This is a word of comfort, because it assures us that even when our words fail, our heart can rest secure, and even when our heart doubts, we can still speak the simplest three-word creed: Jesus is Lord.
The promise is rooted in the fact that the only way we can endure any ounce of suffering in this life is because Jesus Christ is tending the soil of our lives.
Nearly two thousand years after Paul scribbled out these lines, the only reason “we” are here, reading Paul’s magnum opus together, is that we are inheritors of the promise Paul sees in the paradox.