Romans chapter 5, and I'll read the first 5 verses. Therefore, since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. Through Him we have also obtained access by faith into this grace in which we stand, and we rejoice in hope of the glory of God. Not only that, but we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope. And hope does not put us to shame, because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us. In verse 5 we have the capstone of the reasons that we may know that being justified by faith we may have assurance of our own salvation. As a bit of a reminder, these first five verses of Romans are the opening lines of the theme of assurance that runs really throughout the rest of the book. Paul says our assurance begins with access to God, then there is the certainty of a glorified future, and then the suffering that produces hope, which is certainty, and I forgot to mention the first one, which is peace with God. Today, there is something more to say about suffering and also something to say about God's love and about the source of it, the Holy Spirit. Only those who have taken Christ alone to justify them, taken Him by faith without any contribution of their own, may know the true comforts of assurance. Faith alone justifies, faith alone. And the big therefore that the apostle deducts from justification by faith alone is therefore being justified by faith we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. There is no fear in that, no fear from assurance, but I will warn you this is contested territory. The Roman Catholic Council of Trent says that every person should be afraid and apprehensive about whether he is in a state of grace, because, it says, no one can know that he has obtained the grace of God. The reason for that, of course, is that works make up the basis of justification in the Roman scheme. If there are works that are being counted, then you can never know that you have done enough, and hence you can have no assurance. The same is true for Muslims, who must do it all right, and if they're to have any chance of salvation from their God, They have to do it perfectly, and even then they can't know for sure that they are saved. If you can't know for sure that God is for you, there is always reason to be afraid and apprehensive and sometimes depressed. Well, that is never something that has to be the case for the true Christian believer. Hope formed through sufferings is one kind of assurance, and we'll touch on that this morning, but there are two more kinds. Another assurance comes from God's love for believers. a love that is poured into his or her heart and then thirdly true believers have the assurance that comes from the Holy Spirit dwelling in their heart. You can know you're really saved in a state of grace from observing any combination of these three in you. Now this morning We'll only learn about the first two, and Lord willing, this evening, the last one, why we don't have to live in apprehension. But let's look at these truths. First, believers may be assured of salvation because of the hope formed in suffering Christian hearts. And again, verses three, four, and the beginning of five, more than that, he says, we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, And endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame. Paul takes quite a different approach to suffering than most people are used to. For the worldly and the unbelieving, suffering is pointless, something to be avoided. But for the Christian, Suffering is from God, it's purposeful, it's even a grounds of rejoicing. Verse 5 says, hope forms in suffering. Christian hope is a grace formed in Christians when they anticipate the promised blessings that are theirs by belonging to God. It's knowing, to say it a different way, it's knowing that you belong to God and that all the good God wants to give you is yours from Him, even if you're suffering. This is quite amazing. Hope keeps the Christian from becoming depressed. Verse 5 says, hope does not put us to shame. That's a negative way of stating the positive. Hope does make a person glad. There sure are a lot of people in the world today who are offering remedies for depression. You can see how depression, though, isn't really compatible with hope. If you have hope, you can't be depressed. If people had that hope, they would not be depressed. A person cannot say at one and the same time, I'm hopeful and I'm also depressed." Being disappointed or depressed is what it means to be put to shame, to be drawn down, to be sunk or ruined by life's sufferings. This is not talking about being not ashamed or not being ashamed at the Last Judgment. That is true. Believers will not be ashamed on the Day of Judgment. That, though true, is not what Paul is saying. He's talking about right now in this world. And what about it? Hope does not disappoint or put us to shame. We get disappointed when we look at how we thought things ought to turn out in our favor and we find ourselves forced to say, this just isn't what I thought it was. This is something less. We get disappointed. And you can think how disappointing it would be for someone like a godly woman in Israel, an Abigail, to grow up in Israel and to be hoping for a good husband and then finally to be wedded