Through many tribulations

I beg your pardon
I never promised you a rose garden
Along with the sunshine
There’s gotta be a little rain sometime
When you take you gotta give so live and let live or let go
Oh-whoa-whoa-whoa
I beg your pardon
I never promised you a rose garden

So the song goes. As we go through life, we do find that the loveliest roses do have thorns, that life has plenty of dark dreary days; that rain can and does make us wet.

When we first set out to follow Jesus I rather suspect that we do expect every day to be sunshine and rather naively that life will be and should be a bed of roses.

Did the Lord Jesus ever promise that?

No he did not.

When the Lord Jesus sent his servant Ananias to baptise the newly converted Saul of Tarsus, The Lord Jesus said,

“Go, for “he is a chosen instrument of mine to carry my name before the Gentiles and kings and the children of Israel. For I will show him how much he must suffer for the sake of my name*

And so the Lord did and suffer is what Paul did. But without giving up. If he had the New Testament would be very incomplete and many millions would never have heard, or received for themselves the Good News of God’s Saving Grace in the Lord Jesus Christ.

True, Saul who became Paul once held the coats of those stoning Stephen, but listen to this from Acts 14

Paul Stoned at Lystra

¹⁹ But Jews came from Antioch and Iconium, and having persuaded the crowds, they stoned Paul and dragged him out of the city, supposing that he was dead. ²⁰ But when the disciples gathered about him, he rose up and entered the city, and on the next day he went on with Barnabas to Derbe. ²¹ When they had preached the gospel to that city and had made many disciples, they returned to Lystra and to Iconium and to Antioch,²² strengthening the souls of the disciples, encouraging them to continue in the faith, and saying that through many tribulations we must enter the kingdom of God. ²³ And when they had appointed elders for them in every church, with prayer and fasting they committed them to the Lord in whom they had believed.

Acts 14: 19-23

Very, very many times, Paul found himself beaten up, left for dead and worse … but he never, never gave up. Often as in the passage above it was his own fellow countrymen, those of the Jewish faith who were the cause of his pain and conflict. But did Paul ever give up on them? Did he ever once give up praying for them? Did he ever once stop or tire of speaking about the death, resurrection and the eternal life offered in Jesus Name?

Absolutely not!

Some of us have had a kind of bad week this week. It has rained quite a bit on our parade … we hope that those reading this have known the gentle touch of sunshine but if not would encourage our fellow believers not to give up ….

Take Up Your Crossand Follow Jesus

And he said to all, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and takeup his cross daily and follow me.

Luke 9.23