Romans
5:1-11
5:1 Therefore, since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through
our Lord Jesus Christ,
5:2 through whom we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand; and
we boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God.
In one of H. G. Wells’ books, there is the story of a businessman whose mind
was so tense and strained that he was in serious danger of a complete nervous
and mental breakdown. His doctor told him that the only thing that could save
him was to find the peace that fellowship with God can give. ‘What!’ he said,
‘to think of that, up there, having fellowship with me! I would as soon think
of cooling my throat with the Milky Way or shaking hands with the stars!’ God,
to him, was alien and untouchable and beyond any experience.
Writer Rosita Forbes tells of finding shelter one night in a
Chinese village temple because there was nowhere else to sleep. During the
night, she lay awake in the darkness with only the light of the moon and
stars. In that dim light she could see
the images of the gods of the temple. On
the face of every image or statue there was a look of anger and hate.
But in contrast, here is our God, whom we know through Jesus
Christ, who is the loving Creator and Savior.
It is through Christ that we experience love and
justification. And through love and
justification we have “access” – a word (which in Greek is “prosagoge”) that
raises for us two images.
(1) It is the word
normally used for introducing or ushering someone into the presence of royalty;
and it is the word for the approach of the worshipper to God. It is as
if Paul was saying: ‘Jesus ushers us into the very presence of God, the King.’ The King of Kings. Imagine being summoned to the throne of the
King – and since we have no King, imagine being summoned to the White House –
and since most of us are never going to be summoned to the White House, imagine
instead the one common experience we have either had personally, experienced
through our children’s conduct, or lived in fear of happening – being summoned
to the office of the principal! When
that door is opened we might expect terror and judgment and punishment, but
what we find is grace. There is no
condemnation, no judgment, no vengeance, but the underserved grace, love and
peace of God.
(2) But “access” in
the Greek language brings to mind another picture. In late Greek, it is the
word for the place where ships come in to port. My last church was on an island in the Gulf of
Mexico, and sometimes we would see the waters full of boats – recreational sailing
boats and shrimp boats. Occasionally all
of these boats would head to the harbor, which was in the safety of the bay
between the island and the mainland. It
was home. Safety. Security. Especially when the waves were churning up
and a storm was coming.
We have “access” is that we have peace and a home with God.
When I worked with the Department of Corrections, I remember
being with one inmate who had done something wrong in the prison – I don’t
remember what it was, but he was going to have to serve more time. In prison at that time, every inmate
automatically had a percentage of his sentence chopped off – so if you were
sentence to 6 years, you thought in terms of having to serve 3 years. You didn’t think of 6 years – just the
3. As long as you behaved, you got out
at the end of three years. That’s called
good behavior, but it enables the prison system to have more control over the
inmates. It costs too much money to put
an inmate on trial for an offense committed in the prison, so the Warden and
the staff can make the decision on their own to tell the inmate that he now has
to serve another 6 months or a year – you aren’t really adding time, you are
just taking away some of the early release.
But the inmate looks at it as adding more time.
I remember this one inmate just weeping uncontrollably when
we told him he was going to have to spend another 6 months in prison. He kept sobbing, “home, home, I just want to
go home.”
Home is a good place for many of us, and to have access to
God is to be freed from prison and for us to go home.
5:3 And not only that, but we also boast
in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance,
5:4 and endurance produces character, and character produces hope,
5:5 and hope does not disappoint us, because God's love has been poured into
our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.
We have peace with God, but we have no peace in this world.
Life is hard.
Knowing this, Paul has this wonderful passage.
suffering produces
endurance,
5:4 and endurance produces character, and character produces hope,
5:5 and hope does not disappoint us.
The word he uses for suffering is thlipsis, which literally means pressure.
All kinds of things may press in upon a Christian – want and
difficult circumstances, sorrow, persecution, unpopularity and loneliness. All
that pressure, says Paul, produces character.
When I was a kid, one of the things that Superman would
sometimes do would be to take a piece of coal and squeeze it in his hand and he
would produce out of that pressure, a diamond.
