Christ is risen, dear friends, rejoice and be glad!
I have prepared a reflection for your encouragement from Romans 5:1-5, and I’ve entitled it Living at Peace with God.
May God be with us as we look to Paul’s great epistle.
Romans 5:1-5 (CSB):
1 Therefore, since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. 2 We have also obtained access through him by faith into this grace in which we stand, and we rejoice in the hope of the glory of God. 3 And not only that, but we also rejoice in our afflictions, because we know that affliction produces endurance, 4 endurance produces proven character, and proven character produces hope. 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.
Who is Jesus?
When we answer the question, “Who is Jesus?”, from this passage, we can perhaps most clearly see Him as our great high priest and mediator.
St. Paul teaches us in 1 Timothy 2:5 that there is one God and one mediator between God and mankind, the man Christ Jesus.
It is our Lord’s intercessory, mediator role that makes St. Paul’s words true here – because Christ is mediator, and because we’re joined to Him through faith, we have peace with God.
To say there is a lot that can be said about the words “justified” and “faith” would be the biggest understatement that you’ve heard in quite some time. Part of me wrestled with wanting to write an essay just on these words. I’ve decided not to do that. But in continuing with this section, what I will say is that we should also note that Christ’s priestly role is eternal. And this could perhaps even be the next section, the ‘how does Jesus encourage us’ section, as we should find deep encouragement in the fact that Christ has not justified us in a one-time transaction and then abandoned us to figure it out on our own. No, He justified us, He is justifying us, and He will justify us.
When we are more than conquerors, and riding spiritual highs, it was Christ’s grace and strength that went before us and with us and upheld us and caused this to be so. Similarly, as St. Paul writes, not if, but when we face tribulations, afflictions, and various trials, the Lord Jesus Christ is with us. He’s giving us his grace, his strength, his love.
It is His grace that causes us to stand, and we partner with it through living out our faith through love. Christ is with you, with us, unto the ages of ages.
How Does Jesus Encourage Us?
Next, we’ll seek to answer the question, “How does Jesus encourage us?”
Well, as I mentioned, and as St. Paul wrote, we’re going to have various tribulations in this life. This is all part of our great problem – the curse, the sickness that we inherited from our first father Adam. Spiritually, we have separation from God’s presence, spiritual death, knowledge of good and evil ultimately bringing us moral responsibility, guilt, and shame. Physically, we have death, pain and difficulty in childbearing, our labor is toilsome and frustrating, the ground produces thorns and thistles and it takes much sweat and struggle to produce, and there is relational breakdown in the harmony between all of mankind. This is all just from Genesis chapter 3.
You can perhaps reflect on this and easily see how this has been applicable in your own life. All death, but certainly untimely death, abuse, miscarriage, hostility, divorce, chronic pain, slander, gossip, cancer, infertility, losing a job, so on and so forth, I could go on and on and even then I couldn’t possibly list all of the burdens that we carry.
Before I proceed, let me help us to remember that God is not okay with these things, my dear friends. God loves you. And He is heartbroken over these things. It is because of His love for you, and because of His great mercy, that He sent His Son, Jesus Christ our Lord, to assume our humanity so that He could heal it from within. Christ has suffered unbearably, unimaginably, and He did it for these things, and through His stripes we are healed.
As St. Paul teaches us, there is a kind of divine progression from tribulation to patience to character to hope, and in this divine progression, we see that the tears that fall from our faces to the ground are actually watering the soil from which deeper trust in God can grow. In this way, we can understand that our suffering is not trivial or wasted, but rather, it is producing in us something glorious. Paul says it is producing hope, and he goes on to assure us that our hope will not lead us to disappointment. Why? Because God poured out His love for us in the giving of His Holy Spirit, and it is the Holy Spirit within us who is taking all of these trials and uses them as the means through which we are transformed into the image of His Son.
How Can We Follow Jesus?
Finally, we consider the question, “How can we follow Jesus?”
We must remember that while at one time we were at war with God, now, through faith in Christ, we are at peace with God. Since we’ve moved on from war to peace, especially when we consider that we have the Holy Spirit within us empowering us and shaping us, our daily choices should reflect this new reality. We should resist falling back into patterns of wartime rebellion. We are at peace. Namely, the Apostle teaches us that we should trust that God is doing a hidden work within us, and because of this, we should rejoice in our difficulties.
Following Jesus in this way could look like many things, but it could look like choosing gratitude instead of grumbling (“Ugh, I’m so tired of picking up the same blocks day after day” versus “God, thank you for the precious gift of my children, help me cherish them and lead them well.”).
It could look like choosing persistence over despair (“I can’t believe that person slandered me, I hope the worst for them” versus “I know that this person slandered me because we’re all sick, and that God wants us to be well. I’m going to share God’s love with them by forgiving them 70×7 times.”).
It could look like choosing confidence over anxiety (“There is no way that I can meet all the needs of that homeless man I met. It is better for me to just stay on the sidelines and pray that God will provide” versus “God loves this homeless man and has blessed me in order to share it with him. I may not have a lot, but let me share with him and watch how God multiplies it.”).
There are so many examples I could give.
I don’t want to offer a large commentary on this, but I do think it is worth saying that I know that in our day, there are many conflicting voices that are calling out to us and telling us to ruminate, to consider how we are victims and the people who wrong us are always wrong and we are right, so on and so forth. To this, I will again simply encourage to live as people who have peace with God.
Ultimately, following Jesus from this passage means that we live as people who have peace with God. Leaving as people who have peace with God means that we love God, and we love our neighbors as ourselves. We love selflessly, sacrificially, and steadfastly. And in so doing, we fulfill the law of God.
May God have mercy on us and help us, in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, one God. Amen.