Breaking the Power of Disappointment Romans 5:1-5 David Campbell

Breaking the power of disappointment

Romans 5:1-5

David Campbell

Disappointment is a powerful force. It comes into our lives when we face situations in life where we feel let down by other people or by God. It takes our eyes off God and prevents us from seeing all the good things He has done for us. It causes us to see everything around us through a focus of pain and de- feat. It is a significant milestone on the road to depression. Disappointment can arise out of all sorts of life experiences. The fact is that, as fallen people in a fallen world, none of us can expect to avoid those kind of experiences. But even though we may not be able to avoid them, we can still learn how to respond to them. How we respond to negative situations we face determines whether the disappointment that comes through those situations begins to rule our lives, or whether we can break its power to rise to a place of victory.

And this is exactly what Paul is trying to teach us in the first five verses of Romans 5. Notice how he starts by making four positive statements: we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God, we have access by faith to grace, and we rejoice in the hope of God’s glory. These statements are a pro- gression. Christ died on the cross so that we could be justified, that is, we are no longer guilty of sin. As a result of this, we have peace with God. This peace does not describe an emotional feeling but the nature of our relationship with God: once we were at war with Him, now we are at peace. Now that we are at peace with God, we have access to His grace. The full resources of God’s strength and power are available to us because of the new relationship we have with Him. And finally, as a consequence of all this, we rejoice because we now possess hope. The object of this hope is the glory of God: one day we will enter into His presence and experience His glory for ourselves. Yet even now, Paul teaches us elsewhere, we experience and re- flect His glory in limited measure, for we are being transformed from one degree of glory into another by the working of the Holy Spirit within us (2 Cor. 3:18).

This sets the stage for the statement of verses 3- 4: “More than that, we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope.” Here is where the rubber hits the road. Here is where we encounter setbacks, sufferings, adversity, challenges. Here is where disappointment rears its ugly head. Paul was both a brutal realist and a man of incredible faith. He had encountered massive setbacks in life, yet also found the grace to maintain the joy of the Lord in all of them. Finally, he brings the whole teaching to a climax in verse 5: “And hope does not disappoint, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.”

We can read this passage two ways. The first suggests that the key to facing adversity is to focus only on the statements of verses 3-4. We are going to rejoice in our hardships, because we know that what we are going through will have a positive outcome: suffering produces endurance, endurance produces character, and character produces hope. Now what these two verses state is perfectly true. “Endurance” is the decision or determination to focus on the goodness and character of God when trouble comes: “In everything give thanks” (1 Thess. 5:18). We refuse to become bitter, blaming God or other people for what has happened to us. “Character” is a word which refers to the testedness of a metal refined in the fire which comes through this testing purified. Peter compares this process of testing to the refining of our faith through times of trial (1 Peter 1:7). A tested character is a character with substance. Continued perseverance and faithfulness to God produces an ever-deepening relationship with Christ and dependency on Him, which brings an ever-increasing flow of His strength and grace into our lives. As this flow continues, it gives our lives substance. God begins to build a strong and unshakeable foundation under us, a foundation sturdy enough for us to build our lives on and even take on the burdens of others. Thus, we become people of real substance. But there is a problem with this understanding of the text. If we read verses 3-4 in isolation, we may assume that it is entirely on our shoulders to respond to suffering in such a way that we develop endurance, which then leads on to character. Once, through this great effort, we have attained the necessary degree of character, we will then and only then be able to enter into the hope that the Holy Spirit gives. But too often, when the freight train of adversity rolls down the track and right over us, we find we don’t have the resources to produce either endurance or character. We wind

up instead in the very place this passage says we are not supposed to be: the place of disappointment.

Now can I suggest a second way of reading this passage. Let’s start back at verses 1-2. Paul starts with the thought of being justified by faith. The legal penalty against us has been removed. We have been declared “not guilty” on all charges. Jesus took the punishment for us. The anger of God against hu- man sin has been visited on Him. As a result we have peace with God. We are no longer enemies of God, destined for eternal separation from His presence. We are now His friends. The next step is critical. Because we are His friends, we now have access by faith to His grace. The word used here for “access” refers to the right to enter into a king’s throne room. We now have that right. But note this: just because we have the right does not mean that the right is automatically exercised. It remains our choice whether or not to enter into the throne room of the King. The throne room is the place of relationship, the place where we meet God, the place of prayer, of fellowship with Him. It is not populated only by saintly people who spend hours every day on their knees. It also includes the guy on the way to work coming into God’s presence in his car and lifting his day and his family before the Lord. It includes the mom who has just sent her kids off to school and quickly asks the Father’s blessing and protection on them as they go off. It includes the student anxious before an important exam asking God for help. That’s what it means to enter His throne room. That throne room is the only place on earth you will find the grace of God. If you want it, you have to make the decision to enter that room.

What is the grace of God? The grace of God is the strength that God pro- vides for us to live life abundantly. It is the strength drawn from the infinite resources of Almighty God. It is the strength by which the universe was created, and is still moment by moment held together. Wouldn’t you rather live by that strength than by whatever resources you can find within yourself? In His mercy, God brings us to the end of our strength so that we can find His strength instead. Letting go of our tiny security blankets enables us to fall into the security only He can provide. The grace is there for our asking, but we must ask. It does not come automatically. “You do not have because you do not ask”, James tells us (4:2). It is this grace, Paul informs us, that enables us to rejoice in hope of the glory of God (verse 2).

