Three boys are in the schoolyard bragging to each other.  After trying to best the others by talking about their strength, their skills at sports, and their money, they start to boast about their fathers. The first boy says, "My dad scribbles a few words on a piece of paper, he calls it a poem, they give him $50." The second boy says, "That's nothing. My Dad scribbles a few words on a piece of paper, he calls it a song, they give him $100."  The third boy says, "I beat you both. My Dad scribbles a few words on a piece of paper, calls it a sermon, and it takes eight people to carry all the money!"

Boasting has a bad image in Christian circles.  The Bible speaks clearly on the subject: “Do not boast about tomorrow”, says Proverbs; “Let not the wise man boast in his wisdom, or the strong man boast of his strength, or the rich man boast in his riches”, says Jeremiah; and Paul commands his readers, “No more boasting (1 Cor), Your boasting is not good”; and James, “boasting is evil”.  So you might find it a little strange that in today’s epistle reading Paul writes this, “We boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God. And not only that, but we also boast in our sufferings.”  Well, the answer to the problem of boasting is ‘it depends on what you’re boasting in’.  If it is yourself, or your achievements, then yes, that boasting is not good.  It’s a form of pride and arrogance.  So, ‘I am such a good person that I deserve God’s blessing’ is bad boasting.  But, as in this passage from Romans, when we boast in something else or someone else it is not necessarily a sin.  In fact the Greek word that Paul uses is the same one for ‘rejoicing’ or ‘glorying’ in something.  So Paul was really saying, ‘We rejoice in our hope of sharing in the glory of God, and we glory in our sufferings’.

But that still seems odd, doesn’t it?  Glorying in suffering, rejoicing in pain or loss or sadness?  This doesn’t sound right.  Yet, that is what Paul is saying.  Rejoice in your suffering.  How?  When we suffer it tends to dominate our thoughts; so how can we rejoice?  And why?  Suffering is a bad thing, isn’t it?  We should be avoiding it, not rejoicing in it, thanking God for sending it to us?  Well, that depends on how we look at suffering.  You see if suffering is a meaningless, destructive enemy of humans then, sure, we should fear it, resist it and do all within our power to avoid it.  But what if suffering can lead to good things?  Because that is what Paul goes on to say.  He gives a reason for why Christians can boast/rejoice in their sufferings.  He says, “Suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.”  Suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope.

Martin Luther King summed it up well when he said, “My personal trials have taught me the value of unmerited suffering. As my sufferings mounted I soon realized that there were two ways that I could respond to my situation: either to react with bitterness or seek to transform the suffering into a creative force. I decided to follow the latter course. Recognizing the necessity for suffering I have tried to make of it virtue. If only to save myself from bitterness, I have attempted to see my personal ordeals as an opportunity to transform myself and heal the people involved in the tragic situation, which now obtains. I have lived these last few years with the conviction that unearned suffering is redemptive.”

So, how can suffering produce good things us?  Paul says it’s a process of four parts.  Suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope.  So you start with the suffering.  I wish I could tell you otherwise.  I wish I could say that it’s optional, but it isn’t.  Pain of the body, the mind and the spirit.  Sickness, anxiety, temptations, bereavement, debt, unemployment, betrayal, disappointment.  You name it.  And it produces, says Paul, endurance.  The longer you suffer, the more you endure it.  Why do you need endurance if the suffering ends soon after it started?  Sometimes we pray to God to remove our suffering and sometimes he does.  Yet other times he chooses to answer our cry for healing in a different way.  He wants to change us; to produce the fruit of endurance, or patience if you prefer.  We can’t learn patience by living an easy life.  Just as a marathon runner can’t learn how to endure the pain of running 26 miles by jogging a few hundred yards each day. 

