Summary: No one likes to go through trials, suffering, and pain. But God can use these trials to strengthen the faith and character of Jesus’s disciples, and make us more like Jesus.
Introduction
In my last post, I talked about God’s goals in our spiritual formation. In this post, I introduced two of four character chains described in Paul’s epistles.
Did you ever have a moment where you needed encouragement and to be reminded of the big picture of your suffering? That’s what Paul brings to the table for us. I call the transformation process of Jesus’s disciples character chains. God is working on our character by taking advantage of adversity in our lives.
In the future of these teachings on discipleship and spiritual formation I will address Christian suffering in its many forms. But for now, I want to focus on the process Jesus takes us through when adversity comes to us. God uses adversity to strengthen us into the people He calls His own. Suffering is not pleasant, but it does a great deal of improvement to our character.
As we look at each character chain, think back to all the times you have seen God do incredible work in your life through the adversity you face. It changes your reaction to the suffering and adversity you encounter next. We will look at each character chain in canonical order. Let’s get started.
Suffering Produces Hope and Love (Romans 5:3-5)
The first two character chains in the epistles comes from Paul. When he introduces our first character chain, Paul is expounding the blessings and graces of our salvation. He explains that some benefits of our salvation include justification by faith, peace with God through Jesus, access by faith into God’s grace, and hope of the glory of God (Romans 5:1-2).
Next, Paul introduces his character chain by telling us what may seem like a paradox. He says we rejoice in our sufferings. We will hear the same thing from James in our last character chain. So I will address it here. How can we rejoice in our sufferings? Suffering causes pain, and no one looks for suffering and enjoys it. We are not Christian masochists.
When we suffer, and suffering will find us, we rejoice because of the result of suffering that God allows in our lives. The character chain Paul introduces makes sense of suffering and brings us rejoicing. The suffering itself does not bring rejoicing. Our knowledge of what God is doing through such adversity causes us to rejoice. Let’s look at this first chain.
“Not only that, but we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.” (Romans 5:3–5, ESV)
After Paul has mentioned four benefits of our salvation, he includes suffering as a benefit because its result produces hope and God’s love in our hearts. It begins with suffering from whatever adversity we face. Preachers who tell people who come to Christ and commit themselves to Him that life will be perfect and they will enjoy happiness, health, and wealth to a grave disservice to new Christians.
They come to Christ partially because they hear of how great Christian life is. But that’s not what Jesus promises in the Bible. He tells us we will suffer tribulation (John 16:33). Our hardships do not go to waste. God has a plan to use this adversity to form our Christian character as Jesus’s disciples. It begins with suffering, but we can rejoice that God does not leave it there.
We rejoice because we know God is working all things together for our good (Romans 8:28). It doesn’t mean we will see that good immediately. We must go through the hard times to see what God is doing in our character. Suffering produces endurance, the bearing up under the pressure adversity brings. The first part of our character God improves is our ability to endure adversity.
We don’t see it at the time, but Jesus gives us His strength and peace to bear up under the pressure of the adversity. Picture pressure-treated wood. It can handle great strains because it has been treated with chemicals that help it withstand greater stress and pressure. Unless you are causing your stress, it may be a useful tool for God to mold you into the person He wants you to be.
That endurance produces character in us. The word “character” describes God’s approval when we stand the tests and trials. It is the aftereffect of tests of our faith. When we stand up under the pressure and stress of a test or trial, we have character forged in the test. There’s no other way to get “character.” It’s the result of the tests and the adversity we face.
As we gain character in our trials, it leads us to hope in the Lord for greater things. We can describe hope as a future -looking faith. Our hope believes God’s promises even though we haven’t seen them yet. It fuels our faith to trust for what we know we will see. You only need hope when you’re waiting for God’s promises to become your reality.
Hope doesn’t disappoint us because we see God’s love in the things He does for us before His promise is finalized in our lives. His love proves our hope. We gain hope from passing trials with character. We gain character from the endurance God builds in us through the adversity of our trials. And we have endurance because we suffer in this life. That’s reason to rejoice in our sufferings. It all happens with the adversity most people run from.
