December 6 last year at 6:45 in the morning, I was sitting in my chair in our living room. It was still dark outside, and my one reading light was on beside the chair. My iPad was open to my daily Bible reading portion. I had just spent my 36 minutes on the treadmill in the attic, showered, made myself a cup of hot tea, and settled in to enjoy a time of fellowship with the Lord Jesus over his word. I remember pausing before I begin to read and thinking: I love this quietness. I love this room with its carpet and furniture and fireplace. I love this chair the way it supports me. I love the lighting in this one small spot on this dark, cold morning. I love the feeling in my muscles and the warmth of this orange wool sweater. And I love the sweetness of this tea, and that I have no pain anywhere in my body. And then my mind shifted. I had been reading a book called Avenue of Spies by Alex Kershaw about the French resistance in Nazi-occupied Paris during World War II. I had read how the Gestapo would arrest anyone suspected of disloyalty to the Nazi regime, and to make more room in the prison, they might simply shoot fifty suspected collaborators. And I read about the tortures as they tried to break the secret circles of espionage against Nazi occupation. And as I sat there in my exquisite comfort, with my cushioned chair, and my woolen sweater, and my hot tea, and quiet stillness, I pictured myself being arrested, stripped, plunged into a tub of ice water — and just as I could resist screaming no longer, being held down under water until I sucked water into my lungs. Some had never recovered. They died. Some recovered, and were asked if they wanted to betray their countrymen, or be plunged under the water again. Only in my imagination, I was being persecuted for Jesus, and all I had to do to save my life, and go back to my comfortable home, was to say the words, “Jesus is not my Lord, and Jesus is not my Savior, and Jesus is not the Treasure of my life.” And as I thought about that moment, and whether I would have what it takes to endure agony without renouncing Jesus, I pleaded with my heavenly Father for the power of the Holy Spirit — that by the Spirit, God would make himself and his Son, the Lord Jesus, so real to me, and so glorious to me, and so satisfying to me, that these domestic pleasures all around me would be as nothing by comparison, and that I would be able, when the time came, to endure.

What is there to life that you'll give up for Christ? The whole of all these is not as real as Jesus!