Romans 5:1-11
“One Hope”
May 29, 2011 - Sixth Sunday in Easter

         “You died of cholera,” said the computer to my daughter. She was playing “Oregon Trail,” a game she brought home from school. It simulated planning for and embarking on the 2,000 mile journey from the Missouri River to the Willamette Valley in the mid-1800s. The trip we make in a few hours by plane was a months-long slog by wagon train. It was fraught with hardships and dangers, and as Susan learned, you could die along the way in all sorts of ways, from starvation to scurvy to snakebite.

         The people who did make it to the great state of Oregon arrived with character and strength. They had, through difficult and dangerous suffering, learned to hope. This morning in chapter 5 of Romans, we see how God intends for anyone who has faith in Jesus Christ to grow into a deeper and more sure hope.

         Theological gears shift moving from Romans 4 to Romans 5. To this point Paul has focused on God’s plan the whole world through the promise to Abraham. That plan is carried on and completed through faith in Christ. The blessings God promised to the Jewish people were always meant to bless and include the rest of us. That’s exactly why inclusion in the promise, from the beginning, was based on faith rather than on specific Jewish identity markers like circumcision and obeying the law.

         Justification, being made righteous by God, comes through faith and not through Jewish identity. Now that Jesus the Messiah has died and risen for everyone, anyone can be included in God’s family, in God’s promise, through faith in Jesus. God’s one and only plan to save the world, by bringing us Jesus through the seed of Abraham, is going forward and including people from every nation and race.

         Jewish violation of the law blocked God’s plan, ruined the bridge to blessing they might have crossed by keeping the law. So God built a new bridge, which anyone can cross. Jesus went to the Cross and dealt with sin and lawbreaking by dying and rising to make it possible for anyone to be justified, to be made righteous before God. We left off last week at the end of chapter 4 hearing that Jesus “was handed over to death for our trespasses and was raised for our justification.”

         Paul takes off smoothly in the new gear at the beginning of chapter 5 as he asks us to feel the effect of faith in Christ, of being justified, of being included in the promise, of being part of the family of God. Paul stays in that practical gear on through chapter 8. Here is how justification in Christ works out practically. Here is what faith means day to day.

         So verse 1 of chapter 5 first points to the basic fact that justification by faith brings us peace, “peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.” This is not an individual, internal “peace of mind” given by some sort of spiritual or physical exercise like meditation or yoga. This is the peace of a relationship restored, of persons being reconciled.

         Some words are said, some promise is broken, some trust is betrayed, and we get separated from each other. A wall goes up, a crack spreads across the ground, and suddenly two or more people are not speaking to each other, not accepting phone calls, not answering messages, not allowing that gap to be crossed because it hurts so much.

         Verses 1 and 2 tell us God has done something about the separation between Him and ourselves, the space broken open by our sin. Verse 2 says that through Jesus “we have obtained access,” we may come into God’s presence, speak to Him, enjoy His company in peace. We have access to His grace and in that grace we stand in His presence.

         Peaceful reconciliation with God is the answer to the sentence we heard pronounced back in Romans 3:23, “for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” But now Paul can say, because of our justification by faith, that “we boast in our hope of sharing in the glory of God.” We’re no longer falling short of glory, but hoping to share in it.

         In the early Wagon Train of 1843, a thousand settlers on the Oregon Trail became stuck where it appeared their wagons could go no farther, Fort Hall near Pocatello, Idaho. Their leader, John Gantt, counseled them to give up, turn back or abandon the wagons. But Marcus Whitman said he could get them there, could guide their wagons on a route that would arrive. So they went on. By following the route of faith in Jesus Christ our wagons are no longer stuck in the ruts and mud of sin, but we’re moving forward, hoping to arrive.

         That’s why Paul in verse 3 turns to what endangers hope, our sufferings along the way. Even freed from the grip of sin, we can lose heart, get discouraged, start to give up on the whole business of faith when we encounter trials that feel overwhelming. In Paul’s time those trials took the form of being persecuted for Christian faith. Christians all over the world still have that kind of trial.

         We have our own challenges. You lose your health and enter a life of constant pain. You lose your job and life becomes totally insecure. You lose the one person you loved most and life becomes unbearably lonely. However suffering comes, it threatens faith. One of my old Christian mentors and friends astounded me when in his pain and sickness he said, “I don’t see how God can let this happen. I’m struggling to believe.” But we’ve all felt times like that. We can get stuck there. My friend almost did.

         Yet we can “boast in our suffering,” because with begins process like pioneers on the Oregon Trail experienced. Verses 3 and 4 say “suffering produces patience, and patience produces character, and character produces hope.”

         As N. T. Wright says, there’s no obvious logic in that sequence. People can suffer and learn patience and develop a tried and tested character, but still not have much hope. Thousands patiently plodded the Oregon Trail, but died along the way. But there is a difference when Christians suffer. Christian patience and Christian hope is deeper and stronger. Verse 5 says, “and hope does not disappoint us, because the love of God has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit…”

         Christian suffering leads to hope, Christian hope does not disappointment. We are truly reconciled to God and we are going to arrive in His presence. We know that because He is present with us in the person and work of His Holy Spirit. The Spirit is pouring a love into our hearts that is the sign and evidence of our hope.

         There’s tricky grammar here about “the love of God,” which is poured into us. Most translations take the “of” as a possessive. It’s God’s love for us, the love He shows us, which the Spirit gives us. That’s certainly possible and it fits with the next few verses about how God showed us His love in the sacrificial death of His Son.

