Romans 8:18, HCSB
When I read this verse, my flesh wants to cry out and magnify the "sufferings of this present time." Having struggled with depression, pornography addiction, chronic pain, and my wife's miscarriage in 2012, I have been forced to choose time and again whether I will reject a warped gospel (that is, Prosperity Gospel, which, when faced with tragedy, often gives rise to despair and crippling guilt), draw near to the true Gospel, or simply "check out." I'm ashamed to think of those times I've "checked out," but I praise God for His amazing grace and His abundant patience as He draws me near to Himself--sometimes in providing comfort, sometimes in simply assuring me in the midst of pain.
Paul was no stranger to suffering himself and he was fully aware of the terrible persecution the early church faced. A rational reading of this verse leaves no room for an interpretation which sees Paul as dismissing or dodging the "problem of pain," as C.S. Lewis put it, but rather turning his readers' focus from the temporal to the eternal.
When I listen to old hymns that speak of the assurance of heaven and of believers looking forward to eternal fellowship with God, unimpeded by a corrupt flesh and tendency toward sin, I think that my generation has done itself a great disservice by tending to turn away from the topics of heaven and death except for platitudes and emotional outbursts. The hope of heaven was not given to believers so they might bury their heads in the sand, but rather that they might maintain an eternal perspective and press on in the face of otherwise crippling tragedy and tribulation. The lesson may be lost to Christians living in relative comfort and holding tenuously to their faith, but loss and grief will knock a person to their knees and reveal what they place their hope in.
I hate that my wife and I lost our second child during pregnancy. I hate it so much. I hate that I was exposed to pornography as a teenager and suffer the devastation that porn wreaks on the viewer's mind. I hate that my body is so much fragile flesh and bones. Yet my hope remains in my Savior, in His work of salvation, and in my identity as God's redeemed. A sane estimate of my life flatly rejects the possibility of any kind of salvation on my own merit, so I trust in Him, I lean on Him, even when tragedy knocks me down. My eternity is secure and that gives me hope for this life, as well.
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