Suffering of the Justified

Romans 5:3-5

Today is the last of this year’s sermons on Romans. We started a year ago to work our way through Paul’s letter to the church in Rome. We made it to 3:8 last year and this year to 5:5. We will pick up this series again on January 2, 2005, starting with 5:6. I know it is not good to rush time, but I enjoy working in Romans and can’t wait to begin again this series.

I began the sermon last week talking about a benefits package that comes to a person because he or she works for a company or organization. That benefit package might include holiday and vacation time, savings plans and medical coverage.

That is what Paul begins in chapter five. He set the stage in his letter by talking about the wrath of God and how we are all deserving of God’s wrath. Then comes the stunning piece of good news in 3:21. But now a righteousness from God, apart from law, has been made known. Paul goes on to detail what exactly this righteousness is and then in chapter 5 he begins to describe the benefits that come to the Christian who has been justified by faith alone. Last week we looked at the first three of these benefits. We have peace with God. We stand in grace. We rejoice in the hope of the glory of God.

There are four benefits Paul lists in the first five verses of chapter 5 and we left the fourth of these for today. Read with me from the text. Therefore, since we have been justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. That’s benefit #1. through whom we have gained access by faith into this grace in which we now stand. That’s benefit #2. And we rejoice in the hope of the glory of God. That’s benefit # 3 and now we move to what seems like a most unlikely benefit. Not only so, but we also rejoice in our sufferings.

On the face of it, this seems like a very sick benefit. It sounds like the motto for the Masochist Club: We rejoice in our sufferings.

When I was an exchange student in Hamburg, Germany in 1969 and 70, I went to a bar one night. This was a dark, smoke-filled room and not a place where I felt very comfortable. There was a visible cloud of smoke from all the cigarettes and I had to sit down to have my head below the cloud of smoke so I could breathe. This was not a place I went to normally and I don’t think I ever went back. But I was meeting a friend and he suggested we meet there.

At the table at which we sat, there was a man in his late twenties, big and strong, wearing a t-shirt. My nervousness increased sitting there with him. He was not the kind of person you want to meet in a dark alley. He was smoking cigarettes, as were most of the people there, and then I watched him take his cigarette, puff on it, knock off the ashes so the tip was glowing red and press it into the underside of his left arm, burning his flesh.

I was shocked and then I noticed that his arm was full of wounds and scars from cigarette burns. This was not the first time he had done this. Up and down his arm there were scars and wounds, some scars completely healed, others with a scab and others in the process of forming a scab. There was the brand new wound I had seen him inflict on himself and in the course of the next couple hours, I watched him do this two more times.

When you see someone inflicting pain on himself, the first instinct is to conclude that this person belongs in a mental hospital where he can be helped. No one who is healthy willingly causes his own pain. By the way, I didn’t suggest this to this man in the bar because I was afraid if I did I would end up in a hospital myself. I am not a masochist.

If I see someone hitting themselves on the head with a club and they say the reason they are doing that is because they like to suffer, I know that person is not in his right mind. He is sick and disturbed.

I am not sick and disturbed, despite what you have heard, and evidence for this is that I do not like to suffer. If I am cold and wet, I want desperately to get somewhere that is dry and warm. I love being out in the snow when it is -25? C, if I am dressed warmly. But then I want to come inside where there is a fire and lay down on a soft chair with a good book and a hot cup of tea. I love comfort. Given a choice, I seek always to be comfortable.

So how can this be a benefit to the justified: we rejoice in our sufferings?

The first thing to say about this is that we do not need to seek suffering in order to suffer. Suffering is abundantly available in this world and it comes to us whether we want it or not. You don’t have to burn yourself with a cigarette. In a metaphorical sense, the cigarette will burn you without your having to do anything.

I remember on my 21st birthday taking a walk with my father and I told him that that morning I had woken with a pain in my right arm. My father is 30 years older than I am and he laughed and said, “Wait until you get to be my age. The pain in your arm will seem like nothing.” Well I am now two years older than my father was then and he was right. The older I get, the more pains and aches I have to deal with.

I visit with Noreen Maxwell each week. Noreen is an almost 90 year old Scottish lady who is facing a struggle because her body is betraying her. She is losing control of her body and she suffers night and day with pain and discomfort. She didn’t ask for this to happen. Our bodies will cause us to suffer regardless of what we do.

We suffer physically as we age. We also suffer from illness, headaches, ski injuries to our knees. No one escapes this suffering.

We also suffer relationally. People you love and care for will disappoint you, let you down when you were counting on them for help, betray you, seeking their own interest before yours. A friend you have trusted will say something unkind about you behind your back. You will be in love with someone and that person will break up with you. You will feel lonely when you don’t want to feel lonely. Your parents may divorce, causing you undeserved pain. If money is involved, you will discover that friends and even family will choose the money rather than their relationship with you. We suffer because of these things.

