Blessed Are Those Persecuted Because of Righteousness

By Timothy Holmes

“Why do good things happen to bad people?” she asked. “That is the biggest question that I struggle with.”

I was at a meeting with other clergy and ministry leaders from the Bronx. Prior to the start of the meeting, this question, asked by a senior church leader in the North Bronx, stirred up an intense conversation around suffering, persecution, and Christian doctrine. Very few who were present were comfortable speaking directly about persecution and suffering. As I entered into the conversation I eventually quoted one of the Beatitudes Jesus speaks about: “Well, doesn’t Jesus say, ‘blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’?” As those words exited my tongue, I realized how countercultural they sounded.

I grew up in an urban, low-income, Black and Latino community in New York City. Success, for us, was defined as leaving our current situations to go into something better, something more prestigious and luxurious. Oftentimes, the pursuit of this success dictated the decisions we made in life. The colleges we chose, the careers we pursued, the neighborhoods we moved into, the people we befriended, and the activities we got involved in all became a product of this pursuit. And though those decisions may not have been terribly unbiblical,I began to question the motives. I started to wonder if maybe I was taught that my actions and pursuit of a “better life” meant trying to create a reality where persecution (the mistreatment of a person because of their race or political/religious beliefs) was non-existent.

So when I reflect on Matthew 5:10, I notice that the biggest issue I have with persecution is the level of vulnerability it leaves me in. Being vulnerable and exposed to unmerited hostility and ill treatment is not something I want to anticipate when pursuing righteousness. It’s much easier to think persecution can be avoided if we make the right decisions and do the right things.

Thinking back on the “pursuit of success” that I was taught in my community growing up, I realize that that pursuit is actually the pursuit of privilege and the rejection of vulnerability. I think what might be underneath those motives is the desire to avoid persecution and an embracing of the lie that I actually have control over my life enough to do that.

But a full grasp on Scripture shows that persecution and suffering are actually parts of God’s plan to produce perseverance, character, and hope in us (Romans 5:3-5). Paul says there should be glory in this. But how many of our decisions in life are pursuits to avoid all possible scenarios of suffering and persecution because we’d rather not be put in situations that increase our vulnerability? My assumption would be that the areas in which we choose to avoid vulnerability are also areas in which we lack perseverance, character, and hope.

What if real submission to Jesus meant placing ourselves in situations where vulnerability is necessary, and where persecution is expected? Would we willfully choose to enter into those places, or would we rely on our cultural norms, levels of comfort, and fear of vulnerability to move us away from those places? Do we trust Scripture to be true—that if we willfully choose places where vulnerability is necessary and persecution is expected, we will be blessed?

No Job Is a Calling (and 4 Reasons That’s Good News)

By Drew Larson

Few things in life are as frustrating as a terrible job.

Daily life, at least Monday to Friday, is roughly divided up into thirds: sleep, work, and leisure. For one third of that time—sleep—we are insensible. Which means that, for people in bad jobs, exactly one half of their waking day operates as a negative drag on their quality of life. It’s hard to feel good about life when half of it makes you feel bad about being alive.

This difficulty is compounded by two things. One is that we know that not everyone hates their job. Some people seem to have jobs that fill them with great joy and satisfaction, people who seem to have lucked into the fulfillment of that old adage “If you do what you love, you’ll never work a day in your life.” Hmmph.

The other is that there floats in Christian circles this idea of “calling”—a sense that there are certain jobs or fields of work that God has set you apart for, purposed you for, “called” you into. The idea is that, to have a satisfying vocational life, one must first discover his or her unique calling and then pursue it. Without either that knowledge of calling or the successful pursuit of it, one’s job will always be an impoverishing experience, a drain on spiritual joy and vitality.

Taken together, both of those ideas can be a great discouragement to those struggling in unfulfilling jobs. If a job is supposed to intrinsically satisfy and I am not experiencing that, what am I doing wrong? If everyone has a vocation they are called to and I am not experiencing that, am I living at less than God’s best for me?

Job, Work, and Calling

My perception is that popular Christian rhetoric on vocation has often been shaped by upper- and middle-class cultural values such as “fulfillment,” “satisfaction,” and “passion,” as opposed to biblical reality. As I heard one writer (the name escapes me, but the thought is not original to me) ask, “Would anyone who works on a factory floor feel comfortable at our ‘theology of work’ conferences?”

There is much that is useful elsewhere regarding a theology of work. I encourage you to find it and absorb it. Here, I just want to try to make a distinction that I hope will help you think about this more deeply: a distinction between your “job,” your “work,” and your “calling.”

A job is the name of the thing that you do for money, in order to earn the means to stay alive and provide for yourself and/or your family. It is the thing that the apostle Paul commanded all the believers in Thessalonica to have so that they could eat their own meals and not have to mooch food (1 Thess 4:11-12; 2 Thess 3:10).

