Patient in Affliction

Series: Upside Down: Living the Transformed Life

 “Patient in Affliction” // Romans 12:12

Sunday, January 27, 2013 @ Jericho Ridge Community Church

Series: Upside Down: Living the Transformed Life”

 

Good morning everyone!  My name is Brad Sumner, I’m part of the teaching and leadership team here at Jericho Ridge.  My wife Meg and I had a great weekend away in Seattle last week visiting the birthplace of great coffee but it’s so great to be back here with you all. 

 

As I sit for coffee with people who don’t profess to believe in God and who don’t pretend that they attend church one of the things I am often intrigued by is the perception that many of them have of Christianity.  Many of my friends who are on the outside looking in remark in not so glowing terms about how plastically-optimistic Christians are.  Or how happy or smug they seem to be because they project to the world that they have it all together.  That they just slap a smile on the face and shrug the tough stuff off with a grin.  And it’s not only those outside the church who have this perception.  In the late 1990’s the former Archbishop of Canterbury, the Right Reverend, Right Honourable, Lord Robert Alexander Kennedy Runcie (how’s that for titles?) said in an interview in a very derogatory tone that he felt that most evangelicals were “happy-clappy” or happy clappers.  He was referring to corporate worship gatherings and a style of music that seemed, in his opinion, to focus more on the rousing of positive emotions than focusing on God as the object of our worship.  He felt that by and large Christians were becoming too focused on emotionalism and that this would lead to a distancing from reality and from an ability to identify with the suffering and heart-aches of the real world. 

 

Because the real problem with a kind of happy-clappy Christianity comes when life doesn’t deal you a happy-clappy hand.  In these moments, it is possible to have a crisis of faith because what you’ve been told to expect by Pastor Joel Osteen from his large home and comfortable experience in Texas doesn’t match up with reality.  And it’s often in these moments, when you are in the middle of a non-happy-clappy experience that even well-meaning Christians say stupid things like “Well, just cling to James chapter 1 and count this all joy, brother.  God is making you stronger!”  Or “You know, if you love God Romans 8:28 says that this will all work out OK”.  I think of the Old Testament book of Job where his 3 friends came and sat with him and them began to tell him how all of the bad things that had happened to him were a result of him sinning.  Yeah, thanks for exercising your gifts of encouragement, guys!  But all sarcasm aside, these times of adversity and affliction can be some of the most lonely and the most challenging experiences we can have as human beings. 

And so the question we want to wrestle with this morning is this: “How does a transformed person respond to adversity?” 

 

In January and February here at Jericho, we’ve been looking at a series of verses in Romans chapter 12 that invite us to consider how our lives might be turned upside down in 2013 by the work of Christ to transform us.  We’ve been going verse by verse through Romans 12:9-21 where there is a whole series of descriptions or litmus tests that make the case that if you call yourself a Christian, that there are certain things to look for growing in your life that would prove that.  We began in Romans 12:9 by making a commitment to living authentically and lovingly both toward God and with one another.  Then in verse 10-13, there is a series of 10 phrases or ten examples of how love is at work in a transformed heart.  Each one begins with the virtue and then an action that describes how that virtue will be lived out.  In other words, Romans 12:10-13 could read as follows:

  1. In love, devoted to each other
  2. In honour, out-doing one another
  3. In zeal, never lacking
  4. In the Spirit, being aglow
  5. To the Lord, serving
  6. In hope, rejoicing
  7. In tribulation, being patient
  8. In prayer, being constant
  9. To the needs of others, sharing generously

10. In hospitality, diligent    

 

These ten compact phrases work in lock-step with each other, even though it may not seem so at first glance.  And today, we are going to focus on three of these phrases that appear in Romans 12:12 which reads “Rejoice in our confident hope. Be patient in trouble, and keep on praying.”

