Romans 5:1-5 | How Suffering Serves a Marriage

Church, let's pray.

Psalm 46.

Father, it says that you, God, are our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble.

Therefore, we will not fear, though the earth gives way, though the mountains be moved into the heart of the sea, though its waters roar and foam, though the mountains tremble at its swelling.

There is a river whose streams make glad the city of God, the holy habitation of the Most High.

God is in the midst of her, she shall not be moved.

God will help her when morning dawns.

The nations rage, the kingdoms totter, you utter your voice, and the earth melts.

Lord, what a wonder it is that the Lord of hosts, you God, are with us.

Come and behold the works of the Lord.

This is what we gather to do, Lord, to behold your works as revealed in your word.

How you brought desolations on the earth, you make wars to cease, you break the bow and shatter the spear, you burn the chariots with fire.

Father, in a psalm like this, I can't help but ask for prayer for the people of Nepal and Tibet.

And what they're facing with the flooding, the horrific images that were presented to the majority of us on social media, Lord.

God, I offer your every grace to be available to the people of Nepal, to your people in Nepal, to your people in Tibet, that you would preserve life, that you would sustain life, that you would empower the rescuers, the teams of people that will go to try to provide aid, Lord, that it would come swiftly.

And Lord, that somehow, in a way that our brains can't understand, you are so sovereign, we can trust you even in the midst of these significant afflictions, devastations.

Psalm 4610 is such an encouragement to me, Lord, be still and know that you are God.

Help us to trust you, Lord.

Somehow you're gonna make sense of all of this, that you will be exalted among the nations, you will be exalted in the earth.

That you are with us, that you are with your people, and that you, the God of Jacob, are a fortress, but you are also righteous, and you will do what is righteous, and you will judge with equity, and we trust you for all of that, Lord.

We pray obviously that as you are magnified, you would be magnified for the grace you extend to sinners, but we also glorify you in upholding your righteousness, Lord, and your sovereignty.

Father, as we think about suffering in our own lives today, we ask that you would indeed be a very present help in our times of trouble.

No doubt in a fallen world, Lord, we'll experience much of that.

And we need your word to guide us and lead us, and we need to be shaped more by what your word says to us, more by what you reveal about yourself to us than what we take on when we try to solve our suffering on our own.

So, Lord, open our eyes by your spirit that we might behold wondrous things from your word that might apply to our lives and affect the way we view suffering when surely it will come, Lord.

For your good that you intend for your people.

We trust you now to make that clear to us in your word.

In Jesus' name.

And all God's people said.

Amen.

Well, let me have you stay standing for the reading of God's word as you grab your Bibles, and why don't you go to Romans chapter 5?

Romans 5 · chapter mention

That's where we're gonna be, Romans chapter 5.

Romans 5 · chapter mention

And if you don't have a Bible, there's actually Bibles that we would love to give you as a gift for free on ledges on the sides of the worship center.

Go to Romans chapter 5.

Romans 5 · chapter mention

We're gonna read verses 1 through 5 today.

And if you don't have a copy of God's word, you can read it with us on the screens.

When we read these words in Romans, we're reminded that this is and we're receiving it as it is, the word of the living God.

That's what it says.

Therefore, since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.

Through him, we have also obtained access by faith into this grace in which we now stand.

And we rejoice in hope of the glory of God.

Not only that, but we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope.

And hope does not put us to shame because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us.

Loved ones, this is the word of the Lord for this Lord's Day morning.

May the Lord write these eternal truths on your hearts.

And with that, you can be seated.

Good morning, Doxa! How are you doing?

Good.

Excellent.

If you have your Bibles, go to Romans chapter 5.

Romans 5 · chapter mention

And my name is Scott.

I'm a lead pastor here.

For those of you who don't know me, haven't met before.

Uh would love to get you to meet you.

Sometimes it's been, it gets like years before I get to meet somebody.

I would love to get to meet you earlier.

I've been told that uh it feels scary to meet me.

It's it's not as bad.

I don't think meeting me is as bad as you may think it is.

I certainly would look forward to meeting you, and uh, we'll be hanging out by the first time visitor desk after the service today.

