You Greatly Rejoice With Joy Inexpressible

ought to feel and what we ought to say and those sorts of things. There are a lot of passages in scripture that address grief. I've chosen 1 Peter chapter 1 verses 3 through 9 this morning and my hope is that by the end of our time together this morning we'll understand the connection between faith and joy and suffering. That these things are not opposed to one another. that they can exist in the same place, and that often they do exist in the same place, and that according to God's mercy, joy does increase as faith increases, even as we bear the most awful trials. Peter's writing to those who are enduring great persecution for their faith. Satan's after them. And when we endure trials and adversity of whatever sort, I don't want us to disconnect in our minds the source of those trials. I don't want us to go, oh, well, it's just because.

or I guess I deserve it, or God must not like me. There's a war that we live in as Christians, and it rages every day. And there are times when the battles are more intense than others. But through all of that, we have a persecutor, Satan, and we have a savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, a deliverer, a protector. And so it's not our place to recoil and to give up in these times, but rather to persevere and to fight. And so this is what Peter's addressing as he speaks to his audience. I realize that saying that joy ought to be one of the products of suffering doesn't naturally flow. When things get hard, we don't go, how does that, you know, joy doesn't seem to make sense. And so I want to take our time this morning to explain that connection, how it is that joy is produced through affliction, because this is what Peter is telling his hearers.

Would you please stand now for the reading of God's word from 1 Peter 1, verses 3-9. This is the word of the Lord and it is eternally true. Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who according to his great mercy has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, to obtain an inheritance which is imperishable and undefiled and will not fade away, reserved in heaven for you. who are protected by the power of God through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed at the last time. In this you greatly rejoice, even though now for a little while, if necessary, you have been distressed by various trials, so that the proof of your faith, being more precious than gold, which is perishable, even though it is tested by fire, may be found to result in praise and glory and honor.

at the revelation of Jesus Christ. And though you have not seen him, you love him. And though you do not see him now, but believe in him, you greatly rejoice with joy inexpressible and full of glory. Obtaining is the outcome of your faith, the salvation of your souls. This is the word of the Lord. You may be seated. So our text can be divided up basically into two sections. And this is right, obviously, toward the beginning of Peter's letter, picking up in verse 3 of chapter 1. And so what comes before this is a salutation or a greeting, which basically amounts to, I'm Peter, I'm writing to you. And the first thing he has to say to them is what we pick up on here. This is the very beginning of his letter to them.

And so we can take the first three verses, verses 3 through 5, as one section, and then 6 through 9 as a second section, and we'll be working through it that direction. And I want you to know that the context or the purpose for Peter writing to them is their affliction. And it's worth us noting that that's not what he starts with. It is the reason he's writing to them. But he starts with something else. He starts in these beginning verses with praise. Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. And so having known that Peter's audience was suffering and they were enduring great trials, he's writing to strengthen them. Now there's a question in here when you speak to someone who's suffering or when you're suffering yourself of how do you best comfort them, right? When you have someone around that's struggling, you don't know what to say to them. Have you ever had that sense? You're like, I don't know what to say to them. And I think too often what we want to be able to do is in a desire to take away their grief and their pain because we don't like seeing the people that we love suffer.

We expect that there's some sort of pithy statement that we can make that's going to fix it all. And yet such a saying doesn't exist. There's no thing we can say that all of a sudden makes it all better. And too often we speak and have plenty of things to say in an effort to find that special thing to say that end up being unhelpful or hurtful. And so how do you comfort those? How do you speak to those who are in grief? Well, the first thing we see is what Peter does. But I want to contrast it. with how Job's friends came to him. You remember when, in the book of Job, Job is a righteous man. You hear Satan and Jesus, or in the Lord, speaking about Job. Have you considered my servant Job? There's none like him in all the earth, the most righteous man. And Satan asks permission to afflict him. And the Lord grants it. And so he afflicts Job. All of his wealth, all of his family, except his wife, are all destroyed. And Job doesn't.

He doesn't curse the Lord. His wife tempts him to, but he rebukes her. And he holds his tongue and it says, in all of these things, he did not sin with his mouth. And you think, well, certainly this is enough. And then we go back into the interaction with God and Satan. He says, well, let me add his body. If I can afflict his body, then he'll curse God. And so he's granted permission. And he goes in and he covers his body with boils, weeping, painful. sores all over his body from head to toe, such that he's taking a broken pot and scratching it. It's an awful sight to consider. And so this is Job and his friends. They hear about what's going on and they purpose together and they say, we need to go and we need to comfort our friend. And very often when we look at them, we go, well, these guys were idiots. They came and they said all this dumb stuff. But I want you to consider what they did first. Because when they got there, they didn't start speaking.

