like taming a hurricane…

I think you and I may have lost some perspective on suffering for the gospel of Jesus Christ.  And with as frequently as it is addressed in the New Testament as part of following Jesus (Rm 5:3, 8:17; 2Co 1:5; Php 1:29, 3:10; 2Ti 1:8; 1Pe 2:19, 4:12-13; to name a few) this strikes me as an important thing to deal with.

Living in the United States, my idea of suffering is made up of things like illness, financial struggle, losing friends, and being stressed about having too much to do.  The most persecution a lot of “Ameri-Christians” go through is heated arguments that are frequently politically charged.  (If only there was some way to get the Christians who are so vocal about things like abortion—which goes against the ways of God—and spending money on war instead of the impoverished and the sick—which also goes against the ways of God—to be so vocal about JESUS and His hope of salvation!)  The trials we face often do not happen outside of courtrooms for anything more than speeding tickets.  Offering our lives as a living sacrifice has, in many cases, come to mean going to church and praying to a God we don’t care about or even believe in so that our lives will turn out better.

But perhaps the suffering that the Bible says we will experience is talking about something beyond what happens naturally, to everyone.  Because these types of “trials” and “hardships” are not specific to Christians.  They are experienced by anyone and everyone around us.  Perhaps the suffering that the Bible says we will experience is said under the assumption that we are so in love with Jesus and believe so much that He is the way, the truth, and the life that we are proclaiming His name and His message with reckless abandon.  Perhaps the suffering that we as Christians are called to comes from sharing the gospel so much that it gets us thrown into prison, like Paul, or it gets us attacked, like Stephen, or it whisks us away from everything we’re doing, like Peter.  If we were to live with the fervor that we are called to, the sufferings of Ameri-Christians would be commonplace, and we would not wait for suffering to happen upon us but in a sense bring it upon ourselves by how unapologetically and how frequently we preached the Way of Jesus to the world.  Our suffering for Christ ought not to come from natural unfortunate circumstances, but from our inability to shut up about Jesus.

We have lived far too long by buying apparel and keychains that say we are Christians, and that Jesus is our homeboy and we have faith 4 life.  I think the Christians of whom God will say “Well done, my good and faithful servant,” are the ones who actually require faith to continue living.  We should have faith for life, from beginning to end.  But if we are living the call of Christ we should need faith to live as well.