{"id":955,"date":"2020-05-05T19:52:18","date_gmt":"2020-05-05T19:52:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/disciple4.com\/?p=955"},"modified":"2023-03-27T20:49:03","modified_gmt":"2023-03-27T20:49:03","slug":"happiness-love-and-trouble","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/disciple4.com\/index.php\/2020\/05\/05\/happiness-love-and-trouble\/","title":{"rendered":"Happiness, love and trouble"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>The Biblical scholar William Barclay famously described a New Testament Christian as having three remarkable characteristics: \u201cOne, they were absurdly happy; two, they were filled with an irrational love for everyone; and three, they were always in trouble!\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Persecuted Christians are constantly in trouble. As a Palestinian pastor put it, \u201cIf you speak truth to power, power always reacts.\u201d An encounter with the persecuted reveals the incendiary nature of this gospel we follow, and if our witness does not provoke some sort of explosive reaction, we have to check whether our gospel powder is damp or dry. We should be in trouble for Jesus! If we aren\u2019t, something is wrong\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Biblical scholar William Barclay famously described a New Testament Christian as having three remarkable characteristics: \u201cOne, they were absurdly happy; two, they were filled with an irrational love for everyone; and three, they were always in trouble!\u201d Persecuted Christians are constantly in trouble. As a Palestinian pastor put it, \u201cIf you speak truth to [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-955","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-quotes"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/disciple4.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/955","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/disciple4.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/disciple4.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/disciple4.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/disciple4.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=955"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/disciple4.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/955\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":968,"href":"https:\/\/disciple4.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/955\/revisions\/968"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/disciple4.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=955"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/disciple4.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=955"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/disciple4.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=955"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}