Um, you probably caught the theme, didn't you, from the worship?

We're talking about suffering.

And we're in the second to last week of our marriage series titled The Grammar of Marriage, God's Framework for His Gift of Grace.

And if you think back to all those weeks before where people were like, I'm opting out, I don't want to be here, I'm single, I'm this, I don't like marriage, I think this series has actually done a lot of good.

Would you agree?

Yeah.

And uh I intend that the Lord will continue to do that all the way through the series.

There's a direction, there's a movement to this series that's been intentional, and hopefully you'll see that as we continue, even how this how this sets up next week as well.

Um but we're gonna jump right into the focus for today.

We'll give it this title, How Suffering Serves Marriages.

How suffering serves marriages.

I'd never have chosen it.

I never would have chosen it.

But I wouldn't trade it for anything.

You said that before?

I think no less than ten times I've been in the middle of this series at some point, and someone's brought to me a child that they walk through in their marriage, and it was exactly that phrase.

Pastor Scott, I would have never chosen it.

But now that it's gone through and done what it's done, I would have never traded that for the world.

Such is the response of many married couples on the impact of suffering in their marriages, in their lives.

When we talk about marriage, we've talked about from the beginning that we understand marriage is a lifelong covenant.

But listen, marriage is a lifelong covenant on this side of Genesis 3 in a fallen world.

And because marriage is a lifelong covenant in a fallen world, it means several things when it comes to suffering.

First of all, there's not one single marriage that will make it any distance without suffering being involved, correct?

No one is exempt.

Suffering is, if you're like brand, brand spankin' new to marriage, is like out in the future, or has been an inevitable part of your marital journey.

In fact, if you are new and you're like, I just got back from my honeymoon, suffering is, we haven't suffered at all, it's just been great.

Here's the thing you said.

You said I do on day one, and you just multiplied your suffering times two.

Right?

Because you'll find that the one you love, when they hurt, what?

You hurt.

You hurt.

Marriage is an invitation to sign up to multiply your suffering.

No one's exempt from that.

The second thing we realize is you don't get to pick.

Isn't that frustrating?

How many of you are just control freaks out there?

You would love to pick your suffering.

Right?

Lots of control freaks out there.

Like, Lord, I got this.

It'd always be lighter because we're wossier than we probably let ourselves on to.

And the Lord just doesn't let us pick.

He doesn't let us pick the timing.

Like, you don't get to pick the starting point.

You don't get to pick the end point either.

You get to pick the timing of it.

You don't get to pick the type of trial, though you need to understand it's not random.

Many people just go, oh, life's just throwing a lot of stuff at us.

No, life's not throwing anything at you.

The Lord is sovereign over all of this.

And you have to understand that in God's economy, as believers, there's two ways to suffer, and only one has hardship.

There is suffering, God appointed suffering, and there is the way you suffer suffering.

So you can think about it like this: there's two kinds of suffering.

There is affliction, and there is self-infliction.

How do you respond to the suffering?

Only one of those has hardship.

I bet you could decide which one it is.

What's interesting is that we get very bothered by, don't like affliction when it comes, but as Thomas Boston, the great Puritan who wrote The Crook in the Lot said, there is actually no hardships in our suffering.

The only hardship is in self-inflicted responses.

Suffering can kill you, but it can't actually hurt you if you're a believer.

And he goes on to say, that's because God has purpose in our suffering.

All of our sufferings, anything you'll face in this life, are ultimately servants for God's good in your life.

And one of the things you find about suffering is that God saves you from suffering.

Many times you're not even aware of it, but I'm sure you can think back in your life and go, man, God totally saved me from that suffering, right?

That light that I stopped at, right?

That plane I didn't get on, that situation that I avoided.

Like, and we catch it for a second, and then we just kind of go, huh, that was interesting.

Coincidence.

And then you move on.

The truth is, is God's saving you from much suffering.

You don't get to always see those things.

You catch little glimpses of it.

The reality is what God's far more interested in doing is not saving you from your suffering, but as one Peterson said, saving you in your suffering and by your suffering.

This is how God works.

And this is good news because of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

And I want to show you that this morning.

