Posts Tagged ‘persecution’

Ryle: May we have wisdom to know how to act in time of persecution

Posted: March 10, 2013 by Pam Larson in Devotionals/Commentaries, March, Matthew
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…then let those who are in Judea flee to the mountains. Let the one who is on the housetop not go down to take what is in his house, and let the one who is in the field not turn back to take his cloak.
Matthew 24:16-18 ESV

J.C. Ryle said, “flight from danger may sometimes be the positive duty of a Christian.”

Our Lord Himself commanded his people under certain circumstances “to flee.”

The servant of Christ undoubtedly is not to be a coward. He is to confess his master before men. He is to be willing to die, if needful, for the truth. But the servant of Christ is not required to run into danger, unless it comes in the line of duty. He is not to be ashamed to use reasonable means to provide for his personal safety, when no good is to be done by dying at his post. There is deep wisdom in this lesson. The true martyrs are not always those who court death, and are in a hurry to be beheaded or burned. There are times when it shows more grace to be quiet, and wait, and pray, and watch for opportunities, than to defy our adversaries, and rush into the battle. May we have wisdom to know how to act in time of persecution! It is possible to be rash, as well as to be a coward–and to stop our own usefulness by being over hot, as well as by being over cold.

Can I say, “Yet I will hope in Him?”

Posted: November 14, 2012 by Pam Larson in Devotionals/Commentaries, Job, November
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In part of our passage for today, Job 13:13-1,9 Job basically declares his faith in God:

“Keep silent and let me speak; then let come to me what may. Why do I put myself in jeopardy and take my life in my hands? Though he slay me, yet will I hope in him; I will surely defend my ways to his face. Indeed, this will turnout for my deliverance, for no godless man would dare come before him! Listen carefully to my words;let your ears take in what I say. Now that I have prepared my case, I know I will be vindicated. Can anyone bring charges against me? If so, I will be silent and die.”

He knows that even if God strikes him dead, in the end, he will be vindicated. He has faith that this will all work out for his good, like Romans 8 says.  This kind of faith is willing to say, “Bring it on…I’m ready.  God is on my side!”

Christians in other parts of the world have had to stand up to intense persecution for their faith.  Will that day come in America, sooner rather than later? Will I be prepared? Will you?

 

Fight or flight?

Posted: March 10, 2012 by Pam Larson in Devotionals/Commentaries, March, Matthew
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…then let those who are in Judea flee to the mountains. Let the one who is on the housetop not go down to take what is in his house, and let the one who is in the field not turn back to take his cloak.
Matthew 24:16-18 ESV

J.C. Ryle said, “flight from danger may sometimes be the positive duty of a Christian.”

Our Lord Himself commanded his people under certain circumstances “to flee.”

The servant of Christ undoubtedly is not to be a coward. He is to confess his master before men. He is to be willing to die, if needful, for the truth. But the servant of Christ is not required to run into danger, unless it comes in the line of duty. He is not to be ashamed to use reasonable means to provide for his personal safety, when no good is to be done by dying at his post. There is deep wisdom in this lesson. The true martyrs are not always those who court death, and are in a hurry to be beheaded or burned. There are times when it shows more grace to be quiet, and wait, and pray, and watch for opportunities, than to defy our adversaries, and rush into the battle. May we have wisdom to know how to act in time of persecution! It is possible to be rash, as well as to be a coward–and to stop our own usefulness by being over hot, as well as by being over cold.

Mission Control sometimes uses this launch pad

Posted: January 22, 2012 by Pam Larson in Acts, Devotionals/Commentaries, January
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John Piper concludes a message from Acts 13:1-12 this way:

God is a searching and saving God; that he is a God on a mission; he has straight paths that lead to faith; he is still sending us “to seek and to save the lost.” He is not aloof or passive or indecisive. He is never in the maintenance mode, coasting or drifting. He is sending, pursuing, searching, saving. And he calls us to join him…

…. there will, of course, be people and situations that make crooked the straight paths of the Lord. There will always be hindrances. There will be persecutions and Herods and Elymases. But the point again and again is this: God makes persecution a launching pad for missions; he takes Herod out of the way; he strikes Elymas blind. He carries his advent emissaries forward along the straight paths of faith.

To read or listen to the rest of the sermon, The Straight Paths of the Lord, click here:

God’s grace becomes visible when it makes the anguish of persecution a means of spreading the good news of Jesus.

