Earlier this week, I was riding the car back from picking up Christopher from his class, and we heard this thing going on on the radio that a lot of you picked up, I’m sure, because we’ve heard about it a couple times today. They said 10 minutes ago, Charlie Kirk got shot. Now, he and I immediately knew who that was, that he got shot in the neck, and they took him to the hospital, and we didn’t know.
And so, there was a lot going on at that time on that ride home. I mean, it was kind of fun. It was Christopher’s second class, and they, he was starting to enjoy biology, and this comes up, and it was like such a transition.
And at Two Lines, who the speaker was here last week from Two Lines, there were, I mean, it hit them hard in the office, and there were tears shed, and there were people hurt. And believe it or not, most of the people who were hurt were young adults, because that’s his ministry. It was a unique ministry that a lot of people don’t have, that they minister to young adults.
Not even like a youth pastor, but he would go to college campuses, like in Utah, and talk with them. And he would invite people who thought differently than him politically, and who thought differently than him with faith, to come up and talk with him, and debate him, and to hear a different perspective on it. So, as I could tell from some of the text, and some of the chatter amongst our church, that impacted several people this week.
And it goes to the same thought, when you see that, and you wonder what’s happening, and you think, the world has just fallen apart. And, in some sense, there are so many things that need to be changed in the world today. There is so much hate and discord.
One of the things that impacted the shooter to want to be able to shoot him was, guess, social media, and the hate that comes on there, and how people go against one another. And there is this tendency with faith in the 21st century to say, we are all good. Instead of saying, as traditionally we would say, we are all sinners and in need of repentance.
Who thinks you’re good and you don’t need to repent? Oh, you’re in the right place. You’re with a bunch of other sinners. People who need Jesus.
And we need Jesus more than ever when things come up that hurt us. I mean, there have been assassination attempts on Donald Trump. There have been, there was another assassination of a Democrat governor in Wisconsin, or somewhere, a year ago, six months ago, a year ago, where someone didn’t like her, so he went up to her door and shot her.
There was an attempted kidnapping. The extremism happens on both sides, because hatred doesn’t care where it falls, on the left or the right, as long as it can get a hold of us. But you wouldn’t believe it.
The Bible tells us something we can do about it. As we continue in our series going through the book of Romans, looking at where Paul emphasized hope, and this is our second Sunday looking at that, we’re going to look at hope at four different perspectives and see how we have one hope. And that one hope is what we can lean on no matter what, no matter what we face, no matter what goes on in the world, no matter how much hatred or evil or violence or anger is out there.
And it’s with this hope that we can go forward and talk with boldness and with love and to share Jesus. Will you stand as you are able? Romans 5, verses 1 through 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 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. The word of God, inspired by God, for the people of God.
Thanks be to God. Amen. You may be seated.
There’s some interesting language that Paul uses in here. He says, since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. And that peace with God sticks out to me because it said we have peace because of Jesus.
Not that we just have peace because we can have peace, but we have peace because of Jesus. And there’s something in this text that reminds us that there’s so much more than what we may have looked at before. Earlier in Romans, in Romans 2, Paul was talking about the law and about Gentiles and about faith and about circumcision, which was a divider between the Gentiles and the Jews.
And he was trying to bring them together as one by saying, but a Jew is one inwardly, and circumcision is a matter of the heart by the spirit, not by the letter. His praise is not from man, but from God. Now, the praise that we have, that we look for, does not come from other people, but we look for praise with God.
And the praise that comes from our heart is not a praise that comes from our human side, but from our spiritual side if God is on our hearts. If our hearts have been circumcised in faith with Jesus Christ, then it changes everything for us. Paul says that we have, through him, we have obtained access by faith into this grace in which we stand and we rejoice in the hope of the glory of God.
Now, we have obtained access by Jesus Christ, meaning the law and doing the right thing isn’t what brings us into God’s presence, isn’t what draws us closer to God, it’s simply Jesus. I mean, we are not perfect like Jesus was perfect, so we rely on Jesus to give us that access to God. And it says in there that we have obtained access by faith into his grace in which we stand.
When you have Christ in your life, you’re in this state in which you stand that Paul calls grace. That we’re here not because we deserve it, we’re here not because we are perfect, we’re here not here because life is easy, we’re here in this state of grace where we’re living on the love of God. That sounds like it should be a country song.
In this state of grace, Paul keeps going on to say, and now we rejoice in the hope of the glory of God. We have access to grace, so we rejoice in the hope of the glory of God. Our hope doesn’t necessarily come from thinking we’re gonna wake up tomorrow and have world peace, thinking evil is going to be wiped out of the world before Jesus returns.
Our hope comes from the glory of God. Now, if you look at the Greek glory, it’s the word doxa. And if you didn’t know it was the word doxa, do you know anything called doxology? What are the words to the doxology? Praise God from whom all blessings flow.
Praise him all creatures here. No, no, no. Is that the right one? Okay.
Doxology is about God’s glory. The glory of God coming from God being Father, Son of Holy Spirit. We haven’t sung the doxology for a long time, have we? I was just talking about being in college this morning.
We used to sing the doxology before dinner every night, but it was a fraternized version of the doxology. But it’s about the glory of God. We sing about the glory of God.
We praise about the glory of God. The glory of God, if you look up what doxa means, it means an opinion or a belief. It means a judgment or a view.
And then based on that judgment or view, we decide whether it’s good or bad. We all decide in each moment whether God is good or God is bad. Should I listen to God, or is that just going to get in the way of what I really want to do? Is God good? And when we see God is good, we have this result that comes.
It’s like a natural or supernatural response to the goodness of God, being praise, honor, glory. Doxa also means splendor or brightness, either of the moon, sun, or stars, the magnificence, excellence, preeminence, dignity, grace of God. All those things are reasons that we rejoice.
