Dear brothers and sisters,when troubles come your way, consider it an opportunity for great joy. For you know that when your faith is tested, your endurance has a chance to grow. So let it grow, for when your endurance is fully developed, you will be perfect and complete, needing nothing. James 1:2-4 NLT
A friend spoke of his evangelism efforts with a young Moslem store-owner and said that there is such a difference in the understanding of Christian discipleship for the Muslim than the average American. I asked what he meant. He said, “Well, if this man accepts Christ, he will lose his parents, his wife, his store and possibly his life.” Oh. This man understands what Dietrich Bonhoeffer called “The Cost of Discipleship.” The cost is everything, everything you have, and everything you are. So Bonhoeffer says, “When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.”
This is what is happening in Manipur, India, at this moment. Hindu mobs have burned 3000 homes of Christians, and 300 churches. When the mobs come, the believers can only hope to escape with their lives (so far, 250 haven’t), they are not allowed to take a thing with them. This is discipleship.
This is so far from the understanding of Christianity for the average person in America. What is it to be a Christian? It is to have given an intellectual assent to the proposition that Jesus Christ has forgiven my sin and will assure me of eternal life if I will accept his offer. Having done that, I am a Christian. It is a simple transaction: in return for my acknowledgement of his Saviorhood and giving him my personal allegiance, he guarantees escape from eternal punishment.
What does that have to do with Christian faith? Very little. To be a Christian is to be all in. God is not interested in a transaction; he is after transformation. Somewhere C. S. Lewis says that to become a Christian is to be “in for it,” because God is not going to be satisfied with anything less than reproducing his life within us. And if reaching that goal requires suffering, pain, and loss, he loves us too much to let us off with anything less.
God have mercy on our suffering brothers and sisters. But they have a much clearer understanding of what it means to be a disciple of Christ than we comfortable Western “Christians.”
Called To Be Transformed 