Be Steadfast in Your Suffering

Be Steadfast in Your Suffering
Romans 5:3-5
February 18, 2024

Christian university professor Mark Talbot tells his story of suffering in When the Stars Disappear:

When I was seventeen, I fell about 50 feet off a Tarzan-like rope swing, breaking my back and becoming partially paralyzed from the waist down. I spent six months in hospitals. Initially, I had no feeling or movement in my legs and no bowel or bladder control. I dropped from 200 to 145 pounds because I was so nauseated that I couldn’t eat. Once my back had stabilized a little and I had regained some leg movement, the doctors tried to help me regain even more by having me crawl to breakfast each morning.…

I am now in my sixties, and the consequences of my fall continue to multiply. I have to worry about things most people never even think about. In the last two decades, I sometimes have sleep-robbing leg spasms. And in the last few years my inability to do much walking has depleted the bone density in my hips to the point where, when I fell a couple of years ago, I broke my left hip and became wheelchair bound.

Other complications have hindered my traveling, and some have sometimes put my life at risk.…I have had seasons of profoundly disorienting perplexity when, night after night, sleep fled from me because I was utterly unable to understand how God in his goodness could have been playing any part in what was happening to me. I have experienced hurts so deep and disruptive that they have dominated my consciousness, making me feel I could lose the Christian faith that has oriented me for almost my whole life. Like one suffering psalmist, I have felt like a little owl alone in the wilderness, feeling that my days were disappearing like smoke and my heart was withering away like parched grass (see Ps. 102:3-11).

While Talbot’s suffering is unique to him, his experience of suffering is not unique. I have dozens of books on the topic and dozens to hundreds more articles on trials and suffering.  And Scripture is exceedingly realistic about the various forms of suffering:  illness, accident, weakness, aging and slow deaths, opposition, slander, personal attacks, persecution, broken relationships, and far more.  Consider just a few examples from Scripture’s warnings and preparations for suffering:

• “For man is born for trouble, As sparks fly upward.” (Job 5:7; cf. 30:16-23)
• “The wicked have drawn the sword and bent their bow To cast down the afflicted and the needy, To slay those who are upright in conduct.” (Ps. 37:14)
• “Your wrath has rested upon me, And You have afflicted me with all Your waves.…My eye has wasted away because of affliction; I have called upon You every day, O LORD; I have spread out my hands to You.…I was afflicted and about to die from my youth on; I suffer Your terrors; I am overcome.” (Ps. 88:7, 9, 15; some form of the word “afflicted” appears >50x in Psalms alone.)
• “I was afflicted and about to die from my youth on; I suffer Your terrors; I am overcome.” (Ps. 88:15)
• “If the world hates you, you know that it has hated Me before it hated you. “If you were of the world, the world would love its own; but because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, because of this the world hates you. Remember the word that I said to you, ‘A slave is not greater than his master.’ If they persecuted Me, they will also persecute you; if they kept My word, they will keep yours also.” (Jn. 15:18-20)
• “These things I have spoken to you, so that in Me you may have peace. In the world you have tribulation…” (Jn. 16:33a)
• “Through many tribulations we must enter the kingdom of God.” (Acts 14:22b)
• “[Let no one] be disturbed by these afflictions; for you yourselves know that we have been destined for this.” (1 Thess. 3:3)
• “Now you followed my teaching, conduct, purpose, faith, patience, love, perseverance, persecutions, and sufferings, such as happened to me at Antioch, at Iconium and at Lystra; what persecutions I endured, and out of them all the Lord rescued me! Indeed, all who desire to live godly in Christ Jesus will be persecuted.” (2 Tim. 3:10-12; cf. 11:35b-40)
• “For you have been called for this purpose, since Christ also suffered for you, leaving you an example for you to follow in His steps…” (1 Pt. 2:21)
• “Beloved, do not be surprised at the fiery ordeal among you, which comes upon you for your testing, as though some strange thing were happening to you…” (1 Pt. 4:12)

Life on this side of Heaven is hard and Scripture does not hide that reality; Scripture never affirms the removal of suffering until we get to Glory.  There are enough stories of suffering and persecution and enough affirmations of trouble in the Bible that it might be tempting for a believer to say, “Life is not as good as it seemed that Christ promised for us.  It’s hard — unreasonably hard.”  And in reading passages like Romans 5:1-2 and Paul’s recitation of the blessings of justification, the Roman readers might have been tempted to tell Paul, “That’s okay for you, but we are suffering here in Rome; you don’t know what our lives are like…”  It seems that in verses 3-5, Paul anticipates just such a response and makes a most unusual statement about the blessings of justification by connecting our sufferings to God’s blessings.  In these three verses Paul reminds us that:

Because you are justified, exult and be steadfast in your troubles.

When we suffer, the temptation is to walk away from Christ, to give up on the faith, or to become apathetic, hardened, or even bitter about life and our position in Christ.  But there is reason to be hopeful if you are suffering today (and all of us are suffering in some way).  Why should we remain steadfast and why should we even rejoice?  Here are four reasons to exult (rejoice) in our troubles and suffering — and these reasons are all provisions of God for us through the troubles and trials; they are four products of the trials when we respond in godly ways:

1. Be Steadfast in Trouble Because Trouble Produces Perseverance (v. 3)
2. Be Steadfast in Trouble Because Perseverance Produces Character (v. 4a)
3. Be Steadfast in Trouble Because Character Produces Hope (v. 4b-5a)
4. Be Steadfast in Trouble Because You Have the Love of God (v. 5b)

Download the rest of this sermon on Romans 5:3-5.

The audio will be posted on the GBC website by Tuesday.