Grace to Suffer

from Persecution Blog 

  Upon hearing about persecuted believers around the world, Christians living in the West often say that they would not be sure if they could go through persecution and suffering for their faith and persevere. Enduring suffering for righteousness, however, is not dependent upon one’s courage or strength.

There is an important catch, however; you and I are likely to respond to persecution in a manner consistent with how we are living out our Christian life today. If we are currently walking in faith and responding to God’s grace, we can be assured of God’s presence and grace if and when we are called to suffer for his sake. If we are walking in compromise and lukewarmness before the Lord, however, then we are also likely to deny him in the time of testing. Obedience is the result of practice built through responding to God’s grace in our daily life.

-Glenn Penner and Bernie Daniel

The Grace of God

The grace of God is proclaimed in the Gospel (Acts 20:24), which is to the self-righteous Jew a “stumblingblock,” and to the conceited and philosophizing Greek “foolishness” (1 Corinthians 1:23). Why so? Because there is nothing whatever in it that is adapted to gratify the pride of man. It announces that unless we are saved by grace, we cannot be saved at all. It declares that apart from Christ, the unspeakable Gift of God’s grace, the state of every man is desperate, irremediable, hopeless. The Gospel addresses men as guilty, condemned, perishing criminals. It declares that the most chaste moralist is in the same terrible plight as the most voluptuous profligate; that the zealous professor, with all his religious performances, is no better off than the most profane infidel.

- A.W. Pink

1886 – 1952

It’s All Grace

“Salvation is wholly of grace, not only undeserved but undesired by us until God is pleased to awaken us to a sense of our need of it. And then we find everything prepared that our wants require or our wishes conceive; yea, that He has done exceedingly beyond what we could either ask or think.

Salvation is wholly of the Lord and bears those signatures of infinite wisdom, power, and goodness which distinguish all His works from the puny imitations of men. It is every way worthy of Himself, a great, a free, a full, a sure salvation.

It is great whether we consider the objects (miserable, hell-deserving sinners), the end (the restoration of such alienated creatures to His image and favor, to immortal life and happiness) or the means (the incarnation, humiliation, sufferings and death of His beloved Son). It is free, without exception of persons or cases, without any conditions or qualifications, but such as He, Himself, performs in them and bestows upon them.”

- John Newton, “The Consolation”, Works of John Newton: Vol III (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1985), 32

The Glorification of the Grace and Power of His Son

“The deepest need that you and I have in weakness and adversity is not quick relief, but the well-grounded confidence that what is happening to us is part of the greatest purpose in the universe – the glorification of the grace and power of his Son – the grace and power that bore him to the cross and kept him there until the work of love was done. That’s what God is building into our lives. That is the meaning of weakness, insults, hardships, persecution, [and] calamity.”
- John Piper

HT: Symphony of Scripture