Exposition of Romans 5:3-5

Welcome

Good morning everyone!

So nice to see all of you here today. I hope you have all been blessed in Christ this week and have come ready to worship God in the recognition that God is always good.

I want to welcome our guests with open hearts. We are very glad to have you with us to worship God. Please stick around for a moment if you can after service so we can say hi. And out in the hall there is a table with cards. We would love it if you could your name and any info you’re comfortable sharing and drop it in the trays on the back table. There are also other cards like our prayer request cards back there that you can fill out if there is any way you need us to stand with you in Christ.

As has been mentioned, we have our Spring church ministry meeting immediately after services. I have timed this to less than 15 minutes. And the purpose is to show you what’s on the horizon this spring for our church family. Everyone is welcome to stay.

Assignments

Romans 5:6-11.

Challenge

Be accessible to the community

Every month we have a new challenge that is meant to help facilitate the work of our church. In January it was “be unashamed of Christ.” In February it was “be unashamed of the gospel”. In March we were challenged to “internalize the Word”. And last month was to “create a friendship prayer list”.

This month I think our challenge is suitable because we’re coming into springtime.

We could easily live in this day and age almost completely isolated from the world. We could live in such a way that we don’t make ourselves available to the people around us. But that isn’t compatible with our calling to “love our neighbors”. So your challenge this month is to be accessible to your community. Pray on this. Apply your wisdom. And look for ways to make yourselves open to the community.

Our church is going to help you in this by creating our community garden, which we see as just one small way in which we can connect to and love our community.

So let’s get ready to get into our message for today.

Pause to Go Live > > >

Hope in the Glory of God

Welcome again and thank you for joining us today to celebrate the hope we have in the glory of God!

Our message today brings the story of Paul’s letter to the Christians in Rome to one of its key turning points. We don’t often pay attention to the story of Romans because Romans is not written in narrative form. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have a story. The story of Romans is that one of the most renowned apostles of the Christian Church is writing to a small band of disciples in one of the most powerful cities on earth. Their Jewish leadership was exiled by Emperor Claudius, leaving the Gentile Christians to reform and carry on the mission of the Church by themselves. Once the Jews were allowed to return to Rome, they found the Church they had left behind very much changed. Paul is writing into this chaos to people he doesn’t know in order to call them forward in the Kingdom mission of their Lord. In short, the story narrative illustrates how God takes diverse peoples and makes them one by transforming them into the image of his perfect Son through love. And so we find the tragedy of our human story is redeemed in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, in which we now share through faith.

Exegesis

Now let’s take a moment to make a couple brief observations about today’s text.

First, we’re continuing in the middle of Paul’s thought about the results of our being set right with God by trusting the love that has been proven to us in Jesus Christ. This is the first thought in his fourth argument (5:1-11). I think this is quite significant because Jesus’ good news reveals the quite shocking twist in God’s redemptive story that our salvation will not ultimately stand or fall by our own strength, but is, instead, secured by God’s divine love. And it is this love that has brought peace between God and humanity. This continuity is stressed by the phrase “And not only that, but we also” (v. 3). So we must endeavor to keep today’s message in sync with this thought.

Second, this thought is the cross-section of one of the major themes in Romans, which explores how fallen humanity can obtain the right to happily stand with confidence in God’s presence. After-all, we have offended God by doing the things that are evil in his sight. So how can we ever enjoy the bliss of being in his presence now that we have become his enemies? Paul answers this question in quite an unexpected way: he explains how the means by which we are set right now only allows us to celebrate our right to stand confidently in God’s presence, but is also, itself, a “call-to-action” for the Christians in Rome. “Yes”, he knows they are small in number and outcasts in Roman society. But how can those who stand confidently in the very presence of God fear mere mortals (even Caesar himself)? In other words, the evidence that they have come into God’s presence is seen in their confidence to carry out God’s mission for the Church irrespective of the troubles they face.

So now we’re ready to look closer at today’s message.

