Written by Chuck Swindoll, these encouraging devotional thoughts are published seven days per week.
I have found great help from two truths God gave me at a time in my life when I was bombarded with a series of unexpected and unfair blows (from my perspective). In my darkest hours, these principles become my anchor of stability, my only means of survival.
Paul was no criminal. The man was innocent of wrong ..yet he was misunderstood, mistreated, hunted like a wounded deer, and hated by those who once respected him.
Can you imagine being beaten "times without number"? I cannot. Here is the awful reality of physical abuse. Few people will ever know such extreme pain.
Elie Wiesel gives readers a tragic perspective on the horror of the Holocaust. Wiesel's book, Night, will grab you and not let you go. In terse, tightly packed sentences, he describes those scenes and his own confusion as he witnessed (in his teenage years) a chapter of life we would prefer to erase.
Paul even mentioned the disillusioning times of mistreatment and imprisonment (see 11:26). There certainly must have been times he did not know where to turn—or to whom. Doubt and questions might well have haunted him with maddening regularity.
It is an inescapable fact. If you get serious about being shaped into Christ's image, you'll have to learn to cope with the consequences of being a servant of God. Those who serve will suffer.
I urge you to listen up! Every once in a while we are going to get kicked. Now, this doesn't mean God has abandoned us or that we are out of His will. It just means people are people, sheep are sheep.
Originally, the term persecution meant "to run after, pursue." It's the idea of being chased, having others "on our case," we would say. It is an active, aggressive word conveying everything from being intimidated to being assaulted, actually attacked.
We Christians have received a priceless treasure (the glorious Gospel) in a very frail and perishable container (our weak bodies). There is a reason. So nobody will have any question about the source of power, it must be of God and not of any human origin.
Great-hearted, loving, caring, sacrificial servants of the living God have known ill treatment down through the centuries. The consequence of serving is no new phenomenon. It goes a long way back in time.
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