Bragging Rights (Friday Devotional)

“Therefore, since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand; and we boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God. And not only that, but we also boast in our sufferings, knowing that 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.”

- Romans 5:1-5

When rival teams go head to head, their fans are the biggest beneficiaries. Rivalries have a way of intensifying everything fans already love about sports: the emotion, the competition, the sense of community. During rivalry week, supporters of both the eventual winners and losers get to enjoy the atmosphere and the hype leading up to the big game. But when the final whistle blows, only the victors get to enjoy the bragging rights.

Just hang around the parking lot after a big game and you’ll hear the exuberant fans of the winning team good-naturedly (and sometimes not so good-naturedly) heckling the opposing fans. They’ll recall the game’s biggest plays, they’ll praise their team’s stars and deride the opposition’s, and, when their creativity fails them, they’ll just shout, “Scoreboard!” Their team is on top for now, and until the rivals meet again, all the losers can do is hang their heads. The rules are simple—in victory you’re allowed to boast, but in defeat you have no reason to.

Paul didn’t seem to understand this dynamic when he wrote Romans 5. On the one hand, he says that believers, having been justified by their faith in the saving power of Christ, can boast in the hope of sharing God’s glory. While his use of the word ‘boast’ is better understood as ‘taking pride in,’ rather than outright bragging, our typical notion of how boasting works nevertheless fits here—if you are in Christ, you have been guaranteed a share in God’s victory and his kingdom, so you can boast in that hope.

But as the passage continues, Paul makes a claim that doesn’t line up with our usual conception of when it’s appropriate to boast, saying that we can boast even in our sufferings. At a common sense level, that doesn’t seem to make sense—why would you celebrate when you’ve lost something? In defeat, our cultural understanding is that you can stoically soldier on through the pain and disappointment, you can defiantly cry out, “Wait ‘til next time,” but you cannot boast. You’ve lost, you’ve suffered, you’ve failed—what is there to boast about?

It is at this point that the gospel and the world part ways, because they place their hope in different things. If you do not know Christ, then your hope is placed in victorious outcomes. You might celebrate a graduation or a promotion or a birth, markers of success, drawing hope from the sense of accomplishment they bring. But when you fail or when life fails you, when the victories that gave you reason to hope fade from memory or are transformed into losses, your justification for hoping disappears. When your hope is placed in winning, you can only sustain that hope so long as you keep winning.

But when you know Christ, hope is not found in anything you are doing or that you will do. Rather, it is found in what God has done in Christ, providing salvation and redemption for all who believe. So whether your life is on an upward trajectory or has never looked grimmer, your hope can remain the same, because it is not found in the outcomes of today, but in the glory of eternity.

It is no easy thing to boast in the Lord when you are suffering—it seems to make far more sense to play by the world’s rules and sink into despair until you are winning again. But if you can maintain an eternal perspective, choosing to see life through heaven’s eyes instead of your own, you will find your defeats less crushing and your victories less necessary. May you find your hope not in the shifting sands of circumstance, but in the unshakeable foundation of God’s love.