Real Life Persecution // Blessings in Strange Places, Part 10

A Different Perspective Official Podcast

We recently received a prayer request from Julia – a young woman who’s trying to live out her faith – except that her family’s giving her a hard time. Does Jesus have anything to say to help her live out her faith from a position of strength?

Great that we can get together again! You know, it's Friday, another week is gone. Fridays are the days when we look at the pray requests that we receive at ChristianityWorks. If you have a pray request, you can log on to our website at Christianityworks.com and click on "Pray For Me" and a team of people will pray for you.

Here is a pray request that we recently received. Julia, a young woman, said this: "I would like to ask for you to pray for me as I'm having trouble trying to be a Christian growing up in a non-Christian family. It's so hard for me to do Christian things without getting criticised for it."

Yesterday we looked at the statement that Jesus made.

Blessed are you when they persecute you for my sake for great is your reward in Heaven.

It's a gutsy, realistic Jesus. But does Jesus have something more to say to Julia about living her life today, under persecution?

I used to be one of those people who would have been knocking Julia for her faith. I can just hear the words, "Stop dreaming! Get real! There you go again, carrying your Bible around again. Off to Youth Group again!" Pick, pick, pick, pick. I know exactly the words that Julia's family are probably using in her case, because they were the words that I used around Christians before I become a follower of Jesus Christ.

Now, it's a sad thing, but it's true that people do attack people who believe in Jesus Christ, and personal attacks are painful. It's painful to be belittled. It's hurtful to on the one hand give over your life to Jesus Christ. This Jesus who is so real, this Jesus who hung around with lepers and paupers and sinners and prostitutes, not the religious establishment, but with common people like you and me.

That's the Jesus who I have given my life to. That’s the Jesus that Julia has given her life to. But in real life having done that with all the people around her, the people who sadly matter most to her, she's getting this criticism this knocking, and not just criticism and knocking, but swearing - all those things that we kind of leave behind when we become a follower of Jesus Christ. It hurts!

The picture I have of Julia is like a carnation in the palm of someone's hand. I love carnations, I don’t know if you’ve seen carnations but they’re a beautiful flower, yet they are very sensitive to the touch. They bruise very easily. You touch them here, you touch them there, even softly, sometimes and they go brown.

It would be very difficult for Julia because; firstly Julia is young and secondly, she is a young woman. And women have a tenderness, women have a gentleness, a sensitivity that we blokes don't have. So here is this beautiful young woman, who’s given her heart to Jesus and her family is against her. And Jesus comes along and says:

Blessed are you when they persecute you, the way they persecuted me, because great is your reward in Heaven.

That’s fantastic that Jesus said that because it gives us hope for the future.

He recognises the reality; He understands more than anyone what it is like to be persecuted for your faith. There He was the Son of God, nailed to a cross, reviled, rejected, mocked, beaten. Jesus knows what it is to be persecuted. But that's not all that Jesus says about dealing with people who persecute us.

There is a second string to this bow of hope. When we are oppressed it is difficult to deal with that from a position of weakness, but it is outrageously liberating when we deal with it from a position of power. That's exactly what Jesus has in mind.

We read that verse, “Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness sake”, from the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew's Gospel. Now just a few verses beyond that, in verse 43 of the same chapter, Jesus says this, "You’ve heard it said, "Love your neighbor and hate your enemy," but I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be sons and daughters of our Father in Heaven.”

He causes His sun to rise on the evil and the good. He sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Don't even the tax collectors do that? And if you greet only your brothers and sisters, what are you doing more than the others? Don't even the pagans do that? So Jesus says, "Not only am I with you, not only do I understand, not only do you have a hope for your future because your reward will be great in Heaven, but you should actually take a position of strength amidst persecution and pray for those who persecute you." Love those who persecute you.

Doesn't that feel like a perverse double think? Doesn't it feel like nonsense? Whoever heard of that? Whoever heard of praying for people who persecute you? That's interesting.

Tony Campolo, who is a very well known and highly respected American minister and he loves to go around and ask young people, 'What is the one thing that you remember Jesus saying?' Now we’re talking about people who aren’t Christians. The answer he most frequently gets is this: "Love your enemy." That is the highest expectation of this world on Christians that we should love our enemy and pray for those who persecute us. They look for that and when they don't find it, they criticise us for hypocrisy and who can blame them?

So secretly this qualities of loving those who are against us, of praying for those who persecute us, secretly people admire and value this quality in Jesus. And they admire and value this quality in people who claim to be His followers.

Let me share with you part of my walk before I became a Christian. Berni Dymet, the ambitious businessman who was gonna step on everyone and set the world on fire and become wealthy. And I did, it just didn't satisfy me. There were three Christians, in fact four Christians, three groups of Christians who had enormous impact in my life.

When I was on down and out, when I needed someone, the Christians were the ones that stepped in. There was a husband and wife, some school friends of mine. There was the wife of a business partner and there was her mother. And these four people as those had two things in common. First, they were Christians and secondly, I had let each of them know in no uncertain terms or measure that I was disgusted with their faith and their Christianity.

These are the two things that they had in common. Yet, when I was in crisis, it was the husband and wife that open their home to me and I discovered that they had been praying for me for 18 years and they laughed with me and they cried with me, and they accepted me even though I had persecuted them and they had been praying for me, that's just blew me away. That had such a huge impact on me.

The second is the wife of a business partner and when I needed somewhere to live, when I needed emergency accommodation, when I was on the down and out, she was the one, with her husband, who said, "We have a room, why don't you stay at our place?" And she was the one who gave me my first Bible. Isn't that amazing?

And then there was her mother, when I needed somewhere to live, to board for three or four months, when I was moving city, when I was going through this crisis in my life, I boarded with this elderly woman. Beautiful woman. She spent hours with me, every night, over dinner, sharing the Gospel of Jesus Christ with me even though the only other time she had previously met me, I persecuted her for her faith.

You know what I call that. I don't call that ridiculous double think. I call that gritty authentic Christianity. For me that is real. It's one thing to say things; it's another thing to live them. I believe Julia has an enormous opportunity. I believe every Christian under persecution has enormous opportunities to pray for those who persecute us.

The amazing thing that happens when we do that is that God give us strength, and God changes our hearts. And God fills us with the power of His Holy Spirit and we see changes happening in the lives of those who persecute us, the way that my school friends saw changes happening in my life when they prayed for me for 18 years.

God is an awesome God. God's plan is to take a Christian who is persecuted and to bless other people with His love through that person. That's the sort of God that I serve.