Categories: New Testament, Romans, Word of SalvationPublished On: February 10, 2025
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Word of Salvation – Vol.26 No.50 – September 1980

 

Suffering For The Trial & Confirmation Of Our Faith

 

Sermon by Rev. B. Gillard on Romans 5:3ff

Scripture Reading: Romans 5:1-11

Psalter Hymnal: 286:1,2; 45:1,2,3; 465; 411:1,3,5; 137

 

Congregation of our Lord Jesus Christ, brothers and sisters and young people:

I wonder if you have ever heard a statement that I sometimes hear from non-Christians.  I heard it said only fairly recently, and that is, they are better Christians than the Christians who go to church.  By this they mean they live better quality life than a lot of professing Christians.  It would be a great pity if this were really true.  For the Christian is also to be a shining example in the world.

However, such a statement does not worry me too much, because I know that the life of a true Christian is a much better life than the life of a non-Christian.  One area where this is seen so clearly is in the way true Christians are able to cope with the pressures and trials and afflictions of life.  This is what the Apostle Paul is speaking about in our text in Romans chapter 5 and verse 3 and following where he says, “More than that, we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that sufferings produce endurance.”

But before we go any further with our text, let us back track a little and look at the context in which this statement occurs.  The great subject that the Apostle Paul is dealing with, in this book of Romans, is justification by faith.  To express it in a sentence, this means that when we have true faith in the Lord Jesus, then God no longer looks upon us as guilty sinners, but looks upon us as though we are perfect and without sin, because the Lord Jesus gives His perfect righteousness in exchange for our imperfect righteousness.  The moment we stop trusting in ourselves and really understand what the Lord has done for us and begin to trust in Him alone for our salvation, then God clothes us in the perfect righteousness of Christ.  His sinless robes are put upon us, and all our guilty sin-spoiled works are taken away from us and laid upon Him.  He accepts the responsibility and blame for them, and is punished in our place, and instead of us.

All of this we may have through true faith in Jesus Christ.  This teaching we should know and love beyond all others.  Now the Apostle Paul you see, in this 5th chapter of Romans, wants to tell us in a very practical way what this means for us in our everyday lives.  He begins to do this immediately in verse one where he says, “Therefore, since we are justified (or made right with God,) by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.’  This is the first great blessing that results from being made right with God.  We have peace with Him.  This is not a peace within our hearts, something we first feel.  It is an objective peace.  It describes our relationship with God.  It means the hostility, the conflict, the enmity, the threat of judgement is removed forever.  We are at peace with God; we are on friendly terms through Christ.  As a result of this objective peace, we may also come to feel peace in our hearts as well because we now know that God is favourably inclined toward us, and all our sins are taken away,

The second great blessing Paul mentions is in verse 2.  Through him, that is, through Christ, we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand.  This means the believer has entered into an entirely new relationship with God.  Like an adopted child who is legally taken into a loving and caring family so is the believer taken up into the family of God, and all the blessings of sonship are now his.

The third great blessing that Paul mentions is the blessing of hope.  “We rejoice in our hope of sharing the glory of God.”  Life here on earth is not the end.  It is only the beginning.  The true Christian is going to share in the glory of God.  It is probably impossible for us to say all that this means for us but the glories of heaven and sinless perfection, and eternal bliss await the believer in the future in a far more glorious way that he can possibly experience here and now.  This is the third great blessing that belongs to the true Christian.

Now why is he telling us all of this?  Well he not only wants us to truly understand the greatness of our salvation and rejoice in it every day, but he also wants us to see how secure our salvation is, and that nothing can take it away when we have true faith in Jesus Christ.

No not even all the sufferings and trials and pressures and afflictions that we face in this life, can ever separate us from God’s love in Christ.  They will never make us give up, and lose heart and give in, and turn away from faith and confidence and trust in Him.  On the contrary says Paul, we overcome and we rejoice even in our sufferings.

This then is the context in which our text occurs, and so now we must come closer to it and ask, why is this?  Why is the true Christian able to cope so wonderfully well with trials and afflictions in life?  Why is it that he is able to rise above them, and as the apostle Paul says, “even able to rejoice in his sufferings?  How can he be so sure that he will not fail and that his trials will not separate him from the love of God in Christ and cause him to abandon his hope?

Is it because he is so great in himself?  Is he so strong and so mighty?  No, beloved, it is just the opposite we are weak and faltering.  The real reason is because God is so great, and He is so mighty.  It is because of what He has done for us in Christ, and what he continues to do for us that we are able to bear trials and afflictions so well.  This is what the Apostle Paul wants to tell us in these few verses.  He wants to remind us what God has done for us, and what he is continuing to do for us.  For this is where our strength in weakness comes from.  And so we must now look and see what God is doing and what He has done for us, and when we do, we will see that Paul mentions several things.

  1. The first thing he wants to tell us is that God is the one who is also involved in all our trials and tribulations, and that He has a purpose in it all. His purpose is not to do us harm but to do us good.  Now it is a great comfort to know that already; to know that we are not alone in what happens to us; and to know that God has his hand in it for our good.

