What Suffering Is Actually Doing to You | Romans 5:1-11, 8:31-39

Transcript is automatically produced. Errors may be present.

Good morning, South Fellowship Church. Good morning. It’s good to see you this morning. If you’re new or new-ish around here, I’m Aaron Bjorklund. I’m one of the pastors here. I’m glad you joined us. If you’re tuning in online, thank you for stopping in, and I hope that even there online, you’re able to encounter a little bit of the presence of God this morning.

And yeah, thank you. Yeah, if you are new, we do have the space in the lobby. We already mentioned it once, so I’m not gonna belabor that. But I wanna mention one other thing we haven’t mentioned in a while, so I’ll just bring it up. We do have a podcast midweek. It’s called the Red Couch Theology Podcast.

This summer the connection formation team’s kinda carrying this podcast along. If you have questions today, theological doubts, whatever you ha- you can send us all sorts of things. You can ask us what the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow is. We may not answer that question, but if all right, so redcouchtheology.com, submit your questions there. Yeah. Have you ever had a sort of a fit of anger over a piece of technology? Anyone? Yes. Yes. I’m pretty good with technology, and yet somehow technology creates more anger in me than almost any other thing I’ve ever encountered.

Y- I don’t really believe you lose your salvation, but I’m pretty sure I’ve tested the waters a little bit- … with the level of anger that I’ve experienced towards technology. One of my childhood best friends, after college, we got together, and I was just asking him what he was up to, and he’d gotten a job that and his experience with technology is just the exact opposite from us when it comes to technology.

When he breaks technology, he gets a little excited, because he’s a a quality control specialist for a software company. Wow. So when he breaks software, he’s “Good day at the office,” and I wish that was how my reaction was to software that was breaking or not functioning. But it got me to thinking, what are some of the more interesting quality control jobs out there?

Look at some of these. Pet food tester. Someone actually eats your dog’s food just to see how it tastes. They probably still give it to your dog, even if it tastes bad but they do this, so now they know what they’re doing. Deodorant armpit sniffer. Oh. This is a job, people. Th- someone out there creates the scents, and then they’ve gotta see how well it does at masking the smell of hair and feet and ar- yes, armpits.

And so they have to sniff armpits to see if it works. Toilet flushing technician. Engineer designs a new toilet. They gotta figure out, what kind of strange objects could we stick in this toilet and flush it and still have it work? This one sounds to me like a job invented by a six-year-old boy.

And then someone’s “Yeah, sure, we’ll pay you for that.” How about this? Mattress tester. Eh? Anyone wanna do that job? Mattress … I would love to do this job, where you just take a nap and you wake up and report, give me the money. Chainsaw vibration tester. Did you know in parts of Europe, there’s regulation on how violently a chainsaw can vibrate?

So you’ve gotta just use a chainsaw for a while and get paid for it. Rollercoaster tester. Oftentimes as part of the staff they just have to ride the rollercoaster a couple times in the beginning of the day. My question about this one is, what if it doesn’t go well? I- okay, I don’t wanna be that tester.

How about this? Lego brick quality inspector. Anyone love Legos? Just, build Legos, get paid. If you’ve been building Legos and expending all that money on those expensive Legos, you’re doing it wrong. You should get paid to build those Legos. Golf ball tester. Anyone out there golf ball tester?

You know what, you wanna do this job, you’re like, “Honey, headed to the office. I’ve gotta test some golf balls,” how about professional furniture destroyer? This one re- This one reminds me, have you ever heard of those those places in some cities, there’s destroying houses or like rooms, a des- what’s it called?

Rage room. Rage room. Yeah, a rage room. You go in there, and they just have a bunch of objects that you can just destroy to kinda get your anger out. You could get paid for that potentially. A video game tester, just to see if there’s something wrong with the video games. You would just play video games and get paid for that.

Oh, I got mattress tester on there twice, probably ’cause it’s my favorite idea. I would like to try that one. I might be testing a mattress after service this Sunday But these companies invest a lot of money paying people to test these products so that in theory, by the time they come and make their way into the crucible that is everyday life, these products survive, at least until the warranty’s worn out.