Listen to Job chapter 2. This is verses 11 through 13. It says, And when they don't recognize him because of his condition, they lift up their voices and they weep. And each of them tore his robe and threw dust over his head toward the sky. Then they sat down on the ground with him for seven days and seven nights, with no one speaking a word to him. For they saw that his pain was very great. So did they do well to this point? And the answer is they did well. They recognized that his pain was very great. They also recognized that they weren't God and that they couldn't just...

Fix it. And so they came with the purpose of sympathizing and comforting him. And when they saw the condition, they said, we're just going to sit here with him. So we're here with him. And it's worth noting that when people are suffering, that's often a very helpful thing. You feel like you're not doing anything because you want to do more. And it's commendable that you want to relieve your loved one's pain. But these men loved Job. And what they did was they came and they sat with him. And they sympathized with him and they comforted him. They went off track when they started to speak.

This is when they went wrong. Now, does that mean we shouldn't speak to those who are afflicted? No. Peter spoke to those who were afflicted. We'll come to what Peter said. What was wrong in general with what Job's friends did? Well, instead of seeking to comfort him, they sought to try to figure out, why did this happen? And the sum of all of their counsel, if you were to start in in chapter 3 and start reading what they say, all of it's aimed at, what did you do to deserve this? You must have done something to deserve this. Now, if I say it that way, you're like, well, that's kind of a dumb thing to do. But it's not an uncommon thing to do. Which one of us, when we see pain, doesn't say why? Which one of our minds doesn't start to say, why did that happen? I wonder what? I wonder the details. And then you start wondering the details with the afflicted. Because they're wondering the same thing. You know, as far as Job has gotten is, shall we accept good from the Lord and not evil? But there's no answer given to him for why he was...

He can't say, well, let me tell you, this is why it all happened. He's in the dark just as they are. And it's an unhelpful thing to come and to start wondering with the afflicted or even in our own minds, I wonder why and I wonder how and did you do something to deserve it and was God somehow at work disciplining and dealing with stuff or something that I don't know about. I contend that those are unhelpful thoughts. You don't know the answer to the questions and it's not helpful to ask them. It's not comforting to ask them. And so Job's friends did well to come and sit with him, to come to him. And even in that, you know, when I say, talk to Dan in their circumstance and see if they want you to come visit with them, it's good that you want to go visit with them. It's very good. And no one doubts that or is concerned about that. That's a good desire. That's the desire that Job's friends had. They heard of his adversity. What they wanted to do is go be with them, go sit with their friend. And so I commence to you that desire.

You ought to want to be with those who suffer and those who mourn and those who weep. You'll find in your heart that there's a part of you that doesn't want to do that. You go, man, stuff's hard over there. I think I'll keep my distance. And I say to you, that's a wicked thing. You go and be with them. But then when you speak, be careful what you say. Don't wonder at the details. You go, well, what should I say then? I say, it's okay first if you say nothing. Job's friends sat there for seven days and seven nights and no one spoke. And that's okay. But if you are going to speak, we need to come now to what Peter says and consider what he's saying to those who are under affliction, those who are suffering trials. And he begins by saying to them, Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who according to his great mercy has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, to obtain an inheritance which is imperishable and undefiled and will not fade away, reserved in heaven for you.

Who are protected by the power of God through faith for salvation, ready to be revealed at the last time. And we have to consider, what is he doing? What is he saying to them? What is the purpose of what Peter's doing here? And what he's doing, simply, is he's redirecting. Or he's giving context. You know, when something difficult happens or something scary happens, you tend to focus on the thing that's most difficult and all of the other, everything else kind of just fades away. Right? You're unaware of it. It just kind of is gone. And you become very myopic. There's just this one thing that we're staring at. And it has no context. It has no foundation. It's just consuming. It's all there is. And affliction is this way. When affliction comes, everything else just kind of takes a back seat naturally in our minds. We lose the context of the rest of our lives. And some of this is necessary. But what Peter does when he comes to them is he gives context.

