Episode 2642 - Lesson 3 - Thursday January 15 - United and Fearless

United and FearlessRead Philippians 1:27-30. How does our unity and "striving together for the faith of the gospel" relate to fearlessness?Satan's strategy is to divide and conquer. Disunity is deadly. Jesus said, "If a house is divided against itself, that house cannot stand" (Mark 3:25, NKJV). It's a simple principle that Satan is delighted for us to forget. Our unity helps enable us to fulfill our prophetic role as the remnant of Bible prophecy (Rev. 12:17), proclaiming the "everlasting gospel" to "every nation, and kindred, and tongue, and people" (Rev. 14:6). Because unity is crucial to fulfill our mission to spread this God-given message, and Jesus' prayer in John 17 highlights "the truth" of God's Word as one of the most important keys for unity (John 17:17, 19), our message cannot be separated from our mission or our unity. All three stand or fall together. If one of these three keys is missing, we can't succeed. However, if we have all three in place, there is nothing to fear. We need not be "in any way terrified" by opposition (Phil. 1:28, NKJV). Satan is a defeated foe. Even if we should be put to death for our faith, nothing can harm us if we "become followers of what is good" (1 Pet. 3:13, NKJV). The devil is powerless to stop the onward march of God's truth.Read the following Bible passages and briefly summarize their common theme: Matthew 10:38, Acts 14:22, Romans 8:17, 2 Timothy 3:12.Life itself in this fallen world is hard, even for the "best" of us. Job was a righteous man; the Bible says that he "was blameless and upright, and one who feared God and shunned evil" (Job 1:1, NKJV). And yet, overnight, calamity struck him and his family. Who hasn't learned, either by personal experience or by seeing what happened to others, that life here is lived, it seems, on a precipice, and you never know when you will go over the edge? Suffering, to some degree, is the lot of us all. In the end, though, better to suffer for Christ's sake than for anything else.What hope, what comfort, should we, as Christians, have amid our suffering?