Beloved, do not be surprised at the fiery trial when it comes upon you to test you as though something strange were happening to you. But rejoice insofar as you share Christ’s sufferings, that you may also rejoice and be glad when his glory is revealed. Well, good morning Valley View. It’s great to be with you today as we start into a new series, going through the book of First Peter. And you saw the title there, finding Joy in suffering. First, before we dive into that, I want to thank everyone who sponsored Bald Preacher Month last month. It was a great month for our church. Thank you for Andrew, Colby, and Troy for their role in being up here. I’m glad that’s over though. We can move forward… no, each one of them did a great job and I’m really grateful for them. And as I thought about this series and this title, finding Joy in suffering, I was reminded of a story. I think I’ve shared this before. When I was just right out of college, I was helping a friend work when I was trying to decide (whether) to go to ministry, to go into engineering, and I was helping him sell concert tickets at the Louisville Orchestra. And one day I was driving into work, driving my pickup truck down the Shawnee Expressway, just driving along. And it was one of those days where I just felt overwhelmed with joy for the ways God was working in my life in that season. I just felt like he was helping me grow, helping me work through some things, feeling some victories in some areas, and I was just praising him as I drove. If you had those moments where you just felt his presence, maybe more than normal, you felt a sense of joy for what he’s done in your life more than normal. And so here I am driving along, and then all of a sudden, out of nowhere, I hear this tremendous noise. I mean, it sounded like if Isaac were up here just stomping away and you’re under the stage, jumping up and down and also throwing jars of pickles out into the audience, which I hope he doesn’t do. But you could imagine just this horrible racket. So I pull over and I look under the truck, and sure enough, my whole tailpipe from the muffler back had just come loose and it was just kind of teetering there. So I had the noise of the engine. Plus it was clanking off the ground every once in a while. That’s how it sounded to me at least. All right. So what do I do in that moment? I didn’t know what else to do. I just pulled the tailpipe out, threw it in the bed of the truck, and kept driving on to work. We’ll deal with it later. But in that moment, I thought for just a minute. I just had to smile. Here I was, in just this overwhelming moment of praising God. And then a challenge comes. But it didn’t really faze me. His. He had prepared me for that moment because of the joy, because of the delight in him. What happens when that’s reversed, though? When the challenge comes first? When the suffering comes first, when the trial comes first and you’ve got to go find the joy when your immediate reaction isn’t joy. And thank you and delight. How do we find joy in the midst of suffering? That’s part of the message of first Peter. First Peter is going to help us with that, and that’ll carry us through the whole series. Plenty of other topics will be brought up, but that’s probably the main idea that Peter is addressing. How do we find joy in the midst of challenges, trials, suffering? Why First Peter for this? There’s plenty of passages in Scripture we could go to to talk about this. You know, my very first message here at Valley View was from First Peter, the message in view of a call. And it was about how we get along in relationships and some of the ways we interact with one another and bless rather than curse. But ever since then, I’ve been meditating on first Peter, just thinking about so many of the themes in there. And I also noticed in that first year that a lot of people here were carrying around a lot. There are a ton of issues, a ton of burdens, maybe a weightiness, a heaviness that many of us are wrestling with, are carrying. In fact, it felt that heavy. So much so that I asked our prayer team and you may not know this, but there’s a number of different people in our prayer team who go out during the service to pray for you. They slip out in 15 minute increments. They go over to our prayer room just to pray for you while you’re wrestling with whatever it is you’re wrestling with. There just seemed to be heaviness, many more so than normal. We’re enduring a lot, and so we want to turn to prayer, but we also want to turn to God’s Word. That’s partly why we’re memorizing Romans five one through five we did last month. Since that’s five verses, we’re continuing it this month. And there’s a key phrase in there I’ve been hinting at that’s going to set us up for this study on First Peter. He says, we rejoice in hope for the glory of God more than that, though, we rejoice in our sufferings, for our sufferings produce endurance, and endurance produces character. Character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint. That phrase In there – we rejoice in our sufferings. That’s a hard one to say. I’ll be the first to say I don’t like to suffer. Much of my life is structured in a way so that I can suffer as little as possible. I try to avoid it as much as possible. But make no mistake, it will come no matter who you are, if you are alive. Challenges, trials, suffering will come. Why is it that we’re always shocked by that? Look at the very center of our faith. Here’s what we hang on the wall. At the very center of our faith is God, who came in human flesh. And