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Our Glorious Hope | Rom. 5:1-5 (Ben_Dunson-3-12-2023)
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The sermon text is from Romans chapter 5, verses 1 to 5. The main points are: 1) The foundation of unshakable hope is being justified by faith and having peace with God through Jesus Christ. 2) Christians should boast in their hope and find joy in their sufferings, knowing that it produces endurance, character, and hope. 3) The outcome of our hope is the love of God poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit. The sermon encourages Christians to remember the path they must walk, which includes trials, in order to reach their heavenly hope. Well, good morning. Please stay standing as we read God's Word this morning. The sermon text is Romans chapter 5, and we will be reading verses 1 to 5. So, people of God, please pay careful attention this morning to God's Word and listen for what God would say to you this morning from His Word, how He would convict you, how He would encourage you. This is His holy, inerrant, and infallible Word, so we must give it very careful attention. Romans chapter 5, verses 1 to 5. Therefore, since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. Through Him, we have also obtained access by faith into this grace in which we stand, and we rejoice in hope of the glory of God. More than that, we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us. The grass withers and the flower fades, but the Word of the Lord stands forever. And please be seated. And please now join me as we ask the Lord's blessing on the preaching of His Word. Our great God in heaven, we come before you this morning and we plead your mercies. We are so thankful that you have not left us in the darkness and the misery of our sin, but that you have given us your Word. You have shined this light into our hearts, the light of the Lord Jesus Christ. I pray this morning that you would be with me, that the words that I would proclaim would be faithful. I pray that your Spirit would use your very Word to open up the hearts of all who are here this morning. I pray that they would have humble hearts to receive your Word and to humble themselves underneath your mighty and your loving hand. I pray above all else that Christ would be lifted up, that He would be exalted, that we would find our strength and our joy and our hope in Him. These are all things that are beyond us, and so we pray that your Spirit would do this work. We pray this in Christ's most precious name. Amen. Well, for several years, my family and I lived in Florida, and for a while we lived north of Orlando. And if you've ever been to Orlando, you'll know that there's a highway that goes up and down Orlando. It's Highway 4, I-4. And on I-4, there's a building. This building has come to be known affectionately as the eyesore on I-4. If you are driving from the north where we lived down to downtown Orlando, you can't miss this building. It's fairly tall, looks like a normal office building. But as you get closer, you start to notice that something's not right with this building. And the closer you get, the more you realize what's going on. The bottom portion of this building is missing. All the windows are gone. It's just the steel girders, and that's all that's there. Now, this was the case when we moved to Florida in 2013. And it had been the case, as far as I can tell, for quite some time before that. It's still standing just like that. Even today, we were there a couple of years ago. And the building hasn't been finished. This is a project that obviously someone began with grand hopes of this tall office building, that they would fill it with many tenants. But somewhere along the way, something went wrong. Maybe it was the developers. Maybe they didn't have the adequate resources to actually finish the project that they started. Maybe it was the builders. I don't exactly know why the building was in that state. But I have to assume that someone didn't count the cost before they began that building project. And because of that, this building stands there to this day incomplete. Now, as Christians, we all hope for heaven. We desire to be with our Lord Jesus Christ in heaven. That's our goal. That's where we're headed. But sometimes in the Christian life, we don't know what God is going to do from point A to point B to get us there, or at least we forget what God is going to do. And our text this morning shows us that path. It shows us that path from becoming a Christian all the way to the point of our hope, our eternal hope, our heavenly hope, to when we arrive at that glorious day when we see Christ face to face. Our hope is in heaven, but we must walk a specific path in order to arrive at that hope. And that path that the Lord has marked out for us is a path that includes many trials. When we forget that as Christians, we can become very easily discouraged. Maybe even we can fall into moments of despair as Christians, where we think that the Christian life is simply going to be this life of ease. It's going to be always joyful, always hopeful. And we forget that there are going to be many times in our lives where the Lord is going to place dark trials in our lives. And, you know, He doesn't do that for any reason other than His love for us as His people. But if we forget about that, if we forget that these times will come, and this is true for every single one of you, if you are in the Lord Jesus Christ, many times of trial, even difficult and dark trials, will come into your life. We see this absolutely in our text. You can't get away from this. You can't avoid this. There's not some