But then, after he tells us this, he goes on to tell us something about God’s purpose in our trials.  What he wants to tell us is this: all our trials only serve to assure us that we are his true children, and that nothing can ever separate us from His love.  Do you see how he argues in a kind of circle?  He talks about our hope of sharing in the glory of God in verse 2, and he comes back to that again at the end of verses 4 and 5.  You see, all our courage and strength and patience in life really comes from knowing and being sure that we are a true child of God and that we will one day share in the glory of God.  If we are not certain about this, then when those severe trials and afflictions come to us, as they come to everybody, they will knock us off our feet.

But how can we know?  How can we be sure that we are truly a child of God?  How can we know that we have true faith, that we have been made right with God by grace through faith?  That we do have that objective peace with God?  We can never doubt God’s great love for sinners, but it it also for me?  This is the wonderful thing about our trials and afflictions.  In the hands of God they are the very means to show us that we really are His children.  Notice how the Apostle Paul puts it.  Our sufferings produce endurance.  What is endurance?  Endurance is stickability; it is not giving up.  But not giving up on what?  The answer is not giving up on God, not giving up on Christ, not giving up on the church.  Not abandoning faith and hope and trust and confidence in Him and His mercy and love for us, not doubting Him and questioning Him.  In the case of some, trials and suffering only drive them away from God in bitterness and unbelief.  But the true child of God still keeps hanging onto Christ in the midst of the storm and learns to say, “even if he slay me yet will I trust him ‘  Now when this happens the Apostle says there is a further result.  Endurance produces character The word here in the Greek really means approvedness, it means to pass the test.  It means to be tried and found to the genuine.  Our faith you see has been put to the test, and it has been proved under fire that it is indeed the genuine saving faith.  This is very important because the Bible tells us very plainly that there is a faith which is not true saving faith.  Do you remember for example the parable of the sower?  There were several who thought that they had true saving faith, but when they were afflicted and tried they fell away.

One day there was a young man in the church and we were very impressed by him.  We thought that he was now really a true Christian.  He showed such interest and was coming along to church twice on Sunday.  But then he had a trial.  The young lady he was very interested in, and had spoken with about marriage broke it off.  As a result this young man turned away, and all our efforts to reclaim him came to nothing.  His faith you see was put to the test to see if it was the genuine article.  I do not know if he has come back to faith in Christ or not, but I know this: that trial was used of God to show him what lived in his heart.  This is a very important part of God’s purpose in our trials.  He wants to show us what kind of faith we have and what really lives in our hearts.  I would not say it is the whole purpose, but it is a very important purpose.  The true believer, congregation, though he may sometimes waver and even doubt a little, yet he will not fall away.  He knows that God is in the storms of life with him, that He has His purpose in it, and he will never let him go.  He also knows that he himself can never let go of Christ either – He will still cling to him, in spite of all the inner conflicts and outward trials.  He will not abandon his confidence and his hope in the Lord, nor fail to trust him.

And when he does this, Paul tells us, it produces another result.  It is like a chain reaction.  This passing the test, he says, now produces hope, and so you see we have gone around the circle.  We are back where we started, back at hope.  We started there and now we are back.  Only this time our hope is much stronger.  It is a hope that is confirmed and tested.

Because we do not give up on God and lose confidence in Him, and because we continue to trust in Christ in spite of our trials and sufferings in this world, we now know we must be a true child of God.  We must have that true saving faith.  We do have that objective peace with God.  We have been made right with Him through Christ.  We do stand in a new relationship with Him.  We are His child; and knowing this we are all the stronger to face whatever further trials and afflictions may come our way.  This is part of God’s plan to confirm His love to us and make us stronger and more mature Christians.  It does not mean that we necessarily like to suffer any more than any other person.  Yet when we can see it this way, and see the results and the benefits that come to us in the assurance that we are truly His, then we can easily see why the Apostle Paul could say, “More than that, we are able to rejoice in our sufferings, knowing the outcome, and knowing God’s purpose.”  Knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because we know God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit which has been given to us.”

What does this mean then?  Does it mean that our salvation finally depends upon us and our ability to hang on to faith in Christ, in the face of the wildest storms that may beat against our mortal frames?  No, it does not mean that beloved.  It means that our trials only serve to show us, and to prove to us that God has such a strong hold upon us, and that nothing, not even the most severe trials on earth can ever shake us loose from His hold upon us and our hold upon Him.

This is the note that the Apostle finishes upon in vs.5.  Hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit which has been given us.  God is the one who has done it all, He has poured His love upon us in Christ and given His Holy Spirit to us.

Our very trials and afflictions says Paul, are only God’s way of making us more and more aware of His great love for us in Christ, and of the fact that our faith is the genuine faith, and we have really passed from death to life.  Therefore, we are able to rejoice even in our sufferings and all our trials and our afflictions.  May God grant it to each of us in our times of trial, and help us always to view it in this way and may those times be mightily used and blessed of Him to bring us closer to Him and confirm us in the genuineness of our most holy faith and the knowledge of His great love for us in Christ, and to Him be all the honour and the glory.

Amen.