The world is and always will be full of tragedy. You will be walking down the street and someone will come up and rob you, cutting you with a knife. Someone will break into your house or apartment and rob you. People you love will suffer and die. Accidents will happen. Just this week I was told of a man whose middle-aged son drowned. No parent ever expects to have to bury their child.

We do not have to seek suffering. Suffering comes to us. And if we are Christians, there is an abundance of suffering. Martin Luther wrote this, which is printed in your bulletin:
Since God now has justified us by faith, and not by works, we have peace with him both in heart and conscience, though not with man and with the flesh, nor with the world and the devil. Believers have all the more trials.

Because the devil is at war with God, he uses people for his purposes. Because we are Christians, we are special targets for his work. He desires nothing more than to pull us away from our relationship with God. So as a Christian, you face suffering you would not face if you were not a Christian.

We struggle with our flesh. There are things that we, as Christians, know are not good for us to do and yet our flesh pulls us to those things. We are called to resist temptation. Believers have all the more trials.

You have suffered. You may be suffering in at least some small way right now and you will suffer in the future. And Paul says that we are to rejoice in our suffering. How is that not a masochistic reaction? Paul explains why.
Not only so, but we also rejoice in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance;  4 perseverance, character; and character, hope.

Rejoicing in suffering is not a masochistic act if the suffering you endure leads you to something better. One of my vivid memories of high school is walking down the stairs of the school. I can picture the moment in my mind, I can see the stairs, I know that this moment was in September when I was walking down the stairs. The reason this memory is so vivid is that my legs hurt when I walked down the stairs. Why would I remember my legs hurting when I walked down the stairs? Because after a summer off, I would begin training with the cross-country team in school and we would run and run and my legs were sore from the training. I remember walking down the stairs with my legs hurting because I enjoyed the fact that I was getting back into shape. I rejoiced in my suffering because it meant I was getting into better shape and would be able to run for miles and miles without tiring.

Paul wrote that one of the benefits for a Christian is that we rejoice in our sufferings and he was able to do that because suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope. We rejoice in our suffering because it leads to something better than the suffering.

And so Paul wrote in Romans 8:18
I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us.

The third of the benefits Paul mentions in these verses is that we rejoice in the hope of the glory of God. We rejoice in our sufferings because they are a path through which we come to a more clear realization of this hope.

We do not have to seek suffering, suffering will find us. We rejoice in suffering because it leads to a more clear realization of the hope of the glory of God. Does this mean that the progression from suffering to hope is an automatic one? Does suffering automatically lead to hope? Not at all. Let me show you some alternatives.

We start with suffering and what can happen? You have seen people suffer, what can result? A woman is betrayed by her best friend and she becomes bitter. “She betrayed me and I will never ever forgive her!” The woman begins to harden her heart and as she ages she holds on to resentments and becomes less and less able to love.

I have met people who have a victim mentality. Something bad happens and the response is to sit and soak up as much sympathy as can be found. Everything always happens to me, they will say. And when they tell you their life story, they will tell you incident after incident in which something happened to them. You never hear them accept responsibility for what happened and as a consequence, the growth in character that could result does not take place.

Some people who suffer choose to take the path of apathy. These people respond to suffering by giving up, not caring. They move on through life with a certain listlessness.

Others respond to suffering with hostility. Suffering produces anger and that anger is directed toward the ones who are deemed responsible for the suffering that has been experienced. In my parent’s Unitarian Church I met many who fit this description. These people grew up in the church but then went through a bitter divorce or betrayal, the death of a spouse or child or some other difficult experience, and the reaction was to strike out at God who was supposed to protect them from harm. “I cannot believe in God who would allow this to happen to me,” they say.

My aunt was dying. We had decided to remove life support and as we stood in silence around the bed, the hospital chaplain, a woman, came in and asked if she could pray with us. “Get out of here!” my mother yelled at her. We were all facing mortality and when the presence of God was most needed, my mother’s stored up hurt and pain reacted in anger to the one who could help.

There are a lot of potential responses to suffering but as Christians we can choose to persevere. That is why Paul lists this as a benefit.

What does it mean to persevere? To persevere is to persist in something despite opposition or discouragement. When Paul says we persevere, what is the something he has in mind that we persist in doing?

What Paul has in mind is that we persist in believing in the presence of suffering. We continue to have faith even though we are overwhelmed by suffering. You can see why this is not automatic. If God is loving, why then do I suffer? It is much easier to conclude that God does not exist, God doesn’t care or God is indifferent to my suffering than to persevere in believing that God loves me even while I suffer.

Perseverance leads to character and character to hope. Perseverance is persisting to believe in God even when presented evidence to the contrary. Character is the quality of one who has faced a test and passed it.

I’ve been watching a DVD series called Band of Brothers. It is taken from a book by the same name, written by Stephen Ambrose and is about a company of US Paratroopers who trained together and then jumped into Normandy, France on D-day, June 6, 1944. The story follows this group of men through the war and one of the things that is observed is the difference between the men who landed in Normandy and fought through the battles of the war and the new recruits that came in to replace the men who had been killed.