A man had a particular problem with impatience.  Every day he prayed that God would give him more patience.  And one day he prayed extra fervently that God would grant him patience.  Well, he left for work as usual - a brisk 5 minute walk to the train station which would take him into the city.  But that day something happened to delay him.  His shoe-lace broke.  So, now he had to hobble to the station.  And he arrived just in time to see the rear of the train disappearing around the bend.  And he ranted and swore and punched his briefcase and paced up and down angrily for a whole hour waiting for the next train.  And all that time he was blind to the fact that his broken shoe lace was God’s answer to his prayer.  God provided him with the opportunity to learn patience but he didn’t notice.  I guess he really wanted God to wave his hand over him while he slept and magically he would wake up the next morning with oodles of patience and a big smile on his face.  Sadly, that’s not how God does it.  If we want patience we need to learn it in the University of Hard knocks and if we want endurance we need to develop it in the faculty of suffering.  Suffering and only suffering produces endurance. 

And that, says Paul in the third part of the process, produces character.  Now of course, this doesn’t happen automatically.  People who suffer don’t always produce endurance and character.  Some become bitter.  We’ve all known people who are going through unimaginable physical or mental pain and been touched by the amazing character which they’ve shown.  Their thoughts are outwards.  They’re not looking inwards to their own needs and wishing things were different; they’re looking to see how they can help other people in their needs.  They have character.  They pray, they smile, they trust, they love.  Similarly, we’ve also seen people who have become bitter in their suffering.  Instead of allowing it to produce endurance and grow character in their lives they have allowed their experiences to make them angry and resentful.  And the irony, of course, is that their suffering grows because of their bitterness.  Their faces show the pain of an imprisoned spirit. 

Suffering is the raw material out of which God creates something beautiful.  It’s compost for your garden - you can use it grow beautiful things (patience, endurance, character) or you can use it to grow the weeds of bitterness.

A farmer was owned an old mule that one day fell into a twenty-foot well.  And there it stayed stranded, for hour after hour, making mournful (whatever sound a mule makes when it fall into a well). Now this farmer was hard-headed businessman.  And after weighing up his options and the costs of each he decided that the mule was so old and useless that it wasn’t worth saving, and the well was running dry too, so it was curtains for both.  So he called his neighbors together, told them what happened and they all grabbed some shovels and started throwing dirt into the well to bury the old mule and put him out of his misery. As you can imagine the mule was scared and angry about this initially.  There was dirt landing all over him, gravel going in his eyes, and dust up his nostrils.  But this mule was a canny old beast and worked out that when a shovel load of dirt landed on his back -- he could shake it off and step on the fresh soil.  And he kept on doing this. "Shake it off and step up . . . shake it off and step up!"  No matter how painful the blows, the old mule endured his suffering and kept shaking it off and stepping up!  The mule realized what the farmer had missed, and soon the old mule, battered and exhausted, stepped out of the well! What seemed like it would bury him actually saved him.  All because he used adversity as a ladder out of his grave.

And finally, character, says Romans 5, produces hope.  The great Christian virtue of hope.  The assurance that we will be rescued, even if we have to wait for death for it.  The comforting conviction that our difficulties have a purpose.  There is meaning in our hardships, our illnesses, our pains, our anguish, our broken hearts, our poverty, our rejection.  There is a meaning behind all this.  Life is not a series of random events that mean nothing.  God is behind the events of the world and the events of our lives.  And because of that we can be confident that when we face difficulties of various kinds we have a loving Father and an all-powerful creator calling us to go through and wanting to use us in those times to produce good things for the blessing of others and for our own hope and joy.

The inventor of the polygraph lie-detector (who also invented the cartoon character Wonder Woman) was man named William Marston.  During his research into the way people behave he asked three thousand people, "What do you have to live for?" His findings came as a shock.  94 percent of them said that they were simply enduring the present while they waited for the future; waited for something to happen.  It was "next year" or a "better time" or "someone to die” or “tomorrow”.  Just something.  Anything that might happen and change their circumstances from bad to good.  Marston was struck that these subjects seemed unwilling to understand that all they had was today.  And it strikes me that we can be like the 94 percent of those 3000 people.  We can miss what God is doing today because we are focused on wanting our circumstances to change.  But this is the day that the Lord has made.  A never-to-be repeated gift of 24 hours.  1440 minutes of God’s gift to us.  Yes, many of those minutes might involve suffering, maybe all of them.  But we miss God if we are fantasizing about tomorrow, hoping and waiting for things out of our control to change.

When we’re tempted to do that God calls us again to the words we have heard today.  “We boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God. And not only that, but we also boast in our sufferings. Because suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.”