1 Peter 5:8 “And the God of all grace, who called you to his eternal glory in Christ, after you have suffered a little while, will himself restore you and make you strong, firm, and steadfast.”

Do you see the strength of the promise God gives? There are no conditions attached. There are no words that allow him to wiggle out of this. He doesn’t say he might do this, or he could do this. He says he will.

The Christians to whom Peter wrote lived under persecution. They were slandered by their neighbors. They were considered unpatriotic, un-Roman, because they didn’t offer sacrifices to the emperor or the traditional gods. Their leaders were imprisoned, beaten, and sometimes even killed. We face one set of worries when living in a society in which it seems the criminals are out to get you. It is more discomforting when the government is worse. These people suffered.

We don’t face persecution on the same level as those early Christians. Perhaps some of us look at our lives and don’t see much trouble. We are comfortable, healthy, and optimistic.

But many have the feeling we are living in the worst times ever. We see America’s moral fabric unraveling. We see our country polarized, our economy teetering, wars around the world that threaten to pull us into the conflict.

At some time or other, we all suffer through a personal crisis. Health or money or family problems make us lose sleep at night. They haunt our thoughts during the day. We find it hard to imagine anyone has suffered more trouble than we have.

Jesus warned that only through much trouble would we enter the Kingdom of God. Peter reminds us a few verses later that “brothers throughout the world are undergoing the same kind of sufferings.”

But the Lord never asks us to deal with this all by ourselves. He promises a future in which he has restored us. He will take care of the work of putting things in their proper place in our lives. Through it all, he will support us so that our faith remains strong, firm, and steadfast. It’s a future he promises.

Is there a clue about how he intends to do this when Peter tells us he has “called you to his eternal glory in Christ”? That eternal glory already belongs to each one of us by faith, though we don’t full enjoy it in this life.

Death, on the other hand, may seem like one more of life’s troubles to suffer. Perhaps someone suffering chronic pain or terminally ill can see it as a deliverance from trouble. We may struggle see it that way when we are still strong and healthy.

But we who know how Jesus rose and promised return remember that death is God’s final deliverance. It is the only way to the eternal glory to which we have been called in Christ. There is no fuller restoration than the one we will find on the other side of the grave. There is nowhere we can be stronger, firmer, or more steadfast than our home with him in heaven.

So we take our suffering in stride, and we trust God’s grace to make his promise sure, and our future glorious.