Romans 5:3
What does Romans 5:3 mean?
Not only this, but we also rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces perseverance;
The short answer
Romans 5:3 comes right on the heels of one of Paul's most comforting sentences: because we are justified by faith, we have peace with God and hope of sharing his glory. Then Paul adds something startling. "Not only this," he says — we also rejoice "in our sufferings." The joy of verses 1 and 2 doesn't pause when trouble arrives. Somehow, trouble becomes part of it.
The small word "in" carries real weight here. As Douglas Moo points out in his commentary, Paul isn't saying believers manage to stay joyful in the midst of hardship, gritting their teeth until it passes. He's saying the afflictions themselves become a reason for confidence — evidence, strangely enough, of our redeemed standing with God. And Moo resists the idea that Paul means only persecution, suffering caused directly by faith in Christ. The word Paul uses is broader than that. Every hardship a Christian faces belongs to the collision between the present age and the age to come, the age believers have already been transferred into.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer sharpens this into a pastoral question: what kind of peace did verse 1 actually give you? Some people, he observes, use the cross to settle their inner anxieties — they want calm, not God. That kind of peace evaporates the moment tribulation shows up, which proves it was never peace with God at all. But those who have genuinely found peace in the cross of Christ can come to love even the tribulation in their lives, and can honestly say the words of this verse.
So Romans 5:3 isn't a demand to enjoy pain. It's a claim about what suffering is now free to do: it "produces perseverance," the first link in a chain Paul traces onward toward proven character and a hope that doesn't disappoint.
What scholars say
Moo takes up two questions the verse raises: what it means to boast "in" afflictions rather than merely during them, and whether Paul has only persecution in view. Bonhoeffer answers a different, more searching one — why some people's peace vanishes the moment tribulation arrives, and what it means to love the cross rather than merely use it.
“Not only do sufferings not overthrow the reality of these blessings, but they are themselves occasions for joyful boasting. The believer should boast "not only" in the hope of the glory of God "but also" in afflictions. This means not merely that we are to exult "in the midst of" afflictions but that we are to exult "in" the afflictions themselves: that is, to view them as a basis for further confidence in our redeemed status. What are these "afflictions"? Some would confine them to those sufferings caused directly by the believer's profession of Christ. But Paul's use of the word "affliction(s)" makes any such restriction questionable. Indeed, in a certain sense, all sufferings are "on behalf of Christ." This is so because all the evil that the Christian experiences reflects the conflict between this age, dominated by Satan, and the age to come, to which the Christian has been transferred by faith.”
“Basically, they have sought only peace with the world and perhaps believe that with the cross of Jesus Christ they can at best deal with themselves and with all their own questions; that is, they can find an inner peace of the soul. Thus, they have used the cross but have not loved it. They have sought peace only for their own sake. But when tribulation comes, this peace quickly disappears. It was not peace with God, for they hate the tribulation that God sends…. Those who love the cross of Jesus Christ, who have found peace in it, will also begin to love the tribulation in their life, and ultimately they can say with the Scripture: “We also boast in our sufferings” (Rom. 5:3).”
What it means for you
When hardship comes, it quietly asks you what your peace is made of. If your faith was mainly a tool for feeling calm, trouble will expose that — and that exposure, painful as it is, can be a gift, pushing you toward the real thing. If your peace rests on being reconciled to God, then suffering can't take it, and Paul says it can actually strengthen it. You don't have to pretend the pain is pleasant. Instead, try naming what it's producing: endurance you didn't have last year, a hope less dependent on circumstances. That reframing — from "why is this happening?" to "what is this building?" — is the practical heart of Romans 5:3.
Romans 5 in context
Romans 5 opens a new movement in Paul's letter. Having argued in chapters 1–4 that all people are justified by faith rather than by works of the law, Paul now describes what that justification gives us: peace with God, access to grace, and hope of glory (5:1–2). Verses 3–5 extend that hope into hardship, tracing a chain from suffering to perseverance to character to a hope confirmed by God's love poured out through the Spirit. The rest of the chapter grounds it all in Christ's death for the ungodly and the contrast between Adam and Christ.