WADING RIVER CONGREGATIONAL CHURCH

SERMONS IN PRINT

Peter Vibert 4/02/06

Romans 8:18-39 “Future Glory”

As we live in the “overlap of the ages,” in the “already but not yet” time in a world where the Kingdom of God has broken in through Jesus, but the “Present Age” is still very real, we struggle to make sense of the many contradictory and confusing aspects of our existence as Christians. We have a taste of the “Age to Come,” but we are not yet fulfilled. But that taste is enough to change the way we think about many things: we talked in the past two weeks about Truth and about Death. Today we look at another of the issues that the Apostle Paul wrestles with in the NT: Suffering.

1) What A World!

It is a strange thing, but suffering is no respecter of persons or circumstances, of health or wealth or age or experience. You might imagine that people like us, who live in the 21^st C. in one of the richest and most pleasant corners of the richest nation on earth, would be as happy and content and free of troubles as anyone has ever been. We have bigger houses, newer cars, better health care, more opportunities, higher incomes than almost anyone anywhere at any time.

Yet too often we do not feel that way at all. We are hurried and harried, tired and anxious. And we suffer from heart disease and cancer, we struggle with separation and divorce, alcohol and drugs, frightening expenses and bankruptcies. Our children die in car crashes, gangs control some of our streets and our schools, unemployed men line the roads waiting for a day’s labor. Our soup kitchens and food pantries cannot keep up with demand, and ten thousand people sleep on the streets of the city. If you need proof that money cannot cure all our ills, or defend us from all troubles, it’s right here.

Suffering is real, and it comes to the rich and poor, to the just and the unjust, to believers and pagans. How does this happen? What sort of world is this, where even those who have placed their faith in the God the Creator, Sustainer and Redeemer of the world, and in his Son Jesus Christ, continue to suffer in apparently random ways? Does God not know about this, or care; or is he unable to do anything about it?

2) Why We Suffer

If we ask what the Bible has to say about the suffering of God’s people, about “good people,” we find several strands to the answer, and they are not always easy to untangle.

Some of our suffering is self-inflicted. If we pursue activities that are harmful, we will probably be harmed – whether that is driving too fast, over-eating all our lives, smoking and drinking our way to cancer or cirrhosis, injecting or snorting crystal meth or crack cocaine. There is a price for these things.

Put in theological terms, some suffering is directly due to sin – and not simply what we do to ourselves, but what we sinfully do to other people to make them suffer. Domestic abuse is said to occur in 25% of families in the USA. Some marriages are battlegrounds of bad temper, self-centeredness, and irresponsible behavior. One half of marriages now end in divorce. There is no remedy for these kinds of suffering – personal and relational - except repentance, renewal, restoration and forgiveness. When we make others suffer, we have to accept our responsibility for that, and make the changes that are necessary to bring reconciliation and healing into our relationships.

But there is more suffering in the world than this. Some of it has no direct connection to our sin or the sin of others. It is rather a result of a widespread evil that is at loose in the world. Our world is “fallen” – in rebellion from and separated from God – and evil is now sown into human life and all creation. Some of the evil is clear-cut – persecution for religion or ethnicity, oppression by bad governments and violent gangs, patterns of racism, exploitation of the poor and the weak - especially women and children. Greed and corruption rob millions of people of food, shelter, employment, health.

The pervasiveness of evil in the world means that some of it falls on innocent people, seemingly randomly. It seems almost demonic in nature, and indeed there is supernatural evil at work. You can be the best-living, the kindest, the most Christian person in your town, and be killed by a drunk driver running a red light. If you ask what Christianity says about this kind of suffering, it answers in part that you are sharing in the sufferings of Christ. He promised that as the world had made him suffer, it would make his followers suffer too. Paul talks about the inevitability and even the privilege of sharing in Christ’s sufferings.

Theologically, the NT offers another answer that complicates our vision and understanding. Even as we count peace, harmony, health and wealth as God’s blessings; so we can also see sufferings and disorder and violence as signs of God’s wrath. Neither God’s blessings nor God’s wrath are confined to the future – to the day of Judgment at the end of the Present Age – but are already being revealed in part. We taste some of God’s blessing, and some of God’s wrath. People, and presumably tribes and nations, can become so evil in their actions that God releases just a little of his judgment and wrath on them, until they return to their senses.

Then there is one last reason we suffer, even as believers. We are taught that we are God’s children, adopted into his family by grace, and that he treats us as the best of fathers treats his children. That includes nurture and teaching and protection, but it also includes discipline. We are told that at times God has to discipline us, and that although like all children we do not enjoy it and often rebel against it, nonetheless it is for our ultimate good. But sometimes through suffering God is trying to get our attention to an issue in our lives that needs cleaning up.