If I were to give you a big idea over the text we're going to look at today, it would be this through Christ, God is able to make all suffering serve our marriages.

Yeah, it's not up there, but that word all, I added.

God is able to make all suffering.

If you want to throw that into your notes, do it.

He's able to make all suffering serve our marriages.

Which leads us to Romans chapter 5.

Romans 5 · chapter mention

Now, when you suffer, the question you're prone to ask is what?

Why?

Why?

Why, God?

The question you need to ask is, what?

What are you up to, God?

So when you start to go, that why direct and you want to the why question comes up without you even thinking about it.

It's the natural response to ow.

Why?

What you need to be asking is what?

What is God up to?

And when you need an answer, you need to come to Romans chapter 5.

Romans 5 · chapter mention

It will provide the clarity that you need.

Now, in order to get to Romans chapter 5, let me give you a quick overview.

Romans 5 · chapter mention

I realize I'm jumping, kind of parachuting in.

We've had Romans chapter 1 through 4 before this, and to give a kind of a summary of what Paul has been doing, Paul has been laying out what he calls my gospel, which is the gospel and showing its defense in the way that he has been preaching and proclaiming it.

Romans 1 · chapter mention

And he starts in chapter one and he goes through and says, basically all the way to chapter 3, verse 20, that all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.

It doesn't matter if you're a Jew, it doesn't matter if you're a Gentile, every single one of us is woefully guilty of God's righteousness.

We don't have it in ourselves.

We can't gain it.

There's no amount of good works that you can do, which is the big lie of our culture and society.

If you do enough good things, God will be pleased with you and you'll get entrance into heaven.

According to your righteousness, you will go to hell.

That's the predicament.

You don't have a righteousness, you lack a righteousness, and Paul makes it emphatically clear over three chapters.

It's actually quite discouraging.

You say, but the gospel means good news.

Correct.

That's where the book changes.

It shifts, it pivots in chapter 3, verse 20, when he says, but now the righteousness of God has been manifested apart from the law.

You who have been trying to earn a salvation by keeping the law, God has provided a salvation apart from the law.

Verse 22, the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe.

So there is a way to be made righteous, but it's not by your works.

It's through faith in the person of Jesus Christ for all who believe.

Do you believe in Jesus Christ?

Have you turned to him and rested in him for salvation?

His life, his death, his resurrection.

For there is no distinction, he goes on to say, for all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.

That is all of our predicament, and yet we believer are justified, declared legally righteous by his grace as a gift through saving faith in the Lord Jesus.

There's one way to heaven, through faith in Jesus Christ.

There's no other way under heaven, given to men, by which we must be saved.

And then the whole point of chapter 4 is do you want an example of this?

You want to see how this really plays out?

Look at Abraham.

Abraham is the perfect example of saving faith.

Chapter 4, verse 22, Abraham's faith, here it is, was counted to him as righteousness.

He believed in the promised provision of God to deliver a sinful people and credit a righteousness to them, not their own.

And Abraham believed God and it was counted to him as righteousness.

That's the kind of righteousness we have hope for.

That's the kind of righteousness that saves, the kind of righteousness that believes God at his provision to credit us what we must have in order to be righteous in his presence.

And then we get to chapter five.

And Paul's argument in chapter five is the reason God justified you, declared you legally righteous like he did as a gift of his grace through faith in the Lord Jesus, was so that he might also bring you safely and securely to the eternal hope, to which salvation we enter into and ultimately points to.

You could say it another way, it's to safely, securely deliver us to the eternal hope to which marriage points.

Because if you think your marriage, where it is right now, is where it ends, oh, it's so great.

Man, your marriage is shadow.

Your marriage will give way to the substance of the eternal glory of sharing in and participating in rich, sin-free fellowship with the living God.

And so we pick this up in verse one of chapter five.

Therefore, he says, since we have been justified.

Not by works, but by what?

Faith.

Say it like you're excited about it.

We have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.

So right there.

Let me just say this don't look for peace from your marriage that was meant to come from God.

Just off the bat.

Don't make your spouse the savior.

Your spouse is not the savior.