 

Let’s look at each of those individually.  The first manifestation of a person with a transformed life that is mentioned in Romans 12:12 is that they are filled with joy but their joy is rooted in something very specific – they rejoice not in the troubles or the circumstances of this life, but in the confidence that comes from the future-oriented nature of Christian hope.  The hope of heaven.  The writer of Romans, the apostle Paul, is writing to a group of Christians who are right in the middle of experiencing suffering and persecution.  They look all around them and see every day people who are coming to faith from all walks of life but whose circumstances don’t magically change.  They are seeing people who will not renounce their faith thrown to the lions in the Roman coliseum.  They are hearing about people who maintain a strong witness for God being burned alive as human candles in the gardens of the Roman Emperor.  They are seeing families split apart as women like Perpetua are hauled off to jail for professing their primary allegiance to Jesus as opposed to the state. 

 

And when you are the middle of this kind of high-risk scenario as a minority, it is very normal and healthy to ask the question “is this commitment worth the cost?”  So Paul writes to them to remind them and to teach us of the fact that as followers of Jesus, our joy doesn’t come from our circumstances.  Ultimately, our joy comes from knowing that a person with a transformed heart has a transformed future.  John Piper in a sermon on Christian joy uses the metaphor of a tree.  This tree is rooted in the soil of God’s grace, the strong fibers of the tree’s trunk are the unshakable promises of God.  The branches of this tree is our confident hope in heaven and the natural fruit that this tree produces then is joy.  This joy or rejoicing in our confident hope isn’t something that you can simply muster up by yourself. It’s not natural but spiritual.  It’s not emotionalism or happy-clappyness, it comes from the Spirit of God who causes it to grow in your life and mine not as we experience circumstances that produce joy, but as we place those circumstances in the context of eternity. 

 

But note the tension here…  joy is most often associated in our world with the present.  To us, joy is the natural result of favourable circumstances here and now.  But that can result in a kind of temporary, happy clappy Christianity.  And when my circumstances change, then my joy disappears with them.  But if my rejoicing is anchored not solely on the circumstances of the present, but is tied to hope, hope is occupied primarily with the future.  This is what Paul is talking about in 2 Corinthians 4 where he says “We are pressed on every side by troubles, but we are not crushed. We are perplexed, but not driven to despair. 9 We are hunted down, but never abandoned by God. We get knocked down, but we are not destroyed…”

“For our present troubles are small and won’t last very long. Yet they produce for us a glory that vastly outweighs them and will last forever! 18 So we don’t look at the troubles we can see now; rather, we fix our gaze on things that cannot be seen. For the things we see now will soon be gone, but the things we cannot see will last forever.”     

 

As my heart is increasingly transformed by God, I can experience joy not because of my circumstances, but because of the confidence of my hope.    Does that distinction make sense to you?  What questions does that bring up? 

Too often I think that happy clappy perception that I referenced earlier is driven out of the misunderstanding that Christians are happy about their circumstances.  But the second phrase in our little trio helps set the tone of how a transformed person respond the adversity or affliction.  They respond not with joy about it, but with patience in it.  Be patient in trouble.  Just because joy is the fruit of my future-oriented hope, this doesn’t magically make my life free of pain or troubles.  But the transformed person responds to the challenges of life with two things: patience & prayer. 

 

James 1 if often quoted glibly to people in the midst of suffering but look carefully with me at what it says about times of trouble: Dear brothers and sisters, when troubles come your way, consider it an opportunity for great joy. 3 For you know that when your faith is tested, your endurance has a chance to grow. 4 So let it grow, for when your endurance is fully developed, you will be perfect and complete, needing nothing.”          

 

Many people will use this verse to suggest that I consider my troubles the source of joy.  That’s not what it says.  It does not say “when troubles come your way, consider those troubles great joy”.  It says consider the opportunity to develop endurance in the middle of them to be a constant reminder of the hope of heaven.  We are never commanded to be joyful about the trials themselves.  We are invited to consider patient endurance as another fruit that can grow on the branch of hope on the tree of God’s faithful promises, rooted in the soil of His grace and love.  I am joyful in that no matter what happens to me, I have a secure and confident hope, but this doesn’t mean I am joyful about my troubles themselves.  About my troubles, the Scripture says I am to be patient. 

