The Spiritual Gift of Suffering Philippians 1:29

Jesus can fill you with the fruit of righteousness no matter what your situation, if you follow Him.  Paul was in chains in prison, but he did not let that stop his service to God.  One thing is always certain in this life, it will get messy, you will have trouble and there will be suffering.  Through Jesus you can be the person that shines His light whatever happens to you! It is your choice to not fall way from God during hard times but to lean into God, not away from God.  Your spiritual welfare depends on your spiritual warfare!  Read the first chapter of the letter to the Philippians and remember that you are reading someone else's mail!

Paul is very confident that God can begin a good work in everyone, whatever happens to them.  If we want our love to abound more and more in knowledge and depth of insight we have to look at things as God looks at them.  If we are believers we should have the same attitude as Paul about living and dying.  We are to advance the gospel no matter what! 

How we handle the inevitable struggles that come our way in life depends on our faith in Jesus and our relationship with Him.  Pastor Chris Rygh says, ‘don’t waste a crisis’.  This is the type of attitude that fully trusts in whatever happens to us can bring glory to God! Put on the full armor of God: work, prayer, sacrifice and preparation.  Through His strength we can be the person that never falls away, always leans into God, with the attitude of ‘make it as bad as it needs to be’ so we can suffer for the sake of Jesus and consider suffering a gift when it comes from God!

God is not a coward.

Three things converged on me this weekend to launch this piece. 

The first was a review of some of the work I had done on biblical genealogies in preparation for a PhD thesis.  The Holy Spirit has chosen to lace up the scriptures with genealogies that establish a certain tone.  In one sense, if they were missing, it would be as if we wandered into a very old city that still had a vibrant community, only to find that there was no graveyard anywhere.

The second was a reading I did in the classic historical work of Will Durant, Christ and Caesar.  Some of Durant’s perspective is less elaborate than even that of Edersheim (The Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah) in that he, like Josephus, leans heavily on the biblical record for his material.  However, Durant points out that there never was a serious challenge from the Jews to the early documents that supported the Christian faith.  

The third was that I read a short devotional by a popular Christian author that pointed out that the earliest gospel was that of Mark and it was written in 50 to 60 AD.

My response to these converging points is this:

My God is not a coward.  My God has no difficulty laying His cards on the table and challenging anyone to show Him up (John 8:46…might as well read to the end of the chapter).  My God would not write a book and withhold it from circulation until His enemies no longer had access to the material needed to research His claims.  Anyone who believes that, at the very least, the gospels of Luke and Matthew, were written down and available for examination later than a time contemporary with Jesus ministry is calling my God a coward.  The fact that not one assault upon the accuracy of the genealogies of Matthew and Luke together was ever established in antiquity indicates that the Jewish cult of power of that time could not deny the validity of BOTH.  It also points out that Jesus personally commissioned the gospel works of these 2 writers and told them how they were to shape their perspective on what He was on earth to accomplish.

The time has come for Christianity to shake off the hideous strength of the lies of the ancient church leaders who reinvented the truth of who Jesus was and how He lived.  The ridiculous and insulting pictures of Joseph and Mary barely making ends meet in a rude shop where crude articles of furniture were made is romantic…made up by Roman liars!  What did Joseph do with the investment of gold given him by the Magi? Why does Jesus know a lot more about banking and running a business than He does about carpentry?  Why is it difficult to conceive that Jesus would call someone who had a ready supply of writing materials and implements (Matthew, the tax collector) so that his ministry and mission could be recorded as it happened?

Jesus made sure that the Jews could get their hands on what was written and have plenty of time to deal with it if they could.  They never raised an objection.  “This thing was not done in a CORNER!” (Acts 26:26)