“And not only that, but we also boast in our afflictions, because we know that affliction produces endurance, endurance produces proven character, and proven character produces hope. 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.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

The Gospel isn’t just one thing. It is many things, and all of them are good. It’s the sort of thing where the more you explore it and the deeper you understand it, the more you come to find is there; the more you come to find just how comprehensive it truly is. Paul here has started unpacking the benefits of the Gospel. He started with peace, went to grace and glory, and now he takes us into territory it doesn’t seem like the Gospel should touch. Let’s talk about what the Gospel has to say about our hard times.

It’s easy to criticize something when you don’t understand it. Why do you think the great American pastime of Monday Morning Quarterbacking exists? I suspect something like that exists in other parts of the world with what we call soccer or rugby or cricket or whatever else the most popular televised sport happens to be. After my Kansas City Chiefs’ embarrassing loss in the Super Bowl a few weeks ago, I had several conversations that involved talk of the absolute necessity of our firing our offensive coordinator with whose performance I’ve never really been happy in spite of the fact that the team has never not at least made it to the Super Bowl during his tenure. The truth, though, is that I don’t understand football nearly well enough that my thoughts on the matter are even worth considering on the part of one of the people who would actually have real input into such a decision.

When it comes to the Christian worldview, though, I’m a little more comfortable with my level of knowledge (although there are many people who know and understand vastly more about it than I do). As a result, it’s amusing…and sometimes infuriating…when I see or hear about strident criticisms that reflect almost no meaningful knowledge of the subject in question.

That being said, it’s not hard to understand why it attracts such criticisms. The Gospel of Jesus Christ involves staking out positions that in the view of the unbelieving world range from silly to insane to damnably wrong (although for something to be damnably wrong there must exist a belief in Hell which skeptics don’t have, so I suppose it would just be really, really wrong instead).

What Paul says here is a perfect example. Hard times are something we try to avoid in this life. And, once we are in them, we do anything and everything we can to get ourselves out of them. We don’t boast about them in the modern sense of the word. And we certainly don’t rejoice about them (which is a better translation of the operative Greek word here). And yet Paul here says that our faith in Jesus leads us to do exactly that. We are to boast or rejoice in our afflictions. We are to rejoice in things that make life hard and unpleasant. We are to praise the Lord for situations that leave us somewhere between uncomfortable and agonized.

Why on earth would we do that?

Paul’s glad you asked. In fact, he assumed you would ask because immediately after telling us we should rejoice in our afflictions he goes on to tell us why. We boast or rejoice in our afflictions or hard times because we know that affliction produces endurance.

Let’s take a quick side quest to talk very briefly and simplistically about knowledge. One of the ways philosophers define knowledge is that it is justified, true belief. That is, it is something you have sufficient justifications for believing most notably among which is the fact that it happens to be true. I know the chair I’m sitting in will hold me because I’m currently sitting in it and it hasn’t yet collapsed. In fact, I’ve been sitting in this chair every single day (unless I’ve been out of town) for more than a decade, and it has never once collapsed on me. Even if we were talking about a chair I’ve never seen before in my life being sold in a store, though, I could still say that I know it would hold me. Why? Because I’ve seen chairs before. I know that chairs are built to hold people. I have faith that a store which intends to make a profit and remain in operation isn’t going to knowingly sell chairs that collapse. I could be wrong about it since I’ve never seen it before, but I would still be very comfortable calling my belief knowledge in that case.

Well, shift this back to what Paul says here about our afflictions. We know that afflictions produce endurance. Do we? Of course we do. My son just had his end-of-the-season cross country banquet Sunday night. Running is a kind of affliction. It is a self-inflicted affliction, but it is affliction all the same. When you take it seriously, you willingly, knowingly put your body through great suffering and pain. The result, though, is the ability to run longer and faster. Your endurance increases. The affliction produces endurance. When someone has never faced any kind of adversity or affliction, she’ll often fold at the first sign of trouble. But someone who has been through the ringer a few times holds. She has more endurance. The affliction she has faced has produced endurance. We do indeed know that.

What’s more, endurance produces what Paul calls “proven character.” Someone who has suffered has more compassion for those who are suffering. Someone who has gone without is more generous with those who are in danger of going without themselves. Someone who has lost a loved one can provide the most meaningful comfort to those who lose loved ones. A person who has been betrayed will often make the most faithful friend because they don’t want someone else to experience what they did. Someone who has been lied is going to be more honest with others. People who have endured all of these various types of afflictions can and often do develop proven character. It is proven because it has been tested by the affliction and borne up in the endurance. They know who they are and so do the people around them.

Now, I should note that proven character like this is not the automatic outcome of enduring afflictions. Sometimes people drift the other direction. They got burned and so they look to burn others as a result. Hurt people very often hurt people. We react from out of our woundedness and try to make others hurt like we do or like we have. This doesn’t mean Paul is wrong, though, because he’s not speaking generally. He’s talking about facing affliction from the context of having faith in Jesus. When we face adversity alongside Him, then it will be more likely to produce this proven character in us as we let His Spirit shape us through afflictions to more closely model the character of Christ in and through our lives.

This, however, isn’t the end of the chain. Paul says finally that this proven character produces hope. How? Well, remember that hope is an enacted belief in a future that will be better than the present. Okay, but how does suffering produce hope? Wouldn’t you expect it to produce despair or at least cynicism about the future? Not when we face it with our faith firmly rooted in Jesus.

When we face afflictions of various kinds in Christ and experience the growth of our ability to endure future troubles along with a growth in character, we develop the entirely justified, proven true belief (that is, we know) that future afflictions will produce similar growth in endurance and proven character in us. If we experience this, then it is possible for others to experience it as well. This means that no matter what hard things we will yet face in the future, good can come out of it. The dystopian malaise that has captured so much of our storytelling over the past couple of generations does not make sense from the standpoint of the Christian worldview. Such dystopian fears are necessarily hopeless. While Christians don’t necessarily think the world is going to get a whole lot better in the short term (in fact, at least Jesus and John were very clear that it won’t), in the long term, God’s kingdom will still arrive, and all things will be restored in and through Christ Jesus. So we have hope.

And this hope won’t ultimately disappoint us either. It’s not mere wishful thinking. It won’t disappoint us in the long term. More importantly than that, it won’t disappoint us in the short term. This is because “God’s love has been poured out in our hearts through the Holy Spirit who was given to us.”

What Paul means here is that when our faith is in Jesus, as Jesus Himself told us would happen, God’s Holy Spirit, the third person of the Trinity, takes up residence in our (metaphorical) hearts, giving us an experience of His love that comforts and encourages and reassures us of both His intention and ability to bring Gospel good out of whatever situation we happen to be facing. That is, in Christ we expect tomorrow to be better than today. With God’s Holy Spirit working in us, we find that indeed it is.

None of this is possible, though, without a firmly rooted belief that God’s coming kingdom is a future reality. Apart from that, there’s no reason to buy any of this. It sounds like so much nonsense. There’s no meaningful hope for the future apart from a belief in Jesus. So, start there, and the rest will fall into place. It won’t be instant or necessarily easy. You’ll be embracing an entirely new worldview framework, and those take time to fully transform all of your old ways of thinking about the world. But with God’s Spirit working in you, you’ll get there with His help. And when you do, you’ll most definitely be glad that you did.