Romans 5:1-5
Everyone wants to grow to their fullest human potential. At least I think they do. I may be making a false assumption about that statement. I just think, deep down, people want to know how to grow into the best person they can.
There’s all kinds of self-help books out there to help you achieve that. There’s a book titled, The Path: What Chinese Philosophers Can Teach Us About the Good Life. Such as, Confucius say, “A bird in each hand make it hard to blow your nose.” Or, there’s a book titled, Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself: How to Lose Your Mind and Create a New One. If you’re into using a psychological model that was popular 35 years ago, you could read, Rethinking Everything: Personal Growth through Transactional Analysis. Transactional Analysis is that model that says we act out of three different personas: parent, adult, or child. I’m sure this book has lots of information about helping you out when you’re acting like a child and you should be living like an adult. But, if you don’t like that one, there’s, The Other 90%: How to Unlock Your Vast Untapped Potential for Leadership and Life.
I could go on and on. All’s you need to do is go to amazon.com and click on their book section, find the list of categories of books on the lefthand side of the screen, click on self-help, and Bam! you have 125,300 of such books to choose from. That’s a lot of advice.
The thing is, of all the books I took a cursory look at in preparation for this message, none of those books said that one of the sure ways to grow as a human being is to suffer.
See, you have to start somewhere, if you are going to grow as a human being. Once you’ve determined you are stagnating, or have plateaued as a person, and you’re ready for a change, the first thing you have to do is start. Where do you start when you want to grow?
Paul has some very odd advice for us about this. Paul wrote in this letter to the Romans, that the best place to start, if you want to embark on a path of human growth, is with your sufferings. No self-help, human potential book I looked at said such a thing.
Suffering, Paul says, puts you on the path of human growth, faith growth. It’s not a starting place that we would likely choose. In fact, Paul wrote that we should not only start with our sufferings, we should “rejoice” in those sufferings. The word Paul used could also mean, “boast.” We not only start with our sufferings on a path to growth, we rejoice that we can start with our sufferings. We can boast about the fact that our sufferings have been the best place from which to launch into a time of growth as a person and in our faith. Odd. Very odd.
The word Paul used for suffering literally means feeling the pressure, being squeezed into a ball, being squashed and flattened out, being hemmed in into a smaller and smaller space, finding yourself on a very narrow path with little to give you a foothold—like being on the narrow ledge of a cliff. Rejoice when you find yourself in those kinds of places. Boast about it, even. You could be on the road to tremendous growth in your faith and as a person.
This kind of suffering could be caused by a number of life experiences. Certainly persecution. That may be the situation that Paul is addressing in this letter. Christians, especially in Rome, were facing persecution on several fronts.
But this suffering could also develop from inner distress or sorrow. It certainly is a part of anxiety and fear. And most assuredly and ultimately, if you are staring death in the face. Your questions may be on a very basic and intense level, along the lines of, “Am I even going to make it out of this situation intact as a person?” You may not be thinking about human growth and potential. You’re just worrying about survival when these levels of suffering hit.
To be told by Paul to rejoice or boast about this level of suffering, because they are great opportunities for growth, may elicit a response from us, such as, “I’d like to grow, just not in this way.”
What happens when we are suffering, is that our “flight-or-fight” mechanism is triggered in our brains. It’s a normal response to any anxiety producing situation. When your body or your psyche experiences some kind of major threat, you are also faced with a decision: fight the threat, or flee the threat. Either take on the suffering situation or attempt to put as much space between you and it as possible.
When this kind of suffering (making you feel limited, small, squeezed, flattened, with narrower and narrower options) when that kind of suffering hits, it feels like we are being chased down by some kind of predator: cancer, psychological abuse, debilitating illness, being bullied, even old tapes that run in our heads from our past. Our first impulse is to find a place of safety from those kinds of predatory situations. We do that by either fighting or fleeing.
Here’s where Paul says we can start on the road to growth as human beings, with our sufferings as the initial springboard. Suffering can lead to endurance. Endurance can become our place of safety, if we so choose.
The word Paul used that we translate endurance, is a great word. The root word means to stay in one place, to stand fast, to hold out, to remain calm, to stay in force—even if you are a force of one. The whole word means to stay behind, when all others have cut and run. It means to stand firm, but not just stand firm—stand firm with positive expectation. It means standing with energy that leads to successful resistance. It means, ultimately, to be heroic. To be the hero of your own story, and just maybe a hero for others as well.
In the fight-or-flight spectrum, endurance as Paul is describing it, is not a flight word. It is a fight word.
If you choose to fight rather than flee your suffering, and if you choose the way of endurance, Paul says that endurance will lead to the next level of human growth, which is character.
The word that Paul used for character basically means watching. But here’s how it plays out. The full word means to be tested by watching. That is, understanding that as we endure our sufferings, we are being watched. We are being tested by those who watch to see if we are reliable, valuable, and genuine. We are under the scrutiny of others who are watching how we handle ourselves when life is hard and we are suffering. That’s what determines our character, according to Paul. Endurance, as Paul described it, has a way of demonstrating our character, or failing in character.
