REAL DEAL MANHOOD

Are You Willing to Be Unpopular or Even Hated for Speaking the Gospel Truth?

2026-03-31T10:56:00.000-07:00

“All men will hate you because of me.”
(Mark 13:13)

“If the world hates you, keep in mind that it hated me first.” (John 15:18)

Years ago, when prolife speaker Gianna Jessen shared at our church, she said many memorable things. The one that has stuck with me is that to be a follower of Christ you need to be willing to be hated.

I agree, and that's what I want to talk about. Of course, this does NOT mean being hateful. Nor does it mean seeking to be hated. Or having a persecution complex, so you think people don’t like you because you’re following Christ, when they actually don’t like you because you’re just rude or obnoxious.

I am all for graciousness, kindness and servant-hearted love as we speak the truth. I seek to practice this with the nonchristians I’m around. But at some point the greatest kindness we can offer them, coming out of a life of humility and faithfulness to Christ, is the good news about Jesus. (That good news actually involves some very bad news about human sinfulness, which is what makes the cross offensive, meaning that it ticks people off).

The danger comes when we live in such fear of being mislabeled that we don’t step forward as unapologetic and unashamed all-out followers of Jesus. They can call us Jesus freaks or ignorant or uncool or intolerant or anything they want, that’s fine. We should do what we believe pleases our Lord, regardless of how it pans out in opinion polls. That includes loving others and giving radically and ministering to the down and out and addressing addictions and saying we think it’s wrong to kill children of all ages and helping people find alternatives. We do such things not seeking the approval of our culture, but of our King.

If we seek our culture’s approval, we’ll either never get it or get it only at the expense of failing to represent Christ. We are promised, that if we “live godly lives in Christ Jesus” we “will suffer persecution.” If we’re not suffering persecution, at some level, then what does that suggest?

We should certainly be nice, and it’s sad when Christians aren’t. But it’s also sad when we imagine “niceness” has greater impact than it really does. Niceness is not the gospel. Some modern concepts of evangelism are little more than being nice to your neighbor and loaning him your hedge clipper and hoping that somehow he will come to Christ without you actually having to say the WORDS of the gospel which would run the risk of him thinking you’re weird. Our good example is important, but it’s not sufficient. There are actual truths that must be grappled with in surrendering to Jesus (1 Corinthians 15:1-6). And these truths are expressed in words.

I’m all for audience analysis and understanding the perceptions of this generation and speaking in a way they can understand. But instead of letting the world set our agenda and the ground rules of what we can and can’t say, let’s ask the Lord how best to take the timeless message of the gospel to these people.

But—and I say this coming out of some of the conversations I’ve had with cool Christians—the answer is not altering the contents of the gospel to make it something everyone can easily agree with. If the gospel becomes nothing more than the reflection of a worldview they already have, it has nothing to offer them. It’s God’s gospel. Given the price He paid on the cross to offer it, He has the right to say difficult things such as Jesus is the only way to the Father and we are hell-bound without Him. That message is not popular and never will be. Our job isn’t to edit the message, but to deliver it.

Among some believers, the definition of a good Christian is holding your beliefs privately, not challenging those who publicly share beliefs that dishonor Christ, and avoiding controversy at all costs lest we be perceived as “those kind of Christians” who supposedly favor inquisition and live to burn witches. We so much want the world to like us that we end up distancing ourselves from the historic Christian faith, from biblical doctrine (including hell), and from churches (because they’re all hypocrites except us). We end up making ourselves indistinguishable from the world, and therefore have nothing to offer the world.

Sometimes we assume the moral high ground by rolling our eyes at those street preachers, congratulating ourselves that we aren’t like that. Street preaching’s not my thing, but I can give you names of people who have come to Christ through street preaching. It’s more of a stretch to name those who’ve come to Christ through Christians who think it’s not cool to tell people the biblical truth that they need to repent of their sins (a synonym for evils; basically a big insult), and turn to Christ to be saved from hell.

