How to Have Hope in Trying Times

Introduction

Last week we looked at three benefits of our salvation. You could summarize those benefits with words like peace, grace, joy, hope and glory. Those words sound like a perfect idyllic picture of what life should be like, but that is not the whole picture. Paul just spoke of Hope, but what is the number one reason why people lose hope? Is it not the pressures, difficulties and trials of our lives today that crowd out the hope we have for the future. Who cares about what things are going to be like tomorrow when I can’t feed my kids today! Life throws a lot of things at us that make it hard to hope.

A new mother is not used to a screaming child and she is on her last nerve. She feels like it will never end.

A man has been out of work for months now and it seems like no one is hiring. He has scrapped along, but he doesn’t know what he is going to do tomorrow.

An older lady sits in her room looking out the window. It has been weeks since anyone visited her and the loneliness is stifling.

A young couple has tried to be financially responsible but every step forward they take something happens that puts then two steps backward. Now the debt is pilling up and they don’t know what to do.

The list could go on and in these moments the solution to their problems is more than just hope, but the loss of hope makes it impossible to bear. Without hope, we give up. Might as well just let life crush me because I can’t do anything about it. We stop striving and fighting for life. Life loses its delight. Without hope, we become bitter. Hopelessness makes us angry and when anger sits in our hearts long enough it makes us bitter. When we feel powerless, like there is no hope of enacting change, we lash out.

With everything that Paul faced in his ministry, it would be understandable if he lost hope, but in

2 Corinthians 4:8–10 “We are troubled on every side, yet not distressed; we are perplexed, but not in despair; Persecuted, but not forsaken; cast down, but not destroyed; Always bearing about in the body the dying of the Lord Jesus, that the life also of Jesus might be made manifest in our body.”

Everywhere he went, he faced trouble; but it didn’t let him crush him, life confused him, but it didn’t drive him to despair, they were opposed by others, but they remained confident that God had not abandoned them, He was down like a wrestler on the ground but not yet pined. How could Paul maintain hope in trying circumstances?

In vs 3, Paul says we glory in tribulations- These tribulations speak of the pressures of life. Those things which if we are not careful can harden our heart. But Paul not only is not cowed by those trials; rather, he glories in them. He rises triumphant over them. Today’s message is really Part two in our series on the benefits of justification, but I am titling it How to have Hope in Trying Times. So here is the benefit Paul says we have as believers: we can have hope even when life isn’t hopeful. What hope really does the lost person have when they have no guarantee that things will ever get any better? But for the believer we have something they don’t have. This is why Paul can say we don’t sorrow as those who have no hope.

Knowing The Benefits of Trials

Trials show that God is at work even now to accomplish this glory in my life.

The Hope of Glory that we talked about last week. That is all future tense. The reality of that hope is still to come. I have not been made perfect yet, Jesus has not come again, sin and suffering have not been abolished in our world. So how can I have hope today?

Knowing- this is the key word. Knowing that it isn’t all for nothing helps. It is easier to bear a burden when you know its going to produce something good. Think about a wife who is pregnant for nine months. She faces some discomfort, struggles, even hormone issues and then the excruciating pain of labor, but she bears it because she knows in the end she will have a child. James talks about trials in the first chapter, but notice how he begins in James 1:3 “Knowing this, that the trying of your faith worketh patience.” Here in Romans it is a factual knowledge. Hope starts with knowing some truths because hope is a battle for the mind. The mind reminds us that the circumstances are dark. The mind tells us lies that nothing will ever change. But hope shines through when you have some truths to fall back on. In James, it is an experiential knowledge. This kind of knowledge comes from having been through trials in the past and experienced that God got you through them. So if we are going to have hope in trying times: we must first know some biblical truth and remember our past experience with God.

The truth we need to know here is that trials are part of God working in me today. God’s work of perfecting me is not only future. He is at work now. Trials produce patience or the word here means endurance. If life is handed to you on a silver platter, you never learn to face difficult circumstances. Trials harden us up a little so we can face what life throws at us. For the Christian, it prepares us to endure in a godly way the trials of our lives. Now you can fail that test and handle the trials wrongly and that trains you in a different direction. In music lessons, we often say practice doesn’t make perfect it makes permanent. If you practice the wrong response pattern, it will cement that wrong response into your life. But the Christian doesn’t have to live like that. They can endure.

Endurance produces experience. This word experience speaks of a tested and tried character.

1 Peter 1:6–7 “Wherein ye greatly rejoice, though now for a season, if need be, ye are in heaviness through manifold temptations: That the trial of your faith, being much more precious than of gold that perisheth, though it be tried with fire, might be found unto praise and honour and glory at the appearing of Jesus Christ:”

Here Peter speaks of our lives being like gold that is tried in a fire. When you put metals through a smelting process, the impurities are worked out and what you have is purer than what it started as. Trials not only produce endurance, but they produce a tried character.

Tried character produces hope. How is this true? Going back to our point, the very fact that I am going through a trial means God is working on me. And if God is working on me, he is produces something great. Also if he is working on me, then that means he has not abandoned me. He is here with me know. Isaiah 43:2 “When thou passest through the waters, I will be with thee; And through the rivers, they shall not overflow thee: When thou walkest through the fire, thou shalt not be burned; Neither shall the flame kindle upon thee.”

