Paul pursued to be conformed to Christ's death in the fellowship of His sufferings (Phil. 3:10). He took Christ's death as a mold for his life. To Paul it was a great pleasure to be molded in the death of Christ.
Paul said that he was always bearing about in the body the putting to death of Jesus and was always being delivered unto death for Jesus' sake that the life of Jesus might be manifested in his mortal flesh (2 Cor. 4:10-11). Every day in his Christian life Paul was put to death. The only way for him to manifest Christ's life was to experience Christ's death.
In his experience of God's consuming and stripping, Paul did not lose heart. Though his outer man was being consumed, yet his inner man was being renewed day by day. He said that his momentary lightness of affliction worked out for him an eternal weight of glory (2 Cor. 4:16-17).
Paul was one who expected to be consumed every day. He was such a man because he wanted to be renewed. Renewing can be consummated only by consuming. If you are not consumed, you cannot be renewed. This kind of renewing by consuming adds to the weight of glory that you will share in the coming ages. We will all share the Lord's glory, but the weight of glory will differ among the believers. Through God's consuming, the glory that we will share will become an eternal weight.
Job considered his suffering of affliction something very heavy, but Paul considered his affliction momentary and light. Instead of caring about our affliction, we need to care for the increase of the weight of glory. How much weight of glory we will have depends on how much we suffer in our present affliction for the Lord's sake. Paul did not care how much he suffered. He knew that the more he suffered, the more weight of glory he would share in eternity.
Paul magnified Christ by living Him, whether through life or through death, by the bountiful supply of the Spirit of Jesus Christ (Phil. 1:19-21a). This is the Christian life. When God created man, this is the kind of life He wanted man to live.