We who are strong have an obligation to bear with the failings
of the weak, and not to please ourselves. ² Let each of us please his
neighbor for his good, to build him up. ³ For Christ did not please
himself, but as it is written, "The reproaches of those who reproached
you fell on me." ⁴ For whatever was written in former days was
written for our instruction, that through endurance and through the
encouragement of the Scriptures we might have hope.

Romans 12:12

Rejoice in hope, be patient in tribulation, be constant
in prayer.

There’s a parallel between this message and the one from last time.
That one addressed the role of prayer in the fight for joy, and this
one addresses the role of the Bible in the fight for joy. The reason
we are talking about the fight for joy is Romans 12:12: “Rejoice in
hope, be patient in tribulation, be constant in prayer.” And we have
seen that all of this is in the service of love, which is the main theme
of the paragraph.

So, building on Romans 12:12 and the rest of the New Testament together,
the Christian life works like this: Affliction is normal in this fallen
world (1 Peter 4:12; Romans 8:23). Christ has come and carried our sin
and sorrows to the cross and into the grave, and left them there, and
he rose so that now we have unshakable hope in (not instead of) suffering,
and this hope gives rise to joy. That’s why verse 12 says, “Rejoice
in hope.” This joy sustains patient endurance, which is why verse 12
says, “Be patient in tribulation,” and why Hebrews 12:2 says that Jesus
endured the cross “for the joy that was set before him.” And so we see
that endurance sustains us in the sacrifices of love, since the cross
was the most loving act that was ever done. Blood-bought, Christ-exalting
hope yields indomitable joy, which enables patient endurance in affliction, which sustains the sacrifices
of love.

What Produces and Sustains Our Hope? Prayer!

So the question rose: if hope is that foundational to joy and endurance
and love, what sustains our hope? What keeps us hoping in Christ? The
question is not, “What’s the basis of hope?” That’s Christ! His death
in our place, his resurrection, his sovereign reign over the world.
That is the unshakable basis. It never changes. But we change. We are
vulnerable and fragile and fickle and emotionally unstable. So the question
is what keeps our hearts fixed on Christ, our hope? What produces and
sustains our experience of hope?

Our answer last time was prayer. We based this on Paul’s prayer in
Ephesians 1:18-19, where he prayed for three specifics: “[1] that you
may know what is the hope to which he has called you, [2] what are the
riches of his glorious inheritance in the saints, and [3] what is the
immeasurable greatness of his power toward us who believe”—to keep you
for the hope laid up for you in heaven (1 Peter 1:4-5).

One of the functions of prayer is to enable us to see and savor Christ
as our hope so that he is more precious to us than anything else. Without
praying this for ourselves and our children and our church regularly,
we should not be surprised if our hearts drift away and start feeling
that our hope is in money and work and family and a hundred things that
compete with Christ as our treasure.

What Produces and Sustains Hope? God’s Word!

Now today we ask again, What produces and sustains hope? Since hope
sustains joy and joy sustains endurance and endurance sustains love,
and love is the aim of all Paul’s instruction (1 Timothy 1:5), the great
battle for the Christian is to sustain joyful hope in Christ. We must
see our future with him as more precious and satisfying than any other
treasure. That is what “rejoicing in hope” is: being satisfied with
all that God is, and will be, for us in Christ.

So the second answer we give to this question (How do we awaken and
sustain this joyful hope?) is that we read and meditate on and memorize
the Scriptures. God has appointed these two means above all others for
awakening and sustaining hope: Prayer and musing on God’s
word. If you neglect prayer, your hope in Christ will diminish.
And now we will see just as clearly that if we neglect the word of God,
our hope will diminish.

Paul’s Implicit Demonstration That Scripture Awakens and
Sustains Hope

How does Paul make this plain? He does so implicitly and explicitly.
He shows the immense importance of the word of God first by the fact
that he writes as an apostle of Christ, creating Scripture
for us, and in his writing Scripture he quotes the Old Testament
Scriptures that are already written. Take Romans 12:19 as just one example.
In calling us to love again, he says, “Beloved, never avenge yourselves,
but leave itto the wrath of God, for it is written, ‘Vengeance is mine,
I will repay, says the Lord.’” “As it is written”! Then he quotes Scripture
(Deuteronomy 32:35). And what he quotes is a promise: God will settle
your accounts! God is just, and God will sweep no evil under the rug
of the universe. All accounts will be settled. That is Scripture. That
is something we learn when we read the Bible.

And what is its effect? It lifts the burden of vengeance. We don’t
need to carry this. God will. He promises that no wrong against us will
be overlooked. It will be avenged on the cross, if our abuser repents
and believes. Or it will be avenged in hell. You don’t need to carry
the load of being God. You can hope in him. You can count on future
justice. And in that hope you can rejoice and endure and love--even
those who abuse you (Luke 6:28).