Posted: January 20, 2012 by Pam Larson in Acts, Devotionals/Commentaries, January
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John Piper preached a sermon, “He Saw the Grace of God and Was Glad,” from Acts 11:23. Here is an excerpt; please read or listen to the entire sermon at DesiringGod.org

The Grace of God Uses Suffering

In other words, the good news about Jesus Christ came to Antioch because of persecution. Barnabas saw this and called it the grace of God, and it made him glad. God’s grace becomes visible when it makes the anguish of persecution a means of spreading the good news of Jesus.

If anything is clear from the Bible it is this: the grace of God does not spare his people suffering in this age, but rather uses suffering to bring people to himself. The Son of God himself suffered to save people from condemnation. And now he turns suffering again and again for our good both in this age and in the age to come.

God’s Grace Among Koreans in the 1930s

God has been showing his grace in our own time the same way he did in Acts. For example, in the 1930s thousands of Koreans fled what is now North Korea when the Japanese invaded. Many of them settled in the USSR around Vlapostok. Many of them were Christians and so by the suffering of the Koreans the gospel of Jesus was being carried into central USSR. But the grace of God was just beginning to be visible.

Joseph Stalin saw the Koreans around Vlapostok as a security risk to the weapons manufacturing center. So he relocated them to five areas around the Soviet Union, spreading the Christians even farther into the Muslim areas of the USSR (just like the persecuted Christians that went to Antioch).

One of the places they were sent was to Tashkent the center of the 20,000,000 Muslim Uzbek people who had violently resisted western efforts to bring Christianity. Over the next decades these Koreans became an accepted part of Uzbek society. Then, with Glasnost and Perestroika, on June 2, 1990, the first open air Christian meeting in the history of Soviet Central Asia happened. God used this meeting to awaken the Korean Christians especially, and the upshot was that the decades of acceptance by the Muslim Uzbeks and Kazaks has allowed the spread of good news about Jesus far more widely than it could have with merely western influence.

In other words, the grace of God was at work in all this. God hasn’t changed. This is the same grace of God that used persecution to get good news from Jerusalem Jews to Antioch Gentiles.

Piper: God Is Turning Things Around All Over the World

Posted: January 16, 2012 by Pam Larson in Acts, Devotionals/Commentaries, January
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John Piper in a sermon, “Jesus Still Turns Things Around” brings this encouragement from Acts 9, our reading for today:

Luke drives this home by showing the persecutor becoming the persecuted. First, in verse 23 Luke tells us that the Jews in Damascus plotted to kill him. The hunter becomes the hunted. And he escapes (v. 25) in a basket through the wall. Second, in verse 29 Luke tells us that the Hellenists in Jerusalem were seeking to kill Saul. The hunter becomes the hunted. And he escapes by taking a ship to Tarsus.

And the upshot of this amazing turn around? Verse 31: “So the church throughout all Judea and Galilee and Samaria had peace and was built up.”

Nobody would have dreamed it could happen—and happen so suddenly. Persecution, violence, conspiracy, suspicion, scattering—and then suddenly, out of the blue, Jesus turns things around. That’s the way he is and that is the way we should think about life.

God Is Turning Things Around All Over the World

He is the same today as he was then. He is surprising people and nations all over the world. He is alive and he is turning things around.

Persecution, prostitution and the great pimp

Posted: December 20, 2011 by Pam Larson in December, Devotionals/Commentaries, Revelation
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Revelation 17:1-2 Then one of the seven angels who had the seven bowls came and said to me, “Come, I will show you the judgment of the great prostitute who is seated on many waters, with whom the kings of the earth have committed sexual immorality, and with the wine of whose sexual immorality the dwellers on earth have become drunk.”

Dr. Kim Riddlebarger explains:

Through the use of apocalyptic imagery, John not only has in the mind the city of Rome and the Roman empire which was even then both the beast and the harlot, the great prostitute Babylon the Great also symbolizes the city of man in every age, which through wealth, celebrity, and luxury, seduces Christians away from Christ into the arms of the bride of the dragon, and who, after the seduction, will leave them with nothing, much the same way a female black widow spider kills its mate after he has fulfilled his obligation to his bride. Therefore, the harlot is Rome, while at the same time is symbolic of any idolatrous nation or empire which persecutes Christ and his church, and which attacks the church, not with the sword, but through seduction. Like most harlots, who think their actions will gain them love and affection, it will not be long before her pimp, the beast, will cast her away the moment her glory fades.

A.W. Pink: How can we expect to be admired by the world?

