“we also glory in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope.” (Romans 5:3)
These are some personal reflections that came to me while I was preparing this week’s sermon on Romans 5:1–5. They didn’t quite belong in Sunday’s message, so I’ve gathered them here instead. Think of this as the sermon’s “outtakes” — the material that didn’t make the final cut, but which, as outtakes often do, reveals what was really going on beneath the surface.
On a damp Friday morning, here I am sitting at my desk finishing a sermon on Romans 5:1–5. Paul’s words about peace, grace, and hope feel like fresh air. But it was verse 3 that caught me: “we also glory in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope.”
Over the past two years, I’ve been living with what I now understand as high-functioning anxiety. With medication, better spiritual rhythms, regular meetings with a spiritual director, and a season of counselling, I’ve learned to manage it. From the outside, it’s easy to miss; most weeks I keep everything running. But inwardly there’s often a hum of unease, a sense of strain that I can’t simply “switch off.” I know this doesn’t compare to the deep suffering many people face, and I don’t claim it as such. But it has shaped how I approach faith. It’s made me hungry for a kind of Christianity that doesn’t demand instant transformation but meets people where they are.
This is why Romans 5:3 speaks so powerfully to me. Paul doesn’t promise the removal of suffering; he reframes it. He writes about a process — suffering leading to perseverance, perseverance to character, character to hope. There is no denial of pain here, and no demand to perform victory. Instead, there is the steady assurance that God is at work within the difficulty itself, and that his love is poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit.
I know many find real strength in proclaiming Christ’s victory boldly, and there is deep truth in remembering that the decisive battle has been won. But in my own life, those messages can sometimes feel distant. My anxiety does not vanish through declarations of victory; in fact, pastoring a church where expectations around deliverance and healing vary widely has, perhaps ironically, become one of the factors that feeds my own anxiety.
The more helpful truth has been that Christ is present with me in the middle of it — not waiting for me to get better, but walking with me regardless. His solidarity in suffering has become my anchor. The image that sustains me is not a distant victor on a stage, but Jesus sweating blood in Gethsemane, weeping at the tomb of his friend, and crying out from the cross. A loser in the eyes of the world.
I believe wholeheartedly that God can do the miraculous — I have prayed for it and, at times, witnessed it. Yet more often, I have not seen such prayers answered in the way I hoped. In fact, if every prayer for the miraculous were answered, then by definition those events would cease to be extraordinary and simply become ordinary. The reality remains that most prayers for healing go unanswered. In this light, the wiser pastoral response is found in the guidance Paul gives the Romans in Romans 5:3 when talking about God’s ordinary work.
Perhaps living with anxiety has changed how I pastor. When people share their struggles, I’m less quick to reach for triumphant language and more likely to simply sit with them, to say, “Christ is with you in this. He knows.” It has also, paradoxically, freed me from some of the pressure to make our small Welsh ministry look like a larger, flashier one. Our calling is not to keep up, but to be faithful.
Perhaps this is why Romans 5:3 resonated so deeply in my heart this week. It doesn’t offer escape from suffering but insists that God’s love and hope can grow within it. It’s a vision of Christian life that makes sense not only on a good Sunday, when everything clicks, but also on the quiet Friday morning when the rain falls, the to-do list still undone.
And maybe that’s okay. Maybe the smallness, the ordinariness, the language spoken by fewer tongues, the faith that perseveres without spectacle — maybe that’s precisely where the character and hope Paul describes are forged.
