To Rejoice

A man by the name of John Bunyan, who you may have heard of, wrote a book in 1678 called Pilgrim's Progress. It's an allegory, a story of a man by the name of Christian and how he comes to faith and his pilgrimage to the city of God. It's a book full of pictures, of mental pictures, of metaphors, of this journey, and the journey of a Christian like us coming to God. Now one of these pictures from the book describes a journey not so much of Christian, but of his wife, Christiana, this journey that she makes from the city of destruction to the city of God, the heavenly city. And as she is nearing the heavenly city, she sees a man raking in the mud.

The book calls it muck raking. And in this black, thick mud, he's obviously looking for something. Perhaps he had lost something, a treasure that was precious to him, or perhaps he was just looking for treasure that would make his life completely different. And with his eyes fixed down on the ground, on the mud, and with a muck rake, it calls it, in his hands, he doesn't see that there is someone standing right in front of him holding out a crown of immeasurable worth, and he doesn't see it. It's a picture of Christ, the book makes clear, out the blessing of the gospel.

And a person who could be so oblivious to those blessings seeking a similar treasure where it could never be found in the muck and the mire of life. This is also a picture of Christians who may be living the Christian life, conscious that there are treasures beyond our imagination offered to us in faith in Jesus Christ, but finding ourselves looking, looking in the mud. The apostle Paul portrays a similar journey in the book of Romans, which is an epic explanation of the human heart and its journey back to God. Early on in the letter, Paul speaks about the fact that mankind in and of themselves do not know the way of peace. They have lost peace.

They have sacrificed God for things around them. But we in our striving find all sorts of ways apart from God which ultimately fail us and fail us disastrously. And then we come to chapter five in Romans. And Paul comes to a point of saying that in Christ Jesus, we can find this peace with God. And I want to read this with you this morning and we're going to study it.

Romans 5:1-11. Therefore, since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. Peace with God. Through Him, we have also obtained access by faith into this grace in which we now stand, and we rejoice in 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. For while we were still weak at the right time, Christ died for the ungodly. For one will scarcely die for a righteous person, though perhaps for a good person one would dare even to die.

But God shows His love for us. In that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. Since therefore we have now been justified by His blood, much more shall we be saved by Him from the wrath of God. For if while we were enemies, we were reconciled to God by the death of His Son. How much more, 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. When I read these words, I also get a mental image of what is happening in this passage. It is a picture of someone who is being brought up to the summit of an incredible mountain. And he sees before himself a vast panorama of beauty. And as they see the beauty, as they behold it, they can do nothing but whisper to themselves, wow.

As they see this beauty before them, it is almost as if their hands need to be raised in the air and they just say, yes. This is marvellous. It's this sort of expression, this sort of emotion of overwhelming joy and deep humility and smallness that we have when we read these words in Romans 5. But Paul is explaining the wonderful privileges of the gospel and that it will ultimately result in incredible joy. The way in which Paul brings out these emotions in these verses is by using a refrain.

He uses repetition in order to bring these emotions out. You'll see in verse two, we find the first instance of that where he says, we rejoice in hope of the glory of God. The word rejoice. It can be boast. It can be translated as exalt.

We rejoice in the hope of the glory of God. Verse three, not only that, but we rejoice in our sufferings. And then the third time, the same word in verse 11, more than that, we also rejoice in God through our Lord Jesus Christ. What is Paul talking about here? He's talking about joy.

That's simple. He's talking about rejoicing. So we're going to take some time looking at these three uses of rejoice and the context and the reason that they make up this passage. What is it that we are able to rejoice in? Well, first of all, it says in verse two that we are able to boast, we are able to rejoice or exalt in our hope of the glory of God.

Now you know well from your studying of the New Testament that when Paul says we hope, he's not talking about wishful thinking. He's not talking about a vague optimism. He's talking about the question of certainty not yet received. It is not like we would say or some religious Christian might say if you ask them, are you sure you will go to heaven? And they tell you with eyes downcast, I hope.

That is not the hope talked about here. Hope in the New Testament is a present certainty of something we have not yet fully experienced. And so Paul is saying, because of the present historical reality of Jesus, by His work on the cross, your sins have been forgiven. Your future has been established in God, and you have come to know that He loves you. And so, therefore, you're able to rejoice in your certainty about the future glory that you will receive and experience forever with God.

Now interestingly, this future glory, this glory of God that we share in and that we should be rejoicing in, that is the very last thing that a religious person, a person who doesn't understand or believe in the gospel will think about. It's the last thing that a non-Christian will think about God's glory. We think about our glory often. We think about our fame and our comfort and our status and our acclaim and our worth often. See, the problem of sin at its core isn't that we think of ourselves too little.

