Acts 5:41 “The apostles left the Sanhedrin, rejoicing because they had been counted worthy of suffering disgrace for the Name.” Here is an aspect of Christian joy that initially seems a bit unexpected

Is Jesus’ Teaching on Persecution Outdated? Matthew 5:10

Has modern society become so tolerant that talk of persecution is outdated?

According to the World Christian Encyclopedia, 2.2 billion people lived in 79 countries under significant restrictions on their religious freedom in 1980. 60% of all Christians live in these countries. And 16% (224 million) of all Christians live in countries where there is severe state interference and harassment.

How could Paul make such a sweeping statement?

“All who desire to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted.” He makes it on the basis of a deep conviction about the nature of Christianity and the nature of the sinfulness of man. He is convinced that there is such a tension between the message and way of life of Christians on the one hand and the mindset and way of life of the world on the other that conflict is inevitable.

This conviction is rooted in the nature of fallen man and the nature of the new creation in Christ. Therefore it does not go out of date. It is still true today. Sooner or later a deeply God-centered Christian will be mistreated for the things he believes or the life he lives.

All of you who are dead earnest about putting God first in your work and home and school and leisure will bump into some form of opposition sooner or later. And none of us knows when our freedoms may cease

In other words, the grace of God was at work in all this. God hasn’t changed. This is the same grace of God that used persecution to get good news from Jerusalem Jews to Antioch Gentiles.

Leaders are Particularly Vulnerable to Persecution

When persecution comes, the leaders of the flock are the most visible and sometimes the most vulnerable. If you are the shepherd of a suffering flock, you will be among the first to fall. That’s the way it was with Stephen and the Peter and James in the early church. Stephen was probably the most eloquent spokesman of the Hellenistic wing. And James and Peter were the leaders of the whole church. Stephen was killed in Acts 7; and James was killed in Acts 12; and Peter barely escaped the sword of Herod by a miracle.

it’s dangerous to be a leader when the church is under persecution. These churches were about to go through a fiery ordeal (4:12) and it is understandable that the elder-shepherds might look for another job.

We are familiar with the story of the amazing growth of the church during the oppression and persecution of the Maoist Cultural Revolution 1966 that closed China to the outside world for 40 years. Instead of crushing Christianity, one million Christians became 30 to 50 million.

What is new and not as widely known is what has happened since Tiananmen Square in June 1989. During the Communist oppression almost all of the church growth was among the poor, the peasants, the under-educated. Millions of them. But after the massacre of Tiananmen Square many of the intellectuals of the land were openly disillusioned with the regime and the philosophy that could crush unarmed students. Writing one year later one insider said,

We have reports of thousands of intellectuals turning to Christ. In at least five university cities no less than ten percent of the students have been reported as turning to Christianity. In a way this is even more amazing than the revival during the Cultural Revolution. For the revolution that was led by intellectuals is now being deserted by those who made it. (From Herbert Schlossberg, Called to Suffer, Called to Triumph, Multnomah Press, 1990, p. 26)

Acts 5:41. Two of the apostles have just been beaten up for the first time for their faith, and we’re told, “The apostles rejoiced because they were counted worthy to suffer for the Name.”

“The apostles left the Sanhedrin, rejoicing because they had been counted worthy of suffering disgrace for the Name.” Here is an aspect of Christian joy that initially seems a bit unexpected. Don’t misunderstand what it is. It is not masochism. They weren’t rejoicing in their suffering. There are some people who have such twisted minds that they actually extract pleasure from pain, but the apostles are not among them.

It’s not as if they say, “Go ahead. Hit me again. I really love it.” Rather, in the pain, they rejoice because they are counted worthy to suffer for the name. What is the rationale for this? Where does this aspect of Christian joy come from?

What is the rationale for it?

Where does it come from, and how binding is the example of the apostles on us?

The only suffering I’m talking about is suffering for Jesus’ sake. Not some kind of physical ailment which we will endure because the Lord will not heal us.

“What kind of suffering do the biblical writers consider at greatest length and most repeatedly? It is suffering for Jesus’ sake It’s suffering for Jesus’ sake. It’s persecution. It’s being despised. It’s being abused because of our attachment to Jesus.

Where does that kind of Christian joy play its part in our lives today?

Jesus himself connects his suffering with our suffering., he does this in two ways. First, by tying his cross with us taking up our cross.