So Paul illustrates implicitly by his own uses of Scripture how we
are to use Scripture. Read it, meditate on it, memorize it, and then
get hope and joy and endurance and love from it. If we don’t do this,
we will be conformed to the world. But if we give ourselves daily to
reading and thinking and memorizing and praying over the word, we will
be transformed in the renewing of our minds and we will have our hope
made strong and our joy unshakable—even in suffering.

That’s Paul’s implicit demonstration of how crucial the
Scriptures are to giving us hope and joy and love, and freeing us, in
this case, from vengeance. Now let’s go to Romans 15 to see Paul’s straightforward,
explicit statement that this is what the Scriptures—the Bible—is
for,
namely, to waken and sustain hope.

Paul’s Explicit Demonstration That Scripture Awakens and
Sustains Hope

Look at verses 2-4, “Let each of us please his neighbor for his good,
to build him up.” In other words, he is telling us again to love each
other. This is what love does. Now he does something that to me is simply
astonishing. What’s not astonishing is that at this point Paul would
use Jesus as an example: Christ, of course, chose pain that we might
be blessed. So you act that way, too. If you have two good legs, don’t
park in the church lot. Please the elderly and the visitors. Park farther
away. Etc. That’s not astonishing that Paul would use Jesus’ self sacrifice
as an example of calling us to please our neighbor before ourselves.

But what is astonishing is where he goes to get an illustration of
Jesus’ self-sacrifice. He could have illustrated from a dozen events
in Jesus life where he was sacrificial in his love. But what does Paul
do? He quotes Scripture written a thousand years before Christ came.
Verse 3: “For Christ did not please himself, but as it is written [then
he quotes David’s Psalm 69:9], ‘The reproaches of those who reproached
you fell on me.’” I think that is amazing.

He is saying: Now treat each other with self-denying love. Then he
supports this exhortation with the life of Jesus. But instead of telling
an instance from Jesus’ life, when he acted this way (say the washing
of the disciples’ feet, John 13:1-2), Paul describes Jesus’ life by
quoting Scripture (verse 3). “As it is written, ‘The reproaches of those
who reproached you fell on me.’” Jesus accepted reproaches which belonged
to us. The penalty that was ours, now became his.

Now that’s very hope-giving—to learn that Jesus bore our reproaches.
The gospel of Christ suffering in our place is the great ground of our
hope. And this hope fills us with joy and joy sustains self-denying
behaviors of love: “Let each of us please his neighbor for his good,
to build him up.” But here’s the amazing thing that catapults Scripture
so high in the fight for joyful hope: Paul does not tell a story about
Jesus’ love, he quotes Old testament Scripture about Jesus.

Now you might ask—I would—how do you know Paul is really making a
point about the importance of Scripture in the fight for joyful hope?
The answer is something else astonishing in this text. Paul interrupts
the flow of his exhortation about how the strong should love the weak,
and comments on the role of Scripture in the Christian life. Think about
this. You are going along in chapters 14 and 15 trying to help believers
who have strong differences about what to eat and what to drink and
what do on Sunday, and you reach for your heaviest gun, namely, the
substitutionary death of Jesus, as a motivation, but instead of telling
a story from Jesus’ life, you quote Psalm 69:9, and then, on top of
that, you pause in the flow of the exhortation and comment on why you
did that.

That’s verse 4, and it’s one of the most important verses in the
Bible about the role of the Bible in your life. He says, in effect,
all right, I have quoted Scripture to illustrate the love of Christ.
You think that strange? Well, I can tell you do! So I will pause here,
in the middle of my exhortation about what love looks like between the
weak and the strong, and tell you why I argue like this. I will tell
you why I saturate my Scripture with Scripture. Here it is. This is
Paul’s explicit statement that the Scriptures are for awakening
and sustaining hope which sustains joy which sustains endurance which
sustains love.

He says, “For [that word “for” signals that he is giving the basis
for why he just quoted the Scriptures] whatever was written in former
days was written for our instruction, that through endurance and through
the encouragement of the Scriptures we might have hope.” Now this is
even more astonishing than the fact that Paul quoted Scripture to illustrate
the love of Christ. Here it says something so sweeping about the Old
Testament that it should set you to reading your Bible vigilantly all
year long. He says, all of it—all of it—is written to waken and sustain
your hope.

Read it again and think about it: “For whatever was written in former
days [all of it—the whole Old Testament] was written for our instruction,
that through endurance and through the encouragement of the Scriptures
we might have hope.” All of it was written to waken and sustain your
hope.

The Word of God and Prayer

So last time we saw that prayer is God’s appointed means to waken
and sustain your hope. And today we see that the Scriptures are God’s
appointed means to awaken and sustain your hope. If we are going to
obey Romans 12:12, “Rejoice in hope, be patient in tribulation,” we
must read and meditate on and memorize the Scriptures. They are God’s
way of wakening and sustaining our hope.

When we pray, “O Lord, enlighten the eyes of my heart to know the
hope of my calling, and the riches of the glory of your inheritance”
(Ephesians 1:18), God says, “Mingle this praying with reading and meditating
and memorizing, and I will waken and sustain your hope. I will open
your eyes to see wonders in the Word of God. And these wonders will
cause hope to rise in your soul.