It’s not our job to be popular. We are not contestants on American Idol. And we are not Christ’s speechwriters or PR team, airbrushing Jesus so He has greater appeal to people who don’t want to hear what He said about sin and hell. He’s the King, He calls the shots, we’re just His ambassadors. So let’s represent the real Jesus, the whole Jesus, not just the culturally acceptable one.

There is nothing new or postmodern about the gospel turning some people off. That’s always been true, just as it’s always been true that some people are longing to hear it and will deeply appreciate it that you had enough courage to tell them about Jesus.

As D. L. Moody said when someone criticized his approach to evangelism, “I like the way I do it better than the way you don’t do it.”

It is not gracious and kind to withhold the gospel from those who, according to Jesus, are going to hell without Him. Sometimes what we imagine to be our graciousness and kindness is actually indifference or cowardice.

“All men will hate you because of me.” (Mark 13:13)

“If the world hates you, keep in mind that it hated me first.” (John 15:18)

By Randy Alcorn - bestselling author of over sixty books (including Heaven) and the founder and director of Eternal Perspective Ministries.

Your Friends Are Fallible…Except One

2026-03-30T17:51:00.000-07:00

"Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends. You are my friends if you do what I command you. No longer do I call you servants, for the servant does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends" - John 15:13-15

It is good to have friends who are wise and who have been seasoned by their experience of life. It is good to have friends who are trustworthy and who are committed to being a blessing to others. It is good to have people on our side, and especially good to have Christian people on our side.

But our friends are fallible. The wisest among them is still prone to misjudgment, and the most knowledgeable among them is still prone to ignorance. The fairest can still be partial, and the kindest can still act in selfishness. Even the best-intentioned friend can provide counsel that hurts, harms, or leads astray. Friends are a blessing and wise friends a greater blessing still, but, as the old saying goes, the best of men are still only men at the best.

It is a tremendous comfort, then, that when we pray, we are not praying to someone else who is just trying to figure it all out, as we are. We are not praying to someone who sees incompletely and opaquely, or to someone who is merely doing his best to sort fact from fiction and truth from lies. Neither are we praying to someone who is only ever reacting and attempting to make the best decisions possible based on muddled information.

Rather, when we pray, we pray to one who sees and knows everything there is to see and know. We pray to someone who sees not only what is and what was, but also what might have been and what has never been. He knows not only the words that were said and the deeds that were done, but also the thoughts of the mind and the intentions of the heart. He understands the motives as well as the actions and the desires as well as the results.

Even better, we pray to the one who is sovereign over all of it, the one who uses evil just as he uses good, and who redeems the acts of self-serving men just as much as God-fearing ones. We pray to the one who has wisdom that cannot be surpassed and purposes that cannot be hindered, thwarted, or arrested. We pray to someone who knows the end from the beginning and from ancient times the things that are still to come. We pray to the one who stands over all of it and declares with the utmost truth, sincerity, and confidence: “My counsel shall stand, and I will accomplish all my purpose” (Isaiah 46:10). This is the most definitive of statements, for, unless God is a liar, his counsel shall stand, and he will accomplish all his purpose.

This God who is all-wise, all-knowing, all-powerful, and all-purposeful, hears our every prayer and responds to each one in the most appropriate way.

Because we pray to such a God, we can have the utmost confidence in his response to our prayers. This God who is all-wise, all-knowing, all-powerful, and all-purposeful, hears our every prayer and responds to each one in the most appropriate way. If it is best that he answers just when and how we have asked, he will do so. If it is best that he delays and answers in the future, he will do so. If it is best that he denies the very thing we have asked, he will do so. His “yes” and his “no,” his “later” and his “not yet,” and even his silence are inarguably and unassailably the best possible response. Everything he does or declines to do will indubitably bring him the greatest possible glory.

Hence, when we pray, we can pray with confidence that our prayers will never be unheard or misheard. They will never lead to the undermining of God’s purposes or the diminishment of God’s glory. Whether God grants our entreaty or denies it, he will be seen to have acted with knowledge greater than the smartest of any friend and wisdom greater than the wisest of any friend. He will be seen to have acted just the way we would have acted had we seen what he sees, known what he knows, and always acted most faultlessly for the good of others and the glory of his name.