But they survive. They wanna know whether these products are gonna make it in the actual everyday life. Now, I think this is true about our lives too. You have ideas, you have principles, you have trues, philosophies around how you live your everyday life that help you navigate the world around you.

It’s called your worldview. And your worldview it’s what governs how you interact with the world when things go poorly, when things go well. Your worldview in- helps you navigate that kind of space. And so today, we’re gonna be doing some quality test control on your worldview and on w- whether it holds up.

So here’s the question we’re gonna be asking today, how do you know when the foundations of your life are sufficient for the weight of your life? This is the question that we’re gonna explore today, and I think the text that we’re gonna look at is gonna be really helpful for us to do some quality control testing on your worldview and on your perspective of how the world functions.

If you have a Bible, you can turn to the Book of Romans. We’re gonna be in Romans chapter 5. It’s in the New Testament. That’s a little past halfway, Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Acts, and then Romans if you wanna turn there. Before we dive into this text, I just wanna take a moment and pray again, help my heart settle, maybe help yours settle, and then we’ll dive in and do some quality control testing

Holy Spirit, We’re in desperate need to hear from you today. Not me, not any other human word

Not even just the scriptures, but we need you to breathe life into them. And so give us ears to hear

Even now, we recognize that you’re here among us, that you intend to speak, that you have a message for some of us in this room that you wanna draw us in. So make us soft. Make us ready to hear your truth, we pray. Amen and amen So the book of Romans, since we’re diving right into the middle of the book, let me give you a little bit of context.

The book of Romans was written by a guy by the name of Paul. You may know him as the Apostle Paul. And he’s a church planter, a Hebrew scholar, and itinerant preacher in first-century Israel. And h- he’s writing this letter to the church in Rome. It’s not a church that he planted, but he saw it as a strategic springboard city for his mission to the rest of the world.

So he wanted to go to Rome, and then from that, springboard to Spain. And so he’s writing a letter in advance to prepare this church for his arrival, ’cause he really wanted them to be healthy and strong and ready to be a h- a safe haven for him as he prepared for this rather difficult missionary journey.

And so he writes to this church partially ’cause he’s heard about some dis- discrepancies taking place in the congregation some fighting taking place in the congregation, because the church was highly diverse. It was a church made up of Jews, Jewish Christians who followed Jesus, and Gentiles, non-Jewish Christians who followed Jesus, and there were some disagreements about some theological things disagreements about what are the foundations of their faith.

What are the things that, the sort of minimum theological ideas that you have to believe in order to understand the Christian worldview? And so in, in a lot of ways he’s writing this letter to clear up some theological things to shape their worldview so that they’re all on the same page about their foundations of their hope and their faith.

And that’s what he does in the first few chapters. In chapters one through four, it’s like a theological classroom space. And it’s from these chapters, the book of Romans is one of Paul’s, maybe his magnum opus of theological work, and this is where Christians come up with this idea: salvation comes by grace alone through faith alone.

And so he’s trying to help them understand that it’s just Jesus. If you … Salvation, being saved means it comes only through grace or only by grace through faith. And so i- it’s a great truth. It’s such an important truth to what it means to be a follower of Jesus, but he wanted to clear that up.

But essentially, Paul’s argument so far in the book has been in the theological classroom space. It’s all mental ideas. It’s ideas about God. It’s ideas about how this functions, and he’s clearing it up. And then our text, Romans chapter five, is the culmination of all this mental, theological, hypothetical idea space, and he lands with this big, beautiful exclamation on what it means to be Saved and theology with this this text here.

He says this, “Therefore,” and the I haven’t heard this in a while, so I’m gonna say it. If you see therefore in a Bible, go back and find out what it’s there for. So that’s what I was just describing. So he, he says, in light of the fact that Jesus has done this incredible work on your behalf, and he’s given you salvation by grace alone, through faith alone, “Therefore, since we have been justified through faith, we have peace with the living God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have a- gained access by faith into this grace in which we stand.”

If you’ve ever wondered where grace is located, you’re standing

I remember when I first came across this text. It was in my first year of Bible college, and I was… I’d heard about this grace stuff growing up, and it was powerful. Grace is the engine of the soul that helps the Christian follow God. Grace is this unmerited favor. It’s the, it’s God’s i- sort of power inside of Christians.

