Now the purposes of pressure are manifold. For one thing, they certainly are preservative. Take yourself — take myself: If I am free from the handling of God in the way of what we speak of as trial, difficulty or pressure, I am very predisposed to take things easy, as it were, here in this world. I am very predisposed, in the exercise of vigorous health or easy health, of easy circumstances or of surroundings that are to my liking, to regard it with a fairly independent state of mind, without, perhaps, very much concern for others. But then pressure comes in as a wonderful preservative. I might illustrate it by Peter. The principle runs through from Abel onward, but I will illustrate it with Peter. The Lord said to Peter, “When thou wast young, thou girdest thyself, and walkedst whither thou wouldest; but when thou shalt be old, thou shalt stretch forth thy hands, and another shall gird thee, and carry thee whither thou wouldest not. This spake He, signifying by what death he should glorify God” (John 21:18-1918Verily, verily, I say unto thee, When thou wast young, thou girdedst thyself, and walkedst whither thou wouldest: but when thou shalt be old, thou shalt stretch forth thy hands, and another shall gird thee, and carry thee whither thou wouldest not. 19This spake he, signifying by what death he should glorify God. And when he had spoken this, he saith unto him, Follow me. (John 21:18‑19)).
There is Peter: Wherever he goes he has this in his mind, “The Lord has put pressure upon me.” Suppose someone comes to him and says, “We have a fine proposition for you — a sure thing to set you up here in this world.” He says, “The Lord has told me that I am going to die [and die he did, by the cross]. I have no time or place for the thing.” Suppose, in one way or the other, the power of the world has come in; he would always think, “I have the sentence of death in myself; that sentence of death carries me along day by day to an inevitable end.” But how does he regard it? With serenity; in peacefulness.
We say sometimes, “Is so-and-so resigned?” Perhaps the answer is “yes.” I am rather sorry to hear it. In the light of Christ glorified and of the spirit which illumines the house of God, I do not think resignation is the spirit, because resignation implies a kind of stoicism — a sort of a feeling that one cannot escape that which is inevitable—therefore we must take it quietly. But if we view Peter as he addresses us in his second Epistle, speaking in the peace and serenity of a spirit perfectly at home with God, in the contemplation of the fact that he was shortly going to “put off this my tabernacle,” that was not resignation; it was the serene expression of one at perfect peace in the hand of God.
Now, the enlargement that came to Peter was that he is enabled to magnify the great glory of Christ as he does and also that there is secured for him a definite place in the world to come. The pressure is answered by what is proportionate in the world to come.