By Tim Challies, a Canadian theologian, pastor, blogger and best-selling author

The Man on the Middle Cross Said I Can Come - by Alistair Begg (sermon text with video clip)

2026-03-30T13:57:00.000-07:00

The Man on the Middle Cross Said I Can Come - by Alistair Begg (sermon text with video clip)

I invite you to turn with me to 1 Corinthians and to chapter 1 and to follow along as I read from verse 18.

As you turn there, a moment to say a sincere thank you for the privilege of being here this evening. To come to a place that I’ve never been, to be welcomed by folks that, by and large, I don’t know is another testimony to the wonder of what it means to be united to Christ and to be part of the body of Christ. It’s a happy thing for a Scotsman to be in the great state of Texas, because we have a long history and association with Texas. If you know your history, you’ll know that approximately 40 percent of the original three hundred colonists who settled here with Stephen F. Austin at the beginning of the nineteenth century were all of Scottish descent. And when we began to export our famous Aberdeen Angus cattle from Scotland, we sent them first of all here to Texas in 1883. I first made a visit here in 1972 for Explo ’72 when I was twenty years of age, and I remember very vividly so many things about it. And so, to be invited back is, as I say, a privilege.

First Corinthians 1:18:

“For the word of the cross”—or “the message of the cross”[1]—“is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. For it is written, ‘I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart.’ Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, it pleased God through the folly of what we preach to save those who believe. For Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men.

“For consider your calling, brothers: not many of you were wise according to worldly standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are, so that no human being might boast in the presence of God. [He is the source of your life] in Christ Jesus, [whom God made our] wisdom … [and our] righteousness and sanctification and redemption[; therefore,] as it is written, ‘Let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord.’”

Amen.

And a brief prayer, an old Anglican prayer:

Father, what we know not, teach us. What we have not, give us. What we are not, make us. For your Son’s sake. Amen.

Well, my text is essentially the eighteenth verse, and my topic is the power or the message of the cross. And I should say at the very outset—especially if somebody says, “Well, why choose such a topic for this evening? Is it really necessary to come to an event like this, to a place like this, and address the matter of the centrality of the cross?”—well, I should say that I have not arrived here to tell you something that you do not know, but rather that we would remind each other of that which we must never forget. In 1951, James Denney, who was a Scottish theologian, remarking at the beginning of that decade: the cross “has less than its proper place in preaching and in theology.”[2] One could only wonder what Denney would have to say if he were to reappear at this point, certainly in my native Scotland.

Three simple observations by way of introduction.

First of all, the cross is rejected by other religions. Islam rejects the notion of a sin-bearing Savior. According to the Qur’an, each one shall reap the fruit of their own deeds. And therefore, there is no place, there is no need, for the cross. And indeed, to the Muslim mind, it is unthinkable that a major prophet of God should come to such an ignominious end. Hinduism, while accepting the historicity of the death of Christ, rejects its saving significance. And humanism, in all of its forms in contemporary selfism, rejects the notion of the cross entirely. In an earlier era, a rather arrogant professor from Oxford University remarked that Christianity is the worst of all religions—he’d said, because it rests “on the allied doctrines of original sin and vicarious atonement, which,” he said, “are intellectually contemptible and morally outrageous.”[3] So the cross is rejected by other religions.

The cross is marginalized by liberal scholarship. In liberal thinking throughout, certainly, the last 150 years, the essence of Christianity is the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus is an exemplar. He’s an ethicist. He is in some places the leader of a liberation army. The incarnation is defined apart from its relationship to the death of the Lord Jesus on the cross. It’s a kind of Harry Belafonte kind of Christianity: that “man will live forevermore because of Christmas Day.”[4] But in actual fact, the incarnation without the atonement has nothing at all to say to us.