off to Nabal, the fool. Disappointment. Or what might it have been like for Hannah to anticipate children in her marriage and then to have no children? Eli saw her in the temple crying. And she told him, I am a woman troubled in spirit. Beloved, the world was not made to do that to us. It was created to be a world with no disappointments. But because it is a fallen world, we suffer. Suffering becomes like a great weight that pulls confidence and happiness and joy towards the bottom. In other words, it disappoints. And untreated disappointment leads to depression. I am not saying anything as ignorant or as trivial as that Christians will never get depressed in their suffering. I am showing you from scripture that suffering is good, can be good, and how it may be transformed into hope. If you have hope, You cannot also be depressed because hope lifts up. It makes the spirit buoyant, able to float above misery and be joyful. My own grandfather became hopeless in a Nazi concentration camp in the Second World War. He said that when he was in Auschwitz, surrounded by beatings, killings, torture, cruelty, starvation, and that kind of thing, he became hopeless and he was sure he was going to die. And then he was moved to another camp and he was put to forced labor in a granite quarry. And the weight of the stone and not having enough food to eat and the miserable conditions made him thinner and thinner and he was afraid he'd get sick and die and he was in despair. And then somebody took pity on him and moved him to an inside job where he sometimes got to work with Austrian civilians and they brought him sandwiches from the outside and they told him the news of the war. They told him, Hitler's getting a beating. They told him, hold on a couple months and you'll be free. And what do you think that did for him? Hope. Spirits rose. And then one day the Nazis all fled. And in the afternoon, five American tanks rolled in. He said the prisoners were weeping for joy They were kissing the tanks. They were kissing the American soldiers. He says, then he was happy. His hope was realized. See the difference? Hope doesn't go with depression. And depression is incompatible with hope. Paul says here that believers rejoice in their sufferings, and the sufferings produce this kind of hope. Other testimonies of hope come from the lives of the Covenanters. If you read about their stories, you'll find that after being imprisoned and tortured, when they're finally being led up to the scaffold to die, they are at their most hopeful. By worldly standards, they have every reason to be depressed. They have every reason to think, this is not what I thought it was. But no, their spirits are at the lightest. Yet Christian hope and hope does not disappoint. You noticed that the word shame or disappoint is here in verse 5. I thought it important to say that the sufferings we experience are not shameful of themselves because they are not sin. Sometimes we feel ashamed of conditions like poverty. or being sick in a hospital. Being in a hospital is no fun. It's not glorious. But it's not sin. It's not shameful. Suffering is no sin. And I say this because sometimes we are ready to give up when we're suffering. Hannah, whom I mentioned, was one of two wives. And the other one had children and would mock her for not having any. Can you imagine having somebody like that in your life who made fun of you all the time? she was being mistreated. But when we're in a situation like Hannah's, we have to keep the perspective that there isn't really shame in what people say about us. There's no shame in bodily weakness. The only time to really feel ashamed is when we have sinned, for then what we have done is we have failed to measure up to the standard of righteousness that we ought to have been. And when we feel such shame, we know it doesn't have to be this way either. There's a remedy for shame. Why? Because we have an advocate with God, Jesus Christ the righteous. He went to the cross bearing our shame. He went bearing our sin for all the unrighteous ways that you and I failed to measure up to the righteous standard of what we should be. Hebrews says, for the joy that was set before Him, He endured the cross, despising the shame. He's our advocate. He has appeased God's wrath for our sins. We do not need to carry a load of shame. So whenever we suffer, we have to remind ourselves that our sufferings do not reflect our portion as believers. Beloved, God is not giving us our portion now. It's the unbeliever who gets his portion in this life. And sometimes the unbeliever gets the world's best things, all those luxuries we read about in Revelation 18. but they have no portion with the Lord or in heaven. And who would want it? In a disappointing world, in a fallen world where you can't keep the things you get, where you can't really rise above your circumstances, when you're inevitably stuck with sin and misery, no thanks. Friends, you don't want your portion now. You want the portion that comes from God. And on the other hand, the portion promised to believers in God and and is finally, God is our portion, and finally to be liberated by Him from all the burdensome miseries of life. What awaits believers? He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more. Neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away." Revelation 