Luke 21:19

“By your endurance you will gain your lives.”
‭‭Luke‬ ‭21:19‬ ‭ESV‬‬

James‬ ‭4:14-15‬ ‭ESV‬‬ “yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes. Instead you ought to say, "If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that."” If we compare our lives spent on this Earth to the eternity that we are promised in Heaven, just as James says, it is like a mist that appears for a time and then vanishes. Our lives are a practically meaningless span of time when you compare them to eternity. A grain of sand in the entirety of the Earth’s oceans, and still that isn't a true enough comparison of how short our lives on this Earth truly are. And I believe this is what Jesus is trying to say here in this verse. This life will be filled with sufferings of many kinds, but compared to the eternity that we are promised for our sufferings, where life will be perfect, the sufferings will be infinitely worth the pain. The suffering will seem like such a microscopic portion of what we will come to know that it will be as if we had never even endured any suffering. No matter how harsh the suffering may seem now in this life, Luke‬ ‭21:18‬ ‭ESV‬‬ “not a hair of your head will perish.” And on top of that we aren't just pointlessly suffering, but we are suffering for Christ, who as Pastor Steve said yesterday, suffered that greatest form of suffering, taking on our penalty of sin, in the most undeserved way, sacrificing his own eternity so that we could have eternity. So how amazing is it that we get to show him how appreciative we are by suffering for what he stands for. Along with the fact that the Holy Spirit gives us the power to suffer through it all. That God is dwelling in us, helping us withstand the hardships of this world. Therefore, no matter how much emotional pain I've felt, no matter how lonely I at times may feel, no matter how badly my body is beaten, no matter how much I am disregarded and hated, no matter how much I fall to sin, I am reserved an eternal seat in Heaven, and no amount of suffering on this Earth will ever take that away from me. So whenever I feel as though I cannot bear the suffering that I am enduring, I am going to reread, at least parts of, the book of Job. Because even with all of the suffering the Job endured, he was able to keep his eyes fixed on God because he knew that no matter what happened to him in this life that God is a “good, good father” and that life in eternity was worth the suffering he had to endure.

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