All over the world, right now, there are people who have suffered and are suffering for the cause of the gospel. For a great many believers outside the United States, that is simply what it has meant to follow Jesus.
A few weeks ago John Piper stood before our supporters at the PassionLife fundraising dinner just outside Atlanta, Georgia, and gave a keynote titled Risk Taking for Life and Fruitfulness. It was an interesting message and a challenging one, and it pressed a question on everyone in the room: what can risk taking and suffering produce inside the life of a Christian? On last week’s PassionLife Podcast, John Ensor, our president, and Mark Nicholson, our executive director, worked through the first half of that address. This week they picked up the rest — and because part of it reaches back to a jail cell in Boston in 1989, this one gets personal.
If you want to see the whole keynote for yourself, it runs about thirty minutes and is posted on our homepage at passionlife.org. But you will not need it to follow along here.
Muscles We Have Never Built
One reason Piper’s message landed so hard with that room — and has kept the conversation going since — is that outside the United States, suffering and being willing to suffer are part of the DNA of being a Christian. In America, a long history of wealth, prosperity, and freedom has meant we have not really been required to suffer directly for our faith.
So we have very little training in it. We have not even had to suffer in small ways very often, which means we have never built up the muscles. It works like exercise: you can endure more as you experience more. And very few of us have any muscle memory for this at all.
“Let Him Not Be Ashamed”
A passage in 1 Peter 4 frames the whole conversation:
But let none of you suffer as a murderer or a thief or an evildoer or as a meddler. Yet if anyone suffers as a Christian, let him not be ashamed, but let him glorify God in that name. (1 Peter 4:15–16)
Peter draws a sharp line. There is suffering you earn by doing wrong, and there is suffering that comes because you bear the name of Christ. The first is a black mark on your record. The second belongs in the honorary column of life. Being arrested for living out your Christian faith is not something to be ashamed of.
Not everyone sees it that way. John Ensor once spent a couple of days in jail — more on that shortly — and afterward a member of his own church kept pressing him about it. You must have done something wrong. You must have done something wrong, because you got arrested.
So John asked him: What did Jesus do wrong that got him arrested?
That stopped the man — arrested him intellectually, you might say. Then John asked about the apostle Paul. What had Paul done that was wrong? Or was he simply suffering as a Christian? From there the two of them talked about how the American experience is the exception, not the rule. Through much of history, and in many parts of the world, there have been seasons when more believers were arrested for their faith than were not.
When the Law Itself Is Wrong
That church member’s instinct — if you were arrested, you must be guilty — echoes an argument often heard from the pro-choice side of the abortion debate: abortion is legal, so there cannot be anything morally wrong with it. If the law permits it, it must be right.
But obviously some laws are antithetical to the law of God. Those are precisely the points where, in Scripture and throughout history, we admire the people who kept the higher law of God and were willing to suffer for it. If right and wrong are nothing more than legal and illegal, then there are no moral absolutes in the world at all.
Go back to the Hebrew Scriptures. When Pharaoh ordered the Hebrew midwives to kill the Israelite baby boys at birth, the midwives did the right thing by disobeying the law. The law was to kill the babies, and the law was wrong. It is hard to imagine anyone who makes the “legal means moral” argument today saying it would have been right, correct, and virtuous for those midwives to obey.
Martin Luther King Jr. popularized the idea — he did not originate it; he was drawing on Augustine — that an unjust law is no law at all. And we honor the people who suffered to make that case, even though in their own day they were looked down on as troublemakers and lawbreakers. Because they were lawbreakers.
It is worth being honest about where things stand now. In America today it is not easy to be arrested for your faith without actually doing something wrong. If you go to demonstrate at an abortion clinic and throw a bottle at somebody, you can be arrested, and rightly so — violence is wrong. We are not, at the moment, in a period where it is easy to be arrested for doing the right thing. That may change. It may go the way England is going, where people are once again being arrested for doing the right thing.
But there was a period, not long ago, when you could do the right thing and still find yourself in handcuffs. John Piper remembered one of those moments.
A Rescue in Boston
In the late 1980s, John Ensor was a pastor in Boston. In March of 1989 he took part in a rescue — a nonviolent, prayerful sit-in in which participants laid their bodies down in front of the entrance to Planned Parenthood. They were all dragged away, and John was held in jail for two days before being brought before a judge and released.
Just a couple of hours after he got home, John Piper happened to call him about something else entirely. The two ended up talking about what John had just been through, and Piper wrote the conversation down in his journal.
Nearly forty years later, standing at our dinner, Piper opened that journal.
He began by asking the room a question: Where do you think PassionLife came from? Where does any fruitful ministry come from — where does a fruitful life come from? Before John Ensor was president of a global pro-life ministry, he was a pastor in Boston who invited Piper to a 1987 conference called Fueling the Burning Heart. Even then, two pastors were dreaming about the relationship between local ministry and global impact — about saving eternally, and saving in the womb. Something was brewing in America with regard to pro-life, Piper said. Risk was brewing. Both men were involved in the rescue movement.
Then he read the entry, dated March 6, 1989. He had just talked to John, who had gotten out of jail at five o’clock that afternoon after two and a half days of internment for participating in a rescue in Boston. He was ecstatic, Piper had written. He had preached on Sunday in jail to 40 men. He said it was like a men’s retreat on the front lines.
It was not long, Piper went on, before that same pastor was overseeing five crisis pregnancy centers in Boston — then doing the same in Miami, then Atlanta, then China, and on from there. He pointed the room to the PassionLife brochure on their tables, where the first line of the second page reads: The challenge before us is hard, costly, occasionally dangerous.
Fruitful ministries and fruitful lives, Piper said, come into being through risk. That is how it happens.
What Risk Is — and What It Isn’t
Piper was careful not to leave it at a motivational speech — hey, take a risk. He wanted the room to hear what God has to say. His first conviction was that taking a Christ-honoring risk is biblical and right. And because people get badly confused without definitions, he gave one:
A risk is an action that might expose you or others to loss or injury.
Take a risk, and you could lose money, reputation, health, job, home — even life. Piper called that a good thing to seriously consider. But not all risks are good, and the Bible makes that plain. Paul escaped Damascus in a basket let down through the wall; he got away from the danger and saved his life. Jesus told those in Judea to flee to the mountains. The angel told the wise men to go home another way or be killed. Not all risk is right — you know that from Scripture, and you know it from the wisdom of your own life.
Then he dwelt on one word in that definition: might. Only people who don’t know how things will turn out can take a risk. If you know exactly how it will go, you do not call it a risk. If you know you will die when you throw yourself on a grenade, you do not say you are taking a risk. You say you are making a sacrifice.
It caught John by surprise that Piper reached back to something from 1989. In a friendship that now spans roughly fifty years, Piper remembered one phone call. Mark’s read is that Piper was struck less by the arrest than by John’s attitude — the excitement of finding a ministry among the inmates — and wrote it down to remind himself. John’s own read is that Piper was highlighting a discovery he made in that jail.
Joy in the Fiery Trial
That discovery deserves a careful word, because nobody wants to suffer.
John is the first to say so. He does not like pain. By his own admission he turns into a big baby when he just gets a headache, and he is no strong example of enduring a lot of pain. In general, all of us avoid pain and suffering.
And yet the Bible says two things. First, don’t be surprised when it comes, because if Jesus suffered, his people will too. Second, there is a blessing — an actual joy in the soul — when you suffer for being a Christian, in the name of Jesus, identifying with the cross. That is what Peter meant when he wrote, do not be surprised at the fiery trial when it comes upon you to test you, as though something strange were happening to you (1 Peter 4:12). We think suffering is so strange. Peter says it isn’t. It is simply part of living out the Christian faith as light in a dark and broken world. And suffering for doing what is right deepens your joy and your sense of connection to Christ.
Repentance, Not Protest
Mark raised a nuance worth drawing out.
In the 1980s, rescuers would sit or lie down in front of abortion clinics. The point was to say: We are not going to just sit here quietly. We are going to get involved, because people are being killed inside this building. What they were doing was civil disobedience. It was disruptive. But the laws have changed since then. You can no longer chain yourself to a door the way people did in the eighties, and in many places you are not allowed within a certain number of feet of a clinic entrance at all.
John agrees. Local, state, and federal laws have been put in place to prevent those sit-ins from happening, or to attach much heavier consequences when they do.
But that season needs to be remembered for what it was. It was a movement. Hundreds of people gathered together, and they did it mainly as an act of repentance.
That is how John approached it. He took part as a pastor in Boston, repenting for having said nothing and done nothing to stop innocent babies from being intentionally killed. For him it was not a protest. It was an act of repentance, even though it led to jail whenever he did it.
Things have changed, and other ways have been found. John went on to help his church start a pregnancy help clinic, reaching women long before they ever got to Planned Parenthood, which proved to be a more long-term, viable approach. But he does not think what he did at that time was wrong. He believes it was good for those who took part.