What a job is, what it does, what one does in it, whether one likes it or hates it, whether one makes lots of money or no money at all, is incidental. Some people will be born wealthy, go to Harvard, and become pediatricians because they have every avenue open to them and love every second of it. Some people will be born in rural China and be subsistence farmers because they have no choice and simply work hard at a difficult job forever. Whose life gets what job is in every way a product of cosmic providence. Your sphere of vocation is mysteriously and providentially God-assigned, yes (2 Cor 10:13), but from our perspective, incidental.

Work, on the other hand, is something else. A good starting definition might be the outward exertion of cultivating energy on creation. Work is a God-ordained, good part of creation (Gen 2) that was marred by the Fall and subsequent curse and made difficult and sometimes painful (Gen 3). It is the thing of which Paul can say:

Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for human masters, since you know that you will receive an inheritance from the Lord as a reward. It is the Lord Christ you are serving. (Col 3:23-24)

 

Never be lazy, but work hard and serve the Lord enthusiastically. (Rom 12:11 NLT)

 

Furthermore, your “calling” might be best summarized in Paul’s words in 2 Timothy 1:9:

For God saved us and called us to live a holy life. He did this, not because we deserved it, but because that was his plan from the beginning of time—to show us his grace through Christ Jesus.

 

Note Paul’s distinction in the Colossians passage, with my parentheses: “Whatever you do (job), work at it (work) . . .” “Job” is a category of nomenclature, while “work” is a category of activity. Expressed more poetically: your job is the bucket; work is the water.

Note also what we are called to in the 2 Timothy verse: not a unique, special, personal vocation which God has tasked you to identify, but the general, everyday life of a normal Christian disciple in your individual circumstances.

Why Is That Better?

I make this distinction in order to bear out this truth as clearly as possible: your calling is something fully independent of, and fully distinct from, your job situation, and that knowledge is a life-giving wellspring of glorious freedom.

You are gloriously freed by that truth in these four ways:

1. You can know, with 100 percent clarity, what God’s will is for your life in your job because Scripture tells you: to work hard because God sees it and is glorified by it, and to be an obedient and faithful disciple while employed (etc.).
2. You do not have to worry about being outside God’s favor/will for your life because you want to do something else for your job and you currently are not. If you are passionate about X, go do X. If you love Y, try to do Y. If you just hate your job but don’t know what else to do, join the club. The quality of one’s job does not define the conformity of one’s life to God’s will for you.
3. You are freed from worry that you are wasting your life because you are not doing something that you feel “called” to. God has called you to be a disciple. He has given you a job. He will never un-call you to follow him. He may, or may not, someday give you a different job to do. The distinction is a crucial one.
4. You do not have to worry about the amount of success you have in making lots of money or achieving an important vocational status. Your calling as a follower of Christ, and identity as a child of God, is utterly independent of any job “success” or failure to achieve vocational “greatness.” 

It may be true that for some of you, a career change is indeed necessary. You are a bad fit in your position. You are not inherently skilled for it. Your passions lie elsewhere. These are all reasonable things, and you are entitled to pursue better work, to pursue something different, to follow your passion if you like.

But hear this: we are not entitled to success in those new areas simply because we feel more “called” to them. Nor are we entitled to disparage the job God has given us because it seems like less than we should have received.

A job is a job. It is a thing you do while you are alive on earth. If by God’s grace you find yourself in a job that you enjoy, savor it and give praise to God for what it is: a gift to you.

If you do not enjoy it, that is understandable because many jobs are awful. Give praise for it as a gift also, and enjoy and savor God elsewhere.

In either case, remember that your calling is not for a specific job but for a specific purpose—God’s glory—and for a specific person—God himself.

An Unforgiving World of Bumbles & Misfit Toys

by F. X. Turk

I have a little "file for future use" item that seems relevant this week.  I hope this will take up neither more than an hour of my time nor more than about 3 minutes of your time: the next time someone under 40 tells you about what a rotten church we all have here, please direct them to this piece of journalism from the National Review.  On the one hand, it's about something completely different than the problems of being a Christian church in a society which is insufferably Middle Class.  On the other hand, it is talking about the exact same problem and solution in a different context.

I bring it up because someone who is bucking to be a famous malcontent along the pedigree of the young and pretty Jefferson Bethke has written an essay getting a lot of "yeah, bro," comments concerning the idea that the church is something that is not a club and therefore he's leaving it for something else

(which I guess is supposed to be better, but he doesn't really say what it is or how it is better).  What always bothers me about these young fellers is that it seems really obvious to me that they think they are the first ones to come up with these ideas, the first ones who are going to strike out on their own like Hermie and Rudolph into a harsh and unforgiving world of Bumbles and Misfit Toys, and the first ones who will finally, finally, finally live the way Jesus intended people to live.

The biggest reason this bothers me is NOT that they are dissatisfied with the English-speaking church.  I think that the whole parcel of English-speaking churches is, by and large, disappointing for quite a laundry-list of reasons which all boil down to really one root cause: human beings.  Once you put two human beings together for anything to accomplish anything, the results are all of a sudden disappointing -- especially to the next 1 or 2 human beings who walk by and start auditing the results.

