Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Good morning.
[00:00:02] How's everybody doing? I'm going to set that aside.
[00:00:11] I'd like to thank the guys for giving me an opportunity to open the word to you all today.
[00:00:17] I actually have specific thanks for each of you.
[00:00:22] First of all, thanks to Jesse for reminding me what a dinosaur I am. Bringing paper up instead of electronics, that's actually a risk mitigation effort. If anything can be dropped, I will drop it. That's just the way I am. I almost did this morning, and actually, I think God caused that because he made me realize that I didn't have page numbers on my notes.
[00:00:47] And so if that highly likely thing happened, we'd all be in trouble. So I was furiously scrolling the page numbers on my notes this morning just in case.
[00:01:00] And I do want to thank Jim as well for handing me the easiest and most pleasant subject of all, the roman series, the one on suffering.
[00:01:12] Thanks for that.
[00:01:16] Actually, it was a good thing he gave me that weeks ago because I've been wading through this one like molasses for weeks, and God's been very good to me in the process of doing that. For those of you that ever had the opportunity to open the word, you know that it is a bit of a buzz saw if you're doing it well, I trust that I did, and I hope that you'll all profit from that. So thank you, Jim.
[00:01:43] And then finally, and this is just kind of a personal aside, I'd like to wish a soon coming happy birthday to my brother Craig.
[00:01:51] I say that for a specific reason.
[00:01:57] He reminded me as I was walking in to the church last Sunday that we'd be preaching back to back. Craig will be in the pulpit next week.
[00:02:05] And I understood why he said that, because we've had a journey, haven't we? In 1988, we became brothers in law.
[00:02:17] In 2001, we became brothers in Christ.
[00:02:20] In 2012 or so, we became brother elders, although at different churches.
[00:02:27] And then now in 2024, we get to share the pulpit in the same church. And that's a blessing, that's just a testimony that God puts us on journeys that we little suspect when they start. And then as they go through, in this case, what, 36 years now, you can see that the path that God puts you on is filled with blessings.
[00:02:51] Blessings that prove that he is good and that he is faithful.
[00:02:57] And so, happy birthday, my four times appointed brother.
[00:03:04] All right, here we go.
[00:03:10] We'll pray in a bit because we'll need it. Honestly, like I said, it was a bit of a strenuous hike getting through this passage in Romans, chapter five that we're going to be covering today. It really been a long time since I dug into Romans, and I have done that more than once. But this passage was a weighty one. It was a convicting one. I trust that it will be for you as well. It really hasn't stopped being any of those things for me the whole time that I've been preparing. And I guess there's a reason for that.
[00:03:38] The topic of suffering is a weighty one. If we're honest with ourselves, if we ask the hard questions, we realize that the dilemma of understanding suffering in the context of a good and faithful God is a sober topic to think through. I'm thankful that God gives us, in his word, concrete guidance on these kinds of things, because I don't know how I would answer those questions of suffering and why God brings suffering into our lives without the sure, certain word of God to point me in the direction of truth and reality. So the question we are going to be talking about today is, does God have a purpose for my suffering? That's a good question. That's a question we should all ask. It's one that we all can ask because we all universally experience suffering in our lives in one context or another. Ken and Michelle's testimony that they just gave is a poignant example of God. God brings adversity into our lives. And to ask the question is that for a reason? Is that for a purpose? Is a human good question to ask. It forces us to the places we need to go for the answers that we need to have.
[00:05:00] I can assure you that God most definitely has a purpose in any manner of human suffering. I know that that's an extraordinarily difficult and unnatural thing to believe. It doesn't come naturally to look at the pain and suffering that we experience on our daily lives and not ask the question, is there a reason for something this painful? Is there a reason for something this difficult?
[00:05:26] I'm strongly convinced, though, that it's true that there is a purpose for it. Because the understanding that scripture gives me of God's sovereign providence and plans. If God in fact is sovereign over all, if his plans are certain and sure, then nothing that he intends or allows is without purpose or meaning.
