By Rev.
Brian Wilkie
Pastor of St. Andrew's Christian Community
Rockland, Ontario
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PODCAST LINK to CFRA
broadcast - Sunday, June 22nd, 2014:
Broadcast Notes:
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‘The Persecuted Church’
Welcome to
Good News In the Morning a program of words and music bringing a Christian
message of hope and encouragement to those who are looking for intelligent
meaningful and spirited approach to faith and to life.
This program
is sponsored by Good News Christian Ministries PO Box 184 Rideau Ferry, Ontario
K0G 1W0. I'm your host today, Brian Wilkie of St. Andrew's Christian Church in
Rockland. As always I want to start by thanking you our listeners. We are so
grateful for your encouragement and support. Please remember that you can
always visit our website for materials to encourage and support you in your
Christian walk.
If you miss an
episode of the show you can go to our website and download the podcast or the
MP3 of our broadcast. Details can be found on our website.
Today want to share with you Scripture from Matthew, Chapter 24, where the
disciples have been asking Jesus about the things they are to expect in the
future. Jesus answers them:
“Watch
out that no one deceives you. 5 For many will come in my name,
claiming, ‘I am the Christ,’ and will deceive many. 6 You will hear
of wars and rumors of wars, but see to it that you are not alarmed. Such things
must happen, but the end is still to come. 7 Nation will rise
against nation, and kingdom against kingdom. There will be famines and
earthquakes in various places. 8 All these are the beginning of
birth pains.
9
“Then you will be handed over to be persecuted and put
to death, and you will be hated by all nations because of me. 10 At
that time many will turn away from the faith and will betray and hate each
other, 11 and many false prophets will appear and deceive many
people. 12 Because of the increase of wickedness, the love of most
will grow cold, 13 but he who stands firm to the end will be saved. 14
And this gospel of the kingdom will be preached in the whole world as a
testimony to all nations, and then the end will come.
15
“So when you see standing in the holy place ‘the
abomination that causes desolation,’ spoken of through the prophet Daniel—let
the reader understand— 16 then let those who are in Judea flee to
the mountains. 17 Let no one on the roof of his house go down to
take anything out of the house. 18 Let no one in the field go back
to get his cloak. 19 How dreadful it will be in those days for
pregnant women and nursing mothers! 20 Pray that your flight will
not take place in winter or on the Sabbath. 21 For then there will
be great distress, unequaled from the beginning of the world until now—and
never to be equaled again. 22 If those days had not been cut short,
no one would survive, but for the sake of the elect those days will be
shortened. 23 At that time if anyone says to you, ‘Look, here is the
Christ!’ or, ‘There he is!’ do not believe it. 24 For false Christs
and false prophets will appear and perform great signs and miracles to deceive
even the elect—if that were possible. 25 See, I have told you ahead
of time.
This is the
word of Jesus Christ in the gospel of Matthew.
As I prepare
this message it's the middle summer in Ottawa, in Canada and it's been a great
summer: warm, relaxing and very peaceful here. Yet as I read the news and I am
informed from sources on the Internet, I discover that it's not at all peaceful
for many of our brothers and sisters throughout the world. Currently as I speak
and record this message there are persecutions happening in various places in
the world and at this point our attention is very much on the persecutions of
Christians in Iraq. There are problems in other places as well: we heard of the
kidnapping of girls from a Christian school in Nigeria some months ago; there
are problems during the Civil War in Syria there have been problems for all
kinds of people, including Christians, as unrest has torn apart that country. There
have been ongoing problems of imprisonment of Christians in various parts the
world throughout our lifetimes. It is a difficult time for Christians in many
parts the world. This makes some of Jesus’ teachings a little bit hard to take.
