Romans Chapter 5 (part 2)

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Keep reading below if you want to start where we are (Romans 5:3-4)
Or go back to the beginning - [Here's the intro to Romans], and [here's the full archive] so you can start from Chapter 1.

Either way works. I just don't want you to feel lost.

Before diving into my notes, I encourage you to read Romans 5:3-4 first (or the whole chapter if you have time).

I include all the Scripture below, but there’s something about sitting with the whole chapter first — giving yourself room to be curious.

What catches you off guard?
What doesn't make sense?
Where is that?
Who's that?
Why?

Those questions will make the notes hit deeper.

"When disciples followed a rabbi, they followed him closely so they would never be out of his sight, never be someplace where they couldn’t hear him speak. They followed him so closely that his sandals often kicked up dust."

May you be covered in His dust.

To the saints, grace and peace.

Last week, Paul handed us gifts.

Peace with God. Access into grace. The certain hope that one day we will see what Moses could only glimpse from the cleft of a rock with God's hand covering his face.

If Paul had stopped there, we would have gone home happy. Most of us would have called it enough. More than enough, actually. What could possibly top peace with the God who was once at war with us? What could follow access into a grace we didn't earn and can't lose?

Paul answers that question with four words.

“Not only that.”

What Paul says next is hard to grasp. It’s almost unbelievable.

“We exult in our tribulations.”

Not endure them. Not survive them. Not white-knuckle our way through them until the storm passes and the sun comes back out.

Exult in them.

If you're honest, that sounds strange. Maybe even impossible. Because most of us spend our lives trying to avoid suffering, escape suffering, pray away suffering. We treat trials like problems to be solved rather than gifts to be received. We bargain with God to take them away. We assume that if we're doing something right, the hard things will eventually stop coming.

But Paul isn't describing a Christianity that only works when life is easy.

He's writing to believers who bury loved ones. Believers who lose jobs. Believers who are persecuted for the name of Christ. Believers who wake up some mornings carrying burdens they never asked for and never would have chosen.

And he says: exult.

Why?

Because God’s doing something in your suffering that comfort never could.

That's what we're going to discover today.

A quick note before we begin.

I normally teach from the ESV, but every now and then another translation captures a shade of meaning that opens the text up a little differently.

Romans 5:3 is one of those places.

The ESV says, "we rejoice in our sufferings."

The NASB 1995 says, "we exult in our tribulations."

“Rejoice” comes from the mouth.
“Exult” is something else entirely.
“Exult” comes from deep in the heart.

"Tribulations" is the Greek word thlipsis. Something pressing in on you from every side, squeezing, crushing.

Paul writes from experience.

That’s tribulation.

Paul has a plan for Romans 5.

Verses 1 through 11 are a single breath. One argument. And the argument is this: because you have been justified by faith, here’s what is now true of you. The immediate benefits of justification.

He's already given us three of them.

Verse 1: We have peace with God. The war that began in Eden, the war that ran through every chapter of Romans 1 through 4, the war you were born into and fought on the wrong side of without even knowing it. That war is over. It was purchased. At the cross.

Verse 2: We stand in grace. On our worst day, in our worst season, when faith feels thin and prayers feel hollow, we are still standing in the same grace we were standing in the moment we were justified. The floor’s not going to drop out.

Verse 2: We rejoice in the hope of the glory of God. What Moses begged for is what you’re going to see. Face to face. That's what's waiting.

Peace. Grace. Glory.

But Paul sees something coming.

He's written enough letters. Preached in enough cities. Sat in enough prisons. He knows exactly what a justified believer is going to ask when the hard things don't stop coming. When the diagnosis arrives. When the marriage fractures. When the persecution starts. When the thing you prayed away keeps showing up anyway.

If all of that is true of me now... why does it still hurt this much?

If I stand in grace, why am I still standing in this?

Paul walks straight into it.

Remember, Paul isn't writing Romans 5:3 from a comfortable chair with a cup of coffee. He's writing it as a man who’s been beaten, imprisoned, shipwrecked, stoned and left for dead, hungry, cold, and hunted. A man who carries, as he says in 2 Corinthians, the daily pressure of his anxiety for all the churches.

When Paul says we exult in our tribulations, the word we includes him.

There's a word in verse 3 that most people read right past.

"We also exult in our tribulations, knowing..."

They see tribulations and they see perseverance and they start trying to figure out how to be tougher. How to hold on longer. How to endure better. And they miss the thing that makes all of it possible.