So I’m like, “Okay, I need this grace stuff in my life, so how do I get this grace in my life?” I started doing a concordance search for the word grace all throughout the Bible, and I’m reading and I’m trying to figure out, how do I get this grace? Grace comes to the humble, and all these things, and I finally landed on this text, and I’m reading, “Therefore, since we’ve been justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have gained access by faith into this grace in which I stand?

And I had this image that just shot into my mind of me standing in an ocean of grace. I couldn’t see the seashore. I w- and I knew it was miles deep, and I’m like, here I am frantically trying to find grace, and I’m standing in the stuff

You know you’re standing in the grace. It’s all around you. Beautiful. All right, I digress. All right, so there’s a couple words here beyond that. So we’re standing in this grace, but then he highlights this word and w- and we boast. This word is really significant in Paul’s teaching.

He talks about it a lot. There’s a negative boasting that comes from pride. It comes from self-effort. But then Paul loves to talk about this positive boasting. It’s a boasting, it’s a rejoicing in the work of God. And we boast in the hope of the glory of God. So let’s dig into this word boast. This word boast is in the middle voice, which just means it just means that it happens to you.

When you encounter, like I did in that first year of Bible college when I first understood that I’m standing in grace, there’s no more searching required, I’m standing in it, something happened to me. I was overcome with gratitude for this grace, and it did, it just welled up in me. This rejoicing, this kind of boasting wells up, and it happens to a person But then he says, he, we boast in the hope.

Hope here is elpis in the Greek. It’s a looking forward to something with some reason for confidence, hope or expectation. But because the Apostle Paul was a Hebrew speaking Hebrew scholar in his day, he probably carried with him this definition of hope from the Old Testament, which comes from this wor- this word tikvah.

It’s a hope from the idea of a cord. It’s a cord or a rope that tethers the soul to something safe. Made out of a mass of threads, it ties something secure. The Bi- one of the biblical ideas of hope is this. It’s a cord. It’s a cord that tethers you to something. If you’re on a precipice and you’re at risk, this cord gives you hope that it’s gonna be okay, right?

This is some of the idea of the idea of hope. And so the first thing I find in this text about testing our, the doing some quality control testing of our worldview is that the work of Jesus ties us to a hope. It ties us to hope. So it’s kinda like this. The work of Jesus, all the theological stuff, all the theology does this for us It ties you.

It tethers you. Now it’s helpful to know that this is paracord. It’s got a 550-pound weight limit. It’s beautiful. It gets exciting. You might, it might be so e- encouraging to your soul to know that this can handle that much weight. When I was coming up with this illustration, I thought about hanging myself from the ceiling.

And I thought, “I don’t wanna bring the lift in on Sunday morning and try and figure out a drill into the concrete.” It just, … But just know this could hold my weight. That’s helpful to know. But this early part of Romans 5, it’s a hope, but we haven’t tested it yet See, I haven’t actually put any weight on this rope yet.

I know some stuff about it. I know the theology about it, and it’s… That, in and of itself, if you’ve made that mental ascent, maybe you’ve had this kind of hope that just overwhelms you like I did when I discovered grace in this passage, and it is beautiful, and it’s exciting. It’s good to know that I’m tethered.

But it’s not tested yet. That brings us to the next section in this chapter. It says this: not only do we have this untested hope, but we also glory” Same word, boast. We boast s- it happens to us when we what? When we suffer? This is a strange thing that happens to Christians. It’s a strange thing that happens when we suffer.

Sometimes you experience this strange, unusual, out- so otherworldly hope and boasting in our suffering. It pr- because suffering produces perseverance, character, and character, a different kind of hope. And hope does not put to shame because God’s love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who’s been given to us.

So this is the formula. Suffering comes into our lives. It produces perseverance, and these words in the Greek, they build on top of each other. Suffering, and then suffering produces perseverance, and then perseverance produces character, and then character produces a special kind of hope.