A little bit hard to understand. Oh, not this one, which I just read to you
from Matthew, for in it Jesus promises persecution and we see that is proving
true. There are always times and places where the message of the gospel is it
hated: not just disbelieved or rejected, but the messengers of the gospel are
actually hated. It is not difficult to understand this, but when we turn to the
early chapters of Matthew, to the Beatitudes where Jesus says, “blessed are those who are persecuted for
righteousness sake,” well that's a bit difficult to speak and to
have roll off your tongue when you hear about the terrible stories that are
coming from these places of persecution.
I read of an
Anglican Minister who was just horrified to receive a couple, some parents whose
child he had baptized. They were fleeing from persecution and had to report to
him that the child which he had baptized had been killed because of his Christianity.
We hear of entire towns where the Christian inhabitants are terrorized and
driven out. It's been reported that the province of Nineveh in Iraq has been
emptied of its Christian population. They fled because of the terrible
persecution there and cities where Christians have been present from the very
beginning of the church are now emptied of Christians. It's easy to save the
Beatitudes: “Blessed are those who are poor. . .
blessed are the meek. . . blessed are those who mourn,” and yet when we
hear of the terrible atrocities are being brought upon people, we might say, “how can Jesus say blessed are
those who are persecuted?” It’s certainly not easy for us to say
when we're sitting in peace and comfort and we're torn up by these things, but
Jesus does say it, and it's an important thing to remember that God is not
blind to the suffering of those who are persecuted. God is not forgotten them
or abandoned them. In fact God is very close to them. The blessing that Jesus
speaks in the Beatitudes is always accompanied by a promise. He says, “Blessed
are those who are persecuted for righteousness sake, for theirs is the kingdom
of heaven.” You know even as we look at these atrocities, and we should be
horrified by them, we have got remember that our treasure is in heaven and so
is the inheritance of our brothers and sisters in Christ. We can be comforted
in knowing that God does not see this life as the sum total of our existence. In
fact he promises an eternal life that far outstrips even the pleasures of this
world. Nevertheless as we join in concern for our brothers and sisters
throughout the world we do have some things that we need to bring to bear as
Christians. There are responses we need to make. Yet so often we find ourselves
uncertain and confused about what we can do.
There doesn't seem to be any way
for us to stop the persecution. There is nothing we can do as individuals, even
as a country. We can't see a way forward to bring peace to an area that is so torn
by violence. We don't know how to put into play the call of Jesus Christ to
love our enemies and to pray for those who are persecuted. How can we do that
and what can we do?
These are
serious questions and they need much more than just one radio program to deal
with. However I want to make a start at that today, I want us to really engage
with this problem and to think about what God is calling us to do as Christians.
Right now I do want us to just take a
moment to listen to a song. This is a song by Sarah Groves which speaks about
the cloud of witnesses that we’ve seen go before us, resisting evil, protecting
the vulnerable and helping the weak. This song is called When the Saints and it's rooted around the theme of the song When The Saints Go Marching In but it's
a quite different song. I hope you enjoy it as you listen to it with me.
Thank you for
listening to that song. That was When The
Saints, a song by Sarah Groves from Her
Album Tell Me What You Know.
Now as we move
on with the question of how the Saints of God are being persecuted in this day,
in various places in the world, we do come to that question of what can we do.
I was searching myself this question and I really want to commend to you an
article that I found on www.Christianitytoday.com (http://www.christiantoday.com/article/crisis.in.iraq.six.things.you.can.actually.do.to.help/39094.htm ) in which the writer spelled out five things that we can do in order
to be of the help to those who are being persecuted.
Of course, and
perhaps this is may be too obvious, the first thing he said was to pray. Now
it's possible that we might say, “Well what are my prayers going to do? How is
prayer really helping the situation?” But let's remember we are believers in a
God who answers prayer! He is the God who was and is great and powerful, and is
able to deliver!