Some stars in the universe have an unusual amount of
carbon. They are interesting to look at
or photograph because they tend to have a ruby color. Because these starts contain so much carbon,
as they die out their core, which is under so much pressure, become
diamonds. Imagine, a diamond in space
that is as large as our planet!
http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2010/09/our-sun-will-eventually-turn-into-a-multi-trillion-ton-diamond.html
Paul would have liked that, because he talks here of
pressure – stress – trouble, creating character.
Now between the stress and the character is endurance. The word he uses for endurance is hupomone, which means more than
endurance.
It means the spirit which can overcome the world; it means
the spirit which does not passively endure but which actively overcomes the
trials and tribulations of life.
We are currently mystified with the loss of the Malasian
airliner, but several years ago there was another crash.
Juliane Koepcke was a 17 year old German schoolgirl flying with her mother
when their plane came apart in mid-air over Peru.
She plunged 10,000ft into the jungle still
strapped into her seat. With a broken collar-bone and maggot invested wounds,
she walked and swam through the jungle without food for 10 days until she found
help, vultures circling overhead throughout.
She survived the horrific ordeal of the next ten days by using the little
knowledge she had to very good effect. Despite the terrifying situation she
found herself in, she stayed calm and adapted her mindset to survive the jungle
terrain around her. She trusted her instinct and refused to give in, despite
the often hopeless outlook of her situation...She kept her cool and she kept
moving. She ignored the pain, and she stuck to her plan. And, ultimately, it
was that indomitable survivor spirit that saved her life. Now there’s a girl
with endurance!
When Beethoven was threatened with deafness, that most
terrible of troubles for a musician, he said: “I will take life by the throat.”
That is hupomone.
Hupomone is not
the spirit which lies down and lets the floods go over it; it is the spirit
which meets things head on and overcomes them.
This goes onto produce character.
The word he uses here is dokime.
Dokime is used of metal which has
been passed through the fire so that everything base has been purged out of it.
When affliction is met with fortitude, out of the battle we emerge stronger,
purer, better and nearer to God.
Character produces hope.
I find it interesting that hope is at the end of this list,
not at the beginning.
For the Christian, hope is not “pie in the sky” illusion, it
is comes from the experiences we have when there is no hope.
5:6 For while we were
still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly.
5:7 Indeed, rarely will anyone die for a righteous person--though perhaps for a
good person someone might actually dare to die.
5:8 But God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ
died for us.
5:9 Much more surely then, now that we have been justified by his blood, will
we be saved through him from the wrath of God.
5:10 For if while we were enemies, we were reconciled to God through the death
of his Son, much more surely, having been reconciled, will we be saved by his
life.
5:11 But more than that, we even boast in God through our Lord Jesus Christ,
through whom we have now received reconciliation.
THE fact that Jesus Christ died for us is the final proof of
God’s love.
There is a great story from the life of T. E. Lawrence,
better known as Lawrence of Arabia.
In 1915, he was trekking across the desert with some Arabs.
They were in a desperate situation – no food and very little
water.
The sand was in the wind and stinging the men terribly.
Suddenly, someone said: ‘Where is Jasmin?’ Another said:
‘Who is Jasmin?’ A third answered: ‘That yellow-faced man from Maan. He killed
a Turkish tax-collector and fled to the desert.’ The first said: ‘Look,
Jasmin’s camel has no rider. His rifle is strapped to the saddle, but Jasmin is
not there.’ A second said: ‘Someone has shot him on the march.’ A third said:
‘He is not strong in the head, perhaps he is lost in a mirage; he is not strong
in the body, perhaps he has fainted and fallen off his camel.’ Then the first
said: ‘What does it matter? Jasmin was not worth anything.’
And the Arabs hunched themselves up on their camels and rode
on.
But Lawrence turned and rode back the way he had come.
After an hour and a half’s ride, he saw something against
the sand. It was Jasmin, blind and mad with heat and thirst.
Lawrence lifted him up on his camel, gave him some of the
last drops of precious water, and slowly plodded back to his company.
When he came up to them, the Arabs looked in amazement.
‘Here is Jasmin,’ they said, ‘Jasmin, not worth anything, saved at his own risk
by Lawrence, our lord.’
That is a parable. It was not good people Christ died to
save but sinners, not God’s friends but those who were hostile to him.
