One Thing Leads to Another
Is there any way out of this? Are there any paths we can forge or follow to get to the other side? Things are SO overwhelming in life - and I’m not even talking about the current events of our society and world. It would be ‘picking the low-hanging fruit’ to make today’s message tie into all that seems to be consuming the air. However, let’s cast all that aside for the next few minutes.
Instead, I want to bring you to the reality of the personal overwhelm. The things that are either causing you or someone you love to be truly anxious, panicky, and on the verge of mental or emotional collapse. For, you see, it can be awfully tempting in chaotic times like the Planet Earth 2020 to simply slough off our or other’s difficulty by saying that in light of everything else, “My problems are pretty small.”
Let me say now to knock it off. Knock it off for two reasons: 1) What is affecting you is affecting people around you most likely more than you know, and, 2) Failure to deal with those things that are slowly eating us up wind up manifesting themselves in ways that are most unproductive for you, those you love, those in your sphere of influence, and the world around us.
Before we go too much further, let’s hear from Romans 5:1-5:
Therefore, since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand; and we boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God. And not only that, but we also boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.
Paul’s words to the church at Rome are absolutely essential if we are going to make it through ANY season of life, but most especially those seasons where life is just hard for whatever reason. Paul’s words are written in a time where the church knows true persecution and it could be very easy for him and the people of Rome to get down, discouraged, and ready to give up. The apostle is very pastoral here in that he helps point them to a bright and glorious future not by just moving from A to B, but through understanding that hope is something that is built over time.
He talks about having peace not through circumstance, but through Christ. Because of peace from Christ, Paul then starts building the case for hope in the face of conditions on the ground. Paul acknowledges the suffering, and rather than wallow in it, he shows the redemption of suffering, builds upon that momentum to help realize that enduring suffering builds endurance, through endurance we get character because we realize it is possible to get through the suffering, and once we realize that we can get through it, we realize hope - and when we have hope that is rooted in the grace of God and love of Jesus, we will not be disappointed. We won’t be disappointed because our hope is in the peace that comes from knowing God is with us, not any particular outcome.
Whether it is the personal stuff that is weighing you down and causing you more than a little hopeless anxiety or if it is despair at things around us, rest assured, dear friends, there is redemption in the midst of the chaos - one step at a time. One thing leads to another. Let us acknowledge the overwhelm; let us be inspired in the midst of the overwhelm because we know that one thing leads to another.
Who knows what kind of transformation is awaiting us and the world around us as we travel through the redemptive process of suffering producing endurance, endurance producing character, and character producing hope.