I know that I am the only one who does this kind of thing, but I started down one road in my previous post and ended up at a different place.  I got diverted early and never got back.  What I intended to blog about was related to what I addressed, the heresies in or era that we don’t see as heresies.  We have grown all too comfortable with a severely compromised Christianity that does not resemble at all the Christianity of the first few centuries or even that of the eighteetnt and nineteenth century.  Perhaps there is no place that makes this reality more prominent than our perception of suffering.

I have been at the office all day today (that is intended to get affirmation from some of you) working on teaching material for my trip to the Ukraine.  I am not by nature a procrastinator.  Never was. Hope I never will be.  But this trip has slipped up on me. Usually by this time I would have had all the lectures done and the books read.  I am here today because I have now only two of eight done, hundreds of pages in the texts to read, and I fly out on Sunday.  But while working on this material that essentially has to do with how Paul saw missions, I have been struck by how much suffering was a part of the mission of Paul from the beginning.  When Paul was converted on the road to Damascus and immediately called, God sent Ananias to Saul for three basic purposes:  one, to affirm that salvation and service was due to the choice of God; two, to make sure that Saul knew that he was going to suffer many things for the sake of the Gospel and three to extend through the laying on of hands the anointing for the Holy Spirit for the mission to which Paul was set apart.  Three things and the center of the three that stayed with Paul throughout his life was sufferering.  He never escaped suffering.  He as far as we know died a prisoner in Rome while under house arrest at night and preaching the Gospel during the day.  He saw his suffering as central to his commitment as a Christian and as ordained of God as an essential component in the work of the Gospel.

What if he had lived in our day and in our culture?  What if God came to me and said to me, “Al, you are going to suffer greatly for my Name but you are my chosen instrument for the work of the Gospel; rejoice and be exceedingly glad!”  Well, while writing the blog that some of you read, I might say, “that is what God has said and I will honor what God has said,” but in private I would petition heaven for a second opinion.  I would inquire of God whether He had been apprised of the fact that we spend most of our prayer times in our churches not asking for suffering to be a vehicle of sanctification; we ask to be delivered from it and think that it is a sign of remarkable faith that we pray that way.  I would want God to know that we have created  faith that seeks to eliminate suffering of any kind and now measures meaning in relationhip to God by how well we are and how well-off we are.  I would want Him to know that in our world we have seen fit to take monetary and material blessings as a sign of our salvation so it is fair to say that the most secure in their salvation must be those with the most money in their saving accounts.  I would want Him to know that I appreciate so much the sacrifices of Paul and Peter, of Tyndale and Huss, of Jim Elliott and those who were with him; but we just live in a different day when we have grown to see that suffering is not a vehicle of grace but represents an occassion for praying and pursuing victory over it.  We just name the darkness and claim our victory over it.  That is what I would want to say in private to Him.  I wonder what He would say to that.  Well, I have been listening all day as I have tracked this theme of suffering through Paul and I think that He would say to me or any other who fails to see suffering as a vehicle of grace:  Paul I know and Jesus I know, and who are you?

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