The cost of the gospel: A story that should humble every generation (2), By Ayo Akerele

Persecution of faithful Christians has more than doubled around the world and will yet multiply in the years ahead. The future of the Church in Africa, and indeed globally, now rests to a significant degree in the hands of the Christian young people of today. But the question that must keep every spiritual leader awake at night is this: will the youths of today, who are drinking from the wells dug by the fathers, take up their own swords and sharpen them for the battle ahead?

“So it came about, on the day of battle, that there was neither sword nor spear found in the hand of any of the people who were with Saul and Jonathan. But they were found with Saul and Jonathan his son.” (1 Samuel 13:22).

What a tragedy beyond measure. On the day it mattered most, the day of actual battle, no sword was available in the hands of the people of God. The fathers carried swords, but the children carried none. The Sword, of course, is the Word of God. A sharpened sword is the sharp, undiluted, uncompromising truth of God’s Word. But how will our children and the children of our children confront the moral rot, spiritual recklessness, and doctrinal confusion of their generation without a Sword?

“But all the Israelites went down to the Philistines, to sharpen every man his share, and his coulter, and his axe, and his mattock.” (1 Samuel 13:20).

This passage serves as a sobering allegory for the next generation of the Church. The Philistines should have been coming to the Israelites for everything, the Church was meant to be the light, the standard-bearer, the shaping force over culture. Instead, it was God’s own people who descended to their enemies for sharpening. It was the reverse of what God intended. Rather than Scripture shaping culture, culture is increasingly shaping Scripture in the minds of many who sit in our pews. The present generation of young and teenage believers face the very real danger of not following the Lord wholeheartedly in their own generation.

Many of them have not been prepared to carry swords. Many have never been shown what a sword truly is. The Sword is the genuine, unadulterated Word of the Lord, the very nucleus of the gospel. If the present generation of Christian leaders does not urgently assemble a solemn gathering to train and thoroughly equip the youths of today in the undiluted truth of God’s Word, those youths will inevitably descend to the Philistines to sharpen their own, and in truth, many of them are already mingling with the Philistines in the land.

Many are boldly and unselfconsciously singing the Lord’s song in a strange land, entirely unaware of the spiritual danger they are in. Our children must be rescued. If they are not, they will be subdued by the world and by the spiritual forces of darkness that are intensifying in this end time. They will carry no fire and distribute no fire. They will be vulnerable, weak, and without passion. It is time for the Church to rise, to contend earnestly for the faith, to rescue its own soul, and to fight without retreat for the souls of the next generation.

What does the next generation truly know about intercession? What do they know about sanctification? What do they know about discipleship? What do they know about genuine repentance, not the performance of it, but the reality of it? What do they know about authentic love and compassion for the poor? What do they know about faithfulness and self-control? What do they know about the gifts of the Holy Spirit and the fruits of the Holy Spirit, and the critical difference between them?

What do they know about eternity and eternal rewards? What do they know about purpose and God-given vision? What do they know about the charge of evangelism? The walls of the gospel of Christ are being systematically broken down, and the next generation of believers stand on the very edge of apostasy, unless they are called back to God with surgical urgency and unwavering love.

“And there arose another generation after them, which knew not the Lord.” (Judges 2:10).

The present generation of mature believers and spiritual leaders must therefore begin with great intentionality to build bridges and demolish every wall that stands between God and the next generation. We must return to the uncompromising truth of God’s Word, a truth stripped clean of greed, egocentrism, post-modernism, and the subtle infiltrations of new age philosophies. We must come together with unified purpose to fulfil the prophetic vision given to David: “One generation shall praise Thy works to another, and shall declare Thy mighty acts.” (Psalms 145:4).

For by doing this we will be able to place sharp swords into the hands of the next generation, and when we have gone to our reward, they will be strong and bold enough to confront the Philistines of their own lands. They will grow tall and deep-rooted in God, and they will succeed in passing those same swords to their children, and this gospel of the Kingdom shall be preached to all nations, and then shall the end come.

