“Resilience” is the positive capacity of people to cope with stress and adversity. The negative response to the last invitation may have been taken as a personal rejection and has stopped us from trying again.

Contrast this ‘giving up’ attitude with the life of Jesus and the early church where there appears to be a remarkable resilience to rejection and persecution. Many early Christians were beaten, imprisoned, tortured and put in stressful situations, yet still Christianity spread. What made the early church so resilient when the church today seems to become paralysed with fear after even mild disappointments? It is almost as if  rejection and persecution led them to an even stronger faith.

I have heard many Christians say that what we need is a bit of persecution to sort out the church. This comes from the belief that testing makes faith stronger.
In fact Matthew 5 it says “Blessed are those that are persecuted because of righteousness for theirs is the kingdom of heaven”
We could exchange the word blessed for happy. Happy are those who are persecuted and rejected. Could we say that about the church of today?

We need the resilience of the Sower who kept on sowing despite knowing that some of the seed failed to reach the good soil.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 15th, 2011 at 5:48 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.