[0:00] All right, well, turn with me again.
[0:12] We'll be in Romans chapter 5, just chapter 5, verse 1 to 5. We read the rest for context, which is always good.
[0:27] All right. In Romans 5, if you look down with me at verse 1, it says this, Therefore, since we have been justified by faith.
[0:38] So that initial phrase right there tells us something, right? It tells us that there's been a lot before, a lot of explanation that Paul has given prior to this verse, therefore, since we have been justified.
[0:51] And he's been building up to this one phrase now for four chapters. And in the previous chapter, I'll just summarize briefly what he said.
[1:02] He said that justification, or in other words, the forgiveness of sins that we have in Christ, is not brought about by law-keeping. It's not brought about by keeping the law.
[1:14] It's not brought about by keeping the Ten Commandments. There's no amount of commandment-keeping that you can do to get forgiveness in God's sight. Secondly, he said this, that Abraham and the Old Testament saints were saved in exactly the same way that we are.
[1:34] And that's by Jesus' work. By the work that would be. As we are said, by the work that was. And thirdly, that justification was worked through, and look down with me at chapter 4, verse 25, and this is just the centerpiece of how our salvation works.
[1:54] Jesus was delivered up for our trespasses and raised for our justification. That the forgiveness of sins that we have in Christ is centered in the fact that he was killed, crucified, and that he resurrected.
[2:09] Without those two historical facts, we are a people most to be pitied, as Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15. So that's the background of this passage. That's where he's been.
[2:20] So when he says in verse 1, since we've been justified by faith, he's talking to born-again, covenant, saved, faith-in-Christ believers.
[2:34] So if you're a born-again, you've professed faith in Jesus this morning, these next five verses we're looking at are directed specifically towards you.
[2:45] Since you have been justified by faith, dot, dot, dot, what's he going to say? Now, what this passage is doing then, in light of all that, is Paul is giving us a statement that your salvation does not stop at justification.
[3:08] It's not just the fact that we profess faith in God once, one day, and he forgives us, which he does, and our salvation is over.
[3:19] It's all finished. It's done. But Paul says that, no, that's just the beginning, the groundwork, the bed for what is to come. That forgiveness in Christ, by the work of Christ in faith, gets you benefits.
[3:38] It gets you salvific, salvation-type benefits. And those benefits are both now and not yet. Look with me for a second, or just listen if you want.
[3:52] The passage says things like this. We have peace with God. That's a past and present tense. We have access to God because we've been justified.
[4:04] We are rejoicing in suffering. We are rejoicing in hope. We will not be put to shame.
[4:18] Do you see that array of past, present, and future benefits that salvation brings? And the point of it all, the centerpiece of this text, is in this, that these benefits that we receive by way of our forgiveness because of what Christ has done is all rooted in the future, in the past, present, and future glory of God.
[4:44] The past, present, and future glory of God. So, what I want you to think about with me for a few minutes this morning is this. What do you hope in?
[4:57] And I'm not talking about the small hopes, you know, the hopes for lunch today, you know, the hopes for a decent work week. I'm talking about life-orienting, this is why I get out of bed in the morning type hope.
[5:14] What is it that you hope in? And what I want to suggest to you that Paul is telling us in this passage that rooting our hope in the glory of God is one of the aspects of our salvation that opens up an array of benefits for us in this life now.
[5:39] All right, so what we're going to do then is we're going to look in three parts really quick, just three simple reasons why we should hope in the glory of God this morning.
[5:50] Before we do that, we need to define God's glory. And that's one of those things that's really difficult to do. You know, if you've ever been asked, what is God's glory?
[6:02] Just think right now, do you have a good answer for that? What is God's glory? You know, that's our catechism in a nutshell, isn't it?
[6:13] Question number one. We're all about God's glory as Westminster Confession confessing people. We're all about it. But what is it? And here's just a brief definition.
[6:24] I think it could be defined in many ways, but at least in one sense it's this. God's glory is the infinite fame of His holiness. The infinite fame of His holiness.
[6:38] Think about Isaiah chapter 6. It says, Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty. The whole earth is full of, and you know the next word, His glory.
[6:53] So God's glory and the spread of His holiness throughout all the cosmos, the fame of His holiness is His glory.
[7:04] And that glory can actually be seen now even though He is invisible. Even though we don't see Him yet, God says that His glory is seen.
[7:16] But where? Well, in creation, in all forms of revelation in God's Word. But in Matthew 5.13 it says this, Let your light shine before men that they see your good works and glorify your Father who is in heaven.
[7:34] So Jesus says that it's actually in Christians, in us, that people see God's glory. They see our good works. They see faith.
[7:46] And it should draw them to glorify the only true God in heaven. Alright, so here we go. Three reasons we should have hope in this glory.
