Rom 5.1-11
boasting without boasting
Romans 5.1-11
Jason Procopio
If I say the words “arrogant Christian”, it’s likely that the face of someone particular pops into your head.
Few things in life are less appealing than an arrogant Christian. These are the folks who will get so riled up over a subject (usually a theological or a moral one) that they not only refuse to listen to any other position, but they’ll berate those who disagree with them, suggesting that either their faith is lacking or they’re stupid. These are the ones who will ask loaded questions, knowing perfectly well the person in front of them will give the “wrong” answer, so they can pounce.
An arrogant Christian will talk about Jesus all the time…but in the end they’ll be difficult to distinguish from an arrogant non-Christian.
But just as few things are less appealing than an arrogant Christian, few things are more appealing than a confident Christian. A confident Christian is the kind of person even unbelievers want to be. They’re not worried about what other people think, but they genuinely care about those other people. They remain stable under difficult circumstances, sometimes even encouraging the people who have come to encourage them. Most especially, they’re happy. Because they are confident in their faith, they always have a reason to rejoice.
That said, however, the line between an arrogant Christian and a confident Christian can be a hard line to walk. But Paul teaches us how to do it in today’s text, in Romans 5.1-11.
Let’s remember what we’ve seen so far. (I’ll hit the bullet points quickly.)
Every human being who has ever lived or will ever live has rebelled against God and fallen short of his glory, and deserve his eternal wrath and punishment (3.23). We do not deserve to be saved from this punishment, and we cannot earn our salvation. (That, by the way, is what “salvation” means: being saved from the wrath of God.)
And yet, God justifies his people—he declares them righteous—not on the basis of what they have done, but because Christ lived a perfect life for them. Christ was delivered up for our trespasses, and raised for our justification (4.25): God takes our sin, places it on Christ, and punishes Christ for that sin; and he takes Christ’s perfect righteousness, places it on us, and declares us righteous. This justification is a gift that we receive, through the faith God gives us in Jesus Christ (3.23).
(And if you’re an unbeliever here this morning, we’ll give you the opportunity to ask God for this faith and this salvation in just a few minutes.)
So because our salvation is a gift, arrogance in the Christian makes no sense. Paul said in 3.27 that because we have been declared righteous through the faith that he has given us, we have no reason to boast.
Two weeks ago I used a silly example: our kids boast in their Christmas presents, even though we’re the ones who bought them. If they had any integrity, they’d brag about us, because we’re such good parents.
That’s exactly what Paul is laying out here. We absolutely have reasons for boasting, but none of them are found in us. We boast, but we are not arrogant, because our boasting is rooted in God. In this text, Paul actually gives us four separate reasons for boasting in the Christian life, and they are all rooted in God.
Reason for Boasting 1: Hope in His Glory (v. 1-2)
This text is really interesting, because it’s both a series of arguments that build on each other, and an emotional crescendo, as if Paul can barely contain his excitement as he writes. Basically, he spends all his time going, “And not only that, but also this. Why? Because this.” He does that a lot in this book, but this is the first time we really see it in action.
The first reason he gives us for boasting is hope in the glory of God. This is a two-pronged hope. V. 1:
Therefore, since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.
As you might know, today marks the traditional beginning of the season of Advent. If you’re new to the church, Advent is the season during which we remember the time God’s people spent waiting for him to send the King he promised, who would free them from their bondage to sin; this season culminates at Christmas, when we remember and celebrate the birth of this King who came, Jesus Christ.
We’re not beginning our Advent messages today…but in a way, we kind of are.
Do you remember when the angels came to visit the shepherds, in Luke chapter 2? They come and tell them that today, in Bethlehem, a Savior has been born. They tell them where to find the baby, and then (Luke 2.13):
13 And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God and saying,
14 “Glory to God in the highest,
and on earth peace among those with whom he is pleased!”
