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Let's pray together.
Father, sometimes we would just rather not be challenged.
We would just rather really be conveniently comfortable and yet as the lady saying
earlier, Father, you do shake us.
You shake us out of patterns and out of routines with which we have become comfortably comfortable.
And you push us out into new territory because it's in being pushed out into new territory.
Where, Lord, we discover a fresh, how all sufficient you are to whatever you need.
Help us always to be willing to submit to that discipline and help us to know Lord that
you will never give us more than what you equip us to handle.
And that one we've come through the fire and when we've come through the testing, we
will be stronger than we were ever before because your fire is not designed to destroy,
but only to purify and to claim and to make us need.
Help us therefore, Lord, to submit to you, to submit to your word, and help us, Lord,
to know that all your ways are truth and righteousness and love.
Bless your word, apply it to our lives, help us to live it.
We ask it together in the name of Jesus.
Amen.
Brothers and sisters in the Lord, Paul starts Romans chapter 5.
You will recall with this threefold declaration of the riches that we have through faith
in Jesus Christ.
Number one, He says we have peace with God.
Number two, He says we have access to this grace in which we stand.
And then He says number three, we rejoice in our hope of sharing the glory of the Lord.
And having thus outlined some of the basic benefits that we have through faith in Jesus
Christ, then when He gets to verse three, He throws in a curveball.
He lists a fourth characteristic of faith in Jesus Christ and ability to rejoice in pain.
More than that, He says, we rejoice in our sufferings.
We rejoice in our sufferings.
How do you know this morning if you're really a Christian?
Well, one of the ways in which you can tell if you're really a Christian is that your analysis
of pain and suffering begins to change.
The natural man views pain as something that is to be avoided at all costs.
And the natural man will go to great extents in order to make his life as secure and as
comfortable as possible.
The Christian, however, has begun to understand that pain when it's allowed by the loving
hand of Heavenly Father can be a two in the hands of God to shape us to become all of the
things that God wants us to be.
And once you understand that, then pain is still not something that you might happen
to like, but you can begin to rejoice in it, even in the midst of the tears because you
know that God is at work in your life.
And then you will recall as He goes on in this passage, He begins to outline the process
whereby God uses pain for a good purpose in your life and in my life, suffering He says,
produces endurance.
And we've looked at that in some detail.
And then He goes on to say, "And that's what we're going to look at together this morning.
Character produces hope."
Character produces hope.
This whole process of pain, producing endurance, producing character far from destroying my
hope in God, it builds it up.
And the hope that He's talking about here, of course, is the hope that He talks about
in verse two, our hope of sharing the glory of God.
And He has come full circle in His argument.
He starts out by saying, "When I come to faith in Jesus Christ, I begin to share the hope
of glory.
God works His Spirit in my heart.
And I know that God has got a place for me and God is going to take me places where I
will be filled with His glory.
I know it by faith in Jesus Christ.
Then comes suffering.
And you would think would you not that suffering would destroy hope.
That suffering would diminish my certainty of who God is and what God stands for.
And how much it is that He loves me."
But Paul says, "That's wrong."
Suffering produces endurance, produces character, produces hope.
And so by the time God has finished His cycle of discipline in my life, my faith,
my sense of endurance, my sense of hope, is stronger, rather than weaker than before.
I was tested.
Character, He says, produces hope.
In the time that we have together this morning, what to give you would I believe are three
reasons from the scriptures, why this process of paging, this process of character building,
leaves us at the end of the process with even a greater certainty of hope in God's love
and God's power than before we began.
Number one, the hard times of my life.
Straight to me, God's incredible love for me.
Listen again to these verses from Hebrews chapter 12, you've heard me quote them many times,
they're actually a quotation from the book of Proverbs the third chapter.
My son do not regard lightly the discipline of the Lord nor lose courage when you are
punished by Him for the Lord disciplines Him whom He loves and chastises every son whom
He receives.
The Lord disciplines Him whom He loves and chastises every son whom He receives.
And then He goes on to say, it is for discipline that you have to endure, God is treating you
as sons for what son is there whom His Father does not discipline.
There are still a lot of people in the world today who have an image of God that says that
if God really loves me then nothing is ever going to go wrong in my life.
