Persistence…

Genesis 11:1-9    Psalm 104:26-36    Acts 2:1-21    John 14:8-17

A story is told of a man from New York City who did not follow basic hiking rules: he left the trail and subsequently got lost in a desert somewhere in the south-western States of the US. After hours of frantically searching for the trail, he stumbled on a dry riverbed and remembered from his days in the scouts that if one digs deep enough you will find water…so he started to dig. But soon his city-slicker hands were chaffed, scratched, and bleeding and when he hit the river stones he gave up. This was just too much effort…it was just too hard. Had he persisted, he would have found water under the small boulders. But he gave up, sat down under the shade of a dry bush, and fell asleep.

A wise friend of mine recently sent me an email with an attachment that read: NOTHING IN THE WORLD CAN TAKE THE PLACE OF PERSISTENCE. TALENT WILL NOT; NOTHING IS MORE COMMON THAN UNSUCCESSFUL MEN WITH TALENT. GENIUS WILL NOT; UNREWARDED GENIUS IS ALMOST A PROVERB. EDUCATION WILL NOT; THE WORLD IS FULL OF EDUCATED DERELICTS. PERSISTENCE AND

DETERMINATION ALONE ARE INDISPENSIBLE.

This is true in any field…if one does not press on, you will not gain the prize…you will not gain the expertise…you will not receive the knowledge. In short, you will remain at best mediocre.

The same is true with regard to following Jesus. A half-hearted following will not bring joy, peace, and love…as soon as the troubles of this world press in the half-hearted follower gives up. Following Jesus means knowing Jesus and knowing Jesus means knowing the revelation of Himself in His Word…and knowing the Word means, reading, marking, and learning the Scriptures…the Bible. Ah, but there’s the rub…so many followers of Jesus will read soppy romance novels, or spy thrillers, or detective stories, or instruction manuals on whatever topic strikes their fancy, or they will spend hours playing silly games on their phones…but they struggle to read just one chapter in the Bible…and, like the man lost in the desert, they give up all too quickly when it gets tough…as a result, they miss out of the living water that could have been theirs if they only dug a bit deeper…if they only persisted.

But following Jesus is more than just reading the Word. The Scriptures tell us that we ought to be doers of the Word, not only hearers. It doesn’t help we know how to do something if we don’t actually do it, does it. “If you love Me,” Jesus said, “obey my commandments.” In other words, do what I tell you.

Take our Old Testament lesson for today as an example. When God created Adam and Eve He expected them to “fill the earth and govern it” as His vice-regents. If they had done what He had told them to do, they would not have been hanging out in the middle of the Garden – at base-camp, as it were – to be tempted to eat the fruit of the forbidden tree.

Keeping that in mind, what was the object of the building of the city and the tower in Genesis 11? Look at verse 4. “Come, let’s build a great city for ourselves with a tower that reaches into the sky. This will make us famous and keep us from being scattered all over the world.” In Genesis 9, God had repeated the original creation command given to Adam and Eve to Noah and his descendants: “Fill the earth.” So, in building this city, the folks were in direct conflict with God’s clear and expressed will.

Now, let’s move to the New Testament. At the end of the Gospels and the beginning of the book of Acts, Jesus told His disciples that they ought to bear witness to Him before all nations even to the ends of the earth. True, they were to wait in Jerusalem until they were filled with the enabling power of the Holy Spirit but then they were to go out and make disciples of all people groups. In Acts 2 we read about the coming of the one who would help the disciples to obey Jesus…namely the Holy Spirit. But what is interesting is that even though the empowerment had been given, the church stayed in Jerusalem! Yes, they were very active and yes, they preached boldly in the Name of Jesus, but they had been told to be witnesses in Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.

It seems that like Adam and Eve and like the folks in Babel, they preferred to stay put and not to venture out of their proverbial comfort zones. And each time, this disobedience led to judgement. In Acts 8 we read that “a great wave of persecution began (on the day Stephen was stoned), sweeping over the church in Jerusalem; and all the believers except the Apostles were scattered through the regions of Judea and Samaria…and wherever they went they preached the Good News.” But wait! There’s more! I think it is simply mind boggling to find out later, that the very same person who was behind this “great wave of persecution”, who was uttering threats with every breath and was eager to kill all the Lord’s followers…this very same person became one of the first one to take the Good News to the ends of the earth. While it is true that Jewish converts from Cyprus and Cyrene were the first to preach to Gentiles in the largely Gentile city of Antioch, Paul was the first to take the Gospel to Gentiles further afield as a missionary.

I can’t help thinking of a man like Julius Malema with all his threats and hatred. Could you imagine how wonderful it would be if the Lord did to Julius what He did to Saul of Tarsus? That’s my prayer for Julius…that God would turn him into a great witness to the reconciling power of Jesus.

But I digress…

All the way from Adam and Eve to the present day, we humans tend not to do God’s expressed will…why? Why do we find it so hard to follow Jesus? Why do we fail to read, mark, learn, and obey (inwardly digest) His Word? Why do we prefer the shallow waters of mediocrity when there is an ocean to be circumnavigated? I’ll tell you why…besides rebellion…we lack persistence. To press on requires effort and may mean that we will have to live life as if it is not all about us!

Can you imagine if Jesus had decided the price of our atonement was just too high…it was just too much to ask…it was just too hard…and so He chose not to be obedient to God even to death on the cross? Where would we be today? We wouldn’t be here, that’s for sure! We would still be lost in our trespasses and sins!

To press on…to be persistent…may not be easy, but it will be worthwhile!

To the Jewish believers who were thinking about giving up following Jesus because of persecution, the author of Hebrews wrote: “Think of all the hostility (Jesus) endured from sinful people; then you won’t become weary and give up. After all, you have not yet given your lives in your struggle against sin.”

Dearest beloved brethren, as you come to feast at His table once more today…as you take the symbols of His persistence…ask Him to once more fill you with the One who was sent to help us (we who are the Church) to forget what is past…to let go of that which is of no eternal value…and to press on towards the goal, the end of the race, so that we might receive the prize for which God, through Jesus Christ, is calling us.

Oh, and if you’re wondering what happened to the chap lost in the desert…he was found and he did recover…and he never went hiking in the desert again.

© Johannes W H van der Bijl III 2019-06-04