Our times leave us hard-pressed but not crushed

I was disheartened—and confused—after I learned that Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal, a Republican and professing Christian, vetoed a bill that would have protected pastors, religious organizations, and business owners who don’t want to celebrate what the God who saved us calls an abomination, as is our constitutional right. Did he cave to corporate threats, or does he really believe that in this anti-Christian climate, Christians don’t need protection from government retaliation?

I was alarmed about objections to North Carolina’s new law that requires biological males to use men’s restrooms and biological females to use women’s restrooms. Why is this even up for debate, and why do we need such a law? Unfortunately, this isn’t an episode of The Twilight Zone. This is our reality. We live in such times. We are witnesses. The world is determined to marginalize and penalize Christ followers. The homosexual lobby wants our silence and, more important, our total compliance and prostration.

We read stories about Christian-hating Muslim terrorists targeting our fellow believers for murder. Though here in the United States we aren’t dealing with this bloodlust form of persecution yet, the American form comes from those who push an abnormal and destructive lifestyle, and our own government is complicit. We’re reminded that the world is fallen, the world hates Christ, and the world hates us. God punished Israel for her rebellion and allowed the Hebrews to be conquered and exiled by their enemies. Are we witnessing a similar kind of punishment?

One thing we know for certain: The gates of hell will not prevail against the body of Christ. His suffering on the cross is a finished work, and He’s making His appeal to the unrepentant through us, His ambassadors. How easy it is to forget this, our human nature being what it is. It’s not about us. Some of the people who presently hate us might be our brothers and sisters in Christ one day. That is what we should envision when we read about Christians murdered for their faith, a Christian business owner filing for bankruptcy because he refuses to celebrate sin, or a believer losing his job for daring to oppose the government teaching his children that a destructive lifestyle is normal.

The Apostle Paul reminds us that God commanded light to shine out of darkness. As bondservants for Christ’s sake, we’re salt and light in a decaying world, but one in which God is still saving. There is hope for the persecutor. Just as we received the gift of grace and blessings of mercy, so can he.

“We are hard-pressed on every side,” the Apostle Paul wrote, “yet not crushed; we are perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed—always carrying about in the body the dying of the Lord Jesus, that the life of Jesus also may be manifested in our body. For we who live are always delivered to death for Jesus’ sake, that the life of Jesus also may be manifested in our mortal flesh. So then death is working in us, but life in you.”