Your Response to Suffering and Trials Can Inspire Others
Key Verse to Read and Treasure
Therefore we ourselves boast about you in the churches of God for your steadfastness and faith in all your persecutions and in the afflictions that you are enduring—2 Thessalonians 1:4
For Insight
What a word! What a beautiful report to go out about someone who is suffering tremendously in their life. The Christians in Thessalonica were going through a time of suffering and Paul, Silvanus, and Timothy were impressed at the believer’s endurance and faith under so much pressure. Paul didn’t mind boasting to the other churches about this band of believers who were experiencing all kinds of persecutions.
Did you know your response to suffering and trials can be an inspiration to others? The way you respond can help someone in their own journey; can help them make it through their own struggles and trials. Sometimes people will think or say, “If, they can do it, then so can I! “If they can endure under that kind of pressure and hardship, then I can too!”
Think of the people in your own life(time) who are suffering or suffered and endured some very heavy trials in such a graceful way, they became a standard bearer, a spiritual hero to you. I know I can. Dating all the way back to childhood. I can still see their faces and remember how I was impressed even then and I didn’t even know the full extent of what they were going through until I was much older. Yet the memory of how they pressed on or through has stayed with me.
Think of how you can be that kind of sufferer to others today. Maybe you have children, grandchildren, others who may not know the Lord very well, who might be looking at you as you suffer, experience trials of all kinds. It may not be your conscious goal but you might be their standard-bearer and hero just as someone else was or is for you.
Paul’s words of praise for the believers in Thessalonica did inspire others in their suffering and our suffering can inspire others during theirs. When we suffer with a word of praise on our lips and grace in our heart God is pleased, the Church of Christ is strengthened, and the kingdom of God advanced on earth.
Life Lesson
We don’t bear up under suffering for show. Impressing others should not be our goal but when we suffer, and our testimony is genuine and heartfelt then we can’t help but inspire others to get through their own seasons and times of suffering.
Prayer
Let my life praise you, O Lord. Let the way I endure suffering be an inspiration to someone else. Amen
Digging Deeper
Devotionally Yours 