[7:57] Three reasons. Reason one. We should hope in the glory of God because we are His soldiers. We are soldiers. Look down with me at verse one again.
[8:10] Therefore, since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. Now, I said to the kids earlier, justification, and I've said it as simply as possible, justification is a legal term.
[8:25] It has other uses, but it's referencing the fact that before the face of God, we are guilty. We have incurred sin, and we are guilty before Him.
[8:39] We deserve punishment. But in Christ, He has remitted, acquitted that guilt because of what Jesus has done, and by faith. So, when Paul tells us here that we have peace with God, what does he mean?
[8:56] What does it mean to be at peace with God? Now, there's a lot of ways to think about the word peace, right? I mean, if you're married, you know that there are those days when you come home, and there's that awkward, passive-aggressive silence between you and your spouse.
[9:15] And if you're a bad communicator, it may go on for quite a while, maybe into the next day. And you know in your heart that if you're a man in here, you know you've done something wrong, and there's no peace there.
[9:31] There's this lack of peace in your marriage, and it's miserable, right? Now, is that what Paul's talking about here? That emotionally strained peace that's missing between you and God.
[9:48] Well, I don't think so. For the past four chapters, he's been explicating how we stand before God as guilty people, deserving His wrath.
[9:59] And so, the peace that he's talking about here that comes by way of justification is a peace of status. A peace of status. It's not simply just some emotional feeling of peace that comes and goes.
[10:15] It's much bigger and better than that. It's a peace that is objective, can never be abandoned. Once you have it, you can't get rid of it.
[10:27] It's an objective status in the fact that he has pronounced you free from sin, not guilty, forgiven. Paul says in Romans chapter 1 that we were enemies with God.
[10:43] And now we have peace with God. It's a war-like metaphor. And so, the peace that we have with God, according to Paul, is an objective peace of status.
[10:58] That means for you that it doesn't matter what you did this week. Let that sink in a bit.
[11:11] It doesn't matter what kind of sins you committed this week. If you have been acquitted in God's sight, that peace cannot be taken away.
[11:24] That peace cannot be taken away. Now, how is this connected to hoping in God's glory? Well, it's simple.
[11:36] If you're at peace with God, then you're no longer God's enemy. And if you're no longer God's enemy, then, in this war-like metaphor, you're his soldier.
[11:47] You're his servant. You're his son. You're his daughter. He has adopted you. And that means that we should, as believers, hope in the very same things that God hopes for.
[12:03] And God hopes for his own glory. So, I'll ask you this morning, is your hope aligned with the things that God hopes?
[12:17] Namely, his glory. And you can test this in a couple ways. One of them being this. Do you cherish, cherish seeing the gospel go forward in this world?
[12:32] To bring it a little closer to home, I'm trained as a minister back in the States and did the whole seminary thing and all that. And when I was in seminary, and if any of you have been in seminary, maybe this has happened to you, I fell into a sin issue of not being that happy when other people had extreme ministerial success.
[13:00] And you may know what I'm talking about, that in your own field, you know, you want to be the best preacher at seminary. And you want to be the best exegete and the best at Greek and Hebrew and all these things.
[13:14] And I fell into that. And I started getting to a point where I didn't enjoy seeing a good sermon from one of my fellow students or a text well represented or a church booming with new gospel converts.
[13:29] Now, I would never say that out loud. I would never put on a face that made it seem that way. But in my heart, I was stale. Right? I did not hope in God's glory.
[13:40] Because God, hoping in God's glory is wanting the things that God wants. And God wants His glory to go forth into the world by way of His gospel that that the church be grown.
[13:57] That the elect be called. So I ask you again, do you love it when you see God being glorified in the lives of other believers? In the work of the church?
[14:09] In conversions? Learn to want the things God wants is one way Paul is telling us. Learn to want the things that God wants.
[14:23] This point actually is really grounded in verse 2. Look at verse 2 with me. Through Him we have also obtained access by faith into this grace in which we stand.
[14:37] And that word stand there is a continuation of this warlike metaphor. It really has the idea of standing in battle and being unmovable, immovable, unshakable.
[14:52] In other words, it's the same idea in Ephesians, the armor of God that when you are justified by faith, when you have your hope set on God's glory, God plants your feet with the armor, the breastplate, the helmet of His righteousness, right?
[15:08] And He stands you there and you cannot be moved. Now what is it about you that cannot be moved? Well, it's your salvation. It can't be taken away.
[15:20] It's your justification. It can't be stolen. When you think of Romans chapter 8, when the accuser comes, if you are God's, as Romans chapter, Romans 8 teaches us, then you can't be plucked out of His hand.
[15:39] All right, so that's point one. Point two, the second reason why we should hope in God's glory. We should hope in God's glory because He wants to give you unquenchable joy in this life.
