When the S*** hits the fan

The Raw Truth

A Logicians Guide to the Uncomfortable Truth of Following Christ 

"In fact, everyone who wants to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted,"
       - 2 Timothy 3:12

Let's talk about logic for a second. (If you absolutely cannot stand math: skip ahead to the big bold words that tell you to read here). I don't know if you're at all familiar with logical expressions, but for the sake of argument, the above verse can be expressed as:

"All people who want to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted."

Then, if we let

Christian(x) mean x is a person who wants to live a godly life in Christ Jesus

and

persecuted(x) mean that x will be persecuted,

then we end up with:

"x, Christian(x) ® persecuted(x).


This is now in the form of an implication - or an if/then statement. We'd read it as:

For all x, if x is a Christian (a person who wants to live a godly life in Christ Jesus), then x will be persecuted. Exciting right? Well, it gets better!

Now that we have it in implication form, we can take the contrapositive (a transformation that keeps the same true-false values). In other words, we can transform the sentence to look different, but still be true.

Check it: the contrapositive of "if p, then q" is "if not q, then not p". So, we'd have:

"x, ~persecuted(x) ® ~Christian(x).

The tilde (~) means "not". In English, this would read (brace yourself): 

"If you're not being persecuted, then you are not wanting to be a Christian (a person who wants to live a godly life in Christ Jesus)". 

Read that again. That's some challenging stuff.

Side note: I know that the Bible was written in a completely different language and that language had completely different contextual meanings and that this "proof" is no where near concrete enough to show any absolutely indisputable truth, but it still definitely opened my eyes to something.

Here's where you should pick up reading again:

Being persecuted is a part of Christianity - it's a part of life. In fact, truly living a life for Christ means we will be persecuted. So much so, that not being persecuted is a warning sign to reevaluate our life in Christ. Paul isn't even the only one who points it out when he writes to Timothy. Jesus himself said that

"If the world hates you, remember that it hated me first. The world would love you as one of its own if you belonged to it, but you are no longer part of the world. I chose you to come out of the world, so it hates you."
     - John 15:18-19

Here are some question that were posed to me around the end of my senior year in high school through a sermon at church: Am I really carrying a cross if there is no suffering and sacrifice? Can I really say that I'm carrying my cross if it hasn't cost me anything?
I want this information to do two things for you.

1) Encourage you:

If you're going through crap, I want you to know that it's completely normal. It's to be expected, but no one said that it was to be desired. We don't have to love the persecution and say things like "I'm so glad that I lost my job because I just know that Christ is doing awesome things!" Maybe He is, but we don't have to fake it for Christ. Hard times suck. We know they suck. God knows they suck, but He didn't make us go through them alone.

Christ is with us, and what's more is that just after He told the disciples to anticipate hatred, He said that He was sending another to guide them. That other - the Holy Spirit - is within us as well. We are not alone. We have the Holy Spirit, and we have each other.

2) Challenge you:

If you think about the last time that you lost something because of the cross, or were mocked because of your faith, or had to sacrifice something because of your beliefs, and you can't think of anything - you may need to reevaluate your relationship with Christ. Now, this isn't to say that we will always be in hardships - in fact I just came out of a low time and I'm feeling amazing! - but, if you can't think of a time that you had to sacrifice for Christ, maybe you need to ask yourself if you're really living for Him.

I can only say this because that's the exact question I had to ask myself earlier today. I hit a point where I was comfortable. Life was going along, things were fine, people were okay, but nothing was exceptional. Then I realized that my relationship with Christ had also grown stagnant. As with everything, it's a process, but I'm slowly getting back on my feet. I want to challenge you to do the same. I pray that God shakes your life in amazing ways!

As always, God Bless and good luck!
~XTopher