Endurance that Endures

Endurance is an intriguing enterprise in the life of a Christian.  Endurance is a character trait but it is also an action.  It is something we possess but also something we do.  In the biblical account, endurance is synonymous with perseverance.  Etymologically, they both refer to a state of being steadfast under strain. Simply put, it means staying true when there is intense pressure not to.  In the life of the believer, this means that we will stand up under pressure, particularly spiritual pressure and persecution.

There are several verses for positing the importance of endurance (Heb. 12:1-2; Jam. 1:2-3; 1 Pet. 5:8-9).  Basically, we as Christians are called to endure but endure with intent.  Although we affirm that we are born again, we simultaneously assert that we are continually being renewed and sanctified.  This is the battle that rages between the flesh and the spirit.

But we are called to endure, to persevere.  Perseverance, at its root, requires an obstacle.  It is not perseverance if there is no hindering obstruction to overcome.  When we say that we are enduring or persevering, we are affirming that there is an object that impedes us, something that is crippling or disabling our abilities in one capacity or another.  Endurance requires an object to endure.

Secondly, endurance requires distance/time to take its full effect.  It would be incorrect to call a 100m dash an endurance event.  No, we call marathons endurance events.  Why?  Because in any situation that calls for endurance or perseverance, the passage of distance/time is the measurement for the success or failure to endure.  If If a marathon runner only ran 23 mi. then he/she did not actually endure the marathon.  Endurance requires a passage of time or a traveling of distance.  These can be physical, literal, spiritual, and/or figurative

James 1 says: "let steadfastness have its full effect."  What James is saying and Paul confirms (Rom 5:3-5) is that struggles are often the soil that God chooses to use to grow fruits of divine character within us.  It is the struggle which causes growth.  The struggle itself is not the point; it is our attitude and reaction to the struggle that is of most importance.  Many people shrink when facing struggles.  God calls us to endure struggles.  Moreover, He calls us to rejoice in those struggles.

We rejoice amidst struggle because God is growing us and because God is in us.  It is a beautiful phenomenon.  It is by way of endurance that we achieve what God wills for us.  This is to be our attitude during struggle that require endurance.  We should always strive to look forward to the work that He is doing in us and through in the midst of struggles.  When life pushes us to endure, our straining should be our effort to look to and for God for everything.  When we see obstacles that will hinder us, we should be excited that God is going to be glorified in our endurance.

Remember, He blesses those who endure and persevere in righteousness.  This is not to say that enduring struggles is easy.  On the contrary, the fact that things are difficult is what necessitates endurance.  Only when it is difficult does anything require perseverance to overcome it.  We should strive though to always remain focused on the Lord and His intent in raising us up in righteousness as we are pressed to endure.

Practicing Presence

The Word of God is the Sword of Truth, the offensive weapon with which we fight life’s battle  (Eph.6:10-20).  This is a foundational understanding that should dictate how we handle the Bible.  A basic rule in all matters of effective weapon wielding is practice, determined and disciplined practice.  Using the Sword, that is Holy Scripture is no different.  It should always be pursued with diligence and a heart for growing in the will of the Lord.  If I wanted to be a knight, I would need to be skilled in the art of the sword.  If I wanted to be an archer, I would need to be well-practiced in the art of the bow.  The Word of God is no different.  Practice.

Practice is a learned discipline.  It takes dedicated time to learn the art of practicing.  Practice involves rigorous repetition focused on the singular goal of improvement.  In regards to the Bible, practice means studying the Bible.  But, like any craft, it takes work and help. Reading your Bible is not enough.  You also need to find good Bible teachers with solid doctrine and firmly grounded faith to guide and direct.  Reading the Bible can be a daunting task to say the least.  It was written over the course of some 1500-2000 years, it has some 30+ authors. spread across the ancient world, and took make matters even more difficult it has nearly every generic form of literature.  Not an easy task.  Find a good teacher, or a few.

Practice requires something else too: passion for the craft when you feel no passion for the craft.  Because humanity is so fickle and so emotional, we’re not always going to feel like getting into the Word.  This is the flesh battling for supremacy in our lives.  Instead of giving into our flesh, when we don’t feel like reading, we read.  Perseverance is a good thing but it comes only when there is something for us to endure.  

Therefore, when we do not feel like studying the Bible, we should be glad and joyful that God is growing our perseverance.  This is a beautiful thing.  God uses our flesh as the soil for our spiritual growth.  Perseverance only happens when there is a hindrance; you cannot persevere if there is no struggle to overcome.  This is a very simple way to continually assert who will be the Lord of your life.

