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WHERE IS GOD WHEN IT HURTS?SUFFERING IN HOPERomans 8:17-27INTRODUCTION I'm interrupting our series in the letter to the Hebrews this morning because life was interrupted this last Wednesday. As many of you know on Wednesday morning within the span of 5 minutes four people were killed and two injured in two car crashes here in Rock County . For me and many others here at River Hills, one of those crashes took a friend, Marguerite Bladorn. She and her husband John and 16 year old son, Ryan, and 12 year old daughter Kendal were a significant part of our church in the earliest years. John was my running partner for several years. In the last few weeks the Bladorn family, along with members of Boy Scout Troop 405, has been working here at the church repairing our garage and doing landscaping to fulfill the requirements for Ryan's Eagle Scout award. I and a number of others here were involved in helping the Bladorn family this week and we hosted the memorial service for Marguerite yesterday. Therefore I did not have enough time to devote to preparing the sermon for this week. Also, I felt that it would be very appropriate for us as a congregation to revisit a subject we spent almost three months discussing following my oldest son, Jared's accident in 2002: God's purposes in suffering. So this morning we're going to look at Paul's extended discussion of the place of suffering in God's world in Romans 8. Philip Yancey in his book, “Disappointment with God” tells the story of a mom, Maggie, who had two children with Cystic Fibrosis. She was a Christian. Her son died at the age of twelve. Her daughter, Peggie, surprisingly graduated from college and got a job. There was some hope that she would actually survive this dreadful disease. However, when she was 23 she suffered a long, painful and horrible death from cystic fibrosis. This was in spite of many years of faith-filled prayer by hundreds of people for her healing. Maggie, the mom, wrote to Mr. Yancey some time after her daughter’s death describing how she died in faith, to the glory of God. However, in the letter she also described her reaction to her daughter’s suffering while knowing that God loves his people and has power to heal every disease. After describing some of the horror her daughter experienced she writes, “So, it’s against this background of human beings falling apart…that God, who could have helped, looked down on a young woman devoted to Him, quite willing to die for Him to give Him glory, and decided to sit on His hands and let her death top the horror charts for cystic fibrosis deaths. I tell you Philip, it does not help to talk of the good that results from pain. Nor does it help to talk of God almost always letting the physical process of disease run its course. Because if He ever intervenes, then at every point of human suffering He makes a decision to intervene or not, and in Peggie’s case His choice was to let C.F. rip. There are moments when my only responses are grief and an anger as violent as any I have ever known…. Again I wonder, how could he be in a situation like that and sit on his hands?” I do not believe there is a more troubling or difficult problem than this one posed by Peggie’s mom. If God is infinitely powerful and has pledged himself to all who trust in Christ in love as his dear children and sealed that love by killing his own Son, then why does he permit (or more biblically, "ordain that") Christians to suffer? Why are Christians in Sudan raped, murdered and sold into slavery? Why are we beset with temptations to sin and why does he permit us to succumb to sin? Why does he not answer our prayers to heal our children or to cause a wayward spouse to repent? Now there is an evil and erroneous way of dealing with this problem to which millions of professing Christians subscribe. Millions of Christians believe what a man I do not know wrote to me in an email after Jared's accident. He told me that it was, without question, God’s will to heal Jared right now. The only thing hindering his healing is whether or not Jane and I will believe God is going to heal him. We must never speak negative words or listen to any negative report. Jesus wants to heal him and we hold the key; we must never think that God will not heal Jared. While he had the sense to not say it directly it was everywhere implied in his letter, if Jared is not healed it is our fault and if he is healed it is to our credit. This man and millions of professing Christians like him believe that it is God’s will for Christians to never be sick or to suffer in any way and that if we do suffer it is only because of our own lack of faith. They assert that faith is believing that God will do whatever you want him to do. You need to know that this teaching is anti-Christ. It is false and is a blasphemy to God and destroys people by destroying true faith. The apostle Paul in Romans 8: 17-36 is giving the biblical answer to the question, if God loves us and we have been given his very own life and made his children, then why do we suffer with temptation, sin, hardship, accidents, disease and persecution? If God is our Father, why in the world are we suffering as we are? How can my family have any hope that any of God’s promises are going to come true when our son, who loves Christ, is in the condition that he is in? How can John and Ryan and Kendal Bladorn know that there is a God of love ruling his universe when his wife and their mother was so suddenly taken from them? Paul’s assertion in the second half of Roman’s 8 is that… MAIN POINT The Christian life is full of hope in spite of suffering because…I. Christ suffered in hope (v. 17) When I covered this material back in 2002 I preached an entire sermon on this one verse. I'm not going to