It is my humble opinion that one of the most underrated, but at the same time, most important traits someone can have is perseverance. In our time we don’t value perseverance. If it doesn’t come easy, find something else that is easy to do, seems to be the ethos that I see around me. My brother is one of those guys who can fiddle with something, be it computers or chemical stuff (he’s a chemist) until he gets it right. He can just sit there and go over the same thing until he gets it right. I, on the other hand, am more impatient. I am blessed, or cursed, depending on how you look at it, with some talents. But I depend on those talents to get me through problems too much; rather than poking and prodding and trying over and over to make something work. I need to learn perseverance.
In much the same way, discipleship in the ways of following Christ is a long haul. It is a long journey, and a long obedience that we are called to. Becoming a Christian is relatively easy. We commit our lives to Jesus Christ, we believe that He came, He died taking on the punishment for our sins and He was resurrected. It is believing the Bible is God’s Word to us always; 2000 years ago, today and all the tomorrows. But continuing to be a Christian, day after day, when it may not be exciting, when it may feel like we are doing the same things over and over, fiddling with life trying to get it right; that takes perseverance. When I was in high school it was explained to me this way; if you are taking a boat to Hawaii, you don’t take a speed boat. It will get out a ways quickly, but it won’t make it all the way. You have to take a big, slow boat to get to Hawaii. In the same way, we are traveling toward God, to a place better than Hawaii, and it takes a while to get there. So we need to be ready for the long haul, perseverance, keeping the faith over the long haul, not for just short bursts. So let’s take a look at Psalm 129.
let Israel say—
2 they have greatly oppressed me from my youth,
but they have not gained the victory over me.
3 Plowmen have plowed my back
and made their furrows long.
4 But the LORD is righteous;
he has cut me free from the cords of the wicked.
5 May all who hate Zion
be turned back in shame.
6 May they be like grass on the roof,
which withers before it can grow;
7 with it the reaper cannot fill his hands,
nor the one who gathers fill his arms.
8 May those who pass by not say,
“The blessing of the LORD be upon you;
we bless you in the name of the LORD.”
Let’s pray.
Over the past couple months, months leading up to Easter, we’ve been looking at a series of Psalms called the Psalms of the Ascent. These are the song the Jewish pilgrims sang on their way up to Jerusalem from all over the known world; up to Jerusalem to worship God, to offer sacrifices, to celebrate feasts. Jesus Himself probably sang these songs as He traveled up to Jerusalem. You will hopefully remember that Jesus was in Jerusalem when it was time to celebrate the Passover feast. So it strikes me as likely that these are the psalms that Jesus and the disciples sang as they traveled, a very little like we have, up to Jerusalem for Jesus ultimate confrontation with evil.
For me, these psalms have been reminding me of how different the Christian world view is than the American world view. Culture says life is precarious, party hard. We say life is precious, and we are safe within God’s fortress. The world says claw your way to the top, the psalms say count your blessings, and know you are blessed because God is with you. Our culture says work yourself to death because that’s the way to get ahead; the psalms say all work is in vain unless God is involved. The culture we swim in says that its okay to hard and angry; the psalms say we are to be full of joy. And our culture says it is okay to leave projects because they are hard. Its okay to give up when something is hard; because what’s the difference anyway? Its okay to stop doing something because it isn’t as fun or as interesting as it used to be. We are slowing having the perseverance sucked out of us. We don’t reward people who have been faithful over the long haul-like people who having taken on mentoring a kid for years. But it is that long term faithfulness, like when mentoring a child, that makes a difference. A quick meeting doesn’t change someone, a long faithful journey does. With that in mind, let’s take a look at Psalm 129.
let Israel say—
2 they have greatly oppressed me from my youth,
but they have not gained the victory over me.
