therefore, having been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, 2 through whom also we have access by faith into this grace in which we stand, and rejoice in hope of the glory of God.
"3 And not only that, but we also glory in tribulations, knowing that tribulation produces perseverance; 4 and perseverance, character; and character, hope. 5 Now hope does not disappoint, because the love of God has been poured out in our hearts by the Holy Spirit who was given to us."
In this sometimes hopeless world, in Christ we can still have hope! And the only hope that any of us have is because God provides a way of reconciliation.
He did that when our Lord Jesus paid the price for our sin on Calvary's Cross. And the really good news is that He not only saved us, but also sanctified and declared us to be holy. We are justified in Christ.
And the result is, we have absolute peace with God. The world longs for peace, but it is very illusive. Look at what is going on in the world today. We have tragedy upon tragedy as tribes and nations struggle for dominance.
So where is this peace? Even Jesus foretold that there would be wars and rumors of wars. All we have to do is open our eyes and see that is true. And when we sin, which we all do, it puts us at war with God. That is a war we will not win.
Most people outside of Christ do not think of themselves as enemies of God. Because they have no conscious feelings of hatred for Him, and do not consciously oppose His work or contradict His Word, they consider themselves, at worst, to be “neutral” about God.
But no such neutrality is possible. The mind of every unsaved person is at peace only with the things of the flesh, and therefore by definition is “hostile toward God”.
Scripture clearly says that every person who is not a child of God is a child of Satan (John 8:44). And every person who is not a citizen of God’s kingdom is a citizen of Satan’s kingdom.
Thankfully conditions of peace have been offered to end this war. This is the most crucial peace of all: We have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.
Jesus died on the cross to take all of the punishment for our sins, and He rose again from the dead. In doing so, He took our sins away and satisfied the wrath of God against sin by making a new covenant, a covenant of peace between us and a holy God.
A lady told about a time when she was struggling with past failures in her life. Then God helped her through a letter from one of her friends. This friend told about a recent visit with her young granddaughter.
They got to see a sky-writing plane writing messages in the sky with smoke. The little girl loved watching the words being drawn, but she was mystified when the smoky letters started to disappear.
That little granddaughter thought about it for a few moments. Then she blurted out, "Maybe Jesus has an eraser!"
Have you ever been accused of something, and then you were cleared of the accusation? Well we were more than accused, we were guilty, but our guilt has been erased by what Jesus did on the cross.
And now we can have peace. The peace that really matters. Peace with God. As Paul said in Colossians 1:19-20:
"It pleased the Father that in Him (that is, in Jesus) all the fullness should dwell, and by Him to reconcile all things to Himself, by Him, whether things on earth or things in heaven, having made PEACE through the blood of His cross."
We all desperately need the peace God can give. Galatians 5:22 tells us that the fruit of God's Holy Spirit in our hearts includes love, joy and PEACE.
And in Philippians 4:6-7, Paul tells Christians to "be anxious for nothing, but in everything by prayer and supplication, with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known to God; and THE PEACE OF GOD, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus."
Without peace, we will not have hope. We all need peace. We all need hope. Without faith in God, we lack both hope and peace.
There is a Greek fable about King Sisyphus who was a proud, arrogant and deceitful king. Upon his death the Greek gods punished him by sentencing him to roll a large stone up a mountain only to have it roll back down again and again for eternity.
This fable can at times describe the life of a Christian. As we navigate through this world, we seem to always be pushing uphill against the stream of a world increasingly hostile towards the truth of God’s word. And life can seem very difficult.
Peace is not the absence of problems, peace is in fully trusting the unseen hand of God. Life is but a journey where God is stretching our faith to new levels.
We are indeed living in serious times, and life seems upside-down right now! There is still the fear of Covid-19. There is turmoil on the world's stage. There is the seemingly unnecessary loss of life in Afghanistan that should have been prevented. We need some hope.
We need the kind of hope that comes from God through Jesus Christ. I believe the absolute best thing we can do today is to be focused on the words of hope in the Bible, because God is in the business of hope!
Hope is mentioned 28 times in various Psalms. It is mentioned 68 times in the New Testament, and 12 times in Romans alone. For that matter, even in the book of Job hope is mentioned 15 times! (NKJV)
God wants us to have hope. And now it is clear, that hope is found when we place our faith in Jesus Christ and His death, burial and resurrection, and commit ourselves to follow Him.
When we place our faith in Jesus Christ, we get peace with God. It is that peace that gives us hope. That is when we can, as it says in verse two, “rejoice in hope.”
According to God's promise, we know that there is more to life than the problems or trials we face in this world. There is a place that He has prepared, and Jesus has promised to come back and take us there. He also has promised to be with us in this life until that time when He comes again.
No matter what may happen while we are on this earth, He says, “Hold on, I give you hope!” It is a hope that gives us reason to rejoice.
We have been justified by faith and now have peace with God through Christ on the cross. Our relationship with the Father has been restored and we are no longer children of wrath but have a right to be called a child of God.
We do rejoice in this and rest on the assurance found in putting all our hope in Jesus. While this would on the surface seem to be enough, Paul makes a declaration in verse three saying, “And not only that”. He points out there is more.