Posted: December 6, 2011 by Pam Larson in December, Devotionals/Commentaries, John
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 “If the world hates you, know that it has hated me before it hated you. If you were of the world, the world would love you as its own; but because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hates you. Remember the word that I said to you: ‘A servant is not greater than his master.’ If they persecuted me, they will also persecute you. If they kept my word, they will also keep yours.  But all these things they will do to you on account of my name, because they do not know him who sent me.”   John 15:18-21

A.W. Pink:

The warning which the Lord Jesus here gave the apostles is much needed by young believers today. The inexperienced Christian supposes that the hatred of the world against him is a reproach. He thinks that he is to blame for it. He imagines that if only he were kinder, more gentle, more humble, more Christlike, the enmity of unbelievers would be overcome. This is a great mistake. The truth is, the more Christlike we are the more shall we be antagonized and shunned. The most conclusive proof of this is found in the treatment which our blessed Savior received when He was in the world. He was “despised and rejected of men.” If then the purest love which was ever manifested on earth, if goodness incarnate was hated by men in general, if the brighter His love shone, the fiercer was the enmity which it met with in response, then how can we expect to be admired and esteemed by the world? Surely none will entertain the horrible thought that any of us can surpass the prudence of the Son of God!

Risk for the Cause of God

Posted: September 3, 2011 by Pam Larson in Devotionals/Commentaries, Luke, September
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In America, generally, Christians have not had to face the kind of risk and persecution that is common in other parts of the world. Let’s pray for our brothers and sisters in Christ, around the globe, and ask ourselves how we would handle intense persecution.
John Piper preached on the passage from Luke that we read today:

You will be delivered up even by parents and brothers and kinsmen and friends, and some of you they will put to death. (Luke 21:16)

Last week our subject was Risk and the Cause of God. Our main point was that it is right to risk for the cause of God.

It may not be right to risk much for the cause of personal prosperity or public prestige. And not every risk for the cause of God is necessarily right, either. Jesus refused to jump off the temple, and Paul snuck out of Damascus in a basket to escape the governor.

But even so, it is right to risk for the cause of God.

Risk for the Cause of God: Looking Back

When the battle of the Lord is at hand, it is right for someone to rise up with a strategy, put it into practice and then say with Joab: “May the Lord do what seems good to him” (2 Samuel 10:12).

When the good of God’s people is at stake, and one life could save many, it is right for someone to take the challenge and say with Esther, “If I perish, I perish” (Esther 4:16).

And when the world is without the gospel, and perhaps even hostile to it, it is right for someone to say with the apostle Paul, “I do not account my life of any value nor as precious to myself, if only I may accomplish my course and the ministry which I received from the Lord Jesus, to testify to the gospel of the grace of God” (Acts 20:24).

And we looked at one example of what happened once when the people of God refused to take a risk for the cause of God. Caleb and Joshua said the promised land of Canaan was beautiful and rich; it would take a battle but they could conquer it because God was with them. But the people preferred the mirage of Egyptian security. And so they wandered in the wilderness for 40 years. And I have asked myself how many of us have been sentenced just to wander through life in boring circles because we refused to take a risk for the cause of God.

Risk for the Cause of God: Looking Forward

My subject today is the same as last week. Only instead of pointing you back to the risk-takers of the Bible, I want to point you forward to some possible risks that God may be calling you and me to take.

Our text is Luke 21:16.

You will be delivered up even by parents and brothers and kinsmen and friends, and some of you they will put to death.

The key word here for my purpose this morning is the word “some.” “Some of you they will put to death.” What this word does is put the earthly life of the disciples in great uncertainty. Not all will die for the cause of Christ. But then not all will live either. Some will die. And some will live. This is what I mean by risk. It is the will of God that we be uncertain about how life on this earth will turn out for us. And therefore it is the will of the Lord that we take risks for the cause of God.

To read or listen to the rest of the sermon, “Risk and the Cause of God,” click here:

Piper: Launching pads for missions and straight paths of faith

Posted: January 23, 2011 by Pam Larson in Acts, Devotionals/Commentaries, January
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John Piper concludes a message from Acts 13:1-12 this way:

God is a searching and saving God; that he is a God on a mission; he has straight paths that lead to faith; he is still sending us “to seek and to save the lost.” He is not aloof or passive or indecisive. He is never in the maintenance mode, coasting or drifting. He is sending, pursuing, searching, saving. And he calls us to join him…

…. there will, of course, be people and situations that make crooked the straight paths of the Lord. There will always be hindrances. There will be persecutions and Herods and Elymases. But the point again and again is this: God makes persecution a launching pad for missions; he takes Herod out of the way; he strikes Elymas blind. He carries his advent emissaries forward along the straight paths of faith.

To read or listen to the rest of the sermon, The Straight Paths of the Lord, click here:

 

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