A Promise You Can Stand On
Have you ever read the Peanut’s cartoon where Charlie Brown is telling his problems to Schroeder? To comfort Charlie Brown Schroeder says, "Don’t be discouraged, Charlie Brown. These early defeats help to build character for later on in life." Charlie Brown asks, "For what later on in life?" Schroeder answers, "For more defeats!" Here in the fifth chapter of Romans the apostle Paul declares, “we also boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope."
God, throughout the Bible, made many promises. God made a covenant (promise) with Noah that He would never destroy the world by flood again. God promised Abraham & Sarah that they would have children, even at nearly 100 years old. God promised to establish David’s throne forever. God promised that, if we believe in Jesus, we would have eternal life. God has made these, and many, many other promises. And we can see throughout the Bible that God has been faithful in keeping His promises. I take this phrase by Paul as a promise, as well. I think God promises that, if we follow this pattern, this sequence of events, we will end up at hope, and we won’t be disappointed, either.
But many people might read this passage and think, is this guy nuts? How many here want to learn to endure their sufferings? I don’t want to learn how to endure them; I want to know how to avoid them all together.
Perspective makes a world of difference. When Goliath came against the Israelites, the soldiers all thought, "He’s so big we can never kill him." David looked at the same giant and thought, "Man, he’s so big I can’t miss."
Paul’s perspective had changed. After all Paul had endured, after all he had suffered for the sake of Jesus, he’d learned to say, “suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope.” We must learn, as Paul did, that hope does not come first. Hope must be developed along our journey. If you want hope, you have to have character. Character is developed in the sufferings we face in this life and along our journey. And to endure our sufferings we must remember this truth, “Therefore, since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand.”
What does justified mean? Justification has to do with our standing with God. It’s when God looks at us and says, “Not guilty, by the blood of Jesus”. A simpler meaning that I like is “Justified” – “Just if I’d never sinned.”
If we take that perspective-that we are “justified by faith”, then we can endure our sufferings, which produce character.
An example of this is a parable of a farmer who owned an old mule. The mule fell into the farmer’s well. The farmer heard the mule ’braying’, or whatever mules do when they fall into wells. After thinking about the situation, the farmer sympathized with the mule, but decided that neither the mule nor the well was worth the trouble of saving. So he called his neighbors together, told them what happened and they helped haul dirt to bury the old mule in the well and put him out of his misery. Initially, the old mule was hysterical! But as the farmer and his neighbors continued shoveling and the dirt hit his back, a thought struck him. Every time a shovel load of dirt landed on his back -- he should shake it off and step up! He kept doing this. "Shake it off and step up . . . shake it off and step up!" No matter how painful the blows, the old mule endured his suffering and just kept right on shaking it off and stepping up! It wasn’t long before the old mule, battered and exhausted, stepped right out of that well! What seemed like it would bury him had actually blessed him -- all because of the manner in which he handled his adversity.
That’s character. We must face our problems and respond to them positively because the adversities that come along to bury us usually have within them the potential to benefit and bless us!
At the beginning of his journey up the well, that mule probably had no hope. But I’m sure that as the mule got closer to the top of the well, his hope grew.
As Christians, hope is central to our faith. Hope rests in the understanding that we are not alone in our sufferings. Because of God’s grace we can learn how to endure our sufferings, which produce character, which springs into hope. This is a promise we can stand on. Jesus, who endured all things for us, offers to us His strength by which we can endure. As Paul said, “I can do all things in Christ, who strengthens me.”
On a scale of 1 to 10, How optimistic are you about your future, how much hope do you have? In that great mid-life crisis movie, City Slickers, Billy Crystal’s character Mitch attends career day at his son’s grade school. Mitch is anything but optimistic. His son had told everyone that his dad was a submarine captain, but he really sells advertising. The kids aren’t interested at all in what he does—and neither is he. In classic Baby Boomer angst, Mitch gives the kids something to think about. He tells the kids to
“Value this time in your life, because this is the time in your life when you still have your choices, and it goes by so quickly. When you’re a teenager, you think you can do anything, and you do. Your twenties are a blur. Your thirties, you raise your family, you make a little money and you think to yourself, "What happened to my twenties?" Your forties, you grow a little potbelly, you grow another chin. The music starts to get too loud and one of your old girlfriends from high school becomes a grandmother. Your fifties you have a minor surgery. You’ll call it a procedure, but it’s a surgery. Your sixties you have a major surgery, the music is still loud but it doesn’t matter because you can’t hear it anyway. Seventies, you and the wife retire to Fort Lauderdale; you start eating dinner at two, lunch around ten, breakfast the night before. And you spend most of your time wandering around malls looking for the ultimate in soft yogurt and muttering, "how come the kids don’t call?" By your eighties, you’ve had a major stroke, and you end up babbling to some Jamaican nurse who your wife can’t stand but who you call mama. Any questions? (From City Slickers)
On a scale of 1 to 10, he was a 1-a man without hope! What is your rating? How much hope do you have?
Hope is critical. So critical that, “hope” is repeated three times in our scripture. The first time, is “our hope of sharing the glory of God.” Having this hope is great because we can know that God will be faithful to us, and that no matter what may happen now, our hope for the future is secure.
This security leads us to the second hope in verse four, where we find that hope is at the end of a chain of events that begins with suffering. Now it doesn’t seem like suffering and hope would have much in common, aside from the fact that most people would hope that their suffering would end!
The words in verse three, "we boast in our sufferings", don’t mean that Christians should go looking for ways to get hurt. Listen carefully. The verse says boast IN our sufferings, not BECAUSE of our sufferings. As Christians, we can boast in our sufferings because we know that our suffering is not meaningless. Our suffering is just part of God’s process. We have to accept the reality of suffering in our lives, trusting God to help us through them. You see, God can do great things with those who trust Him in the tough times as well as the easy ones.
And the third time, in verse five, we read "… hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.”
This is a hope of which we can be certain. When we reach the stage of hope we will realize that God does love us. Which leads us to this promise & the core of this message: "God proves his love for us, in that while we still were sinners, Christ died for us." That is the fulfillment of the promise God made back in Isaiah 53.
We didn’t deserve it. We didn’t earn it. But God, through Jesus, as an act of love, kept His promise and saved us.
The Hebrews in the desert didn’t deserve water. God gave it to them. The crowd by the lakeside didn’t deserve food. Jesus gave it to them. Lazarus didn’t deserve a second chance at life. Jesus gave it to him anyway. As sinners, we don’t deserve anything, says Paul. But God, out of love, gives us what we need anyway.
No one promised us it would be easy when we became Christians. No one promised us we would never get sick, never have any problems, always choose the quickest line at the grocery store, or our children would be perfect. We weren’t promised a perfect life. What we were promised is that no matter how much we suffer, if we learn to endure our sufferings and grow through them, we will end up at hope. We will get what we need, when we need it. God promised it. And that’s a promise we can stand on.
