July 22, 2001

Romans 5:1-8

How Suffering Can Show Us God’s Love

  1. Introduction
    1. Illustration – Brent Curtis and John Eldridge, in The Sacred Romance, write, Have you ever had to turn a lover over to a mortal enemy to allow her to find out for herself what his intentions toward her really were? Have you ever had to lie in bed knowing she was believing his lies and was intimate with him every night? Have you ever sat helplessly by in a parking lot, while your enemy and his friends took advantage of your lover even as you sat nearby, unable to win her heart enough so she would trust you to rescue her? Have you every called this one you had loved for so long…and asked her if she was ready to come back to you only to have her say her heart was still captured by your enemy? Have you ever watched your lover’s beauty slowly fade in a haze of alcohol, drugs, occult practices, and infant sacrifice until she is not longer recognizable in body or soul? Have you ever loved one so much that you even sent your only son to talk with her about your love for her, knowing that he will be killed by her? All this and more God has endured because of his refusal to stop loving us.
    2. Context – God’s love for us, like His grace to us, is impossible for us to fully comprehend. But Paul made a pretty good attempt at explaining it, and that’s what we’re looking at today in Romans 5:1-8.
  1. Scripture Passage
    1. Romans 5:1-8 – Therefore, since we have been justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, 2 through whom we have gained access by faith into this grace in which we now stand. And we rejoice in the hope of the glory of God. 3 Not only so, but we also rejoice in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; 4 perseverance, character; and character, hope. 5 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. 6 You see, at just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly. 7 Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous man, though for a good man someone might possibly dare to die. 8 But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.
    2. Let’s try to unpack this a bit so that we can better understand this thing of God called love.
  1. Suffering and Love
    1. In verse one, Paul leads off with "therefore." He’s just finished writing about Abraham’s faith justifying him before God and being credited to him as righteousness. So Paul says, Therefore, since we have 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 we now stand. Faith is what God recognizes in us as our heartfelt attempt to believe Him and to receive His grace and love. Faith gets us off the hook that sin has left us hanging on. Faith is the only response to God’s grace and love that allows Him to forgive our sins. And without our sins standing between God and us, guess what? We’ve surrendered the fight to God, granting us peace with Him. The death of Jesus Christ on the cross means we don’t have to fight against God anymore, and since we’re no longer His enemies, faith lets us receive His grace. Now that is good news!
    2. Paul goes on – And we rejoice in the hope of the glory of God. Not only so, but we also rejoice in our sufferings… Now wait a minute! I can handle rejoicing in the hope we have of experiencing God’s glory when we leave this world. But rejoicing in sufferings almost seems perverse, almost like something only a sick mind would do, very contrary to our concept of love. And if we were to stop here, that would be true. But we have to go on – Not only so, but we also rejoice in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope. So there’s a purpose in the sufferings. According to Paul, the only way we can fully know the hope of the glory of God is to go through suffering.
    3. Larry Crabb, in his book Shattered Dreams, writes, The greatest blessing is no longer the blessing of a good life. It never was. It is now the blessing of an encounter with God. It always has been. But now, in the new way (what Crabb calls the New Covenant), the greatest dream is available. But we don’t view things that way. So God goes to work to help us see more clearly. One way He works is to allow our lower dreams (in other words, all other dreams than that of knowing Him) to shatter. He lets us hurt and doesn’t make it better. We suffer and He stands by and does nothing to help, at least nothing that we’re aware we want Him to do. In fact, what He’s doing while we suffer is leading us into the depths of our being, into the center of our soul where we feel our strongest passions. It’s there that we discover our desire for God… Through the pain of shattered lower dreams, we wake up to the realization that we want an encounter with God more than we want the blessings of life. And that begins a revolution in our lives. That’s why Paul can write so encouragingly about suffering. Because God transforms us through it so that we can be more like Him. And that’s why Paul can go on and write, 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.
    4. Suffering is the only way we can fully experience God’s love, because it’s the only way our hearts will be open enough for God to transform us so we can experience it. Through suffering we learn to persevere, to stick with it. Through persevering we learn to allow God to build in us godly character. And through the building of godly character we learn to hope when our circumstances tell us otherwise. Hope allows the love God has poured into us through the Holy Spirit to grow into a powerful, sacrificial love that transcends our circumstances. Suffering allows God to do all this.
    5. This illustration does more than anything else I’ve seen to convince me of God’s loving presence when I’m suffering and can’t seem to hear His voice. Len Sweet, in Postmodern Pilgrims, writes, Doctors see a lot of pain, some so severe that it can’t be relieved by medication. One doctor wrote to a magazine that he had seen a most unusual attempt to help the suffering: Today I visited an eight-year-old girl dying of cancer. Her body was disfigured by her disease and its treatment. She was in almost constant pain. As I entered her room, I was overcome immediately by her suffering – so unjust, unfair, unreasonable. Even more overpowering was the presence of her grandmother lying in bed beside her with her huge body embracing this precious, inhuman suffering. I stood in awe, for I knew I was on holy ground…the suffering of innocent children is horrifying beyond words. I will never forget the great, gentle arms and body of this grandmother. She never spoke while I was there. She was holding and participating in suffering that she could not relieve, and somehow her silent presence was relieving it. No words could express the magnitude of her love. God could relieve our suffering, but for our own good He chooses not to. He uses our suffering to transform us into a people who can fully know Him and experience His love.
  1. God’s Love
