Chuck Swindoll tells of reading a newspaper article years ago about a guy who earned his living being shot out of a cannon at carnivals. The man’s nickname quite naturally was “Cannonball.” In his younger days Cannonball was blasted out of a cannon 1200 times. He said he did it for the thrill of the crowd’s applause. “Do you know,” he asked, “what it’s like to feel the applause of 60,000 people?” Twelve hundred times shot out of a cannon! (1) We all like to be applauded, don’t we? We all like to hear others say what a great job we’ve done. Nothing wrong with that.

How about if you had done the very best you could, and instead of being applauded, you were persecuted? That would be a bummer, wouldn’t it? And yet Jesus tells us that when that happens to us, we ought to rejoice.

Jesus said t…