But that's a false image because if God is my Father and He loves me then when He sees
things in my life that need changing He is going to do whatever it takes for those things
to change just like an earthly parent if you love your child, you're not just going
to let your child grow up wild and go whatever way that He wants to go.
What Father is there among you He says or what son is there whom His Father does not discipline.
If you are left without discipline in which all have participated then you are illegitimate
sons or children and not sons.
His argument is pretty plain as long as we are outside of the family of God.
God's not particularly interested in how I turn out because God knows there is coming
a day when I'm going to be judged in the fires of hell at any rate and He's quite content
to wait until the final day for my sin to be shown in all of its ugliness and all of
its wickedness, but when I become part of what's called the forever family of God, when
God becomes my Father and my character becomes tied in with His character and His purposes
are tied in with my purposes, then God has an interest in my being all of the things
that He wants me to be, which is why when we become part of the family of God, God begins
to discipline.
He stops me in my tracks when I go the wrong way.
He speaks me so to speak when I've been bad.
He corrects me when I want to wander and He begins to use the circumstances and the
situations of life in order to bring out in my life things that are not right, that need
to be healed, that need to be flushed out to the surface because they are a dishonor
to Him and they are a hurtful thing in my relationships with other people.
If God loves me, He disciplines everyone whom He loves and chastises every son whom
He receives.
Now therefore, when I begin to experience that disciplining hand of God, when I see God
stepping in and not letting me get away with my double-mindedness, when God steps in
and He causes my sins to be found out and I've got to deal with stuff that I didn't want
to deal with before in my life, and when God begins to use the pressures of my life to
make me grow into faith and into maturity, then oddly enough, far from removing out of
my life a sense of God loves me, there is something in my heart that says, "Wow, God's
really there.
He really cares about me.
He really cares enough to not let me do the things that I in my weakness want to do for
myself."
If you ever noticed in your own family that when your child is bad and they're just crying
out for a spinky, well they do do that sometimes.
And you stop them dead in their tracks, and you say, "Look, it's enough of this foolishness
smart enough," and you discipline them, perhaps even spank them.
You ever noticed how children respond when they have been disciplined in fairness and
in love?
Do they hate you?
Do they go running off and saying, "Well, I'm going to find another mommy in a dead.
If it was done in fairness, and they know that they had it coming, you'll get some of
your biggest hugs from your children after some of the most severe times of discipline."
Is that not true?
Often say to people that have whiny children, nothing personal here, folks, but the remedy
to a whiny child is not more love, even though love is very important.
The remedy to a whiny child is to bring in the fences a little bit so that the child
knows where the barriers are because children need the security of knowing there are limits
to their behavior because it helps them feel secure.
They know there is somebody that is bigger than they are, and because there is somebody
that is bigger than they are, they feel protected because they know that if they can't manipulate
their mom and their dad, their mom and their dad are big enough to take care for them,
of them.
The same thing is true in our walk with God.
When we see God placing the limits around us, not letting us get away with what it is
that we want to get away with, ironically enough there is a sense of security that settles
in my heart that says, "Wow, you know, God really is there.
He really does love me and he loves me enough to discipline me because of the seed that
is in my life."
This was never as clear to me in my own personal life as good many years ago when I tried
to buy my first car, I shared that story with you before I can be brief with it.
I was a senior in college, all my friends were getting married.
I was living off campus, my love life was the pits, all social activity was far removed
from where I was and I decided the Lord needed a little bit of help in order to advance
my love life and I needed the car to do that.
So I started to go through the classified ads in the newspaper, found you will recall
this marvelous '67 Oldsmobile for $1,800, cars were cheap then.
As I began looking through those classified ads, the alarm bells began to ring inside
ever have that, you want to do something, but deep down in your spirit there is a little
voice that says, "This isn't the thing that you ought to be doing even though it's not
necessarily a bad thing to do, it's just not the right time to do it."
Well, I'd like to tell you I was spiritual enough to listen to it, but you know, when your
love life's at stake you can't afford to be spiritual, you've got to get a car.
So I went out and I got the car, at least I put it down payment on it and I said I would
buy it and you might recall the rest of the story, finances fell through, I had a forfeit
my $10 deposit which is all I fortunately had and I had to do without that car.