Romans 5:3 CSB

3 And not only that, but we also boast in our afflictions, because we know that affliction produces endurance,

“And not only that” (v. 3): Since we’re picking up in the middle of this thought, we need to reorient ourselves by asking to what does this refer? The “referent”, as scholars like to call it, is the Christian’s celebratory boast in the hope of God’s glory.

Romans 5:2 CSB

2 We have also obtained access through him by faith into this grace in which we stand, and we boast in the hope of the glory of God.

And you’ll notice that this hope in God’s glory is obtained through the grace of Christ’s peace by faith:

Romans 5:1 CSB

1 Therefore, since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.

So Paul means, not only do we boast the hope of God’s glory, but because of this hope, we even boast in our tribulations! So we not only have confidence to stand in the glory of God’s presence, but we also now have confidence to face all of life’s afflictions because we stand in God’s presence.

You can already hear the not so distant echoes of the new man:

Romans 8:31 CSB

31 What, then, are we to say about these things? If God is for us, who is against us?

“But we also boast in our afflictions” (v. 3): Immediately we start to recognize that the Christian idea of “hope” is not merely intellectual or even emotional. For, if that were the case, our hope would be very fragile and could be shaken the moment life wakes us up from our daydreams and crushes our hopes. But our hope is not composed of mere daydreams. Instead, we have hope that is secured by our experience of God, who is daily at work in our life. We’ll explore this thought in greater depth momentarily.

Now what kind of “boasting” is in mind here?

Well, first, we gain some valuable insights by reading other translations:

Romans 5:3 (NASB 2020)

3 And not only this, but we also celebrate in our tribulations...

Romans 5:3 (ESV)

3 Not only that, but we rejoice in our sufferings...

These translations bring out the functional nuance of these words in this context. We celebrate or rejoice even in the face of our terrible trials on this earth because of our hope in the glory of God. So this word, which formally refers to “boasting”, has the meaning in this context of celebrating in confidence. This is why I recommend reading across the spectrum of translations.

Briefly give some recommendations > > >

In other words, we’ve been developing the Christian idea of how fallen people obtain confidence in God’s holy presence.

Romans 2:17 CSB

17 Now if you call yourself a Jew, and rely on the law, and boast in God,

Paul began by challenging the idea that our confidence to enter God’s presence is obtained through our heritage or observance of the law. One of the many problems with these ideas is that Abraham himself had no special heritage and did not possess the law. So how was Abraham able to be right with God?

Romans 2:23 CSB

23 You who boast in the law, do you dishonor God by breaking the law?

Even more than this, everyone violates the law and proves themselves guilty in God’s sight. So how can guilty sinners obtain the joy of entering God’s holy presence in confidence when they violate the very thing in which they entrusted their confidence?

Romans 3:27 CSB

27 Where, then, is boasting? It is excluded. By what kind of law? By one of works? No, on the contrary, by a law of faith.

Since no one will be justified in God’s sight through the law because the law only exposes our guilt (3:20), and because the righteousness of God comes through faith (3:22), all boasting in ourselves is excluded by the law of faith since by this law our confidence to enter God’s presence with joy is established in Christ!

Romans 4:2 CSB

2 If Abraham was justified by works, he has something to boast about—but not before God.

You see? Even if our works gave us the right to boast before other fallen people, our guilt would still shame us before God. So there must be another way for fallen people to be reconciled to God. And there is! The good news of Jesus Christ loudly proclaims that peace is made between us and God through the resurrection power of his love. And by God’s grace we will unpack this last statement in far greater detail in chapters 6 and 8.

Romans 5:11 CSB

11 And not only that, but we also boast in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received this reconciliation.

And this develops the theme of how sinners are transformed by the grace of God and secured by the power of his resurrection so that our reconciliation to God does not depend on our unreliable strength, but, instead, is established in the faithfulness of Christ. So now we joyfully boast in God through our Lord Jesus Christ! And this transformation turns the human conception of righteousness upside down.