Matthew 16:13) “Who do people say the Son of Man is?” we’re told in 21, From that time on Jesus began to explain to his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and suffer many things at the hands of the elders, the chief priests, the teachers of the law, and that he must be killed and on the third day be raised to life.

Today we sometimes use expressions like, “We’ve all got our crosses to bear” to refer to fairly innocuous sufferings: an ingrown toenail, an abscessed tooth, a grumpy in-law.

In the first century, you didn’t make jokes like that. The Romans had three categories of execution, and crucifixion was exclusively for scumbags, slaves, traitors. No Roman citizen could be executed by crucifixion apart from the explicit sanction of the emperor.

A German scholar by the name of Martin Hengel has collected all of the references to crucifixion in the ancient world, and he has shown that everywhere where the expression occurs, it is so associated with shame and ignominy and disgrace that parents are told not to talk about these things in front of their children. “If there’s a public place of execution, make sure you walk around it so that kids will never see it.”

To take up your cross in the ancient world means that sentence has been passed, and you’re forced to carry the cross member There you die in agony and shame.

Jesus, to live under Jesus’ authority, is in some deep sense to die to self.

“If the world hates you, keep in mind that it hated me first. If you belonged to the world, it would love you as its own. As

if Jesus is persecuted, why on earth should you ever think that his slaves, his followers, should escape opposition?

Christian suffering for righteousness’ sake presupposes that the world is evil.

They do not know God. They’re alienated from God himself.

That is, they’re persecuted because of righteousness. Their own conduct is such that it shames other people.

Our Christian suffering is tied in the Bible to experiencing Christ’s resurrection power.

Philippians 3, verses 10 through 12. Verse 10: “I want to know Christ.” This isn’t an apostle who already knows him. He means, in the context, to know him better. He is talking actually about the nature of justification.

“I want to know the power of his resurrection.”

Do you know what? Wherever there’s a resurrection, there’s a death first. It’s jolly hard to get resurrected if you don’t die first.

That’s the context in which Christ’s resurrection power works within us until ultimately we’re raised in resurrection existence on the last day

Christian suffering in the Bible is also tied to the dissemination of the gospel.

Now that’s what’s going on obviously in Acts, chapter 5. It’s while Peter and the others are still preaching that they get arrested. Eventually they get flogged, and they rejoice that they are counted worthy to suffer for the name.

Then later on in the book, in Acts 16 we find Paul, for example, one of his many incarcerations or beatings. There now he is in prison himself. After a severe beating and being locked in the stocks, he and Barnabas are heard at midnight singing hymns. That is, they are rejoicing. Rejoicing! Thanking God for the grace that is granted to them not only to believe in his name but also to suffer for his sake, which is what Paul then wrote in his next letter to the Philippians.

Because he is thrown out of heaven because of Christ’s cross work, we hear a loud voice in heaven say (Revelation 12:10), “Now have come the salvation and the power and the kingdom of our God, and the authority of his Messiah. For the accuser of our brothers and sisters, who accuses them before our God day and night, has been hurled down.”

“They did not love their lives so much as to shrink from death.”

It’s closer to the truth that when persecution comes in, the hangers-on and those who are merely nominal Christians fade away. They die off. They’re not interested. The cost is too high

When the missionaries in China were all left about 1949 to 1951 or thereabouts under the influence of Mao, there were fewer than a million Christians of any sort of description in the entire country. Now the most conservative estimate puts it at 80 million. “They didn’t love their lives so much as to shrink from death.” Christian suffering is tied to the dissemination of the gospel.

According to the authoritative “Black Book of Communism,” an estimated 65 million Chinese died as a result of Mao’s repeated, merciless attempts to create a new “socialist” China. Anyone who got in his way was done away with — by execution, imprisonment or forced famine.

For Mao, the No. 1 enemy was the intellectual. The so-called Great Helmsman reveled in his blood-letting, boasting, “What’s so unusual about Emperor Shih Huang of the China Dynasty? He had buried alive 460 scholars only, but we have buried alive 46,000 scholars.” Mao was referring to a major “accomplishment” of the Great Cultural Revolution, which from 1966-1976 transformed China into a great House of Fear.

The most inhumane example of Mao’s contempt for human life came when he ordered the collectivization of China’s agriculture under the ironic slogan, the “Great Leap Forward.” A deadly combination of lies about grain production, disastrous farming methods (profitable tea plantations, for example, were turned into rice fields), and misdistribution of food produced the worse famine in human history.