way to live the Christian life without walking through the trials. And yet you can become discouraged if you don't remember the purposes of God, if you don't remember even the love of God is the reason that He places these trials in your life. Now, it's also true, biblically speaking, that there are some in the church, think of the parable that Christ taught about the seeds, there are some who seem to receive the Word of God with great joy at the beginning. But what is it that Jesus said chokes that joy out of their life and actually in the end proves them to have not known the Lord Jesus Christ at all? It's trials that come into their life. Trials come into their life and then when they face those trials, because they do not have the root of the saving knowledge of Christ, they fall away. So even when we talk about trials, this is a warning to those who are in the church, who are pretending, who maybe seem to love the Lord Jesus Christ. But brothers and sisters, I hope better things for all of you this morning. As the author of Hebrews says, I hope better things for all of you. And I want to show you this morning how we can have hope in the midst of the darkest trials that we face as God's people, that this is the path that the Lord has marked out for us. And the main points this morning that I want to leave you with are first of all, what the foundation of unshakable hope is. Secondly, how we should learn and we must learn as Christians to boast in our hope. And finally, what the outcome of our hope is as believers in the Lord Jesus Christ. So the foundation of our hope, boasting in our hope, and then finally the outcome of our hope. Hope for the Christian is not like hope for those in the world. When someone says, I hope that I get that promotion, I hope that the weather is good today, they're just kind of wishful thinking. Biblical hope is not like that at all. Biblical hope, Christian hope, is absolutely certain. Our hope in the Lord Jesus Christ is certain that we will one day see Him face to face. He will wipe away every tear. We will rejoice for all of eternity in our Savior. What is the foundation, though, of unshakable hope? And what is the foundation of a hope that's going to be strong enough to get you through all the trials that you'll face in this life? And the Apostle Paul tells us here in verse 1, Since you have been justified by faith, you have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. Peace with God. That is the foundation of our hope. That through the Lord Jesus Christ, through faith in Him, you can be at peace with God. I think peace is one of those things that you hear a lot about today in the world. People are always talking about anxiety, aren't they? Everywhere you look, the discussion is always about anxiety. I feel so anxious. And we can turn to any number of sources in our world and people will tell you, I'm going to show you how to be free from anxiety. And half the time I think they make us more anxious because they're just telling us to just accept it. You're always going to be anxious. It's going to consume you. There's nothing you can do about it. You try to find some way to deal with it, but you're probably going to always be like this. Peace in the Bible is not really about anxiety. It's not about dealing with anxiety. I think that might be a byproduct of being at peace with God. But what Paul's talking about here is enmity with God. God is a holy God. He is a righteous God. He cannot overlook sin. And our fundamental problem in life is not that there are things that make us anxious, but that in our natural state, we stand condemned before a righteous and a holy God. That's the fundamental problem of every single person in this room, outside of Christ and every person in the world. Being at peace with God then means that that enmity, that righteous wrath that we deserved has been overturned in the Lord Jesus Christ. It means that you are objectively at peace with God. It doesn't matter how you feel from day to day. Now, the Lord doesn't want you to be consumed with anxiety. He doesn't want you to be consumed with these feelings that He despises you, anything of the sort. But it doesn't matter how you feel. If you are in Christ, you are at peace with God. The enmity has been overturned. The wrath has been turned away. You simply are at peace with God. Now, why are we at peace with God? Well, Paul tells us you're at peace with God because you've been justified. You are in the right with God in the Lord Jesus Christ. That's what justification is. It means that the divine judge has counted you as righteous, fully righteous in His sight, only because the Lord Jesus Christ died for you on the cross. He shed His precious blood for you, and He made you right with God. You stand right with God only in Him. Nothing you've done, only in Christ can you be right with God. What I love about Romans, among other things, is that Paul has all these wonderful images of what it means to be in the Lord Jesus Christ, what it means to be saved. Justification is one of them. And justification takes us into this realm of the law court, the divine judge has pronounced sentence upon us. But that's not all there is to salvation. You can even imagine, if that's all that Paul ever said about our salvation, you might start to think, well, that's interesting. I mean, God, He's the judge, and He's now satisfied. He's no longer wrathful towards me. And you might think, well, is that all there is to it? God, He accepts me now, but maybe He's not particularly fond of me. If a judge simply pronounced sentence on someone, the judge might not care for that person in human life. They might not have any