Luke 2.14 is one of those verses that, if you’ve grown up in church, you’ve heard a million times; we repeat it every year, often several times a year. So it can be easy to go too quickly over what the angels say.
They proclaim the glory of God, who reigns over all things; and they proclaim his peace among his people. This is the fundamental gift God brings to the world through Jesus Christ: peace on the earth, for his people, for his glory.
But this “peace” isn’t the absence of violence, or even the absence of trouble. Jesus’s life was a troubled life that came to a violent end (before his resurrection), and the same is true of all of his disciples but one: the apostle John did not die for his faith, but he still died in exile on an island after being boiled alive in hot oil. And Christians all over the world continue to be persecuted today.
So if the peace that Jesus Christ brings is not the absence of violence or conflict, what is it? What is the “peace on earth” that Christ came to bring?
It is not primarily peace amongst ourselves, but peace with God.
We’ve seen this already: on our own, left to our own devices, we are in perpetual conflict with God. We are his enemies. We fight against his reign over us, and he stands over us as Judge, who will condemn us for our sin if his wrath is not appeased by another way. This isn’t just conflict; it is THE conflict. It is the only conflict that ultimately matters, because the end result of that conflict will determine not just the course of our lives, but the course of our eternity.
But through Jesus Christ, since we have justified by faith, we have peace with God.
The peace that Christ came to bring is the knowledge that because God has declared us righteous in Jesus Christ, God no longer holds our sins against us. He no longer has any wrath toward his people, because all of that wrath was poured out on Jesus Christ on the cross. Therefore, since we have been justified by faith, we have peace—not necessarily with everyone, and certainly not over the entire world, but we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.
Not only that… V. 2:
2 We have also obtained access through him by faith into this grace in which we stand…
It’s almost like Paul is describing a well, from which we can draw grace. Every time we sin, we need grace. However, because we’ve sinned, we don’t deserve to receive grace; because we have sinned against God, we shouldn’t be able to draw from that well.
But we can. God has granted us access to this grace through Christ.
One of the Puritans said (I’m paraphrasing) that the more like Christ you become, the more you realize how unlike Christ you actually are. The more like Christ you become, the more you realize just how badly you need God’s grace every day of your life.
And in Christ, we always have access to that well.
Every day, we return to it, and we let down our bucket, and we find that it never runs dry. Our sin may seem insurmountable to us…but God’s grace is always present to cover it, always there to help us fight it.
So we have peace with God, and inexhaustible grace by faith.
And not only that… The second half of v. 2:
…and we boast in the hope of the glory of God.
This can be kind of a nebulous idea, and Paul’s going to go into this in much more detail in chapter 8. This hope of the glory of God is ultimately the promise that Christians will be raised with Christ, and made perfect like Christ, when he returns.
What does this hope look like?
I don’t like cosmetic surgery; too often it goes wrong, and sometimes it goes very wrong. If you’ve been in a car accident, and you’ve been scarred or burned, then sure—I get that. But (this is just my opinion) cosmetic surgery just to make “improvements” is a bad idea.
But I’ve seen enough reality TV to know that when someone goes in to have some kind of cosmetic surgery done—to get their chin tucked, or their nose reduced or their face lifted—they’re excited to go.
Think about that. They’re excited…to have surgery. They’re excited to have a doctor open their face with a knife, to have him do unimaginable things in there (don’t ever go on YouTube to watch cosmetic surgery videos if you have a weak stomach). They’re excited to go in, and let the doctor do those horrible things, and come out with giant bruises, looking like they’ve gone ten rounds with a heavyweight champion.
Why are they excited? Obviously they’re not excited about the process, because it’s horrible.
They’re excited because of how they hope they will look when the healing is done. This excitement is real, even when they have no solid assurance that the surgery will go well.
That’s the same kind of dynamic we see at work here, but in this case, that joy, that hope, is actually grounded. It’s right.
