Blessed is the person who keeps going when times are difficult. After they’ve made it through these times, they’ll receive the crown of life that the Lord has promised to give to those who love him.
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.
There they strengthened the disciples, encouraging them to remain faithful to what they’d been taught. “We have to go through many hard times to enter the kingdom of God,” they explained.
These enemies left our community of believers, but they didn’t really belong to us. If they had belonged to us, they would have stayed with us. By leaving, they showed that none of them really belonged to us.