These have come to show that your faith is genuine. This will bring praise, honor, and glory to God when Jesus Christ returns. Your faith is worth even more than gold, because gold can be destroyed even after fire has made it pure.
Our troubles are small and they last only for a short time, but they’re earning a glory for us that will last forever. That glory outweighs all our troubles.
Everything written in the past was written to teach us, so that we would have hope both through the endurance the Scriptures teach and through the encouragement they provide.
But hope that can be seen isn’t really hope at all. Who hopes for what they already have? But if we hope for what we don’t have yet, we wait for it patiently.
Since we’re surrounded by such a huge cloud of witnesses, let’s throw off everything that weighs us down and any sin that gets in our way. Let’s keep on running the race on the course in front of us.