But you know, in that whole episode was done, I might have been rebellious or I might
have been angry, but interestingly enough those were not of my emotions.
When God stopped me did in my tracks and did not allow me to pursue the thing that I
had set my mind on, though I knew in my spirit it wasn't a thing for me to be doing.
I felt oddly comforted because it occurred to me that this God who had just become real
in my life and whom I was wanting to serve with everything that was within me was not
a God that would let me manipulate him and he was bigger than me and he was big enough
to stop me in my tracks and that made me feel like I could trust him because if I could
not manipulate him then maybe other people couldn't either and then maybe just maybe
I could trust him with all of my life.
The discipline of God makes me experience the love of God and the more God disciplines
me and brings me through that discipline the more strongly convinced I become that
God really is there and that He really loves me.
It's the number one, the pain in the hardship of life, confirm God's love to my heart if
I have eyes to see it and then number two, this process of suffering, producing endurance,
producing character, produces hope now because of the process of pain in my life.
That's me know how much of my faith is really real.
Peter puts it this way, he says, "In this you rejoice, though now for a little while
you may have to suffer various trials so that the genuineness of your faith, more precious
than gold which though perishable is tested by fire, may read down to praise and glory
and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ."
He says, "So that the genuineness of your faith, more precious than gold, may read down
and glory praise and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ."
Why does God allow affliction in your life and in my life?
Well, it's a process of testing, isn't it?
The word "character" here in Romans chapter 5 is a shared with you before, is the Greek
word "dachame" it means the quality of being approved, brings to mind that whole image
of being stuck in the fire and then being pulled out and everything that is phony has been
burned away, but that which is real cannot be touched with the fire because it's the
genuine thing, and I believe in a lot of our lives, it's pretty easy to confuse the real
thing with the human.
It's easy to say, "Well, of course I believe in God."
And yes, I think God's there and I think He loves me when everything is going okay,
anybody can believe in that kind of a God, but what about when it doesn't go right, when
it goes the wrong way, talking to a lady just yesterday, Christian parent raised her
children in a Christian way as a daughter in the mid-twenties, serving the Lord elsewhere,
violently got raped the other day, and the cry of her heart is where is God, one of those
kinds of things happened.
And yes, it's easy to say, "Well, of course I believe the Bible from cover to cover."
I mean, aren't we all supposed to believe the Bible from cover to cover?
But what when it doesn't seem to work?
What about those times when I have difficulty believing the kinds of stories there are in
the Bible?
Well, I mean, come on, Jonah and the whale.
You see, how much of my faith is really my own and how much of my faith is stuff that
I believe because I've been taught it when I was growing up?
Now, there is nothing wrong in being taught faith when you're growing up.
That's how most of us learn it.
But some were along the line that faith has got to become my own because if it doesn't,
it's not real.
Easy to say, "Well, of course I'm a loving person and I love everybody."
Or what when you have to rub shoulders with somebody that you just can't stand.
And so our lives are a mixture, a mixture of true faith that God has really worked in
our lives and a mixture of sort of the boundless optimism that may be part of my own personality.
The sort of positive feelings that I have because my life has never been challenged and
things have really gone the right way.
How do I know what's what?
How do I know that when the test comes, I'll really be able to stand and that the faith
that I have is not just, you know, was he good feelings, but is based on a dynamic and
counter with God through faith in Jesus Christ.
Well, that's the purpose of the fire.
So that the genuineness of your faith, more precious than gold which though perishable,
be downs to the praise and the glory and the honor of God.
And so I go through the fire.
God disappoints me.
Doesn't do the kinds of things that I think you ought to be doing for me.
My hopes, my dreams, they fall apart.
I try to apply the scriptures, but it doesn't seem to work.
Now what?
Well everywhere where my faith is dross, it'll puff away.
And there are many people when confronted by the harsh realities of life, they lose their
faith.
And I read in the paper just the other day at an interview with one of the mothers of
the hostages in Lebanon, really just lady, she'd go to church probably most of her life.
And she said, "Well, you know, I've lost my faith.
I just cannot believe there would be a God in heaven who can stand by and watch that happen."
If your faith is not real, it'll burn up.
And that's not so bad.
