Perseverance

Almost as an aside, Paul tells the Thessalonians “not to get weary with well doing” (2 Thessalonians 3:13). His comment strikes at an important point in our endeavors: not to quit before we’re done. Sometimes without our knowing it, success lies just ahead if we keep at it a little longer.

Jesus spent more than three years traveling, teaching, healing, resisting temptation, and being rejected. The night and morning before his last afternoon, he was up all night being arrested, deserted, ridiculed, put through five trials, flogged, and crushed under a cross he was too weakened to carry to the site of his crucifixion.

He didn’t quit somewhere along the line the night before—as in the upper room or in Gethsemane. All his efforts to date would have been of little value if he had quit too soon.

In this observance we pledge to persevere like the One whose faithfulness unto death these emblems represent. We’ll be done “this afternoon.”