We Endure Hardship for the Glory of God

We must never forget that we are people of faith—not fantasy, where we deny reality and believe in the delusions of our mind; not human optimism, where we think we can overcome real demonic strongholds with positive thinking; and not presumption, where we decide to take action on our own, apart from divine initiative. Instead, we are people of faith, like Moses, who “chose to be mistreated along with the people of God rather than to enjoy the fleeting pleasures of sin. He regarded disgrace for the sake of Christ as of greater value than the treasures of Egypt, because he was looking ahead to his reward. By faith he left Egypt, not fearing the king’s anger; he persevered because he saw him who is invisible” (Heb. 11:25–27).

As Paul said, we endure hardship and opposition without flinching because “we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal” (2 Cor. 4:18). Nothing can shake our holy confidence in our Lord. Nothing can lessen our resolve, because we are not moved by what we see or feel but rather by who God is and by what He has promised us. Fear has no place in our lives!

That’s why we ground our praying and our proclaiming in a spirit of faith, as Paul also wrote (quoting from Psalm 116:10), “It is written: ‘I believed; therefore I have spoken.’ Since we have that same spirit of faith, we also believe and therefore speak, because we know that the one who raised the Lord Jesus from the dead will also raise us with Jesus and present us with you to himself” (2 Cor. 4:13–14). We too know that Jesus died for our sins and rose triumphant from the grave. We know that the light shines in the darkness and that the darkness cannot overcome it (John 1:5).

We know that in the end Jesus will return and establish His kingdom here on earth, doing away with wickedness and establishing a world of justice and honor. This is what we believe, and this is why we also speak.

It is these eternal realities that infuse us with faith every single day, no matter what comes our way. It is the truth of God and His Word, the truth of the Spirit and the resurrection, the truth of the lordship of Jesus, that help us look beyond the pain and the failures and the setbacks and the injustices of the hour, causing us to shout instead, “We believe God!”