A little while back, LaFonda Chenault shared a Facebook post about piñatas; the humor in it was that, yeah, just about now we all feel like beating something and then eating a bunch of candy—we need a release for this tension.  Maybe we won’t make it.  Maybe God won’t come through for us.  Maybe God is not strong enough, after all.  Maybe He can’t really help us.  Maybe He is against us.  Maybe He has abandoned us.  Along with everyone else, we are dealing with a lot, beloved.  It was a little easier to bear challenges and burdens, fears and troubles, when we were all able to gather together, here.  Now, that feels much harder: we can barely gather.  Now, we are separated.

We’re told this is best, in our own best interest, that it is a serious risk, dangerous, to be near one another, that we are potentially lethal for each other.  Now, there’s a sense of lack of connection, that support we felt, before.  Oh, we try to stay in touch with one another, with more or less success.  Our love and concern for one another has not lessened over these months, even if our loneliness feels stronger.

The power of what is against us seems to be in the ascendant: disease, fear, violence, intimidation, threat, destruction, anger.  “Give us what we want and maybe we’ll stop terrorizing you.  maybe we won’t hurt your family.  Maybe we won’t burn your house down.  Maybe.”  We may want to excuse the anger as righteous anger, we may want to make allowances, try to be understanding.  Let me just suggest that what we are witnessing now has little to do with justice, let alone freedom of speech, but a lot to do with power.  We see the power of violence, that uniquely human ability, that innate talent for destruction, and it causes some of us to tremble, a little.  How easy it would be to join the violence, to be violent, too.  How easy to tear down, hunt down, persecute, punish, vent all our pent-up frustration on some convenient thing, some available body.

We know that’s not the way, though, not God’s way for us.  God makes plain the way for us in Jesus Christ.  When I am afraid, I put my trust in You.  When I am angry, I put my trust in You.  When we give to God the dangerous things in us, surrender them, we are proclaiming that God can handle them, transform them, that God is the one who will make all things right, in God’s own time.  None of those things is easy to proclaim.  Each of those proclamations bears a personal cost.  To affirm our faith is to sacrifice things we might feel reluctant to offer up.  The Gospel cost God, too, who sent His only-begotten Son for our healing, for our salvation.  The cross is a constant reminder, a blessed assurance, that God is not against us.  In Jesus Christ, God demonstrates that He is for us.  We are not abandoned, even if our loneliness feels stronger.

When we are called before God to give an account of our lives, how will any of us have the strength to do it?  Who among us has fully lived as God expects us to live?  All that we have forgotten, God remembers.  All that we remember with greatest shame and regret, God remembers.  How can we bear the thought?  In Jesus Christ, in the power of the Holy Spirit, who bears all, for us.  We do not go alone before God our maker and our judge.  Our advocate stands with us.  We are not abandoned to the righteous judgment of God.  In Christ, God comes through for us.  In Christ, God’s righteous judgment is life for us, mercy, salvation.

Like all the churches to which Paul wrote, the Christians in Rome were under pressure.  They were dealing with a lot.  They saw the power of violence setting its eyes upon them.  Neither society, nor culture, nor politics was going to help make it easy to be a Christian, though there were many opportunities to make it easy on yourself by making accommodations: a slight softening of the message here, a gentle altering of the message there, a shift in emphasis, a relaxing, a seeking terms with the world.  The alternative was persecution and suffering.  Maybe God can’t really help us.  What is the help we are seeking?  Escape?  But what if the help comes in the form of endurance?  We’d rather escape.

We don’t like suffering.  Suffering is evil.  We prefer death to suffering!  The comfort we want to be able to share when someone dies is that the deceased didn’t suffer.  What we have in mind is an excess of suffering, unbearable suffering, for we all know the suffering that we do bear, each day: our physical sufferings, our emotional sufferings, the sufferings in our souls.  Our hurts.  They make us feel lonely and afraid.  How can we bear it?  How can we bear up?  There was a time when we all could come here and be together; we are no longer in that time.  What resources do we have, now?  Beloved, we still have God’s Word.  We have prayer.  We have our voices.  We have a hope, and we have faith.

