Luke 6:22-23 Blessed are you, when men shall hate you, and when they shall separate you from their company, and shall reproach you… Persecution is no accident in Christian life. It is simply inevitable from the collision with evil of Christian righteousness when it becomes positive, especially when it becomes aggressive in the cause of peacemaking. It is the activity of Christian life which lays its own faggots, prepares for itself its own martyrdom. It is when the disciple follows in the wake of the first great Peacemaker, and from the side of God approaches the world's evil with implied rebukes and an open summons to it to repent, submit, and be at peace, that it is most certain to encounter the world's missiles. A very holy or unworldly life may be itself so telling a rebuke, even though a silent one, as to draw on some meek, pare souls dislike, and calumny, and malice. But it is the active, witness-bearing, and missionary type of Christian character which provokes the chief resistance. The Christianity of the wholly unpersecuted must be a Christianity defectively aggressive, which has not advanced sufficiently to the last stage, the stage of peacemaking. Nor is this all. Persecution is not simply inevitable as soon as the development of active Christian life leads it into collision with evil; it is an indispensable factor in the very development and perfecting of Christian life. Persecution is not indeed a grace; but persecution is the creator of a grace (James 1:3, 4). (J. C. Dykes, D. D.) Parallel Verses KJV: Blessed are ye, when men shall hate you, and when they shall separate you from their company, and shall reproach you, and cast out your name as evil, for the Son of man's sake. |
    |