3) What God Does

This is a complex story! So many different answers to why we suffer! What is God doing in the midst of all these various kinds of suffering? Does he care, can he help?

There are four things which the Apostle Paul tells the Roman Christians that they need to know about their sufferings. First, – if we are his children through faith in Christ, he gives us the Holy Spirit to help us. The Spirit comes to dwell in us, to strengthen us, to guide us. It is the Spirit who makes it possible for us to see God as our Father, to call him Abba, and to trust him. It is the Spirit who reassures us that God loves us. It is the Spirit who even prays for us when we cannot pray ourselves.

In our sufferings, we often do not know where God is, what he is up to, what he wants of us. We feel cut off, alone, neglected. In Paul’s word, we “groan” about our condition. Some of us do it audibly, some people wear their groans “on their sleeves” - or on their faces - and some people bury them deep inside and just keep busy. But the Holy Spirit hears our groans and interprets their meaning and presents them to God as the prayers we cannot articulate. Beyond words, he works in us to bring our deepest desires to God and to reveal his will to us.

Secondly, says Paul, our sufferings are in fact light and momentary compared to what yet lies ahead of us. Just as we have now long forgotten the scrapes and bruised knees of childhood, we shall soon forget the aches of age, the weakness and shortness of breath, the intense pain of disease and injury, when we come into the full presence of God in the Age to Come. What we deal with now is light, whereas the future is heavy. What we deal with now is temporary, whereas our future is eternal.

Thirdly, what lies ahead for us can be called “glory” – a word that hardly makes sense to us. It speaks of brightness and majesty, of fame and honor. What could this mean? C. S. Lewis, in a sermon in Oxford in June 1941, wrestled with this “future glory.” It made no sense to him until he saw it as the moment when we are privileged to stand before God and be told that he is pleased with us; that he knows us as his children; and we hear the unforgettable words “well done, good and faithful servant!” That will be glory, to be affirmed by God, to be at last given the appreciation, the attention, the love, the reward that we have secretly craved all our lives.

Finally, at that moment it will also become clear – and we have the hints of it already now – that God indeed “works in all things for the good of those who love him, who are called according to his purpose.” In all our sufferings, and in all our joys; in all the (to us) seemingly random events of our lives, God is at work, “cooperating with,” using for his purpose, exploiting in pursuit of his goals, everything that happens. We cannot begin to grasp how this could be, but then he is God and we are not. It takes a being of supernatural and unlimited wisdom, knowledge, power and love to make “all things” work for our ultimate good. But he is God, and he makes even evil men and evil deeds serve his purpose. If you find that hard to believe, you can – as they say – look it up. It is called the Crucifixion of his Son. There was never a worse day, but it has ever since been called Good Friday, because through his death at the hands of evil men, the Son of God redeemed the world.

So we can be reassured, here and now, that nothing can get between us and God’s love in Jesus, between us and his purpose for our lives. God is “for us”! He will persist with us, defending us against all evil – though not from all suffering – until we are glorified in his presence. If he has called us, and we have responded, then we are already justified -although the great Judgment is not yet here. If God has done that, he will also glorify us, and we can be reassured that it is not our persistence, not our progress in holiness, not our great faith, that will bring us to glory, but his perseverance with us. If it depended on us, we would never make it. But because it depends on him, we are guaranteed that we will make it home.

Then we shall find glory. It will be the answer to our deepest longings – to be loved, welcomed, appreciated. As C.S. Lewis said so evocatively, all the best and most beautiful moments in this life leave us dissatisfied, because they awaken in us a wistful yearning for another more perfect place, another more perfect life: “The scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.” Lewis calls this yearning “the inconsolable secret” of our lives – but then reminds us that “At present we are on the outside of the world, on the wrong side of the door. We discern the freshness and beauty of the morning, but they do not make us fresh and pure. We cannot mingle with the splendors we see. But all the leaves of the New Testament are rustling with the rumor that it will not always be so. Some day, God willing, we shall get in.”

Therefore, as Paul says to the Corinthians, we do not lose heart. Outwardly we may be wasting away, but inwardly we are being renewed in the image of Jesus Christ by the work of the Holy Spirit within us. So we keep our eyes on what is eternal, and full of glory; and not on what we can see now, which is temporary, and in the end does not weigh much at all. Christians know that suffering has meaning, that it is all in God’s loving hands, and that he works even this for our growth, our discipline, and our good.

Let us pray...