Rejoicing through Suffering

Introduction

There are few things that amaze more than seeing someone who is truly gifted who gets in the zone. Do you know what I mean when I am talking about the zone? It’s that state where your mind is able to be totally focused on the task at hand, you ignore all distractions, and you work at peak efficiency. I have seen any number of athletes in my time enjoying sports that I could bore you with, but there is nothing like being an athlete, and being in that zone.

But athletics isn’t the only place that you see people enter such a zone. Those who respond to crises, or who fight in wars and conflicts, can also testify of a moment when all your senses focus in, when all the distractions and petty problems of the day seem to not exist, and you focus on one thing: survival. Your goal is to make it through, or to do your job, and all of the things that seem to complicate life become far less important when compared to the serious things that lie ahead.

I have seen this with spouses in hospital rooms. I’ve seen it with people saying goodbye to a child. I’ve seen it in crisis, and tragedy, and I’ve experienced in my own life as I wrestled with a sorrow that tempted to drown me. What do all these things have in common? When challenge and hardship come into our lives, it causes us to not only focus, but to return to the things that truly matter. Spurgeon, writing about the Christian’s need for suffering, writes it this way: “When he is going along smoothly he wants this and that comfort; he is aspiring after this position, or wanting to obtain this and that elevation. But let him once doubt his interest in Christ - let him once get into some soul distress and trouble, so that it is very dark - and all he will feel then is, “I desire you with all my soul in the night” (quoting Isa. 26:9). In other words, in suffering, we as Christians are, or at least ought to be, prone to run back to the very basics of our salvation.

But as we discussed last week, we are in a Christian culture that is functionally illiterate. We may know some facts about the Christian life, and sometimes we may even know more than most, but generally speaking we can often live our lives without much thinking about how understanding doctrine impacts our daily life.

Paul’s desire in this section is to show us how the doctrine of justification by faith provides us stability, safety and security in the Christian life. Last week, we examined the first three benefits of justification that help provide that confidence for us. Today, we will examine a fourth - we who are justified can have hope and joy even in suffering.

But how? How on earth can we find joy when we are fumbling in the darkness? As Paul gives us this truth of justification, he provides for us three steps we can take as we seek to rejoice in suffering. Because ultimately, that is our work: to rejoice in suffering. Let’s examine this text together, going step by step, and then seeking to put these things into practice.

Three action steps to find joy in suffering:

1 - Return to the basics of your salvation

Romans 5:3 (ESV)

Not only that, but we rejoice in our sufferings,

Excellence in anything, whether it be your job, or a sport, or even in understanding doctrine, begins with having a thorough and complete understanding of the very basics, and continuously putting those basics into practice. If I want to get good at hitting a baseball, I have to work on mechanics of my swing constantly. If I want to get good at playing an instrument, I have to work on the basics of that instrument, and of musical scales. If I want to improve at this whole following Jesus thing, I have to constantly go back to the basics. This is especially true in suffering, when I am confused about a great many things, and I’m prone to wonder what is even true. It is in those moments that my understanding of the Gospel must be sound, and I must be quick to run back to those things which are absolute certainties.

Remember Romans 5:2 and we rejoice in hope of the glory of God.”

another of those “But wait, there’s more!” moments.

not only do we rejoice in the hope of eternity, but we rejoice now, when eternity seems forever away. The song we led off with today - we rejoice in the land that is plentiful, where His streams of abundance flow; AND we rejoice in the desert place, when we are lost in the wilderness.

One of my favorite examples of how we see this at work: Acts 5. The disciples are arrested for preaching and persecution begins in Jerusalem. They respond with “we must obey God rather than man.” They were beaten, charged to not preach again, and threatened. Their response? Acts 5:41

Acts 5:41 ESV

Then they left the presence of the council, rejoicing that they were counted worthy to suffer dishonor for the name.

How? How after beating and persecution could they rejoice that they were counted worthy to suffer dishonor for the name?

Or, one closer to home - I sat with a dear friend at Panera, who was preparing to have heart surgery that had about a 50/50 survival rate. He loves Jesus, loved life. His words to me “this is the day that the Lord has made, I will rejoice and be glad in it.” Ps. 118:24.

What is the key? This word that we use - “rejoice.” It carries the meaning of “boasting,” just like before. But this can’t simply mean that we brag about our suffering, can it? It sounds absurd for us to walk around saying “man, I am suffering so much! You just wouldn’t believe it!”

But it’s a bit deeper and more lasting than that. Really break down the word “rejoice.” It’s a “re” word, indicating something we do again, right? Like “refinish” or “redo” or, for those of us from a different generation “rewind.” Thinking about it this way, what is the word rejoice?

We return to our source of joy. To re-joice is to joy again! And that is the key that unlocks the door of making sense why suffering is allowed in the Christian life. When we suffer, we are either given something we don’t want, or something we desire is taken away. To rejoice in these times is to go back to our true source of joy! And what is that source of joy? Well, we discussed it last wee:

We have peace with God!