You put your spouse up as the one who's supposed to save you and deliver you from all your problems, your insecurities, your loneliness.

You are putting a weight on your spouse they were never meant to carry.

There's a progression that helps us in this text.

You're not looking for peace from your marriage that only God can provide in Jesus Christ.

Furthermore, what a blessing it is that you have peace with God instead of enmity with God.

So the idea of this is so great, is like, listen, you're gonna have battles in your marriage.

You're gonna have battles between the two of you, you're gonna have battles in general that you face, things that are onslaughts from the outside.

But here's the thing: when you understand that everything you face is a battle because Jesus faced the war and it's finished, you have a much different perspective on things.

You fight battles, Jesus fought the war.

The war's been fought, the war's been finished, he rose from the dead, he ascended to the right hand, and every one of the promises of God are yes and amen in Jesus Christ.

So you make sure you keep what you're facing in the battle category.

Jesus has won the war.

Christ didn't leave us in our sin.

He didn't leave us in our suffering.

Here's the amazing thing as we talk about suffering in marriage, Christ suffered for us to save us.

He was able to flip suffering on its head.

He was able to take, as it were, the venom of what suffering intends to inflict and suck out all the poison and replace it with good, and so a suffering fastened its teeth into Jesus, released a blood that cleansed us from our sins, right?

That he might secure for his bride access to the sphere of grace, which he talks about in verse 2.

Through him, that's Jesus, we have also obtained access by faith into this grace in which we stand.

So it's an ever-present current reality.

We're not just waiting for the future, although we are waiting for the consummate glories of the future.

But right here, right now, eternal life is yours if you are in Jesus Christ by faith.

Right here, right now, you live, breathe, and move in the sphere of grace.

And as a result, we rejoice in hope of the glory of God.

But then look at this.

This is where we're gonna focus.

Not only that, but what?

We rejoice in our sufferings.

Now, you read that and you're like, well, that sounds nice.

That's not me at all.

I don't rejoice in my sufferings.

I struggle in my sufferings.

I'm fetal position in my sufferings.

I'm a complainer in my sufferings.

I don't rejoice in my sufferings.

I'm not even sure how to get there.

This is what Paul wants to lay out for us today.

You watch this pattern, right?

Our standing with God is set.

We've been justified through faith in Jesus Christ.

That means no suffering, nothing that happens to us in suffering can affect our standing with God.

So suffering is not a sign that your standing with God has changed.

On the contrary, because of the work of Jesus Christ, your suffering now becomes a means of God to secure you to the peace that Christ purchased for you on that cross.

Your suffering is a way to, if you could, think of it like a chain link, you know, like a chain whipped around you and pulling you in the direction of the peace of your eternal future.

That's what suffering is for.

And there's links in this chain to get us to this place.

This is why suffering is an ally, not an enemy.

This is why we can rejoice in our suffering.

Now, to be clear, we're not massacred.

Okay?

We don't derive pain from our, excuse me, pleasure from our pain.

But we understand in Jesus Christ, God makes our sufferings profitable to us.

They produce something in us.

And so God makes suffering service, securing purposes.

Now here's where we're going to go here.

There's three links to a chain by which God is pulling us through our suffering to the hope that He has for us.

The hope to which marriage points.

When your marriage gives way in the end, and you die and you go be with the Lord, the hope of what is to come.

Three links in that chain serving God's securing purposes.

Here's the first one about suffering.

Suffering serves to strengthen your marriage.

Suffering serves to strengthen your marriage.

There's two ways you can go on this.

You're gonna believe God at His Word, or you're gonna believe you and your grumpies when you get to suffering, right?

So don't write it down.

This is one of the things that I just want to say as a preacher.

It's kind of one of those off the cuff things.

I don't give a rip if you write it down.

I care if you believe it when you're suffering.

Don't write it down if you're not going to actually look at it and go, I'm going to replace how I feel when I suffer and believe God at His Word.

Are we clear on that?

Because I'll tell you, it doesn't matter if you write it down.

It matters if you believe it when you're suffering.

It matters if you deny yourself and choose in the moment when it's hardest to say, God's right, I don't feel it, and it doesn't matter.

