Are You Provoking Persecution?

Christians are not so much in danger when they are persecuted as when they are admired. - Charles Spurgeon

The world considers those “blessed” who are secure and popular and live at ease, not those who have to suffer persecution.

Jesus added to the list of the Beatitudes the inevitability of persecution.  Matthew 5:11 says, “Blessed are you when mean people insult you and persecute you, and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of Me.”

The first part of the Ninth Beatitude is similar to the Eighth Beatitude, but the second part is quite different. “Blessed are you when they say all kinds of evil against you falsely for My sake.”

How should Christians respond to this persecution?  When false stories are being told about you, when people seek to ruin your reputation by spreading all kinds of lies about you, that is when you need self-control. And self-control is a fruit of the Holy Spirit, when we’re leaning on Jesus Christ.  We can still take it when we are correctly accused. We can still be gentle when the facts are true. But we can’t accept it when people slander us and say false things about us. We are angry and we just want to strike back. That is the time when we most desperately need self-control. Don’t let your anger get out of control. Don’t lose your temper. Those responses will not bring glory to God.

In The Beatitudes: The Only Way to Happiness, John MacArthur points out, “If Christians in our culture were more confrontive about what they believe, and if they really lived the fullness of the Beatitudes, they would find more hostility.  In fact, Jesus describes the three different kinds of persecution—insults, persecution, and false accusations—we should expect.”

Click here for more from John MacArthur’s The Beatitudes: The Only Way to Happiness

Tears We Cannot Stop

We should all be about the business of finding, discussing and furthering solutions to our problems. But none of that can be done without at first speaking honestly about the problems we confront, with whoever in our ranks will listen and respond. - Michael Eric Dyson

Have you ever known real persecution?  I have not…but I’ve been learning a lot about other perspectives over the past several years (as noted in my “Diversity & Inclusion Incompetency” Journey).

Earlier this year, I read Michael Eric Dyson’s Tears We Cannot Stop, as I seek to gain a perspective that is very different from my own.

According to Dyson, America is in trouble, and a lot of that trouble—perhaps most of it—has to do with race. Everywhere we turn, there is discord and division, death and destruction.  Black and white people don’t merely have different experiences; we seem to occupy different universes, with worldviews that are fatally opposed to one another.

Of course, America is far from simply black and white by whatever definition you use, but the black-white divide has been the major artery through which the meaning of race has flowed throughout the body politic.

As Luke 12:48 puts it, “From everyone who has been given much, much will be demanded; and from the one who has been entrusted with much, much more will be asked.”  As we pass through this Thanksgiving season, many of us have reflected on how much we’ve been given!

Click here to for more of Michael Eric Dyson’s Sermon to White America