[00:05:51] That purpose may not be immediately apparent.
[00:05:55] Oftentimes we know it's not.
[00:05:58] It may, in fact, not be apparent in this life.
[00:06:02] There are those trials that we go through that we never get the kinds of answers for, that we want. God promises that what we see through a glass darkly today will become clear in his presence. And so we live in faith that the suffering that we go through will one day become something that brings glory to God. We may look at those things today and wonder how that could possibly be. I can guarantee you, knowing the God that we know from scripture, that it will be, that his answers are waiting for those who love him and live in faith for him.
[00:06:40] I can sleep peacefully at night because of that.
[00:06:43] I can fall asleep every night, well and long, in the confidence that God gives me in his goodness, even in the middle of adversity.
[00:06:55] But addressing the general topic of suffering, well, that's a big topic, right? I could take all seven weeks, I think, and address the one that's fraught with alleyways and tangents and uncomfortable questions. And that actually is why I'm kind of truly thankful that Jim gave me the text that he did today, because it draws some boundaries around that whole idea of suffering. And Paul starts to talk about a specific kind of suffering that I trust will be relevant to you in your life in one way or another. I suspect that it will be at least helpful.
[00:07:32] This passage in Romans five, I believe pretty strongly at this point that Paul is talking when he refers to suffering of the kind of suffering that we experience in following the cause of Christ, the suffering that we experience because we are representatives of the gospel.
[00:07:49] Whether suffering for the cause of the gospel is your specific reality or not, I believe there's something in this for you, and that's been my prayer as I've studied through this, is that God would help all of us see the reason why he brings the kind of adversity that he does when we live faithfully for him. So I think it's really important that we read the passage together. So if you have your Bible or one in hand, please open it with me to Romans chapter five. If you don't have one, there are some under your chairs. Feel free to grab one and open it to Romans five. If you don't have a Bible personally, please feel free to take one. I guarantee you there's not a better or more important book to have in your library.
[00:08:32] So let's read Romans chapter five.
[00:08:35] Uh oh. Where'd they go?
[00:08:41] Scared? You see?
[00:08:49] All right, Romans, chapter five, verse one. I'm going to read the first five verses. 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 the hope of the glory of God. Not only that, but 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. Let's pray real quick.
[00:09:39] Father, we are thankful for this life that you have given us. We are even more thankful for the gospel that you have sovereignly implanted in our hearts. We are thankful that you provide us the word of God that offers us answers to questions that otherwise would be unanswerable. I thank you, Lord, for this word that we talked through today. We thank you for Paul and his testimony of it. Lord, put us this day into the eyes of the author. Give us, we ask, the enlightenment of the Holy Spirit as we read through it so that we may see what you have for us today. Lord, pierce our hearts with your word.
[00:10:23] Make us once again through it fall in love with the savior who has given his all for us. I pray this in the name of Christ and for his sake and purpose. Amen.
[00:10:36] All right, let's do this. If we want to understand Paul's perspective on suffering, we kind of have to walk his thoughts backwards from chapter five, verse one.
[00:10:48] That's a little daunting if you know romans. Well, there is just a whole lot here and trying to figure out the context for the therefore that Paul starts chapter five with is going to take a little work.
[00:11:04] That phrase, since we have been justified through faith, is a huge mouthful that we really have to understand in order to get why Paul is going to write what he does in these remaining verses.
[00:11:16] The whole of chapter five is really predicated on an understanding of the importance of that assertion. We have to understand how important the fact that we've been justified by faith is in order to understand the implications of it. So if you'll indulge me, I'm going to attempt to set a world record for the fastest ever overview of Romans chapter one through four.
[00:11:41] Hit the stopwatch.