The Christian faith has been one of long-suffering. It started with Jesus ministry-and that ministry started in the most difficult way possible. It started with Jesus being tempted-tempted with good things, ways He could easily improve the world, feed it, love it, but it would have been under the devil’s direction and not God’s. His was not an easy ministry-hounded and questioned at nearly every turn by the Pharisees and scribes, having no place to lay His head, having His own home town folks dismiss His ministry out of hand. His ministry ended on Good Friday, an endurance test like no other. Beaten, whipped, crucified. Long suffering, perseverance. The willingness to see His mission on earth through to the end. Isaiah prophesied the long struggle of Jesus. Listen to portions of chapter 53…
He grew up before him like a tender shoot,
and like a root out of dry ground.
He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him,
nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.
3 He was despised and rejected by men,
a man of sorrows, and familiar with suffering.
Like one from whom men hide their faces
he was despised, and we esteemed him not.
4 Surely he took up our infirmities
and carried our sorrows,
yet we considered him stricken by God,
smitten by him, and afflicted.
5 But he was pierced for our transgressions,
he was crushed for our iniquities;
the punishment that brought us peace was upon him,
and by his wounds we are healed … it goes on like this for the entire chapter. Read it sometime. Near the end of the chapter, in verse 11, we find this, “Out of His anguish He shall see light, He shall find satisfaction through His knowledge. The righteous one, my servant, shall make many righteous and He shall bear their iniquities.” Faith wins out, faith in Christ survives the test of time.
To be honest, this has characterized His disciples too from the very beginning. Most of the disciples were killed for their belief in Jesus, for what they proclaimed about Jesus. The early church built on their testimony and their blood was persecuted by the Roman Empire, at varying degrees of intensity for about 250 years. The church is still persecuted in places like China, North Korea, Indonesia, North Africa, throughout the Middle East and India. It is not safe to be a Christian in many parts of the world. There has been a war against Christianity almost from the very beginning-the church has endured persecution, exile, ridicule, and yet faith in Christ has endured, generation after generation.
Then comes an interesting image.
Plowmen have plowed my back
and made their furrows long.
4 But the LORD is righteous;
he has cut me free from the cords of the wicked.
Picture Israel as a person lying on the ground, a big person, and plow men are plowing long bloody cuts in the back of Israel. The bulls are pulling a plow through the flesh of the big person’s back in the same way that they pull a plow through the ground. Imagine the pain, the distress, the cruelty. Over and back, across the back over and over until not one little bit of the back remains unplowed, unmutilated. But then, God steps in. He cuts the cords that attach the plow to the bulls. The plower doesn’t know the cords have been cut and he keeps hitting the bulls to make them pull harder-but he doesn’t realize the cords have been cut. He is not wounding Israel at all anymore. His efforts to wound Israel are to no end. God has thwarted the plans of evil people.
Then comes another image that needs to be explained to us as it is something we are unfamiliar with.
May all who hate Zion
be turned back in shame.
6 May they be like grass on the roof,
which withers before it can grow;
7 with it the reaper cannot fill his hands,
nor the one who gathers fill his arms.
Back then people would attempt to insulate their house by cutting chunks of earth out of the ground and putting on the roof. Surely you’ve seen this sort of thing before, perhaps movies made of more primitive folks. The dirt has no real depth, so anything that may sprout and try to grow in that soil quickly dies. Well, this is sort of a joke for the Israelites. A person seeking to harm Israel is the same sort of person who would go looking to reap a harvest from the grass on the roof of a house. There is nothing there to reap-only a fool or an idiot would jump up on the roof to harvest grain.
And here is those two images together-life and actions opposing God will ultimately be unfruitful- it will be to no avail. It will be like someone trying to plow vicious wounds into Israel without knowing the cords have been cut, that person is an idiot who would look to reap a harvest of wheat off a roof. The way of the world lacks perseverance. It is full of enthusiasms that are here one day, and gone the next.