Because right now their affliction and their pain and their misery is just hanging there. And they're living in the midst of it. And they don't know where to turn or what to do or how to think about it or anything like that. And so Peter comes to them and he says, let me give you some background. Let me give you somewhere to put your feet. Let me give you something to look at. Let's put your affliction on a canvas that's not blank. And so he draws their attention to God who sent his son to save them. Verses 3 through 5 can be summarized as him bringing up God's mercy to them and saying, you're in affliction now. You're having trouble now. You're overwhelmed now. But it won't last forever. And the thing that will last forever is what you don't want to lose sight of. God has sent his son, Jesus, to cause us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of the dead.

And so he's promised to give us two things. If you were to look at how the text is set up, he's promised to give us two things, a living hope and an inheritance. He's caused us to be born again to a living hope. And so that means that there is a context for your suffering. There is an end to it. There is some way to process it. And then he goes on to the fulfillment, verse 4, of what that hope is. You'll obtain an inheritance. And then he describes the inheritance. And I want to contrast the inheritance that he describes with them with the sort of inheritances we get. Now there's one thing that is for sure with inheritances that we would leave, for instance, to our children. And it's this. They're not guaranteed. You can work your whole life. You can do well with your money. You can save it all up. And then you can lose it all.

You can get cancer or something and have to go into the doctor or something like that. There's no guarantee that the inheritance that has been worked for its whole life will actually be there for your children. It's tenuous. But that's not how the inheritance that Peter promised them is. He says their inheritance is imperishable. It can't rot. It can't go away. It doesn't have an expiration date on it. He says also of their inheritance that it's undefiled. So much of the The misery and the pain and the sorrow that we endure in this life is the result of Satan's affliction on us and is the result of sin in this world, whether it's ours or others. But the inheritance that they're promised is undefiled. That means it's not touched by sin. Satan doesn't have access to it. He cannot corrupt it. It will be just as it's been promised. It will not fade away, meaning that its beauty or its desirability will not shrink over time.

And then he ends with saying that it's reserved in heaven for you. And I want you to pay attention to the final word, for you. He could have just said that your inheritance is reserved in heaven. But he's very personal to his people, to their affliction. He says it's reserved in heaven for you. And in these words, we see God's mercy and his kindness to his people. That he's given them a living hope in this world to guide them through the troubles of this world. And he's promised to them an inheritance personally. It reminds me of the words Jesus spoke to his disciples when they said, we don't want you to go away. He said, it's better if I go away from you. He says, I go to prepare a place for you. And if it wasn't so, I would have told you. Jesus is intimately concerned with the care of his people. He's reserved places for them, not just generally, but specifically. And it's meant to be a comfort to them in the midst of their affliction, in the midst of their trial. Now, some of us may have in our hearts going, well, that's all well and good. I'm glad for that inheritance. It sounds wonderful.

I don't think I'm going to make it. I'm glad that my inheritance, you know, the ship of glories, you know, docked in a calm harbor, but I'm out at sea right now and the waves are just crashing over me. And I don't know that I'm going to make it to that safe harbor. I don't feel like it. What am I supposed to do with my present troubles? How am I supposed to get there? Peter anticipates this struggle and he ends this section, verse 5, and he says, for salvation ready to be revealed at the last time. And what he offers to them as a comfort in the midst of these trials is the protection of God. You who are protected by the power of God. And what other comfort can there be? I mean, we can go and we can search and we can look high and low and all over the place for comfort and strength and a path forward in this life. But what better path is there and what better promise or what better comfort is there

than the protection of God. That he would exercise his power for our protection. God has not just promised peace and paradise in the world to come for his people, but also protection in this world against all of the trials that we endure. That he will never leave nor forsake us, no matter how tough it gets. But that through faith, he will protect us. It's sort of a strange thing. faith protect? Is God's protection contingent upon our faith? And I say, well, yeah and no. And it's sort of like having a baby. What's the one thing a woman in labor is convinced of or worried about? Is that this pain is going to last forever. And what do you comfort her with? You say, it's not going to last forever. There's going to come an end. And if you'll walk by faith through this process, there will come an end to it. And at the end of it, You'll say it. All of the pain and all the recovery will have been worth it because you'll have a baby. And she wonders, can I endure it? Can I make it? Can I handle it? And the answer is yes, through faith. Absolutely. And so in that analogy, the woman has faith that God will provide for her. And does he? He does. And it takes just about everything she's got to believe that she's going to make it through. You husbands, it takes everything you've got to believe she's going to make it through.

