You have probably heard it by now. The great persecution of American Christianity has started up once again. America is just not like it used to be. So much has changed in one year. Just last year Starbucks had Christmas cups…but now they are just red cups. There you have it. That is the front line of what we here in America are facing in terms of persecution…. Hopefully you have rightly identified that dripping sound in the background as my sarcasm. Apparently there has been some real concern about how our culture is once again warring against Christmas. What is the evidence? Plain red cups are exhibit A of the war front.
Last week we concluded our look at the first organized opposition to the gospel from Acts 4:1-31. We addressed the question of what our first response should be to opposition. We discovered from Acts 4:23-31 that prayer should be our reflex to opposition. But the recent news about red cups and the outrage from some corners of American evangelicalism exposes to us how ignorant we can be about true opposition and what really matters. This kind of “chip on our shoulders” response compared with the prayer of the early church in the face of opposition is the difference between red cups and red wood trees-you can’t get any different. The prayer of the early church acknowledged that opposition as evil. Their prayer acknowledged that those carrying out the opposition were culpable. But in addition, they acknowledged that the opposition was ordained by God to further His purposes. And in the face of that opposition they asked for the boldness to speak God’s Word knowing full well that doing so had caused the opposition to surface. They loved the opposition so much and were so enthralled with the glory of Christ and His mission that they were willing to suffer more so that the opposition might be reached and the glory of Christ might be seen. Their response was not a “chip on their shoulder” response, it was a Christ-like response. Certainly true opposition to the gospel is growing in our culture today. So how do you identify true opposition and the right response to it in our culture? Acts 4 helps us to do so. May we be driven by what God’s Word says about true opposition to the gospel and our right response rather than a shallow American evangelical understanding of opposition and its associated shallow responses. Here are 8 principles from Acts 4 to do so:
- The church’s message of salvation through faith in Jesus will be opposed (1-3)
- The opposition to salvation through faith in Jesus will not stop Jesus from building His church (4)
- The church’s messengers of salvation through faith in Jesus will be interrogated (5-7
- The church’s messengers of salvation through faith in Jesus have the Spirit’s empowerment to give witness to those who oppose (8-12)
- The church’s messengers of salvation through faith in Jesus will be threatened to be silent (13-18)
- The church’s messengers of salvation through faith in Jesus must boldly obey God rather than man (19)
- The supernatural results from the power of Jesus confounds those who oppose salvation through faith in Jesus (20-22)
- The opposition to the church’s message of salvation through faith in Jesus ought to produce a spirit of prayer which results in further Spirit empowered witness (23-31)