Sometimes, we need to sit with the weight of what Christians in other nations and in other generations have endured in their faithfulness to Christ, not merely to admire them from a distance, but to allow their stories to deepen and demand more of our own commitment.

Charles Colson, in his important book The God of Stones and Spiders, recounts the story of Armando Valladares, a Cuban poet who was arrested by the regime of Fidel Castro in 1960. Castro imprisoned Armando for twenty-two years. In Colson’s own words: “During one three-month period, Armando Valladares and some condemned Christian prisoners were given showers of human urine and excrement by sadistic prison guards. In the middle of the night, Armando would hear from his prison cell the measured footsteps of condemned Christian men being marched outside. Then he would hear their voices rise in a final defiant shout of ‘Viva Cristo Rey’, Long live Christ the King, just before the exploding rifles of the firing squad shattered those voices into eternity.”

At that time, Armando Valladares was not himself a committed believer. But having witnessed the unshakeable faith and fearless trust in Christ demonstrated by those condemned Christian men, even as they walked calmly toward death, he emerged from Castro’s prison after twenty-two long years as a transformed man, carrying a renewed and burning commitment to follow Christ passionately for the remainder of his life.

Friends, the prices that generations of Christians have paid in defence of their faith are prices most of us have not begun to contemplate. Christianity has never been, and was never designed to be, a cost-free, comfort-centred experience. Jesus Himself declared without ambiguity: “If anyone will come after Me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow Me.” (Matthew 16:24) You cannot be a genuine follower of Christ and simultaneously live with reckless self-indulgence and spiritual carelessness.

This is precisely why it is absolutely essential that we collectively de-emphasise church membership as the primary measure of Christian life, and begin wholeheartedly promoting, modelling, and living out the demanding but life-giving virtues of discipleship. This means deliberately building spiritual stamina and deep scriptural capacity for the increasingly difficult days that lie ahead. It means prioritising intimacy with God, depth of relationship with the Holy Spirit, and genuine spirituality over carnality, both in the way we teach and in the way we live, so that our children and our spiritual sons and daughters have a solid platform upon which to stand when the storms of their generation break against them.

Above all, let those who have been stealing, whether of God’s resources, of people’s trust, or of their own integrity, steal no more. Let hypocrisy in leadership come to an end. The younger generation stands at a crossroads of defining decisions. Dr. Billy Graham has gone to his eternal reward. Kenneth E. Hagin has gone ahead. The next generation is marching toward war without swords. Some are already descending to the Philistines to sharpen what they have.

They will self-destruct if we do not act. If we do not live our truth but only speak it, if we do not model what we preach, they will not catch the flame, much less ignite a fire of deep, consuming love and passion for Jesus Christ in their own generation. Churches must repent and return to God in genuine, not performative, repentance.

Pastors and leaders must wake up and take seriously the sacred responsibility of helping our children know, love, and faithfully serve the true and living God.

We live in a generation that has become dangerously obsessed with signs and wonders and supernatural spectacle, yet Jesus Himself issued a sobering warning: “A wicked and adulterous generation seeks after a sign.” (Matthew 16:4) The genuine move of the Holy Spirit never contradicts the fruit of the Spirit, love, joy, peace, patience, humility, self-control.

God does not compromise His own nature to satisfy our appetite for excitement and performance. It is infinitely better to fail quietly with the fruit of the Spirit than to succeed spectacularly through the works of the flesh. Gifts may impress crowds for a season, but only godliness, deep, hidden, costly godliness, sustains a ministry, a family, a church, and a generation.

Let us return, with urgency and with tears if necessary, to the essence of Christianity and ministry. Let us focus on what matters most: becoming genuine disciples of Jesus Christ, and in so doing, faithfully producing the next generation of disciples who will carry the fire further than we ever could. The scars on Pastor Joseph’s back demand nothing less.

Ayo Akerele is the senior pastor of Rhema Assembly and the founder of the Voice of the Watchmen Ministries in Ontario, Canada. He can be reached through [email protected]. You can connect with him on: YouTube: @VoiceoftheWatchmen, TikTok: @drayoakerele, Instagram: @drayoakerele, Facebook: @Ayo Akerele