Romans Chapter 5 (part 3)

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Keep reading below if you want to start where we are (Romans 5:5-8)
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 5:5-8 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.

Peace to you brothers and sisters.

Last week Paul told us to exult in our tribulations.

Not just survive them.

Exult.

God is using even the hardest things, the weight you didn't ask for and wouldn't have chosen, to produce something in you that comfort can’t.

Just when you think Paul’s said the most unsettling thing he could possibly say, he takes a breath, says "not only that," and you realize he was just clearing his throat.

He knows exactly what you’re thinking.

You may have never said it out loud.
Most people don't.
But it was there.

“What if hope disappoints me?”

What if I trust God with the hardest thing I'm carrying and discover, that in the end, I was wrong?

Maybe it was a diagnosis that came with a name you couldn't pronounce. Or a child who walked away and hasn't come back.

Maybe... it was a grief that everyone around you has moved on from, but you haven't, because grief moved into the house, and it lives there now, and some mornings you wake up and for one half-second you forget. And then you remember.

We know what that disappointment feels like. We take the hope someone hands us. We say thank you. And underneath it, quietly, we think:

“We'll see.”

But Paul knows.

Which is why the very next thing out of his mouth is SO BREATHTAKING.

“And hope does not disappoint.”

Not, usually doesn't.

“Does not.”

Full stop.

That’s bold. Especially coming from a man writing from inside a world…

soaked
in
suffering.

A man with scars on his back and a prison cell in his future. He’s not a man who’s never had his hope tested. He’s lived inside the very tribulations he just finished describing, and he looks up from all of it and says:

This hope will not let you down.

How can he possibly know that?

The rest of this passage is his answer.

Notice what Paul does here.

He doesn't move on. He stops. Right at the place where most of us would have kept walking, he plants his feet and says: before we go any further, I need you to understand something about this hope.

It will not disappoint you.

The Greek word Paul uses is kataischunō. The ESV translates it as to be put to shame. It means reaching for something in your moment of greatest need and finding it wasn't there. You trusted it, built your life on it, and then watched it give way.

That's what Paul is promising will never happen.

Not to you.
Not with this.

Maybe you've prayed for something so long the prayer started to feel like a habit rather than a conversation. You still say the words. You still show up. But somewhere along the way the expectation quietly drained out of it, and what's left is the shape of a prayer without the faith that anything is actually going to happen.

Maybe you've watched God work in someone else's life in a way He didn't seem to work in yours. You heard the testimony. You celebrated with them. And you meant it. But on the drive home something small and sharp settled in, something you’d never say out loud. It sounded a little too much like:

Why not me?

Maybe the fear isn't even about a specific unanswered prayer. Maybe it's quieter than that. Deeper. The fear that underneath all of it, underneath the theology and the worship songs and the years of trying to believe, maybe God's love isn't as real as you've been told. Maybe it doesn't reach as far as you need it to reach.

Paul knows that fear and he doesn't talk you out of it. He doesn't tell you to pray harder or believe more or just trust the process. He walks straight into it and says:

Hope does not disappoint.

Not because the hard season is almost over.
Because of what God has already done.
Because of who God already is.

Verse 5 is a hinge. Paul just showed us that the progression through tribulation produces hope. And now he turns and says: and that hope rests on something that cannot move. Something that was true before your trial started and will be true long after it ends. Something that has nothing to do with how well you've held up or how strong your faith has been or whether you've exulted or merely survived.

The love of God.

Not your love for God.
His love for you.

And Paul is about to show us exactly what that love looks like.

Not measured out.
Poured.

The Greek word for poured is ekcheo. It's the same word used in Acts 2 when the Holy Spirit came at Pentecost and Peter stood up and quoted Joel: I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh. 

It's not a careful word.

It's the word you use when something is moving with force and volume and no intention of stopping.

It’s not a drip. It’s a flood.

Paul doesn't say the love of God is being poured out.

He writes, it was poured out. Past tense.

At the moment of your salvation, the Holy Spirit acted directly on your soul. He moved into you the way Pentecost moved through that upper room. And He brought something with Him.

The certainty of God's love.

