One of the toughest challenges I have ever had as a pastor was ministering to a young wife who was diagnosed with a terminal illness and was about to give birth. She was given the choice whether to start the treatment which would abort her child, or wait until the child is born, but it might be too late. She struggled with this and we talked about this in my visits with her. She later decided to have her child before her treatment. After the child was born, she was proud to show me her beautiful child. I gave her an audio tape of lullabies and she told me she will play the tape on those days when the child will be with her. During her treatment, she was in pain and was miserable. I prayed with her several times with a kind of desperation. At that moment, I felt the sting of death hovering over her. I felt my own weakness that Paul describes in the verses: “I did not know how or what to pray at that moment. I hoped that God’s Spirit would intercede.” Hundreds of other people were praying, too. Then I saw a miracle emerge gradually like a sunrise. It was not what we wanted most — a cure for the illness. But it was a miracle nonetheless. I saw her place her hand and soul in God’s keeping, and to take charge of her life and her baby, one day at a time. Whenever a friend or a family member would visit her, she was the one consoling them. Her life was a booming declaration that though her body was dying, she and Christ had a victory that would last forever.
I must confess that much of my early ministry was spent offering explanations about our faith. I believed then and, to some degree, still do now, that the gospel can be rational, and (indeed) ought to be rational.
However, after so many years of being confronted with experiences, there are times when I have to accept the mystery of God’s power and strength.
Let me share with you two things that can help us as we live our lives day after day, confronted with a lot of challenges.
The first is that life cannot be easy even if you love God.
There are times that people who love Jesus suffer. We often assume that people who breeze through life with a minimum of bumps in the road are somehow in God’s favor. I hear several times, “Oh, yes, Pastor, I’ve been blessed: a good job, a good marriage, good health. Yes, God’s been good to me.” This can be true many times.
But this is not true all the time. Jesus taught us that God’s rain falls on the just and the unjust.
Paul knew this. That is why in his letter to the Christians in Rome, he is able to connect with the early Christians in the midst of their struggles, in their fear, and their hope.
Sometimes, life can be terribly, terribly difficult — even for those who love Jesus. I met someone one day, and asked him how he was. He answered flippantly: “I guess you could say I’m on top of the world. But the world has this funny way of rotating so that one day you’re on top of it, and the next day it’s on top of you.”
And it can happen to any of us. It happens when you get a failing grade after studying hard, when you are not accepted to a fraternity or to a joy, when your son is arrested, when your home is washed by the flood or destroyed by an earthquake, when your marriage is broken into Humpty-Dumpty-like pieces that defy reassembly by all of the king’s horses and all of the king’s men, when your biopsy comes back positive, or when the doctor tells you, “you have to have surgery right away.”
Let me be blatantly and painstakingly clear. We may deserve some of the stuff that happens to us. But we probably don’t deserve all of the stuff that happens to us. But more than that, I don’t think God thinks we deserve all of the stuff that happens to us, either.
In fact, I think some of the stuff that pains us, pains God, too, and some of the stuff that outrages us, outrages God, too. And that there may be occasions when God’s “why” is as anguished as our “why”.
That means God suffers, too, when we suffer. God leaves glory behind, grandeur behind, holiness behind, heavens behind, mountains behind to walk in the valleys with the likes of you and me.
I may be saved by the fact that Jesus came to suffer for me. But I am moved and also thankful that Jesus came to suffer with me.
But then Paul added that in spite of the experiences we have that may pull us down, we can still be victorious. Paul uses one of his “hyper” verbs to describe the state of those who, though they may suffer, are never separated from Christ’s love; they are “hypernikan,” or “more than victorious.”
The faithful are not merely “survivors” of these onslaughts; they are “victors” not because of what they do, but “through Jesus who loved us.”
Paul asks the Romans and himself (and us) to trust in this process of the Spirit of God producing that which we need and desire: to be grounded in the presence of God. He urges us to hear and see that there is a whole different way of perceiving ourselves and reality to those who love God.
You know, we think sometimes that it is through our endeavors that we can live fulfilled lives. This is spiritual arrogance. But we can be victors when we allow God to find us. When we are willing to go to the places of service and caring, God finds us there with deep and indescribable joy.
In The Door magazine (Jan.-Feb. 2005), editor Ole Anthony asks the question, “When did Christians become champions?” He worries about a culture in which pastors preach on “being a winner for Jesus.” I agree with Anthony that we cannot be victors for Jesus. Instead, Jesus’ presence in our lives is the one that can make us victors. Without Jesus, we are nothing. We need Jesus in our lives to be able to overcome those things that seem to overwhelm us–tribulations, distress, persecutions, famine, nakedness, peril, or sword.
A child asked his parents one day, “What would you do if I was missing?” The mother bent over the child, looked him in the face, and said, “If you were ever missing, don’t forget that we would never, ever, ever stop looking for you.” The words of that parent are the words of God. God sees us when we’re lost, and will stoop as low as our lostness, as low as a manger, to tell us that God will never stop searching until we are found.
Thus, Paul is not asking us to escape from the struggles of the world but to go back into those struggles with a renewed sense of God’s love for us and for the world, with a renewed sense of hope and possibility. Hope is born of a view that says evil is very much a part of things, but not in control of things. One hymn writer, Maltbie Babcock, put it this way: This is God’s wondrous world/ O let me ne’er forget that though the wrong seems oft so strong, God is the ruler yet.
May God grant us to be victors with Christ, and live lives that are abundant.
