RRR_Endurance
Endurance is easy to say very difficult to prove out. What does endurance mean? If you really want to test endurance, just to see how long your endurance actually is, get somebody with a gallon jug of water in a car. And just take off, walking and let them follow you and just walk until you can't walk anymore. You may make 3 miles, you may make 5 miles, but at some point you're gonna say, this walking is getting old, get in the car, have a drink and you'll know your level of walking endurance, you'll know how long you can keep on walking without it being to the point where you don't feel like walking any more.
We view endurance with several different aspects of perspectives and vantage points. Endurance is also easily associated with long distance running.
People are familiar with the idea of building up endurance, but in Christianity, building up endurance, takes on an entirely different meaning we think of and usually hear sermons about testing. How the Lord will put us in circumstances that will measure our faith from which we learn whether or not we have enduring faith. And also there is this term in the New Testament martyrios, which is the term martyr. And it is the idea that you have to make choices that run up against your faith, and most of the time, those choices are rarely direct.
They're mostly very indirect, so you're not really sure, is this a faith choice, a measure of endurance, a test, what's going on?
Satan uses that confusion to try to fool people into not thinking that they have endurance, when in reality, if their back was up against the wall, they have a lot more endurance, and a lot more faith in what they would realise or give themselves credit for having. And by doing so they take away credit from the Saviour who died on the cross and shed his blood that they might have the availability of that endurance?
Peter said we could endure. Paul said we could endure; John says we can endure; Jude says we can endure; Philemon, says we can endure.
Endurance is a statement of the New Testament Peter endured? After denial, Peter endured in the face of direct instruction in discipline by Jesus in in front of the other disciples, whom Peter had been leading; as one of the primary disciples to Christ. Peter James and John, the men who had gone up on the Mount of Transfiguration, and now, here's Jesus addressing Peter about the issue of whether or not Peter loves him?
Peter's faith endured. It endured through that kind of trial, it endured through the trial of his life of building the church, and overcoming his own set of Jewish instructions and legal ideas, people think that Peter was prejudiced against the gentiles.
That's not the case. Peter was Jewish. He had Jewish thinking in his background, and so he wanted to observe the things that he was supposed to observe about proper food etiquette; while the Lord instructed him about a huge amount of ethics and ways and choices of morality that he should make regarding not just food but the genitiles! That which God had created, he said when He brought down all of those different creatures in the sheet, that which he had created is not unclean, and therefore you can partake of it, but it had to be shocking to Peter that vision.
Look at Paul! Paul, the apostle to the gentiles, the one who had started out persecuting the the Christian church persecuting those who had turned from what Paul believed was proper Judaism, educated at the feet of Gamiliel, the head rabbi of Jerusalem; Paul had endurance, Paul endured. What(?) long-suffering sweeping shipwrecks being bitten by Paul endured?
He had enduring faith and that creates the question for all of us in modern Christianity. Do we have enduring faith? And my contention is, yes, you do.
And my Also contention is, if you will give yourself and your Savior credit and Holy Spirit sway in your life, you will discover endurance that will surprise even you, and then it will certainly surprise disciples that you are bringing to Christ?
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