what was his main purpose? To suffer. To die. We have a cross hanging up there. Not a yacht. Not a private jet. Those aren’t our end. Those aren’t our goals. Great if that happens. But that’s our goal. That’s where we’re headed. It should be no surprise, then, that suffering comes. Yet I’m always shocked by it. You think it would be the opposite? I should be shocked when things are great. Always shocked when challenges come. First Peter is going to help us navigate this reality. We’re going to find hope in the midst of the challenges. Hope in Christ, hope in his suffering that will guide us to finding joy in the midst of suffering. Because my hope is that not just that we would endure the challenges at the bare minimum. I hope we do that. But how do we move from just enduring to flourishing to see him work in powerful new ways? And I think if we surveyed the room, most of us would say the ways we’ve seen God move in our life have been more so through the challenges than in the victories. Probably every one of us would say, man, he worked in my life in some amazing ways through the hardest times. I don’t want to go back there. I don’t want to do that again. But he worked in some powerful ways. How do we find joy in the midst of suffering? We’re going to look at First Peter, and if you have a church Bible, that passage should be on the screen with the page number. It’s going to be on page 953. If you don’t have a Bible, we have copies of Bibles that are free for you that allow you to follow along with me. As I read, I try to get people to turn in God’s Word. Turn in your copy of God’s Word. Obviously the page numbers won’t match. That’s okay. We want you reading his word. That’s a huge priority. That’s going to be one of the ways that you get through suffering with flourishing is to be in his word, to know his word. So we’re going to look at First Peter. And in First Peter we’re going to see three things, by the way, that will- you need to know to help endure suffering. Three things you need to know. First, who you are. Going to see these three things in here. First, who you are. Second, what he’s done. And these should be up on the screen. Who you are, what he’s done. And then third, what we need. In order to find joy in suffering, you got to know who you are, what he’s done and what we need. So first of all, look at who we are, who you are in Christ. And we’re just going to look at the first two verses today as we survey a number of themes in the book of First Peter. So here I go. I’m going to read First Peter chapter one, verse one, Peter, an apostle of Jesus Christ, to those who are elect exiles of the dispersion in Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia and Bithynia. So here we have a couple of things going on to set the stage. First, Peter describes himself before he talks about his audience. He describes himself with just two simple words. One is his name, Peter. Greek word petros, rock. It’s where we get words like petrified and petroglyph. Now we know that wasn’t his name originally. His given name was Simon, but Jesus gave him a new name. Jesus called him the Rock. I hope Jesus gives me a cool nickname like that. Most nicknames, all nicknames I’ve been given haven’t been cool. They’re not the ones I wanted, but a cool nickname like the Rock. Here’s the powerful part of that. Was Peter the Rock when Jesus called him that? Jesus knew he would betray him, and yet he called him the Rock. Peter, you are going to stand firm, even though I know I know you won’t. But this is who you are. One of the takeaways for us in that is that when Jesus makes you new, he gives you a new name, but you’re no longer who you were. Will you still go back there at times? Maybe. Peter did, but he gives you a new name. He gives you a new direction. He gives you a new identity and purpose and meaning in life. That’s part of what he does. And Peter calls himself. He doesn’t go back to Simon. I’m Peter. A part of this ties into the whole purpose of the book of First Peter. If you flip over to chapter five just a couple of pages over, you know many books of the Bible will give you this hint. They’ll say something like, this is why I’ve written this book. Not every book does that. But 1 Peter has just a glimpse of that. Chapter five, verse 12. First he introduces a guy, a faithful brother, and he says, I have written, this is why I’ve written. I’ve written briefly to you, exhorting and declaring that this is the true grace of God. And then he says this. Stand firm in it. Peter, the one who didn’t, is calling us. Now, I know the key to moving forward in the grace of God is to stand firm in it. This is going to be a hint in how we navigate suffering, how we navigate challenges, how we find joy in the midst of challenges. It’s to embrace the Peter, to stand firm in the truth, to stand firm in the grace of God. So he calls himself Peter. Then he uses another title. He says Apostle of Jesus Christ. And that word apostle just simply meant messenger in ancient times, well before Christ in the New Testament came along, that was just a word used for a messenger, someone who came delivering a message with the full authority of and on behalf of someone else. And Peter says, my authority, the one I’m speaking for is Jesus Christ. And that term, the apostles in particular, came to be known. They really came to be seen as messengers with similar weight of authority as the Old Testament prophets. In fact, one thing we’re going to see in the book of First Peter that really stands out First Peter is all about the Old Testament. Peter