There is a clear difference and that difference is character. Those who had been through the terrifying moments in battle had discovered they could face death and move forward. The new recruits had not yet faced this test and had yet to prove to themselves as well as the rest of the company that they could likewise face the terrors of battle and do what they were supposed to do.

I have to tell you at this point that I am in many ways like one of those recruits. My life has been fairly easy and I have not suffered a lot. There are those in this congregation who have suffered much more than I have. There are those who have lost spouses and children. There are those who have been physically beaten for their faith.

I don’t know how I will react to suffering that may come to me in the future. I know how I would like to react, but I am still on the path. But I believe by faith that if I persevere in faith, I will pass the test and stand on the other side of suffering with the seasoned character of one who knows that suffering leads to something better.

Suffering can lead to perseverance. I can choose to react to suffering by continuing to believe and put my faith in God who loves me. Perseverance leads to character and character to hope.

And hope does not disappoint us, because God has poured out his love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, whom he has given us.

I have talked before about the story of a man hanging on to a branch on the side of a cliff. There is no hope of climbing the rock wall to get to the top. Below there is a 500 meter drop. As he hangs on to the branch, he calls out for help, “Is anyone out there who can help me?” and he hears the voice of God from the clouds. God tells him, “Let go of the branch and I will save you.” And then the man calls out, “Is there anybody else out there?”

This is the image that I find useful. As a Christian, I am hanging on to a branch growing out of the side of a cliff. One hand is firmly attached to the branch and the other is holding on to the arm of God. God wants me to let go off the branch and put both my hands in his, and I cannot let go. The attraction of this world is too powerful for me.

What I think happens in suffering is that it clears our mind and helps us to see what is really important. We carry the illusion that this life with all its pleasures and relationships is worth holding on to. Our faith, on the other hand, is something we cannot see, taste, feel, smell or hear and so we hang on to the branch.

My observation is that Christians who have experienced suffering and held on to persevere are brought to a more clear sense of what really matters. Eternity becomes more real and this world more temporal as we move along the path of suffering and we are increasingly able to let go of the branch.

Our hope becomes stronger because our awareness of what is real and worth living for becomes more clear.

Mt. Blanc is a beautiful mountain peak located in the intersection of France, Italy and Switzerland. But many days the peak is covered with clouds and cannot be seen. You can look at a map and know it is there but you cannot see it. But then on some mornings, as the sun burns through the fog, little by little, Mt. Blanc becomes visible and it is beautiful and then it is time to get out the camera and take some pictures.

Suffering burns through the fog in our lives and makes our hope more clear and when we see our hope more clearly, our confidence in our hope is strengthened.
And hope does not disappoint us, because God has poured out his love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, whom he has given us.

See how this was lived out in the lives of the apostles in Acts 5:
They called the apostles in and had them flogged. Then they ordered them not to speak in the name of Jesus, and let them go.
41 The apostles left the Sanhedrin, rejoicing because they had been counted worthy of suffering disgrace for the Name.  42 Day after day, in the temple courts and from house to house, they never stopped teaching and proclaiming the good news that Jesus is the Christ.

What allowed the apostles to respond to suffering with joy and boldness? Their suffering made clear to them that their experience with Christ and the love that God poured into their hearts by the Holy Spirit was more powerful and more real than anything else.

Here is my prayer and hope for you. When you suffer, in any way that you will suffer, large or small, do not withdraw from God. Because someone you loved died, that does not mean God doesn’t love you or the person who died. Persevere in your belief. In the midst of your suffering, open your heart to God and continue to believe.

When you suffer physically, do not draw inward like a turtle pulls into its shell. Make the effort to call out to God for help and trust in him. It may not be until you meet Jesus face-to-face that you will understand his purposes in your suffering. But trust him. Do not pull away.

I am not telling you to put on a stiff upper lip and continue with life. Cry, grieve, express the pain you feel. That is all good and healthy. But make the effort to do so with a heart that is still open to God.

Paul prayed for the Colossians in his letter to them. This is my prayer for us as well.
Colossians 1:10-14 (The Message)
We pray that you’ll live well for the Master, making him proud of you as you work hard in his orchard. As you learn more and more how God works, you will learn how to do your work. We pray that you’ll have the strength to stick it out over the long haul—not the grim strength of gritting your teeth but the glory-strength God gives. It is strength that endures the unendurable and spills over into joy, thanking the Father who makes us strong enough to take part in everything bright and beautiful that he has for us.

God loves you and because he loves you he is able to take the pain and suffering you will experience in this life and transform you into a Christian of character who moves joyfully through life, certain of the hope which will not disappoint.

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Benediction
I Peter 5
Be self-controlled and alert. Your enemy the devil prowls around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour.  9 Resist him, standing firm in the faith, because you know that your brothers throughout the world are undergoing the same kind of sufferings.
10 And the God of all grace, who called you to his eternal glory in Christ, after you have suffered a little while, will himself restore you and make you strong, firm and steadfast.  11 To him be the power for ever and ever. Amen.