[00:11:43] All right. There's a brief outline up at the top. This is where it's going to go. In the first chapter in verses 19 and 20, it states that God has clearly revealed his existence and his nature to everyone. All we have to do is open our eyes and God says, we see plainly that he is and who he is. All right, number two. In chapter two it says that God has also placed a universal moral law in every human heart. Regardless of whether we have received the explicit law of God or not. There is a moral law that's been implanted on the heart of every human being that leads them to either sin or not. All right, that's a big statement. That's a big statement. The third point that Paul makes, several points in chapters one and two, is, he said, even though those two things are true, we've all failed to obey God's law. Whether you are a jew who has received the word of God, or a gentile who simply observes what God has revealed to you in nature, etcetera, no one has been able to keep the law that has been implanted on the human heart. That puts all of us in a desperate condition. It puts us in a desperate condition before a righteous God, as unrighteous people who are unable to keep the law in a way that would afford us the approval of God.
[00:13:13] If we, as we know from scripture, if we violate the law in its smallest measure, we have violated, effectively all of it. That leaves us in, as I said, a desperate condition.
[00:13:26] So we know that no one can be righteous through law keeping. Chapter three, verses nine through 20, there is no one who can keep the law to the point that God will approve of them as righteous. The law does nothing but condemn us. If we choose to see it as the means to gain a relationship with God, it does nothing but condemn us. So where does that leave us?
[00:13:53] Pretty much nowhere until verses three or chapter three, verses 21 through 31, which Jim covered last week. But God offers us a different righteousness, an alien righteousness, as it's referred to through faith in Jesus, who becomes our justifier. Since we cannot attain to a righteousness ourselves by keeping the law, God gives us a righteousness outside of ourselves. He gives us a righteousness that comes from the sacrifice of Christ. That is what justification by faith is. When Paul refers to that in Romans five one, therefore we've been justified by faith. He is saying that this justification, this conferring of righteousness upon us, is coming through something other than.
[00:14:44] And then, as a parenthetical aside, it's not appear in chapter four. Paul, I think, for the benefit of his jewish brothers and sisters, makes the case that in fact, what he's saying here is biblical. He goes back to Abraham, and he explains to them, even Abraham, who was before the law, was justified by this same means. He was justified by faith.
[00:15:08] And so he, as a help to his jewish brethren, says, this is something that you should know. This is something that's already happened. This is the means that God has used to bring his people to himself all along.
[00:15:20] All along. Those five points in chapters one through four comprise the major theological truths of the Book of Romans, pretty much. You've got the theology of Romans through those first four chapters. I think the remaining twelve chapters are really nothing more than considering the impacts and the implications of those theological truths, and they are many.
[00:15:41] That takes us all over the place, including the one we're going to talk about today, which is suffering.
[00:15:46] As I walked through that, I try and I always try and do this is I try and put myself in the mind of the author. Who's the author here? Paul. How would Paul be seeing this, considering his unique circumstances, considering the pathway that he took to understanding this justification by faith? My suspicion is that Paul was quite undone by the magnitude of the meaning of being justified by faith. I think he makes that pretty clear in chapter three, verse 21 and forward. Jim covered this last week, but I'd like to read it again because this concept is so important as we walk it forward into what does this mean for me in the context of my life and suffering? It reads like this. But now, apart from the law, the righteousness of God has been revealed, attested by the law and the prophets. The righteousness of God is through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe. Since there is no distinction between jew and Gentile, for all have sinned and have fallen short of the glory of God, they, or those who have believed are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus. God presented him as the mercy seat, an interesting term, as the wrath removing sacrifice, if you will, by his blood, through faith to demonstrate his righteousness. Because in his restraint, God had passed over the sins that were previously committed. God also presented him to demonstrate his righteousness at the present time, so that he would be both just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus. Then he ends. Where then, is boasting? It is excluded. The work is all his, not ours. We have been justified by faith. If you're a believer, those six words should bring you to your knees in awe, in gratitude, and most definitely, in humility.
[00:17:58] God worked his greatest miracle that day on the cross at Golgotha. He relieved me of every one of my sins, every last one. The large ones, the small ones, the short ones and the long ones, the intended ones and the unintended ones.
