Sinclair Ferguson on persecution and suffering:

In God’s workshop in this world, suffering is the raw material out of which glory is forged (1 Peter 1:7; 4:12–13). That is standard New Testament teaching. But there is a subtle development of it in Peter: “If you are reproached for the name of Christ, blessed are you, for the Spirit of glory and of God rests upon you” (1 Peter 4:14, emphasis added).
   The prospect of future glory has been a great consolation to believers throughout the ages. But Peter is saying more than that. Glory belongs not only to the “there and then”; it is part of the “here and now” of suffering. The Spirit who uses our sufferings to produce glory gives advance indications of the final product in the lives of believers.
   We get a glimpse of that sometimes in older Christians who have seen trials; we see that there is a grace in them that eludes definition. It is etched into their lives from beyond. A touch of the glory of the future world seems already to clothe them in the present one.
   Peter’s bottom line is this: don’t be surprised by suffering (1 Peter 4:12).
   But how can twenty-first-century Christians be un-surprised in times of suffering? We can only do so by being delivered from a faulty understanding of what it means to be a Christian. Jesus was crucified by this world. To become a Christian means by definition to follow a cross-bearing Savior and Lord. it means to be identified with Him in such a way that opposition to Him will inevitably touch us.
   Paul said that he bore in his body the marks of Jesus (Gal. 5:16). So perhaps we should ask:

Hast thou no scar?
No hidden scar on foot, or side, or hand?
I hear thee sung as mighty in the land;
I hear them hail thy bright, ascendant star.
Hast thou no scar?

Hast thou no wound?
Yet, I was wounded by the archers, spent.
Leaned me against the tree to die, and rent
By ravening wolves that compassed Me, I swooned:
Hast thou no wound?

No wound, no scar?
Yet as the Master shall the servant be,
And pierced are the feet that follow Me.
But thine are whole. Can he have followed far
Who hast no wound or scar?*

   Are you a marked man or woman?

—Sinclair Ferguson, In Christ Alone: Living the Gospel Centered Life (Reformation Trust, 2007), 203–204.

*Amy Carmichael