People say to me sometimes, "Well, you know, that situation or that person that caused
me to lose faith, I lost my trust in God."
Well that's wonderful.
Then at least you know where you are, and you can get down on your knees, you can cry
out to God to give you the real thing, not true?
I may sound hard-hearted when I see that.
But I want you to know, I would rather discovered today how much of my life is dross versus
gold than come the final day of judgment when all of it is unveiled before me, and I've
got no time to recover.
That's why God disciplines those whom He loves, and that's why when you're a Christian,
you'll go through the valley so that God can burn out the crowd and make us lay hold
of this stuff.
That is real.
And so I come out of the fire, stronger, better, clearer understanding of God, a clearer
distinction between my own natural optimism and the promises of God, and the dross is increasingly
being burned out, and there is some solidity in my life now.
And I have faced the mountain, and by God's grace I have climbed the mountain, and my faith
is intact.
When that happens and I come out on the other side, I am more convinced than ever that God
is alive and that God is real, and that my faith is real and that my hope is real because
you see, before I knew it intellectually, but now that I've been tested and God enabled
me to endure the test, I know in my heart the reality of the promises of God.
Some friends of mine, a number of years ago, were involved in a car accident.
Both their fault, even if it had been, wouldn't have made much difference, I suppose.
Car cut in front of them, and both the husband and wife ended up in the hospital.
He was dislocated or broken hip as I recall, and she put her head through the windshield
that left glass embedded in her forehead and that would leave her scarred for life.
Those things are tough.
Those things are especially tough when you're a Christian.
They were, as I recall, coming back from a Bible study that night.
And if you've ever been in that kind of situation or if you can imagine that kind of situation,
you can imagine the questions that very easily start flowing through your mind like, "God,
where are you?"
You know, the more faith you've got, the more of a problem this becomes.
Pagans don't have this problem, they just curse God and die.
But when you're expecting God's blessing in your life and it doesn't come in the form
that you think it ought to be coming, that produces faith problems.
Besides that, if you've ever been in that kind of situation where you're at the mercy
of other people, there's a lot of apprehension and a lot of fear.
What's going to happen to me?
Will I bear scars?
Will my husband still like me?
Will my hip heal properly?
Will I, you know, all of those kinds of questions?
It was a test.
When they went through that valley, they discovered in the midst of that valley, as I know so many
people have, including so many people here, that when the pressure was on, the grace of
God abounded.
And they came through that process out on the other end, more convinced than ever before
that God loves them and that God is with them and that God's power is available in their
lives.
Because you see, they had faced their fear, they had climbed the mountain and having climbed
the mountain, they knew that if ever they should climb other mountains again, the same
God who got them through this process would get them through the next process as well.
And their character yielded hope to the glory of God.
And then number three, when I see God changing my character, removing deep-seated patterns
of sin, replacing them with the flow of His grace, then I have a foretaste of that day.
When all my sin will have been healed, all my life will have been restored and I shall
be shining like the stars in the heavens.
Beloved, He says, we are God's children now.
It does not yet appear what we shall be, but we know that when He appears, we shall
be like Him.
And we shall see Him as He is.
And everyone who thus hopes in Him purifies Himself as He is pure.
It does not yet appear what we shall be, but we know that when He appears, we shall
be like Him for we shall see Him as He is.
You know, I wonder sometimes if we understand very clearly how radically different the kingdom
of God in its full splendor is from the kind of life that we're accustomed to.
Imagine for a moment if you cannot and know it's very difficult for all of us, but a scene
where God is all and in awe, where everybody honors and worships God not because they
have to, but because they want to, where the glory of God flows like a river where there
is no sin, there is no rebellion, there is just unending worship, praise, adoration.
That's the kingdom God's building.
That's the kingdom God is working in your heart and in my heart, and sometimes when
you begin to see what that kingdom is, and you begin to see the demands that God makes
in His children and the kind of lifestyle that He wants us to live in all of our relationships,
you look at your own life and you say, "Who?
You know, who was Me?"
I mean, don't you have that sometimes?
You face a trial, you face a temptation, and you wipe out.
And you say, "Boy, I don't know if God could ever love me."
