Jesus took it for granted that his followers would be mocked, lied about, and persecuted. As I said in yesterday’s blog, we are experiencing that negative reaction in today’s world. I don’t think the issue when we face such resistance is how to escape it, but how to respond to it.
I want to include a passage from I Peter 1. It’s not directly about responding to persecution, but it contains the elements we need to focus on. Remember that by the time Peter wrote these words both he and the church had faced a persecution on both the personal and national level that was growing in severity.
“Through Christ you have come to trust in God. And because God raised Christ from the dead and gave him great glory, your faith and hope can be placed confidently in God. Now you can have sincere love for each other as brothers and sisters because you were cleansed from your sins when you accepted the truth of the good news. So see to it that you really do love each other intensely with all your hearts. For you have been born again. Your new life did not come from your earthly parents because the life they gave you will end in death. But this new life will last forever because it comes from the eternal, living God.”
Let’s trust God.
And if we trust him, we can live for him. There is a caveat in the last beatitude. It does not say that all Christians will be persecuted. It says God blesses those who are persecuted because they live for him. You can trust God. He has life and history and the end of all things in his grasp. So follow him.
I will never forget the night in Bob’s house in Anaheim when I sat with him and Debbie and told them the gospel. I invited them to become Christians and to get ready for baptism. I invited them to follow Jesus. Bob knew what that meant for him. He asked me to follow him to his bedroom and he and I carried out five large boxes of pornographic magazines. Debbie watched us and wept with gladness. Bob knew that the call of Jesus was a call to a new life and he trusted God to follow through on his promise that he would bless purity.
In all these years in the ministry I have come to understand that all of us have things that we must give up if we are to follow Jesus. Both men and women wrestle with pornography, bitterness, self-centeredness…the list of liabilities would be as long as there are people. My point is this: the time is long past when following Jesus was as uncomplicated, as acceptable, or as encouraged as it was in the past century. A clear and unambiguous stand for Jesus in this age will produce behavior and priorities that are in conflict with contemporary culture. That being so, we can trust God, for he has raised Christ from the dead for us and has demonstrated his power over the forces of the world. We can be pressed, we can be crushed, we can be persecuted, but he will always triumph, and in him, we will triumph as well. We can trust him.
And if that is so, and it is, let’s love outrageously.
Jesus said that people would know that we were (are) his disciples by the love we show to each other. In the face of growing opposition, love is the power of God in its most winsome form. We could react to attacks on our faith with the responses of the world…anger, dismissal, hatred, or even violence…and we often do, but why use the tools of the world to show the excellence of the Kingdom of God? We are called by Jesus to love each other in terms that the world would call outrageous. To love each other this way is to love the truth that love is the best foundation for life. To love each other is to build each other up and never tear down, or whisper behind backs, or be condescending. But it goes much further than what we will not do. It means that WE WILL, AS GODS’ PEOPLE, BUILD A WHOLE NEW CULTURE WITH THE VERY TOOLS THE WORLD HAS TOLD US TO HOARD TO OURSELVES.
Let me cite some of those tools. If the church in America is to get its act in order, these are the things it must major in
-
We will give each other our financial resources, counting the work of the Kingdom of God and the care of his body, our brothers and sisters in faith, as a higher calling than constantly guarding our own security. We will develop a holy generosity of heart, giving, and pocketbook because of our love for each other and for the common work of growing the family of God.
-
We will give each other our time, understanding that time spent in fellowship with each other will produce benefits far greater than the constant pursuit of entertainment the world calls us to. We will invest our time, our care and our energy in small gatherings wherein we can learn faith, grow in obedience, and support each other’s growth, and we will teach our children to do the same.
-
We will care for each other’s needs, so that the basic needs of food, housing, and clothing will not be missing for any of our family of faith. We will do so knowing that sometimes we will be taken advantage of, but knowing also that the strong must support the weak so that the weak might become strong.
-
And we will never miss coming together to worship, realizing that a fundamental commitment to worship God together will build a community of such power and imagination that it will shape our children as it opens our hearts, minds, and souls to reach for goals of nobility and grace.
Those things sound so simple, but they are put to little practice in the world we live in. If practiced we would find them to be revolutionary. In America the church needs to stop talking so much and begin putting its faith into action.
If we can do this; if we can trust God, and if we can love outrageously, then let’s give them something to talk about!
We are born again. And we struggle with that. We accept Christ, we are baptized, and then so many of us go on to live the same basic life that we lived before. But it does not have to be that way. It is not that we were all wretched criminals before we accepted Jesus and therefore have dramatic changes to make. But it is not that we are perfect and have no changes to make either. I have been working at my calling long enough to realize that even the best of us have changes to make that will demonstrate a life that is fit for the eternal Kingdom of Heaven rather than for a life taqht is for this world.
Let’s give them lives that are lived completely for the glory of God and the expression of Love. Is that just religious talk? No, that’s the realization that we will be our happiest, our most joyful, our most noble, and our most fulfilled when we live life only as God intended it to be lived. Life lived that way may invite persecution, but it will overcome it, and then transcend it.
Prayer: “Father of life, do not let us wilt in the face of opposition or scorn. Make us strong with a winsome faith that will not be shaken. Turn our eyes in the direction of wisdom and love and lead us each day. Deliver us from our obsession with ourselves so that our hearts might be open to others. Help us to live in your strength and not in our weakness. We are yours and we are born again as your children. Grant that we will bear your likeness each day. In Jesus’ name, Amen.”