[00:18:17] But, and this is an important but, he didn't excuse them.
[00:18:22] He didn't excuse them. No, he wouldn't. Because God is perfectly just. So every sin must incur a just wrath. So what did he do? He sent his son, who lived a matchlessly perfect life completely honoring to his father, humble and obedient to the end. And then he put him on their cross and he took my sins and he set them on the only person who was both qualified, willing, and able to endure his defined wrath against them completely.
[00:19:00] In those three dark hours. Jesus did that for every person who had ever or will ever have faith in a merciful savior who suffered the painful agony of his father's wrath.
[00:19:13] When it was done, God became my justifier and your justifier. And the miracle is that in so doing, he remained just. He remained a just God. God's nature did not change when he justified my sins because they had been paid for by the one who was able to pay for them and remove them completely from the equation. I exchanged my sins for Jesus righteousness. My sins hadn't been atoned for in his body on that cross. That's justification by faith in faith. When I believe in that work of Jesus Christ, God declares me to be righteous on the basis of that sacrifice because my sins have been paid for it and your sins have been paid for. Now think about that in the context of your own life. Then think about it in the context of Paul's life.
[00:20:11] What would he have been hearkening back to as he considered that reality?
[00:20:16] That fearful, unbelievable, knee buckling miracle prefaces what Paul has to say that we're going to talk about in just a minute. And to make it more personal, don't forget what Paul was thinking of when he thought of what he had been forgiven, about the debt that had been paid. Paul referred himself in one Timothy, didn't he? As the chief of sinners? He had good reason to call himself the chief of sinners. He never forgot. I rather suspect that he'd been forgiven of persecuting and killing the very same groups of people that he's writing to in this book, the same groups of people that he's ministering to in love, he had persecuted, in some cases unto death. I rather imagine that those painful memories inhabited every word that Paul ever wrote. He never forgot them. He never forgot them. I wouldn't.
[00:21:10] His gratitude for receiving the righteousness of Christ simply through faith just permeates everything that he writes from here on in the book. It's everywhere if you look for it. Paul is profoundly in awe that God would do such a thing for him because of what he did.
[00:21:31] And because of that, he was passionately devoted to the savior that he had personally met on that road to Damascus. You remember the story, right? That encounter ripped him apart completely.
[00:21:44] It would happen to any of us if it had happened to us. It tore him apart completely. And God put him back together, a radically transformed man, perhaps more radically than anyone that the kingdom has known. He became the greatest friend of the kingdom of God when formerly he had been its greatest enemy.
[00:22:05] That's a story that's part of the sweeping plan of God is to see Paul's testimony in all of this. And Paul understood what he'd been forgiven of. He understood the cost to Jesus of what he had done personally, and that grace that God had shown him became the defining reality of his life, the defining reality of his life. That's the key to understanding the message that Paul's giving to us in this passage today. Without that understanding, I don't know that this passage really makes a whole lot of sense.
[00:22:41] Radical thanksgiving and gratitude for the work of justification by faith drives us to what Paul asks of us in the coming verses. If we have the gratitude that should be in our hearts, that comes from the knowledge of what we've been forgiven, when we accept by faith the sacrifice of Christ motivates us to do things that we couldn't otherwise do. I can say that in my life. I suspect many of you can as well, is that the energizing power of the forgiveness of God brings us to places and brings us through places that we would not otherwise have chosen to have gone.
[00:23:29] So let's go through those verses. As I look at them, I see three benefits of the justification through Jesus. The first one is the obvious one. In verse one, we have peace with God. Peace with God. Before I believed, my sin had condemned me to a just wrath of a holy God. As we've been talking through, God called us in Ephesians, objects of wrath. Our sin has permeated our lives to the point where we become objects of God's wrath simply because he is a just God. And sin cannot exist in the economy of God.