What is that hope? Why is it special? It’s because it’s tested. It’s when you actually get to experience that this is weight-bearing. When suffering comes into our lives, we get to actually feel it carry the weight of our lives. Now I know deep down in my soul that this cord can hold me So suffering produces a hope that is tested and found strong Now why is that hope different?

So there’s two kinds of hope. There’s this hypothetical untested hope, but then there’s this tested hope. And part what the, part of what’s going on when we’re tested is we discover that this is the kind of hope that it is, a hope that does not put to shame. Why? Because God’s love’s been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who’s been given to us.

When you run into a season of suffering, a season of wilderness, a season of waiting, a season of uncertainty, what it does is it takes your worldview and it puts weight on it, and you find out that the Holy Spirit sustains you in the midst of that season But the Holy Spirit’s doing what? He’s, he, because i- he’s confirming that God’s love, that it’s the love of the Father that’s been poured out into your hearts through the Holy Spirit.

Specifically, when you’re in a season of suffering, that, the weight-bearing thing, the thing that you’re confirming is that I’m loved, that I have one thing in my life, if only one thing in my life, that will never fail, and that’s the love of God Almighty, the creator of the heavens and the Earth, the one who loves my soul.

The question is this: What qualifies us for this kind of love? And part of the beauty of this text is what the qualifications to get this kind of love. This is why Romans 5 is iconic in the Christian faith, because he gives us, here’s the qualifications. If y- if you’ve never experienced this kind of hope or this kind of love, here’s what, how, the steps you need to take to get it.

Ready? powerless, ungodly sinner at just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly. Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous person, though for a good person, someone might possibly dare to die. But God demonstrated His love in that this, while we were still sinners, Christ died for you.

So if you wanna qualify for all of this hope and all of this love, you need to be powerless, ungodly, and a sinner

In other words, you don’t do anything. He goes on, “Since we have now been justified by his blood, how much more shall we be saved from God’s wrath through him? For if while we were God’s enemies…” In other words, while we’re headlong running away from God, maybe even shouting profanities at him over our shoulders, that’s when he dies for you.

That’s the time he demonstrates his love for you. “… while we were enemies, were reconciled to him through the death of his Son, how much more, having been reconciled, shall we be saved through his life? Not only this, s- this but we also boast…” There’s that word again. We… It happens to us. We rejoice, we boast in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have gained re- now received reconciliation.

So the thing that catches you in suffering the thing that catches you, the love that catches us in suffering is what makes hope unshakable. Now, why is that? Why, what is it about being unconditionally loved prior to any of my success, prior to any of my good behavior, prior to any of my a- ability to boast in my own effort, why is that so unshakable?

Because it means that you can’t do anything to take it away. No one can. It means that that you have one thing in your life, the love of God for your soul, that no one can steal. Nothing can take this away from you. Now, that is a tested hope That’s a tested hope. It makes you unshakable. You’re invincible.

No one can access that, no matter how hard they try. If you’ve never experienced that kind of hope or the love of God, and you want to, at the end of the service, we’re gonna have some people up here to pray. And I’d encourage you to just come up here. You might need prayer for other things, that’s fine, but if, at the end of the service, we’re gonna have time for prayer, and I’d encourage you, if you just want, I need that kind of tether in my life, ask them how to meet this hope who is Christ on your behalf, and they’ll be glad to pray with you and invite Jesus to s- infuse this kind of hope into your life God demonstrated his own love for us in this, while we were still sinners, he died for us.

In other words, he suffered. He suffered excruciating pain. He left the purity and perfection of the heavenly dimension and realm, and he came to Earth, he suffered, he lived a hard life, and he died to prove that y- his love was that big. So this is the message. God loves you

He loves you. He loves you God loves you The heart of God loves you deep down to your core, and he demonstrated before you could screw it up, before you could be successful, he demonstrated his love. He proved it. God proved that’s the love he has for you by suffering for you. So the love that catches us in suffering is what makes hope unshakeable.

And when I first was studying this passage, oh, that’s beautiful, that’s good, it’s so powerful, and it’s… But it still felt a little bit like a principle that I was trying to wrap my mind around. And I love this section. It goes, okay, suffering produces perseverance, and perseverance, character, and character, hope.