connection to that person at all. They might simply pronounce the sentence, and that's the last they would ever have to do with them. But that is so far from the biblical picture. We are righteous in the sight of God, the divine judge, only in the Lord Jesus Christ. And because of that, we are at peace with God. And to be at peace with God means that we have been reconciled to Him. The one who must be our enemy outside of Christ, who could be nothing other than our enemy, has now, in the Lord Jesus Christ, become our friend. We've been brought back to Him. We've been reconciled to Him. We're at peace with Him in Christ. We've moved from the courtroom, justification, and we've moved into the realm of friendship with God. There's so many wonderful pictures like this in Romans. Paul will go on to talk about adoption, moving from friendship to God, into the family of God even, becoming God's beloved children in the Lord Jesus Christ. Peace with God is not mere toleration. It's delight. And just think about that for a moment, that God is not merely satisfied. His justice has not only been satisfied. It certainly has. But God in Christ, if you are in Christ, delights in you. There's this wonderful text in Zephaniah, Zephaniah chapter 3. It says, the Lord your God is in your midst, a mighty one who will save. He will rejoice over you with gladness. He will quiet you by His love. He will exult over you with loud singing. I will gather those of you who mourn for the festival so that you will no longer suffer reproach. Isn't that an amazing text, to hear that God will rejoice over His children? That God exults over you with loud singing? God is dancing with joy over His children. He's exulting over you, brothers and sisters, rejoicing over you. That's the glory of our salvation in Christ. That's the foundation of our hope, not merely that we're right with God, but that God delights in you, that He rejoices over you. That is our hope. And if we don't have that right, nothing else I say this morning will be of any benefit to us. If we don't have that foundation right, that God in the Lord Jesus Christ delights and rejoices in His children. That's the grace, Paul says, in which we stand. We never outgrow that. We can never get to the point where we move past this. I figured justification out. I figured peace with God out. And now I want to move on to something else. We have to come back to this day after day. This is the grace through which we stand, he says in verse 2. We've obtained access by faith into this grace in which we stand day by day by day. And because we have this foundation, because we know that we are friends with God in Christ, He delights in us in Christ. Then, Paul says, we're to move on to begin to speak of rejoicing in hope. To rejoice in this hope. And even, maybe strangely for us, he says rejoice in your sufferings. And that's our second point, is that we are to rejoice in hope. You might have noticed that I said originally at the beginning of the sermon to boast in hope. The word that Paul uses here is actually the word to boast in hope. So the ESV translates this as rejoice, and that's absolutely fine. That's a part of this, is to rejoice in hope. But the word boast, we're going to see, actually becomes really important in this text. Boasting is a good thing. If you boast in the right thing. But the scripture is so clear that our natural tendency is to boast in ourselves. It's to boast in our own righteousness, to boast in our own accomplishments. Instead, the scriptures tell us, boast in God. Boast in your hope. Boast in this hope that's set out for you. The hope of eternal life in the Lord Jesus Christ. That is to be our boast. Boast in hope, because you have this great confidence that you are at peace with God. But Paul adds here, boast in suffering. I think boast in hope might initially sound fairly easy. Who doesn't want to go to heaven? Anyone who believes in heaven wants to go to heaven. So this idea of boasting in hope, at least on the surface it might sound like that's the easy thing here. But then Paul says, boast also in suffering. Why in the world would I boast in suffering? Why would that be something that I see as a good thing, as much as my hope in heaven? The reason is that God has marked out for us the path that we must necessarily walk until that day when what we hope in becomes ours. And he's going to use that path, which is going to be a path that includes suffering. He's going to use that for our good. And he's going to do that for everyone who is his child. Now, what are trials? Paul says, we can boast in hope, and then we boast, verse 3, in our sufferings, rejoice in our sufferings. He's talking about trials. He's talking about any sort of trial that comes into your life as a Christian, as big as it is or as small as it is. There's no sense of trial envy in the Christian life where we think, oh, it's just those who have those great trials. I see those around me who have cancer or who maybe are on their deathbed or those who have lost a loved one, and we think, okay, that's a trial. But I just have a really bad cold today, and that's not really a trial. God doesn't care about those things, but that's not actually true. In Romans 8, Paul will go on to show that every single aspect of living in this fallen world, every single thing that happens to us that isn't as it should be, is a part of that. It's a part of the trials that we face as God's people. And I really do mean this. This is not to be flippant or to make a joke. Stubbing your toe, something as small as that, shouldn't happen. You shouldn't stub your toe and break your toe. That's a result of the fall. So even something