Because we have been made righteous by faith, we are at peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. It is through him, and through faith in him, that we have been brought into the grace in which we stand. This is why we rejoice in our hope of sharing the glory of God. And, at the same time, we exult in our trials, knowing that they bring about perseverance, which produces tested character. Tested character, in turn, brings about hope which never disappoints us because the love of God has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who was given to us.

Romans 5:1-3

In his book Life Together, Dietrich Bonhoeffer uses the brilliant, succinct term, “wish dream” to describe how humans envision and attempt to create Christian community according to their own standards and ideals. Although Bonhoeffer was limiting his observations to the church context, I think he would be OK if we expanded the notion to a broader set of environments. Indeed, we can probably use the phrase to understand any time and any place where we form expectations according to our sense of what the good life – at least our good life – ought to be.

The idea of expectations helps us to more closely define wish dreams as reflecting human-generated hope. Hope divorced from faith in God, disconnected both from his world and the world in which we live. Wish dreams are all about our little worlds – what we want others to do for us; what we want God to give us and do for us; how we want circumstances to line up so that we can move smoothly into accomplishing our well-laid plans. Alas, we don’t have enough power and authority to bring our ends to pass. Double alas, the world is not committed to aiding and abetting our ventures. And, triple alas, the Lord is not given to doing our bidding.

So it’s clear that wish dreams suffer from an unreliability gap. Bosses and the economy fail us in our quest for job security. Spouses and children falter in their place as pieces in our perfect family puzzle. Genes and habits conspire to ruin our picture-perfect health. The social order breaks down; pandemics arise; politicians muck up the works. Such failures often bring out spiritual schizophrenia. One day they prompt a response of despair, regret, or cynicism. The next, they engender a renewed effort to propose new and better ideas and purposes for the future. Either way, the consequent disappointments reveal the hard-stop limits of God-less hope.

What differentiates the biblical virtue of hope from the human construct of wishing is that the world’s imperfections and its claims don’t alter the design of the Father and his kingdom. God is able to take the whole mess and, in the familiar words of Romans 8:28, “work all things together for (our) good.” While we are prone to trust the inconsequential, fickle, undependable, and ephemeral, the Lord seeks to provide certainty, rest, and confidence that arise from knowing who he is and what he is capable of accomplishing.

This principle of divine sovereign goodness is the background to our passage from Romans 5. In these three verses, Paul is keen to help us recognize how hope operates in the lives of believers. In order to do this, he builds one of his typical rhetorical constructs. As always, the foundation stone is crucial. Here, the basis of hope is the death and resurrection of Jesus and the faith that connects us to those history-defining events. Immediately, Paul disabuses us of any notion that we or the world can define or attain hope by fulfilling wish dreams. God has made good on all his great promise in Jesus’ victory over sin and death. This is solid, unchanging ground to stand on.

The resurrection launches us into a dizzying, countercultural and counterintuitive flight. Stage one is this: Because we have such an incredible assurance of God’s love and grace, we have an equally amazing hope, which is the promise of “(sharing) the glory of God.” It’s not clear what Paul exactly means by this phrase. At the very least, it is a picture of presence, of seeing and reflecting divine beauty, of an experience of the King and his kingdom that goes beyond any wish dream. It is a matter for joy (literally, “boasting*” – lifting our heads) that transcends any human expectation.

Meanwhile, the next verse describes a concurrent part of our journey that seems to temper hope’s greatness. Paul declares that Jesus followers also boast (he uses the same word) in their trials. They don’t wallow in them, become bitter about them, or compare them with those of others. They aren’t merit badges or points of unique honor. They are simply part of life that manifest both fallenness and opportunity. To our natural way of thinking, this makes no sense. For the most part, wish dreams are not only outcomes, but smooth and generally painless paths to those outcomes.

Paul’s rationale for this overtly (and, to the world, overly) positive view of tribulations is that they bring about endurance**. If we look through the keyhole of this little phrase, we are back to the Romans 8:28 promise: all things work for good in God. This is hope inside of hope. We don’t suffer just to demonstrate how good we are at suffering or to play “me big and strong” in the face of adversity. No, we find grace from the one who endured ultimate tribulation so that we reflect his same patience and perseverance. Through surrender to that grace, we allow the Spirit to form contentment, peace, and patience in our souls. In combination with our hope of sharing God’s glory, the gift of patient endurance allows us to put trials in their proper place and perspective – as temporary events and circumstances that are all redeemable by divine faithfulness.

So the purpose of godly dealing with suffering is not that we can bear more and bear down more. Rather, Paul goes on to say that the Lord’s testing produces proven character***. In other words, as pressure on carbon produces diamonds, perseverance makes us “tried and true.” However trite that might sound, the biblical idea is anything but shallow. In the parlance of discipleship, imbibing the grace to endure trials makes us more dependable and compelling representations of God’s own personality. The result of acquiescing in divine discipline is (given my natural propensity) rather stunning, and includes such wonders as greater compassion, generosity, humility, and faithfulness.

Paul now takes us back to an explicit mention of hope. In God’s world, walking with him through the discipline of suffering and finding ourselves transformed into his likeness converges with the expectation that we will, indeed, share his glory. Conversion and sanctification are remarkable things, quite the opposite of what wish dreams produce. When I look back at the work of the Spirit in changing me, against my predilections and intentions, I am amazed. And I am hopeful. In fact, Paul’s conclusion makes it clear that there is a virtuous cycle of hope that the Father continually invests in through an inexhaustible supply of love that he communicates through the Holy Spirit.

Resurrection power. Power that sustains us through trials. Transforming power to make us like the Lord himself. The power of his love given us in the Spirit. No wish dream here, and no disappointment. Only Christ in us, the hope of glory, given and guaranteed by the One who raised him from the dead.

  • Kauchaomai, to (figuratively) lift one’s head; to boast (in the biblical sense), to glory.

** Hupomoné, meaning a patient waiting, a willingness to remain under God in adverse circumstances

*** Dokimé, something, especially character or virtue, that is shown to be genuine through being tested and proven