Getting your P's: Perseverance

Some things take effort. Things like finishing a degree, getting fit, eating healthy, your spiritual life. You add to them every day little by little and not so suddenly, after some time you realise you’re closer to where you want to be. It’s called perseverance. 

I struggle with perseverance. I always have an excuse. Right now, I’m supposed to be studying for my exams but I’m writing this. When I’m not, I’m watching Brooklyn 99 and even if watching tv shows usually helps me study, 95% of the time that’s just my excuse to procrastinate even more. It’s tough stuff to persevere sometimes, especially after 6 years of uni, but that’s just another excuse because this started well before uni :P. Honestly sometimes it feels like I’m swallowing a bowl of nails when it comes to persevering. 

My personal relationship with God has definitely been the area of my life where I’ve persevered the least in the past. Only recently its come to my attention that it doesn’t need a million grand sacrifices (but do so by all means if that’s what you want to do). We do need to remember the grandest sacrifice of all though, the cross of Christ. Most often, perseverance consists of mundane every day choices. 

“Every time you make a choice you are turning the central part of you, the part of you that chooses, into something a little different than it was before. And taking your life as a whole, with all your innumerable choices, all your life long you are slowly turning this central thing into a heavenly creature or a hellish creature.” - C.S. Lewis.

If you haven’t already guessed, I’m going to be talking about persevering for the cause of Christ.

"Let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us." Hebrews 12: 1 

What is the race?

The path Jesus walked when he was here is clearly marked out for us in his Word. This is our race. It’s a unique race, a christian race, the path you choose when you choose Jesus. And make no mistake, this choice guarantees suffering and pain. If you want to follow someone who was persecuted, rejected and crucified by this world then you can know that your path isn’t going to be much different. Take heart in this! For he has overcome the world (John 16:33)! We are encouraged to 'rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope' (Romans 5:3-4).

Why do we persevere?

The intent is important to clarify. Perseverance is usually used in relation to achieving your goals, becoming the best and the brightest on your way to fame and fortune. Unfortunately, if that’s what you were hoping to read about, this isn’t that. The perseverance in the Bible has a clear purpose, to be an example to those around us. So that our lives and the love we give may be a sermon. So that the way we cry out to God, the way we worship him and adore him may be a reflection of the love he so willingly pours out for us. Not so that we may become more and better but so that God may be represented more and better through us. So that in becoming windows and mirrors we become nothing in and of ourselves, but all of whom we are revealing, God’s love story to a rebellious people. 

I know, it sounds countercultural to persevere to become nothing, when everyone around us is working so hard to become something or someone. But as my pastor pointed out this sunday, as Paul drew closer to Christ he realised how much smaller he was, not in a self-loathing and self-pitying kind of way, but in awe and appreciation of the greatness of God. He compared it to walking towards Mt Everest. From far away it looks huge, you know it’s really big even from pictures, but when you get closer and closer you realise just how big it actually is. You don’t even think about your smallness because you’re consumed by it’s greatness first and foremost. 

How do we persevere? (based on Romans 5:3-5)

1. Prepare: 
1. Figure out what's getting in your way. May it be drive for worldly gain; money, fame, admiration or a group you want to fit in with that clearly don’t represent the characteristics of Christ or natures in yourself that keep telling you to go against the word of God; your flesh, your feelings, your fear. Most likely, its a whole lot of pride or a everything combined. "Throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles."  
2. Be brutal. The Bible is brutal in telling you to remove sin from your life. It uses words like FLEE and CUT OFF YOUR ARM and REMOVE YOUR EYE. Its brutal and exacting, because it knows that sin “so easily” entangles and its consequences can impact eternity.
2. Run:
1. One step at a time. Just put one foot in front of the other. Whether that’s asking God to help you get out of bed each day or crying through a broken heart every night. One step at a time, there’s no need to rush.
2. Do it daily.
3. Know your end goal: When you know where you’re going, the steps to get there become all the more clearer. 
1. Read the Bible to remind yourself of his story, of the nature of God and all his goodness through the mistakes of thousands of years of humanity that is recorded there. "Fixing our eyes on Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of faith. For the joy set before him he endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God."
2. Pray for strength. Whatever you’re doing you need the energy to do it. God is an endless source of strength, he will be the arms that hold you up when your knees hit the ground. "Consider him who endured such opposition from sinners, so that you will not grow weary and lose heart.”

"For me to live is Christ, to die is gain.” Philippians 1:21

You can do it! Make that your conviction every single day. Make it your life motto. 

"Yet it is oft the course of deeds that move the wheels of the world.” -J R R Tolkien.

-evieroo