1 Peter 5:9: Standing on Something You Know

Resist him, standing firm in the faith, because you know that the family of believers throughout the world is undergoing the same kind of sufferings.

1 Peter 5:9 (NIV)

Standing on Something You Know

Resist him, standing firm in the faith, because you know that the family of believers throughout the world is undergoing the same kind of sufferings. Peter has a roaring lion in the picture, prowling and hunting for someone to devour, and the reason he gives for holding the ground is other people. They’re on the far side of the world, going through the same thing while you’re reading about them.

I’m good for an afternoon of holding out. Around the twentieth day I stop being able to tell a hard week from something giving way underneath.

The standing Peter asks for takes a whole winter, and most of it looks like making the lunches and going in to work with the question still open. A man whose company let him go in November and a woman whose grown son stopped answering his phone are carrying different weights, and both of them are in for months of it.

A bus station at eleven at night is full of people in the middle of something. The man asleep across three seats with his jacket over his face, the two who’ve been arguing since the ticket counter and who stand close together at the gate now while one of them apologizes badly. You’ll never learn what any of it is about.

Peter asks them to count faces they’ll never see as company, on the strength of that fact alone. And the God of all grace, who called them to his eternal glory in Christ, will restore them after they’ve suffered a little while, and make them strong, firm and steadfast. He does that part himself.

Right now a departure is being called in a station you’ll never stand in, and people are standing up.