Nick Napier (pastor of Boyce Memorial Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church in Kings Mountain, North Carolina, USA)  writes:

There is a video going around on Facebook of an outraged, Christian man who is proud that he has cleverly “outwitted Starbucks.” The premise of the video is that if you are a real Christian, you are offended that Starbucks doesn’t say, “Merry Christmas,” or have it written on their cups. The video opens with the man making some trite statements about being “open minded” and how Starbucks wants to take Christ & Christmas off their cups—more than that, their employees are *gasp* not allowed to say, “Merry Christmas.”

He then says that instead of boycotting Starbucks, he wants to start a movement of patrons who answer that their name is Merry Christmas. Clever. Wow! What a wonderful way to demonstrate that you are a Christian. Doing this obviously means that you love and serve Jesus more than others. Obviously. (Because lying in order to carry on a holiday that he did not command, is exactly what God wants.)

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Geoff Willour writes:

“If you insult my wife, you are no friend of mine.  If you loudly and publicly proclaim your loyal friendship to me, but you can’t stand to be around my beloved bride, then your boastful claims to loyalty and friendship are hollow, empty, and meaningless to me.  Any husband who loves and cherishes his bride would say the same thing.

“Yet, ironically, there seems to exist today a whole host of individuals who think they can be loyal friends to a particular husband while at the same time despising his bride…”

A man approached Martin Luther rejoicing that he’d become a Christian. Sincerely wanting to serve the Lord, he asked, “What should I do next?” (as if to ask, does the Lord want me to become a pastor? a missionary? a traveling evangelist? a monk?).

Luther asked him, “What do you do now?”

“I’m a shoe maker.”

To the man’s astonishment, Luther replied, “Then make good shoes, and sell them at a fair price.”

The call to follow Christ is not necessarily a call to leave the vocation that you already have. God says, “Each person should remain in the situation they were in when God called them” (1 Cor. 7:17, 20). Nor do you need to justify your work in terms of its “spiritual value” or “evangelistic usefulness.” God says, “make it your ambition to lead a quiet life: you should mind your own business and work with your hands, just as we told you, so that your daily life may win the respect of outsiders” (1 Thess. 4:11–12). You are simply to do whatever God calls you to do, wherever God calls you to do it, with a fresh commitment to pursue it with greater excellence “as working for the Lord” (Col. 3:23–25).

This means that we make a big mistake when we define our service to Christ only in terms of the church—as a Sunday school teacher, or youth worker, or nursery helper, or music leader, or evangelist, etc. By shrinking our notion of serving Christ only to serving either inside the church or in churchly ways, we fail to see that, according to God, “full-time Christian service” involves everything we are and everything we do—not only inside the church but also, more importantly, outside the church.

Some time ago, someone asked Os Guinness why the church wasn’t having a bigger impact in our world. He said the main reason is not that Christians aren’t where they should be. There are plenty of labourers, farmers, lawyers, housewives, builders, doctors, bakers, teachers, business owners, etc. who are Christians. Rather, the main reason is that Christians aren’t who they should be right where they are. As believers follow the Lord and pursue their lawful callings as working for the Lord, the Lord will use them as salty salt and shining light that he himself has positioned right where he wants it throughout a dark and decaying world (Mt. 5:13–16).

Serve the Lord full-time by blooming right where he’s planted you!

Tim Challies writes:

Christians know to expect suffering and persecution. The formula is simple: If the perfect and sinless Son of God suffered persecution, so too will his imperfect and sinful followers. We are to be people who live in the world, but not of the world. We are to live among unbelieving people, but to live in a very different way. When we do this we are never far from some kind of persecution.

Still, there are a couple of ways we can insure ourselves against suffering.

The first way to avoid persecution is to live outside the world, to seclude ourselves away from it. If we do that, we will not suffer. We will not suffer because we will never come into contact with people who would persecute us. Our isolation will keep us far from their thoughts. But there is a high cost: It will also keep our faith and our Saviour far from their thoughts.

There is a second way: to live in the world but to remain like the world. If we live just like the people around us, we will not suffer because there is nothing in us that stands out, nothing worth persecuting. And all the while our worldliness will contradict whatever we claim to be true about our faith and our Saviour.

I appreciate how John Stott frames this. He says, “The first group escapes persecution by withdrawing from the world, the second group by becoming assimilated to the world.” It is just that simple. But God does not call us to either of those two extremes. Instead, he calls us to be salt and light, to plant ourselves in the midst of a watching world and, right there, to live very different lives. Some will see, and hear, and be persuaded. Many more will see, be convicted, and persecute. But as Christians we simply need to expect it: Persecution comes to those who are faithful.

from http://www.challies.com/articles/2-surefire-ways-to-avoid-persecution