[00:24:08] All we had to look forward to in our future was judgment. That's it. Just judgment.
[00:24:14] But now for the believer, that war, that enmity, is over because Jesus ended it.
[00:24:26] He brought us peace with God through his blood shed on the cross. Peace with God. Do you experience peace in your daily life?
[00:24:36] Is your life peaceful because you have peace with God? By peace I mean the elimination of that vague feeling of dread that your sins will one day be discovered, the total sense of security and confidence, that eventual judgment isn't coming, the relief of the moral guilt that contemplating our many failures in life often brings. A believer in Christ has been given that confidence that God's well deserved wrath on them has been stayed.
[00:25:08] Where then was sin and judgment and wrath between you and your creator? There's now sweet, quiet peace.
[00:25:18] You sleep well at night.
[00:25:21] Jesus sacrifice can bring you that kind of peace today in Christ, we needn't live lives of anxiety and fear and judgment. We can live lives of confident peace even in the middle of a chaotic world that we live in. The characterization of believers that ought to be the most defining is the fact that they have peace in the middle of chaos because of the God who has given them righteousness through the grace of Christ.
[00:25:59] That single gift would be benefit enough. I think that'd be enough for me.
[00:26:05] That's good, right? That's good. Considering his murderous past, I'm sure Paul would gladly have settled for that as well.
[00:26:14] The gift of God's peace could simply have manifested itself in a quiet, distant neutrality between us and God.
[00:26:21] Compared to our prior condemned state, that certainly would have seemed sufficiently excellent, I think. No more conflict, no more dread, just peace and quiet.
[00:26:31] But that's only verse one.
[00:26:36] There's more. Second benefit is proximity to God. In verse two, we have proximity to God. Look at what Paul says. Through Jesus we have also obtained access by faith into this grace in which we stand, and we rejoice in the hope of the glory of God. Notice the present and future proximity. Both. We have obtained access by faith, and we rejoice in the hope of the glory of God. Jesus sacrifice has given us a vital, intimate relationship with God. Today.
[00:27:13] Today you can have, if you place your faith in Christ, as those of you who have well know, an intimacy of relationship with the God who made you in the way that he designed you. And that is a sweet, not only a relief, but a sweet feeling of relationship.
[00:27:34] Not only that, Paul also beckons us confidently to anticipate the one day when I will be in proximity to God's glory.
[00:27:45] I think Sam, last year at some point, did a fantastic job describing to us the reality and the magnificence of the glory of God. If you haven't listened through those sermons or if you don't remember, though, I challenge you to go back and listen to them. He did a compelling job of helping us understand the magnificence of the glory of God and why that is something that we are by nature drawn to when we are in Christ.
[00:28:09] The believers hope of God's glory and their proximity to it is a compelling motivation to endure.
[00:28:19] Sometimes for many people in the church in this world, it's the only motivation they have to endure.
[00:28:28] God offers us in our context, the confidence that we need, the hope that we require to endure in the middle of adversity. When we look forward to that day, spirit works in us. We tend to review or to view our lives kind of on a common timeline. I think all of us, from the day we're born until the day we die, that's the timeline that we're almost mechanically hooked into. When we think about and conduct our daily lives, that timeline dominates our perspectives. It dominates our planning and our sense of mortality and existence. Our minds and hearts are so often focused on that all too short stretch of 70 or 80 years. But that view is short sighted, and it's deadly. It's deadly in a universal sense. Our few brief decades here are pretty much simply preface, excuse me, and preparation.
[00:29:27] If there's one appeal that I make to you today that you remember, it's this one. Don't live your earthly life as if that is all you are, because it's not.
[00:29:38] That mistake has cost countless doubters their proximity to the glory of God.
[00:29:43] It's cost many believers the rewards that God anxiously desires to give you when you're united with him in that day.