give you two sermons this morning and so I won't go into all the detail that this verse deserves. I'm just going to point out the basic outline of the verse and then if you want the details you can go to the website and read the sermon on Romans 8:17. Paul says here that we are co-heirs with Christ. In other words, all of God’s promises of eternal joy with him in the new heavens and the new earth are true for us because we are united to Jesus and we obtain the promises the same way that Jesus obtained the promise of glory, he suffered. These two things are infallibly linked together, as Paul says at the end of v. 17, we are children and heirs of God “…if indeed we share in his sufferings in order that we may also share in his glory.” The only people who are going to heaven are those who have suffered with Christ. And everyone who suffers with Christ is going to enjoy eternal happiness in the presence of God. This is not a cause/effect relationship as if God rewards me with heaven because I suffer. Rather, because we are co-heirs with Christ who suffered and then gained glory so it is with us who are his followers. The two key questions are: what are the sufferings of Christ? What does it mean to share with him in those sufferings? Briefly, the sufferings of Christ are his enduring all the miseries of this life, including but not limited to his betrayal, false arrest, torture and death on the cross. We share with him in his sufferings when we endure all the hardships of this life the way he did, by faith in the promises of God. We endure disease, accidents, being yelled at by your wife or treated rude by the check out clerk and persecution as a Christian trusting God without grumbling or complaining against God or man. We spend our life fighting against our own sin and repenting when we lose a battle and returning to fight again. We joyfully choose to deny ourselves the pleasures of this world in order to love and serve others. Anyone who teaches that Christians should not suffer is lying to you. The only people who are Christians are those who are sharing in the sufferings of Christ by trusting the promises of God in the midst of the suffering. The Christian life is full of hope in spite of suffering because…
II. The creation suffers in hope (vv. 18-22) Paul knows that the experience of pain and suffering causes people to question the love of God, the power of God and the very existence of God. So he says in v. 18, the future every true Christian is going to experience is so amazing that the hardships we endure here are as nothing when compared to the joy that awaits. Do not miss the offhand way in which Paul describes our present experience as an experience of suffering. He simply assumes, because we are coheirs with Christ, that the common experience of every Christian living on planet earth is a life of suffering. However, the future that God has promised to give to all who belong to Christ is so amazing and so glorious that the sufferings of Christ that I am now experiencing are as nothing compared to it. Verse 18 is the authoritative description of hope. Hope is the confident expectation of good in the future that enables us to endure the difficulties of the present. I want you children to imagine that one night your dad comes to the dinner table with a silly grin on his face and holding an envelope. Before dinner is served he announces to the entire family that in six weeks the entire family is going to take a week’s vacation to Disney World in Orlando , FL. Then, he opens the envelope and pulls out airplane tickets for each member of the family and three day passes for Disney World, Epcot Center and Universal Studios. Your eyes grow huge with excitement and you press your dad to describe again when you will be going and how you will get there and what you will do when you arrive. Your dad has made a promise and you know the promise is true because he’s your dad and because he has already paid a lot of money so you can go on vacation. Now, during the next six weeks you are looking forward with hope to going on vacation. Let’s suppose that during those six weeks you disobey your dad and he has to discipline you. Or suppose he tells you to mow the lawn or do the dishes. Or suppose you get the flu and lay in bed for three days while everyone else is outside enjoying the freedom of summer. During the course of those six weeks there will most likely be many things that will happen to you that will not be pleasant, may indeed be painful. However, will any of that “suffering” negate the promise that your dad has made for you to go on vacation? In fact, will not the thought of going on vacation help you to endure the suffering? Won’t you be thinking when you are mowing the lawn, in a few weeks I’ll be at Disneyland ? Won’t you spend time during those six weeks reading some of the brochures that your dad has provided about the amusement parks? Won’t you talk with your friends about how excited you are to go? Won’t you talk with your siblings about all the fun you are going to have? In other words, won’t you live in hope? This is what Paul is doing. He is absolutely certain, because of who God is and the price God has paid to secure our salvation, the death and resurrection of Christ, that all of God’s promises are going to come true. He has a confident expectation that the joy and happiness that is coming is infinitely greater than all the suffering he must endure to get there. The thought of what is coming fills him with hope, joy, and peace in the midst of his sufferings now. Now notice what Paul says next. Verse 19 begins with “for”. The reason Paul is absolutely certain that the future joy is infinitely greater than the present sufferings is because the creation is waiting in eager expectation for the sons of God to be