Christ in You, the Hope of Glory

All Christians will suffer for their faith in one way or another: if not outwardly, then inwardly, through the long, slow battle with temptation or sickness, the agonizing anxieties of Christian responsibilities for a family or a church, the constant doubts and uncertainties which accompany the obedience of faith, and the ‘thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to', taken up as they are within the call to follow Christ. All of these, properly understood, are things to rejoice in—not casually, flippantly or superficially, but because they are signs that the present age is passing away, that the people of Jesus, the Messiah, are the children of the new age, and that the birthpangs of this new age are being worked out in them. —N. T. Wright