Or you encounter one of these deep-seated patterns of sin in your own life, and you've struggled
with it and you've tried to overcome it and you've just had to give up because, "Look,
I can't beat this thing."
And you say to yourself, "I don't see how I'm ever going to feed in God's eternal
glory.
I'm just no good."
And then there are those times you face temptation, and you battle it out, and you know, every
once in a while you win the battles, isn't that true?
I mean, we don't always wipe out.
There are times when God's grace is there.
There have been times in my life I face sin that I couldn't cope with.
And all of a sudden, after a period of desperately seeking God, God and His grace was just there
and took it away.
A lot of us know about that.
Or you go through the fire and you go through circumstances, and you don't fall apart.
You come out better than ever before, or God opens your eyes and helps you see just a
little bit of how different you are today than you were a year ago, and how you can handle
more things better.
And how your life has begun to change, even just a little bit, you are not yet what
you ought to be, but you're a whole lot different than what you were last year.
And your heart just begins to overflow.
You say to yourself, "You know, this stuff is really real.
God's really real.
His power is really real.
The battle is not in vain.
He loves me.
His power is there for me.
And if He can bring me this far compared with where I was before, then I know the stuff
that remains in my life.
He's going to take hold of it, and He will transform me from glory to glory.
And I get excited about going to glory because I know that God's going to get me there
because He's bigger than all of my fear.
He who hopes in Him purifies Himself as He is pure.
It does not yet appear what we shall be, but we know that when we shall see Him, we shall
become like Him.
So here's the process.
When I first come to faith in Christ, God gives me the Holy Spirit.
And with the eye of faith, I begin to see the hope of glory that God has laid up for me.
I begin to understand God's love as Paul goes on to talk about in this passage.
I have an understanding that because of Christ, God really loves me, and that He's really
going to take me to Himself, and nothing in all of the universe is going to separate
me from the love of God.
And then I go through the valley.
Then the valley I learn endurance, and I build character, and when I come out of that
valley on the other end, miraculously sustained by God's love and God's power, having discovered
number one that God loves me because He disciplined me.
Having discovered number two that my faith by God's grace was able to stand the test
in spite of the testing.
And number three, when I see that He's changing me from glory to glory, then my hope and
my assurance begins to soar to even higher levels because you see, once I understood
it by faith, but now it's being worked out in the depths of my heart.
It's not that I didn't have hope before.
Every believer's God hope, but you see when that hope has been tested, when it's been
purified, and when it's gone through the fire, there is a subtleness that settles in
my soul that says, "I knew it before."
I mean, I really knew it before, but now I know it even better because you see, "I've
gone through the fire."
At all to theory has burned away, but what has remained is the real thing.
And the real thing, praise God, nobody can ever take away from my life, suffering,
produces endurance, endurance produces character and character produces hope.
And that hopes his Paul, and perhaps someday we'll have occasion to continue looking
at that.
That hope will never disappoint me because I know God's love has been poured into my
heart through the Holy Spirit, which God has given to us.
May God help us to abound in hope, let us pray.
Other there are times when we go through the test, and we don't fare very well.
We fail, we grumble, we complain.
We don't always respond, Father, with thanksgiving, and with the kind of joy that you command us to
have even in hard times, Lord, that's true for my life as well as I'm sure for many of
our lives here.
And we thank you, Father, that you love us enough to allow disciplines to come into our
lives, and let you test us, and let in the testing you burn away the dross, and you make
us straw in your grace, Lord, there are some of us here.
We've come through some of those tests, and we've become the stronger for it.
And with the wisdom of hindsight, we're able to thank you for those afflictions that
you have allowed into our lives.
There's others of us, perhaps, who are in the midst of that fiery furnace even now.
We pray, Lord, that in the midst of that fire, you would comfort, strengthen, and protect
us, that you'll help us to understand the wisdom of God and the love of God.
That Lord, you'll burn away all the things that aren't real, so that the things that are
real may remain, so that Lord, as a congregation, strengthen and encourage in you, we can boldly
go to a hurting world, and we can tell them with a certainty that is born of faith.
God is alive, and God is real, and God loves you, and wants to bring healing and restoration.
In your life, T. Thank you, Lord, for your love, and thank you for hearing us.
In Jesus' name, Amen.