Endurance, perseverance, patience—how little these are valued out there, yet how great their value, as we are coming to know, now more than ever.  Fight, hide, tear down, lockdown, shut down—these are the values of the day, values of destruction because destruction has been empowered.  Endurance, perseverance, patience—these are gifts, blessings, provision from God, our daily bread that sustains us.  Have there never been times in your life when all that you seemed to have left was patience, and faith?  Jesus shows us, tells us how to endure: just consider his endurance, and his patience!  The Holy Spirit gives us grace to endure and is actively at work within each of us to enable us to desire that grace more and more, to rely upon it more and more.

We fear suffering, yet we suffer already.  Life is already filled with suffering.  We didn’t truly know how to endure it before we knew Jesus.  We know how to endure it now.  Our endurance, perseverance, patience, and faith—these have a point and a purpose: full communion with God, salvation, eternity, joy beyond measure, fulfillment.  Before we knew Jesus—truly knew him, truly had room for him in our heart—our resources for endurance were limited, pathetic, and all too often self-destructive.  We still bear the scars of those false resources; we are the walking wounded.  Now, with Christ, our resources are unlimited, glorious, yet this world still plays upon our lingering, latent fears that God might not be strong enough, after all, might not be able to provide us with an escape.  And He doesn’t.  He does not provide us with an escape.  He offers the gifts of endurance, patience, and perseverance.  But we don’t want to weather the storm.  We want the storm to go away.

The challenges remain.  They don’t go away.  They don’t even, necessarily, decrease.  If anything, the challenges increase as our faith grows, because the world hates any faith it has not dictated, any faith it does not control, shape, and guide to its own deadly ends.  Any faith in what is not God can only lead one place, beloved.

Paul tells us something for our comfort and encouragement, but do we receive it as comfort and encouragement?  He says to those battered, fearful, suffering Christians that, “in all things God works for the good of those who love Him, who have been called according to His purpose” (8:28).  Huh.  Is that supposed to cheer us up?  In all things.  All things?  In whatever happens, Paul says, God is actively working for our good, as we love Him.  That’s a huge test of love, though.  In all things.  In all good things, yes, I can endorse that; I like that and agree.  When things are going well, and life is good, yes, I know that God is at work for my good—it’s so obvious!  But what about the things that aren’t good?  Is God still at work for our good, even in those things, those times?  How can we know if it doesn’t feel that way?  We love our feelings.  Do we love faith more?  When we feel, we feel alive!  But life is with faith.

I could speak of maturity and fortitude, resilience and resolve.  All that may be true, it may even be bracing, but we don’t live that way, always.  We crumble and cry—if only on the inside.  We feel as if our lives have become brittle.  Maybe we won’t make it.  Paul invites us to accept, to believe that, in adversity, God is even there at work for us, actively, powerfully at work for our good, and always successfully, because God does not fail.  God says, for the sake of the wheat, let the weeds remain, for now.  We know we do not walk by sight but by faith.

Faith sees beyond the present; it remembers the past and has God-given confidence in the future: God will provide, will preserve, will save.  God will bless.  Our confidence is not in us, not in our personal or even collective resources.  When we put faith in ourselves, we end up with the chaos and turmoil we see around us, a brittle society, a coarse culture.  Intimidation, anger, and violence in the air—the Spirit of the Age.  Maybe we won’t make it.  Faith knows that God is providing, preserving, blessing, and saving even now, no matter what’s happening in our lives at any given point.  This is why faith is such a challenge and such a blessing.  Faith blesses us, oh yes, but faith also challenges us, disciplines us as disciples.  To what end?  Why?