It's that we think about ourselves too much. Paul says the first sign of someone who has truly come to experience and understand the gospel is that they rejoice in God's glory, of which they will in some way participate. And it indicates a remarkable transition. It is a sign of a true believer that this transformation of the Christian's heart has taken place. Paul spoke earlier in Romans about the shame of our sin and that we don't have a leg to stand on.

We don't have a leg to stand on. Romans 3:27, what becomes of our boasting? Same word. What becomes of our rejoicing? In anything nice or pleasant that we may have done?

Paul says, it is excluded. It is chucked away in light of God's supreme law and its requirements of us. Our boasting is a joke. In other words, we have failed God's test. We have all got the shameful title of sinner stamped across our lives.

Then Paul explains in Romans 5 how we may boast. How we may boast. How we may rejoice. And he says, may boast in the certainty of God's glory. Because he says, the one who is the manifestation of God's glory, Jesus, has come and he has taken our shame.

And he has taken our title of sinner. And he's taken it on Himself. Romans 4:24, just before we get to this passage, he says, righteousness, righteousness, rightness with God will be counted to us who believe in Him who raised from the dead, Jesus our Lord, who was delivered up for trespasses that we had done and has been raised for our justification. You remember in the Gospels, the night before Jesus went to the cross where he was praying in the Garden of Gethsemane, the night of His betrayal. And he was praying and he was wrestling with God the Father saying, Lord, if you could just take this cup from me, if you could just let this cup pass me by.

Why does he say this? Why does he ask this? It's because the cup that had been described in the Old Testament was a cup that would be filled with shame instead of glory. The Old Testament, the ancient Near East, when it talked about the king's cup, it was a cup of glory. It was a cup of victory.

It was a cup of majesty. This cup that Jesus would take, this cup that Jesus would drink from was a cup of shame. It was a cup of suffering. And the reason for His sacrificial death, of course, is because He had to exchange His glory, His victory, His majesty for our shame. It was our cup.

And by the glorious resurrection, He proves that through faith in Him, our shame has been exchanged for His glory. The gospel's power is this. And once we grab that and we grasp that power, Paul's saying, we want to throw our hands. We should want to throw our hands and say, yes. Yes.

It is marvellous. It is amazingly real. And I rejoice in the hope of God's glory because it's been the glory of my salvation. So our salvation is the essence of grace, receiving something that is completely undeserved, exchanged our shame for glory. Paul says in verse two, it's in this grace we now stand.

It is in this we now exist. It is in grace we now thrive. This is our life, God's grace. And we anticipate and we look forward to share in God's glory one day because of it. That's why the angels in Revelation 7 at the end of time, we have this picture where the angels and the multitude of voices sing, salvation belongs to who?

Our God. Not to us. We weren't the ones that did it. Salvation belongs to our God, and they say praise and glory, wisdom and thanks, honour, and power and strength. Who does it belong to?

God. All of these are individual pieces of the treasure chest, the bounty of God's victory, and it all belongs to God. But the heavens rejoice that He has that. And it is His glory, and it is His victory, and we, in some way, participate in that. Now in a way, it is understandable that somebody who has a certainty of this forgiveness, who has a certainty of this hope, who has a certainty of this as a reality for them would rejoice.

It makes sense, doesn't it, logically? Even if you were a non-believer this morning, even if you were far from God this morning, you could logically understand this. You may even say, I wish that I had this. This rejoicing in God's glory is understandable. But what Paul goes on to say next is almost incomprehensible.

Incomprehensible. He says, we don't only boast or rejoice in our hope of God's deliverance, but verse three, not only that, we rejoice in our suffering. Can I hear an amen to that? Yes. Rejoicing in suffering.

How? How can we rejoice in that? How does suffering lead to glory? How does suffering lead to rejoicing? Well, God reveals here that suffering has a work to do in us.

It has a purpose in our lives. Suffering is a means to an end. Verse three, the second half says, suffering produces endurance and endurance produces character and character produces, there's that word again, hope. What God wants you to understand this morning is that He is preparing you even in the midst of suffering. He is developing glory in you.

And He does it in the midst and in the struggles and in the trials of suffering. Friends, this is not a question of if, but when. You will suffer as a Christian. Not necessarily because you are a Christian, but as a Christian, you will suffer. But it has a purpose, God is saying.

And that purpose is to develop hunger and a hope for glory. Therefore, suffering in the Christian life is like a friction that creates beauty. It is a struggle that makes believers to shine. Every year when I was young, around springtime, out would come all the cleaning jobs that Mum had to do, and all of us had to be involved in that. Part of this ritual of the spring clean was that we would collect all the brass items at home, and Mum had a lot.