[00:29:51] The benefit of intimate and eventually proximate access to God can't be comprehended. The fleeting glimpses that I get of it in scripture blow my mind, and I love to think about those pictures that God gives us of those days. They're compelling in the extreme, and he put them there so they would be. He wants us to understand that our access to God isn't just for today. It's access to the approximation of his glory. When we see him revealed that day, God didn't just choose to give us peace. He generously granted us proximity to him for eternity. Once again, through Jesus. That phrase comes up over and over. You've noticed it over and over again. Through Jesus. Through Jesus. Through Jesus. Now we get to the difficult and kind of perplexing part. Look at verse three. Not only that, not only do we have proximity to God, but we rejoice in our sufferings.
[00:30:56] Did I read that right?
[00:30:59] We rejoice in our sufferings. How do we rejoice in our sufferings? How do we do that?
[00:31:06] As God's chosen ambassador to the Gentiles, Paul understood suffering intimately. He describes his suffering really well, in detail, great detail. In two Corinthians, second corinthians, eleven. I'm going to read this to you really fast, he says. Are they servants of Christ? I am a better one, with far greater labors. There's actually some humor in this passage. I encourage you to go read it. He says, far more imprisonments with countless beatings and often near death. Five times I received 40 lashes. Less one at the hands of the Jews. Three times I was beaten with rods. Once I was stoned. Three times I was shipwrecked. A night and a day I was adrift at sea on frequent journeys, in danger from rivers, danger from robbers, danger for my own people, danger from the Gentiles, danger in the city, danger in the wilderness, danger at sea, danger from false brothers in toil and hardship, through many a sleepless night, in hunger and thirst, often without food, in cold and exposure. And stop it off. The daily pressure on me of my anxiety for all the churches.
[00:32:16] It's amazing that even puts that one on the end. After that list, did Paul understand suffering for the cause of Christ? Yeah, I think he defined suffering for the cause of Christ. That's quite a list. That's quite a list. No normal person, no well adjusted person, would willingly choose to take on a mission that resulted in that kind of suffering. Would you, if you knew it was coming?
[00:32:42] But Paul did. Why?
[00:32:46] What did he know about suffering that we don't?
[00:32:49] What compelled him, after he was stoned almost to death in lystra, to get up, go right back in the city, and immediately continue preaching to the same people that had just stoned him?
[00:33:01] I hate that passage.
[00:33:05] Right, because you can't not ask yourself the question, could I have done that? Could I have done what Paul did?
[00:33:12] Was Paul just a fool?
[00:33:14] Most people would think so.
[00:33:17] But no. Paul learned something that few of us get the privilege of experientially understanding, living our security and comfort obsessed western culture lives.
[00:33:27] We learned that enduring suffering on behalf of his proximity, granting, peace, declaring, justifier, Jesus was the path to even closer intimacy with the savior that he had bet the farm on.
[00:33:40] Look at verses three and four. Suffering produces what? Endurance. Endurance produces proven character, and proven character produces hope.
[00:33:50] Hope does not put us to shame, because God's love has been poured in our hearts through the Holy Spirit has been given to us as we give ourselves in service to Jesus. The tribulations that inevitably come produce the very qualities in us that draw us into greater intimacy with him. We are never on more intimate basis in relationship with Jesus than when we share in his sufferings. Scripture makes that very, very clear.
[00:34:21] When God's spirit lives in us, suffering is the empowering means of helping to us endure. Helping us to endure. That endurance produces, by definition, godly proven character proven in the fires of suffering. I can say that I have character, but when I see it manifest in me by the spirit of God, when I suffer for his cause, that's proven character. I can look at that and I can see God did that in me because I couldn't have done that myself. Those of you who've given testimonies, I think we even heard it today from Ken. I don't know how we got through that. God got us through that. Where did that come from? It came from the spirit of God as we suffered.
[00:35:03] That endurance produces, by definition, proven character.
[00:35:08] When we see his character living out in our words and actions in the middle of great trial, it affirms loudly the hope of the coming of his proximate glory and our sharing in it.
