There’s an age-old adage that reads “to the victors go the spoils”. In war, politics, and a bunch of other things, this adage is truthful. For believers in Jesus Christ, though, this is only a part of a much bigger picture.
The bible firmly reminds believers that victory is already assured, not based upon our merit, but upon that of our indomitable God Who cannot lose, and Who, in His love for us, grants us universal victory through His Son, Jesus.
The adage for Christians, as I understand it, is “To whomever perseveres go the spoils.”
We who are in an eternal love relationship with Jesus, we have victory already promised us. The spoils of victory, to be sure, will be poured out as we step into our real life in eternity. But the bible does promise the “spoils of victory” to believers even here on the earth. Why then, so frequently, does our experience not line up with the biblical promises?
I believe the answer is found in perseverance, or the lack thereof, in a believer’s life. Our culture has become fixated on quick answers, easy solutions, immediate gratification and a constant, never-ending stream of information available within seconds. Ever wonder about the significance of a date? A historical event? A quick jump to the internet and we can find innumerable sources of information about it. We visit Google for just about anything we need and a few key clicks or mouse strokes away and we have what we want.
As a culture, we grew tired of the work involved in cooking a full meal for ourselves or our families… we have fast food restaurants now to scratch that itch. Within a few minutes of wait, we have full, hot meals at our lips. We have microwaves and frozen dinners to eliminate the wait on food if we don’t want to go out.
So many shortcuts, easy buttons, quick solutions and we’ve quickly found ourselves, at best, as long-distance relationships with things like patience, waiting, enduring and perseverance.
But God doesn’t function the way that we do. He never has, He never will. Our cultures have sped up, running at frenetic paces, however God is still eternal, still methodical, still functions in His supreme wisdom at a pace that seems frustratingly slow to most of us. And unfortunately for us, as a derivative of this, His blessings follow the same pattern.
Enter into the world of perseverance. Maybe now more than at any other time, this has become the proving ground of faith. It’s easy to say “God is all powerful, He can answer my prayer.” So we offer up a bullet prayer and look up to the heavens waiting for a divine answer. After 5 or 10 minutes of waiting, and seeing no visible results, no angelic hosts, no parting of the clouds over our heads, and we slump our shoulders in defeat and assume that God won’t answer OUR prayers. We look at specific examples in the bible where God miraculously intervened in the moment of devout prayer and we create a theology of immediate answer to prayer, and then our faith is crushed when our reality doesn’t mirror this position.
And often we lay blame on God. He hasn’t answered, He hasn’t done enough, He’s ignored us, He’s… He’s… and so forth and so on. But this isn’t fair to God. We’ve set ourselves up to fail with this bad theology because we’ve inadvertently reduced God to someone who also functions on our frenetic paces, Who also is always 15 minutes behind, $100 short and needs to scurry around to save us the moment we call.
We look at verses that say that God is “a very present help in time of trouble”, and cry out in our moment of need, waiting to see the immediate response of sovereign deity, however when nothing happens within our expected, allotted time frame, our faith breaks down, suffering under our false expectations and we crumble and start a pattern of praying less and believing for progressively smaller and smaller things, if we believe at all, until eventually our Christian experience revolves around nothing more than church on Sundays, maybe a midweek service once in a while, and the occasional brunch with church friends.
How empty. How sad.
Not only have I had conversations about this with quite a few believers from different places and experiences who have all found themselves in this same place, but in my own life this errant expectation or theology of immediately answered prayer defined me for much of it. I spent most of my early years as an adult as a very frustrated Christian, not understanding how to rectify what I saw as biblical truths with my own personal experiences. It left me frequently mad at God, jaded, cynical and very spiritually frustrated. But through it all, God faithfully stuck through it with me and started teaching me greater principles. My prayer is that some of these might help others through the same debacle.
Perseverance is one of those “spiritual” principles we want to gloss past… just like we do with long-suffering and patience. I’m no different than anyone else in this regard. But regardless of how pleasant the lesson is, it’s a necessary part of our faith that we’ll never grow through unless we tackle it head-on.
So how does the bible address it?
The Backstory
Jesus, in Luke 8:15 says that we see the growth and harvest of our spiritual crops only by perseverance. Paul, speaking in Romans 5, says that being forced to persevere in the Lord will develop Godly character in us which eventually gives way to Godly hope. That in-and-of itself is a pretty good reason to endure.
In I Cor 13, Paul uses perseverance as one of the God-given definitions of real love. He also teaches the principle to Timothy, saying in I Timothy that perseverance to a Godly life and sound doctrine will result in salvation for many others.
It’s funny, I had so many different verses in mind when I sat down to write but I keep finding even more that I’d forgotten about. Jesus talks about the parable of the persistent widow haranguing an evil king for justice as an analogy to our need of perseverant prayer to our GOOD King. The writer of Hebrews uses pretty much the whole book to encourage in perseverant faith, citing examples of it from God’s major players throughout spiritual history as object lessons of the need to persevere at any and all costs.
In 2 Peter, perseverance is a building-block of godliness. James writes about it at length.
Elijah persevered in prayer until God released much needed rain. Hannah persevered in prayer until God gave her a son. Over and over throughout scripture, this call to endure and persevere is taught and taught and taught. When anything in scripture consumes so many pages of example and exposition, it’s probably pretty important to pay attention to it.
But the central question is, why does the bible put so much emphasis on perseverance?
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Check back next week for more on this topic. I’ll continue this in a new blog post next week as we continue to unpack the importance of biblical perseverance. Be sure to subscribe to the blog so that you get notified of new posts as they become available! You can sign up at the bottom of the page.
Chasing Nehemiah 