To Encourage You

1 Peter 5:1 “. . . a partaker in the glory that is going to be revealed”

Do the words above have any meaning to you?  Well, if you are a Christian, they should mean everything.  They should motivate you, encourage you, strengthen you, and comfort you for they are a declaration of your future, no matter what.  With these words, Peter is encouraging the spiritual leaders of the early church in the midst of their great suffering. They were hated by the world around them. They were persecuted. They were facing martyrdom.  To say that life was hard for them was an extreme understatement.  So, in the face of this, Peter is encouraging them to hold on. He reminds them that Christ suffered, so they shouldn’t think it strange that they would suffer.  As Jesus had told His disciples before His death “If the world hates you, know that it has hated me before it hated you. If you were of the world, the world would love you as its own; but because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hates you. Remember the word that I said to you: ‘A servant is not greater than his master.’ If they persecuted me, they will also persecute you” (John 15:18-20).

But then Peter points, in the words of Paul Harvey, to “the rest of the story.”  He wants them to realize that “weeping may tarry for the night, but joy comes with the morning” (Psalm 30:5).  He wants them to keep “looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God” (Hebrews 12:2). And as Paul wrote in one of his letters, Peter would have them to know that “the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us” (Romans 8:18). 

You see, Peter had been present at the Transfiguration. He had seen the radiant glory that filled Christ on the inside all the while, on the outside, He had “no form or majesty that we should look at him, and no beauty that we should desire him” (Isaiah 53:2).  And in just the same way, while the life of a believer, particularly when it includes suffering, may not be attractive to anyone who may be observing us, if they could see the radiance of the glory that resides within us, they would be stunned at the wonder of it all.  But it is that glory, that beauty, that new creation that is within us and has transformed our lives that will be evident on the outside in the eternity that awaits. 

You see, the Lord has promised all His children that “no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man imagined, what God has prepared for those who love him — these things God has revealed to us through the Spirit” (1 Corinthians 2:9-10).  Every believer has realized these things in part, because of the transforming work that God has done in their lives.  And they are “sure of this, that he who began a good work in (them) will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ” (Philippians 1:6).  There is coming a day of celebration like they have never known. There is coming a day that has been described for us in Revelation 21, when “(God) will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God.He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.” It will be a glorious city that “has no need of sun or moon to shine on it, for the glory of God gives it light, and its lamp is the Lamb. By its light will the nations walk, and the kings of the earth will bring their glory into it, and its gates will never be shut by day—and there will be no night there. They will bring into it the glory and the honor of the nations. But nothing unclean will ever enter it, nor anyone who does what is detestable or false, but only those who are written in the Lamb’s book of life.”

So, is your name written in that book?  If so, this is the glorious future that awaits you, regardless of how things might look right now!  But if not, if you’re not sure, and if all of your prospects look uncertain at best and at the worst very dim, it can all change for you if you will only believe. As Jesus said plainly, “whoever comes to me I will never cast out” (John 6:37).  And “never” means never for all eternity. The believer lives in the absolute certainly of the eternal glory that is going to be revealed to all those who have trusted in Christ.