But we're protected through faith by the power of God. He won't leave us or forsake us. He won't abandon us in our grief or our struggle. And so we trust that God draws near to and stays alongside the weary and the brokenhearted, protecting them as long as they bear their burdens. So then we come to the second part of our text. Peter says, In this you greatly rejoice, referring to what he's just spoken of, the mercy and kindness of God extended to them through Jesus Christ. In this you greatly rejoice. Even though now for a little while, if necessary, you've been distressed by various trials. So this is the context Peter sets up for their grief and their trials. We're not told in detail what their sufferings were, what their trials were, how hard they were. Suffice it to say it was bad enough that Peter decided to write to them about it. In this you greatly rejoice, even though now for a little while, if necessary. There's all these qualifiers to their grief. And it's all meant...

In one way you could read it, you could say he's meaning to minimize, to downplay their grief. And we have to be careful here not to take away Peter's words and go, well, I guess our suffering is just not that bad. Because that's not actually what Peter's saying. He's not saying, well, you're making more out of this than there really is. What he's doing is he's providing context. You remember how when grief comes, we get myopic and we just stare at the grief and we lose sight of... Everything else that goes on. And what Peter's done is opened up our vision and said there's more to it. And in the context of all of the rest of this, your salvation through Jesus Christ our Lord, if you have to suffer even for a little while, not that it's insignificant that you suffer, but if you only have to suffer for this little while, and this little while does mean and carry with it your whole life. This is how valuable the inheritance that is promised to them is to Peter.

That he would say, even if you have to suffer your whole life, it'll be only for a little while. And then he says this strange thing. He says, if necessary. And you have to wonder, are trials necessary? Wouldn't all of us decide that we don't want trials, that they ought not to be necessary? That we would come out of the box with no assembly required? We wouldn't need to be put together by God and grown into the men and women that we ought to be? And yet that's not the case. We need to be renewed. We need to be redeemed. We need to be changed. And one of the things we see in this text is that trials are the tool that God uses to redeem us, to restore us, to make us new, to grow us. I remember hearing a father say one time of, he was speaking after one of his daughters had had a miscarriage, and he said, I'm so glad that I'm not God.

because he's concerned about my daughter's growth and is willing to put her through things that I never would have the strength to do. And I want her to grow. And he was crying. He said, I want her to grow, but I never would have had her grow like this. And he was acknowledging that there was a deficiency in him, that what he wanted was growth without struggle. And he knew that you couldn't have growth without struggle. And so he praised God in the midst of his grief for God growing his daughter. and her husband. So are trials necessary? Yes. Which one of us can say in our own lives we haven't faced trials? Or can say that having faced them that they weren't profitable for us? Difficult as they are. I had another godly older man talk, speaking again of his child, this is a different man, and he'd gone through very difficult things with his daughter. She'd rejected the faith, she'd rejected the family, she'd rejected it all. And then the Lord restored her.

to the faith and to her family and gave back the years that the locusts had eaten. And the father said, I don't ever want to go through that again. And I'm so thankful that we did. And how does that make any sense? That you'd be thankful for the trials, you'd be thankful for the griefs, that you'd praise God for them and in them, and yet at the same time confess your own weakness and say, I don't want to do that again. I don't want you to see Peter as minimizing their grief. Oh, it's just for a little while. Suck it up. Get over it. Pull yourself up by your bootstraps. Everything's going to be fine. That's very, very, very far from what Peter's saying to these people. In no way does he minimize their grief, their pain. And so that means that in no way should we minimize the grief and pain of those around us. That'll be okay. I remember years ago, I don't remember how old I was, but I had a grandma who wasn't really my grandma. She wasn't my blood grandma, but she was my grandma.

And she loved me because she had a son that had died in infancy, right after birth. And this was years ago. This was back in the 30s. So, I don't know, a long, long time ago. And the doctor said to her, well, don't worry about it. You'll have more children. And she never had more children. And what was he doing but minimizing her grief and her pain? Don't worry about it. And you understand in your bones that that's not the thing to say to a grieving mother. And so if it's not the thing to say to a grieving mother, it's not the thing to say to grieving people in general, well, it'll be okay. Our place is not to minimize people's grief any more than it's to try to discern the secret mind of God about why. Even though now for a little while, if necessary, you have been distressed by various trials. And then he tells them why they're going through this. So that the proof of your faith, being more precious than gold, which is perishable, even though tested by fire,

may be found to result in praise and glory and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ. And so I want to say to you what Peter's telling his people. In other words, it's in the times of trial that you prove your faith in Jesus Christ. Because that's what's being tested. Your faith in the doctors is not what's being tested. Your faith in the economy, if we're talking about your money, that's not what's being tested. What's being tested is... Tested is your faith in Jesus. And he compares their faith to gold. And he says, basically, your faith is more precious than gold, and gold has to be refined. And how is gold refined? But put in a pot and burned, cooked, until it gets so hot, it softens. And until it gets so hot that the connection between the gold and the impurity is broken. And the dross, the impurity, raises to the top to be skimmed off.