We rejoice, we boast, in the hope that one day, Christ will return, and we will be made like him. And our assurance is certain, because since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God. And because this peace brings with it this incredible hope, we’re excited about it. We want to talk about it with other people—we are not ashamed of the gospel (as Paul said in chapter 1), but we boast in it, because we know where God is taking us, and what the end result will be.
Reason for Boasting 2: The Fruit of Affliction (v. 3-5)
And that hope—knowing where we are going and what the end result will be—changes every aspect of our lives.
Paul gives a dynamite example of this in v. 3-5. And not only that… (Those are his actual words.)
3 And not only that, but we also boast in our afflictions…
Any normal person who is going through affliction will read this verse, and think Paul is nuts. Why on earth would we be happy about affliction, to the point where we boast about it?
Because we know where we are going, and what the end result will be.
We boast in our affliction (and here Paul gives a crescendo in the form of a list):
…because we know that affliction produces endurance…
Endurance is the ability to persevere through difficult times.
When you begin playing guitar, particularly if you’re playing on steel strings, and not on a classical guitar, it hurts to play. These tiny strings press into the soft spot on your fingers, and it’s like six little knives slicing into your skin.
But if you keep playing, what happens? You grow calluses.
The same thing happens when we suffer affliction, and most especially when we suffer affliction with this perspective in mind, of knowing where we are going, and what the end result will be. Affliction makes us tough. We get thicker skin. We adapt. We learn to relativize. The things that seemed insurmountable at the beginning are no longer as daunting, because we’ve already gone through them.
And because we’re tougher now, we endure. We keep going. We persevere.
Affliction produces endurance, and (v. 4)
endurance produces proven character…
I like the way the CSB translates this, because the growth of character in our lives is the proof that we have persevered well.
I’ll probably use this example for the rest of my life, but one thing many of you noticed while our brother Gaël was sick was how his mother dealt with the pain of it. She saw her son wasting away, and knew that if God did nothing, he would die. She was honest about the pain she was going through, and made no attempt to hide it.
But through all of that, we saw her constantly lifting her eyes back to God and remind herself of what is true: “It’s so painful…but I know that God is good. It’s so painful…but I know he hasn’t left us. It’s so painful…but I know he’s in control.” This was fully on display at Gaël’s funeral a couple of weeks ago, and it was incredible to see.
If you want to really know what someone’s character is like, watch how they suffer. If you want to see what your character is like, watch how you suffer. If you persevere, you will see a gradual growth: when you suffered ten years ago, or twenty years ago, it felt like the world was crumbling down around you. But today, even if it’s hard and painful and difficult, you are more able to do what Gaël’s mom did—you more easily remember what is true, and you more easily find comfort in the truth that God is good, and your hope is secure.
Affliction produces endurance, endurance produces proven character, and (v. 4b)
proven character produces hope.
People with proven character, who have persevered in hardship over many years, are not as easily shaken as the rest of us. This is true even of unbelievers—they are not easily shaken because they know what happens when they persevere in hardship. They know what they are like when they come out of it. They’ve seen how they grow.
The assurance of growth through suffering makes the idea of persevering in suffering less frightening.
If this is true for the unbeliever, it is infinitely more true for the believer, because sometimes perseverance doesn’t reward right away; sometimes it doesn’t make us as strong as we thought it would. And if we do not have the firm assurance of where we’re going, and what the end result will be, we can grow bitter, and defeated.
But the believer has this assurance that our hope will not disappoint us:
5 This hope will not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured out in our hearts through the Holy Spirit who was given to us.
Brothers and sisters, we have a permanent testimony of God’s faithfulness and love, inside of us, all the time, through God’s Holy Spirit who lives in us. If he were to fail us, he would fail himself, because we are his people, and we are in him, and he is in us. God will not fail us, because he will not fail himself. He will do what he promised to do, for our good and for his glory.
Reason for Boasting 3: Our Improbable Salvation (v. 6-10)
We boast in the hope of God’s glory, because we know where we are going and what the end result will be.
