Gabe Fluhrer

What he is teaching us is so, I think, powerful and helpful for our daily lives.

But before we look at what that is, let's go back to Luke's gospel and hear Jesus teach us the same thing Paul teaches us in Colossians 1.24.

Luke 9 and verse 23.

And he said to all, if anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me.

How do we connect these two and what are they teaching us?

Jesus will say to us elsewhere that a servant is not above his master nor a pupil above his teacher.

And taking all of that together, here's what Paul and Jesus are telling us about life as a resurrected, adopted child of God awaiting the final resurrection.

And it's counterintuitive.

They are telling us both

that suffering always precedes glory, and that every Christian has an allotted measure of suffering, of cross-bearing, that he or she must undergo.

That's what Paul is saying when he says, I'm filling up what is lacking in Christ's afflictions.

It's not a redemptive lack on the part of Christ's sufferings.

No, he's saying to us, why is all this happening to me?

Why does the catalog of trials in 2 Corinthians happen to me?

And Paul's answer in brief is to us to say, do you think it's just going to happen to me?

Do you think this is just my story?

And Paul says, no, no, no, no, no.

This will be your story because it was the Savior's story.

Better, it was the Savior's life pattern, as one scholar put it.

That the life pattern of the Savior, which will be inescapable for the Christian and will make any kind of suffering you go explicable, is the life pattern of suffering than glory, of the cross before the crown, of Good Friday before Easter Sunday.