         But the other possibility is that God is the object in the phrase “love of God,” as when we talk about the “love of music” or the “love of sports.” It love for God that the Spirit pours into our hearts. That’s why it’s poured into us, rather than as verse 8 says about God’s love for us, being demonstrated or proved to us.

         Hope does not disappoint us because we feel this great effect of faith happening in our hearts. The Spirit moves us to love God. It’s a sign that reconciliation is accomplished, the relationship is being healed. With the Spirit in our hearts we grow to love the One we sinned against. Love for God in us is evidence that our hope is real and sure.

         Yet Paul doesn’t want us to imagine our hope depends on what we feel. If my personal love for God is the measure of my hope, then I may come up short. There are times we find it hard to love God, times when the trail over the pass just gets too steep.

         So turns definitely to God’s love for us. Verse 6 says, “For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly.” Here the whole message of the first four chapters comes together. Jews were violators of the law. Gentiles sinned against their own consciences. Everyone on earth is weak and ungodly, unable to keep the law or rebellious against what they know of God. But Jesus Christ died for them all.

         Verse 7 asks why one person would die for another. On Memorial Day, our minds and hearts are drawn toward those who in died for others in armed service, died, some of them, for us. What moved them? Paul is a bit cryptic, saying that it’s rare for anyone to “die for a righteous person, though for a good person someone perhaps might actually dare to die.”

         There is some distinction here between a righteous person and a good person, but it’s hard to figure out. The best guess is that the righteous person is someone who does what’s right, but the good person is someone who has been good to you, a person who has been a personal blessing. It’s for that latter sort of person that you might give your life.

         Under an archway at the University of Chicago, in front of statue in a park in England, and in the narthex of the church I served in Lincoln, Nebraska written in stone or brass there are names inscribed of those who served and died in the great wars, particularly World War II. Some of you have seen the Wall that names those who died in Vietnam.

         When I look at names like that and think about all those beautiful lives ended too early, I get a deep impression of love. Those names were remembered because their friends and families loved them. And they loved their friends and families. That’s why they died. They believed their sacrifice would bless people who had blessed them, keep them safe, give them a good future. The sacrifice of soldiers in war is most often what Paul says in verse 7, a sacrifice by good people for others who have been good to them. Their sacrifice is a good and honorable thing, definitely worthy of a Memorial Day.

         But Paul’s point in verse 8 is that Jesus was not like a soldier defending his beloved country, laying down his life for friends and family and good people who loved him. No, on the Cross, “God proves his love for us in that while we were still sinners Christ died for us,” while we were still sinners. Jesus was not a good man dying for good people. He was a perfect Man dying for sinful people. And that’s why our hope won’t disappoint us.

         All our worries about our sins and our fears that God might hate us for all the are met by this love showed to us even when we are sinners. God didn’t look for some spark of goodness in us, then sacrifice Jesus to save that little bit of light in dark souls. No, He sent Jesus to die for sinners, for people who aren’t good at all, for folks who have no justification, no righteousness of our own. That’s how much He loves us.

         So in verses 9 and 10 we get a couple of the “how much more” statements that are familiar in Scripture. The basic idea is this: Our hope is sure and won’t disappoint us, because if God has come this far, how will He not go all the way with us?

         The Great Migration of 1843 arrived at The Dalles and found themselves blocked because there was still no road around Mt. Hood. But they had come so far. So they disassembled their wagons and floated their possessions down the dangerous Columbia. They had come that far; they weren’t going to be stopped by a mountain. Nearly all the settlers and their wagons arrived in the Willamette Valley in early October of 1843.

         Paul says in verse 9 that “we have been justified by his blood.” God’s own Son Jesus bled for us on the Cross. He won’t stop now and fail to save us from His wrath. In verse 10 similarly we read that “we were reconciled to God through the death of his Son,” so “much more surely… will we be saved by his life.” He’s already done the hard thing by loving us enough to let Jesus die for us when we didn’t deserve it. So God will not fail to complete the story by bringing us safely into eternal life and salvation.

         The love of God which was great enough for Jesus to die for sinners is the guarantee of our hope. God has come this far with us. Of course He’s going to bring us home. He’s done the hard part. Why wouldn’t He finish the easy part?

         Verse 11 brings us to the very heart of why we are here today, why we get together every Sunday. “But more than that,” he says. In other words, even more than just the hope we have for the future, “we even boast in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received reconciliation.” Worship is boasting in God.

         Worship is the opposite of what people sometimes see or think Christians do. We’re not boasting in ourselves, glad we are good or that we know the secret of being saved. We boast in the God who loved us enough to die for us while were still sinners. We rejoice and celebrate not because we got ourselves reconciled to God, but that through Jesus Christ “we have now received reconciliation.”

         God gave us reconciliation. The hard work was all His. As the Covenant theologian Paul Peter Waldenström realized, God reconciled us. He didn’t change Himself. He didn’t switch from hating us to loving us. He changed us. He poured love for Him into our hearts and turned us from hating Him to loving Him. That’s what we’re here to boast about. That’s what we’re celebrating. That’s why we’re going to sing, “We’ve a Story to Tell to the Nations.” We’re boasting about God’s great love for everyone.

         Amen.

Valley Covenant Church
Eugene/Springfield, Oregon
Copyright © 2011 by Stephen S. Bilynskyj