“For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is going to be revealed to us.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

I don’t get sore throats anymore. Not often anyway. And on the rare occasion that I do get one, it’s typically not very bad, and it hardly phases me. This wasn’t always the case. I used to get them fairly frequently. I still remember suffering a bout of mono in high school which featured what was quite literally the worst sore throat of my life. None had been that bad before, and none since have come close to it. Part of the reason none have been that bad since is because that one gave me perspective. Perspective is a powerful thing in the midst of a hard season because it allows us to see beyond the immediate to something bigger than that. One of the blessings of the Gospel is the gift of perspective. Let’s take a look at one of the ways that can be particularly helpful.

When you start looking up the stories of people who have been killed for their faith, it’s hard to find an end to that particular rabbit hole. The easiest place to start is Foxe’s Book of Martyrs. First published in the 1500s, it is little more than a collection of stories of just that: martyrs. Although some of the stories there may be somewhat sensationalized, not nearly all of them are. The raw fact is that people who have committed their lives to Jesus have endured incredible amounts of suffering and abuse because of it over the two millennia of the church.

Those stories persist still today. I just finished telling the story of Jim Elliot and Nate Saint in my sermon from this past Sunday. Much more recently than that is the story of the 20 Egyptian Coptic Christian martyrs who were publicly murdered by ISIS terrorists on a beach in Libya. One man after another was given the chance to recant his faith, and one man after another refused and had his throat slit on camera. When they finally came to the 21st man, a Ghanaian who was not known to be a follower of Jesus, he courageously declared that his God was the same God as the man whose throats had just been slit, and promptly suffered the same fate.

But the things Christians endure in this life go well beyond mere martyrdom. Some of these troubles and sufferings are directly related to their faith. Many more, though, are simply the effects of living in a world that is broken by sin. We suffer through diseases of various kinds, financial hardships, relational betrayals, political upheavals, and so on and so forth. Life is hard. As a fatalist might put it, life is short, hard, and then you die.

Yes, an optimist might protest a bit here and start trying to point out all of the good things we experience in this life. Love, family, friendship, the beauty of the natural world, and the like, but when we are sitting right in the midst of a mess of some sort, such protestations tend to fall on deaf ears. They can even make things feel all the worse by comparison.

When we are in the midst of hard times of one sort or another, where can we find the kind of meaningful, lasting relief that we seek? Well, our circumstances can change. That’s probably the most desired outcome. If our circumstances are hard, if we can change our circumstances so they aren’t hard anymore, that’s obviously the best outcome. But we don’t always have that power. Sometimes our circumstances are hard and there doesn’t seem to be anything that lies within our power we can do to change them.

So, what else is there? Well, we can distract ourselves from them somehow. We can give all our attention to something other than our circumstances. We can throw ourselves into one cause or another. We can focus on helping those around us, trying to do what we can to make their circumstances better. This certainly isn’t a bad thing, but when our own circumstances stubbornly refuse to change, this approach only works for so long. Eventually, the weight of our circumstances gets to be more than we can hold back by focusing on something else. You can only sweep dirt under a rug for so long before the pile gets so big the rug doesn’t hide it any longer. One false step and a big cloud of chaos comes shooting out in all direction.

A third option is one that Paul offers to us here. And this one has the potential of being the best of the bunch. We can learn to see our circumstances, hard as they may be, through a different set of lenses.

As I learned from a great They Might Be Giants’ song, if the sun were hollow, a million earths would fit inside of it. If the sun were next to the earth, you wouldn’t even be able to see the earth by comparison. And yet, if you close one eye and hold your thumb up, you can cover up the sun entirely. When something sits sufficiently near in your field of view, just about no matter how small it is, it can become the only thing you can see. If you open both of your eyes and take in the bigger picture, though, you can see things from a whole different perspective.

The lens of the Gospel gives us that kind of a perspective shift when it comes to our lives and the hard circumstances we face in them. Paul lets us in on this perspective shift here in this verse: “For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is going to be revealed to us.” In other words, the glory that we have waiting for us in Christ and in God’s final kingdom is so surpassingly greater than anything we experience in this life – no matter how hard it may be – that the comparison isn’t even worth making.

The hard things we encounter in this life can feel so hard that we reach the point we start to convince ourselves nothing could bring us back to a place of hopefulness and joy once again. But the promise we have in Christ is that there is a day coming when things will be so unbelievably good that we will hardly be able to remember even the hardest times we faced before getting there. The sore throat I had in high school succeeded in making all subsequent sore throats seem not so bad by comparison.

Similarly, the goodness and glory we have waiting for us in Christ will be so good that all the hard times we face here and now will seem not so bad by comparison. Actually, that’s not a strong enough statement in light of what Paul says here. The goodness and glory we have waiting for us in Christ will be so good that if we even remember the hard times – even our absolute hardest ones that seemed like they were going to make the rest of our lives bad – all we will be able to remember is how the goodness of God was revealed to us more through them. There’s just no comparison. It’s not worth making.

What the Christian worldview offers that no other worldview can come even close to approximating is hope for the future. It is hope rooted in the character of the God who has proven Himself true and trustworthy over and over and over again in and through the lives and experiences of His people. It is a hope Christ Himself secured when He came walking back out of that tomb on the third day. If we will stand firm in this hope, it does indeed have the power to sustain us through the hard times. It can lead us to find peace and joy even when things are falling apart. This is yet another thing that makes the Gospel so good. You should embrace it.