is really unpacking the Old Testament all throughout. There’s something like 20 direct quotes in this short book from the Old Testament. There’s another 20 strong allusions that are probably close to quotes. In fact, one commentator said, almost every verse echoes the Old Testament all throughout. We’re going to see hints of that as we go through, even just these few short verses today. So Peter first describes who he is very briefly, and now he turns to the audience and what we’re going to see throughout the book of First Peter is that when Peter gives direction to his audience, the way he is going to bring hope in the midst of challenges, he’s going to point them to something interesting. In fact, there’s a great quote from Paul Tripp. I think the timing of this is incredible. I’ve got a group of guys. This is why I wasn’t here last week. I got a group of guys I meet with an accountability group. These are guys that were friends of mine in college and we still meet together once a year. We get away and we challenge one another. We hold each other accountable. We encourage one another. But over the last few months, one of the guys will take turns picking a book to read and discuss. One of them chose a book with the title Suffering the timing of that. Certainly Lord had a hand in that. Paul Tripp says it this way. What does Peter say to his audience about how to endure suffering? In fact, we’ll put this quote on the screen. It says Tedd Tripp. It’s actually, I think, Paul Tripp. They’re brothers. They won’t mind if we get it wrong. Either way, here’s what it says. What Peter gives to his struggling readers is marching orders. We’re going to see through the book of Peter. Peter is constantly giving action. There’s something like 35 commands in this short book– action, action, action, action. And there are times where we just need to be comforted, for sure. You’ve been there. Don’t tell me what to do. I just need comfort in this moment. But then there comes the season. Or now it’s time to move forward and take action. And Peter knows who he’s speaking to. This is what they need to hear in the moment. I just want to wallow in my pity. No, lean on Christ, trust him to move forward. That’s why we’re calling this whole series finding Joy in the Midst of Suffering. Go find it. Sometimes if I just wait on it, it may never come. How do I be active to go find it? There are seasons to just wait. You understand what I’m saying? You get that? In First Peter he’s calling us to action. He’s giving marching orders all throughout. So Peter describes who he is. Now he’s going to talk about who they are, which will relate to who we are in him. What does he say? What does he call them? Look back at verse one to those who are elect exiles of the dispersion. Three really important terms that we’re going to unpack elect exiles of the dispersion. Three pretty loaded terms. In fact, when you read those three words, those scream of the Old Testament, all three. We’ll start with that word exiles. That word was often used to refer to those who were living in a foreign land, yet still loyal to their homeland. You might think of Daniel and Esther, who said, even though Daniel in particular, yes, I am here. I’m living in Babylon, but I’m still holding to the values I was brought up with. I’m still holding to my true home. Yes, I’m living in a foreign land. But I got a true home. This isn’t it. When we lived overseas, we were there willingly. We were there doing missions. And yet that country still wasn’t our true home. This was still our true home. We were glad to be there. You know, probably a modern term instead of exile. Might be expat. You might hear if you’re overseas. And I remember one night in particular, we’d been there about a month, and we were sitting on the back porch of this home. We could see the ocean. We were living on an island, large island in the South Pacific, but up on the hillside, all of a sudden I could hear these tremendous explosions, huge, loud, booming explosions. And look up there. It’s off a few miles in the distance, and I see this magnificent display of fireworks. And I knew up on that hillside was the American Embassy. This was the celebration of July 4th. It wasn’t July 4th there because of the date line at the time, but it was July 4th here. And when I saw that I had mixed feelings, my first feeling was, I’m a traitor. I’m not up there helping to shoot them off. So how did I not know this would happen? But the other side of me was, that’s my home. I wanted to go around all the neighbors and go, look, America, that’s my home. That’s not what you want to hear in your own country. But my heart was immediately tugged back home to my true home, my true allegiance. Yes, we’re here willingly. We’re glad to be here. I got a true home somewhere else. We are exiles, every one of us. We live in a culture hostile to your faith. Plenty of times we don’t get direct assaults, but the culture at large is hostile to our faith. If you watch the opening ceremony of the Olympics, you got a taste of this. And many were upset, maybe outraged. In fact, there’s one gentleman, Brant Leatherwood of the Southern Baptist Convention, ERLC. He sent a letter to the Olympic Committee. I’m just going to read you this quote here was his comment because the guy who put it together. Thomas Jolly, said he merely wanted to send a message of love and inclusion and not at all to divide. Brant Leatherwood said this. How did Mr. Jolly think that insulting 2 billion Christians worldwide was going to accomplish that? One response is