“But we also boast in our afflictions” (v. 3): Now we want to finish this thought. We want to bring our confident celebration in the hope of God’s glory into our present reality, where there is suffering and sorrow, affliction and distress, trouble and tribulation. Our hope is not composed of fleeting daydreams about better days. No, because then we would despair when our afflictions threatened the hope of better days! Instead, our hope in the glory of God is realized through the resurrection power of the Holy Spirit in our lives to such an extent that it causes us to celebrate with confidence even when we suffer various hardships in this life!

The word for afflictions is generalized and all encompassing. In other words, this isn’t a limited promise for hope only when we are persecuted because of Christ, though such persecutions certainly fall within this assurance. But this has in mind all of our present sufferings that trouble, afflict, and oppress our souls in this life.

Taken together, then, we have in Jesus the promise of a hope that gives us confidence to face even our worst trials.

“Because we know that affliction produces endurance” (v. 3): We can boast in our afflictions because we stand in the grace of God that produces endurance in us through the afflictions that we suffer. In other words, we know that the troubles we bear in this life are not the end of our story.

Now I think the point here is very difficult to understand when you are strong and have so much life in front of you to live. When you have your health and a reasonable expectation of more time, then you can go through many difficult tests because you know these difficulties will eventually end and you’ll have time and strength left to enjoy your life. But what if something threatened that confidence? Then such a person would be overcome by despair unless their confidence stands in something, or someone, other than themselves. And this is the good news of Jesus, that no matter where our “end” might be, we have a good future because of him!

But what is the reassurance of this hope? When the trials come, how are we reassured of this confidence that we have in Christ?

Our confidence in Christ is reassured by what he works in us through these trials.

When the heat of the day comes and blows upon the grass, it withers and fades away because it is temporary. But when gold is put into the heat of the furnace, it endures and is purified. “Endurance” reassures us through our trials because it proves what we are made of inside.

Romans 5:4 CSB

4 endurance produces proven character, and proven character produces hope.

“Endurance produces proven character” (v. 4): When we stand in the grace of Christ, we see in our life a steady progression in which God uses our sufferings for the same purpose as he gives us his own presence and love: to transform us into the new humanity that we were made to be.

And this introduces us to how God will set-right everything that has gone wrong because of our rebellion against him. What the Law could not do because of human weakness, God will do in us through the power of the Holy Spirit: he will transform our lives. And this personal transformation in our life is the reassurance of God working in us.

To understand this I want you to think about a young man named Ben:

This young man was the top of his class. He excelled in every subject and was the standard his teachers compared other student to. He rose quickly and began winning national academic competitions. So he was granted a full scholarship to a prestigious university abroad. But with every new accomplishment came a new sense of emptiness. Ben couldn’t concentrate on anything. He was smart enough that this didn’t really impact his studies. But it meant that he couldn’t ever truly enjoy anything in life. He was just moving through life like a ghost. Never really touching or experiencing anything. Life was empty.

Then this young man became deathly sick. His young body was inexplicably stricken. He had to return home from his prestigious university. The doctors could do nothing, and everything they tried to do only made him worse.

Even though Ben’s family was Buddhist, he had been taught about Jesus by his English teacher and was able to attend church at his university. His faith was real, but up until this point in his life, his faith never produced anything tangible, and so it left his life relatively unaffected.

Over the course of the next few years as this young man’s health declined and he became bedridden, his faith produced endurance. As his dreams for this world began to fade, Ben discovered the concentration of suffering. He began to be transformed by the grace of God into the similitude of Christ. And the authenticity of his transformation was proven by how he endured his suffering.

This is the true story of a young man I know abroad. I preached the gospel to him in my English class when he was just a little teenager. I didn’t know that he believed Jesus until much later when I found out that he returned from college sick.

Ben speaks often about what he calls “the concentration of suffering”. He talks about how suffering will either strip someone of everything that mattered in life to them, or, it will bring them closer to what matters most to them. If what matters most to them are things that can be taken away from them, then suffering will take everything away from them. But, when God is the sum of your joy, then suffering merely focuses your concentration on him.