He's true.

That will get you somewhere.

That was my loving pastoral lowercase R rebuke.

Okay.

Knowing that suffering, here's the first one.

Knowing, so we rejoice in our sufferings.

Why?

Because we know something about suffering.

We know suffering produces endurance.

That's the first one.

Suffering produces endurance.

Now, suffering is a word that refers to pressure, okay?

So could come from a bunch of different things.

Affliction, yes.

Distress, yes.

Should I give you some categories within your married life that may fit in this category of suffering?

Here we go.

Sickness that you may face.

Sound familiar?

Various kinds of health setbacks that were unanticipated, but just a constant nagging issue.

Is it life-threatening?

No.

Is it life-altering?

Yes.

Job loss, house foreclosure, unanticipated, unexpected move, infertility, struggling with a difficult child and how to parent them, family dynamics, aging parents, deaths around you.

All of this can be at play.

All of them are pressures that are brought on by some sort of affliction or distress, but God wants you to know that in Jesus Christ, those kind of pressures are actually designed by God, and whatever negative they could do for you, God has taken the venom out of it, and in Christ, He's causing that suffering to produce endurance, which is the capacity to remain steadfast under pressure.

He's building in you the capacity to remain steadfast under pressure.

In other words, God's big plan with suffering is that your marriages don't actually get stronger by avoiding difficulty.

They get stronger when we embrace God's good purposes for suffering.

They get stronger when you understand that resistance produces strength.

This is what you do in the gym, isn't it?

You put your muscle under resistance until there's some serious effort that needs to be put in there.

And eventually, over time, your body reacts, your muscles grow, and you get what?

And by the way, the in-between, between the resistance in the gym and you getting stronger, there's that thing you wake up the next morning with.

And that is ow.

Ow.

This is why we go, I'm not doing that again.

I quit.

Right?

The gym, it's terrible.

But it's the old phrase: no pain, no gain.

This is exactly how your faith grows.

You say ow, God goes, I'm working.

We're building muscles, y'all.

Now listen, there are two kinds of resistance that we will face.

We we may exercise.

Let's call it that.

One resistance you exercise is against the suffering itself.

And this is what most of us do in the flesh.

Our fleshly response is how are we gonna embrace the resistance that comes?

We are going to fight the resistance.

So wherever God has taken our straight paths and he's made them crooked, we spend our time trying to straighten what God has made crooked in our life.

We trend to tend to straighten our suffering.

We tend to try to find alleviation as fast as we can.

And we spend all of our effort doing that.

How do I get back to normal?

How do I get back to comfort?

How do I get back to ease?

How do I get back to what makes sense to me?

When instead what we need to do is ask God for strength to sit under his mighty hand.

As Peter says in 1 Peter 5, humble yourself under the mighty hand of God.

If you can recognize in all your sufferings, the suffering that you're under is ultimately through and by the fatherly hand of a God who loves you and is for you and is using this suffering to build endurance.

I was having a conversation with a friend recently who came by and have the side garage door that goes to the backyard, and it's just terribly put in and it was leaking, and I needed to get it fixed before the end of the year.

And it's hard to put up a door by yourself, and let's be honest, he knows a lot more than I do about that stuff.

And so we had a great time talking, and I still, I mean, I'm so cheap from all these years.

I still have all these old, terrible made in China tools.

And they're just like broken, some of them, and they're just jacked up.

And he was, he was talking about man, you gotta get some good stuff.

You gotta get that tempered steel kind of stuff.

And I go, tell me more about that.

And he goes, Yeah, tempered steel is the way to go.

Because it takes way more to break tempered steel.

So all of a sudden we're having this conversation.

I'm going, this is gonna fit in at some point to a sermon.

It does today.

Let me tell you what tempered steel is all about.

Tempered steel is forged through a, listen, controlled reheating process.

It's sovereignly controlled by the one heating the metal, and it's reheated several times to develop this kind of strength that when it's taken off the heat and cooled, it cools in a way that makes it almost indestructible.

It's a fascinating thing.

So you process as the steel's heated and then quickly cooled, and that locks in the atoms, but it's very brittle at the beginning.