We have access to God!

We have the hope of glory!

See, suffering forces us to move. Either 1. we move to the end of our selves, away from our true source of hope and deeper into hopelessness, or 2. we return to our source of joy.

We see this in our toddlers, right? Their independence and confidence to walk on their own only lasts so long as they are not hurting or afraid. But when either of these things happen, they come back to their parent!

Suffering returns us to our source of joy - what Christ has done! At its core, that is what it means to re-joice in suffering. To return to the essence, the very heartbeat of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. We have peace with God! And when we do this, we have that hope of the glory of God. and with that hope, we can do something with our suffering.

2 - Remember what suffering is producing

Romans 5:3–4 (ESV)

knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope,

Think back to the sermon from a few weeks ago, when we heard about Martin Lloyd-Jones referring to suffering as “God’s gymnasium.” There aren’t many people who will endure the pain of fitness if they don’t perceive some benefit from it.

The most hopeless feeling in the world - thinking that our suffering is meaningless or pointless. Here, Paul is telling us not only that our suffering is doing something, he is telling what it is doing, and how it is doing it!

“In this world you will have trouble” - we keep saying it because we need to be reminded of it. Trouble is a certainty. Tribulation is a promise. In fact, the idea of a Christian, pain-free existence is frankly terrifying to me, for so many reasons. The primary reason? Because seasons of suffering mark points of maturity.

So, how is suffering producing maturity?

Suffering produces the endurance the Christian life requires - “A long obedience in the same direction.”

The Christian life requires endurance. We will encounter many Mark 4:5 people in our journey towards the celestial city: Mark 4:5

Mark 4:5 ESV

Other seed fell on rocky ground, where it did not have much soil, and immediately it sprang up, since it had no depth of soil.

But bearing fruit requires endurance. Fruit trees require deep roots to bear good fruit. And good roots take time.

There are no shortcuts for endurance - it takes suffering and time. Thinking about it as a math problem, which is a real joy for me, we could say it this way:

Difficulty + time = endurance.

At least for us as men, part of maturity into Christian manhood is for God to drive the quit out of the heart of his men. Almost every young man I have ever encountered is born with a streak of quit. And so, men simply must experience suffering because endurance is a necessary component of Christian manhood! (probably true of womanhood too, by the way)

The temptation of the human heart: “It’s hard. I quit.” If this is your heart, you will never find any contentment in relationships, in finding a church, in keeping a job or anything else! If we will have contentment in Christ, we must have endurance. And endurance is produced according to the math problem we just did - Endurance + time = endurance.

2. Endurance produces character - maturity. Every Christian desires maturity. However, far fewer Christians are willing to endure what is required for that maturity. There are some things that don’t equal maturity, that are worth discussing:

Zeal does not equal maturity - being passionate about God is great, but passion wanes. Being zealous for Christ is a great thing, but that alone does not make anyone mature. Again, think about the seed on rocky soil - these people spring up quick, seem to grow super fast, take on a hundred things, then burn out and fade away. Simply being zealous is not maturity.

Time as a Christian does not equal maturity - there are a great many old spiritual infants in this world. And it is tragic. Growing old in Christ and growing up in Christ are not the same!

Brains do not equal maturity - we can learn a great many things about God, and still not be mature in Christ.

All these things are helpful! But none of them are truly maturity. The word we translate maturity simply means “proof.” There is a word picture at play here. When gold was refined, it was super heated to remove the worthless things, known as dross. When wheat was sifted to be used, they would throw the wheat in the air, and the grains would fall to the ground and the chaff would be carried away by the wind. In both of these pictures, this is what it means to be “proven.” That is character - to be tested and found to be who you claim to be.

This is why, as a pastor, the single most encouraging thing for me to see is people stick it out through conflict, through disappointment, through uncertainty. Why? Because stick-it-outedness is an evidence of Christian maturity. This is character! The very essence of character - Hellen Keller’s quote: “Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, ambition inspired, and success achieved.”

This is why when Paul writes his instructions to Timothy in 1 Timothy 3 about those who are qualified to pastor and deacon, he says that pastors ought not be “new converts” and that deacons should first be “tested.” That word “tested” is the same word that Paul is equating as the fruit of endurance through suffering. In other words, suffering is one of the things that qualify a man to lead the church of Christ. And it is also a warning - a life of leadership, in any capacity, is a life of suffering, because suffering is a necessity in creating character.

To desire a life of ease is to desire a lack of character, whether we realize it or not. Because suffering produces endurance, and enduring through our suffering produces character, and that character? It produces hope.

3. Character produces hope - and now, we come full circle. In verse 2, we hope in the glory of God. And now, through suffering, we hope in the glory of God! There is a cycle of sanctification that is at work here, and in that circle we can apply some of what we learned through our last series: (go to powerpoint slide at this point)

- hope: beginning with hope, in the glory of God. We have peace with God!

when suffering happens, we rejoice! We return to our source of joy - Christ Himself. And so we can say:

“I wait for the Lord, my soul waits, and in His Word I hope” Just like Ps. 130 that we studied together

“Whom have I in heaven but you?” from Ps. 139.

