Last week, God encouraged us to have fun on the life-long adventure of discovering our true identities.
Something that we must possess as we pursue our purpose in life is hope.
Hope is an eager desire and a confident expectation of receiving something good.
Hope is what keeps us pressing forward and onward and upward in life. Hope is a placeholder in our lives that prevents discouragement and fear from seeping in and weighing us down. Hope is a pathway for joy to exist in our lives despite our current circumstances.
Hope enables us to endure hardships and stand up under pressures and keep our eyes fixed on the future.
Although hope is awesome and so valuable, it means that there is some area of lack in our lives.
Romans 8:24-25
24 …hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what they already have? 25 But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently.
What gives us hope is not what we have or who we are, but entirely on whose we are!
When we receive God’s salvation, we are adopted into His family as His children! We are co-heirs with Christ inheriting His Kingdom. We have access to the riches of God and so much more all because of whose we are!
This enables us to not only have hope, but to also be able to enjoy life regardless of our current circumstances in life!
Romans 5:1-8 (AMPC)
1 Therefore, since we are justified (acquitted, declared righteous, and given a right standing with God) through faith, let us [grasp the fact that we] have [the peace of reconciliation to hold and to enjoy] peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ (the Messiah, the Anointed One).
2 Through Him also we have [our] access (entrance, introduction) by faith into this grace (state of God’s favor) in which we [firmly and safely] stand. And let us rejoice and exult in our hope of experiencing and enjoying the glory of God.
Rejoicing, triumphant elation, hope, in experiencing and enjoying the glory of God!
What if, whatever our need may be, our heart’s desire was for God to be glorified?
A few weeks ago, we learned some of the reasons why we may be in need of something.
James 4:2-3 (AMPC)
2 You are jealous and covet [what others have] and your desires go unfulfilled; [so] you become murderers. [To hate is to murder as far as your hearts are concerned.] You burn with envy and anger and are not able to obtain [the gratification, the contentment, and the happiness that you seek], so you fight and war. You do not have, because you do not ask.
3 [Or] you do ask [God for them] and yet fail to receive, because you ask with wrong purpose and evil, selfish motives. Your intention is [when you get what you desire] to spend it in sensual pleasures.
Our hearts may be our very own logjam holding back the promises of God.
Do we rejoice thinking about the opportunity that our need presents for us to experience and enjoy the glory of God?
Do we think about the testimony that we could have to brag about God and His power and what He can do?
John 9:1-3
1 As Jesus went along, he saw a man blind from birth. 2 His disciples asked him, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?”
3 “Neither this man nor his parents sinned,” said Jesus, “but this happened so that the works of God might be displayed in him.
Beyond God receiving glory when the fulfillment of His promises are received by us, there is also something that God does while we are waiting.
Who we are is more important that what we have or what we don’t have.
Who we are is more important than what we do or don’t do.
God sees beyond the identity that we try to put on to others.
He sees our hearts, our thoughts, and our attitudes.
He sees who we currently are AND ALSO who He created us to be.
He loves us too much to let us settle for lesser things and to compromise our full potential!
Yes, we are children of God.
Yes, we are spoiled.
However, we are not supposed to be brats.
We are spoiled in order for our lives to generously pour out whatever we’ve been spoiled with to other people.
It’s so that they can see how good God has been to us, who didn’t deserve any of that goodness. It’s so that they can taste and see that God is good and seek after Him for what He has for them as well. Our lives are supposed to be living testimonies that cause people to ask us the reason for the HOPE that is within us!
1 Peter 3:8-18
8 Finally, all of you, be like-minded, be sympathetic, love one another, be compassionate and humble. 9 Do not repay evil with evil or insult with insult. On the contrary, repay evil with blessing, because to this you were called so that you may inherit a blessing. 10 For,
“Whoever would love life
and see good days
must keep their tongue from evil
and their lips from deceitful speech.
11 They must turn from evil and do good;
they must seek peace and pursue it.
12 For the eyes of the Lord are on the righteous
and his ears are attentive to their prayer,
but the face of the Lord is against those who do evil.”
13 Who is going to harm you if you are eager to do good? 14 But even if you should suffer for what is right, you are blessed. “Do not fear their threats; do not be frightened.” 15 But in your hearts revere Christ as Lord. Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have. But do this with gentleness and respect, 16 keeping a clear conscience, so that those who speak maliciously against your good behavior in Christ may be ashamed of their slander. 17 For it is better, if it is God’s will, to suffer for doing good than for doing evil. 18 For Christ also suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, to bring you to God. He was put to death in the body but made alive in the Spirit.
Children of God are called to do good always and to everyone seeking and pursuing peace with everyone so far as it depends on us. There certainly will be seasons of suffering in our lives.