Paul says God called us “according to His purpose” (8:28), that God “foreknew” His own (8:29).  Peter says that we were chosen “according to the foreknowledge of God the Father, through the sanctifying work of the Spirit, to be obedient to Jesus Christ and sprinkled with his blood” (1 Peter 1:2).  The Spirit works not according to our merit or worthiness, but according to God’s foreknowledge.  Foreknowledge of what?  Seemingly, foreknowledge of His own.  Our obedience is not some innate talent or ability in us, but the gift of the sanctifying Spirit, working according to God’s plan, for God’s own purposes.  As God continually reminds me, it’s not about us.  Along with perseverance and patience, Christ and the Holy Spirit teach humility.  But we do not live in humble times; we live in times of humiliation.  Humiliation has nothing to do with justice.  Humiliation has to do with power.

God knew from before the beginning who would be His own and who would reject Him, despite every opportunity He gives to turn and be healed.  God does not compel.  He will not compel.  Oh, that He would compel them!  How we grieve over those we love, so dearly, who reject Him.  He saves, according to His purpose.  His ways are not our ways.

Scripture insists that no one is called because of their merit: none are called because they have earned God’s regard or mercy or love.  No one has.  No one can.  Humanity rejects God, rejects God’s instructions for life.  Even God’s own people continue to wrestle and resist.  Did God really say?  You can be like God, knowing good and evil, naming these for yourself—your interpretation, your standard, your way, your wisdom, your compassion, your righteousness.

Graciously, out of all this mess, God mercifully chooses a number for Himself—His wheat.  He didn’t have to.  The remainder He patiently allows to continue in their rejection—it may be that some of them will yet be chosen.  In the end, no one who rejects God, rejects God’s instruction for life, will have any excuse, any ground for a defense: God will not be culpable, He will not be at fault.  God will have given them all every opportunity in this life to receive and believe, rather than reject and revile.

What is this purpose of God, for which we have been foreknown, predestined, and chosen?  It has to do with the glory of God; specifically, in us, it has to do, as Paul reminds us, with being reshaped, restored and renewed, in “the image of His Son” (8:29).  What sin deformed, God is reforming.  Hard exercise can leave us sore.  Strength training builds by breaking; strength training works through resistance, as, for example, resisting sin, resisting the seductions of this world.  We’ll never be “perfect,” but we can become better.  The benefits of such exercise are not immediately obvious, though the soreness and the tiredness are.  We don’t exercise so much from desire or will power as from habit, discipline.  Undisciplined living made us sick—actually, it was killing us.  It helps to have a personal trainer, a coach, a partner, someone who pledges to go the extra mile with us when we just want to collapse and say, “I can’t,” to cry and say “It’s impossible.”

But we will make it, because we have that ally, beloved: God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  Through our God, by the abundant mercy and grace of our God, we also have one another, still and despite all the many obstacles thrown into our path in this life.

Knowing all this, believing this, reveling in this, what shall we say?  God is for us.  We know this by faith, and faith is from God.  What is stronger than God?  Pain?  Violence?  Fear?  Sorrow?  Grief?  Death?  We seem quick to focus upon our lack: lack of courage, lack of strength, maybe lack of happiness, lack of hope, lack of patience, lack of faith.  Maybe we feel our emptiness much more often, and much more strongly, than we feel God’s fullness.  Before we run the marathon, we know we could never run a marathon.  It doesn’t matter if we finish last.  It doesn’t matter if we finish late.

We remain in this world, for the time being.  God’s Word speaks to us, calls to us, assures us that God will fulfill His promise because it is a promise He makes to Himself: He will be glorified.  He breaks through for us.  He has the power.  He will be known, truly.  He will gather His wheat, despite any and all human fears and scoffing to the contrary.  He is strong enough to do it.  He is not against us.  We will make it, sisters, brothers, because God makes it happen for us.  He does not abandon us.  Nothing can separate us “from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord” (8:39).

And to Jesus Christ, who loves us and freed us from our sins by his blood, and made us to be a kingdom, priests of his God and Father, to him be glory and dominion forever and ever.