BROTHER IN TRIBULATION

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Hello everyone. This is Pastor Dean Thompson with the word of hope. A brother in the tribulation. I John, your brother, and partner in the tribulation and the kingdom and the patient endurance that are in Jesus, was on the island called Patmos on account of the word of God and the testimony of Jesus. Revelation chapter one verse nine. Before John records a single vision, he tells us where his feet are standing on Patmos, a small rocky island in the Asian Sea, where he had been exiled on account of the word of God and the testimony of Jesus. The greatest visions in Scripture were given up were given not in a palace or a seminary, but in a place of banishment. Heaven opened over a man the empire has thrown away. And how does John describe himself to the churches? Not your apostle, not your superior, but your brother and partner. The Greek word synchronos, a kosher, a fellow partaker. He shares three things with them, and he names them in a striking order The tribulation, the kingdom, and the patient endurance. Notice he does not say the kingdom and the tribulation as if the kingdom were the reward that follows the trouble. He folds them together. In this present age, the kingdom is something you shear in the middle of the tribulation, not after it. That is bracing and freeing at once. We often imagine that fate should lift us up out of difficulty and that go and that ongoing trouble is a sign that something has gone wrong. John locates the kingdom inside the trouble. The same lived experience holds suffering and reign together. You can be at the very same hour hard pressed and royal, exiled and seated with Christ. Holding those two together is the work of the third word. Hippo Hippo Money, patient endurance. It is not passive resignation. The word literally means a remaining under, staying put under a weight without being crushed or running away. It is the strength to keep standing in the place faith has set you, refusing both despair and escape. This is the muscle Revelation will ask of its readers again and again. There is enormous comfort in the fact that the seer is a brother. The visions do not come down to us from someone untouched by hardship, lecturing us from a place of safety. They come from a man on a prison island who shares our predicament. When Jesus wanted to show his church the throne above all thrones, he chose to do it through someone sitting on a rock, far from home, kept there against his will, and that man calls us family. Wherever your patmos is this week, the diagnosis, the strained marriage, the dead end season, the place you did not choose and cannot leave. You are not exiled from the visions of God. Some of heaven's clearest sights are given precisely there. The kingdom is not waiting on the far side of your trouble. By faith you share in it now, as a brother once did on a rock in the sea. So remain under, endure, not because the weight is light, but because the one who reigns is sharing it with you, and the kingdom is nearer than the shoreline. O Lord, and our own small potmus, give us the grace of hoopomin hippon hippomonino hippomonino to remain under without being crushed. Let us share your kingdom even here and call call us your brothers and sisters still. Amen. God bless you, brothers and sisters.