Unity and Knowledge Produce Christian Maturity (Ephesians 4:12-16)
Paul’s second character chain comes after he declares the fivefold ministry/leadership gifts of the Spirit. These are the springboard for Paul to talk about how God uses these people with these ministry gifts in our churches and lives. He gives God’s reasoning for giving the gifts and the people to the Church as gifts.
The gift from the Spirit is both the gift given to these people, and the people themselves. The gifts are God’s appointed leadership in apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors, and teachers (Ephesians 4:11). These ministry gifts working in the people who lead the church produce a powerful unity that no one can hinder.
That unity and maturity we receive comes from the ministry of the Holy Spirit through these people. Here’s how Paul describes through a character chain what the Holy Spirit can do with willing and able (because of the gift of the Spirit in them) Spirit-filled and led people:
“to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ, until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ, so that we may no longer be children, tossed to and fro by the waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by human cunning, by craftiness in deceitful schemes. Rather, speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and held together by every joint with which it is equipped, when each part is working properly, makes the body grow so that it builds itself up in love.” (Ephesians 4:12–16, ESV)
God gives these ministry gifts and people to the Church for several reasons. First, it equips the saints for the work of serving (ministry). Their lives and work are poured out before us as a drink offering for the Lord. They don’t ask for us to give them anything. They just obey the Holy Spirit and minister to the Church. Second, the Spirit gives these gifts to build up and encourage the body of Christ. They give us perspective and challenge us.
The third reason the Spirit blesses the Church with these leadership gifts is to bring unity and knowledge of Jesus. Unity is powerful and gives the Holy Spirit’s power to the church. We move as one person because of this unity and knowledge from the Spirit through people with these ministry gifts.
The unity of the Spirit produces within each of us the maturity of Christ, and set us up in the fullness of Jesus. We realize more who He is through the ministry of the leadership gifts. Paul takes a moment to show the opposite of maturity, characterizing it as being children, allowing the waves to toss us about. He describes three types of wind or adversity that we must not allow to control us.
First, the wind of doctrine challenges what we know to be true of God and His Word. It suggests, like the serpent in the garden of Eden, suggests something different, “Did God really say…” We must not listen to these wounds of doctrine that blow in and out of the church, these fads against the faith, try to change the faithful. We must address them and strike them down.
Second, the wind of human cunning, thinking we can solve every problem that comes toward us. Instead of trusting in God and His answers, we conjure up our own. We think we don’t need God to help us. We can handle the trial with our own resources. But that will never work. Trials come to remind us to rely on God for our every need.
Third, and closely related to human cunning, is craftiness and deceitful schemes. Jacob used these to get ahead in life. But he learned that these do not please God. We need to look to God for our blessing and the answers to our prayers. We should not look for deceitful ways and schemes to get what we want. We must learn to rely on God alone. Every blessing we have comes from Him.
Christian maturity does not develop this way. Paul has contrasting them with the way we do grow into perfection, completeness, and maturity. These are synonyms for God’s working in us. We speak the truth to one another in love. We need both truth and love. Some of us are heavy on truth, but we don’t share it in love. If we do love others with the truth, they would never know it. We must also not love someone so much that we are afraid to tell them the truth. Telling people the truth is love. And truly loving people means we tell the truth. The way we do it matters. Learning how to do this requires maturity.
We achieve maturity as we grow into Christ. We work with others as members of the body of Christ. He is the Head of His body. We mature as we look to Him for leadership and learn how to discern His will by listening to His voice. When we build each other up and encourage one another, we are growing closer in maturity to Christ’s goals in His body. And all this happens because the Holy Spirit gives ministry gifts to the Church.
Growth Challenge
When you face trials, how do you react? Nobody wants to endure suffering and trials, but God’s working His good in your faith through them. Look at the adversity you face with confidence in God’s plan to make it more like Jesus through them.
Up Next
Now that we have talked about the character chains in Paul’s epistles, we will conclude our study of character chains by looking at Peter and James.
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