revealed. What is Paul talking about in vv. 19-22 and how is this the explanation for his exuberant hope? Paul says, "The reason I am confident that the future joy is infinitely greater than the present suffering is that the entire created order is currently waiting with eager anticipation for the sons of God to be revealed." There are two questions that this verse raises. First, why is the entire creation eagerly waiting for the sons of God to be revealed? Paul answers that question in vv. 19-22. Second, to what does the phrase, “the sons of God to be revealed”, refer? Paul answers that question in v. 23. Why is the entire creation eagerly waiting? The creation is waiting in eager anticipation because it was subjected to frustration. Frustration is the word used in the book of Ecclesiastes 31 times and translated “meaningless” in the NIV and "vanity" in the ESV. When do we feel frustrated or as if something is meaningless or vain? We feel this way when things don’t work the way they are supposed to work. We feel this way when we put in a large amount of effort in a task or relationship and then it doesn’t work. It's how you feel when your son shatters his skull or your wife is killed in a car accident. This is how the entire creation feels. It isn’t working the way it’s supposed to work. It isn’t fulfilling the purposes it was created to fulfill. The sun rises every day in a meaningless cycle because what is happening on the earth and in the universe is not what is supposed to be happening. Notice, this didn’t happen because the creation by nature is meaningless but because someone enslaved creation to futility and decay. Paul is referring to what happened in Genesis 1-3, particularly 3:14 -19. God said about the world that he created that it was very good. It perfectly conformed to his will and to his desires. It functioned perfectly, fulfilling its purposes of supporting human beings as they glorified God by who they were and what they did. However, when Adam and Eve ate from the forbidden tree God cursed creation, the home of mankind. God enslaved creation to the power of Satan. He made the bearing and raising of children full of pain and misery. He decreed that the entire created order not cooperate with man’s efforts to subdue it and use it. And the greatest evidence of the curse that the world is now under is death. Death makes mockery of every human ambition and hope. As you read the OT, especially the book of Ecclesiastes death destroys all pleasure with its inevitability. We are merely walking corpses and the world we live in is a world full of death and therefore full of futility. The creation is eagerly waiting for freedom from this decay, this death, this futility. Now notice that God subjected creation to death, corruption and futility, “in hope”. Paul is thinking of Genesis 3:15 and the hundreds of other promises in the OT that declare that death and suffering and futility are not the last word. God kicked humans out of Eden and placed us in a world of suffering with the full intention of saving a people out of this suffering and into a new heaven and a new earth through a Savior. He is going to remake human beings and the creation so that a holy people will live in a holy place once more. Then, in verse 22, Paul uses a powerful metaphor to show what the present experience of the universe is like. He says that creation, since Adam and Eve’s sin, has been groaning like a woman in childbirth. Do you see what that means? All the pain and suffering in the world is like the pain and suffering of a woman delivering a baby. It is painful and it is present due to human sin but it is not futile, wasted, or pointless suffering. It is necessary for the baby to be born. There is joy coming, after the pain. The entire creation has been experiencing the pains of childbirth since the fall. It is like the woman who is in pain but who is full of certainty and joy that a baby is about to come. The joy that is coming is the “revelation of the sons of God” or the “glorious freedom of the children of God”. Verse 23 tells us that these phrases are referring to, “the redemption of our bodies”, that is, our resurrection from the dead at the return of Christ. The end for which the world is heading is that day when God’s people are delivered from death in totality and given immortal bodies, at that same time, the entire universe will be delivered from Satan, death, futility and decay. Then the sun will rise day after day not on a meaningless, frustrated creation but on a creation that is fulfilling all God's good purposes for it, supporting humans as we live to the glory of God. Don’t miss the connection Paul is making between creation’s groaning and his certainty that the future joy every Christian will experience makes the current suffering seem as if it were nothing. All of the death, futility and decay in the universe are merely evidence of the eager anticipation of the glory that is coming. God subjected the world to this suffering in hope, not in despair. The suffering serves a purpose, just as the suffering of the woman in childbirth serves the purpose of bearing the child. I want your experience and my experience to be Paul’s experience in v. 18. I want us to experience the sufferings of the present time full of hope because we are so convinced that what is coming will make the present suffering seem as nothing. There is only one way for that to be true. You have to want the glory of heaven more than you want the pleasures of this world. If a woman in childbirth is unhappy that she is having a baby, then the suffering of childbirth will seem futile and she will despair. So I tell you what Peter said in 1 Peter 1:13 , “Set your hope fully on the grace to be given you when Jesus Christ is revealed.” The Christian life is full of hope in spite of suffering because…