But then see, it's reheated to a specific temp, sometimes several times.

And listen, it's held long enough there for the atoms to adjust, relieving the internal stress, and then over time locks in this stability as it cools.

And I thought, that is exactly what God is doing in your suffering.

Listen, your suffering is not out of control.

It is a controlled process of reheating to the exact temp that the Lord would see fit to apply to you until you're not brittle anymore, until you're tempered, until your faith is a tempered faith, until your faith is strong enough to endure.

It has the capacity to remain under.

And so when you think about it, you begin to change your mentality.

You start to rehearse what's reality.

We're here under this suffering by God's will.

God will keep us here in and by his love for as long as he sees fit, and it won't be a second longer, not an iota more, than what he needs to accomplish his good purposes in us through that controlled reheating process.

And in the end, he will surely bring us out because all suffering in the end is seasonal.

It's all temporary.

And so the question is simply this is suffering shaping your view of God, or is God shaping your view of suffering?

That's what you have to ask yourself.

Is suffering shaping your view of God, or is God shaping your view of suffering?

That's the first link.

Paul says, we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance.

But here's the second link in the chain.

The link that God uses to pull us towards the hope of what is to come.

And number two, suffering serves to sharpen your marriages.

So it's not just that suffering produces endurance, but endurance produces character.

So if point one was God wanting to develop in you a tempered faith, point two is God wanting to develop in you a tested faith, a faith that proves good when the going gets tough.

That word character there carries this idea of something being tested and proven genuine.

So if the first link again is tempered steel, then right here you could say maybe that there are um flames are used as they would to purify metal, to make the s uh dross go to the surface, all the impurities of the metal that they might be wiped away.

So God increases the heat and you see what you're made of.

And God wants you to be made of the real stuff.

I don't mean this in a rude way, he just doesn't want you to have a made-in-china faith to go back to the tools thing, right?

He doesn't want to have this brittle faith be the remains of where you are after all these years of marriage.

And so he's after something here.

He's trying to see that you're not only purified, the dross comes to the surface as he heats up the, you know, the pot of suffering, if you will, in your life.

But it's also that when that dross is being raised to the surface, he uses then the chisel as you begin to harden to form Christ in you.

So it's both things at the same time.

And suffering is an amazing way of accelerating our sanctification.

Wouldn't you agree?

What do we say about it?

I wouldn't choose it, but I wouldn't trade it for anything.

Marriage has a way of revealing, doesn't it?

Not just what we really believe to point one, but who we really are.

Marriage is just a stunning way of putting pressure on where sin is hiding.

You go, I don't even have sin.

No, your sin is just dormant.

You do have it, and God's like, I see it.

I know where it is.

And guess what?

One of my best tools for you to find the dormant sin in your life is by marriage somehow putting pressure on it.

God's wanting to form this character.

This is what suffering does.

A couple of things you can write down about suffering.

First of all, suffering sanitizes us, which is which is a great gift from the Lord.

I love the way God's made this work through his redemptive purposes.

Suffering gets sin out of the saints, it sanitizes us.

Listen to this quote.

I have been wrestling with this quote for weeks now.

Thomas Case, the Puritan, said this.

Sin brought affliction into the world.

And God makes affliction to carry sin out of the world.

That is worth the entire sermon.

Go chew on that.

Sin brought affliction into the world.

God makes affliction now a servant to deliver sin out of the world.

Personalize it.

Sin brought affliction into your life.

God makes affliction carry sin out of your life.

He goes on in this way.

He says, God has never intended more good to his children than when he deals most severely with them.

Never is God doing more good in your life than when he is dealing severely with you.

In fact, the greater the trial, the greater the expectation of the blessing that's coming on the other side.

Because God never inflicts a trial without intention to bless.

What if we were under severe suffering and we were like, oh, man, this blessing is going to be huge.

That'd be faith, wouldn't it?

Wouldn't that be faith in action?

I cannot wait.

If it's this big, then the blessing God is intending for us must be massive.

Suffering sanitizes us under that character that we're talking about.

Suffering does another thing, though, it sours us to the things we ought not love as much as we do.