So, if it is rejected by religions, if it is marginalized by liberal scholarship, what will we say further? Well—and this is painful—the cross is in danger of being trivialized by the approach of much contemporary evangelicalism. I’ll say again: this is bitter. We should examine ourselves in this regard and recognize that the rehearsing of clichés and evangelical mantras should not be equated with a central emphasis on the cross of the Lord Jesus Christ—an emphasis which declares its necessity, which establishes its meaning, and which does not shy away from its offense; the offense which is clearly stated by Paul in this section: “The message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing.”[5] But that is exactly what Paul preached.

Somebody puts up their hand and immediately says, “But of course, Alistair, we have moved a long way from those days. Time has gone by. That was then, and that was there. But this is here, and this is now. Wasn’t Paul just able to do this because that’s the kind of thing that people in Paul’s day were happy to hear?” Actually, no. If he had chosen to respond to the expectations of his listeners, he would have spent the afternoon performing miracles, and then he would have had a crowd over to his tent later in the evening, when they could sit around and discuss philosophy. It wasn’t just that he chose not to give them what they wanted; he continued to provide them with the one thing they didn’t want. Now, what possible idea of church growth is this, that you set your stall up to make sure that whatever it is that appeals to people, you’ve decided, “I’m going to set that aside, and why don’t I talk to them about something else? Why don’t I give them this story of a crucified Christ?” Especially if I’ve got a number of Jewish people listening! Because it stumbles them. And of course, the gentiles, they just thought it was absolutely ridiculous. Why do such a thing? Why do it then, and why do it now?

Well, in large measure, it falls on from where we have been earlier, in terms of this great paradox, not only revealed as it is outlined there in 2 Corinthians 4 but also in this respect: that God’s power is seen in weakness, and his wisdom is revealed in the foolishness of what is preached; that the cross is actually not simply a central event of biblical theology, but the cross is actually the pivotal event of human history. Can you imagine going into the history faculty at one of the great universities here in Texas and saying, “You know, I’d like to give a talk to the class. I’d like to explain to them that whatever their perspective of ancient history and ancient Rome and Greece and right through into the twenty-first century, I want to be able to explain to them that they will never understand history as it is taught them unless they have a Bible. And they will never understand the Bible unless they realize that the cross is at the very center of God’s making himself known.”

We can tell people that Christ will come into their hearts and live, but first they need to know that he has come into the world, lived and died, and rose again.

You see, all the way through the Bible, God does this, doesn’t he? We’re studying 1 Samuel at the moment—1 Samuel 16 and 17. I’m struggling my way through it. If you doubt that, just go online, and you can see how much I’m struggling. Or better still, phone my wife; she’ll tell you. At least, she told me on Sunday night I was struggling. But there you have it. I mean, Samuel says, “Well, Eliab, he’s the big, strong, tall one. He’s the obvious one.” No, he’s not. We go through the whole seven brothers, and there’s nobody there at all, till eventually the father, Jesse, says, “Well, there’s another… We do have another one, just… That fellow. But I never even brought him up for the interview, because clearly, clearly, he’s not the man.”[6] Oh, yes, he is the man! Who would think that he would be the man?

And who would think—who would think—that the major problems of our world and the troubles of human life find their ultimate solution in the execution of an innocent man in AD 33 and in the preaching of that news about him to the nations of the world? Who actually believes that? Who believes it, you see? We do not expect people to believe it. We understand that their immediate response to it is to say, “You know what? You are a major clown, and we don’t know where you appeared from, but the sooner you go back, the better. Because in actual fact, it is obvious to us that such a thing is folly.”

And yet everywhere Paul goes, he does the same thing. He’s essentially got one string to his bow. He goes into the synagogues again and again, and he labors to show them that the Messiah had to suffer and die. Check it out, wherever he goes. And he goes in, and he says, “Now, I want to show you from the Scriptures that the Messiah had to suffer and die.” And then when he has done that, he then says, “And this Jesus is that Messiah. This Jesus is that Christ.” In other words, the Jesus of history is the Lord of glory. He was pointing out something that we need to point out in our preaching, and that is that we can tell people that Christ will come into their hearts and live, but first they need to know that he has come into the world, lived and died, and rose again. And that historic foundation gives to us the platform upon which we are then able to encourage them in that way.

