As posted by The Round Farmhouse on October 9, 2024 as part of a study of Romans.
“Not only that, but we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope.” Romans 5:3-4 ESV
During 2020 I started keeping index cards with scripture on my kitchen counter. I suddenly found myself home, alone, teaching online, and trying to find some kind of hope: hope that I wouldn’t get sick, hope that my family would be safe, hope that I wouldn’t go stir-crazy. I came across Romans 5:3-4, and it made its way onto my counter. Since I was spending more time in my kitchen than ever before (and no, not baking sourdough bread), my eyes glanced at it regularly.
Let’s look at hope in the verses surrounding this countertop verse.
According to Romans 5:1-11, I can have hope because I have:
-Peace with God (Verse 1)
-Access by faith into grace (Verse 2)
-Hope of the glory of God (Verse 2)
-God’s love in my heart (Verse 5)
-The Holy Spirit given to me (Verse 5)
Did you catch all that? The God of the Universe, the God of all power and might, the Creator of all things, loves us so much that He gave us the Holy Spirit to live in us. What a reason to have hope! And because we have these reasons to hope, we won’t be put to shame (verse 5).
And since we won’t be put to shame, we can rejoice, or boast, in our hope, knowing that God won’t abandon us because we aren’t perfect. Verse 8 tells us that God sent Christ to die for the ungodly and the weak, knowing that we are sinners: “but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” Wow! Christ died for us, knowing we can’t possibly be perfect. We don’t need to clean ourselves up or “be right” before going before God. He wants us to come as we are.
This is why we can have hope in our suffering (verse 3), because God loved us enough to save us, and He won’t just leave us to figure out life. In fact, Paul uses the words “more” and “much more” in verses 10 and 11 (and later in verses 15 and 17) to expand upon God’s love and Christ’s sacrifice for our salvation: “For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son, much more, now that we are reconciled, shall we be saved by his life. More than that, we also rejoice in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received reconciliation.”
So let us rejoice in the hope that we have because of God’s love – a love that won’t abandon or diminish when we’re suffering!