Rejoicing leads us think about what is happening here - our suffering is doing something! It is producing endurance

That says, as our Lord in Gethsemane “not my will, but Yours be done.”

That says, like Job “though He slay me, yet I will praise Him.”

This endurance produces character. A character that can come to the rescue in our despair and remind us

“All this happened to teach us not to rely on ourselves but on God who raises the dead.” 2 Cor. 1.

And that Character? It produces hope! And the cycle starts again. And that is how I can say, with a clean conscience, that no suffering is pointless - it is ALL doing something! Those cycles of doubt or depression? They are doing something? Those years of declining health and physical pain? They are doing something! Those times of grief and loss are doing something! And THIS IS WHAT THEY ARE DOING!

No pain is pointless. And that alone is something to rejoice about. But wait, there’s more! We have returned to the basics, and so re-joiced; we have remembered what our suffering is producing, and now? We can rely on the glorious presence of the Holy Spirit.

3 - Rely on the goodness of the Holy Spirit

Romans 5:5 ESV

and hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.

I have never been much for working with clay, but it is a fascinating practice. I couldn’t help but think through this process, of suffering producing endurance producing character producing hope, that through suffering God is patiently fashioning us into a vessel for His service, just as the potter patiently works with clay.

It’s like the suffering we experience in this life is the kind, yet firm hands of our Father, gently pushing us, molding us through great patience, to make us into what he wants. And as he does so, we become a vessel equipped to handle this great promise that sends us home at the end of this sermon. Through suffering, our hearts become vessels into which God’s love is poured.

Any number of us can testify to never experiencing the love of God like when we have gone through abject hardship and suffering. God uses these times to remind us of our dependence on Him, and when we confess our dependence on Him, we feel the filling of our lives by His love.

Our bodies are built to tell us when we need water. The feeling of thirst is built to remind us that we need to be filled by water in order to function as intended. The hope we have in Christ, even in the midst of suffering, never puts us to shame because we who have been fashioned by the Master also have been filled by Him.

And that is the what the Comforter does - He strengthens us, He sustains us. He reminds us of God’s love for His children. He opens our minds to His Word. God in His mercy has given us Christ, the Word, and the Spirit, and He brings all three to bear to produce godliness in his suffering servant.

And so we rejoice in suffering, when the world around us quits, or walks away from, or rejects, the true hope found in Christ. We endure, and persevere, when all we see is darkness. We face persecution, trial nakedness and sword because we have the one thing that the world doesn’t have - the Holy Spirit, the very presence of God dwelling in our hearts.

What is Romans 5:3-5 telling me to do?

Examine what is happening in your life: it is not by accident, and it’s purpose is to produce hope.

This doesn’t always feel like a happy answer to our question “why is this happening to me,” but it is the only truly good one. Saint, listen: God loves you enough to do whatever it takes to conform you to the image of Christ. And that conformity will involve suffering.

It comes back to those words of Jesus in Mark 8: “whoever wishes to follow me must deny himself, take up his cross and follow me.” Taking up our cross will, and must, involve a measure of suffering. The question that we must strive to answer is: is it worth it? Paul wants us to answer that question with a resounding yes, because in 5 verses he has laid out for us the glorious benefits of justification:

We have peace with God - even when we don’t feel at peace with the world around us.

We have access to speak with our Father and make our requests known to Him

We have hope that no matter how painful and hard this world gets, there is a glorious and beautiful end that awaits us.

And not only that, we have the certainty that the pain, the difficulty, the hardship that we experience in this world isn’t senseless, fruitless, or meaningless. It is doing something. It is actually producing more hope in us. According to Paul, hope is both the parent and the child of hope. Hope gives birth to more hope, through suffering.

And so, even in suffering, and especially in suffering, we return to our source of joy. And all this is our source of joy! Whatever you are dealing with, and wherever you are, is not by accident. You are precisely where you are, if you are God’s child, because He desires to first humble, and then teach you as He conforms you to His will.

No suffering is neutral in our lives - it drives the children of God closer to God, or we run farther from our only source of hope. But one thing suffering does: it moves us. Which way is your suffering moving you today, friends? Run to the Father. You have access because you have peace with God.

2. Trust in the suffering servant Jesus. The pain you are experiencing in your life may be meant to drive you to God for the first time. Maybe life is really hard for you right now, so that you will wake up, repent of sin and trust Christ. My prayer is that today will be that day. That you will see the utter futility in spending your life waging war against God, and then trying to run from His presence. Lay down your arms, submit to Him, trust in Christ, and be saved. Would you trust Him today?

Benediction: James 1:2-4

James 1:2–4 ESV

Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds, for you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness. And let steadfastness have its full effect, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing.