Think of Zacchaeus giving half his goods to the poor (Luke 19:8). And the priority he gave to giving to them is seen in the priority his followers gave to giving to them. He came to proclaim good news to them (Luke 4:18). This is especially true for the poor of “the household of faith” (Galatians 6:10). There is another distress people suffer that Christians are called to enter into, summed up in these three words: “Remember the poor” (Galatians 2:10). Since it is impossible with us, we must plead with God for the gift of distress over the persecuted church, for it is such distress that moves us into action. And yet in this verse, God commands us to share in mistreated Christians’ distress nonetheless, for “with God all things are possible” (Matthew 19:26). It was humanly impossible for the original Hebrew readers, who knew the imprisoned and mistreated, much less us modern Western Christians, most of whom don’t know anyone suffering beatings and property-plundering (Hebrews 10:32–34). It’s humanly impossible to even want to share someone else’s suffering as our own, much less do it. Is that possible? With man, no, it’s not. Jewish Christians experiencing such persecution were likely the recipients of the letter to the Hebrews.Īnd in Hebrews 13:3, the author wrote, “Remember those who are in prison, as though in prison with them, and those who are mistreated, since you also are in the body.” Another way to say this is “share suffering Christians’ distress as though in distress with them.” Of course, in the early church many Christians were Jews, and Jesus-rejecting Jews, ones Jesus and Paul anguished over, who at times persecuted them. So we must plead with God for the gift of distress over perishing unbelievers, for it is such distress that moves us into action. If we can speak of God’s election and people’s spiritual blindness and hardness and Christ-rejection as abstract categories without being regularly moved deeply, we do not yet know as we ought to know. O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often would I have gathered your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing! (Luke 13:34) For Jesus felt the same anguish when he cried out, Those of us who do not feel such anguish demonstrate that we do not. Paul’s distress demonstrates just how deeply he understood its truth, complexity, mystery, and his intellectual limits. Paul’s distress was not due to his weak grasp on God’s sovereignty in election, as we see from the rest of Romans 9. ![]() Paul’s anguish in view of my frequent lack of it troubles me. This text undoes me whenever I stop to think about it. Jews were rejecting their own Christ, and this caused Paul “unceasing anguish.” the Christ, who is God over all, blessed forever” (Romans 9:4–5). He felt distress on a corporate level: ethnic Israel was God’s chosen people to whom “belong the adoption, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the law, the worship. ![]() He felt distress on a personal level: he was a Jew and knew and loved hundreds, perhaps thousands of Jews personally. Paul was distressed over Jewish unbelief in Jesus. Standing on the summit of hope that nothing in the world, visible or invisible, could separate him from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus (Romans 8:37–39), Paul mourns for those in the hopeless valley and almost wishes he could be separated from Christ, if only it resulted in his Jewish kinsmen reaching the summit. For I could wish that I myself were accursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of my brothers, my kinsmen according to the flesh. I am speaking the truth in Christ - I am not lying my conscience bears me witness in the Holy Spirit - that I have great sorrow and unceasing anguish in my heart. In arguably the greatest letter ever written, after the most glorious explanation of the gospel recorded in human language, and immediately after unparalleled reveling in unconquerable Christian hope, the apostle Paul jarringly breaks into a lament: We all experience such relief from distress in different times and various ways.īut there are certain kinds of distress we should not be delivered from rather, we should plead with God to give us more. “Out of my distress I called on the Lord the Lord answered me and set me free” (Psalm 118:5). ![]() Rightly do we celebrate that he is “a refuge in the day of distress” (Psalm 59:16). We love it when God delivers us from distress.
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