    1. After telling us about God’s purpose in suffering, Paul proceeds to tell us about His purpose in His Son’s suffering. Verse six: You see, at just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly. Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous man, though for a good man someone might possibly dare to die. But God demonstrated his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us. It’s easy to read verse six and think, "That’s nice. I know lots of people who are ungodly. I see them every day. I work with them every day." Paul goes along with us and points out our human reasoning – hardly anybody’s going to die for a righteous man – they’re religious fanatics! Maybe somebody would die for a really good guy, you know, like Kurt Warner or Reggie White or Cal Ripken Jr.
    2. But Paul then puts the nail in the coffin of our futile thinking: But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. Did you know that about the worst thing you could be called in first-century Jewish culture was a sinner? Those were the scum of the earth kind of people, the prostitutes, the thieves, the tax collectors. Sin made us the scum of the earth. Sin made us the rejects of eternity. Sin made us the hopeless ones. Sin made our sufferings pointless, but at just the right moment, when it seemed sin would swallow us whole, Jesus Christ died for us as a demonstration of God’s love for us. Suffering without Christ is meaningless, but suffering with Christ and for Christ allows God to show us the fullest riches of His love for us. The suffering of Christ allowed God to demonstrate His love for us.
    3. Hebrews 12:2 says, Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy set before him endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God. Jesus endured the cross – it wasn’t fun. In fact, as we already know in our heads, it was pure physical agony, not to mention God placing all the sin of mankind on Him and leaving Him hanging there. But "for the joy set before him" he endured it. What was that joy? There was joy in fulfilling His Father’s mission for Him. There was joy in freeing us from sin. But I believe there was also joy in showing us how much God loves us. There was also joy in knowing that our sufferings no longer have to be in vain. God’s love not only frees us from sin, but it also brings meaning to our suffering. And that’s some of the best news we could ever hear!
    4. Have you been having trouble believing God’s love for you? Have struggles and trials and suffering been causing you to doubt that love? Do God’s love and grace seem to you to be only a distant dream? Guess what? There’s hope. Hope because the faulty filters you’ve been using to process what you experience can be changed. So how do you change those filters? First, changing your filters is a choice. You have to made a conscious choice to change them. You have to decide that you will do whatever it takes to change those filters. Second, you have to pray earnestly and hard that God will help you change those filters. Pray that the Holy Spirit will help you recognize which filters are true to Him and His Word and which filters are not. Pray that He will protect you from Satan’s efforts to keep you using those faulty filters. Pray that Satan’s efforts in your life will be frustrated, because this is spiritual warfare of incredible importance. If Satan can rule our thought lives by controlling which filters we use, he has won. Don’t let him win! Pray hard! Third, every time you find yourself listening to an interpretation in your mind of a situation (which is what a filter is) that is contrary to what God’s Word says about you or about anything else, you have to mentally refuse to receive it. Say to yourself, "I refuse to receive these thoughts because they come straight from the pit of hell." That’s exactly where they come from! Straight from the father of lies! You have to diligent in doing this. You can’t let your guard down. The times I find myself in trouble are the times I let my guard down and start to believe those lies about myself. Refuse to receive and dwell on thoughts that you know are contrary to the Word of God! Refuse mentally to give them a foothold! And if you have to say that refusal out loud, do it! Take a stand and do whatever it takes to win this battle!
    5. Make the choice, pray hard, and refuse to receive those thoughts! You know what? It’s not too hard to do these three things for a few days, maybe even a week. Then we tend to slack off. Studies show that, in order to form a new habit, it takes six weeks of consistent effort. Then, while you still have to make conscious choices, it becomes more of an automatic response. So think of it this way, you could be six weeks away from a totally new way of thinking about yourself and about who God is. Six weeks can seem like a lot of time, but compared to eternity it’s peanuts! You could be only six weeks from seeing new meaning in suffering, from knowing more deeply and fully how much God loves you, from being free from those thought patterns that have kept your soul in bondage. God loves you more that you will ever know, and He wants to bring meaning to your suffering! When are you going to chose to do whatever it takes to let Him do that? When are you going to allow your suffering to draw you near to Him and to help you know Him better?
    6. Illustration – Jim Congdon writes, The most jarring TV commercial last fall didn’t say a word. It simply shows a series of people who have one thing in common – a nasty injury or scar. There’s a cowboy with a huge scar around his eye, and something wrong with the eye itself; a fellow with a bulbous cauliflower ear; another with horribly callused feet. There’s no explanation at all, simply the Nike swoosh and "Just Do It." The ad has been analyzed and criticized widely as being incomprehensible and extreme. But the key to the controversial commercial lies in the background music. Joe Cocker sings, "You are so beautiful…to me." To these athletes – the wrestler with the cauliflower ear, the surfer with the shark bite, the bullrider blind in one eye – their injuries are beauty marks. And to their fans, these athletes are beautiful because of their scars. "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder," says Mike Folino, the ad’s creator. God’s grace is just as jarring and controversial. Our beauty is found not in us, but in him. He looks down at us – injured, blind, and scarred – and sings, "You are so beautiful…to me."
  1. Conclusion
    1. Have you been having trouble believing God’s love for you? Have struggles and trials and suffering been causing you to doubt that love? Do God’s love and grace seem to you to be only a distant dream? Guess what? There’s hope. Hope because the faulty filters you’ve been using to process what you experience can be changed. Hope because God is allowing the suffering to take place in your life so that you can draw near to Him and know Him and love Him more fully. The only question is: how will you respond?
    2. With every head bowed and every eye closed, take a few minutes to allow the Holy Spirit to speak to you and show you His great love for you.
    3. Let’s pray.
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