Many of the people of the world wake up every morning with some kind of chronic illness, ache or pain, to endue another day. Many, if not most of us, awake with circumstances and situations of life that seem hard to bear. As a believer, but yet a human living in this fallen world, with situations of life and infirmities of the flesh, you will rejoice at 'knowing' we have what the Apostle Paul calls "that blessed hope," (better translated, 'that confident expectation,') of one day soon living eternally with Christ in the heaven, in our new incorruptible spirit-bodies. Thus we should be those who are "Looking for that blessed hope, and the glorious appearing of the great God and our Saviour Jesus Christ;" Titus 2:13 (KJV)

Paul also tells us that “the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now” (Rom. 8:22). Note the term “the whole creation.” This takes in the whole world; no one is excluded. In the next verse Paul goes on to say to say of Christian believers: “...(We) ourselves also… even we ourselves groan within ourselves… waiting for… the redemption of our body.”

No doubt many of us feel like crying out with the Psalmist David, “Look upon mine affliction and my pain” (Psa. 25:18). In spite of all sorrow, trouble and pain which the child of God must endure, he can be assured with the Apostle Paul that: “our momentary and light affliction, which is but for a moment (comparatively), worketh for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory” (2Cor. 4:17).

When we go to be with the Lord in the catching away (the rapture of the believers) we will no longer be living in “this earthly tabernacle (body),” but will have “a building of God, an house (body) not made with hands, eternal in the heavens” (2Cor. 5:1). Paul then adds that, as Christians, we earnestly desire “to be clothed upon with our house (our new body) which is from heaven” (2Cor. 5:2).

Paul declared that “to depart, and to be with Christ… is far better” (Phil. 1:23); far better, not only than all earth’s sorrow and trouble and pain, but "far better" even than earth’s greatest joys and its dearest treasures.

It is wonderful to 'know' that “Christ died for our sins,” so that we might have a His life within us to be our new life...beyond the grave. We have a hope beyond the tomb! Surely, this is "far better”!