Tenacity.

Tenacity, or tenaciousness, is a form of patience. It means we’re not going to change our position. We know where we stand, we’re standing where we should, and we’re not gonna budge.

Jesus encourages tenacity. Especially when it comes to prayer.

Jesus told them an analogy about the necessity of their prayer—that they shouldn’t lose heart—saying, “There’s a certain judge in a certain city. He’s not a God-fearer; he doesn’t care what people think of him. There’s a widow in that city. She comes to him saying, ‘Punish this person who’s wronged me.’ For a time, he doesn’t want to, but later he told himself, ‘I’m not a God-fearer, nor do I care what people think of me… but this widow is giving me such a beating, I’m going to help her so she stops coming to bother me.’”

The Master said, “Listen to what this wrong-headed judge says. Won’t God punish the foes of his chosen people, who cry out to him day and night? Will he put up with them? I tell you he will punish them, and quickly.

“But when the Son of Man comes, will he find any faith in the world?”

—Jesus, Luke 18.1-8 KWL

In other words, will God’s people have the patience to wait for God to do his thing? Or will we take matters into our own hands, and try to solve them through our own force instead of the Spirit’s power?

Tenacity and stubbornness.

Tenacity regularly gets confused with stubbornness. In fact, a lot of people think “tenacious” is what we call a stubborn person when we’re trying to be nice, or when we like the particular way they’re stubborn. People like that widow in Jesus’s story, who stand up for justice and don’t back down till they get it: Their opponents call them stubborn, and their fans call them tenacious.

But the words don’t quite mean the same thing. Stubborn means we won’t back down from our position—even though we’ve been shown plenty of evidence how our position is wrong. A stubborn person doesn’t listen to reason. When God condemned the Hebrews time and again for being a stiff-necked people—like a donkey who won’t turn when you tug the reins—he was referring to the fact he was meant to be in charge, not them. He knew best; they knew he knew best; even so, they were dead set on doing as they wished, even if it meant charging into a wall or off a cliff.

Tenacity means we are being reasonable: We’re doing the right thing, regardless of the difficulty level, and regardless of consequences. People may try to get us to back down, and say, “Be reasonable.” But they won’t argue our position is wrong. (In fact, they may wholly agree with us.) What they mean by “reasonable” is they don’t believe the consequences are reasonable: “Be reasonable” means “Look at what’s gonna happen to you. People will think you’re nuts. You’ll lose your standing. You’ll lose money. You’ll lose your job. You’ll lose your family’s support. That’s not worth it. You can avoid that! Just compromise. Be reasonable.” But just as the ends don’t justify the means, consequences have nothing to do with rightness. The prophets were right in proclaiming God’s word, and they died. The martyrs were right in standing up for Jesus, and they died. Jesus was right in saying he was a king, and he died. Consequences are never a valid reason to back down. Only rightness is.

Stubbornness only comes into it when our “rightness” is wrong-headed. And that’ll happen. Christians regularly fall into the trap of standing up for righteous causes in a carnal, unfruitful way. Fr’instance Christians who are against abortion because they believe it to be murder… yet have no trouble when an abortionist is murdered, or who do nothing to provide women better options than abortion. People who teach, “Hate the sin, love the sinner” seldom take the last part seriously. But when we do anything without love, we negate everything we stand for.

Regardless of consequences.

In the United States, what we tend to see among Christians is this attitude of, “Because I’m doing the right thing, I shouldn’t have to suffer consequences.” We don’t believe in suffering for God. We don’t believe in suffering period. Our entire culture is designed around the idea of escaping suffering. Where Jesus teaches that if our body parts lead us to sin, we should lop them off, we respond, “Not only is that hyperbole, but come on: Sin isn’t that bad.” We would far rather sin than suffer.

The Greek word for patience, makrothýmia, literally means long-[in]-suffering. It’s where the King James Version got the word “longsuffering.” The very idea of patience implies we are suffering—we’re not getting what we want right now, and that makes us unhappy, but we’re gonna tough it out because God has our best in mind. As I said, our culture is designed around the idea of escaping suffering, so in the U.S. our idea of “patience” has all the suffering taken out of it. We’ll put up with delays. We’ll put up with difficulty. We’ll not put up with suffering. We’ll get righteously angry first.

This desire to dodge suffering is a lot of the reason why the argument, “Be reasonable; look at the consequences!” works so well and so often. People are willing to ditch rightness and justice and sinlessness and love because we love our comforts too much. We do it all the time. It starts with little things—skipping church services because the weather is nice; not returning that message because we’re too tired; going back on little promises to the kids because it’s too much trouble—and it escalates from there. American Christians stumble the most over anything which threatens to put us out. It’s why we don’t fast—or why our “fasts” are nothing more than diets.

Tenacity puts aside discomfort. The tenacious Christian knows how sometimes we gotta suffer for God. Jesus warned us it was coming, and told us he’d reward us for it. The patient Christian is willing to put up with a little persecution in the present day, in exchange for the greater reward when the Son of Man returns. The impatient Christian isn’t willing to wait that long, and will instead fight tooth and nail against those who dare to make them suffer. Yeah, they’ll fight for Jesus… and they’ll fight for themselves while they’re at it. (You can usually tell the sort by how jerklike and self-righteous they are as they defend their actions—as if they want society to reward them for being right, instead of just Jesus.)

The apostles treated suffering for Jesus as an honor. Some of it was because of the optimism God wants us to practice. Some of it was because they saw Jesus rewarded for his suffering: They saw him resurrected, and they saw him ascend to glory, and they knew they were going that route too. They knew, so they had faith. By doing, we can learn this too, and likewise have faith.