Lastly, memorization.  Like a painter needs to memorize the tips of his/her brushes, the chef the ingredients, the musician the music, the Christian needs to memorize the Bible.  This alone can be a frightening endeavor because of the sheer weight of reading a book like the Bible. Luckily, like all of life, there are baby steps.  Simply put, start with easy, fundamental verses that matter.  Then, frankly, memorize it.  This means spending time repeating the verse, writing it down and saying it out loud. Rinse, Lather, Repeat. Remember, this will be a struggle but have hope that it is an important and worthy one.  So, to get this rolling, here is one of my favorite verses and one of the first that I memorized (It took like a week, one verse at a time...):

Eph. 2:8-10:  “For by grace you have been saved through faith.  And this is not of your own doing ; it is the gift of God, not by works so that no one may boast.  For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.”

Ready to Speak

The Lord is amazing.  He has done so much, for He is God.  He spoke all of creation into existence by the power of His Word (Gen. 1).  This is not a light assertion and yet it is so quickly forgotten when under pressure.  For believers, God is everything.  Jesus is the object of our gaze and of our faith.  When people become believers, God becomes the focus that makes of all of our time and every facet of life.  That being said, for some reason, when believers get in public, around non-believers, they shy away from speaking abou the Lord.   This not right.

Peter says that we should always be prepared to give a defense for why we believe (1 Pet. 3:15).  This is real, we should always be ready to give an account of Christ.  The Lord is the Lord, there is no other and none that is greater than the Lord.  Why would we not want to talk about Him?  He spoke all of creation into existence, this is utterly amazing and should cause fear and trembling at His name.

Moreover, God is holy.  Because of this, He cannot be in the presence of sin.  Adam and Eve as well as all mankind were cast out of His presence because of sin (Gen. 3).  The wages of sin is death.  All sin costs death.  A weighty cost to be paid by every human being.

Fortunately, in God's infinite wisdom and gracious design sent His one and only Son, Jesus, to condescend into human form to take on the sins of all mankind.  Jesus lived a perfect, sinless life.  Because of this, when He suffered a sinners death, He took in His flesh all the iniquity of mankind and thus paid the sin debt to be reckoned to all mankind.  Why would we ever not want to talk about this!?

Additionally, the Holy Spirit lives within every believer for counsel, for comfort, and for guidance among other things. The Holy Spirit lives to radiate and glorify the Son.  When we give testimony to the Lord, the Holy Spirit is activated, aroused by the fragrance of Jesus' name.  Again, this is amazing and awesome: when we want to be in the presence of the Holy Spirit, we are to speak Jesus' name.  Simple.

Yes, it is true that not everyone is a stellar, gifted evangelist.  This is a truth.  However, we are all, everyone of us, called to glorify the Son in word and deed.  Sometimes the deed part is the easier part.  But we need to speak about God.  We need to herald His holy name.  How would anyone learn about the Lord unless we preach it (2 Tim. 1-2)?  Being ready to speak keeps us focused and fixed on Christ, the Holy Lord.

Focus on Forever

Life is fickle.  From day to day, everything changes.  Up and down, the universal constant.  This is as true today as it has been since the Fall.  In science, this is expressed as entropy, or the continual decline and decomposition of everything in all of creation.  Creation is in a constant state of degradation from form to chaos.  Scripture speaks clearly to the principles of entropic declension in creation, speaking most directly to the volatile and capricious nature of humanity.

Peter, in his first epistle, quotes Isaiah in stating, "All flesh is like grass and all its glory like the flower of grass.  The grass withers, and the flower fails, but the word of the Lord endures forever (Isa. 40:6-8; 1 Pet. 1:24-25)".  The principle is clear.  All flesh is as grass, growing fast and strong only to perish like waste upon seasons change.  Man is here today and passes away tomorrow without any hope for relief from the impending end of deterioration and death.

Solomon wrenches the truth of the flesh's vanity to a fevered pitch of nihilism in Ecclesiastes 1:2b, "Vanity of vanities, all is vanity."  Think of the bleek picture of humanity Solomon paints with the swift strokes of his keenly wise pen.  Vanity.  Life is but vain in all of its endeavors and pursuits.  Understanding the uselessness of life apart from God is principle in any proper understanding of sin, the Fall, and of God Himself.