I want you to think a little bit about purifying gold. When you purify gold, what do you end up with at the end? You probably end up with a big hunk of gold, right? Do any of you have big hunks of gold laying around? Are they useful to you? Maybe you've invested in gold bars, but that's not what I'm talking about. What good is a hunk of pure gold? None of us wear that on our fingers. What's that gold have to go through again, having been purified? Now it's got to be shaped. And how is it shaped? More fire. More fire with a craftsman who knows what to do with molten gold. And this is our God, who takes us in our faith as gold and purifies it and then shapes it as he would. One of the contrasts between gold and fire and our faith is that when gold is purified, it's reduced. It's made smaller. It's made purity.

With gold, it means it becomes less, right? Stuff is taken out of it. And yet when our faith is purified, what happens to it? Does it shrink? Is it made smaller? No. It multiplies. It grows. So if necessary, you've endured these trials so that the proof of your faith being more precious than gold, even though it's tested by fire, may be found to result in praise and honor. Praise and glory and honor. This is the result of it. of those who are suffering, of those who are aggrieved, as their faith is purified, as it's multiplied, the end result, when it comes out, the other end of the trial, is praise and glory and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ. And what that necessarily means is that those who go through the trials and those who are purified grow in their desire to see Jesus revealed.

They look forward with more intensity and more anticipation than they did previously. They become more heavenly minded. As their impurities are removed from them through trial, their faith grows and they love Jesus more. And they want to be with him more. And so the result of their trials and their faith growing is that they will praise and glorify and honor Jesus better at his revelation than they would have otherwise. Now, it's one thing to say, that's what I want. Because if I were to ask you as a Christian, is that what you want? We'd all say, yeah, I want to praise and I want to honor and I want to glorify God better than I do now. And I say, okay, praise God. That's good. You didn't find that desire in your heart on its own. That's something God put in you. Now, consider how he's going to produce it. And don't despise it. These are not times when Satan will leave you alone. They're not times where he goes, oh, you're suffering.

I'll turn down the temptation. It's quite the opposite. When you're suffering, he piles on. His temptations and his attacks become more severe, more frequent, more appealing. This is the nature of battle. This is the nature of the Christian life. You're left fighting and you're left struggling and you're left not sure how it's all going to turn out. Are you going to persevere? You want to persevere. Lord, I believe. Help my unbelief. Right? It's a nice verse to say. The context of it is pretty dire. This man's brought his son to Jesus, who's demon-possessed, who's mute. The demon throws his son into the fire and into the water to burn him, to drown him, to kill him. And the man brings his son to Jesus and says, help if you can. And Jesus keys in and he says, if I can, do you believe that I can? And the father, in his haste, with his imperfect faith, I believe, help my unbelief. He's begging. He's crying out, please help my son before he's consumed. And so his faith was not perfect. It's almost an exclamation. I believe, help my unbelief. Have mercy, please. My son is about to die. And Jesus heals him. And so I don't want you seeing as we read all of this and consider it is that your faith has to be perfect. If your faith was perfect, think of it this way. If your faith was perfect, you'd have no need of trials.

they wouldn't be necessary because you'd pass them with flying colors. The reason we have trials is because our faith is imperfect and in needing of improvement. And so the Lord sends them into our lives that we would be better prepared to praise and honor and glorify him when he reveals his son. Another way of saying is that our trials are meant to draw us closer to Jesus and to put our priorities in order. What do we love? What do we cling to when life gets hard? If it takes fire to get gold to release its impurities, this is what makes it valuable. You understand, if you couldn't separate the impurities from gold, if you couldn't get the dirt and the rocks and the sand and the stuff that's mixed in with the gold, if you couldn't get it out, the gold wouldn't be valuable. No one would want to make jewelry out of it. And so the same is true of our faith. We're refined. The impurities, the dross, are taken out of us.

And the explanation of faith that Peter uses is very similar to the, in Hebrews, he says, Though you have not seen him, you love him. And though you don't see him now, you believe in him. Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. And by it, the men of old gained approval. And then you go into Hebrews 11 and you read what all of these men did without seeing. Have you ever thought that faith doesn't make sense? Does it make any sense to believe something you can't see? And you wonder why. I was thinking about this yesterday. The reason that it seems that way is because faith is a higher calling than knowledge or reason. It's not lower. Unbelievers would have you think it's lower, that stupid, foolish people have faith. But the exact opposite is true. Those who understand who God is, those who understand the world he's made, those who understand all of the things that he has said, then believe.