“And proven character produces hope” (v. 4): I think it is this concentration of suffering that exponentially amplifies our hope in Christ. The more our old person fades away, and the more the new is realized in our life, the brighter our hope for Christ becomes. In this personal transformation, we begin to truly experience Christ through faith. We realize in our life the promises of God made through Christ, and find the real communion of the Holy Spirit.

So this introduces us to how Christians are meant to engage the afflictions of this world:

Romans 12:12 CSB

12 Rejoice in hope; be patient in affliction; be persistent in prayer.

Hope gives us access to joy.

Patience allows us to navigate our afflictions in the joys of hope.

And through all of this we are reassured by God in prayer.

Romans 5:5 CSB

5 This hope will not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured out in our hearts through the Holy Spirit who was given to us.

“This hope will not disappoint us” (v. 5): All kinds of people from different backgrounds, faiths, and beliefs have found different ways to endure hardships with hope for the future. So we want to be clear that the kind of hope in mind here, is not merely the kind of hope that will keep you afloat through the storm so that you can move on with your life when the storm is over. No. Because that kind of hope will ultimately fail since it delivers nothing more than getting one through the storm.

The point of “hope” isn’t just to get you through the storm; it’s to realize the reality of which you hoped!

Hope that merely gets you through the storm but does not bring you to what you hoped is false hope. And hope that gets you through one storm but fails you in the end is disappointing hope.

Instead, because the basis for our hope is in the one who has already conquered the grave and, in so doing, has proven God’s steadfast love to us, we rejoice in the confidence that his grace with both get us through the storms of life, and, even more importantly, bring us into the glory of his presence!

“Because” (v. 5): And how can we know that we won’t be disappointed? How do we know that our hope isn’t just another crutch like everyone else’s, which may help us get through hard times, but which will ultimately disappoint us?

“God’s love has been poured out” (v. 5): We have not been asked to stand on the clouds, but upon the rock of Jesus Christ! To often the Christian faith is presented as mere intellectual ascendance, as nothing more than a string of theologies that we have arranged to produce some kind of coherent worldview. No! The Christian faith is the real proof of God’s love!

Hebrews 11:1 CSB

1 Now faith is the reality of what is hoped for, the proof of what is not seen.

God’s love proves the reality we hope for in Christ. And this reality is accessed now through faith. How many times have you responded to God’s leading in your life and seen his love poured out before you? How many times has God’s love been your sole hope in life? To the point that you were up against the wall and had no where to go, and then God’s love shows up and is poured out just in time.

This points us forward:

Romans 5:8 CSB

8 But God proves his own love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.

This is why I’ve been using the phrase that “Jesus proved the love of God to us”. Jesus’ death upon the cross proved beyond any doubt the faithful love of God for us even while we were still sinners! He did this so that we could be assured of what we hope for in Christ.

“In our hearts” (v. 5): I’m taking aim at intellectualism right now, not because I’m against using mind, reason, logic, and serious study to pursue God, but because these things in isolation are insufficient for our calling in Christ. Where is the love of God poured out for us? Upon the cross? Yes. But even more than this. “In our hearts”!

Every person’s heart is different in the way that they experience things like “love”, “joy”, and “hope”. Some people are more emotionally expressive. Others are “deep feelers”. But the point is that the love of God is tangibly poured out in our hearts.

We see this later on in our spirit’s response:

Romans 8:15 CSB

15 For you did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear. Instead, you received the Spirit of adoption, by whom we cry out, “Abba, Father!”

You see? There arises deep within us a response to the love of Christ that compels our whole life towards him. “Faith” is not simply an intellectual conviction, but a whole-being response to God. And part of “faith” is the evidence within of what is unseen - the very thing we hope for in Christ.

“Through the Holy Spirit” (v. 5): Now we encounter the ministry of the Holy Spirit and see that his ministry is to bring to fruition the new person that is born from the resurrection of Jesus Christ. So the ministry of the Holy Spirit is where we realize in us the realities of the new creation and the fruits of the resurrection. This is what I refer to when I use the phrase “the communion of the Holy Spirit”.