outrage. That’s appropriate. It’s sad that that happened. Another response, I think for us is sorrow. You know, France is a country that for centuries has been saying to God, get out of our life. We don’t want anything to do with you. Something like 5% of the country goes to church. This is a country known for their magnificent cathedrals, and they’re dead inside. We shouldn’t be shocked that all they know about The Last Supper is that it’s a painting by some old guy. And that should bring deep sorrow. We should be praying for them. Yes. Be upset. Be outraged. That’s true. And yet we should long for them to know Christ, to really know him. That’s their hope, not the Olympics. That’s great. You’re only going to find hope in him, not in just some semblance of unity, but it’s in Christ. We are exiles living in a foreign land, but we know where our true homeland is, and that’s going to be one of the keys to enduring suffering. If you know where your true home is, you’ll know what’s worth suffering for. If you know where home is, you can endure. You know this is worth suffering for because I know where my home is. So he calls them exiles. And then he says they are dispersed. They’re part of the dispersion. Now that word shows up in various places. And historically, it was a technical term to describe the Jews who had been dispersed, who had been spread throughout the ancient world. They were no longer just in Israel. Israel was conquered. The Babylonians came, conquered them, dispersed them, spread them throughout. But here’s the big difference. Notice when he calls them exiles who’ve been dispersed. He uses a word that’s never used to describe to describe Christians or Jews elect exiles, elect exiles of the dispersion. And here’s the big contrast between what happened with the Jews and how he’s describing the Christians. The Jews were dispersed. The Jews went into exile because of disobedience. All the prophets over and over again, you read through the prophets. What are they saying over and over again? Repent, turn back to him. Follow his commands. Stop living the way you’re living and stop rejecting him. Follow him. Repent over and over again. Repent or judgment will come. And judgment comes. And because of their disobedience, because of their rejection of him, they’re exiled. They’re dispersed, they’re spread throughout. But the big difference for Christians, when we see in the New Testament, their dispersion comes because of obedience. In Acts persecution comes from the Jews to the Christians because of their obedience to Christ, they’re spread away from Jerusalem. You see the difference? God has spread Christians throughout the world, and it all started with because of their obedience, suffering came. But that led to him reaching the world. Like I said, I don’t like suffering. I don’t like anything to change. Sometimes God uses the suffering, the persecution to force us into places we wouldn’t go on our own. That was true of the early church. But here’s the beautiful reality of just being called elect exiles of the dispersion. Here’s what that means all throughout the world. You are not alone. We know where our true home is and you’re not alone. You can go to any country. You can meet someone who’s a Christian and in minutes, in minutes, feel an intimacy with them that you haven’t felt with someone you’ve known for decades because of Christ. You’re not alone. He calls them elect exiles of the dispersion, and he calls them and describes the cities where they live. That’s all throughout what is now modern day Turkey, one city after another. Many believe that’s probably some kind of travel route that the person delivering this letter would have gone along to deliver this message, trying to reach many who were following Christ all throughout this area. Who are we? Who does he say they were and thus who we are? We’re people wandering in a foreign land, but we know our true home. And when you know your true home, when you know who you are, you you know what’s worth suffering for. So that’s who we are. Now let’s look at what he’s done. What has he done to make us who we are? Here’s what he says in verse two. You’re elect exiles of the dispersion according to the foreknowledge of God the Father in the sanctification of the spirit. For obedience to Jesus Christ and for sprinkling with his blood. We’ve got three key phrases here to highlight, and the first thing to notice about this is just a hint of the Trinity. You see all three members of the Trinity at work, bringing us to the place of where we can say we know him, elect exiles of the dispersion. God the father is at work, the Holy Spirit’s at work, and Jesus Christ is at work. We’re going to unpack each of these three phrases that describe what he’s done. So look first at this first phrase, verse two, according to the foreknowledge of God the Father, that word foreknowledge shows up in one other place in the New Testament in the noun form. It’s in Acts chapter two, and it refers to the fact that God knew, he had a plan, that Jesus Christ would come and suffer and die. He knew from the beginning of things what would happen. He is in control. He’s not surprised that his people rejected him and said no thanks. He knew that Jesus. He wasn’t shocked that Jesus was put to death. It didn’t unravel everything for him. He had a plan he knew from the beginning, and he knew that those who were formerly rejected would come to follow him. Which, by the way, is all of us. Every single one of us. He knew there would come a day when we would follow him. Now the beautiful part of