It takes us a while to learn the value of tenacity. Shackleton learned it the hard way when he undertook his 800-mile journey in an open boat to save his imperilled crew. Cross-Channel swimmers demonstrate it. So do climbers tackling the Eiger. A forgotten singer called Sir Harry Lauder (whom Churchill described as Scotland’s greatest ambassador) wrote a song about: ‘Keep right on to the end of the road’. His singing and song-writing went on by inspired if anything by the death of his son John on the Western Front in1916.
Tenacity is not a monopoly of religious people – far from it. It was men called navvies who built railways in the UK and all the bridges and depots that went with them. Men of the same ilk in north America drove railway construction from one side of the continent to the other. The two great canals, Panama and Suez, exacted untiring tenacity from their constructors.
Jesus applauded sticking to the task (Mark 8.31) He came to perform a task and he did that. If he likened his audience in the market-place to an audience distracted and wanting something different, he was alive to one of the characteristic shortcomings of our human nature. We are easily diverted, always ready to take the plunge into something new. People disliked John the Baptist who was abstemious. They disliked Jesus who was good company. It is no wonder that they gave him a hard time.
Well did James say in his New Testament letter that we can’t do without that virtue called endurance. In fact this emphasis came at the very beginning of the letter. It chimes with the saying about putting one’s hand to the plough. The New Testament makes it clear that faith is not something that goes in fits and starts, that depends on the mood we are in or the disappointments we are coping wn th.
Bunyan knew all about this. He had learned it in prison and his clashes with the authorities and he put what he learned into ‘Pilgrim’s Progress’. For his pilgrim strider faith was far from a cosy shelter. It showed itself in dealing with Apollyon, the Hill Difficulty and all the smart fellows who came and went as he pressed on with his journey.
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