21. We have to preach to ourselves about the temporary nature of our sufferings and the eternal joy that will be ours in the resurrection. We have to preach to ourselves, remember self, remember self, that because of what Christ has done for you, you don't belong to the former things. Your portion is with the things to come. This world's suffering ought to be a warning to the lost. If only they knew that outside of Christ and without Christ, dying is no relief from suffering. Here, at least, if you suffer and turn to Christ in faith, suffering will do you good, for you will be saved and you'll learn God's ways through suffering. Here, at least, there's hope in suffering. Psalm 100, 1967, before I was afflicted, I went astray, but now I keep your word. See the good that's done? That's what to do with affliction. But to suffer and to not submit to Christ is a foretaste of hell. For in hell they are always sinning and they are always suffering. How much better to be united to Christ by faith and thereby have your sins removed. What should believers do when they suffer? What should they do? Well, we should not make our sufferings worse by trying to remedy them without Christ. If it is God's will to have put suffering in our way, then no amount of man-made fixes can relieve our suffering. You may put your whole might, your whole effort into getting rid of problems, but if God wills to afflict you, unless He removes your suffering, you are stuck with it. And if you try to remove it yourself, you might make it worse. Think of this verse, Ecclesiastes 10, a serpent will bite him who breaks through a wall, and he who quarries stones is hurt by them. put your effort in, you might end up hurt worse. So what that says is if there's any possibility of getting relief from your affliction in this world, you have to start by believing that God placed it in your life for your good. Now you might say, well, how could suffering be for my good? And by the way, you'll go to churches where they don't preach like this. They don't talk about suffering. How could it be for the Christian's good? Well, one reason is to give you dependence on God. It is only right for us, as intelligent, created beings, to acknowledge that God can do all things, and without Him, the small or the great is unavailable to us. Just like Hannah could not fix her barrenness, she took herself to God at His tabernacle to pray and to supplicate, to declare her dependence on God. God loves to have His people pray for requests like those because He loves to come to their relief in suffering. Call upon Me in the day of trouble, He says in Psalm 50, and I will deliver you and you shall glorify Me. Or Psalm 146, the Lord lifts up those who are bowed down. The Lord loves the righteous. Dependence on God. Well, it's a kind of faith. It's good to depend on God because faith pleases God. Without our suffering, we might not have looked to God in faith at all. Suffering is also to bestow on Christian believers Christ and His Kingdom instead of earthly comforts. God is going to withhold something from you in this life, something you want, something you depend on. something everybody else has. Health, wealth, a game, I don't know what. God will withhold something good. He might withhold the feeling of being successful. But if God takes one thing away from a believer, then you have to realize He is giving something else to him or to her. He is removing from you what cannot make you happy. He is taking what is sure to perish and He is giving instead grace and mercies and a Kingdom that He has prepared for you. Suffering always involves loss, but we can by faith relinquish that portion in this world and take God in Christ as our portion. You see that suffering is good for the believer. also helps believers produce spiritual fruit. I have observed that crops are produced only when the earth is first plowed up, and the plow is a sharp implement. Believers would not grow a life of endurance, character, or hope. These same things written in verse 3 and verse 4, believers would not bring forth these fruits were the blade of suffering not put in first. Perhaps you've noticed the weakness and the immoral character of many unbelieving people nowadays. Character, in verse 4, means a provenance. It's something that has been tested and shown to be genuine and valuable. You don't find much good character out there in the world. And how rare are other graces like humility, meekness or mercy. So how is good character formed? Perhaps you have heard of the Rockwell Hardness Tester. It's a machine and it's probably hydraulic operated or physically operated. It was patented in 1919. It's a big machine, sits on a table. What does it do? Well, it makes an indentation in a piece of metal. And by displaying the depth of the dent on a gauge, the machine makes it easy for workers to tell how hard that piece of metal is. And so, the workers, it was a revolutionary tool, workers were able to measure the quality of their product. For Paul, the Apostle, and for all Christians, God's work inside a justified person is like a production factory. There's a process at work in suffering. Suffering produces endurance, endurance produces character, and character