Immanuel Lutheran Church - Benson

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; and we boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God.  And not only that, but we also boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and 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.
Romans 5:1-5

You would probably think that, following all of Paul’s arguments that finally lead to his statement, “…we are justified by faith,” there would follow a lot of wonderful, flowery talk about how great this new justified life will be like.

After all, the justified sinner is brought into peace with God only through grace (the unearned love of God for all creation), given to us through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ!  How could life not be great?!  What could we possibly have to worry about?

Well, life definitely is not all rainbows and puppies.  Even as we stand in God’s grace, knowing our sins to be forgiven, seeing life as a blessed gift, and knowing that our salvation is both certain now and sure to come to fruition - despite all of this, there is still suffering, tribulations, trials, and torments.  And that’s just what we see in church!

Paul, knowing that the Christians in Rome are just like the Christians in Asia Minor where he had been preaching, assures them that suffering will happen.  But in a surprising turn, claims that suffering is something to boast about! 

What?! 

Seriously, what does that even mean?

I know when I’m suffering (think of a nasty head cold), I don’t feel much like boasting in it.  In fact, our usual reaction to suffering is make it go away.  We take medicines to make our aches and pains fade.  We make up with our loved ones when we fight.  No, usually, suffering just needs to be over and done.

But Paul teaches us here a little bit more about human nature.  We boast in our sufferings because suffering will produce endurance.  The more you deal with now, the more you will be able to suffer through later.  And then endurance will produce character - will make you an honorable person.  And then character will produce hope - the knowledge that the sufferings of today will in fact be done and over in the future.

I’ve always thought of this passage in terms of long-distance running.  No, I’ve never ran a marathon, but I used to run competitively in high school.  Running long-distance (especially for medals and awards) takes a lot of practice.  It takes sore knees, sore feet, tired arms, burning lungs.  In other words, suffering.  It is hard work to be a good runner (which, by the way, I never really was that good).  But, through all that suffering (that coach always used to call “practice”) eventually I found I could run longer distances, faster, easier.  Suffering had built up endurance.  As endurance builds, so does character.  In races, I saw plenty of people cheat or injure other runners, as ways to cut corners and win unfairly.  But character, the ability to see through the test with honor and respect, playing by the rules, always wins in the end.  And while character didn’t make me into the best runner, it made me into the type of runner who cheared for the winner, who cheared on the rest of my team, no matter my performance.  And as my character grew, so did my hope and desire to be a better runner, able to compete fairly and gain the respect of my team.

And so it is with the life of faith (I don’t feel bad about using a race as a metaphor for the Christian life, since Paul himself uses it!).  We are thrown into this life, and we must suffer through all the ups and downs that this wierd world will give us.  Some days are good, some days are bad, but through them all we suffer, building our endurance.  Eventually, our endurance has grown so that we can take all the bad the devil can throw at us, and still smile and ask, “Please, sir, may I have another?”  And this endurance makes our character one that other Christians will respect and admire and use for a model for their own lives - a living example of truly faithful living, knowing and trusting that we stand in the grace of God.  And then this character will build in us the hope to know that, when Jesus returns, we will see all the grace of God for all creation.

We will not be disappointed, even though we are enduring hardships now, because it is not up to us to make all the bad in this world go away.  That is God’s job!  It is our job to spread the good news that the bad in this world has already met its match in Jesus Christ, and upon his return will lose the fight.  

The love of God is the love we have for all people, Christian or not, that we show primarily through giving them the gift of the hope we have developed through our sufferings.  We are like Job, through all the sufferings of loss of family and children, through all the sufferings of listening to four friends who don’t know what they’re talking about, through being shown our place in the cosmos by a loving God, who finally know that, in the end, all things will be restored to us and more.  This is the hope we have, the hope that sustains us even in the ravages of the evil in this world, and this is the hope that we pass along to all those who need it.  This hope is only in Jesus Christ, who took away the power of sin, death, and the devil on the cross for us all!

Thanks be to God!

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