We seem to be made to suffer. It's our lot in life.

Yes, there will be trouble.  There will be persecution of Christians.  But the thing about Christians, especially North American Christians, is our claims of persecution seem to be a little disingenuous.  For a start, the Christian church is by far the dominant faith, and informs a great deal of the culture of the nation.  It's difficult to claim too terribly much discrimination when the faith that you hold ends up being on the money, in the anthem, in the courts, in the houses of parliament, and all that tut.

North American Christians have basically rolled the double sixes, the boxcars, when it comes to discrimination, and we aren't likely to face any large scale massed discrimination for the faith that we profess, no matter how bleak things seem to be.

But here's the thing, Christians are almost always looking for persecution.  We have a nasty habit of looking wherever we can for whatever persecution we may encounter.  It can be under whatever rock we choose to lift up, it can be in anyone's refusal to toe our particular line, and it can be as simple as the government not actively supporting us enough for what we want it to do.

But the Christian faith has suffering built into it.  It is made of suffering.  As a Christian, I can promise you without even checking your current status, that you ought to be suffering more than you would as a non-Christian.  Wait a minute, ought to be suffering?  That's strange, isn't it?  Shouldn't this Christian life be easier and nicer?

Well, not really.  This is the thing that happens when you bow to and raise an altar to an unknown god.  This was what Paul was running up against in the Aeropagus, the idea that you could worship in freedom and truth a god that you know very little about.  And this is not an alien concept in the
Christian church either, as most Christians essentially worship an unknown god.  Not that God can't be known, but that they don't know him.  The entire ministries of people like Peter Popoff are based on the idea that people like God, but don't know anything really about him, so they have to have someone else tell them about him.

And the various hucksters and shysters peddle the word of God for profit, and make sure to tell you that if you pray hard and send them money, that all your troubles will be over, because they'll sell you miracle spring water.  Which will be great.  Because the miracle spring water totally works, and it totally makes you wealthy..... as long as you're the one selling it.

You and I have a responsibility, as Christians, to get over the whole notion of treating Jesus like an unknown god, of treating him like a far away god of whom we can never know anything.  Most North American Christians treat God like this, as an unknown in their lives, they have an idea that he's there, but they have no idea what he's all about.

And yet, the God of the Bible is near, not far off. Near in three ways:  First of all, through Jesus Christ, who took on flesh and dwelt among us.  Secondly, in the Holy Spirit, who is the part of God who lives in us, and makes us holy.  That was what Jesus promised to us when he gave us his word that he would not leave us as orphans, but would take care of us.  The third thing is through his holy word, the Bible.  And the Bible will tell you stuff about what it means to suffer as a Christian.

For there are two ways to suffer as a Christians.  One is to suffer for saying you're a Christian, and the other is to suffer by being a Christian.  I'll explain.  In North America, it's quite unlikely that someone will execute you for saying you're a Christian.  Yes, it can potentially happen, but it is remarkably rare.  Far more likely is you taking on board the words of Jesus, living them out, and suffering for it.  When you read through what Jesus says, saying it directly to you, then you will be mashed flat under an avalanche of incredibly difficult moral teachings.  He has some things that he wants you to do, and if you were to look at them, you would likely conclude that you don't want to do them.  Because they're hard, and because you would be essentially better off if you didn't start trying.

But that's not just the teachings of Jesus.  It's not as though the New Testament and the Old Testament tell different stories, because they don't.  They tell the same story.  And something you need to know, that you absolutely need to know, is that a call to holiness, to being set apart by God, is not a call to timidity or to weakness, to idleness or to passivity, but a call to holiness, uprightness, righteousness and strength.  And if you read through the Old Testament, you'll find that those called to God's path are
those called to a much harder experience.  That trip that the Israelites made through the wilderness, when they left Egypt, things got much harder rather than much easier.  Things were all of a sudden far more complicated, things were way more difficult, especially compared to the surrounding nations.  Think about the Persians, the Babylonians, the Hittites, all those nations surrounding Israel, and about how they actually got less interference from God.  He was less harsh to them, less present as a consuming fire to them.  But Israel, he was very interested in what they were doing.

Ultimately, we who are Christians, the more we know about God, the more we will know about his will for us.  Reading through his word, we will uncover so much about what he has in mind for humanity, how we are to behave, how we are to interact, how we are to relate to each other, and that will be far more restrictive than otherwise.  And if you treat Jesus not as an unknown God, but as a known one, then you will find that he has some incredibly difficult things for you to do and to observe.

But there is more than that.  Even those who treat Jesus as a barely known quantity will know that he has some restrictions for you.  Anyone who is anyone knows that Jesus is interested in how you live your life, in what you do, in being moral.  But the big secret, the one that requires you to listen to Jesus incredibly closely, is the one where he tells you that it's not all dependent on what you do.  It's dependent on what he does.  This is part of the change between Jesus as the unknown god, to him as the known God, is knowing what he's all about.  And you only do that by knowing him, by knowing what he says, and who he is, and what he has done.  If you stop having the altars to him as altars to unknown gods, and instead having his altar as the altar to a known god, then you will find something.  You will find that this is not an altar where God demands more and more and more sacrifices, but this is an altar where God himself provides the sacrifice.  It's just like it was waaaaaay back when in the book of Genesis, in which Abraham was told by God to sacrifice his son, and promised to his son 'God himself will provide the sacrifice.'  After God provided the sacrifice, then the name of that place was changed to 'the Lord provides.'

You see, a cursory look at the Bible, a cursory look at God, will tell you that he demands sacrifice.  But knowing God, knowing Jesus, will tell you that he provides the sacrifice that is demanded.  If you stop treating God like an unknown god, then you will know something remarkably important about him - that he asks you to take his burden upon yourself, and learn from him.  For his yoke is easy, and his burden is light.  You won't know this unless you know Jesus in the way he is known, through his word, through what he has left for us to read mark learn and inwardly digest.  And that's the curious thing about the God of the Bible.  If you move him from being unknown to known, you will discover both how much more you have to do, and how much more he does for you, culminating with the all availing sacrifice of his body and his blood on the cross, that because he lives, you will live also.

PJ.