Re:Verse passage – Romans 8:31-39 (day five)
Do you think about our Christian brothers and sisters suffering for the sake of Christ? For a couple years now, I’ve been reading from a Daily Bible that has a story and a prayer for the persecuted. This keeps my perspective in the right place. More specifically, it humbles me that I’m not experiencing tribulation, distress, persecution, famine, nakedness, or having a sword pointed at me daily. Yet other Believers are being put to death like sheep being sacrificed as an offering to the Lord. In 2026, the number of Christians killed for their faith worldwide rose to 4,849, with 93% of those deaths occurring in sub-Saharan Africa. Approximately one in seven Christians worldwide, which translates to about 14%, face persecution for their faith. This includes various forms of persecution, such as discrimination, violence, and the risk of death.
I love sharing my faith and witnessing. It’s what brings me the most JOY. If it meant I would be threatened with death and my family would be tortured in front of my eyes, then I don’t know how this would change my outlook. Would I still find joy in sharing the Gospel? James says, “Consider it a great JOY, my brothers, whenever you experience various trials, knowing that the testing of your faith produces endurance. But endurance must do its complete work, so that you may be mature and complete, lacking nothing.” James 1:2-4 HCSB
I think persecuted Christians take courage in verses like these and the ones we have in Romans chapter 8. Look at verse 32, “He did not even spare His own Son but offered Him up for us all; how will He not also with Him grant us everything?”
They risk losing their jobs, homes, families, and their lives because they know their Father God will graciously give them all things. They refuse to listen to Satan’s lies that tell them to give in and renounce Jesus. They remember Jesus was offered up for them and that the Father didn’t hold back from sending His own son to the slaughter. Holding onto this truth is where their JOY comes from. Even through the most painful of experiences.
When our brothers and sisters are persecuted for their Christian witness in countries like Iran, Nigeria and India, we can let them know they are cared for and loved by the global body of Christ. November 1st is the International Day of Prayer for Persecuted Christians. Take time to remember them in prayer. www.persecution.com/response
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This request brings me great joy (even a certain degree of happiness) in light of our collective studies with the Apostle Paul, who so greets others with a message, “[It is just me] Paul, a servant of Jesus Christ, called to be a disciple…” as are we all. And I am praying for our missionaries, right now at Pastor Byron’s request, for a family who just headed to Uganda less than a month ago. I’m hoping they’ve now had time to get their, respective, balance as they begin to dwell. But the Apostle Paul sets an example for us the requires us to look within our own communities and pray for our local missionaries as well. I’m going to request a prayer for a woman who attends FBC, but I’ve never met personally. Her name is Nancy and she will be gone from her Bible study class for the month of November because she is moving –not out of the country or to another church. She is relocating in the city. But for her, she is being used as a local missionary by God for Christ. Whatever else this relocation entails, she will be dwelling beside others who may or may not know Christ and may or may .not be receptive to a neighbor we commonly greet in church with the words “Welcome and…we love you.”. So since Nancy is relocating in November, I ask us to pray for her on her new mission at a new venue. It probably won’t look like the war-torn streets of the Ukraine or make the 6 o’clock news as an earth shattering moment in the history of the world (at least I hope not.) But it is, quite possibly, the very best of why the Apostle Paul wrote”…without ceasing I always make mention of you in my prayers.”. So while we come together on Nov 1 to remember to pray for missionaries, I urge us to pray in real-time for both those abroad and those with daily opportunity in our own backyards. Perils will never leave this earth apparently, but people living as daily disciples will make a difference any way.
did pastor Chris write this because not signed because i assumed Danny did
just curious
It’s Byron! I filled in for another pastor.
The preparation to pray for and with missionaries from a distance, which is often what the Apostle Paul found himself doing as he journey, needs some varied consideration as well because it’s not quite as simple as “I’m going share Jesus with strangers who don’t know him.”. Sometimes that’s not even the end result. I was considering the young people involved who truly might need prayer. Just 161 years ago, three girls, one 17, two 16, came to San Antonio from Lyons, France. They lived in the current Brackenridge House with William and Bishop Dubuis. There was no university, no zoo, no Hildebrand or Broadway. It was all grassland with red dirt/rock roads
The three girls had one interest, the impressive waterworks system they needed access to to go any further with a mission. But…then Dr. St. Pierre (who would later become a formidable Mother Superior), wrote home: “Dear Mother, please pray for us. We have need of the waterways, but these savages seem to control them.”. The “savages” were not at all a threat to the sisters, but they appeared ferocious, clad in sombreros and the cutlery of defense that adorned their daily attire for survival purposes. After sometime another letter home reads, “Dear Mother…, Good news. The men we wrote of are not at all savage. In fact, they understand the waterways here better than we thought and have agreed to help us with our initial plans to use the land bequeathed….”(This text is in a very old record by Sr. Finck, that Sr. Margaret Patrice has since clarified in a very interesting historical document.). My point is that those three teenage women were quite intimidated by what appeared to be threatening individuals in their relatively rugged quarters. They could not return home. They were to ensure an orphanage in a non-inhabited community in need of Christian servants who were to nurture orphans developed. And much prayer went into that endeavor, according to the letters of need that are collected
But not so much mentions Christ or salvation in the letters; they are mostly of needs or health scares. Yet without question, some of the most productive Christian acts of missionary kindness and courage came from that adventure.
I’m also reminded of Dr. Ruth Berggren. I think, through marriage, she is now a practicing Jew. But until the age of 14 she lived with her parents in the mission fields. In a lecture to a group of 6th-8th graders who aspired to pursue fields rich in foreign missionary trades, she explained that it wasn’t so much telling about the Lord, as it was to help people understand the value of hand washing and becoming in ovulated to literally survive. But what really required her need for prayers was when she arrived back here and had to learn how to fit into what was normal teenage life in the United States because it was our culture that was shocking, not the mission field.
And last, but not least, is our own Danny Panter’s description from the pulpit of his childhood in the mission fields. In one of his most impacting sermons, Pastor Danny described the day his dad wheeled in and picked him up in his truck and raced home, saving his 8 year old son’s life, literally, from a volley of unfriendly, wreckless fire. So I guess as we approach praying for missionaries, whether here or abroad, we should be mindful of their young families as well, who, through no fault of their own, are just like the innocent bystanders at the cross, the ones who weren’t actually called at that moment, but whose lives would be irreparably altered from that which God chose them to witness