If we are following Jesus, who only ever did what is good and right, and He suffered in His lifetime before the cross, why should we also not expect to? In fact, Peter calls out that seasons of suffering may be a part of God’s will for our lives.
So how do we reconcile all of this? God’s word tells us that His plans are not to harm us, but to give us hope and a future. However, suffering sure does feel like harm!
Well, let’s finally continue on in Romans 5 on to verse 3.
3 Moreover [let us also be full of joy now!] let us exult and triumph in our troubles and rejoice in our sufferings,
Not that I have completely achieved this one, but I understand how we can always be full of joy here and now. Joy comes not from our circumstances, but from the Holy Spirit who does not change like our circumstances do.
How can we triumph without troubles? I get this one, too.
Rejoice in suffering? That one is tough for anyone. In fact, without Jesus, it’s nearly impossible…
So… let us rejoice in sufferings? How do we do that?
Well, Paul goes on to explain how this is possible.
rejoice in our sufferings knowing that pressure and affliction and hardship produce patient and unswerving endurance.
Now having patience and endurance I can see the value in. No one wants sufferings or pressure or affliction or hardship, but they serve a beneficial purpose.
We can consider our lives kind of like a block of marble and God as the sculptor. We’re just a bunch of lifeless blockheads bumping around through life. However, God sees the beauty and full potential within.
Ephesians 2:10
we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus
To expose who we truly are, that masterpiece within, the sculptor has to start by breaking away the things that don’t belong first. The initial steps are chaotic and loud and risky and violent. The sculptor uses heavy tools like sledges and hammers and chisels.
It looks more like destruction than it does production. It doesn’t look like the sculptor cares anything for the marble. However, it is a necessary step.
Suffering, pressure, affliction, and hardship in the hands of the enemy steal from our lives, tear us apart, and destroy us.
However, those same tools in the hands of God are used to build us up and separate us from the things in life that don’t belong and only serve to weigh us down and trip us up. It doesn’t look or feel very loving. It absolutely requires trust and faith to allow it to happen because we cannot see how anything good can result from it.
As we trust God in faith, we become patient and learn how to endure hardships and sufferings.
As we endure and continue to allow God to break things away from our lives that do not belong in them, it leads to the next step.
4 And endurance (fortitude) develops maturity of character (approved faith and tried integrity).
As we endure, the first stage, the second stage begins to take place. We can begin to see what God, our sculptor, sees.
Who we truly are begins to emerge. Our character begins to reveal itself. We are more than we realize and we are capable of far greater things that we had ever thought.
Although it still requires faith, faith becomes easier because we have experienced the goodness of God and seen how He is able to bring good things that benefit us through hardships.
We have seen how our lives have improved and have become better and better as we trust Him more and more and allow Him to do His work in our lives. He is molding and shaping us into the person that He always intended us to be.
He is bringing out the best in us.
Endurance develops maturity of character. It has always been there, it has just been buried and corrupted and drowned out by sin and all of the weight and heaviness that it brings. God is simply setting us free!
As we learned last week, this is all part of the process of us discovering who we are; our identity and purpose.
God’s not finished with us yet. There are always areas to refine and more fully develop.
Faith that is not put to the test is no faith at all.
Integrity that is never tried and stressed by temptation is no integrity at all.
God is not trying to break us, He is proving us. More often than not, proving us to ourselves. He is revealing how strong and capable we actually are through Him.
Then, the cycle continues forming a life-long habit of faith and trust and development and maturing. The sculpture entrusting itself into the hands of the sculptor.
This is how we can rejoice in suffering. We can rejoice because if it is part of God’s will and happening by His hand, it is going to produce something good. It actually causes us to have hope; an eager expectation of good things that are coming!
And character [of this sort] produces [the habit of] joyful and confident hope of eternal salvation.
5 Such hope never disappoints or deludes or shames us, for God’s love has been poured out in our hearts through the Holy Spirit Who has been given to us.
Again, like a sculpture, it is a work inwardly that is being revealed outwardly.
6 While we were yet in weakness [powerless to help ourselves], at the fitting time Christ died for the ungodly.
7 Now it is an extraordinary thing for one to give his life even for an upright man, though perhaps for a noble and lovable and generous benefactor someone might even dare to die.
8 But God shows and clearly proves His [own] love for us by the fact that while we were still sinners, Christ (the Messiah, the Anointed One) died for us.
Whatever pain we may endure throughout this process of being reborn and transformed, it is nothing compared to the ultimate price paid by Jesus on our behalf.
We don’t have to suffer or endure the punishment or shame or condemnation of our sin. Jesus took that all upon Himself. Through simple faith in Him, He will transfer our sin upon Himself and His righteousness upon us.
He will shower us with grace and mercy empowering and equipping us to rise up again into new life and give us a living hope!