And I was like, but Paul, it’s not working all the time. What if I don’t feel the hope? I’ve experienced the suffering, and I do think it’s produced some perseverance and maybe some character, but I’m not always experiencing the hope. What happens if I don’t feel the hope yet?

And I was wrestling with this, and in my wrestling I just kept reading further into the Book of Romans, and I think Paul knows that this is gonna happen to me. And so in Romans chapter 8 he started to answer that question. And this is the image that I have. What happens if, okay, I’ve tested it, and in theory it holds, right?

It’s a theoretical thing, but what happens if it’s still falling, and I’m in free fall and I haven’t quite felt the confirmation yet that it’s gonna hold? And I’m in free fall, Paul. Okay, hypothetical character and perseverance, hypothetic. It’s … But I feel like I’m in free fall. It’s after I tethered it, and it’s after the fall happens, but I haven’t felt the force of the rope and the hope hold me yet.

What then? Paul jumps into Romans chapter 8. He says, “The Spirit Himself testifies with our spirit That we are God’s children. Now, if we are His children, then we are heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ, if indeed we share in His what? Suffering. In order that we may also share in His glory. And then he says this, 8:18, “I consider that our present sufferings are not worthy- worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us.”

And I could read this entire chapter. It’s one of the most famous chapters in all of the New Testament, but I wanna read you a couple more selections. If you need to look this up, here’s parts of where I’m reading. He goes on and he says this “What then shall we say in response to all of these things?”

All this suffering and this groaning, all this kind of stuff. What are we supposed to say? “If God is for us, who can be against us? He who did not spare His own Son but gave Him up for all- for us all.” Then he jumps down in verse 35, he says, “What shall we… What shall separate us from the love of Christ?

Shall tribulation, or hardship, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or danger, or sword? As it is written: ‘For your sake,’ God, ‘we face death all day long; we’re considered as sheep to a slaughter.'” He continues, verse 37, “No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced of this,” listen, “that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything in all of creation will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus.”

Here’s what he’s trying to say. What he’s trying to say is this, no power in heaven or on Earth can break this hope, not even death. So you might find yourself today feeling like you’re in free fall, and Paul says, I see that, but what I’m gonna do is I’m gonna remind you that this is a 550-pound tension cord, and nothing’s gonna break it.

What I’m gonna remind you of is that not even death.” So you may not experience the hope yet, but when you pass over, when you die, you’ll see that the hope will not fail. Not even death itself can steal that from you. Now, that is a hope. And I get it. I hope that there’s a day where you experience the tether and you feel h- the hope well up in you in this life.

But even if you don’t and you die, there is a hope meeting you on the other side in the love of a father who refuses to let death itself steal a hope that he offers to a child that he loves

This hope when tested, it won’t let you down. This kind of hope is the most secure hope a human could possibly have in their soul. It won’t let you down. It’s not gonna fail So, one final question to explore, and it’s how in the world can we cultivate that hope in our souls? How can we let that hope grow a little bit more in the midst of wilderness experiences?

Maybe the first step is evaluate your hopes ‘Cause not every hope gives you that kind of safety. There might be a cord in your life that’s actually made of yarn, and it’s promising to uphold you, and then when it hits that, the end of the rope, it just breaks. I don’t know if it’s, for you, if it’s a job.

I don’t know if it’s y- financial security, a relationship that you’re holding onto. Any other thing other than the love of God for your soul cannot sustain the weight of your life. It cannot hold. So evaluate your hopes. Interestingly Victor Frankl wrote this pretty famous book, Man’s Search for Meaning, and in it, he’s a Holocaust survivor and a psychologist, and in it he made an observation about false hopes.

I’ll just read this little section to you and describe it a little bit. “The death rate in the week between Christmas 1944 in the ch…” He’s talking about in the concentration camps, “and New Year’s 1945 increased in the camp beyond all previous experiences. It was simply that the majority of the prisoners had lived in a naive hope that they would be home again by Christmas.

As the time drew near and there was no encourage- encouraging news, the prisoners lost courage and disappointment overcame them, and many of them died because they’d placed their hope in, ‘We’re gonna be out by Christmas.'” False hopes don’t sustain you. And part of the observation of his work in psychology is to say you need a meaning in your life that’s bigger than your life.