III. We were saved in hope (vv. 24-25) Verse 23 is connected most closely with vv. 26-27. I will look at that connection in a moment. What Paul does in vv. 24-25 is insert a sort of parenthesis to talk about the definition of hope. The reason he does this is because in v. 23 he said that Christians are waiting for our adoption as sons. The phrase, we are waiting for our adoption as sons ought to set off all kinds of alarm bells in our brains, if we’ve been reading Paul’s letter carefully. Look up in v. 15. “We did not receive the Spirit who makes us slaves again to fear but we received the Spirit of adoption as sons”. The same Greek word is used in vv. 15 and 23 but notice the tenses of the verbs. In v. 15 we already have been adopted as sons but in v. 23 we are waiting to be adopted as sons. Which is it? Are we adopted as sons or are we waiting to be adopted as sons? The answer is both. We have been adopted but we are still waiting to experience the full blessings of our adoption. It’s what v. 17 said, we are children but we are waiting for our inheritance. In v. 24 Paul then says, “In this hope we were saved.” Again, notice we are already saved. But then if we compare this verb tense to 5:9 we discover that we will not be saved until the future. Therefore, we are saved in hope. We have been given something in the present that guarantees something far greater in the future. We will see what it is we have been given in the present in a moment but first Paul has to explain something about the nature of hope. He says, “But hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what he already sees?” We know that we became Christians through faith, by believing the promise that God would forgive our sins and receive us as his children because of what Christ did for us. Therefore, we necessarily were saved in hope of a future fulfillment of the promise. Hope eagerly waits for what is promised. If you already have it, then there is no need for hope. But you entered the Christian life in hope, not obtaining what was promised but looking forward to it. Every saved person lives in confident expectation that God is going to fulfill his promise that we will live with him forever in eternal pleasures. In v. 25 Paul then describes the characteristic of all those who have that hope. If you are living in hope than you "wait patiently for it." Confident expectation of good in the future, i.e., hope, inspires and motivates endurance or perseverance in and through trouble. I have read almost every book written by the late Louis L’Moure. He wrote mostly westerns. He vividly describes the hardships that people endured on the wagon trains that took people across the Great Plains and the Rocky Mountains to Oregon and California . The thirst, hunger, disease, death, attacks by Native Americans, loss of property that these men and women experienced to get to the west coast is amazing. Why did they do it and how did they do it? They were convinced, whether truly or not, that California and Oregon would provide for them and their families land and wealth and comfort that could not be obtained where they currently lived in the eastern half of the U.S. They believed a promise of a better life and they lived in the confident expectation that when they arrived, life would be good. It was this hope that enabled them to endure amazing amounts of suffering. It wasn’t all suffering. Along the way they enjoyed the company of those they traveled with. Some met their spouses among the other travelers and were married. Children were born along the way. They enjoyed water from fresh mountain streams and eating deer and antelope and bison. I’m sure they admired the scenery and the stops for rest along the way. However, they persisted and persevered through all the trouble and didn’t make homes along the way because they were sure that great joy was coming. This is exactly how Christians live. We are absolutely convinced that “our adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies” will be so glorious and joyful that we will not stop on the journey until we are safely home. We endure the suffering and resist the temptation to build our homes here because we know that Jesus came not to bring heaven to earth now but later. I was having a discussion with one of my children a few years ago when I said something that I’ve been thinking about ever since. I said, “The only people going to heaven are those who are going to heaven.” Do you see what I’m saying? The only people who went to Oregon were those who went to Oregon . Those who stayed back in Illinois and talked about how great Oregon was, did not go. The people who started to go but then built homes in Nebraska , didn’t go. The only people who went to Oregon were those who believed that to be in Oregon was better than anything else and then who endured the suffering of getting there trusting the promise and enduring in hope, a confident expectation that the joy to come would make all the suffering now worth it. The Christian life is full of hope in spite of suffering because…