Not as information. As experience. A deep, settled, knowing in your bones that the God who made you has set His love on you and won’t take it back.

That's what He’s already given to every single person who belongs to Christ.

Wait. But how?

How does the Holy Spirit convince us? How does He pour the love of God into a human heart? Does He whisper it? Is it a feeling? Is it an argument? How does a person move from knowing that God loves the world to experiencing that God loves them?

Paul’s answer isn’t what most people expect.

He points.

He takes the love of God that was demonstrated in history, on a specific afternoon, on a specific hill, outside a specific city, and He opens your eyes to see it for what it actually is. He holds the cross in front of you and He says:

Look there.
Do you see it?
Do you see how much God loves you?

And when He enables you to truly see it, the love of God moves from being a fact you hold in your head to a reality that pumps through your veins.

That's the work of the Spirit.

He opens our eyes to the evidence that’s been standing there for two thousand years, arms stretched wide, saying everything that needs to be said.

Which means if you want to know whether God loves you, there’s only one place to look.

Not inward at your feelings or backward at your failures.

And definitely not at your circumstances. They’ll lie to you. They’ll tell you on your worst days that a God who loved you would never have allowed this.

Look outward.

To a hill called Calvary.

To a man on a cross.

To the moment God said everything He wanted to say about how He feels about you, and said it in a way that cannot be taken back and cannot be misunderstood and has never stopped being true.

But Paul won't let us get there yet.

Not until we see who we were when God said it.

Paul’s building a case, one word at a time, and every word is chosen to dismantle something. To strip away every possible reason you might construct in your own mind for why God loves you.

Because we do that.

We make up reasons.

We tell ourselves that God loves us because we've been faithful. Because we've tried... hard. Because somewhere in the economy of grace there must be something we've contributed, something that made us worth loving, something that caught God's eye and made Him say that one. I want that one.

Paul spends three verses burning that down.

He gives us four words.

And they land like hammer blows, one after another, each one removing another stone from the foundation of our self-justification until there’s nothing left to stand on.

Except the grace of God.

Helpless

The Greek word is asthenes. Weak. Without strength. And Paul isn't talking about physical weakness. He's talking about moral helplessness. The condition of a person who has zero ability to do anything about their own standing before God. Not struggling and falling short. Not trying and failing.

Nothing.

Paul says the same thing in Ephesians. “You were dead in your trespasses and sins.” 

Dead.

You can’t negotiate with God from a position of death. You bring nothing to the table. You can’t make yourself more lovable or more worthy or more deserving of rescue. The very capacity required to fix your problem is the very capacity you do not have.

That's helpless.

And into that helplessness, Paul says, at exactly the right time, Christ came.

Did you notice that?

At the right time.

It wasn't an afterthought. God didn't look down one afternoon and think, maybe now?

The cross happened at the exact moment God had determined before the foundation of the world. He wasn't waiting for better candidates. He knew exactly who we were and He came anyway, on schedule, without hesitation.

Ungodly.

This is the condition of our hearts toward God before Christ.

Defiant and rebellious.

No fear of God and no love for God. Paul described it in Romans 1.

We knew God and we refused to honor Him. We exchanged the truth for a lie. We suppressed what we knew because we didn't want it to be true. We wanted to be our own gods in our own worlds and we pursued that with everything we had.

That's who we were.

Sinners.

Every standard God set, we fell short of. Every commandment He gave, we broke, not just in action but in the heart.

And then.

As if those three words weren't enough.

Paul will add a fourth in verse 10.

Enemies.

At war with the God who made us, fighting against the very One whose breath was keeping us alive while we fought Him.

Helpless.
Ungodly.
Sinners.
Enemies.

That's the portrait. That's who we were. That's the person God looked at and loved.

Think about the first time you noticed someone.

I was at a church service on the Colorado State University campus. She was two rows over. Beautiful. Throughout the whole service I kept stealing tiny glances, trying not to get caught.

And then she looked at me, she smiled, and then stared straight ahead. She never looked back.

Man, I needed to meet her.

When I finally introduced myself, her blue eyes almost made my heart burst. She had a gentle but confident voice. She was kind. She smiled. I quietly begged my heart to stop racing but it paid no attention.

