Morning thought:
In Acts: 5 several of the apostles are jailed for preaching about Jesus.
God sends an angel to prison and sets them free, and then when the priests and Sadducees went to chat with them the next morning, they were utterly confused by the empty cell. Eventually the clued in to the fact that the apostles were back where they had started, preaching and teaching away again. The priests were ticked.
They were working on a plan to kill these men, when one of their leaders, Gamaliel, advised them to hang on a minute. Gamaliel asked them to send the apostles away so they could speak privately....then convinced the other priests to let them live.....saying that if the apostles were "of man"....then their followers would eventually disperse since the leader had been killed; BUT if they were of God....nothing could be done to overthrow them....and it was a bad idea to fight against God anyway.
The other priests agreed....then just had the living snot beaten out of the apostles and sent them on their way.
Here it says that the apostles "Departed from the presence of the council, rejoicing that they were counted worthy to suffer for His name." (Acts 5:41)
They were certainly not rejoicing in the fact that they had been beaten.....
They were rejoicing in the fact that they had been following Him strongly enough that they had to suffer.
Suffering is never fun.
Bad things aren't fun.
Bosses attacking you aren't fun.
Realizing that you have been following Him strongly enough to ...
threaten somebody's sense of "normal"...
shake up someone's idea of "fair"...
make satan want to throw in some "extra nastiness" to tip the scales his way again.....
Well...
it may not be "fun"...
But I think it's probably something to do a little bit of rejoicing over.