[15:53] Unquenchable joy. Listen to, this is a quote from a pastor, a theologian that's passed away now from the States named John Murray, and he says this, about this passage.
[16:07] Glorying in God is both a state of mind in the present, but that which evokes something to be realized in the future. Thus, we project ourselves into the future with hope.
[16:23] The glory of God is our expectation. Why? Because we are His soldiers. Because we are His sons. Because we are His daughters. His own glory, which is His goal, is now our goal.
[16:39] God's glory is our rock-solid expectation. And it's that, in this second point, that grounds our state of mind as Christians in the present and are propelling into the future with hope.
[16:53] So look down with me at verse 3 and you'll see this. Verse 3 says, or back up, we'll look at 2B. We rejoice in hope of the glory of God.
[17:07] More than that, we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame.
[17:18] Now, do you see the logic in that passage? If you look closely, he begins in the second part of verse 2 by saying, we rejoice in hope of the glory of God.
[17:32] And then what happens? We hope in the glory of God, then we suffer, and what is produced out of suffering, ultimately? Hope.
[17:44] Hope is what he ends on. In other words, Paul's saying this, if you step into suffering by hoping in God's glory first, then you will come out of suffering with more hope in God's glory.
[18:00] No other religion on earth can say things like this, by the way. Islam doesn't offer verses like this. Rejoice in suffering.
[18:14] For Islam, the way of suffering is the way to a possible salvation. In Christianity, it is because we have been saved that we are able to rejoice in suffering.
[18:27] Because that hope is not going anywhere. Now, the main point is this, I think that what Paul's doing here, that God has purpose in suffering, in that you can live in a life full of suffering with a joy that is unquenchable.
[18:48] How? By rooting your hope before you suffer in God's future glory. In God's future glory.
[18:59] As Murray said, it's an expectation that the promises of God, namely, that His glory, will ultimately be utterly and ultimately fulfilled.
[19:10] How do you know that God's good on His promises? How do you know that you can expect to escape the suffering of this world and step into an eternal kingdom with Him?
[19:23] How do you know? Well, I think one way to know is this, God made promises in the Old Testament and then He killed His Son to fulfill them. He killed the second person of the Trinity in order that those promises might be fulfilled.
[19:39] He makes good on His promises. And what that can do for us in this daily life now, besides giving us an unbelievable promise that's joy and suffering, which sounds contradictory, but it reorients our worldview from being people that are obsessed with efficiency and productivity and look more towards effectiveness.
[20:07] effectiveness. You know, we live in an age where books about being productive are everywhere. I mean, some of you have probably gotten into some of this if you're a businessman.
[20:21] They're actually really popular within the church right now. There's a big movement of good and bad productivity books for pastors and ministers and all sorts of people.
[20:31] people. But let's consider for a second how the New Testament worked out. If I was writing the script on the first century of Christianity, or if you were writing the script, ask yourself, what would you have done with Paul's ministry?
[20:53] You know, would you have had Paul snakebitten? Would you have set it up where Paul was shipwrecked or where he spent most of his Christian life in prison?
[21:05] Would you have done it that way? If Paul's to be the missionary to the Gentiles, to take the gospel to all the nations of Europe, to get to Spain and beyond, would you have set it up that way?
[21:20] No. Right? You would have wanted him to be as efficient as possible. God pushes his gospel, spreads his gospel, takes his gospel to the ends of the earth by suffering.
[21:38] His people suffer and thousands come to faith. That's what we read about in Acts. What Paul is offering us here and what God is offering us here through Paul is an unbelievable promise that when you suffer and you will, if you're young in here this morning and you haven't suffered much yet, you're going to suffer.
[22:03] You're going to suffer. That you can have joy by hoping in God's future glory.
[22:13] that what he has promised is coming to pass. It's coming. My prayer simply right now is that God would take away whatever hope you thought about if you were honest with yourself at the beginning, that he would take it away and that he would just kill it.
[22:32] And there would be no hope in you besides a hope in the fulfillment of God's glory by way of his promises in Christ. All right.
[22:44] Thirdly and finally and we'll be done. The third reason that we should hope in God's glory is this. Have hope in God's glory because hope in God is a hope of full assurance.
[22:57] It's hope of full assurance. There's an assumption that this passage is making that we haven't touched on and it's this, that hope is actually an essential piece of saving faith.
[23:09] Hope is an essential piece of saving faith. Now how do we know that? Well, in Hebrews 11, the famous roll call of faith, you remember that in the very first verse it says that faith is the assurance of things hoped for.
[23:26] Or we could say it this way, that hope in God is the assurance of saving faith. It could be flip-flopped and mean the same thing. In other words, faith and hope go hand in hand.