The exulting doesn't come from gritting your teeth harder.

It comes from knowing something.

Here's what Paul’s not saying.

He's not saying suffering is good or that pain doesn't hurt.
He's also not saying trials automatically produce anything.

Suffering doesn’t automatically make you more like Christ.

It doesn’t automatically deepen your faith or automatically produce endurance or character or hope or any of the things Paul is about to describe. There is no guarantee written into the nature of hardship itself that says if you go through enough of it, you will come out the other side stronger and more faithful and closer to God.

We assume that's true.

We say things like what doesn't kill you makes you stronger and we half-believe that difficulty has some built-in refining quality, that time and pressure will eventually produce something good the way heat and carbon produce a diamond.

But that's not what Paul says.

Two people can walk through the exact same trial. The same diagnosis. The same loss. The same betrayal. The same years of unanswered prayer in the dark. One of them comes out the other side with a faith that is deeper and more settled and more real than anything they had before. The other comes out bitter. Convinced that God either doesn't exist or doesn't care or can't be trusted with the one life they were given.

Same trial. Completely different result.

The trial didn't make the difference.

The knowing did.

“We exult in our tribulations knowing.”

It flows from something you’re convinced of.

You can waste a trial.

Most people don't know that's possible. Not every person who suffers grows.

Some just hurt.

And that's one of the hardest things you can say to a person who’s suffering. Because it means the question isn't only what are you going through? The question is what do you know while you're going through it?

What do you believe about the God who allowed this?
What do you believe about His character?
What do you believe about whether He’s good,
whether He’s present,
whether He’s using this for something you cannot yet see?

That's the difference.

Knowing.

So what do we know?

Paul’s about to tell us.

So what do we know?

Paul gives us a chain. Four links. And every link is forged in the fire of the previous one.

Notice how confident Paul's language is. He doesn't say tribulation might produce perseverance. He doesn't say it could. He says it brings about perseverance.

Not because suffering is good but because God is at work in it. Paul's writing as a man with scars on his back, a man who knows from the inside out what God does in the furnace.

He's lived this chain. Every link of it.

“Tribulation brings about perseverance.”

The Greek word for perseverance is hypomonē. Built from two parts. Hypo means under. Menō means to remain. Put them together and the picture comes into focus: remaining under. Not finding a way around the pressure. Staying beneath it, faithful, when everything inside you is screaming to put it down and walk away.

It’s the Spirit-enabled decision to remain faithful to Christ when you’ve run out of reasons to keep going on your own.

It’s Job refusing to curse God after the animals are gone and the children are buried and his body is covered in sores and his wife is telling him to give up.

It’s Paul standing back up and walking into the next city after being stoned and left for dead in the last one.

It’s Jesus in Gethsemane, sweating drops of blood in the dark, saying not my will but yours and then rising and walking straight toward the cross.

That's hypomonē.

And tribulation produces it. The weight is the tool. There’s no other way to build what God is building.

“Perseverance brings about proven character.”

The Greek word for proven character is dokimē. In the ancient world it described metal that had been put through fire and come out the other side approved. Genuine. Authentic. The impurities burned away, what remained was the real thing.

And get this. The proof isn't for God. He already knows who belongs to Him. He’s never once looked at any of His children and wondered.

The
proof
is
for
you.

When your faith walks into a trial and comes out the other side still standing, still reaching toward the God who allowed the whole thing, something settles in you that wasn't there before. A confident assurance. Your faith is no longer borrowed from your parents. It’s no longer theory. It’s been tested. It carried the weight and didn't collapse.

That changes a person.

“Proven character brings about hope.”

Most of us think hope is what we bring into suffering. We carry it in like a lantern, something to hold onto in the dark, and hope carries us through to the other side.

Paul says suffering produces hope.

Not because suffering is good or because pain is pleasant. But because suffering proves something that nothing else can. Before the trial, your hope may have been sincere. But it was untested. And untested hope, however genuine, carries a quiet question underneath it, one you may have never said out loud.

Will this actually be enough when it gets hard?

Then the trial came. And somehow, by the grace of God, your faith was still standing when it was over. Not perfect. But standing. You discovered that Christ was enough on the days when you weren't sure He would be. That His promises held when everything else seemed to be coming apart. That He really does sustain His people.

And that changes you.

The hope that comes out of a trial is not the same hope that went into it. It's stronger. Steadier. Rooted down into something that can hold when the next hard thing comes, and the one after that. Not because you've become stronger. Because you've seen God's faithfulness for yourself. You're no longer wondering whether He'll be enough.