And their belief doesn't come from knowledge of the facts. The belief comes from God revealing himself to them. And they understand and comprehend and take hold of something that our natural minds can't. You look at it and you say, well, why would God send his son to die for you? You're a terrible person. And you say, I don't know. I really don't know. I wouldn't have done it if I was him, but he did. And so having not seen him, you love and believe in him. He says, you greatly rejoice. with joy inexpressible and full of glory. And this is a here and now product of our faith in the midst of trials. Joy inexpressible is the sort of thing you can't describe, but you know it when you see it or you know it when you've experienced it. That as life is just unbearable, there is inside of you, by the grace of God, somewhere in there, calmness and peace and even joy.

And it exists right in the midst of the trial. And you try to explain it to somebody. I have joy. And what? It's inexpressible. Are Peter's words not true? You rejoice with joy inexpressible and full of glory. How can you explain the mercy of God and his goodness in the midst of your trial? And yet it's true. And so if you find that in yourself, you should know that it's a good fruit that you're on the right path to obtaining the salvation of your souls. You remember I said at the beginning that our faith is proven through trials. And if you find that God gives you grace in those times, you have all the more reason to rejoice and be thankful and praise God. Because this is not a natural response. Joy is not something that bubbles up in anybody naturally. It's a fruit of the Spirit. It's a gift from God. And so if you find that you have joy in you in the midst of these trials, it doesn't mean that you're not sorry. It doesn't mean that you're not grieved.

But it means you trust God. And you need to trust God. Most especially in times of sorrow and grief. That you're not overcome by them. There are two quick points of application I want to make. And then we'll be done. The first is from Galatians chapter 3, verses 3 and 4. Paul writes in a different context, but true words. He says, The temptation will be to curse God, as Job's wife tempted him to do. And Paul says to us here, you've begun by the Spirit. Are you going to be perfected? Are you going to be redeemed? Are you going to be made holy through the flesh, through giving in to your fleshly desires? Was your suffering in vain? Have you endured so much and gone through so much out of love for Jesus Christ only now to quit? Brother, don't do that. Sister, don't give up.

The life that we live, we live by faith. And so the path that we've started down by faith, we must continue down when it gets hard. You can't turn away from faith in the Lord and his deliverance and his mercy when life gets hard. Or you'll have gone off the path out into the unbeaten wilderness and Satan will have his way with you. And it's not my desire that that would happen to any of us. Having begun by the spirit, are you now being perfected by the flesh? No. He who started a good work in you will bring it to completion. Faithful is he who called you and he will bring it to pass. Second application. Times of trial are times when God reveals himself, most especially as a father to us. Most especially when things are difficult. There's a certain comfort that comes from, you know, men and women offer comfort differently. Nothing wrong with it. It's how God's made it to be. But there's something especially comforting about a father's

and love when you're suffering, is there not? And so in these times of trial, that's what we experience, is the comfort and the mercy of God, the Father, being a father to us. Not saying, well, son, I told you that's what was going to happen. You think of the prodigal son's father and you go, he must have been out of his mind. His son was so awful and wicked. Give me my money so I can go spend it on... My flesh. There you go, son. And when he sees his son off at a distance because he's looking for him, nothing but mercy. Get the robe. Kill the fattened calf. We need to have a party. The love and the comfort of a father. There's nothing like it. And so the Lord's mercies, our Heavenly Father's mercies, are meant to be remembered in times of trial. And that's what Peter's saying to his people. Jesus' Father and ours will see you through this. Don't give up. This is what Peter begins with, and it's what we must remember.

and encourage one another with as we walk through life's burdens and their trials. There's nothing to be ashamed of in saying that God will see you through and he'll be merciful to you. He will not abandon you or forsake you. I'm praying for you and I want you to trust God. He's a strong tower and he's a very present help in time of trouble. You can trust him. I trust him with you. I trust him for you. These are the things we say and we do to comfort those who are afflicted. These are the things that are comforting to us when we're afflicted. And it's our privilege to be able to offer such hope to one another. There's no other comfort or hope to be offered. Compare that with, well, it'll be okay. We're thinking good thoughts. It just rings hollow. There's no substance there. But with the Lord, there is. And so by faith, let's stir each other up to trust the Lord in times of trial. Let's pray.