Perhaps it is how we look at things that determines how we respond to those who mistreat us and dispitefully use us?
I brought this up in our SS discussion.
To be meek is not to surrender our rights; but it is the preservation of self-control under provocation to give way to anger or to the spirit of retaliation. Meekness will not allow passion to take the lines. {ST, August 22, 1895 par. 3}
When we are provoked and tempted to be angry and retaliate, who is our greatest enemy at that point? Self. Self is trying to be in control again. Essentially, it is trying to enslave us.
So, if we become angry or retaliate, we might repel the persecutor, but we become slaves to sin in the process. Essentially, we give up our right to liberty and put ourselves in bondage.
But "to be meek is not to surrender our rights." And that especially means not to surrender our right to be free from the tyranny of self, sin, and Satan. If that means that people will continue to persecute me because I continue to refuse to be a slave to self, then so be it. I might look like a doormat to human eyes, but I am free in reality.
He who can stand unmoved amid a storm of abuse is one of God's heroes. To rule the spirit is to keep self under discipline; to resist evil; to regulate every word and deed by God's great standard of righteousness. He who has learned to rule his spirit will rise above the slights, the rebuffs, the annoyances, to which we are daily exposed, and these will cease to cast a gloom over his spirit. {AG 256.2}