You've already watched Him carry you through.

That's the hope Paul’s talking about. Not wishful thinking and not optimism.

The certain expectation of a believer whose faith has been tested and whose God has never once let go.

Tribulation.
Perseverance.
Proven character.
Hope.

Four links. One chain.

And it begins in the hardest thing you're walking through right now.

The pressure isn't pointless. God’s not wasting it. Even now, in the middle of it, before you can see what He's building, He is building it.

Something that can only be built under the weight.

This is what the chain looks like in real life.

When it's just any otherTuesday.

I work with nine pastors in Cuba and I’m telling you that Romans 5:3-4 lands differently there than it does here. Not because Cuban believers are more spiritual. Not because they've figured something out that the rest of us haven't. But because thlipsis isn’t a word they have to imagine.

They live it.

The power goes out and stays out. Not for an hour. For days. Medication that your child needs isn't available anywhere on the island. You skip meals so your kids don't have to. You walk miles to get to a church gathering because there's no other way to get there, and when you arrive you're not sure how much longer gatherings like this will be permitted. The government is watching. The pressure is real. And it presses in from every side the way the Greek word thlipsis says it does. Squeezing. Crushing.

And the pastors preach anyway.

The women walk the miles anyway.

The churches meet anyway.

I've sat with these men. I've heard them pray. And there’s something in the room when a Cuban pastor prays that I don't know how to describe except to say that it has weight to it. A settledness. A confidence that doesn't come from circumstances because the circumstances have never been favorable. It doesn't come from comfort because comfort has never been available.

It comes from the chain.

These are men and women whose faith has been tested under real conditions. Not theoretical pressure. Not the mild inconveniences that most of us in the west call trials. Real thlipsis. And what has come out the other side is dokimē. Proven. Genuine. Stamped.

When a Cuban pastor reads Romans 5:3, he isn't reading a theological proposition about how suffering might theoretically be useful if approached correctly.

He's reading his own biography.

Paul was writing to believers in Rome who were about to find out what thlipsis really meant. Nero's persecution was coming. The fire that would burn half the city and be blamed on Christians was coming. And Paul wanted them to know before it arrived that God had a purpose in it. That the pressure was a tool. That what came out the other side would be real and proven and full of a hope that nothing could touch.

He wanted them to know what my Cuban brothers and sisters know.

The furnace is His.
The fire is His.

And what comes out bears His stamp.

Whatever you're carrying right now, it belongs in this chain. Maybe it's nothing like what a Cuban pastor carries. Maybe it's smaller, quieter, the kind of suffering that feels almost too ordinary to bring to God. A marriage that has been hard for so long you've forgotten what easy felt like. A child you've been praying for so many years the prayers have started to feel like echoes. A grief that everyone around you has moved on from but you haven't. A faith that used to feel alive and now just feels like furniture.

Bring it.

It belongs in the chain.

Because Paul doesn't say tribulation produces perseverance only for the people whose suffering is impressive enough. He says tribulation produces perseverance. Period. The Father who is using the Cuban pastor's trial is the same Father who is using yours.

He's not wasting any of it.

Paul started chapter 5 with gifts.

Peace with God.
Standing in grace.
The certain hope of glory.

And then he said not only that.

Because justification doesn't only change where you're going. It changes what happens to you on the way there. Every hard thing. Every trial you didn't ask for and wouldn't have chosen. It all enters the chain. And what comes out the other side is something that comfort never could have built and easy days never could have produced.

Perseverance.
Character.
Hope.

The war is over. You’re standing in grace and you are not going anywhere. And the God who justified you, the God who purchased your peace and introduced you into this grace and secured your hope of glory, that same God is governing every hard thing between here and there.

Not the cruel hand of fate.

Your Father's hand.

On the life of someone He loves.

Next week Paul’s going to show us the foundation underneath everything we've just seen. The reason the chain holds. The reason you can look at the hardest thing you're walking through and know, not hope, not wish, not wonder.

Know.

That God is for you.

I love you,
George

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George Sisneros is a full-time missionary in Guatemala and the founder of Ordinary Missionaries and the El Rosario Christian Academy for Boys.

He’s been married to his wife, Vonda, for 27 years. He’s a father to nine children, five adopted.

In 2024, George and his wife expanded to Cuba, joining forces with nine pastors committed to transforming lives through the gospel.