produces hope. The character of a believer is his approveness, the confirmation that he is what he says he is. But getting to that confirmation stage first requires hammering. If you will, it requires heat treating. It requires the crucible and the furnace. Hope is not native. It has to be produced in the furnace of suffering. But the end product is hope. And hope is of great value because it ushers in assurance. God also gives us suffering in our earthly portions so that we will worship Him directly from the heart. Have you ever been in the middle of some grief, some unconquerable trial, and almost unknown to you, almost to your surprise, you found in the quietude of your own heart that you were yearning for and reaching out for God, you were even thanking Him for the trial, even praising Him for His mercy, even resigning yourself to Him, even denying yourself to serve Him. What was happening? Your heart was worshiping Him, and that worship is precious and good in His eyes. The unrighteous, the proud, do not worship because they rely on self. They bring no delight to God. What delights God? His delight is not in the strength of a horse, nor His pleasure in the legs of a man. That's reliance on other things. But the Lord takes pleasure in those who fear Him, in those who hope in His steadfast love. Psalm 147. This worship. we do from the heart through Christ our Redeemer. So all that kind of a way of tying up some loose ends in verses three and four. We see the good of hope. For one thing, it keeps us from becoming depressed. It keeps us productive. It forms character. It builds up our faith. It's the workshop of the Spirit. Hope is formed in suffering, and hope does not put believers to shame. Now we get to a second line of assurances. Believers receive assurance of salvation because God's love is poured into their hearts. God's love is poured into Christian hearts. Verse 5 says, "...and hope does not put us to shame, because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us." This is a portion of verse 5 that it is especially delightful to preach since it is so encouraging. It says that believers may come to know that God loves them in an experiential way. This is a way of being certain or assured that God's love is directly and individually for them. This is a different, closer kind of knowledge than only hearing about it in the Word, critical as that is. This is perhaps an internal sense or a spiritual perception of God's love. Importantly, God's love is not love that the believer may have for other people. That does exist, of course. That's a righteous thing. But in the context of results that stem from justification by faith, what's Paul talking about now except how a believer may have a deep and abiding sense of the love of God. God loves those He's saving with steadfast covenant love, though they don't always feel that way. But there can come a time in the believer's life when he can experientially know God's love. He would say, I know that God loves me. And the worldly skeptic says, well, if God loved you, he would take away all the problems from your life. But that won't shake the assured Christian. Because in addition to reasoning from the truth of the Bible to being in a state of grace, the assured Christian says, more than that, I sense the love of God. I sense it. Now the apostle is going to develop this theme of love later on, saying that nothing in all creation can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. But He's saying it now in this way. He's saying God splashes out His love in the heart. God pours His love into the innermost heart of believers. It's not knowledge, really, although you do know it. It's a sense that God loves and always will love you. There's an immediate certitude about that, an assurance. Those of you who are married to a godly spouse, and know that your spouse will always love you. Youth has its wistful romantic adventures of trying to see who is a romantic interest, of trying to see who is available for marriage. But in times like those, you come away with apprehensive questions. Will this person get snatched away by someone else? Or what if she says no when I ask to court her? What if he breaks my heart? God honoring marriage is better than that because even if you go away on business, you know your spouse has not gone away from you but loves you still. God's love is even more stable than that. God's love is so stable it can be counted on and that's why there is a doctrine of assurance in Reformed theology. Believers can see God's love in His grace. They say, I don't know why He loves me. Have you ever said that? Believers say, I don't know why he loves me, but he loves me because he loves me because he loves me. He chose me, he atoned for my sin, and he saved me. I don't know why, but I praise him. You may have heard of the game that some lovestruck girl will play where she takes a daisy and plucks the petals one by one to try to determine if the boy loves her. He loves me, she says, plucks a petal, She plucks another one and says, he loves me not. And then whichever one is the last one held in her, pinched in her fingers, supposedly gives her prophetic insight into the boy's uncertain affection. She hopes the flower will have the right number of petals so