Our hope comes because we can rejoice in who God is, in what God has done, and where we are headed with God. When Paul was talking about Abraham last week, and about his faith, and how he could have faith, and it was counted to him as righteousness, even though it didn’t make any sense. Remember, Abraham was 100, Sarah was 90.
You know, what if God came up to you and said, okay, I want you to go out for football on your 100th birthday. Or this is the year for you to take up ballet. Sometimes that doesn’t make sense.
And with Sarah and Abraham, it didn’t make sense, but he had faith, and it was counted to him as righteousness, and that’s where he garnered his hope, was because of faith in what God had. Hope, remember, was on the future. God said, you’re gonna do this.
25 years later, he’s going, you know, I’m three digits now, God. What are you gonna do about this? As he goes on talking about Abraham in verse 4, in verse 20, he picks up, no unbelief made him waver concerning the promise of God, but he grew strong in his faith as he gave glory to God, fully convinced that God was able to do what he had promised. He grew strong in his faith.
That is the buildup that we have in the book of Romans to have faith, to be able to rejoice, to be able to praise God in what we do. You see, Abraham, Abraham suffered. I mean, who wants to leave, go on foot, maybe you got to ride something, go across miles away, travel that probably took months, and start a new life, and then have to go to Egypt, cause some of your own problems in Egypt, have to deal with your nephew leaving and being more alert by the riches and by a place called Sodom, and then having to fight for your nephew when you, as far as we know, he hadn’t really fought before.
All the suffering he went through on his process to God fulfilling God’s promise was a huge thing for Abraham that he could have hope, because all along the way he saw God working in everything that he was doing, and he knew God was with him, and he knew God was still coming to him, and he was present with him, and he was guiding him, and he had this hope, and this hope became unwavering. Paul goes on to say, not only that, but we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, endurance produces character, and character produces hope. We need these things in our life.
In the suffering, if we have faith, we can endure. In the endurance, if we have faith, it builds our character, and if our character builds, then we can have hope in God’s promises. Just like Abraham, just like Paul did, and it wouldn’t be too many years later after he writes this book to Rome that he’s in prison in Rome writing other letters there.
In our suffering, God will grow within us. If we lean on God, if we trust in God, if we have a rough week, if things just seem off, suffering produces endurance, endurance produces character, character produces hope, and the difficulty is, the main thing today is, there is this pervasive thought that no one should have to suffer anything, that that is a reason to think God doesn’t exist if anybody suffers, but it’s in that suffering that we gain strength. It’s in that endurance that we gain character, and I’m just gonna hang out on character for a minute because if we’re to the point in the world today where we feel like we’re suffering too much, that somebody else saying something that we don’t like is worth, you know, this is probably a, this is the most controversial thing I’ll say today, but one of my things this week was that cancel culture now includes canceling your life, that we wanna be canceled out.
If you’re to the point of that, then you haven’t built up to the point where you have that character, that character that says, I will endure, that character that says, this is tough, or I don’t like this situation, but I know God is faithful, and I know God is good, and I know that no matter what I face, no matter how off kilter the world seems, that if we have the character of Jesus in the midst of trials and in the midst of tribulation, and that character of Jesus works through us in our hearts and in our lives, that we can have hope. There are people of faith who are struggling with their hope this week because they think, man, if I talk about Jesus, is someone gonna shoot me? Who talked about Jesus and suffered? Jesus. Who talked about Jesus and suffered? All the disciples? Who talked about Jesus and suffered? Suffering is the beginning of God doing good things in us.
Paul says with Abraham that I read earlier, but he grew strong in his faith. Now, even if we don’t have a suffering moment that brings us closer to God, leaning on the one who suffered everything so we can live, leaning on Jesus, who is the one hope, because he suffered, we can be strengthened through his suffering, when we trust him, when we know that he won the victory in that and that he is the one who gives us hope. That’s why we say one hope.
We don’t hope that the government is gonna solve every problem in everybody’s lives. If you do, Godspeed. We don’t hope that another war is gonna solve every problem.
What we hope is in Jesus Christ. We hope for his glory to intersect our lives, to be with us, to guide us, to give us the endurance and character we need to be the people God has called us to be. And that is the hope for the world.
The world needs the gospel that we have in here. They need to know that in suffering, they can produce endurance, and endurance can produce character, and character can produce hope. And Paul says much later on, how are they to know that unless someone shares it with them? That’s where we fit in.
We are bearers of hope for the world today. We can offer hope in the midst of darkness. We can offer joy in the midst of sorrow.
And it’s with this hope in God’s glory that we can rejoice, that we can rejoice in who Jesus is and how Jesus has impacted our lives and how Jesus impacts the world and how we can let Jesus work through us. Just talk to someone, one person this week, and give them hope because hope is awesome. Hope is what keeps us going.
Hope says, I know that there is even something better than this, that God’s promises are true. Faith is what carries us through today. Hope is what lets us see that God is faithful.
God will give us eternal life. But John says that eternal life begins now as he walks with us, as he strengthens us, as he gives us the power. Even though we suffer, whether it’s suffering about worrying or it’s suffering in our own lives, health, whatever it might be, that we have hope and we can rejoice and we can glorify the name of God, no matter what happens out there, that we’ll take Christ with us.
Will you stand as you are able as we sing our closing hymn? Let’s pray while they’re making their way. Gracious God, thank you so much for the love that you give us in Jesus Christ. Thank you for hope when we hurt.
Thank you that we can rejoice when things are painful. Thank you, God, that even though none of us are perfect, none of us can do it all on our own, that through you, we can live in this amazing state called grace where we can grow stronger like Abraham and we can trust in Jesus because he is our one hope.