We boast in affliction, because affliction produces this hope in us.
Our third reason for boasting is the improbable, unexpected work of God to save us. And this reason is intimately linked to the first two. Everything we said before about the fruit of affliction is true…but it can sound terribly naive. “Affliction produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope…” It’s is the kind of thing you say when everything’s going well for you. But when things start to go badly, it becomes a little harder to swallow.
How do we know that the hope of God’s glory will not disappoint us? How do we know that affliction is producing this hope in us? What is the ground, the basis, of our hope in God’s future faithfulness to us?
It is God’s past faithfulness to us. V. 6:
6 For while we were still helpless, at the right time, Christ died for the ungodly. 7 For rarely will someone die for a just person—though for a good person perhaps someone might even dare to die. 8 But God proves his own love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.
How do we know that God will not disappoint us? Because Christ died for us while we were still his enemies.
Selflessly dying for someone else is a good thing, but it’s not particularly surprising. One reason people love The Lord of the Rings is because of how inspiring it is to see Frodo and Sam accepting to take the One Ring to Mordor, knowing they’ll probably die.
Why are they willing to die? Because they love the Shire. They think about it and talk about it all the time. It’s a good thing they’re doing, because the Shire is good, and they want to save it.
People often draw parallels between the story of the hobbits and the story of Jesus, but what the hobbits do in that story is not the same as what Christ did. Frodo did not accept his mission in order to save the orcs. He accepted his mission to save the good and wholesome hobbits in the Shire.
This is how people are, and that’s a good thing. But it makes sense. For a good person, someone may be willing to die.
But God’s love is infinitely superior, and we know it because Christ died for us while we were still his enemies.
Now Paul’s going to continue this encouragement, and he’s going to do it using a common form of argument: “If X is true, then how much more is Y true?” If God did this—the hard thing—then how much more readily will he do the easy thing?
Parents constantly have to do a lot of really gross things when their kids are young. They have to clean poop (often in very unexpected places). They have to clean vomit. Little kids throw up in bed, while they’re sleeping, so not only do you have to clean up their mouths; you have to rinse the sheets, you have to pull chunks of food out of their hair… That part of parenting is awful.
But how many times have we seen parents very calmly wipe their babies’ chins when they’re eating, or when they drool? Could you imagine doing that for anyone else? Parents do this for their kids without even thinking about it, and keep on talking and smiling as they do it.
Why is it so easy for parents to do that for their kids?
Because for their kids, they’ve done a lot worse.
That is Paul’s argument here. V. 8 again, then we’ll continue:
8 But God proves his own love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. 9 How much more then, since we have now been justified by his blood, will we be saved through him from wrath. 10 For if, while we were enemies, we were reconciled to God through the death of his Son, then how much more, having been reconciled, will we be saved by his life.
You see Paul’s point. If Christ was willing to go through the agony of a brutal death to justify us, he will certainly stay faithful and make sure his death saves us from God’s wrath.
Strangely, people often have doubts in this area. We don’t doubt that Christ came to die for us while we were sinners…but that happened a long time ago—long before I was even born. He didn’t know me. He didn’t see how screwed up I am. Now that he sees what I’m like, surely he’ll change his mind: Nope, sorry, I wasn’t expecting quite that much trouble.
Put simply, we accept that Christ died for us, but we have a hard time accepting that he will keep us.
I hope we can see from Paul’s argument that such doubt makes no logical sense. Nothing in the world has ever been more difficult, more painful, more taxing, than what Jesus Christ did for us on the cross—not just the physical pain of crucifixion, but the pain of bearing the weight of all of our sin. It is the hardest thing anyone has ever had to do.
Would he really put himself through all that (the hardest thing) and not bring his work of salvation to completion, which is comparatively much easier? Of course not!
