 I can't wait to go to prison for being a Christian. Persecution is something we're told in the Bible that we should expect as Christians, but there is an extremely troubling trend on TikTok that I need to address and we need to cut this out right now. Hey guys, what's up? My name is Isaac David and this is The Daily Disciple where I help you find Jesus and follow Him daily. I didn't know, I almost didn't get that right. Where I help you find Jesus and follow Him daily. For those of you who don't know, I put out daily content and that is only possible through the support of everyone on Patreon. It is an amazing blessing to have you guys over there. Part of one of the perks of being a patron is that you get discount codes on merch and I just wanna announce, look at this baby, we got merch. Follow Jesus daily, this is one of our designs, but you know, check it out now under the video. Now I wanna preface this and I'll say this again later, but this isn't calling this girl out specifically. I'm not trying to bash her or condemn her or anything like that. I'm sure she's a nice Christian girl who puts out nice content. Ultimately I wanna use this as a teaching tool because a lot of other people are making content along the same lines and I just think this is not great. One moment, I need to grab my reacting glasses. Okay, we are back. Now I can see the video clearly. Let's do this. I can't wait to go to prison for being a Christian because then I'll go to prison with my fellow Christians and then the guards will become Christian because we're talking to them about Jesus and then they'll go to prison and the new guards will come and then they'll become a Christian and they'll get arrested. And it's just an ongoing thing. It'll be super fun. It's gonna be great. I'll bring the popcorn. Okay, so obviously she's kind of playing this off as a joke as well. Oh, let me take off my reaction glasses as well. She's playing this off as a joke so she's not totally serious, but I've seen people make way too many jokes about this where there is a level of seriousness and I've seen sincere videos about this as well where people are like, well bring on persecution, right? Because I can take it. I want the persecution. I'm just, it's gonna be a fun time where we're all band together as brothers and as Christians and we're just gonna go for it, right? Because we have a soft view of what persecution actually is. We see it as kind of like an exciting, fun thing, like bring it on, well let's be ready for it and let's do this, it's gonna be great. Let's Christians gather together and we're gonna sing songs and that kind of thing. It's like persecution, especially going on in other countries right now is insane. It is tragic and it is beyond anything that you can comprehend at this point. Here's what the Bible has to say about it. Indeed, all who desire to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted, okay? It doesn't say, oh we should desire to be persecuted. We desire to have a godly life, to live a godly life and let the results fall where they may. Our desires ought to be oriented towards Christ regardless of circumstance. Now I don't over exaggerate the point. This is just one girl making one video about persecution and obviously partially a joke for sure but I've seen enough of these kind of videos that are talking and fantasizing about being persecuted. We create these fantasies for ourselves that seem to heighten our role for Christ and bring excitement into our lives. I can relate to this, like back when I was a teenager, perhaps maybe you've even had this same dream of being in a church or at your house and an intruder comes in and he's like trying to shoot up the place and you're like, no, I'm gonna do everything possible. I'm gonna tackle him, I'm gonna take him down, I'm gonna sacrifice myself and you have this fantasy of like being the hero and laying your life down and that's so exciting and it brings so much purpose to your life but then you return home and you're incapable of doing the dishes or you don't wanna clean your room. It's like we heighten these amazing fantasies and get so excited, I'm gonna live for Christ, I'm gonna do all these things for him but then we can't do the bare minimum. But you know man, I can't wait to be persecuted for Christ, seriously? Yeah man, it's like lock me up right now, man. I won't deny Jesus. Yeah, but man, what makes you think you're gonna speak up for Jesus when you're not even doing it now? Here's what I'm getting at. Instead of building up these big fantasies of what future persecution could look like and fantasizing about being the hero and not denying Christ and being that strong Christian, we need to embark on the journey of following Christ in our daily lives, no matter how small or insignificant that may look because it's about being faithful in our circumstance, not just being faithful, oh, in the future when the stakes are really, really high, well, can you be faithful? Can you speak up for Christ now at your college, within your family, within your friend group? That's where we begin. Just speaking from personal experience, it's pretty boastful of me to think that I'm gonna stand up and withstand all this tremendous persecution when I can't even speak up to my professor at college or I can't even share the gospel with somebody on the street with really no ramifications other than social rejection. So here's my encouragement for you. Ground yourself in God's word. Read it. If you need reading glasses, that's great. Get some reading glasses, whatever you need to do. Get a translation, get an audio Bible. I'm dyslexic. I listen to the audio Bible all the time. That's like my primary way of getting God's word each day. But whatever you need to do, ground yourself in God's word because when the time comes, when persecution actually does come, for real, and we're done making jokes about it and we need to be able to know God's word, have it hidden in our heart and be able to stand on something concrete other than just our own thoughts, ideas, and opinions. And we need to remember that God has given us his power and his presence in our lives to overcome the temptation and the trials that we encounter. Not just when persecution is massive and tremendous, but on your Monday when you're tempted to do something that you know is wrong. You have that power and God's presence to overcome that because he's given everything we need for godliness in Christ Jesus. Thank you so much for watching this video. I hope you enjoyed it and you got something from it. Thank you again to everyone on Patreon that makes what I do on here possible and helps this ministry keep going and growing. Once again, if you wanna pick up some merchandise, yes, it's so fun. The follow Jesus Daily shirt, there's another design on there and there's some hoodies and some beanies and it's a fun spot to be. So you can head on over to the link in my bio to pick up some of that stuff and take me on Instagram if you want to and I'll repost it for sure. Thank you so much for watching guys and I'll see you next time. God bless.