Before the Fall (Gen. 3), life had purpose and divine intent, full of communion and relationship with the Lord.  Because of the Fall and the sin thereof, man was made unable to be in the presence of God.  Thus we lost are ties to the everlasting and we were relegated to the perishing.  Thus all pursuits of righteousness are worthless in light of the righteousness of God (Isa. 64:6).  As a result, we need Christ.  

We need the cleansing atonement of Christ's grace applied to our lives by faith.  This is where all of the worth of life comes from.  Flesh is perishing, but God is infinite and eternal.  Our focus is to be on the eternal and not on the perishing.  This is a major tenet of the Christian life.  Christ is our tie to the eternal, our only tie.  

Apart from Jesus, there is no intermediary between the decomposition of man and the eternal  character of God.  He is the connecting conduit which transforms the perishing into the eternal.  When we give ourselves to Him, His grace is applied to our lives through faith and we gain access to the eternality of the Heavenly Lord.  This is a beautiful thing.  Oh, that we would always focus on forever, which is only achieved by an ardent faith in Jesus.  Only in Christ and through Him can we who are of flesh know anything of the Spirit, which is eternal.

Divine Gifting

God has divinely created a body of believers that we call the Church, His bride.  The Church is a complex organism made up of diverse peoples with a wide variety of abilities, experiences, and godly giftedness.  Ideally, the Church is made up of microcosmic churches comprised of the same sort of complex organic composition.  When we understand the Church and churches in this way, certain hues began to color the beautiful picture of Christ's bride.

First of all, because we (believers) make up the Church through our churches, commitment and consistency to a particular body is essential.  More than that, because we each are part of the body, whose head is Christ, we should always strive for humility throughout every action, especially within the Church.  

Paramount to this is the fact that no one person has the entirety of God.  Again, no one can have the wholeness of God.  We each have parts, yet when put together, we make up the body of Christ.  This means that we should never lord authority over one another.  Not ever.  On the contrary, those who wish to be overseers and leaders within the Church must humble themselves as servants of all and never lord authority over anyone (Mk. 10:42-45).  We are to look to Christ's example in this regard.  Although being in very nature God, He humbled Himself and suffered the penalty for all man's sin (Phi. 2:1-11).

Part and parcel to this is spiritual gifting and divine placement.  These two things work in concert so that individuals are most effective within their ministry positions.  Everyone has a ministry position, we are all called to the priesthood of believers (1 Pet. 2:5).  Additionally, whatever we do, in word or deed, we are to do utterly for the Lord (Col. 3:17, 23).

Spiritual gifting refers to specific divine-equipping that God has done for every believer.  Every believer.  God has uniquely gifted every believer for a specific role in the body.  The Holy Spirit gifts each and every believer by grace according to the will of God (Rom. 12:4-6; Heb. 2:2-4).  These gifts include but are not limited to: teaching, leading, prophesying, exhortation, healing, wisdom, knowledge, discernment, mercy, generosity (1 Cor. 12:4-11; Rom. 12:4-6).  The gifts aren't the important thing.  What matters is that these gifts are given to us by His grace and for His will, not our pleasure or misuse.

Spiritual gifting is paired with divine placement.  Divine placement is the working of the sovereign hand of God placing us in the perfect situations for our benefit and strategic usefulness.  Essential to this is prayer and patience because we do not always know where we will be most effective.  Some people do, some do not.  If you are of the latter, do not fret but be patient and steadfast in your pursuit of Him during this season of waiting.  Remember, God is preparing you just as He is preparing a specific place for you.  This is how He works.  

It is akin to a chess board.  Every piece on a chess board has a specific purpose paired with a distinct set of skills as well as drawbacks.  A pawn cannot move like a knight, but a knight cannot regain a queen.  There is design and order in this.  In the Church, it points to the need for community between the body.  Think of a tapestry.  If it was just one type of thread and a single color, it would not be very desirable.  Luckily, God weaves us together as distinctly different threads for His purpose and as His Church.  A concert wouldn't be very pleasurable if the band only played one note on one instrument.  Instead, how splendid is the masterful creativity of the Heavenly Composer!  

Again, remember that we are to be a single body of diverse parts woven together by the blood of the lamb for His good pleasure, for His glory, and as His church.  Because of this, we should always be respectful and modest regarding other's gifts.  We cannot know how God is using or planning to use them.  Therefore, we should not ever lord our gifts over others (1 Cor. 12:14-26).  Instead we should always strive to encourage one another to growth in efficacy in whatever function God has called us to.  And remember, God is the one who gifts.  He alone should be who receives all the praise for gifts, calling, and placement.  To God alone be the glory!