It's one of the things suffering does.

As a kid, I remember I could not stop sucking my thumb.

What a loser, right?

The best part, the best part was that my mom, I think, was embarrassed, which was great.

And so she found the most disgusting paste to stick on my finger.

I remember it to this day.

And it was like every time you do one of those accidental, you're like, no, I'm told it's like accountability every week, you know.

You're like, oh, I did great, and then you actually stumble into it, you know.

So I'm like, no, I'm not gonna gross.

It was so disgusting, I never wanted to do it ever again.

That's exactly what suffering is trying to do in your life.

The same things you used to go back to, the same comforts, the same sins, the same patterns of trusting in and resting in anything other than the Lord.

He's trying to go, ah, no.

Suffering is meant to get that out of here.

That's what he's trying to do.

Suffering is trying to sour you.

As one Pierre said, until sin be bitter, Christ will not be sweet.

He's trying to sweeten Christ to you by souring.

Sin sanitizes the sin out, suffering sanitizes the sin out of you.

Suffering sours you to sin.

And then here's another thing that's interesting: suffering softens you.

So you have the strength, and yet you have the softness, and they come side by side.

Suffering creates what wasn't there before.

Right?

Suffering has this way of tilling the soil, uprooting the weeds in your soul, so to speak, so that you can ultimately be prepared for the seeds of Christ's likeness to be planted and your soul's garden in them to bear fruit.

This is one of the things suffering does.

So we want to be hard in the right ways, and we want to be soft in the right ways.

We want to be hard in that we are strengthened in our faith to hold rock solid steady when things go bad.

But we want to be humbled in such a way that our hearts are soft, malleable, and moldable in the Lord's hands.

Because while he is heating us up, he's not leaving us the way we were.

Like if anything, when he says endurance produces character, he's saying that suffering is meant to ultimately reveal authenticity so you can look and go, I really do believe.

I really am a Christian.

I really do love the Lord.

And you're not sure until suffering comes.

I mean, so many people profess.

So many people walk away.

I was just reading recently about, you know, narrow is the way, right?

In in the Gospels.

That's a word about suffering, right?

That that there's intent there as well about the minute you face something hard, you jump ship.

God wants your faith to be authentic, not a knockoff faith, not a flimsy faith.

A Psalm 119 faith.

Before I was afflicted, I went astray.

But now, I keep your word.

Before I was afflicted, I went astray, but now I keep your word.

God is a way of drawing us in through our suffering.

Suffering serves to strengthen your marriage, that's the first link in the chain.

Number two, suffering serves to sharpen your marriage, that's the second link in the chain, pulling us in the direction of our eternal hope, which is where all of this culminates next week.

Number three, suffering serves to sweeten your marriages.

This is it.

And you see it, right?

Suffering produces endurance.

Endurance character.

And character produces hope.

This is where it's going.

This is what God's trying to do here.

Now, hope is not wishful thinking.

That's not the power of positive thinking.

Hope's not even anticipation, like my faith-filled anticipation.

Hope is a confident expectation.

Rooted in the rock solid certainty of the future fulfillment of the promises of God.

If you wanted to say it another way, this point is basically saying affliction produces assurance in the believer.

How many conversations do I have as a pastor with somebody who was just like, man, I'm not sure if I'm a Christian?

I'm like, listen, the suffering that God will appoint for your life will be one of those gauges by which you can really see where your faith stands.

And it's not meant to be a gotcha moment where you're like, man, I'm not as strong of a Christian as I thought.

It's meant to be an encouraging moment that you're still standing by the grace of God.

And the fact that you're still standing, and albeit when you look back stronger than you were before, all of that is proof of the authenticity of the work that God is doing in your life.

So affliction produces assurance.

So you could say it like this: if Proverbs 13, 12 says, hope deferred makes the heart sick, suffering expands your secure grasp of hope.

It sweetens your outlook.

I've shared this poem before, but William Cooper, and if you have any poem you memorize in your life, it should be this poem, God Moves in a Mysterious Way.

Memorize that poem, live by it.

Let it sit right next to these verses in Romans 5.

Let it sit right next to the verses in 2 Corinthians 1.

