The Order of Suffering

Paul says something in Romans 5:3-4 that most of us would not say on our own. He glories in sufferings. Not because suffering is pleasant, and not because he is pretending. He gives a reason, and the reason is a sequence. Suffering produces perseverance. Perseverance produces character. Character produces hope. And hope, he adds in verse 5, does not put us to shame, because God has poured out his love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit.

Look at where the chain begins and where it ends. It begins with the thing we would avoid and ends with the thing we most want. Nobody signs up for suffering in order to get hope. But Paul is describing what God actually does with hardship in the life of someone who has been justified. Pressure that is endured becomes a kind of proven quality, and proven quality becomes the ground for expecting more from God, not less.

The one idea to carry from this passage is that the steps come in order. You cannot skip from suffering to hope. The middle terms, perseverance and character, are built slowly, and they are built by continuing. A person who keeps praying through a dry season, keeps showing up at work when it is thankless, keeps loving a difficult family member, is not merely surviving. Something is being formed.

The turn toward life is simply this. Whatever you are enduring right now, ask what it is producing. Not whether it will end soon, but what it is doing in you while it lasts. Paul grounds the whole thing not in your strength but in what God has already done: verse 8 says that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. The one who did that for you when you were his enemy is not going to abandon the work now that you are his friend. That is why the hope at the end of the chain holds.