Jesus sends the Spirit to give us what is his:

John 16:14 CSB

14 He will glorify me, because he will take from what is mine and declare it to you.

What we discover is that the real love that Jesus displayed on the cross is now to be realized within our hearts through the ministry of the Holy Spirit.

All of what we have been saying here is very much echoed by the apostle Peter’s writings:

Briefly expound as you go > > >

1 Peter 1:3–9 CSB

3 Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. Because of his great mercy he has given us new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead 4 and into an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for you. 5 You are being guarded by God’s power through faith for a salvation that is ready to be revealed in the last time. 6 You rejoice in this, even though now for a short time, if necessary, you suffer grief in various trials 7 so that the proven character of your faith—more valuable than gold which, though perishable, is refined by fire—may result in praise, glory, and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ. 8 Though you have not seen him, you love him; though not seeing him now, you believe in him, and you rejoice with inexpressible and glorious joy, 9 because you are receiving the goal of your faith, the salvation of your souls.

We so often shortchange the ministry of the Holy Spirit. But what we discover is that all of these things that Peter and Paul are talking about are realized through the Holy Spirit! He is the difference in the Christian’s life because, as we’ll find out in chapter 8, he does in us what the law was powerless to do because it could not change who we are (but he can).

“Who was given to us” (v. 5): Now I want you to let this statement really sink in: we’re not told simply that he has been “sent to us”, nor just that he “comes to us” or “among us”. While all of these are also true, this says a great deal more. The Holy Spirit was “given to us”. So what does that mean?

One way to answer this question is to consider the promise of the Holy Spirit:

Ezekiel 36:26–27 CSB

26 I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit within you; I will remove your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. 27 I will place my Spirit within you and cause you to follow my statutes and carefully observe my ordinances.

God promised Israel to give them a new living heart and place in them his Spirit in order to enliven them to his righteousness.

So the Holy Spirit is given within the covenant promise of God:

Acts 2:38–39 CSB

38 Peter replied, “Repent and be baptized, each of you, in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. 39 For the promise is for you and for your children, and for all who are far off, as many as the Lord our God will call.”

Another way to answer this question is to look at the relationship of the Holy Spirit:

Ephesians 4:30 CSB

30 And don’t grieve God’s Holy Spirit. You were sealed by him for the day of redemption.

The Holy Spirit is given to us in the manner of a relationship whereby we can grieve him. We can live in such a manner that we inflict pain and suffering on the one Promised to us. So he is given to us in such a way that requires a relationship.

For that reason we have fellowship with him:

2 Corinthians 13:13 CSB

13 The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all.

I think this is what makes Paul’s comments about walking in the Holy Spirit possible:

Galatians 5:16 CSB

16 I say, then, walk by the Spirit and you will certainly not carry out the desire of the flesh.

Far too often we interpret this as walking in some kind of impersonal force or feeling rather than in the context of walking in a relationship with someone. But I think the paradigm of a relationship explains what it means for the Holy Spirit to be given to us.

So we receive the Holy Spirit in a covenant relationship.

What this tells us, then, is that the love of God that is poured out in our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us is experienced within the relationship we have with the Holy Spirit. The extent, then, to which one realizes the love of God in their life is the extent to which they walk in relationship with the Holy Spirit.

Hope That Will Not Disappoint

The story of Romans illustrates how God takes diverse peoples and makes them one by transforming them into the image of his perfect Son through love, which they experience in real relationship with him by the Holy Spirit he gives to us. And so we find the tragedy of our human story is redeemed in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, in which we now share by the Holy Spirit through faith.

We discover in the good news of Jesus that God is working out of our brokenness an eternal weight of glory through his love for us. Day by day you traverse life’s course. But you do not traverse life’s course alone. You walk through life rejoicing in the very presence of God. So now even our worst afflictions produce in us the proof of Christ’s victory upon the cross.

Next week we will finish the thought by looking at the reality of our reconciliation to God, which is the basis for the confidence we just described in these last two weeks.