Let it sit right next to those verses where struggle and suffering are pictured.

But here's what he writes Ye fearful saints, fresh courage take.

The clouds ye so much dread are big with mercy and will break in blessings on your head.

Judge not the Lord by feeble sense, which is like feels.

My modern translation.

But trust him for his grace.

Behind a frowning providence, he hides a smiling face.

His purposes will ripen fast, unfolding every hour.

The bud may have a bitter taste, but sweet will be the flower.

The bud is the suffering.

God is trying to sweeten us to the hope of what He's securing for us in our suffering.

And that hope, he says, does not put us to shame, which is another way of saying, does not lead us to a place where we go, man, I had all this hope and I had this all this confidence.

Confidence in Jesus, and in the end, it was such a bust, it was a waste, it was a con.

I was left out to dry.

He says, That'll never happen.

Christ will never put you to shame like that.

Why?

Because God's love has been poured into our hearts.

In other words, He's filling us with love.

When you're in the middle of the suffering, it's meant to be a display, not of his absence from you, but of his presence.

A sign of his love through the Holy Spirit who's been given to us.

You notice the movement.

Paul begins with suffering and he ends with love.

So why can you endure suffering in your marriages?

Here's why, because suffering doesn't get the final word.

Self-infliction may feel like suffering gets the final word.

That's not on the Lord.

But the truth is, is suffering doesn't get the final word.

Hope does.

A hope that won't put you to shame.

See, what's happening in the end is suffering is steering our marriages towards their ultimate destination, the marriage supper of the Lamb, of the eternal glories of what is to come.

Suffering, if anything, does all the work in preparation that we aren't living for this life.

It's meant to wean us from the world we love too much.

Suffering is meant to make us ready for the enjoyment of heaven.

We get so excited about talking about heaven, and then when we get close to death, we get freaked out that we're leaving this life.

Now there's various reasons for that, but some of that is, I don't know if we're prepared for heaven.

God's plan is to prepare us for heaven, to make you actually fit for Christ Himself, ready for the pleasures of heaven.

Suffering sweetens us to heaven's glories.

Suffering does a good thing.

It reminds us this isn't our home.

And the one you're sitting next to, I pray you have an awesome marriage.

I pray after this, at least your marriage is somewhat better.

Or here's the thing.

Maybe I'm being too hopeful.

You have enough tools in this series to make your marriage better.

Okay?

But here's the thing I don't care how great your spouse is, they're not your savior.

And they're not your hope in the end.

And they're not where things are going ultimately.

But they absolutely play a part in the pattern of the glory to come.

Suffering deepens your marriage by driving you to the only hope that will never disappoint.

So, how do you suffer?

Suffer towards Christ together.

Don't suffer alone.

Don't suffer by yourself.

Suffer together towards Christ.

You're gonna suffer in a direction.

Suffer towards Christ.

When you suffer, don't squirm, look at the Savior and see and trust that the fruit he's producing will make you more enduring, have a proven character, and be sweetened to the hope and weaned from the world in such a way that you look at your circumstance and like wine, when it only is crushed and fermented, does it produce such richness?

That's what God's doing in your life.

So instead of asking God, how do I get out of this as soon as possible, ask God, sustain me by your strength to remain under your mighty hand.

To not let my suffering shape my view of you, but to let you shape my view of my suffering.

Let's pray to that end.

Father, we love you and we need you, Lord.

Suffering is real.

Everyone faces it, God, but we do far better when we realize the purpose in it.

And so, Lord, I pray that you would do what you would in the hearts of those who are listening to receive the word, to trust you, that it might bring fruit and bear fruit, good fruit, strengthening, a tempered faith, a tested faith, and a hopeful outlook, weaning us from the world and preparing us for the life to come, which our marriage is ultimately a picture of and pointing us towards.

So, God, would you do that by your grace?

And Father, if there are those in here who do not know you, who do not know your son Jesus Christ, would you grant them repentance and faith to believe upon the Lord Jesus Christ?

That that would be the best beginning to a better marriage.

Sweeten our suffering to us, Lord, in all of these ways.

In Jesus' name.

Amen.