That's how every love story begins. Something catches your eye. A quality, a characteristic, something in the other person that makes you think: I want to know that person. Every human love story begins with something attractive in the object of that love.

Beauty. Character. Kindness. Something.

The gospel begins with the exact opposite.

God looked at helpless, ungodly, sinful, hostile enemies and loved them anyway. Not because of what He saw in us. Because of who He is. His love doesn't begin with something worthy in us. It begins in His own nature, in the eternal, uncontainable, unstoppable fact of who God is, and it moves outward toward the least deserving objects imaginable.

Us.

Paul writes, “for one will hardly die for a righteous man.” Meaning even dying for a genuinely good, upright, morally respectable person is rare in human experience. It happens. A soldier throws himself on a grenade. A stranger pulls a child from a burning car. But it's rare. It's the kind of thing that makes headlines because it's so far outside normal human behavior.

“Though perhaps for the good man someone would dare even to die.” For someone you love. Someone who calls out your heart. A friend. A spouse. A child. Someone you would genuinely lay down your life for because the love you have for them is deep enough and real enough to go that far.

That, Paul says, is the pinnacle of human love.

And then he writes one word.

But.

That word but is doing enormous work.

Paul just described the absolute ceiling of human love. The very best we’re capable of. A person laying down their life for someone they love.

And then he says but God.

It's God doing something that has no category in human experience, something that doesn't fit inside any framework of love we've ever known or witnessed or imagined.

Christ died for sinners.

For the helpless. For the ungodly. For enemies. For people who weren’t seeking Him, not reaching for Him, not even aware they needed Him. For people with nothing to offer and no claim to make and no reason in the world to expect anything from the God they had spent their lives ignoring or defying.

That's who Christ died for.

That's who you were.

Look at the verb Paul chooses in verse 8.

“God demonstrates His own love toward us.”

Notice it’s not demonstrated.

It’s demonstrates. Present tense.

Paul’s writing this letter decades after the crucifixion.

The cross is already history by the time these words reach Rome. And he still uses the present tense. Because the cross isn't merely something God did two thousand years ago on a hill outside Jerusalem. It is something God is still saying. Every time you look at it. Every time you come to it broken and empty and wondering whether any of this is real.

God is still preaching from that cross.

And the sermon is always the same.

This is how much I love you.

This is what the Holy Spirit does. He takes you by the shoulders and turns you toward Calvary and opens your eyes to see what's actually there.

A God who looked at you at your worst.

Who saw every failure, every moment of defiance, every prayer you never prayed and every commandment you broke and every time you lived as though He didn't matter.

And He came anyway.

I met my wife at church. My heart raced. She was gentle and kind and beautiful, and I noticed her the way every love story starts. Because of what I saw.

What she saw in me was a man who called himself a Christian.

I'd memorized the Lord's Prayer. I read my Bible and checked it off the list. I knew all about Jesus. I believed He was the Son of God, believed He died and was buried and rose again.

And my heart was far from Him.

He wasn't my Lord. I hadn't denied myself or died to anything. I was just selfish, dressed up in the right words.

Vonda saw all of it. And she prayed.

She prayed that I would become a man after God's own heart. She prayed that I would fall in love with Him.

She prayed it for thirteen years.

Thirteen years of loving a man who wasn't yet the man she was praying for. She didn't wait until I was worth it. She loved me where I was. The way you love someone who has nothing to offer you yet.

I didn't deserve a single one of those prayers.

And one day, God answered them. He opened my eyes, and the love I'd known about my whole life became the love I finally felt. Not a new fact. The same one I'd been checking off a list for years. I just saw it.

He poured His love into a man who was helpless, ungodly, and far from Him, and He opened my eyes to see it.

That's the only reason any of us ever see it.

So when the doubt comes, and your circumstances start telling you a story about God that doesn't sound like love, don't look inward.

Don't measure God's love by your circumstances.
Measure your circumstances by God's love.

Look outward.

To a hill. To a cross. To the moment God said everything He has ever wanted to say about how He feels about you.

The event is past.
The love is not.

And every time you look, He’s still there.

Still saying it.

"This is how much I love 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 28 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.