as small as that, all the way up to the point of death, everything that we face that's difficult in this fallen age is a trial that God places into our lives. And Paul says, boast in that. Rejoice in that. Now, if that's all Paul said, I think we would probably find it very difficult to figure out what he means or even to obey this command. How in the world would I do that? Well, he shows us. He shows us how to do this, and he shows us why we should do this. It's not the trials themselves. God doesn't place trials in our lives just because. God doesn't place trials in our lives randomly. God certainly doesn't place trials in our lives because he seeks to do us ill. God places trials in our lives because there is something good at the end of those trials. There's something that he's going to do through those trials, which is good for every one of us, and it's necessary. And he gives us here this path that we all must walk. First of all, when these trials come into our life, when the suffering comes into our life, what does it do? Well, God uses it to produce endurance in our lives. Endurance is unshakable fortitude. It's the language of something that can't be moved. To be able to endure is to not be easily tossed around, to not be easily moved away from your hope in Christ. That's what endurance is. It's over time to grow in your ability to endure trials, to face trials, to be steadfast. And endurance then, Paul says in verse 4, produces character. Character is a word that's used throughout the New Testament. It's a word that could also be said to be tested character. Both James and Peter, they use this word, and they bring in this imagery of gold. When you melt down gold, and gold is not always pure, so it might have impurities in it. And you melt the gold down, and when you melt the gold down, the impurities rise to the surface. And then you skim those impurities off of the surface, and then you allow the gold to reform. And when it's done that, it's more pure. That's exactly what God is doing in your lives, brothers and sisters. When he puts trials in your life, even the most difficult and dark trial, he is purifying you in that way. So that your character would be transformed in that way. That you would be changed by that process. And then finally, Paul says, character produces hope. And hope does not put us to shame. Hope is the outcome. Hope is the goal with all of this. Hope is the reason why God is doing this in our lives. It's why he is placing these trials in our lives. And what is hope other than teaching us to look away from this fallen world. To look away from the destruction that we see around us. To look away from the ravages of sin. To look away from our bodies which are corruptible and falling apart, and the world that's falling apart. To look away from that, because there is no solid ground for hope in this world, in this age. Only in the Lord Jesus Christ. In the hope that we have that we will see him face to face. That we will then have our Savior wipe away every tear from all of those trials that we face. On that wonderful day. Hope is the only possible way that we can make it in this life as Christians. If we have that unshakable hope in that glorious day to come. And so God is going to work this process in the lives of every one of his children. There's no way to get out of this. There's no way to find the caveat and to get out of this process. But I will say this, because the way Paul says it, you might think this is automatic. But this is not automatic, is it? When trials enter our lives, we can become bitter against God. We can be prone to despair when trials enter our lives. We can fall into great darkness when trials enter our lives. How could we possibly avoid that? How can we not allow ourselves to become angry against the Lord? To grumble against him, to complain against him, to say this isn't right, this isn't fair. The only possible way is to have faith in the Lord's loving kindness towards us, even by putting these trials in our lives. The only way that we can make it when God puts these trials in our lives is to fix our hope on the day in which there will be no sin, there will be no sickness, there will be no sadness. I think of Job, and I think of Job's wife, and the two different ways in which we can respond to trials when they enter our lives. Will you be Job's wife who says, curse God and die to Job when he faces the trials he faces? Who complains against the Lord, has become bitter against the Lord? Or will you be Job who says, the Lord has given and the Lord takes away? That is the stance of faith. That is the stance of someone who has hope in the good purposes of the Lord. And think of the suffering that Job endured, almost unendurable. And even in his darkness, he could say, the Lord has given and the Lord takes away. And he could still hold on to his hope, even in the darkest moments. Well, this darkness, brothers and sisters, the darkness of the deepest trial you face, it's not forever. That brings us to our final point, the outcome of our hope. In verse 5, Paul says, hope does not put us to shame, because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us. That's where that language of boasting comes back in. Boasting and shame. Your hope, if it is in the Lord Jesus Christ, will never put you to shame. If you find your boast in Him, and if you boast in Him and in nothing else, you will never be put to shame. The cross is shameful. To believe in the Lord Jesus Christ is to believe in one who appeared to the world to have been the ultimate one who was shamed, to have been degraded, to have been defeated. And yet His cross was His victory over sin and over