that she lands on, he loves me. That kind of uncertainty about love is not what believers experience from God. Not if they're justified by faith apart from works. Of course that daisy game is nonsense. But God's love is the real deal. Sincere believers can come to know of God's love for them. They can know that they are saved with an infallible certainty. It's a kind of innate knowledge, an immediate knowledge that arrives by a different means than all the others. Paul has, and now I'm gonna talk about the others real quickly, Paul has walked the readers of this letter through the best reasoning, right up to the conclusion of verse one, therefore being justified by faith, we have peace with God. That's a bit of logic. that's taking a truth and adding another truth and drawing a conclusion, then adding another truth to that and drawing a new conclusion. That kind of scriptural reasoning is important to faith. It's important to understanding and to gaining assurance of salvation. It's like this, you say, if Christ died for those who believe on him, and I believe on him alone, then Christ died for me. You see, that's reasoning. You can reason it out. I am saved. That is a method of gaining assurance. because it's faith resting on divine truth of the promises of salvation. There's another way of gaining assurance. We've spent a couple sermons, including somewhat today, talking about it. It's the inward evidence of Christian graces in the life, such things as only Christians can have, and things like hope. Only a Christian can have Christian hope or exercise faith. Therefore, you might reason, I'm a true Christian. I see these graces in myself. But this one we're talking about, this love shed abroad in the heart is immediate. It's not reasoned out, though it might work with that kind of reasoning. It's not necessarily just believing Scripture, though it can never arrive without believing Scripture. It's an impression on the believer's heart that God loves him. Look at verse 5, God's love has been poured into our hearts. There's a kind of assurance. that's like bathing the inner man in God's love. And obviously this is not something anyone can do for themselves. God gives it and does it for them. And by the way, all assurance is like that. As the Westminster Confession of Faith says, our confession, such as truly believe in the Lord Jesus and love Him in sincerity, endeavoring to walk in all good conscience before Him may in this life be certainly assured that they are in a state of grace and may rejoice in the hope of the glory of God, which hope shall never make them ashamed." Even though assurance like this is desirable, you can be a true Christian without having it. That's so important to say. You can have genuine saving faith without the certain knowledge that you're saved, or without any particular sensation of God's love. That's what the Confession also discloses in chapter 18 where it says, this infallible assurance does not so belong to the essence of faith, but that a true believer may wait long and conflict with many difficulties before he be a partaker of it. yet being enabled by the Spirit to know the things which are freely given him of God, he may, without extraordinary revelation in the right use of ordinary means, attain thereunto." I am closing, so bear with me. In other words, don't give up. Don't despair if you don't yet feel that assurance. God's love belongs to you who believe. It is exercised on your behalf, even if you don't feel it, and even if there are seasons where you go without it. But assurance is the gift of God. It is available to every true believer, but every true believer does not yet have it. And that is not a cause for being troubled, but a reason to ask God for it and to be diligent in the Christian life so that you may attain it. What every true believer does have is the Holy Spirit dwelling inside. You can be a Christian without assurance, but you can't be a Christian without the Holy Spirit. You do have the Spirit dwelling in you. And so we should seek and look for and pray for, as Paul says in Ephesians 3.19, to know the love of Christ which surpasses knowledge. We should look for that. And that's part of our earthly portion that we should pray for. But I'm out of time, so we'll return here this evening. Lord willing, let's pray. Our gracious Father, we pray that you would work grace in our lives through suffering. And we also pray for assurance of salvation. We pray to be rescued from anything that would be like a false assurance or a deceitful assurance that only belongs to false professors and deceivers and hypocrites, but that you would grant us a true assurance. And when we are in the deep, darkest places of life where we feel hopeless, we pray that you would work hope in our lives And give us this assurance of your love, which undoubtedly will make hope abound and will lift our spirits, no matter what our earthly situation. We desire to be like those saints of old, who, even though they were going to their deaths, as martyrs for Christ, were at their most hopeful and joyful. Grant us hope, we pray. Grant us today, as we set the day aside, to worship you and to revere you. that your blessing would be upon us. And please let this word prosper in us. In Christ's name we pray. Amen.