Seeing the Chains

"When Christians came to visit the Apostle Paul in Rome and saw his chains, some of them may have wept or felt defeated. Perhaps some of them stopped witnessing. But later, when they faced a hostile public, they did not back down. Seeing Paul in chains had prepared them spiritually for the fight that lay ahead.

"In Philippians 1:14, Paul writes, "Most of the brethren in the Lord, having become confident by my chains, are much more bold to speak the word without fear."

(Tom White, from Voice of the Martyrs, October 2010)

The Success of the Cross, by Moishe Rosen

"If accepting rejection is the key to success, we need to remember that while many were crucified, only one of those crucified rose from the dead. We should not follow the many who were merely punished and be crucified for the honor of it. We need to follow the crucified one who rose from the dead and thus nullified the crucifixion. It is how we accept that rejection by the world and the newness of life given by the savior.

"Calvary was redemptive and if we can respond to rejection the way that Jesus did, our Calvary's will also be redemptive. There is a holy dissatisfaction that we must allow ourselves to feel. We need to recognize that we could be more, and do more for God if we were only willing to accept the fact of failure as a beginning point.

"Some of us need to get desperate in order to do the right thing. Some of us will never care enough to become desperate to become effective missionaries. Some of us will never find the courage to carry our crosses and accept the crucified life. Sometime we need to see ourselves as failures so that we can repent and receive the holy energy that comes from being filled with the Spirit. No one can be filled with the Spirit when he or she is filled with themselves. We need to become empty of self and filled with the Spirit. For that we need a personal Calvary of dying to sin, self, the world and rising in resurrection power to gain the victories God has for us.

"We succeed by failing, we win by losing, and our apparent defeat becomes our victory."

from "The Fact of Failure", Seventh International LCJE Conference, Helsinki, Finland, 2003. Moishe Rosen is the founder of Jews for Jesus. In honor of his passing to be with the Lord, May 19, 2010.

Jesus and Failure, by Moishe Rosen

"Jesus was a failure as the world sees things. Thousands came to hear him and were enthralled with his message but at the end only dozens remained and that included his mother and siblings. His meteoric rise to popularity began when he was thirty and he was a 'has been' three years later. The triumphal entry might be seen as his comeback trail. He was a gifted communicator and one can imagine that he was thought to lose his cool when he called the religious leaders of his time "whited sepulchers and vipers". Some might have thought he went off the deep end when he was not received after the 'triumphal entry' and he entered the temple to deal violently with the money changers and sheep sellers. As a celebrity, he as on a downward path so far as popularity was concerned.

"But he was not a failure because people failed to see who he was and what was being offered. His way of dealing with rejection was not to accommodate himself to what the people could regard as being a politically wise ruler. He was true to himself and to his principles but most of all he was true to Calvary which was to be his Coronation and Victory."

from "The Fact of Failure", Seventh International LCJE Conference, Helsinki, Finland, 2003. Moishe Rosen is the founder of Jews for Jesus. In honor of his passing to be with the Lord, May 19, 2010.