Daily Devotionals

Music For the Soul

Devotional: August 17th

PERSECUTION FOR CHRIST’S SAKE

If they persecuted Me, they will also persecute you; if they kept My word, they will keep yours also. - John 15:20

We may fairly infer that in the reception a disciple of Christ may expect from the world, we have one of the points in which, very specially, the likeness of a true disciple to the Master will be brought out. If they have called Him Beelzebub, they will not grace us with the fine names of approbation and flattery. " If they have not received My sayings," they will turn a deaf ear to yours. " If ye were of the world, the world would love its own." Now, let me say a plain word about this matter. That law is in a fashion abrogated now. Nineteen centuries have not passed in vain. The "world" - meaning thereby the aggregate of godless men, " society," to use a modern phrase- has been largely leavened by Christian principles and sentiment. An atmosphere has been created, else all these centuries would have passed in vain. But whilst that is quite true, and I suppose in lands like ours we do not need to be afraid of the rougher forms of the world’s enmity, it does not seem to me that in substance this law has ceased to operate, nor will it, until either the Church has become wholly worldly - which, thank God! it never will do - or until the world has become wholly Christ’s. There are plenty of evidences round us that it still remains true that an out-and-out consistency of Christian conduct shall be unwelcome to the mass of society. You have only to look at the bitter antagonism to aggressive Christianity which is manifested in much of our popular literature to see that. They used to burn us; they only sneer at us nowadays; but the sentiment is pretty much the same. In your Christian activity, touch the social sins of this generation, and you will see the claws come out fast enough, and scratch deep enough, for all the velvet skin and the purring that sometimes is heard. Let a man live the life, and shape himself after Christ’s pattern, and he will not miss having to bear his share of the treatment given to his Master. If we take Him for our pattern, and try to be like Him, we have to make up our minds to "go forth unto Him without the camp, bearing His reproach," and to live a godly life amidst ungodly people; and that will never be done without some experience of the deep-seated antagonism between the true disciple and the world.