Part of his work is describing making sure that you don’t have a false, insecure hope. So one of the things you can do is evaluate your hopes. Ask yourself, “Is the thing I’m hoping it w- for, is it big enough to sustain the weight of my life?” Another one you can do is lament. We heard about this in Kevin Butcher’s sermon, week two of this series.

But let me give you an asterisk here. Make sure it’s not just complaining or being frustrated or lamenting with others. It’s a lament that draws you into relationship. It’s a lament towards or with God. Because when you lament and say, “God,” even if it’s an angry lament, even if you’re just frustrated and you’re just like, “God, why is this happening to me?”

You’re going to the one who tethers your soul. So the entire process of lamenting is an opportunity for you to see him show up in that relationship and hold the weight of your life. So lament in and with and towards God. It’ll draw you close to him. Ask God to use your season for someone else. This also comes from some of the from the scriptures first, but also from the, some of the discoveries from V- Victor Frankl.

He found out that s- a lot of the people who had a hope that sustained them through the Holocaust was those who said, “My suffering has purpose for the world around me. My suffering might produce some sort of hope for someone else. I wanna suffer with a kind of dignity that makes my comrade in the squalor bunk next to me have hope for the next day.”

That was a kind of hope that sustained him. It wa- didn’t have a time expiration on it. It says, “I wanna suffer with dignity so that they have the energy to suffer with dignity.” So maybe you need to say, ask God to use your season of suffering and say, “Lord, help me figure out how am I gonna suffer in such a way that I can offer your exceedingly beautiful hope to others?”

This, I’ll have o- one more suggestion for you, and it comes from a sort of a very strange practice that I’ve done when I’m in seasons of suffering. I remember a number of years ago, I kinda stumbled across this practice. I didn’t know I was practicing anything at the time, but this practice it was a particularly difficult season.

It had some relational components, some financial components some vocational components to it, and I was just, I was, like, laying in bed there, and I was processing this, and I just started to imagine the worst possible thing that could ever happen to me. I imagined, okay I’m a pastor, and so maybe the first step in this worst possible scenario is I get falsely accused for some sort of impropriety or whatever and I lose my job, and because of it, I lose all the respect of my wife and my kids.

They never wanna talk to me again. And then one of them gets one of my kids dies tragically, and then one of my, Then I can’t get another job because the, I don’t know how to do anything else other than be a pastor, and so I can’t get a job, so then I end up homeless, and then I’m in a box, and then I get cancer.

This is the game I played in my head, but then I asked this question: Could I survive that if Jesus and I were good?

And the answer in my soul welled up Strangely? Yes It would be excruciating, but if Jesus and I were okay in that box on the street, whatever it may look like, I would survive. It was my way of testing the cord. Is His love actually the only thing I need? And so maybe in a weird sort of masochistic way, a spiritual practice would be imagine the worst thing, but Jesus is still with you.

Can… That’s a great way to test the thing that holds your life. It’s not pessimin- pe- pessimism, it’s stress testing the foundations before the crisis hits. And so I’ll remind you again, this hope when tested won’t let you down. I wanna invite Dan to come up and he’s gonna lead us in one closing song.

It’s this great hymn Jesus, how I trust Him, how I’ve proved Him over and over and over and over again. I’ve proved Him. And we’re gonna sing this song, and that song might be a deep, profound comfort to your soul today because it reminds me, reminds your soul, yes, I did prove that His His, this hope was steadfast for my soul.

And so we’re gonna sing that with joy and it’ll remind us that we can test Him and He’s faithful. But then he’s gonna sing a little bit of the refrain that we sang a little bit earlier, ’cause maybe you find yourself in free fall and you’ve yet to experience the hope catch you, and you just need to know, even when I don’t see it, you’re working.

Even when I can’t feel it, you’re moving. And so we’re gonna sing that. If that’s where you’re at and you’re in free fall, you just need to be reminded that whether you feel it or not, whether you see it or not, He is working. So would you stand? And we’re gonna close with this, these two songs to help our souls where- wherever we are with these emotions.