IV. The Holy Spirit guarantees our hope (vv. 23, 26-27) I skipped over a part of v. 23 because it is so tightly connected to vv. 26-27. Notice how Paul describes Christians. He says we have the firstfruits of the Spirit and we groan inwardly while eagerly waiting. The groaning is the groaning of a woman in the pain of childbirth. We groan because of the pain and we groan because we want the joy that is coming. The groaning is not just the groaning of suffering but the groaning of longing for the fullness of what has been promised. Every true Christian lives in this world groaning over the incompleteness of our salvation and out of longing to have the whole thing. We live in a state of perpetual sorrow because we know that we have not received the fullness of the promise and we live in joy because we know that we are no longer condemned and our future is certain. This is true because we have received part of the promise, which is what Paul shows by the phrase, “the firstfruits of the Spirit”. The Holy Spirit is the firstfruits. In the OT "firstfruits" refer to the first portion of the grain or fruit that is harvested that is brought as a gift to the temple at the beginning of the harvest season. The arrival of the "firstfruits" is evidence that the harvest has begun and soon the barns will be overflowing with grain. Thus the word "firstfruits" refers to the beginning of a process that will most certainly be completed. In what sense is the Holy Spirit the first installment and the guarantee of our salvation? The HS is the first installment on heaven and our guarantee of it in a number of ways but we are going to limit our answer to just what vv. 26-27 tell us. First, Paul tells us that the HS helps us in our weakness. What weakness is he talking about? The weakness of living in a world that is decaying. The weakness of being made into God’s children and yet not possessing what we have been promised. As John Piper said in a sermon, “…the sickness and futility and frustration and decay and misery of life on the way to heaven.” The HS helps us hold fast to Christ in hope in the midst of the suffering. When a person is enduring suffering with faith in Christ, they do so by the work of the HS. But there is a specific way that Paul says that the Holy Spirit helps us. He says that a part of our weakness is that we don’t know what to pray for and so the HS prays for us. Again, Piper says, “So what is it that we don’t know what to pray for in this weakness? I think the answer is: we don’t know the secret will of God about our sicknesses and our hardships. We don’t know whether we should pray for healing or for strength to endure. Of course, both are right and it’s not wrong to pray for either. But we long to pray with great faith, and we groan that we are not sure what God’s way will be with this sickness or this loss or this imprisonment. We just don’t know.” How does the Holy Spirit help us in this expression of our weakness? He meets our inability to know God’s will with a full and thorough knowledge of the Father’s will. He sees our need and he asks the Father to meet our need perfectly. This is how he sustains us in our weakness. God always listens to and answers the Holy Spirit because the Holy Spirit always asks God to do his perfect will in our case. The fact that the HS prays with groans shows that his praying for us is filled with empathy and compassion for us and longing with us for the completion of our salvation. He loves us and cares what happens to us. He, the Holy Spirit, “feels our pain” and knows God’s will in the matter and so he asks the Father to do for us what we need and what the Father wills. The HS knows all of God’s will. So he asks God to do his perfect will in our case. Every Christian wants above all else, God’s will to be done. That is what we are to be praying for and so that is what we want the HS to pray for us as well, isn’t it? This should not breed passivity in our prayers but rather great boldness. First, there are a great number of things that we know God wants to do and that we ought to be asking him to do. If we know something is God’s will then we should boldly ask for it because God always hears and answers requests that accord with his will. We know what these things are from his word. If you are a husband you should be asking God to enable you to love your wife as Christ loved the church. If you are a wife, you should be asking God to enable you to submit to your husband as the church does to Christ. If you are a child you should be asking God to enable you to honor your parents. If you are a parent you should be asking God to enable you to not exasperate your children but to bring them up in the training and discipline of the Lord. If you are a worker you should be asking God to enable you to do your work with all your heart as if you were serving Christ. There are hundreds of things you and I know God will do if we will but ask because he has clearly told us his will in his word. However, there are also many things we do not know God’s will about. Therefore, as we groan over our inability to know and to pray effectually about these things we should remember and thank God for the fact that the HS is helping us in our weakness. He is asking the Father to do his perfect will. He is taking our groans and transforming them into perfect, though unknown to us, empathetic requests before God the Father who hears and answers. Tell about my worship of Christ in those first days as I sat and prayed by Jared’s bed. What I wanted and what I more than anything else is God’s will to be done. At the time I did not know if it was God’s will that he be glorified in Jared’s death or his healing or in our enduring with patience this suffering. Even now I do not know how long will this suffering will continue. There is a day coming when we will always know what God’s will is. Until that day we rejoice and rest because the HS, who dwells within us and loves us, prays according to God’s will perfectly on our behalf. I do know that God's will is that one day Jared will be resurrected and we will together worship Christ for his securing our salvation by his suffering and for his faithfully sustaining us through our suffering. And so we live in hope while we wait patiently for our adoption as sons as the HS intercedes with his groaning requests to our Father on our behalf. The Christian life is full of hope in spite of suffering because…
© Copyright 2007 John Swanson.
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