Obedience Through Experience

“But the God of all grace, who hath called us unto his eternal glory by Christ Jesus, after that ye have suffered awhile, make you perfect, stablish, strengthen, settle you” (I Peter 5:10). God knows what each believer must go through to reach the humility and brokenness of maturity so that His divine disposition can merge with human nature to produce the inner beauty of His characteristics in the soul. From divine viewpoint, the benefits of tribulation far outweigh the temporal pain, inconvenience, and discomfort upon our flesh (2).

God employs trials to go to work for Him to produce in His children eternal benefits beyond human calculation. As the believer yields in his heart, he allows God to deliver him over to death for Christ’s sake and soon finds himself actually experiencing the same resurrection life of Jesus Christ. Even Jesus “learned obedience by the things that he suffered” (Hebrews 5:8).Why should anyone else think that death to self can be bypassed in order to attain the resurrection? It will never happen because each believer is called to fellowship with His suffering (3). For we are “always bearing about in the body the dying of the Lord Jesus, that the life also of Jesus might be made manifest in our body” (II Corinthians 4:10).