Deaths from hunger reached more than 50 percent in some Chinese villages. The total number of dead from 1959 to 1961 was between 30 million and 40 million — the population of California.

Only five years later, when he sensed that revolutionary fervor in China was waning, Mao proclaimed the Cultural Revolution. Gangs of Red Guards — young men and women between 14 and 21 — roamed the cities targeting revisionists and other enemies of the state, especially teachers.

Professors were dressed in grotesque clothes and dunce caps, their faces smeared with ink. They were then forced to get down on all fours and bark like dogs. Some were beaten to death, some even eaten — all for the promulgation of Maoism. A reluctant Mao finally called in the Red Army to put down the marauding Red Guards when they began attacking Communist Party members, but not before 1 million Chinese died.

All the while, Mao kept expanding the laogai, a system of 1,000 forced labor camps throughout China. Harry Wu, who spent 19 years in labor camps, has estimated that from the 1950s through the 1980s, 50 million Chinese passed through the Chinese version of the Soviet gulag. Twenty million died as a result of the primitive living conditions and 14-hour work days.

And yet Mao Zedong remains the most honored figure in the Chinese Communist Party. At one end of historic Tiananmen Square is Mao’s mausoleum, visited daily by large, respectful crowds. At the other end of the square is a giant portrait of Mao above the entrance to the Forbidden City, the favorite site of visitors, Chinese and foreign.

There are some weeks in Ethiopia today in which three pastors are killed in one week.

So then now come back to Acts, chapter 5, and we conclude. We are told the disciples left the Sanhedrin rejoicing because they had been counted worthy of suffering disgrace for the name. You see, the apostle Peter himself was present when Jesus taught the Sermon on the Mount. He was present in Caesarea Philippi when

Peter gave that glorious confession, “You are the Messiah, the Christ, the Son of the living God” and then was rebuked because he had no category for a crucified Messiah.

Their suffering connects us with genuine believers across the ages. It’s almost as if the apostles are (dare I say it?) relieved. They’ve been given authority, astonishing apostolic authority to perform spectacular miracles. They have seen the church grow by thousands. Instead of strutting around and talking about power because they are powerful, they’re a little worried they haven’t suffered yet.

Now they’ve been good and flogged, and they smile because now they’ve been counted worthy to suffer for the name. That is so diametrically opposed to every hint of health, wealth, and prosperity gospel.

Today you now also need to read, for example, Don Cormack’s Killing Fields, Living Fields, the account of the suffering church in Cambodia. The story has not yet been told about Southern Sudan.

On January 19, 1981, a group of terrorists called “M-19” broke into the S.I.L. residence in Bogotá, Columbia, and kidnapped Wycliffe translator Chet Bitterman. The communiqué from the terrorists read, “Chet Bitterman will be executed unless the Summer Institute of Linguistics and all its members leave Columbia by 6:00 PM February 19.” Wycliffe did not budge. Brenda Bitterman and her two little children waited 48 days. On March 7 the terrorists shot Chet Bitterman through the heart and left his body on a bus in Bogota. More than one hundred Wycliffe members in Columbia were given the choice of a new field. None left. And two hundred candidates volunteered to take Chet Bitterman’s place.

Do You Have the Strength to Die for Christ?

I think it is very important for every one of you to think hard about what you would do if cultic terrorists confronted you on a plane etc, and before they blew it up offered to let everyone off who would say, “Jesus Christ is not my Savior and Lord.” The reason I think it is important to think about this is that thinking about your own death for Christ will help you live for Christ as you should.

A true Christian must be willing to say, “I will not renounce Christ, even if it costs my life.” But as soon as we say that, it makes a whole lot of things in our lives look ridiculous. I will die for you, but I can’t find time to sit and read your teaching each day. I will die for you, but prayer doesn’t seem real. I will die for you, but I can’t talk to Otis about you at work. I will die for you, but I can’t support your cause with more than 10% of my income. One of the best ways to bring wonderful Christ-honoring changes into your life is to measure your way of life by your willingness to die for Jesus.

Guard us Lord, that we may not be snookered, and give us courage and boldness, not because we love suffering any more than anybody else, but because we serve a Master who went before us. We begin to glimpse that if we suffer with him, we will reign with him. We are to rejoice if we suffer for the name.