The Bethany Bullet Sermon Message - Week of July 12, 2020

Link to Worship Video for 7/12/20 – HERE

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Romans 8:12-17

“I consider our present sufferings are insignificant when compared to our future glory.”

I suppose if Paul’s medium used to write the inspired Word of God were Twitter he would have faced significant backlash when, even though moved by the Spirit, he said, “I consider our present sufferings are insignificant…”  Yes, we know the rest of the sentence, it’s even printed above… but in a sound bite, twitter, post driven world the black lash would probably have been swift. 

Of course, on the one hand we can understand that can we not?  To make light of another’s sufferings makes one insufferable.  (‘tis true that making more of one’s sufferings that the data supports makes on unbearable & inventing sufferings in order to cause others to suffer makes one intolerable) that said, making light of another’s sufferings makes one insufferable.  That’s obviously not what the apostle was doing.  Paul knew all about sufferings, both communal (the church was always under suspicion, the threat of persecution was always at hand, and the state was none too friendly to this new institution) and personal (“I have worked hard, been flogged more severely, been exposed to death again and again.  Five times I received the forty lashes minus one.  Three times I was beaten with rods, once I was stoned, three times I was shipwrecked… I have been in constant danger, known hunger and faced daily pressure of my concern for the church…”) and he knew that his sufferings were significant to the Lord, significant enough that He came to share in them and make them His own.  Your sufferings, whatever they are, are significant to the Lord.  Significant enough He comes to make them His own.   Yes, our sufferings are significant, yet they are insignificant when compared to the glory that awaits us. 

The glory of eternal days in which anger and animosity are absent forever; where neither tears nor hopes fall, when disease, depression, distress, distrust and divisions disappear to never been known again, when sin and death are no more and God who is all in all is worshiped by all in the unity of the Son, a unity that belongs even now to His heirs. 

That future glory does change our present reality.  If God identifies with us in our sufferings ought we not identify with others in theirs?  We’ve been put in community to hurt when others hurt, to cry when others cry and to console others with the consolation we ourselves have received from God. 

-- Pastor Kevin L. Kritzer