Almighty God, by whose providence your servant John the Baptist was wonderfully born, and sent to prepare the way of your Son our Savior by preaching repentance: Make us so to follow his teaching and holy life, that we may truly repent according to his preaching; and, following his example, constantly speak the truth, boldly rebuke vice, and patiently suffer for the truth’s sake; through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

Therefore, since we have been justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have gained access by faith into this grace in which we now stand. And we boast in the hope of the glory of God. Not only so, but we also glory in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope. And hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us.

—Romans 5:1-5 (TNIV)

What a strange thing for Paul to write! He has just announced the Good News of justification by grace through faith in Jesus Christ, by being made righteous in God’s sight through the blood of the Lamb, and now he talks about what we can expect next—suffering.

But not to worry, says Paul, because the Holy Spirit will use our suffering to make us be more like Christ. This, of course, requires a tremendous amount of trust on the believer’s part, the kind of trust that is impossible with any casual relationship. But Paul did not have a casual relationship with Jesus. Christ claimed him and Paul responded by spending his every waking hour getting to know this Lord who saved him death.

Paul gets it. Do you?

During a dry season in the New Hebrides, John G. Paton the missionary awakened the derision of the natives by digging for water. They said water always came down from heaven, not up through the earth. But Paton revealed a larger truth than they had seen before by discovering to them that heaven could give them water through their own land. So men insist on waiting for God to send them blessing in some supernormal way, when all the while he is giving them abundant supply if they would only learn to retreat into the fertile places of their own spirits where, as Jesus said, the wells of living waters seek to rise. We need to learn Meister Eckhart’s lesson, “God is nearer to me than I am to myself; he is just as near to wood and stone, but they do not know it.”

—Harry Emerson Fosdick, The Meaning of Prayer

What shall we be like when we come to see God face to face? All the psalmist can say is “They will be inebriated by the rich abundance of your house.” When he saw people taking too much wine and losing their senses, then he knew how to express the experience with God. When we experience the joy of being with God, the human mind will almost vanish. It will become drunk with the rich abundance of God. Let those who are thirsty now continue to hope. The day will come when they will be intoxicated by the reality [of God]. Until then, let them continue to thirstily hope.

—Augustine, Commentary on Psalm 35.14

In fact, grace helps one to become a doer of the law.

—Augustine, Grace and Free Will 12.24

[Jesus] teaches that no deed of a good conscience is useless. It is no crime for a believer to have hope that transcends another’s unbelief. For he foresaw that there would be many who glory merely in the name of apostleship but whose every action proves that they are unworthy.

—Hilary of Poitiers, On Matthew 10.29

The death being referred to here [in Romans 6] is not the death that separates the body from the soul but the death by which because of sin the soul is separated from God.

—Origen, Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans