In recent days I have seen a circle drawn around the category of persecution that minimizes what some folk are going through. You’ll find that someone looks at Fox Book of Martyrs and defines “real” persecution as the things that those people had experienced. You don’t have to run too far down the Internet—do a search for “real persecution” and you’ll see what I’m talking about.
Here’s the expectation: Christ suffered; don’t expect better. Here’s the expectation: Christ came to save His own and His own knew Him not; don’t expect better. I can say it but I don’t think we really believe it. We live in a place where we go to school to be guaranteed a job. We go to doctors to be guaranteed good health. We invest in our 401K to be ensured with a retirement fund.
All these things that we do with an expectation of a return; we do it just right, we get a cosmic ‘Attaboy.
Psalm 137 is gorgeous and some would say “almost perfect”. Lots of Psalms fall into that category in people’s minds: that Almost Perfect slot. You usually know where people feel any Psalm falls short during the Lord’s Supper when one of the brothers is sharing a Psalm and stops just short of the end. Surely the rest of the Psalm was right and nice…but that last bit really threw the whole thing off. Psalm 137 is, once again, a perfect example.