[00:35:21] Seeing God work in our lives in the middle of suffering for his cause gives us hope because it affirms the presence of God in our lives. Hope comes from the character that comes from enduring the suffering of Christ. Your hope actually grows. This passage says, as you experience the adversity of serving him, your hope grows because God affirms you as you serve him in adversity.
[00:35:52] That hope isn't the cross your fingers and toes kind of hope, where you're never sure. You won't be publicly embarrassed if you're proven foolish. It's not that kind.
[00:36:02] It's a hope that has become so confidently certain in us that we will endure any hardship, any disdain, any pain, any humiliation in order to be close to our savior Jesus in the most profound way by sharing in his suffering. Does suffering look different to you now than it did a few minutes ago?
[00:36:25] My friend, suffering is the pathway to the greatest intimacy with God. The early church believed that. They believed it with all their heart. They lived in a culture where it was almost inevitable that to claim the name of Jesus was to claim his suffering. They became traitors to the empire that they lived in. They often forfeited their lives. And the strangest thing, they saw it as a gift from God.
[00:36:52] They saw martyrdom as a gift from God, almost to be desired.
[00:37:01] You know what? As I read through Romans five one five, I think I get it. I think I get it. Because what they wanted more than anything was intimacy with the savior, with their justifying, peace giving, proximity offering. Savior Peter actually talks about this as well. It's kind of exactly the same topic in his first epistle. I'm going to read you this in one Peter one since therefore Christ suffered in the flesh, arm yourselves with the same way of thinking. For whoever has suffered in the flesh has ceased from sin by living for the rest of the time in the flesh, no longer for human passions, but for the will of God.
[00:37:47] Beloved, do not be surprised a little later on at the fiery trial when it comes upon you to test you as though something strange were happening to you. But rejoice insofar as you share in Christ's suffering. Sound familiar? That you may also rejoice and be glad when his glory is revealed. Peter's talking about the same thing that Paul's explaining in verses one, two and three of Romans. Do you see what he saw? What Paul saw as he was writing, the sacrificial justifier of your soul, who, for no more reason than his merciful generosity, offered you radical peace with your former enemy and then invited you into intimate relationship, not just for now, but in eternal proximity to Jesus. When God reveals his son in all his infinite, piercing, overwhelming glory, that's worth dying for.
[00:38:47] That's worth dying for. Does God have a purpose for my suffering?
[00:38:52] Forgive my bold answer.
[00:38:56] Whatever your life's purpose is, whatever good cause you've chosen to endure hardship. For if its ultimate goal isn't the revelation of the glory of Jesus Christ and the will of God, you may be wasting your time.
[00:39:13] Don't despair.
[00:39:15] Jesus is worth your time.
[00:39:19] He's worth everything you possess.
[00:39:22] He's worth even your life.
[00:39:25] Paul understood that and was affirmed as he bore the costs of being identified with his justifying peace offering. Proximity granting. Savior, my prayer today is for those of you who have faith in Christ, that you can say that as well. If you haven't, I invite you to get to know the Jesus who is the justifier of your faith, the Jesus who offers you peace with God, proximity to God and intimacy with him as you devote yourself fully to his cause. Let's pray.
[00:40:08] Lord, we don't deserve to be here.
[00:40:11] We don't deserve to praise your magnificent grace, to praise the forgiveness that you've offered to us undeserved, to call ourselves children of God and to look forward to an eternity with him to see his glory. Lord, you've offered those things to us in spite of what we've done, and we are grateful and thankful. Lord, I ask that you would, through our increasing understanding of what you've done, draw us closer to Christ, draw us closer to the cause that you've called us to, that you would make us increasingly willing to endure that which we must if we are to identify with you.
[00:40:55] Lord, I dare to pray that you would allow us to share in your suffering so that the glory of Christ would be revealed in all of its matchless immensity.
[00:41:06] Give us this for the sake of Christ and for his kingdom. We ask in Jesus name. Amen.
