Close your Bible. Close your eyes. Open it at random, front, middle, or end, and place your finger on one of the open pages. Open your eyes and find the nearest named person to your finger.

Who are they? What was their actual life like? What was the context surrounding them?

Then ask yourself the hard, honest question: Would you want to be that person, at that time? Do they have a life you would actually want to live?

Most of us in America or the broader West, if we answer truthfully, would say no.

The Unsanitized Reality of Scripture

Of the prophets in the Bible, most lived extremely difficult lives. They were mocked, rejected, imprisoned, or killed for speaking God’s word. Of the apostles, they lived with ongoing hardship, beatings, shipwrecks, hunger, and rejection. Historical accounts indicate that nearly all of them died brutal deaths. Stephen was stoned (Acts 7). James was executed by the sword (Acts 12). Paul was repeatedly beaten, imprisoned, and ultimately killed. Tradition holds that John was boiled in oil, survived, and was then exiled to Patmos. Most of the kings in Scripture did not end well either. David had a son turn against him, lived on the run with his life in danger many times, arranged for someone to be killed, and committed adultery. His life was marked by both a high calling and costly consequences.

Someone once observed that God has used no one greatly for the advancement of His kingdom who has not first suffered greatly. There is a great deal of truth in that statement. Our trials are often the very means God uses to prepare us for ministry. They are not random interruptions; they are part of the shaping process.

Counting the Cost While Holding Fast to Joy

Scripture does not hide the difficulty of the Christian life. We are commanded to count it all joy when we face trials of many kinds, because the testing of our faith produces steadfastness (James 1:2–4). We are told to give thanks in all circumstances, for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for us (1 Thessalonians 5:18). Jesus promised that He came so we might have life and have it abundantly (John 10:10), yet He also told His followers to count the cost before following Him (Luke 14:28). We are called to present our bodies as living sacrifices, holy and acceptable to God; this is our spiritual worship (Romans 12:1).

The tension is real. Abundant life is not the absence of hardship. It is life found in union with Christ, lived out as a living sacrifice, both literally and figuratively.

Cultural Success Versus Biblical Success

Many churches in the West soften this reality. We often absorb our culture’s definition of success: comfort, material prosperity, status, influence, and personal advancement (what is sometimes called upward mobility). By that measure, most of the people we meet in Scripture would look like failures. The Bible defines success differently. It measures success by faithfulness, obedience, character, abiding in Christ, and fruitfulness for His kingdom, even when that path involves suffering, loss, or obscurity by the world’s standards. Jesus said the one who loses his life for His sake will find it (Matthew 16:25). Paul counted everything as loss compared to knowing Christ (Philippians 3:7–8). Biblical success is not climbing the ladders our culture builds; it is remaining faithful to the God who calls us.

Why This Ministry Exists

I know this tension personally. Living a life of consistent joy does not come easily to me. That struggle is one of the main reasons I believe God entrusted En-Joy Ministries to me, an unlikely person for the task. Our mission is rooted in the truth of Nehemiah 8:10: “The joy of the Lord is your strength.” We seek to cultivate that resilient, Spirit-given joy which sustains believers through real challenges, because true strength comes from abiding in Christ (John 15), not from comfortable circumstances or cultural success.

Joy in Scripture is not mere emotion or the result of favorable conditions. It is a settled confidence that springs from knowing God, remaining in Christ, and being filled with the Holy Spirit. It is the strength that enables us to endure, give thanks, and keep following even when the cost is high. At En-Joy Ministries, we plant seeds of this joy through teaching, practical outreach, and community, trusting God for the harvest of mature disciples who live out their faith with boldness.

An Invitation

Try the challenge. Open your Bible at random, find the nearest named person, and sit with their story. Then ask yourself whether you are willing to follow the same Savior who called people to take up their cross, and to do it while abiding in Him for the strength and joy only He supplies.

The Christian life is difficult and full of sacrifices. We are told to count the cost. At the same time, we are invited into a life that is truly abundant because it is rooted in Christ. The joy of the Lord is our strength. May we learn to cultivate it, even in the middle of hardship, as we walk with Him, measuring success by His definition, not the world’s.

An Addendum: Trying the Challenge Myself—demonstrating the Challenge: Joshua 2 — Rahab and the King of Jericho

I did the challenge myself. I closed my Bible, closed my eyes, opened it at random, and put my finger on the page. When I opened my eyes, I was in Joshua chapter 2, and my finger landed between two names: Rahab and the king of Jericho.

Rahab was a Canaanite woman living in Jericho, identified in Scripture as a prostitute (Joshua 2:1). When the two spies Joshua sent entered the city, she hid them on her roof under stalks of flax. When the king’s men came looking for them, she misdirected the soldiers and sent them on a false trail. Later she told the spies, “I know that the LORD has given you the land… for the LORD your God, he is God in the heavens above and on the earth beneath” (Joshua 2:9–11). She asked for and received a promise that she and her family would be spared, marked by a scarlet cord in her window. When the walls fell and Jericho was destroyed, she and those gathered in her house were rescued (Joshua 6:22–25). She is later included in the genealogy of Jesus (Matthew 1:5) and is cited in the New Testament as an example of faith that acted (Hebrews 11:31; James 2:25). Her life involved risk, a damaged reputation, living under the shadow of coming judgment on her city, and a decisive break from her own people to trust the God of Israel.

The king of Jericho is the ruler who heard that Israelite spies had entered the city and immediately ordered them found and brought to him (Joshua 2:2–3). His city was already gripped by fear because of what the people had heard about the God of Israel and Israel’s earlier victories (Joshua 2:9–11). When the time of conquest came, Jericho was tightly shut. God gave Joshua specific instructions; the walls fell, and the city and its inhabitants were devoted to destruction. Scripture records that the king of Jericho and the city’s warriors were given into Joshua’s hand (Joshua 6:2). Only Rahab and those in her house were spared. The king’s story ends in the complete overthrow of the city he ruled.

Sitting with both stories, I had to ask the same question I invited you to ask: Would I want to be Rahab at that moment—living with a compromised reputation, risking her life to hide foreign spies, standing against her own city and king, and trusting a promise from a God she had only heard about? Or would I want to be the king of Jericho—ruling a fortified city already melting in fear, actively opposing the people of the God who had dried up the Red Sea, and ultimately facing the total destruction of everything under his authority?

Neither life matches the picture of comfort or success most of us in the West are conditioned to expect. Yet one ends in mercy, rescue, and inclusion in God’s redemptive purposes, while the other ends under judgment. That is the kind of honest look the challenge is meant to produce. It forces us to face the real cost of following God and the real difference between cultural success and biblical faithfulness.

I share this not as a finished example, but as a simple invitation. Try it for yourself. Then sit with the person you find and ask the hard question. The Christian life has always involved counting the cost, and the joy of the Lord remains our strength as we walk it out.