We see this
throughout the Scriptures and we see it most wonderfully displayed in the book
of the Judges in the Old Testament. You see during the time of the Judges,
after Israel had settled the land of Canaan, they were still dealing with a
number of enemies who would rise up and oppress them, rise up and causing the
great trouble. There were neighboring nations that want to expand or wanted to
plunder the new nation of Israel. As we go through the book of Judges we find
this curious cycle where the people start out by knowing that they need the Lord,
they know that they need his help and they are praying to God. God sends them a
deliver, he raises up one of their own to come and help them throw off the yoke
of oppression. They are set free and they enjoy their freedom. Then they
enjoyed perhaps a little too much: they forget about God they forget that they
need God, and they start following other ways. Soon enough, things start to go
badly and that's not surprising. When we lose the laws of civility the laws of
loving one another and the importance of focusing on God, the one God, the one
true God who is able to deliver, the problems of life become greater. Even
though it was their own doing when they fell into trouble and were oppressed
again, they would cry out to God and, even in those circumstances, God heard
their prayer and listen to them and delivered them again. Over and over again
God hears the prayers of his people and gives them deliverance. When God
delivers his people he can do it in so many different ways. In the book of
Judges we see that he raises up one of their own number to bring the message of
his faithfulness. The gospel is not yet a part of their vocabulary, but he
brings the message of his faithfulness, and he delivers them from their enemies
through this person raised up in their midst. That happened in recent history
when we saw God raise up Martin Luther King, one of those who was suffering the
injustices of the civil rights that didn't exist for his people. And he was
raised up and was able to help the people to find freedom, and to help the
those who were being oppressive to learn new ways.
God also
raises up people from outside the group of oppressed people. Sometimes it's
another Christian like William Wilberforce in English Parliament fighting
steadfastly throughout his life against the slave trade, or Abraham Lincoln the
President of the United States who emancipated slaves in the United States. Sometimes
it's a friend in the Christian faith was raised up to give some help and some
succor to those who are in need.
But sometimes
it's even somebody completely outside. In the in the days of the of Israel,
when they were in exile in Babylon, God raised up a foreign king, a pagan, some
who was not a Jew, someone from outside of their faith, and his name was Cyrus.
Cyrus was the one who recognized the call to send the people back from exile,
back to Jerusalem. God used someone from completely outside to do his work of
deliverance for the people of Israel and freedom from their oppression.
God answered
the prayers of his people in so many ways. There are many other ways God has
delivered. Sometimes by a miracle! There
is a wonderful story in the Old Testament about an attack on the people of
Israel. The Assyrians had surrounded Jerusalem and besieged it for so long that
the even bread was a precious commodity. It cost a fortune just to get a little
bit of grain. One day one of God's prophets said to one of the rulers of
Jerusalem, “Don't worry! By this time tomorrow grain will be cheap. Any kind of
foodstuff will be able to be had at bargain prices.” This ruler refused to
believe the word of God and the prophet said to him, “because you have not
believed, it will still happen, but you will not see it.”
Sure enough
that very night a group of lepers outside the walls of Jerusalem who had
nowhere to go – they were stuck between Jerusalem, where they weren't welcome
because they were lepers (and there was no food there anyways) and between a
besieging army that would kill them if they tried to escape. They did some
thinking and reasoning, and finally decided that they wanted to take their
chances on the Assyrian army. At least they had food. So they stealthily moved
towards the Syrian Camp, hoping that somehow or other they’d get past the siege.
But as it turned out they came upon a camp that was completely empty of people.
All the food, all the weapons and the instruments of war had been abandoned as
the Syrian army had fled in great Fear. As it turned out, God had caused a
great noise to rise up and they heard the sound of a rushing army. They were
afraid that reinforcement had come. God put fear in the hearts of those were
besieging Jerusalem, and they fled leaving all the stuff behind.