that is just the reminder. Even when things are spinning out of control, even when you can’t imagine going through anything harder, he’s still in control. He’s still there. We saw that all throughout the book of Esther. His God’s name wasn’t even mentioned in the Book of Esther, but there was just one moment after another where you saw, he’s there, he’s there. And I think in your life, no matter what you’ve been through, you can look back. Maybe not in the moment. Whatever trial you’re facing. Right. Somebodies got one, I hear you. They come sometimes. I hope it’s not the preaching. But whatever comes, you can look back and see. I couldn’t see it at the time, but he’s at work. He was there. He was working in the background. Even when I don’t feel it, he’s working. Even when I don’t see it, he’s working. He never stops. He never stops. He never stops working. That’s what this word is pointing at. That’s what it’s hinting at. The foreknowledge of God the Father. Now, the second person of the Trinity at work is the sanctification of the spirit. That’s a big word. In fact, Colby spent some time unpacking that word sanctification. There’s two different senses of that word. One is just the reality of the initial act of being set apart for God. The Jewish people were to be set apart from the countries around them. They were to have different religious practices, different food laws, different ways of living to set them apart. They would be separate. So there’s that reality to sanctification. I’ve been sanctified, set apart for him. But then there’s also the element of continued growth in him. I continually become sanctified. I grow in what it means to follow him and understand him and know him and love him. And both are true. I think of when Julie and I first married that day, our wedding day, we both were saying, I am now set apart off the market, no longer in the dating game. There’s no one else for me. It’s just you. It’s just us. That day was a declaration of being set apart, and yet there were still many years of learning what it meant to be married and growing and understanding and what it meant to be married. Thankfully, I have that all figured out now. It doesn’t matter who you are, it doesn’t matter how much you think you have figured out. It’s true of marriage and it’s true of walking with Christ. There’s no one who says I’m good. That’s a big red flag if you do. We are continuing to grow, continuing to lean on him. And it’s the Holy Spirit who sets us apart. Here’s the beautiful reality of that. There was a moment when you, when me, when I, when we were either indifferent to Christ, I don’t care. I don’t need to mess with that. Whatever. Or hated him. The hated Christ, hated religion, hated the church. I don’t want anything to do with it. And the Holy Spirit is the one who turned you from there to love. How did you go from you remember this? How did you go from I don’t know, I don’t want anything to do with him to I love him, I love him more than anything else. That’s what we sang this morning. And of course I’m singing it going. I hope that’s true. There are days where I wonder if it’s true. I sing it by faith. But I do love him. Is it perfect love? By no means. But I love him more than anything else. I hope. There are days where I wonder. But I know there’s nothing else that I’ve put my hope in that matters in comparison. Nothing. It’s the Holy Spirit who does that, who set you apart. Now look at this third phrase God the Father, the Holy Spirit. And then he says, for obedience to Jesus Christ and for sprinkling with his blood. This is a complicated one. We’re going to get a little in the weeds here, because the way this is translated, I love the ESV for how it normally sticks close to the original language, but here it does something interesting. It separates two phrases obedience and sprinkling. In the original language those are right together, for obedience and sprinkling. And they’ve been separated here. And I look that happens, I get it. Part of it is for readability. Part of it is to draw out different emphasis, but something gets missed by doing that because there’s another passage. This takes us back to First Peter’s burden for the Old Testament. There’s another passage that directly links obedience and sprinkling of blood. We’re going to look at that briefly. This is going to be in Exodus chapter 24. If you have a church Bible that’s on page 60, flip over there, because I want to show you a couple of verses, sprinkling of blood and obedience. Where else did that occur in Scripture? A great way to study Scripture is to look for where else does what I’m looking at show up? How does the Bible talk about the Bible? Let Scripture interpret Scripture. Commentaries are great. Go to those later. Start with what does Scripture say about Scripture? Exodus chapter 24. We’re going to read verses three through eight or so, and you’re going to see a moment where the nation is set apart, the nation is sanctified through obedience and sprinkling of blood. Blood. This is right after Moses had received the Ten Commandments. He had received the laws. He’s been up on the mountain. It comes back to the people. And he says, look, we need to make an agreement between you and God. Look at verse three. Moses came up and told the people all the words of the Lord and all the rules, and all the people answered with one voice and said all the words that the Lord has spoken. We will do. And Moses wrote down all the words of the Lord. He rose early in the morning, built an altar at the foot of the mountain, and 12 