Well, we had a little tour round Corinth there, didn’t we? Thank you, brother. Very, very good: commercial center, lots of shops, and the Isthmian Games, and the sea and the sailors and everything that comes with it, and the Temple of Aphrodite, with a focus on the pagan goddess of love. All of the excessive immorality of the place, so much so that it becomes a byword for sexual license and excess of every kind. And then, of course, there were all the bright boys and ladies that lived there with their high-sounding discourses and the ponderings of the intelligentsia. That was the whole framework. Similar to Athens, wasn’t it? They spent their time doing nothing other than just talking about the latest ideas, Luke says of Athens.[7] Similar here. That’s the context.

And so it is into this significant, decadent city that this little converted Jew walks. And he says to them, “I’m not going to talk about myself. I’m not going to try and impress you in the way I speak to you. Because if I were to do that, you might then just be fascinated by my ability, by my rhetoric, by my capacity with language, by the philosophical notions that I can promulgate for you. But I’m not going to do that at all. I’m not here to build a crowd. No, I’m here just to tell you about the death of the Lord Jesus Christ, preaching the message in such a way that people would cease trusting in anything other than the work of God in Christ.”

We didn’t read as far as 2:5, but that’s the point that he makes. He says, “And the reason for my approach is straightforward: so that your faith might not rest in the wisdom of men, but in the power of God.”[8] And where is the power of God displayed? In the weakness. And where is the epitome of weakness? In this death of a Galilean carpenter, Jesus of Nazareth. Nothing looked less like a Messiah than that scene on the middle cross, outside the city wall. Nobody would have walked up there and said, “Oh, this must be the Messiah!” No, they walked up there and said, “This couldn’t possibly be the Messiah. After all, the whole thing has come to a crashing halt in a Palestinian tomb.”

No, the cross is not only a picture of weakness as revealed in Jesus himself, but he’s actually prepared to say to them, “You know, if you have a mirror”—one of those things that we were hearing about earlier—“if you have a mirror, you can prove what I’m telling you. Because think about yourselves. Think about yourselves. You’re not really a particularly fantastic group of people.” It’s not very nice to say, but I mean, it’s true. He said… You’ve got to make sure that you keep the consonants in this. He doesn’t say, “Not any.” He says, “Not many.” “Not many.”

It’s true. I mean, look at this choir. It’s a very nice group—still awake, most of them, as far as I can see. That’s the only reason I turned around, just to check. But I don’t want to be unkind. This is a very nice church and a nice choir. But you take the average choir on a Sunday, and you look up there, and you go, “Look at these people. What a funny group of people.” Right? And they are representative of the larger group of people. And you say, “We’re going to turn the world upside down with this group? I mean, they can sing, but…”

And he says, “And if you’re feeling bad that I mentioned you, why don’t I just mention me? ’Cause I’m no great shakes myself,” he said. You know, whoever had picked him up at the donkey port or whatever and brought him home for tea, you know, if, you know, while he was waiting for his evening meal, the wife said to her husband who’d picked him up, said, “Well, what do you think? I mean, he hasn’t done anything yet, but…” “Oh,” he says, “he’s a weird guy, man. He’s got sweaty palms. I don’t know whether he’s nervous or what it is, but we didn’t have much of a conversation. I don’t know if he’s going to be much good.”

Weakness! Weak group, weak preacher. Weak! “The word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing.” They look at that and they say, “No, it’s never going to happen.”

The Message for the Unbeliever

Now, when we apply this, we have to say first what this means to the unbeliever. Why this message for the unbeliever? Well, let me suggest a couple of things.