Trials are an opportunity for me to experience God’s love in my life.

Hope doesn’t make ashamed- this phrase means that I won’t be disappointed because of my hope. When I was a kid, my parents would sometimes make plans that I would get really excited about. Once I was supposed to have a special surgery in Tokyo and we had started planning some of the things we would do in Tokyo. But one day, the trip got cancelled; they did the surgery on base and I was disappointed because I didn’t get to do all the things I had planned on doing.

God’s hope doesn’t disappoint. It is during those times in our lives, that we often experience God in the deepest ways. It is possible for a Christian to grow in the good times, but most Christians grow the most during the hard times. It is then that they find God to be what he said he was. Think about most of the psalms. These experiential songs were often written during trying times. In fact over 1/3 of the psalms were laments.

Paul says hope doesn’t disappoint because the love of God is shed abroad in our hearts- In some way, I experience God’s love in a deeper way when I am tried and find hope in God. As we will see in the next verse this is a subjective experience here. But without those trials, I wouldn’t have been able to see God provide. Without those trials I wouldn’t know just how much God cares about my life. Without those trials, God would have had no need to comfort and strengthen me. I can be sure that God won’t disappoint my hope because of God loves me.

Experiencing the Love of God

If the love of God is so essential to rejoicing in hope during my trials, I need to know that he loves me. How do I know God loves me? Really the question is how do I know anyone loves me? If I want to know whether my wife loves me, how would I know that?

She says she does

She shows affection physically

She wants to be around me

She talks to me

She does things for me

Teenagers, here is a wise piece of advice: don’t assume someone loves you if they never said they did. Also don’t just assume they love you merely because they say they do. But words and actions together confirm how someone feels about you. So here’s the question, If the experience of God’s love is why I should have confidence that God won’t disappoint my hope, then how do I know that God loves me?

Two Ways to know God Loves Me

He has give me the Holy Spirit (subjective)

Christ’s death on the cross (objective)

The first evidence we see that hope will not disappoint is the subjective experience of God’s love for us. This must be God’s love for us not our love for God because it is shed abroad or given to us by the Holy Spirit. Romans 5:5 “And hope maketh not ashamed; because the love of God is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost which is given unto us.”

The Holy Spirit makes us deeply and refreshingly aware that God loves us- John Stott

This is an experience that all Christians have this though there are varying degrees of it. A believer may have waves of life where God’s love is more clear, more felt in our lives; but in those moments of salvation, God allows us to experience his love in a unique way. Paul makes this statement as if it were the common experience of every Christian. He states it as a matter of fact: the love of God is shad abroad. And whatever, this experience is, it is something the Holy Spirit does for us.

So the Holy Spirit reminds us of God’s love. The Holy causes us to be assured of God’s love for us in those moments when we are tempted to lose hope the most. Some have made the assumption that people who have gone through traumatic experiences in life cannot experience God’s love. I do not believe this to be true and more than I believe just because you had a good life makes you more aware of God’s love. This is a supernatural work of the Holy Spirit in our lives.

The second reason I know god loves me is the objective work of Christ on the cross for my sins. Vs 6-8 detail this love. Another reason for believing this is God’s love for us is the fact that Paul proves it with Christ’s example. Some have tried to separate fact and experience as if they are two separate things, but what we see here is that my experience is mediated or produced through the revealed facts of scripture. I experience this feeling of God’s love the more I am assured of the scriptural truth of what Christ did for me. So the two work hand in hand.

The depth of love can be seen in how great the gift was and in how unworthy the recipients are.

powerless vs6

ungodly vs 6

sinners vs 8

enemies vs 10

Logic of vs 6-8

Human love will motivate someone to give their life for a “good” person

Christ died not for good people, but for rebellious underserving people

God’s love is greater than any love that mankind can experience

Conclusion

So let’s tie this together. How can I say All believers can find hope in tribulations? The benefit of justification is in this knowledge that God is not wasting our suffering and it is in the experience and knowledge of God’s love. These are things every Christian has. God is not just at work in one Christians life to perfect him and not another. God is and will sanctify every one of us. We also see that Jesus proved his love by dying for everyone of us and every believer has this proof of God’s love through the subjective experience of God’s love poured out in our hearts by the Holy Spirit.

So that means every one of us can have hope even in the trying times of our lives if we will avail ourselves of that hope. Here is where it gets practical: In those hopeless moments, I am engaged in a battle for hope and I don’t have to lose that battle. I could give in and climb into my dark hole or I can use the weapons God has given me to fight for hope. I gave you two this morning:

Know somethings about why God allows these trials in my life. That is going to take conscious effort to change my thinking, to renew my mind. You can’t sit there and entertain the hopeless thoughts. Remember that your pain is not pointless and your suffering is not insurmountable.

Draw closer to God and experience his love- this builds off of the knowledge because our experience of God’s love is produced by the Spirit as we meditate on the truth of God’s love. You will never find hope if you run away or shut God out of your life.