[23:41] If you have faith in Christ this morning, then you have hope in God's glory. And if you have hope in God's glory this morning, you have faith in Christ.
[23:54] Now, the passage Paul's we're in right now says it in verse 5. Look down with me at the end of that little phrase we just read and it says this, Hope does not put us to shame.
[24:07] Or your version may say, hope does not disappoint. There's a question that you might be asking in all this. If I'm put on this earth to hope in God's glory, what do I do with my own glory?
[24:27] What do I do with the desires I have to be glorified? You have them, right? I know I have them. I think they're universal. that every single person has a desire to get glory.
[24:42] You want to get glory, right? Verse 5 says this, Hope in God's glory is hope that will not put you to shame.
[24:53] Now, at first we think when I ask a question like that, that hoping in God's glory and hoping in our own glory must be two antithetical things.
[25:05] Those two things must not go together because the latter sounds like sin and indeed it can be and is prior to our salvation, hoping in our own glory.
[25:19] But what Paul does and John and other writers and the author of Hebrews especially is something that's amazing and it comes to us in verses like this.
[25:31] This is John chapter 14 verse 18 Jesus speaking. He's talking about his ascension here, his death, resurrection, ascension. I will not leave you as orphans.
[25:43] I will come to you yet a little while and the world will see me no more but you will see me because I live you will live.
[25:57] In that day you will know that I am in my Father and you in me and I in you. If you are justified by faith in Christ this morning, if you believe on Jesus to put it simply this morning, the New Testament promises that when you hope in God's glory you're actually hoping in your own future glory also.
[26:22] Now that's an amazing promise because what that's telling you is that when you hope in God's glory you can find a happiness there that satisfies every single want you could possibly have.
[26:38] Paul put it like this, when Christ died, you died. When Christ resurrected, you resurrected.
[26:50] And because Christ has been exalted, you will be exalted. That's what we call the doctrine of union with Christ. When Christ says in John 14, I am in you and you are in me.
[27:03] We are united to him in such a way that we share in the very life he lived. Because Christ has died to sin, we have died to sin as his people.
[27:14] Because Christ is resurrected as the first fruits, 1 Corinthians 15, we will be resurrected as the second fruits. Because Christ has been exalted at his father's right hand, we will sit beside him.
[27:28] We will share with him. Now if you're still skeptical maybe about this, come with me. over to 1 Peter. 1 Peter.
[27:40] And it's an amazing promise in 1 Peter. And we'll end right here. This will be the last thing we do. 1 Peter chapter 5, chapter 5, verse 6 and 7.
[27:58] Now, I hope you have this text in front of you because seeing it really helps. Humble yourselves, therefore, under the mighty hand of God so that at the proper time he may exalt you, casting all your anxieties on him because he cares for you.
[28:16] Now, the question is, what is the relationship in this passage between verse 6 and verse 7? Humble yourself, and then he says in verse 7, humble yourself that you may be exalted.
[28:28] Now, if you just cover up the therefore and the rest of it and just look at the command, humble yourself, and then read verse 7, it says this, humble yourself by casting all your anxieties on him.
[28:48] Humble yourself by casting all your anxieties on him. And then the middle section says this, so that at the proper time he may exalt you. Now, what is that passage saying?
[28:59] It's giving us a command that seems almost contradictory, but he's saying this, if you will humble yourself in this life before God by looking to Christ completely for salvation, by hoping in God's glory that there is a day coming when he will exalt you like he did Jesus.
[29:23] That's why the author of Hebrews calls Jesus our brother and God the father our father. And he grounds that promise in this, cast all your anxieties on him because he cares for you.
[29:40] There's a simple application in that. You don't have to worry anymore. You don't have to be anxious. You don't have to fear. Humble yourself by casting all of that on God, on hoping in his glory, and he will give you an eternal happiness that cannot be quenched.
[29:59] All of this being rooted in the work of Christ. The one thing about this rejoicing and suffering, this hope in God's glory, this hope in your own eternal happiness at God's right hand is this.
[30:17] It's not going to completely be realized in this life. life. There's no prosperity gospel to be had here. It's not going to be fully realized in this life.
[30:31] You're going to have to go along and you're going to have to suffer and you're going to have to endure and you're going to have to persevere to the end. But that can be done with a great joy if your hope is placed in God's glory.
[30:48] So I'll ask you again, what is it that you hope in? What is it that you hope in? Are you selling, am I selling, joy, happiness in this life, joy in Christ for some temporal, petty, fleeting happiness that will not satisfy and will not bring me to the end.
[31:17] My prayer for us today is that we would in fact hope hope in this glory, hope in God's future glory. Let's pray together. Let's pray together. Let's pray together. Let's pray together. Let's pray together.