And over the year, they had become tarnished and dull and brown. And we collect them and usually on a beautiful day when you'd rather be out playing, out would come the tube of Brasso and a bit of raggedy piece of cloth. And what felt like a thousand brass items would be staring at you. And we'd be sitting there and we'd polish and we'd polish and we'd polish.

And you start first by putting a little bit of the Brasso on the brass and letting it dry so that it becomes white and you would know that it's ready. And once it's white, you start rubbing. Now as a boy, having felt the power of my Mum's right hand against my backside on many occasions, I knew the force that could be exerted on those brass objects. And I almost felt sorry for them. But the interesting thing of that buffing is if you held that item in your hand, it would be warm.

It would be warm. And it was because of the friction. It was because of the grainy brass and the pressure of our hands that these brass items would be transformed. They became shiny and beautiful. Sometimes so shiny that the one reflecting, the one polishing it would be reflected in it.

And in a way, that is what suffering does in the Christian life. The afflictions that come to us by the will of God is a process of God polishing friction on us to produce something far more precious, something far more beautiful. Now this is a hard thing to believe. Maybe easy to understand, but a hard thing to really believe and hope for ourselves. But this is why it is such a privilege to belong to a congregation with few grey heads.

See, it's easy, I think, on the Gold Coast to find a church with lots of young people. But there are old saints in this church who have gone through trials and sufferings. And if you were to ask them today to reflect on these things, they would be able to testify to the loving hand of God who polished them, to produce some beautiful things in their lives. We see that through times of trials and difficulty and suffering of all kinds, God has polished grace in the lives of His loved ones. And so we rejoice not simply in the future glory of God, but we rejoice even in the suffering.

Because now, even in this, God is polishing us to reflect Him. And in reflection of Him will be the reflection of His glory. So how does this suffering then produce hope? Romans 5 says that suffering produces something. It produces character.

It produces endurance and it produces in turn hope. Now remember, hope is a certainty of the future thing that we have not yet received now. And suffering does this because it sharpens our minds. It plucks us out of our narrowed perspective. Suffering makes us to look up.

It makes us look out. We are removed from our self-absorption, our narrow way of living our life, and we start asking bigger questions. Even non-Christians will ask, where is God in this? Some of them conclude there can be no God because of suffering, but the fact that they get angry at an idea of a God allowing it well, that already shows a spiritual disposition brought about in suffering.

We see pain and instinctively we clutch at a father who has the power to change it. But what if a Christian experiences suffering? What if we then clutch at our heavenly Father? How can we be sure that we will find Him? How can we be sure that He will hold on to us?

We find this reassurance in verse five. This hope that is produced in suffering, this hope won't put us to shame because God's love has been poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit. Guys, this is a wonderful truth. This is the amazing reality in the midst of suffering, your hope will not be lost because God Himself, by His Spirit, He protects that hope. When all seems lost, when there is nothing else to hold onto, the Holy Spirit living in each Christian makes all of us, even in that moment, know deep down that our future is glorious, and then that future is safe.

That is the hope in the midst of suffering. It is as though heaven's reality has been poured into us. It's what Paul is saying. I read a fun little story of a seventeenth-century fisherman who wrote a book on fishing called The Complete Angler. The complete angler.

I wish I could be that complete angler because the fish that I catch are usually incomplete and very inadequate. But his name is Isaac Walton, and in this book, he wrote a little poem, funnily enough, about a Christian pastor by the name of Richard Sibbs. And he said of this pastor, of that blessed man, let this praise be given, that heaven was in him before he was in heaven. Because of the Holy Spirit, this is true of every Christian. The hope of heaven and its glory is already in us.

And then surprisingly, God polishes us to reflect that, to see that, to desire that. The third bit of rejoicing that Paul points to is that the believer rejoices in God's love. We see the first reason for rejoicing is utterly undeserved, the hope of God's grace. When we have lost peace, God has given us peace in Jesus. The second reason for rejoicing is unexpected.

Suffering produces hope. But if that is so, then the third reason for rejoicing is absolutely unparalleled. Here's something that at the end of the day, no one apart from a Christian will understand. Look at what it says in verse 11. More than that, we also rejoice in God through our Lord Jesus Christ.

Now you'll notice something very interesting here. These verses, verses 6 to 10, that we've just skipped over actually paints a picture of the love of God introduced in verse five. Now where it says the love is poured into us by the Holy Spirit, Paul explains what this love is, what it looks like in verses 6 to 10. Verses 6 to 10 become stepping stones to finish on this point that we can rejoice in God because of His love. Now we understand from these verses the kind of God our God is.