All that is from the first two verses of the passage. The next two verses talk about facing adversity. But instead of reading them as a command to rejoice in hardship and overcome it by our own will power, let’s read those verses as contained within a sandwich. The top of the sandwich is the first two verses, which we have already looked at, and the bottom of the sandwich is verse 5. It says that the hope verse 2 has told us to rejoice in “does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.” Justification leads to peace which leads to access to grace which, once taken hold of, gives us hope. And this hope, the other half of the sandwich now tell us, breaks the power of disappointment, because it has a greater power behind it – the love of God poured out into our hearts by the Holy Spirit.

The knowledge of God’s love is the absolutely guaranteed inheritance of every believer who is willing to take hold of it. In the presence of God, we find an assurance of His love for us. We find a promise that He will never leave us or forsake us. We find Him speaking to our mind, our will and our emotions – as John Wesley put it, “strangely warming our hearts”. This love floods the innermost parts of our being with strength and confidence. It turns our mourning into dancing. It puts our sorrows into perspective. It gives us hope, for the very reason that we now know we have a God who holds our fu- ture in His hands and will look after us no matter what. And this hope does not disappoint us, because it is fortified, strengthened and empowered by the supernatural knowledge and experience of the Father’s amazing, incredible, supernatural love. This is the same experience David had of finding the Fa- ther’s love in the midst of adversity: “Therefore let everyone who is godly of- fer prayer to you at a time you may be found [he knew how to access the grace of God]; surely in the rush of great waters, they shall not reach him. You are a hiding place for me; you preserve me from trouble; you surround me with shouts of deliverance [he rejoiced in his sufferings]... Many are the sorrows of the wicked, but steadfast love surrounds the one who trusts in the Lord [the experience of God’s love kept him]. Be glad in the Lord, and rejoice, O righteous, and shout for joy, all you upright in heart!” [the power of disappointment was broken] (Psalm 32:6-7, 10-11).

I want to address a common problem we have in relation to this. The idea that we can know God’s love and be loved by Him is perhaps easier for a woman to grasp than a man, which means that in the church, often without realizing it, we portray the experience of the love of God as a feminine emo- tion. Men are understandably turned off by phrases like “falling in love with Jesus”. But maybe we can help this situation by finding a better Biblical con- text. Here in Romans 5, Paul clearly teaches it is not Jesus’ love we receive, but the love of the Father. It is God’s love – the Father’s love – which has been poured into our hearts (verse 5). Every man can identify with the need to have a father’s affirmation and approval. Few boys ever lived who could live happily without it, and men who have never had the affirmation and love of a father constitute a major source of family breakdown. But as Christians, we have found the answer for men as well as for women. We can reconnect with the Father who created us. His love is an affirmation, an approval. It is the Father’s heart to draw us, men and women alike, into relationship with Him. His love refers to the reality that we have a Father who accepts us and loves us. Paul writes that God has “blessed us in the Beloved” (Eph. 1:6). The beloved is Jesus. This refers to the father-son relationship between God and Jesus. Because God loved Jesus and accepted His sacrifice, the door is now open for the same God to adopt us as His sons and daughters and love us also. It is not so much that Jesus loves us and we love Him, though both are undoubtedly true. But the way the Bible expresses it is that the greatest father-son relationship in the whole universe has now been opened up for us. We can experience the same love as the beloved Son Himself did. Then the same Father points us to His own Son, the strongest man who ever lived, and tells us to follow Him. If we consistently present Christianity in that way, I believe we will have many more men in the church, including multitudes of men who never had a father who affirmed them but who can now for the first time find one. And we will have multitudes both of men and of women who have found the real experience of the love of God.

Now we are in a position to face the sometimes gristly meat in the sandwich – the very real sufferings of verses 3-4 that we face. We can rejoice in them not because we see them as a way of building character, but because we come into those sufferings strengthened by the Father’s love, which assures us that we will come through the other end stronger than we went into them. In fact, part of His assurance is that, as we look back, we will see the endurance not

that we produced, but which He created and sustained within us by His grace. We will see the character not that we formed, but that He fashioned within us as we endured. And at the end of the suffering, the hope we went into it with will be multiplied and strengthened, because the same Father who enfolded us in His arms at the beginning of the trial will have brought us out at the other end. And usually in the process we are drawn closer to Him, which means gaining a greater ability to receive more of His wonderful love.

This teaching does not answer all the questions as to why bad things happen to God’s people. The fact is that no one other than God Himself can answer many of those questions. But it does provide a framework to see beyond hu- man suffering to a greater reality, which is the love of God. In 1 Corinthians 13, Paul tells us that in the present age three things are central for very believer – faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love. Why? Be- cause at the end of time, when we see the Lord face to face, faith and hope will no longer be necessary. All that remains will be love, for God is love. The love of God is the greatest force known to man. It surmounted all of our rebellion against Him, sent His Son to the cross, and has now justified us, given us peace with Him, provided access to His grace and been poured out into our hearts by His Spirit. The reality of God’s love may not answer every question, but it does and always will put those questions into the greater perspective of an eternal God who in the end has an inheritance for us in His love which will remain when all suffering is gone.

This is the glory of God.