Steps of Faith, Not Gambling
The kind of risk taking Piper was talking about is really this: steps of faith taken before the Lord to advance his name in the world. Not gambling. Not foolishness on purpose, doing things that make no sense. Faith.
Anyone who goes overseas to proclaim the name of Jesus is taking a big risk. And that kind of step can lead to some tight spots.
Taken Off the Sidewalk
Mark and his wife spent ten years as church-planting missionaries in the Far East, in a creative-access country — a country that does not allow missionaries, where they had to live under a different guise. Most of the time, Mark says, it was like being on their honeymoon. They had always wanted to be missionaries, and it was a wonderful time for them and for their four small children.
But there were seasons of intensified pressure. Government or local officials would lean on them, or on the local police, to disrupt their lives and see whether they would flinch, whether they would bend. The authorities did not know whether they were missionaries or spies — and you do not want to be seen as a spy in a country like that. So there were interrogations. And every once in a while there were real arrests: being taken off to a jail, questioned for hours in a cold cell, met with intimidation tactics.
Mark is quick to say they were not poster children for the Voice of the Martyrs. Many people have suffered far more than they did, and he would not call most of what they went through suffering. It was a lot of inconvenience. But they were arrested. And John has been arrested too, not only in America but in other countries, for being a missionary and living out the gospel.
Mark’s wife was hauled off more than once herself. They are thankful that the local police generally did not take the two of them at the same time, because they had small children at home. In that way, Mark says, the police were actually gracious to them.
The last time Mark was arrested was the most intense. Plainclothes police officers pushed him off the sidewalk and into a car without warning and took him to an undisclosed location, where he was interrogated for hours. His wife did not know where he was.
What Mark found is that the Lord gave incredible peace in those moments. There was a sense that God was with him — the promise Jesus gave his disciples, that when they are brought before the authorities they should not worry about what to say, because the words will be given to them. Don’t plan your answers. Mark remembers sensing far more of a spirit of boldness than a spirit of fear. He did not fear what they were going to do to him. If anything, his demeanor was annoyance at the indignity of having been taken. He was not angry, and he was not rude, but he let them know they were not doing the right thing.
That is the part Mark wants everyone to hear. When you go through something like this, God meets you there. He fills you with his Spirit and gives you courage, or peace, or contentment, as you need it. That is the promise for anyone considering a risk-taking life — or what Mark would call a trust-taking life.
Because Piper was clear on this, too: it is risk taking in one sense, but in another sense God is sovereign and knows the end from the beginning. On his side, nothing is being risked. And if our faith is in him, then in the deepest sense we are not risking much either.
A Fork in the Road
Piper then broadened it out from personal stories to everyone. In God’s providence, all of us will be brought to points where we either shudder and shrink back or take a risk for Christ and his name.
“Every person in this room is facing or will face a fork in the road, and you will have to decide: do I take the easy, safe, risk-free way, or the hard and the risky way? And God has sent me here tonight to simply say you should seriously consider the risky way. That’s my message.”
There it is. That is the challenge. And since that evening, people have written to tell us about risky decisions they made because of it. One family had been weighing foster care, going back and forth over everything that could go wrong and everything that could go right. They stepped out and moved toward becoming foster parents, which is a great thing.
The same is true for everyone reading this. We are either avoiding risk, or we are discerning that this particular risk is part of God’s good plan for our lives — part of what he is doing to deepen our walk with him and to advance his name in a dark world.
And put it in an ordinary context. Most of the time the risk is not jail. Sometimes it is simply the fear of losing face — the fear of embarrassment or rejection that keeps us from speaking the name of Christ. Opening your mouth to share the gospel may not get you thrown in jail, but it could bring some disrepute to your name or your reputation. That is risk taking, too. What Piper was urging was to see all of these opportunities, whether the consequences are big or little, and to put it on the line for Christ, because he is with you.
In America today, we are all self-censoring out of the fear of man. It is good to remember that this is not what God wants. He wants us to stand for truth boldly, to live not by lies, as has been said, and to proclaim the truth wherever we can.
Watch the Full Keynote
Desiring God carried the keynote on its website for a while. It remains available at passionlife.org, where you can watch both John Ensor’s remarks and John Piper’s thirty-minute keynote, along with the whole evening, which runs closer to an hour, and the interview John and Mark recorded with John and Noël Piper.
And don’t forget to keep praying for the people taking great risks for the sake of Jesus all over this world — people who are suffering for the gospel today. It is simply our turn to be a part of all of that.
This article is adapted from the episode transcript.