What is it that others are watching for? What are some of the characteristics of character?
First, who you are is driven by the fuel you choose to run on. So what others are looking at to determine our character is the kind of fuel we are choosing to run on. Faith is a fuel you can run on. That’s part of what God is watching to see if your endurance is leading to character. Is faith in the Lord your fuel, or are you trying to run only on faith in yourself?
Faith, hope and love are the three main fuels of the Christian that Paul brings up time and time again. I will say more about hope in a couple of minutes. I think others are looking at this same “fuel” question to determine our strength of character. What’s your fuel, and how are you, with your character, showing others how to fuel up?
Secondly, I think people are watching the choices we make to determine the depth of our character. Life is about choices. Our lives end up being the sum of all the choices we have made throughout that life. Thus, our character is also summed up in all the choices we have made.
Like the Indiana Jones movie where Indiana and friends, as well as the Nazi’s are looking for the Holy Grail—the cup Jesus used at the Last Supper. They have found the cup’s hiding place, but it is hiding amongst maybe 50 other cups of different styles. One of the Nazi soldiers takes a cup from the many that are on the table, drinks from it, and immediately shrivels up, horribly, and turns to dust. The Knight that has been guarding the grail for hundreds of years says, dryly, “He chose unwisely.”
That’s what people are looking at us to determine the depth of our character. Are they having to say about us, “He chose unwisely, as he made his way through life.” Choosing wisely throughout one’s life is a mark of positive character. That’s what people are looking at. Are the choices we are making, especially in the face of suffering, shriveling us up even more, and turning our lives to dust? Or are our choices, made wisely, increasing our wisdom, and thus our character? People are watching.
And thirdly, I think people are watching we Christians to see how much we lean on Jesus with our lives. If we don’t lean on Jesus, why should they? If we aren’t drawing on the strength of the Savior, but only trying to go at life on our own, why should they?
In all these three, catch the vision that character isn’t just a one time event. Character is a course we travel, a current that we flow with, a singular direction that we constantly follow. Character is a consistency and constancy of behavior. That’s what people are watching for, as they look at us and try to gauge our character.
Then Paul writes that if we have started with suffering, and chosen to fight with endurance, and in that fight, built our character, that character will lead to hope. Hope is ultimately where we want to end up when we are in the middle of some kind of pressure cooker of suffering. It's the expectation that we will come to some good outcome, even though we can't see what that is at the moment. We're counting on it. We trust it will happen.
That's why I think hope and conviction are linked together. Conviction is your driving force. Conviction is why you do what you do. When you are in the middle of some kind of suffering, your conviction and hope is what drives your endurance. Once you have decided to endure—that is fight instead of flee in the face of your suffering—it is your conviction and hope that builds the character of a genuine person. It's what makes you the hero of your own story--the hero that others are watching, and gaining strength from their watching your handling of your suffering.
All that leads to hope, because, really, one of the best ways to find hope is to give hope, or provide hope to others. As others are watching you, and your depth of character is providing them hope for their own lives, that in turn gives you hope.
Here's an example. While reading about hope this week, I found an article, I think on the Psychology Today site, about the Chilean coal miners. Remember all those men trapped in the coal mine for several days, and the whole world watched to see if they would get rescued.
There was this tent city that was build all around the collapsed mine site. Remember the name of that tent city, filled with reporters and workers? I had forgotten it. That tent city was named, Camp Hope. Not, Happy Village, or Think Good Thoughts Town. It was Camp Hope. Hope is such a powerful word.
The Chilean coal miners (or any miners for that matter) descend into the dark of the mine every day, and hope to come back out into the light of day. There is never that full assurance that that will happen. But it is a great picture for all the "coal mines" that we may find ourselves descending into, the darkness of suffering with all its dangers and twisting and turning tunnels where you can easily get lost, once that suffering is upon you. Once down in that mine of suffering, isn't your only and driving conviction your hope that you will get out of it and see the light of day again?
"Seeing the light of day" is a great term for the journey of human growth that we go through when we start out with suffering. "Seeing the light of day" is another way of saying "hope." After the miners were reached and rescued, there were so many stories of how different ones followed that path of endurance, leading to the kind of character that was shown when the whole world was watching. And out of that character, hope was built--the good expectation that they would see the light of day again. Which they did.
I hope you don't think me flip to say that you can grow greatly when you're suffering. That you can start with your suffering experience, fight instead of flee with endurance, let that fighting endurance build your character as others have their eyes on you, and move from the strength of that character to a hope that has conviction behind it.
I know that some of you are suffering. When you are suffering you think the opposite of what I'm trying to say--what I think Paul is trying to say. When you're suffering you think you are being demeaned, or decreased as a person. That everything about you is being squashed or flattened, and there is no hope for finding the light of day again.
But I'm convinced Paul is right about how one thing leads to another. I have taken his advice in a couple of my lowest lows. I am living testimony that suffering is not the end of you, but just the beginning of what God can do, to bring you out into the light of day, as a whole new you. And it all started with suffering.
No comments:
Post a Comment