First of all, because the message of the cross establishes the gravity of the human condition. The message of the cross establishes the gravity of sin, says that the story of humanity is the story of man’s rebellion and man’s alienation and man’s brokenness. And the death of Jesus and the picture that is then given to us in the Bible causes us to ponder and then to proclaim that it took the death of God’s perfect Son to deal with my sinful life, with my alienation, and with my brokenness, and with my rebellion.

Now, I’m pretty sure—but I haven’t checked, ’cause I’m not here—but I think if you let me loose tomorrow morning anywhere in your city, I can get agreement from just about anyone that I meet about one subject, and it is this: that our world is broken. That it is broken. You can broach the subject in Starbucks. You can broach it on the airplane. Anywhere you want to go, you will get general agreement that something has gone amazingly wrong. You get agreement on that when it comes to the issue of not simply dealing with the symptoms but actually a diagnosis of the cause, then the opportunity for “evangelism explosion” is just kicking in at that point. But the point I’m making is straightforward: people are prepared to acknowledge something is badly up.

If you saw At Eternity’s Gate, the movie—actually, if you did, you’re in a very small group—but it’s a movie that was made about Van Gogh most recently, called At Eternity’s Gate. And part of that involves his interaction with Gauguin, who ended his life in a miserable situation down in the Islands. And Gauguin, who was brought up as a Roman Catholic and catechized all through his life and painted and abused his circumstances in all kinds of ways, his largest painting is in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. And he wrote on that painting—and he doesn’t write on his paintings! And he wrote three questions up in the corner.:

D'où Venons Nous?

Que Sommes Nous?

Où Allons Nous?

“Where do we come from? What are we? And where are we going?” And he didn’t have an answer to the question.

And the average millennial out in Texas tonight has no answer for that question either. They’ve no answer for the question. They have been raised believing that they exist as a result of time plus matter plus chance. They are a collection of molecules held in suspension. There is no ultimate destiny towards which they are moving; therefore, there is no arc that they’re able to navigate through their lives, and they are at sea. And if the message that is then offered to them is a kind of watery substitute for the message of the cross, then we ought not be surprised that they just walk away from it. Because what we have to face up to is the fact of our rebellion against God: that no part of our lives is left intact—our emotions, our affections, our minds, our wills. The anti-God bias which is part and parcel of our human existence comes in at the level of our understanding and our intellect. And there is no intellectual road to God.

David Wells, who has been a friend to me over the years, has a purple passage in one of his books. I can’t remember where it is. But he talks about how God is beyond the realm of our “intuitive radar,” as he puts it. It’s a wonderful line. So he says, “There is an invisible boundary” between ourselves and God[9]—God in his holiness and we in our rebellion and in our alienation. There is no intellectual road for us to get there. And so it is that the only way that it is possible is for him to come in down, as it were, underneath the radar. We cannot access him on our own terms. We cannot access him in our own time. No, we need him to come and cross the boundary so that we might know him savingly. And what is the message of the cross? It is that God in Christ has done exactly that: that he has crossed that boundary and that he has made himself known.

And so, when we think about it in terms of its gravity in the predicament that we face, it also is possible for us to explain to our friends the absolute necessity of God’s grace, which means that we either, in our proclamation and in our conversation, preach what the Bible says—that human beings are rebels against God, by nature under his judgment and lost, and that Jesus crucified, who bore their sin and curse, is the only available Savior—we either proclaim that, or we emphasize human potential and human ability, with Christ brought in to boost them, but with no necessity for the cross except to exhibit God’s love and inspire us to greater endeavor.

The latter is popular. The former is true. If you go with the latter, no one will say you’re a fool. They say, “No, that’s fine. God, whoever he is…” I mean, I preach every week to a congregation of people. Many of them, because of their status in life, they are operating on this basis: “A good God, if he exists, will reward nice people if they do their best.” That’s the story. “If there is a good God and he exists, he’ll reward nice people.” In other words, “If he’s grading on the curve, I’m in with a chance, because there’s a lot of really bad people, and they’re all sitting just along the row from me. So they are definitely in the F category or the D-minus category. And even if I’m only getting a good, solid C-plus, as long as it’s going that way, I’m in with a very good chance.” No, no, no, it’s not going to work that way. If that was the case, why would we have Jesus dying on the cross? No, see, it doesn’t make any sense at all.

