The Enduring of the Trials of the New Testament

The general epistles do not depict the experience of being a Christian as hunkering down and quietly becoming stronger in an inhospitable world. The pains of the earth are merely a prelude toward the pleasures of the afterlife for an abiding Christian, even though patience is required. Christians then, in the New Testament's later letters, were not only made stronger and purer by their trials, but also in the depths of their sufferings they took on the semblance and even the burden of their God.