So with great expectation we read on as we can only imagine what lies ahead, until Paul says, we rejoice, or glory, in our suffering, our tribulation. What? The next great expectation is to suffer and glory in our suffering? What possible good could come suffering?
Then he tells us. Tribulation produces perseverance. Every person who has been successful at anything will tell you that to get to where they are, at some point they experienced loss, but kept going.
Any goal worth obtaining will require sacrifice, and to keep going we must persevere. God will often let us go into what seems to be a deep valley.
C. S. Lewis in his book “The Problem of Pain” writes, “God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pain: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.”
(Lewis, “The Problem of Pain,” 604)
But before we blame God for the troubles that come our way we need to remember that we all make choices every day. I choose when to get up, what to eat for breakfast, what I am going to wear, and what I'm going to do each day.
Because God allows humans to make their own choices, then there will be some amount of pain and suffering in the world caused by humans making bad choices.
A good father will punish their child’s bad behavior in order to alter it and prevent them from much worse consequences in the future.
A good father will also allow his child to suffer knowing that the short-term pain will bring long-term alterations in behavior. In much the same way, God allows people to experience pain in order to alter their behavior.
Actually, Christians should rejoice in sufferings/tribulations because those hardships are often evidence of faithful living which is blessed and rewarded, and also because of the spiritual benefits they produce.
In James 1:2-4 it says, “2My brethren, count it all joy when you fall into various trials, 3 knowing that the testing of your faith produces patience. 4 But let patience have its perfect work, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking nothing.”
Other translations say it this way, “the testing of your faith produces perseverance.”
It is through enduring faith we persevere and come out on the other side reaching higher mountains, and growing in our walk with God.
Here in Romans chapter five, it explains that perseverance produces character. As we persevere and are put under pressure, we begin to see change. We become more mature in our faith, our lives and character become more like Christ.
We begin to see that those who persecute and challenge us are not the enemy, but lost souls in need of the same Savior that saved us.
As we persevere, we develop a character that has wisdom to discern the truth, and a confidence built upon the assurances of God to stand firm in the faith, and a desire to glorify God in all that we do.
And character produces hope. This is not a hope that is found within ourselves, a hope that will in the end always disappoint. It is a hope that is focused on God and His promises.
Connie Hopper of the gospel group The Hoppers writes a column for Singing News Magazine. She recently recovered from surgery to remove a tumor from her brain. Here is a part of what she wrote In the September 2021 issue:
“When we sing the song, “I've Come Too Far to Turn Back,” I'm reminded of the statement “Knowing what I know now, if I could call back 20 years, I know exactly what I'd do the next time around!”
“Even if the next time around were an unlikely repeat of the last time so that I'd know what I'd do in each situation, I wouldn't want to go back.
“I'm excited about now and about what lies ahead! Hope is ahead and not what's behind us. I wouldn't trade my life of joys and sorrows, disappointments and accomplishments, mountains and valleys. They have helped mold and shape my life for now and for what lies ahead.”
This hope that God gives leads to an ever-increasing willingness to persevere and have a never wavering faith in God. It all begins with faith. Look back at verse one.
The person who is justified by faith in Christ is at peace with God, regardless of how one may feel about it at any given moment.
It was on the cross that Jesus took upon Himself all the fury of God’s wrath against sin. And those who trust and obey Christ are no longer God’s enemies and no longer under His wrath, but are at peace with Him.
So we can glory in our tribulations because of our hope in the glory of God. Jesus Christ, embodying the glory of God, guarantees the believer’s hope, because He Himself is our hope (1 Tim. 1:1).
In His prayer recorded in John chapter seventeen, Jesus prayed in verse five, “And now, O Father, glorify Me together with Yourself, with the glory which I had with You before the world was.”
And then in verse 22 He prays, “And the glory which You gave Me I have given them, that they may be one just as We are one.”
We used to fall short of the glory of God (3:23), but now we boast in it! It is something we look forward to with joy. This sets us apart from the rest of the world.
The Eastern religions offer no hope with their endless nightmare of reincarnations. Existentialists see the future as absurd. Evolutionists have no comfort.
In Christ, and Christ alone, we have peace and rejoice in the hope of the glory of God.
CONCLUSION:
Dennis Fisher wrote: One of my earliest childhood memories was watching snails in our backyard flower garden. I was fascinated by this little creature with a shell, a slimy little tummy, and tiny eyes that turned like periscopes. But what really seemed unusual was how slowly a snail travels.
How slow does a snail go? One study clocked a snail at 0.00758 miles per hour—or 40 feet in one hour. No wonder we use the phrase moving at a snail’s pace to mean “slow.”
Although a snail does move at a “sluggish” pace, one virtue it does possess is perseverance. The 19th-century preacher Charles Spurgeon wryly observed, “By perseverance the snail reached the ark.”
According to Paul, tribulation produces perseverance and God’s plan is for all of us to be persevering in the faith. Someone said, “Faith, at its core, is deep-rooted in the expectation of good things to come.”
So, tribulation may not be pleasant but it’s part of the process of spiritual growth because it produces character and this results in hope which gives us a positive perspective on life.
Because we know that God loves us and has a reason and purpose for everything that happens.
So He calls us out of a hopeless world into His kingdom of peace.
