Trouble is coming.
No, make it more specific.
Persecution is coming.
What do you do? How do you react? What steps should you take to prepare for the coming onslaught? Probably “work on my marriage” wouldn’t top your to-do list. But according to the apostle Peter, that’s exactly what you should do. Work on your relationship with your spouse, work on your relationship with your fellow church members, and then prepare to evangelize all those around you with a passion that cannot be contained and a single-mindedness that defies comprehension.
Many of the preparatory prescriptions we encounter in our daily lives must surely strike us as unhelpful. “I thought about how useful some preparations that we are given by human instruction are,” says Tim Jordan on the third day of the GARBC’s 2015 conference. “Like, ‘Your seat can be used for a floatation device.’ Like that’s going to matter! You’re dead! It won’t matter whether you have a flotation device or not.”
By contrast, God’s prescriptions for preparation are always trustworthy, reliable, and perfect, even when at first blush they don’t seem to make sense. So when Holy Scripture informs believers that persecution is coming and simultaneously instructs them to work on their relationships (1 Pet. 3:1–12) and focus on spiritual opportunity (1 Pet. 3:13–22), there’s a reason.
According to Jordan, marriage is the most effective instrument by which God accomplishes the sanctification of His people. “The person God has used the most in my life has been my wife.” The reasons for this are manifold, but one of the most prominent is that our marriages reveal the depths of our spiritual deficiencies. “Have you ever been uglier with anyone than your wife?” Jordan asks. “I mean the ugly, unvarnished, fullest, most perverse commitment to you. That is squeezed out of you in the day-to-day trenches of married life. So you can’t deny your ugliness anymore. So you’re on your knees. It puts you in your place as a saint-sinner before your God.”
The gathering storm also presents an ideal set of circumstances for effective evangelism. Jordan explains, “We all have [the Gospel] on our heart and we wish we could just get it into somebody else’s heart. But typically, people won’t get to see your heart until God breaks it. And then it’s spilled out all over the sidewalk.”
Hear the sermon audio below:
