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God Helps You Survive
Have you ever thought about how to survive in this world?
1 Peter 5:10, Hebrews 12:11, 1 Peter 2:2
Have you ever thought about how to survive in this world? Maybe that’s something you think about every day as you get up and you look at all of the challenges that face you. And we know we live in difficult times.
I want to share with you a verse from First Peter, chapter five that gives us some encouragement in this regard, emphasizing all of the things that God does so that you can not only survive in this world, but you can thrive in this world
After you have suffered a little while, the God of all grace, who called you into his eternal glory in Christ Jesus, will himself restore, establish, strengthen, and support you. (1 Peter 5:10)
It’s those four things that God is doing for us and will do for us that I want to focus on. First off, that he will restore us. Have you ever broken a bone? What happens when you do that? You go to the doctor, you go to the emergency room and they figure out that the bone is broken via x-rays or such, and then the doctor will take those two bones and put them back together so that they can start to grow back together. And that’s what God does in your life. He restores you. Maybe it’s restoring a relationship that you have with someone that you’ve hurt or been hurt by. But more importantly, he restores the relationship between him and you. He takes us and brings us back together with him. He forgives our sins through Jesus and brings us back into a relationship with Him. God restores you.
And God establishes you. If you have ever walked on a floor that seemed a little bit mushy, maybe you didn’t trust whether or not that floor was going to hold you up. It’s probably because all of the floorboards, everything underneath was rotten. And so you had to have somebody come in and rip out all of those boards and put in new boards so that the floor was solid. And the world’s best carpenter has done that for you. He has come to you and he has taken out that heart of yours that was sinful and rotten, and he’s replaced it with a new heart. He has given you new life. He has established you.
And God also strengthens you. It’s not easy to go through this life and realize that my body is getting weaker. Or maybe you’ve had an injury and your body just needs some strengthening. And so maybe you have a physical therapist to help you out. And he comes in and works with you and works those muscles to make you stronger. Well, that’s what God does for you too. That he comes to you and he makes you stronger through various means. Sometimes it’s through discipline. And that’s not something necessarily that’s fun to go through. In Hebrews chapter 12, verse 11, it says this
No discipline seems pleasant when it is happening, but painful, yet later it yields a peaceful harvest of righteousness for those who have been trained by it. (Hebrews 12:11)
So that’s one way that God might strengthen you. He might cause you to go through difficult times, and those things are going to make you stronger. God strengthens you.
And finally, God supports you. When you’re building a house. One of the most important things to have is a solid foundation. If you have a foundation that has a crack in it or some sort of imperfection, it might cause problems down the road for the whole house. That’s why Jesus uses that picture in Matthew chapter seven when he talks about the wise man building his house on the rock versus the foolish man who built his house on the sand. Which house was it that survived the storm? So God supports you, and he does that actually through what we call the means of grace, through his word, through his sacraments. Peter talks about that earlier in his letter, in chapter two, in the second verse, when he says,
Like newborn babies, crave the pure milk of the word so that by it you may grow up with the result being salvation. (1 Peter 2:2)
That’s how God strengthens you. He gives you a solid foundation. He supports you by listening, having you listen to his word. That’s what he does when we take his supper, when we take the body and blood of our Savior. That’s what happens when every day we go back to our baptisms as we repent of our sins and go back and receive that forgiveness that God gives us through his word. God definitely supports you. So in all of these ways, God restoring you, establishing you, strengthening you, supporting you, he does bring us through this life and takes us all the way to eternal life.