And Paul uses the exact same argument in v. 10. If, while we were his enemies, we were reconciled to God through Christ’s death (a profoundly painful thing), how much more, now that we are his children, will be saved by his life (a subject of great joy and glory for God)?
To come back to parents with their kids (since that’s the example Paul uses): All parents are sinful, but even sinful parents will protect their children if they see them in danger.
God saved his enemies. He reconciled us to him through Christ even when we were in active and perpetual conflict with him.
Would he really put himself through all that while we were his enemies (the hardest thing), and not bring his work of salvation to completion, now that we are his children?
Of course not.
This is the God we serve—the God who not only will keep his children safe, but who will make his enemies his children.
When we have such a God, we boast in him—not because of us, but for the simple fact that he is so good.
Reason for Boasting 4: God Himself (v. 11)
Which of course leads us to our last reason for boasting: God himself.
11 And not only that, but we also boast in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received this reconciliation.
This is why an arrogant Christian makes no sense. Ultimately, all of our boasting is from God, and for God, and toward God: he is the sun around which the solar system of our faith gravitates.
Our boast in this life is God himself, to whom we have been reconciled through Jesus Christ, and in whom we have a hope that does not disappoint us.
In times of joy, God is still God.
In times of affliction, God is still God.
In times of growth, God is still God.
In times of weakness, God is still God.
He is our assurance, he is our confidence, he is our boast.
Boasting Without Boasting
The big question we should always ask after such a text is this: What would change in our lives if we actually believed these things are true?
Three things are immediately evident:
1. Arrogance and pride would disappear.
We would recognize that our position as children of God is not even the slightest bit owing to our obedience or our own righteousness: everything we have, and everything we are, is from God. We would see that even those gifts that seem to have nothing to do with God—for example, intellectual ability or musical talent—are still gifts. Even those things we have which are the direct result of hard work that we did…are gifts from his hand. As Paul will say later in 11.36: From him and through him and to him are ALL things. To HIM—not to us—be the glory forever.
2. We would be supremely confident.
The fact that we have no reason to boast in ourselves doesn’t mean we have no reason to boast period. We have ample reasons to boast in him.
This “boasting”, this “pride”, in God, translates in two main ways, and the first is confidence in our lives. Not confidence in ourselves, but confidence in who he is for us. If we know where we are going, what the end result will be, then both our successes and our failures, our periods of rest and our periods of affliction, will give us opportunities to grow in our confidence.
We’ll know that we don’t have to worry about God being angry at us: since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.
We’ll know that we don’t have to worry about how God feels about us, because he showed us his love while we were still his enemies.
We’ll know that we don’t have to wonder if he’ll be there for us in affliction, because we’ll know what he’s doing in that affliction: we’ll know that affliction produces endurance, endurance produces character, character produces hope.
We’ll know that we don’t have to wonder whether we’ll lose our salvation, whether or not we’ll persevere until the end, because if while we were enemies, we were reconciled to God through the death of his Son, then how much more, having been reconciled, will we be saved by his life?
Our boast in the Lord gives us stability when we would otherwise falter; it gives us joy when there would otherwise be sorrow; it gives us confidence when there would otherwise be fear.
But of course, this aspect of boasting comes to bear in our own hearts; it concerns mainly our vertical relationship with God.
The last way this boasting translates, to our horizontal relationships, is that:
3. We will be endlessly eager to brag about our God to others.
To believers and unbelievers alike, we’ll have a constant desire to tell how good God is, what he has done, how he has cared for us, how he has protected us, how he has helped us grow. We won’t be shy about our struggles, because those struggles are yet another opportunity to tell how he has used them and changed us through them.
This is why Paul is not ashamed of the gospel—he is constantly aware of the atomic bomb of wonderful news he carries with him, and cannot contain himself, cannot help but set it off every chance he gets.
Our boast is in God, through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received this reconciliation.
What wonderful news.
In the face of these glorious truths, let us be humble; let us be confident; let us be proud in our God.