After the
beggars had filled themselves, they got a twang of conscience, and thought, “if
we don't tell the people of Jerusalem about this food out here, God will judge
us and we will have to make an account for it. They went to Jerusalem and told
the people of Israel that the siege was broken and that there was food to be
had outside the walls. When the people of Israel finally believe, they made a
rush. Now we have heard about those horrid rushes the take place when there's a
Tickle Me Elmo at a Walmart, where people actually are killed – nothing to make
light of – but that one man who refused to believe the prophet’s word, he was
standing at the gate when the desperate people headed out and he himself did
not see the deliverance because he was trampled by the rush to get the food out
in the camp.
God delivered
Israel in a miraculous way. Prayer is so important in this. I do want to
emphasize that, but there are some other things we can do as well.
One thing we
as Canadians can do is write to our government, to our member of Parliament. The
persecuted, not just the Christians, but the many other people, who are being
persecuted in the situation, need asylum, and we can help to encourage our
government to make it a priority, to recognize the suffering that is taking
place, and to find responses that help to ease that suffering.
We can give to
organizations that are feeding sheltering and rescuing survivors. How much they
will need when they finally come to a place of safety but still need everything
for life because they left it all behind. They are following the biblical
injunction to flee just as Jesus told the disciples: When this comes upon
Jerusalem fully when the persecution comes, get out of the way. You're not trying
to make martyrs of yourself: get to freedom if you can. We may be able to help
people come to freedom and survive this horrid experience they've been through.
Another thing
we can do is to share the news of these problems with other people so the
pressure builds to find solutions, Christian responses to these things.
I would
encourage you also to connect with good information sources. If you go to our
website GNCM.ca – (GoodNewsChristianMinistries.ca)
- the transcript of this talk will
include links to the Christianity Today article that I mentioned earlier and to
the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada
website which has prayer alerts specifically for the persecuted church ( http://www.evangelicalfellowship.ca/page.aspx?pid=361 ).
When we come
to our own faith, to something we can do about ourselves when we hear these
stories we can learn from the example of the great cloud of witnesses goes
before us. We can learn to endure. We may look at the other things that people
suffer and we may say to ourselves, “You know what? The things I'm going
through are, compared to this, are what Paul calls ‘light and momentary
afflictions.’” We can we can learn to trust God in difficult situations remembering
that he's the deliverer, and remember that others have endured much more and
still held on gloriously, and joyously to their faith.
We can lay
down our lives daily. We don't have to lay down our lives in front of the sword,
but we do have our lives to lay down before our own appetites, our own plans
and dreams, and in light of the call of God to serve him with all our heart,
all our soul, all our strength and all our mind. To lay down our lives in his
metaphorical sense seems so much easier than to lay down our lives before a sword.
Before I go, I
want to ask you as I conclude the message today to visit our website, and when
you comment or if you could you comment on this message on the website could
you leave me the name of a hymn or a song that speaks to you about the of the
work of God and the call the church towards helping those who are being
persecuted perhaps you can find one in my collection I found very few songs
that had that kind of theme you can help me to build my repertoire my library
of music I'd really appreciate that so much.
Once again I
want to thank you listeners for your encouragement and support. We do thank you
because you keep us on the air week by week. We want to encourage you to
support our ministry financially. Your gift can help us to continue to meet
that one vital expense, the cost of broadcasting, which enables us to reach you
and over 7000 listeners in the Ottawa River Valley. If you can please make a
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time. I also want to encourage you to tell others about this program
Be sure to
worship in a church where the gospel is soundly proclaimed and lived out with
compassion, integrity and resolve. Now to conclude our program I would like to
have you listen to a song called Say A
Prayer by Sarah Groves from her Album
Tell Me What You Know
I do pray that
the Lord will hold your heart and you would know Jesus personally and
profoundly. May the Holy Spirit reside deep within your heart, may the heavenly
Father surround you with his constant and abiding and accompanying love.
Good News
InThe Morning is produced in the Studios of News Talk Radio 580 CFRA.
- Rev. Brian Wilkie
St. Andrew's
Christian Community, Rockland,
Ontario
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