I do want to touch briefly on the verse separating those two images of cut cords and roof dirt. In between is a brief verse, almost a curse, “may all who hate Zion be turned back in shame.” One of things I appreciate about the psalms is that they are real. There is real emotion in the psalms. When they show depression, it really comes out. When there is anger, it really comes out. This is a really angry comment. We can think deeply about whether or not it is appropriate- but we can’t argue that it is apathetic. This is a view of passion, of passionate anger toward the way the people of Israel had been treated for centuries by their oppressors. There are times in our long journey upward toward God that we are going to get tired, we are going to get irritated with other people, or with where we are. We will get angry, it is human nature. Sometimes when we see others who are not walking in faith, in fact, running the other way prospering, or when we see someone jumping from thing to thing, never putting the time in at anything, we can get frustrated and angry. We can get envious of those who flit from thing to thing, without responsibilities, without all the stuff of life that ties us down. The psalmist knew, like we do, that anger is not okay, but to be honest, it is apathy, boredom that is the enemy of perseverance. The fiery blast we find here is evidence that the psalmist is not bored, but passionate about God.
Perseverance does not mean we are perfect; it means we persist. We keep going like faithful Christians have done for centuries in the face of opposition from kings, queens, emperors and neighbors next door. We get angry, like the psalmist, or we sin in another way, but we get back up and we keep going. We persevere. Whatever you are going through, keep going. Don’t give up. Keep the faith, keep going. Don’t get jealous of other people, because they have their own problems. We care about God, we care about following Jesus well, we care about glorifying Him with our lives, our words, our actions. Keep going. Ignore those who might ridicule your persistence; fight through the nay-sayers.
The center of this Psalm is this from verse 4, “The Lord is righteous.” This means, in a little way, that God is always right. But in a big way, it means that He is always in right relationship to us. When we are distant from God, it is our fault, our sin that does that, not God. He is always ready for us to come back to Him; He is faithful, no matter what we do. That the Lord is righteous makes it possible to persevere through tough times; through sicknesses, surprise tragedies, disappointments- through it all the Lord is righteous. God makes a covenant with us in Jesus Christ, that His death on the cross brings us to Him. After that, God perseveres too. God perseveres through all of our anger and frustrations, through all of our disobedience and our running away. God has made a commitment to us in Christ, and God maintains His side of the covenant. God perseveres with us. Perseverance, it has been said by Eugene Peterson, is not the result of our determination, but of God’s faithfulness. When we chart over time the many ways that God has remained faithful to us, has come to us when we didn’t deserve it but simply out of His love and His commitment to us; it should inspire us to return a portion of the perseverance, that ability to fiddle with our lives and our hearts until God is well pleased.
We persevere to praise God with our lives because God is righteous, God has been faithful to us, God has persevered on our behalf first. We just return a portion of that to Him. More than anything else, as we go through Lent, I am reminded of how Jesus persevered for me, for you. Jesus came down from Heaven to earth; a huge step down in terms of personal comfort. Taught people for a while, some of who pretty much believed Him, and others who were murderously hostile to His message of truth and grace. He persevered through the last week of His life knowing what was coming on that terrible Friday, He persevered though HE could have gotten off that cross anytime He wanted to. But for us, He endured the cross, despising the shame, for us.
The author of Hebrews deals with complainers. The early church was complaining the Way of Life following Jesus was too hard. So God, through the author, told them to persevere. Heb 12:3-4 “Consider Him who endured such hostility against himself from sinners, so that you may not grow weary or lose heart. In your struggle against sin you have not yet resisted to the point of shedding blood.” And then one of my favorite sets of verses-Romans 5:3ff “…We also boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.” The way following Christ has never been easy. Becoming a Christian is quite simple, and relatively pain-free. But none of us can stay in hat moment. We are all moving on, toward God, and there are times when it is all we can do to persevere, to keep going, one faithful step after another, not knowing where we are being lead, not knowing what is over the next horizon or what even next week might hold for us. But we persevere, knowing that the God who loves us is righteous, and He persevered for us. Therefore, we do our best to persevere for Him. Keep going. It is the long obedience that makes a difference in our lives, the long obedience that makes a difference for Christ and the Kingdom of God. I know it isn’t easy, I know we all mess up and sin; but get up, persevere, follow again the Lord who is righteous, the Lord you love.
Let’s pray
The New International Version , (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Publishing House) 1984.