pillars, according to the 12 tribes of Israel. And he sent young men of the people of Israel who offered burnt offerings, sacrifice, peace offerings of oxen to the Lord. Look what he does with these sacrifices here. And Moses took half of the blood and put it in basins, and half of the blood he threw against the altar. Then he took the book of the covenant and read it in the hearing of the people. And they said once again, all that the Lord has spoken, we will do, and we will be obedient. They declare their obedience. And here’s how Moses responds to that. Moses took the blood, and he threw it on the people and said, behold, the blood of the covenant. He sprinkled them with the blood, the blood of the covenant that the Lord has made with you, in accordance with all these words. Here we get a glimpse of this same concept: obedience and the sprinkling of the blood. When this happened previously, this was the very establishment of God’s relationship with his people. This was God’s moment of saying, you are my people and here’s what I require. My first reaction to that is, I’m glad that we baptize with water instead of sprinkling with blood to establish our relationship with him, but also note how the people respond. I’ve often read this in verse three and verse seven. All the words the Lord has spoken, we will do all that the Lord has spoken. We will do. We will be obedient. I’ve often read that and I thought, how naive, or deceptive, which way? I don’t know, but I read a quote by one commentator that I think helped me understand what’s going on here. You really think you’re going to be obedient? You really think you’re going to follow all that he said? Listen to what Karen Jobe said. She said their response to God’s Word is telling. Even though the human heart is undeniably depraved, there is nevertheless, at the same time, a deep urge within people to obey God. And I thought, oh, I’m more like them than I thought. When I said, yes, Christ, I’ll follow you, I will obey you. Did I have any idea what I was saying? A little. A glimpse. And was it sincere? Absolutely. And would I follow his commands perfectly? As well as you did. No. But there’s something within us that says I long to follow him. And you know what the beauty of that is? He still loves you. He knows you won’t follow him perfectly. He’s got to be chuckling as they’re saying, oh yeah, we got this. We’re yes, we’re obedient. We’re fine. Yeah okay good. I still love you. You’re still mine I’ll still make this covenant. You will still be called my people. And when you know who you are, you know what’s worth suffering for. When you know you’re his. You know what’s worth suffering for when you know he has chosen you, elect exiles of the dispersion. You know what’s worth suffering for. So we know who we are. We know what he’s done on our behalf. And then lastly, what do we need? Peter’s writing this to a group of people, and the setting is those who are faithful to Christ, who call Christ their Lord. And yet because of that, they’re enduring suffering. They’re enduring ridicule. They may be being persecuted. Here’s what we need in the midst of that. Look at this last phrase in verse 2: May grace and peace be multiplied to you. May grace and peace be multiplied to you. You know most every New Testament epistle, most every letter, especially those written by Paul, starts with grace and peace. Grace and peace to you from our Lord Father Jesus Christ. This is the one book that says, Grace and peace be multiplied to you. I don’t know about you, but every day I need grace and peace, and there are some days where I need it in abundance, especially those who are in the midst of suffering. Those are the moments where you go, Lord, I needed you before, but now I really need you. I need your grace and peace. Like I didn’t realize I need it before. Please, would you multiply that to me? Peter knows that, and he prays that for his people, because what they need in the midst of the suffering is abundant, overflowing, multiplied grace and peace. I had a friend up shared this story before as well. We graduated seminary together at the same time a month later. The moment when you’re most excited about finding a ministry job. Beginning to serve in ministry, his wife leaves him. She had a trip planned for a degree she was pursuing. He dropped her at the airport. She gave him this big kiss and hug. He comes back home. There’s a letter and the bank accounts are empty. And he said to me, John, I don’t know what in the world God’s going to do through this, and I don’t know how I’m going to get through it. And I’m not finding joy right now, but I’m going to turn to Christ through this. I don’t know what he’s going to do. I don’t know how I’m going to get through it. I’m going to lean on him through this. I’m not going to run from him. And we watched him. He had his ups and downs, but we watched him continue to turn to Christ through that, to watch Christ work in his life. And it was a powerful testimony. And look, I don’t pretend to know what you’re going through. Everybody. I know some challenges in the room. Look, everybody has a different level of challenges, some greater than others. But this is where we go. This is where we find hope. We find joy in the midst of suffering. We rejoice in hope for the glory of God. More than that, we rejoice in our sufferings, sufferings, produce endurance. Endurance produces character. Character produces hope. Hope does not disappoint. For the love of God has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit has been given to us. Let’s pray.