By your patience possess your souls.—Luke 21:19
By your patience possess your souls...what does that mean? What does it look like? Jesus in Luke 21 answers the disciples’ question about signs that will occur just before the end of the age. Jesus predictions are much doom and gloom but in them He reminds the disciples (and us) to keep their eyes on the prize. To look ahead and look up because all of what they face will turn out for a testimony. Jesus tells them to settle it in their hearts not to meditate beforehand on what they will answer. Inspiration, wisdom and spiritual utterance would be given to them from on high in the hour it was needed and that they would be divinely protected. Here is the thing...verse 19 doesn’t say by your patience possess your lives but by your patience possess your souls. Many of the disciples would in fact lose their lives but in losing their life they gained them forever. The same is true for us.
Jesus here then, is exhorting both his disciples and us to hold fast to His word, to persevere through trials, to trust God to guard our hearts and to keep us through faith. He who has prepared us for this very thing is God, and He has also given us the Spirit as a guarantee.
Now may the God of peace Himself sanctify you completely; and may your whole spirit, soul, and body be preserved blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. 24 He who calls you is faithful, who also will do it.—1 Thessalonians 5:23-24.
My sheep hear My voice, and I know them, and they follow Me. 28 And I give them eternal life, and they shall never perish; neither shall anyone snatch them out of My hand. 29 My Father, who has given them to Me, is greater than all; and no one is able to snatch them out of My Father's hand. 30 I and My Father are one."—John 10:27-30
Beloved...those that are truly His are His forever...No one...not even ourselves...can snatch us out of His hand. Our perseverance and patience under trials does not save us, but it does prove that we belong to Him. True believers will persevere. Jesus here is using these warnings to exhort us not to fall away or lose heart under persecutions and trials. God is with us and will sustain us through them all. He will keep those that are His from stumbling. Be patient, look ahead to the prize...walk through the trials and persecution that come in the power of His Spirit. By your patient endurance empowered by the Holy Spirit you will gain your souls.
being confident of this very thing, that He who has begun a good work in you will complete it until the day of Jesus Christ;—Philippians 1:6
31 What then shall we say to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us? 32 He who did not spare His own Son, but delivered Him up for us all, how shall He not with Him also freely give us all things? 33 Who shall bring a charge against God's elect? It is God who justifies. 34 Who is he who condemns? It is Christ who died, and furthermore is also risen, who is even at the right hand of God, who also makes intercession for us. 35 Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? 36 As it is written:
"For Your sake we are killed all day long;
We are accounted as sheep for the slaughter."
37 Yet in all these things we are more than conquerors through Him who loved us. 38 For I am persuaded that neither death nor life, nor angels nor principalities nor powers, nor things present nor things to come, 39 nor height nor depth, nor any other created thing, shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.—Romans 8:31-39
