I recently sat with a Nigerian church leader who showed me a chilling video that I cannot get out of my mind. Militants from Boko Haram, a terrorist group that has brutally attacked churches in this region for years, filmed themselves standing over a small group of Christians and telling everyone who would listen that they intended to kill all Christians until they submit to Islam. Then they beheaded our brothers and sisters in Christ.

Horror like this has moved me to pray and work for years on behalf of those suffering for their faith. As part of my ministry with Radical, I’ve had the opportunity to speak to Christians who have faced violence, social pressure, or jail for evangelism, church planting, or merely holding fast to their faith.

At the same time, I recognize that for many Christians, examples of persecution can feel distant, abstract, unrelatable, or overwhelming. Many persecuted Christians live in countries we have never visited and places we may struggle to pronounce. We also live in a 24-hour news cycle that inundates us with stories of war and terror, numbing us to the cost of following Jesus for our church family around the world.

But starting the next two Sundays in November, designated by the World Evangelical Alliance as the International Day of Prayer for the Persecuted Church, and beyond, I want to invite you to join other believers around the world in interceding for those who claim Christ and suffer for doing so. I also want to dispel some myths about persecution and help you understand what persecution means and how it plays out in the world. In light of God’s command for us to remember and pray for those who are persecuted as though we are physically with them (see Heb. 13:3), I hope that learning more about persecution will help us be the global body of Christ he has called us to be.

Persecution is harassment or opposition for following Jesus. In the Sermon on the Mount, the term Jesus uses for “persecuted” means “pursued with hostility.” He goes on to describe how this can mean everything from people ridiculing, shaming, excluding, or lying about you to people arresting you, imprisoning you, driving you out, or destroying your life (see Matt. 5:10–12; 10:16–33; Luke 6:22–23). Notably, persecution is when these forms of resistance come specifically because someone is following Jesus. In Matthew 5, Jesus says to expect this hostility that occurs “because of righteousness” and “because of me.”

Source: Christianity Today