At the conclusion, we find that God is supremely praiseworthy. We can rejoice in Him ultimately because of His unimaginable love. And therefore, we rejoice in God for who He is. And we rejoice in that He has shown Himself to be a God who loves the sinner. He loves the sinner.

Have a look at verse six. Paul says, it was when we were weak and ungodly. Verse eight, when we were still sinners. Verse 10, while we were God's enemies, He did what? He loved us.

Now it doesn't come out as clearly in our English versions here, but in the original text, this is what the word order of the powerful summary statement in verse seven looks like. Let's have a look at that up here. This is the Greek structure of Romans 5:7. I'll read it out for us. For a righteous person, one will scarcely die.

Though perhaps for a good person, one might dare even to die. But God shows His love for us in that while we were still sinners, for us, Christ died. Emphasis is on die. Die. Die.

Sacrifice. Sacrifice. Sacrifice. Paul builds up the logical conclusion that to die for a friend who has been good to us, that's perhaps imaginable. But to die for an enemy, that is truly shocking.

And the most shocking of all is that the perfect Son of God should die for sinners in the midst of their sin. Now I know that a lot of us in the twenty-first century, we've grown up with really nice, warm, fuzzy sentiments. We have great Hollywood movies that talk about supreme sacrifices, sacrifices for loved ones, and sacrifices even for our enemies, but this is so removed from the reality. Let's put ourselves into a situation. Think of the person who has hurt you the most in your life.

The person who has, at the most hardened and evil ways, sought on every occasion to do you harm. Now in their most unrepentant, most malicious moment, while they are still swearing at you and spitting in your face, you run and you push them out of the way and get hit by a bus. You saved their life. God's grace, Jesus' death, is that shocking. In this life, you will never know that God loves you by your own ability to interpret the circumstance of your life.

You will never know that God loves you if you are looking around you, if you are looking in the mud. God's love for us will not be immediately plain in the circumstances of our life. And so if we're dependent to believe in the love of God because of the good things that happen to us, we will be miserable our whole lives, and we will spend eternity in the misery of hell. But there is a place where the eternal love of God is given to you to be sure. And it is the place where Christ died.

How can I be possibly, how can I be possibly sure that God loves me? For this simple reason: for us, Christ, Christ died. Preacher Charles Spurgeon said, who, whenever we gaze at the cross, whenever we go to it, and on Sunday morning after Sunday morning, we we look at the cross. We should be obliged in our spirits to ask this question. Would God love me more than Him?

That He would give His Son for me. Can you imagine any circumstance where any father or mother sitting here would give their child for anything or anyone in this world? Can you imagine that they could conceivably love anything or anyone in this world more than they love their children? We cannot. But God so loved the world that He gave His one and only Son that whoever would believe in Him might have eternal life.

And when it is this kind of God we come to know, the God who loves sinners and enemies like you and me. And when we stand on the mountain of the glorious gospel of Jesus Christ and survey its glory and the implications thereof till our eyes can't see the horizon anymore, we can only stand and say, wow. Yes. It is marvellous. It is for me.

We can only say you are amazing, God. This is the glory of God, and this is something every one of us as Christians can rejoice in. And once we see this glory, all else pales into insignificance in light of His glory and grace. The panorama of God's glory. Is this true for you?

Are you able to rejoice in God's glory? The victory that He has won, the hope that you have. Or are you like the man with the muck rake? While this crown of gold of immeasurable worth, these amazing life-transforming privileges is being held out before you and you don't see it. Lift up your head.

Put down the muck rake and take hold of the treasure that is in Christ's hands for you. You know what the pilgrim's wife said when she saw this scene unfold? She prayed and said, oh God, deliver me from the. I hope you find deliverance. I hope God gives that to you, that you may see His wonderful glory, His incredible love, His unmistakable grace in your life.

Let's pray. Father, we rejoice in the glory of God. We rejoice in the treasure chest of Your great bounty, the victory that You have won, the enemies that You have ransomed. The love exemplified in Jesus. Drink.

It was a shameful exchange, but it was a glorious deliverance, oh God, of us. God, may this never ever ever depart from our minds. May this never get a back seat in our thinking. God, whatever comes our way, wherever we find ourselves even today, Lord, may we experience the depths, the riches, the vastness of this glory to where eyes and imaginations fail to see. God, we look forward to eternity when we will spend an unending lifetime marvelling at this.

And eternity will not be long enough for us to delve and to search and to marvel. Spirit fan into flame this vision. Keep it before us always, Lord, that You may bind our wavering hearts to You. In Jesus' name, we pray. Amen.