 

This is really hard for me.  I don’t know about you, but when troubles come into my life, one of my responses is to ask “OK, God… what are you trying to teach me here?  What I would love is for you to let me know what I am supposed to be learning so that I can learn it quickly and then I can move on and we can be done with this affliction.  So, let’s get on with it, shall we?”  Patience is not my strong suit, particularly patience in affliction.  I am a person who is very results or out-comes oriented and so if I don’t know how long a particular affliction or trouble is going to last, I often have trouble clinging to joyful hope and I most certainly have trouble clinging to patience. 

 

I think about the time growing up when my Grandmother lived with us for a season when she was in the early stages of Alzheimer’s.  What seemed at the outset like it was going to be a 14 month experience lingered and became a 14 year journey of loss.  It’s tough as a family to display patient hope for 14 years.  I think about the time when Meg and I were hunched over our two month old baby daughter in an incubator filled with uncertainty about her future.  It was not a place of joy for us.  I think about many of you here at Jericho who have walked through and are walking through deep experiences of pain.  The loss of a child or a family member.  Unrealized expectations about where you would be at this point in your life.  The deep hurt experienced as a result of a broken marriage covenant.  The deep and extended pain of a child who has walked away from their faith and their family.  The patience required to endure an extended job transition.  Patience is hard work in these settings! 

 

I think of Al and Herta, as they walk through Herta’s diagnosis and treatment of breast cancer.  I think about Danny, working through the pain in his leg and back and then gall bladder surgery this past year.  I think about people who we know well who live with chronic illness.  I think about people here at Jericho like Sean, who has been waiting for almost a decade for a kidney transplant.  Does the Bible tell him that he has to be happy in the middle of his experience? Nope.  But it does tell us that we are to be patient in the midst of affliction.  Why?  Because patience pushes me to my knees.  There is a very logical connection between patience in affliction and faithfulness in prayer.  Dr. James Edwards in his helpful commentary on Romans reminds us that “prayer makes endurance possible.”  With the potential exception of faith, I can’t think of anything in the Scriptures that requires more effort than prayer.  And when it comes to spiritual practices, there is nothing that I am need more practice at than faithfulness in prayer.  Except when I am in the middle of a time of trouble.  Then, I reminder to pray.  I pray for others.  I pray for the situation. I pray, first telling God what to do and hoping to change His mind about the circumstance and have Him take it away.  But after that settles down, I often find that I am praying and asking God not what He should do, but what I should do.  Patience pushes me to my knees.  And on my knees, crying out to God about my circumstances or my family in chaos or my finances or my poor decisions or asking for wisdom or whatever it is that I am praying about…  I don’t find camaraderie with happy clappy Christians.  I find a deep sense of soul connection with battle-worn and scarred and wounded and authentic fellow travelers.  People who also are crying out to God in the midst of their circumstances and who are willing to weep with those who weep. 

 

We are going to move into a time of response in worship in song and prayer.  And we have a prayer team, Aaron Franson, Jackie Pasko, Kevin Klassen this morning and they would love to stand with you and join you in asking God for patience in the midst of your trial this morning. The 2 songs that Dustin and the team are going to lead us in are both designed to remind us of the faithfulness of God in the midst of the circumstances of our lives and they invite us to call out to Him again and again.  If you don’t mean that or don’t want that, don’t sing it.  But if you know that you need God either to begin walking with you and you with Him, or if you need a fresh dose of faith today and you don’t have the strength for it, these three and other members of our team would be privileged to keep on praying with and for you.    

 

As the band comes to lead us, I invite you to stand and pray with me as we respond in worship in song together.  Let’s pray. 

How does a person with a transformed life respond to suffering and pain? That's the question we set out to explore together - be warned: glib or happy-clappy answers will be rejected as insufficient!

Speaker: Brad Sumner

January 27, 2013
Romans 12:12

Brad Sumner

Lead Pastor

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