The bother comes from the idea that somehow we have finally found a group of fellas who are either more sanctified or more mature than anyone else has ever been, and these are the guys who are really ready to get down to the dirt of the thing and suffer for Jesus the way the NT says to suffer for Jesus.  And these guys are not yet 30 and not yet on the other side of the first time their circle of Jesus friends come up short against what's best next in their local community (which is to avoid saying it this way: "these guys haven't been pastors long enough to find out that every single person on earth is a disappointment, and every single church is populated with disappointing people, and those people are their own special kind of burden to carry").

What I think these guys need to do is not to read or to write a book.  They don't need to form another parachurch organization or a network of fellow disaffected young bucks who can't do church "like that" anymore.  They definitely do not need to start a podcast or a YouTube channel so that they can aggregate (again) all the ignorance of the internet to solve their problem.

Rather what they need to do is to re-read the letters of Paul to the churches he planted and the pastors he left behind to help these people to know Jesus and to love one another.  They need to know what is means to teach sound doctrine and also what accords with sound doctrine.  They need to learn how to come not for the sake of glory from other people, not for the sake of filthy gain, but to come as gentle and nurturing parents who toil night and day in order to be no burden themselves but to preach the Gospel.  And they need to stop, immediately, thinking that when they are finished they are going to end up looking like anything other than what faithful men who do this always look like: in disrepute. They should look hungry, thirsty, poorly dressed, persecuted, slandered, and the scum of the earth.

And it would probably serve them well to remember that the guys they think have completely blown it started exactly where they are right now, but 20 or 30 or 40 years ago -- and this is how well they were able to do it.  We're all hoping you do better, but we all remember where we started 20, 30 and 40 years ago and what those guys whom we were disappointed in looked like.  Here's to you becoming a better class of scum, I guess.I have a little "file for future use" item that seems relevant this week.  I hope this will take up neither more than an hour of my time nor more than about 3 minutes of your time: the next time someone under 40 tells you about what a rotten church we all have here, please direct them to this piece of journalism from the National Review.  On the one hand, it's about something completely different than the problems of being a Christian church in a society which is insufferably Middle Class.  On the other hand, it is talking about the exact same problem and solution in a different context.

I bring it up because someone who is bucking to be a famous malcontent along the pedigree of the young and pretty Jefferson Bethke has written an essay getting a lot of "yeah, bro," comments concerning the idea that the church is something that is not a club and therefore he's leaving it for something else

(which I guess is supposed to be better, but he doesn't really say what it is or how it is better).  What always bothers me about these young fellers is that it seems really obvious to me that they think they are the first ones to come up with these ideas, the first ones who are going to strike out on their own like Hermie and Rudolph into a harsh and unforgiving world of Bumbles and Misfit Toys, and the first ones who will finally, finally, finally live the way Jesus intended people to live.

The biggest reason this bothers me is NOT that they are dissatisfied with the English-speaking church.  I think that the whole parcel of English-speaking churches is, by and large, disappointing for quite a laundry-list of reasons which all boil down to really one root cause: human beings.  Once you put two human beings together for anything to accomplish anything, the results are all of a sudden disappointing -- especially to the next 1 or 2 human beings who walk by and start auditing the results.

The bother comes from the idea that somehow we have finally found a group of fellas who are either more sanctified or more mature than anyone else has ever been, and these are the guys who are really ready to get down to the dirt of the thing and suffer for Jesus the way the NT says to suffer for Jesus.  And these guys are not yet 30 and not yet on the other side of the first time their circle of Jesus friends come up short against what's best next in their local community (which is to avoid saying it this way: "these guys haven't been pastors long enough to find out that every single person on earth is a disappointment, and every single church is populated with disappointing people, and those people are their own special kind of burden to carry").

What I think these guys need to do is not to read or to write a book.  They don't need to form another parachurch organization or a network of fellow disaffected young bucks who can't do church "like that" anymore.  They definitely do not need to start a podcast or a YouTube channel so that they can aggregate (again) all the ignorance of the internet to solve their problem.

Rather what they need to do is to re-read the letters of Paul to the churches he planted and the pastors he left behind to help these people to know Jesus and to love one another.  They need to know what is means to teach sound doctrine and also what accords with sound doctrine.  They need to learn how to come not for the sake of glory from other people, not for the sake of filthy gain, but to come as gentle and nurturing parents who toil night and day in order to be no burden themselves but to preach the Gospel.  And they need to stop, immediately, thinking that when they are finished they are going to end up looking like anything other than what faithful men who do this always look like: in disrepute. They should look hungry, thirsty, poorly dressed, persecuted, slandered, and the scum of the earth.

And it would probably serve them well to remember that the guys they think have completely blown it started exactly where they are right now, but 20 or 30 or 40 years ago -- and this is how well they were able to do it.  We're all hoping you do better, but we all remember where we started 20, 30 and 40 years ago and what those guys whom we were disappointed in looked like.  Here's to you becoming a better class of scum, I guess.