death. By enduring the cross and taking that shame upon Himself, He made it so that we could find the fullness of salvation in Him, that we would no longer have shame. And yet, as Christians, we walk in this world and we bear shame from the world. The world looks at us and it says, look at that ignorant person. Look at that ignorant person who hopes in God. Look at that ignorant person who faces all these trials and still will not shake his fist or her fist against God. Look at that person who could have the world and doesn't seek it, and seeks to be identified with Christ and to be identified with His people. And the world sees that as shameful. And the world mocks believers, as it always has, mocks us for our faith in Jesus Christ. But Paul says here, your hope will not put you to shame. It will never put you to shame. As Christians, we have to, as it were, put all of our eggs in one basket. We are placing all of our hope in God's Word, in the Lord Jesus Christ. And we're not hoping that there's some escape clause, that maybe if we were wrong it would be okay in the end. All of our hope is in Him, as it must be. One of the church fathers, Cyprian, he said this, he said, he who has outgrown this age can now strive for nothing, miss nothing from this age. I love that phrase, he who has outgrown this age. If your hope is in Christ, if your hope is in the age to come, you've outgrown this age and you can't miss anything. You'll never miss out on anything. Now, it will seem that way so often, won't it, that we miss out on what the world enjoys, what they think is the good life. We could live for the pleasures of what money can buy us. We could live for sex or for drugs or alcohol, whatever it is, whatever will make us feel good. We could live for the things the world lives for. And I think we've just got to get as much as we can, because we've only got a short time on this earth. Get as much as you can from this life, but that's the way the world lives. And we as Christians, we say, no, we've outgrown this age. We are setting our hope only in Christ. We will miss nothing. This is what Paul is saying. You will miss nothing. Your hope will not put you to shame on the last day. Only someone who has staked everything on Christ will find this to be true, who has boasted in the hope of glory. Your hope is only in him. What is your only hope in life and death? The Heidelberg Catechism. What is your only hope in life and death? The Lord Jesus Christ who died for you, who gave himself for you. If that isn't your hope, you will not find a solid hope in this world. You will not find a solid hope in this age. Everything that you could place your hope in will put you to shame in the end if it is not Christ. Now, to bring this to a close this morning, Paul really leaves us where he started. And then he says, hope does not put us to shame because God's love has been poured out into our hearts. God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us. It is only true, active hope of glory resting in the peace that we have in and through the Lord Jesus Christ, the Savior who loves us, who delights in us even, who rejoices over us, is only that that will sustain us in the midst of all the trials that we face in this life. One commentator said it this way, I think he put it really well, Christians need not fear that the last day will put them to shame in the sense that the foundation on which they have built their lives and the foundation on which they have built their hope for eternal blessing will prove inadequate. Christians will not be put to shame. The foundation on which we have built our lives will not fail us. And we will see that in all of its glory on the last day. And now, brothers and sisters, we must hope in Him. And for you maybe who don't know the Lord Christ, I don't know if everyone does here, but if you don't know Him, you will not find a lasting hope in anyone other than Him. Everything will fail you in this age. It will all come to nothing in the end. But for us who are in Christ, when we stand on that last day and we see Christ, we will be able to say, I understand now. I see it. It makes sense. I understand why, Lord, You allowed me to go through all of those dark trials. I understand. I may not have understood when I was going through them. It may have overwhelmed me at times, but I see it now. I see what You were doing. You were giving me something that would be eternal. You were giving me a solid hope when all of the hopes of this world would fail me. And we can rejoice even now because we know that's true by faith. So I want to leave you then with a question. How are you responding to the trials that are in your life right now? Trials must come. They must come because God loves you. If He didn't love you, then He would let you go. But because He loves you, trials must come. Trials must come. Are you Job's wife? Curse God and die? Or are you Job? The Lord gives and the Lord takes away. Blessed be the name of the Lord. Let's pray. Our Heavenly Father, we're so thankful for Your Word. We're so thankful that You have given us true hope. We cannot even truly understand that You could rejoice over us in Christ and delight in us, but we are so thankful that You have loved us, that You are our God, that we are Your people. I pray that You would be with us all, that You would give us that unshakable hope, that You would sustain us and that You would reform us, change us, make us more into the image of Christ, give us the grace to endure those many trials that You placed in our lives. We pray all these things in the precious name of Jesus Christ, our Savior. Amen.
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