So my plea, as one of your shepherds who cares about your soul and
whether you live in hope and joy and endurance and love in affliction,
is that you join us in the two initiatives this year: the fighter
verse memory program (or more) and the through-the-Bible-in-a-year
plan which was handed out last time and which are available from
the church or online.

Think of God’s initiative on behalf of your hope! Everything—everything
written
in the Bible is written to give to waken and sustain your hope.
“Whatever was written in former days was written for our instruction,
that through endurance and through the encouragement of the Scriptures
we might have hope.”

This is especially needed at times of great pleasure when you are
tempted to hope in this world, and times of great suffering when you
are tempted to think that God’s sovereignty is not believable, and therefore
the ground of your hope is gone. Reading your Bible has great hope-preserving
power at times like these.

Our Double Grief in These Days

Our grief in these days since the Tsunami struck (December 26, 2004)
has been doubled—first there is the untold suffering and death. One
entire church on the coast of Tamil Nadu, India was wiped out while
they were worshipping. Only one survivor from the whole church. Story
after story breaks your heart.

Then there is a second grief: the religious people around the world,
including some Christians, who say so many God-belittle things. Like
one article in the Wall Street Journal, that said, “No Christian
is licensed to utter odious banalities about God’s inscrutable counsels
or blasphemous suggestions that all this mysteriously serves God’s good
ends” (David B. Hart, “Tremors
of Doubt,” WSJ, December 31, 2004). Such talk compounds
this calamity with greater and greater evil.

Biblical hope and love in this calamity are sustained in many different
ways by the Bible. The central one is that Christ came into our suffering
and conquered it so that it does not have the last word. But Oh, how
much more the Bible has to say so that we are not carried away by calamities
from our hope in the sovereign wisdom and power and goodness of God.
How could a person say what this man said, if he read and believed his
Bible? He writes as a Christian theologian!

Shall we not believe in the God who destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah?
Genesis 19:24—“Then the Lord rained on Sodom and Gomorrah sulfur and
fire from the Lord out of heaven.” Genesis 13:10—“The Lord destroyed
Sodom and Gomorrah.”

Shall we not believe and worship the God of the Exodus? Exodus 13:15—in
the final plague on Egypt it says, “The Lord killed all the firstborn
in the land of Egypt.”

The people of God in those days knew far better than we do what Moses
would write later in Deuteronomy 32:39. Thus says the Lord: “See now
that I, even I, am he, and there is no god beside me; I kill and I make
alive; I wound and I heal; and there is none that can deliver out of
my hand.”

Shall we not trust and reverence the God of Joshua? Joshua 10:11—the
Amorites gathered against Israel, but it says, “The Lord threw down
large stones from heaven on them as far as Azekah, and they died. There
were more who died because of the hailstones than the sons of Israel
killed with the sword.”

Shall we not fear and worship before the God of David? 2 Samuel 12:15—when
David committed adultery and made Bathsheba pregnant, it says, “The
Lord afflicted the child . . . and he became sick” and he died. God
owns all life. He gives and he takes according to his own wisdom which
mingles justice and mercy in perfect proportion. He does not owe any
human any life (Job 1:21).

Over and over in the Scriptures we have descriptions of God’s judgment
on the nations and on his own people. For example Amos 4:10 where God
reminds Israel what he had done: “I sent among you a pestilence after
the manner of Egypt; I killed your young men with the sword, and carried
away your horses,and I made the stench of your camp go up into your
nostrils; yet you did not return to me, declares the Lord.”

Or in the same time Isaiah 37:36 describes what God did to Sennacherib
and the Assyrians when they came against his people, “The angel of the
Lord went out and struck down a hundred and eighty-five thousand in
the camp of the Assyrians. And when people arose early in the morning,
behold, these were all dead bodies.”

And this is what the book of Revelation says will happen in the last
days of God’s wrath on the world. For example Revelation 16:9 describes
one stroke against the earth: “They were scorched by the fierce heat,
and they cursedthe name of God who had power over these plagues. They
did not repent and give him glory.” Oh, let us not be among that number.

Paradoxically, stories like this from the Old and New Testament keep
us from being knocked utterly off balance by the calamities of our own
day. They keep the solid foundation of God’s sovereignty under our hope.
They sustain hope. The heart-rending calamities of our time are not
new—and they are not over. We don’t know all that God is doing in them.
But to say that God cannot be in them, and that his “inscrutable counsels”
are not at work, and that this suffering does not “mysteriously serves
God’s good ends”—to say that shows (to use the words of Jesus) “you
know neither the Scriptures nor the power of God” (Matthew 22:29).

Oh, how I pray that God will incline your heart to his word this
year. May you read the entire Bible—all of it written to sustain your
hope in global and personal calamities. And may you meditate on it day
and night. And may you join us in memorizing week in and week out. And
may God sustain your hope, and your hope sustain your joy and your joy
sustain your endurance and your endurance sustain your sacrifices of
love as you weep with those who weep and give of yourself and your money
to relieve their suffering.