Today, I intend to bring this series on the spiritual discipline of "stability" or "staying put" to a close by offering this reflection on one word in the virtue list of 2 Peter 1: endurance and a quick link to an article in today's Orange County Register about one man who is patiently making a difference.
But first the word study.
For this very reason, you must make every effort to support your faith with goodness, and goodness with knowledge, and knowledge with self-control, and self-control with endurance... (2 Peter 1:5-6 NRSV)
St. Polycarp, leader of the church in Smyrna, was martyred February 23, 155, AD. The governmental authorities sentenced him to be nailed to a stake and then burned. They wanted him secured of course so that when the fire raged around him, he wouldn’t be able to flee. Polycarp assured them that there was no need for them to nail him to the stake, that he would stand there and die, asserting that the God who “gives me strength to endure the fire” will also keep [me] from “moving in the pile.”
That is the classic picture of endurance. It is that commitment that is willing to suffer anything for the cause of Christ. It is faithfulness that can both stand the fire and stand still, facing anything great or small.
Let me ask you to consider something. If the government outlawed worship, would it stop us from gathering next weekend? I dare say it wouldn’t. We would certainly risk a fine or jail time to worship God, wouldn’t we? Of course we would. We know that we must be willing to face the fire. I’m confident that most of us would try to endure to be faithful to God.
But here’s a conundrum. Why do so many of us, who would go to jail to worship God, stop coming to worship if the parking lot is too full, or if we don’t sing enough of the music we prefer, or if people aren’t as nice as we’d like them to be? If we are willing suffer for Christ, are we willing to be annoyed for him? If we are willing to suffer persecution for Christ, are we willing to suffer irritations?
Interestingly enough, that is what this word endurance means here in 2 Peter. It means the commitment of a martyr applied to life’s everyday irritations. It is specifically about our demonstrating to other people the same patience that God shows with us.
Endurance here is the quality of self-control applied to relationships. It is about having patience with people who absolutely annoy us. And for many of us, this is very difficult. Frankly, that’s why I don’t have a Christian bumper sticker on my car, because the way most people drive can cause me to act in very unchristian ways when I drive! I may be ready to act like a Christian when someone challenges my faith head on, but I often don’t when someone cuts me off on the freeway.
But this text tells us that if faith is going to work, than it must show up in the most difficult, annoying and irritating circumstances and demonstrate the very patience God show us every day...
This passage from my new book, Show Time: Living Down Hypocrisy by Living Out the Faith, gets to the heart of a "hanging out" faith: It takes work. Long, hard, patient work. "Staying Put" as a spiritual discipline is more a matter of endurance than anything else but the blessings of enduring far out weigh the effort.
And for a great illustration of this kind of patient endurance, see my next post.
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