Two People, One Flesh

Sex is one of the most intimate and beautiful things in all of creation.  Sex, like anything created, was created by the Lord for a purpose.  And, like anything created, sex used outside of its intended purpose is sin.  Therefore, a proper understanding of the place and the gravity of sex is absolutely necessary.  Our world is so inundated and saturated with every form of sex that a concise definition of the biblical and godly understanding would be helpful.

Sex, as the Bible presents it, is the physical, emotional, and spiritual union of intercourse between husband and wife.  Simply put, every form of sex that lies outside of this precise definition is sexual immorality and sin.  There is no place in the biblical understanding of sex for pornography, adultery, homosexuality, or promiscuity.  Clearly, this is far from politically correct; however, it is biblical.  Again, any form of sex outside of the union of husband and wife is sin.  Why?

Sex was ordained by God as the fundamental communion between men and women in marriage.  The act of intercourse weaves two independent people into one unified being.  Sexual relation ties husband and wife together physically, emotionally, and spiritually.  Because of the reality and gravity of the union that intercourse is, it is reserved only for marriage.

Additionally, in the Bible, sexual intimacy and marriage is one of the most used metaphors in explaining how believers are tied to God.  Both the Old and New Testaments are full of language that define the relationship between God and His Church in terms of marriage.  In this regard, intercourse is reserved solely in the context of a monogamous marriage just as spiritual union is reserved solely for the Lord.  There is a distinct an intentional parallel between the union of marriage and the union between Christ and His believers.  Any worship that is not directed towards the Lord is sin just like any sex that is not directed towards our specific spouse is sin.

Married believers should not shy away from the topic of sex.  Instead, believers should be outspoken about the seriousness of sex and that it is reserved only for marriage.  Again, this is not politically correct, but it is right.  When thinking and talking about sex, who are we more afraid of offending, man or God?  If we are more fearful of offending societal sensibilities and whims of political correctness, then we are not serving God and thus are sinning.  Again, sex is of the most beautiful and intimate things in all creation.  If we truly want to serve our Lord, then a proper biblical understanding of sex is essential.  We should never let society determine what we think about the Word.  Instead, the Word should always determine how we deal with society.  This is especially true in regards to sex.

Remember Redemption

Peter, in his second epistle, writes: "Therefore I intend always to remind you of theses qualities, though you know them and are established in the truth that you have.  I think it right, as long as I am in this body, to stir you up by way of reminder, since I know that the putting off of my body will be soon, as our Lord Jesus Christ made clear to me.  And I will make every effort so that after my departure you may be able at any time to recall these things."

Notice in this brief selection that Peter talks about remembering the truth three times.  This is not by accident but is fully intentional.  Peter is saying that, although we have known the truth, we should not ever fear or shy from remembering it.

Practically speaking, this means we remember Christ, His salvation and place in our lives.  This has special importance for us.  When we forget Christ, who He is and what He has done, we are prone to backsliding.  This is a real threat.  When we are complacent, we are not growing.  This is not to say if we're not under duress then we're not growing.  Rather, we are unable to live according to His will without His Holy Spirit working in us.  This requires an approach of remembrance towards all of life.

Remembering God keeps us from not remembering Him.  This may sound rhetorical, but think about it.  We are commanded to live in the Spirit, to abide in Him, to unceasingly seek after Him; if we are remembering Him, we cannot but live these out.  It is when we are not remembering Him that we get into trouble.

Numerous times in their history, before Israel was judged and forced into exile, the Scripture says that they had forgotten the Lord, that they had forgotten how He brought them out of Israel and had forgotten His law (Jdg. 3:7; Hos. 8:14).  When we forget about God, we do not set our sights on His righteous will and perfect path, we settle for our imperfect, futile paths.  This can only lead to sin and despair.  God wants so much more of us, for us, and from us.

Therefore, we should set it in our minds and upon our hearts to fix our gaze on Jesus, always remembering Him.  Additionally, this is the purpose of the Communion: a regular remembrance of who He is and what He has done for us.  Remembering Him should not feel like a burden but it should be a struggle of joy for we desire to love and serve Him.  And there is nothing more joyous or joyful than to pursue Him.