So what it does is it establishes the gravity of sin, it reveals the absolute wonder and necessity of grace, and it allows us to say to people, “There is a wonderful opportunity for you now to close with this.” You see, when the “waft of the supernatural,”[10] as James Stewart on one occasion put it—when “the waft of the supernatural” threw the apostles out onto the streets of Jerusalem and they began to preach, they didn’t shilly-shally about, did they? No, no, no. “This Jesus, whom you crucified…” You’ll get yourself stoned for stuff like that! “This Jesus whom you crucified, he has made him both Lord and Christ.” And what did they say? “What do you want us to do? What should we do?”[11]

The average response to the preaching of the Word of God is not “What shall we do?” but “When can we leave?” It’s, like, “Where are you going for lunch?” It’s trivial. Or it’s applause. Applause! Who started applause? Santa Claus. I don’t know who started applause. You said, “Oh, now, you shouldn’t say that, because we’ve had a lot of applause.” I don’t care if you’ve had a lot of applause. This is not a performance. This is not something that you get kudos for! This is, to quote [Thielemann] again—this is horrible! [Thielemann] says, “The pulpit draws the preacher the way the sea draws the sailor. To preach, and to really preach, is to die naked, and every time you do to realize that you’re going to have to do it again.”[12]

That’s what it is: to stand, as M’Cheyne said, as a dying man in the face of dying men and women, and the issue of eternity is at stake, and in between a lostness in the grave and the opportunity for reality is the cross of Jesus Christ. “There … stands the cross” of Christ, with “two arms outstretched to save.”[13] And that’s what they said: “What do you want us to do?” And Peter says, “Repent and be baptized every one of you.”[14] Because to put your confidence and trust in the person and work of the Lord Jesus is actually to believe the gospel.

The Message for the Believer

Well, it matters, this preaching of the cross, for the unbeliever, but I suggest to you that it matters also for those of us who believe—which, I think, would be the vast company this evening, although I never want to assume that everyone who is here has actually closed with God’s offer of salvation in Jesus. Calvin, in the Institutes, he says, you know, that the idea that we simply know it intellectually does not mean that we have embraced it.[15]

But you believe tonight, and I believe. What, then, is this message of the cross? Well, I suggest to you that it is first of all a compelling force. A compelling force. “For the love of Christ compels us.”[16] “The love of Christ compels us.” When Billy Graham was in transition many, many years ago, probably in the ’50s, again—I think this is in the book by Pollock, the biographer—and he didn’t know whether he should stay up in Minneapolis or wherever he was with the school there (I don’t remember the details) or whether this tug in his heart was to go out into the world with this great story of Jesus Christ and him crucified, and he tells of how he walked out through the forest, and as he walked out through the forest, the hymn that just kept coming to him again and again:

Rescue the perishing, care for the dying,

Snatch them in pity from sin and the grave;

Weep o’er the erring ones, lift up the fallen,

Tell them of Jesus, [he’s] mighty to save.[17]

And he says, “I could not get that out of my heart or my mind, and the love of Christ compelled me, drove me out with this story of the death of Christ for sinners.”

FYI --- THE UNDERLINED SECTION BELOW IS WHAT IS INCLUDED IN THE WIDELY CIRCULATED VIDEO VIDEO CLIP TITLED "THE MAN ON THE MIDDLE CROSS SAID I CAN COME" -- “(4:30) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ibqUrAjrZI

A compelling force—and also, for the believer, a correcting force. A correcting force. “In what way?” you say. Well, in this way: without the preaching of the cross, without preaching the cross to ourselves all day and every day, we will very, very quickly revert to faith plus works as the ground of our salvation; so that, to go to the old Fort Lauderdale question—“If you were to die tonight and you were getting entry into heaven, what would you say?”—if you answer that, and if I answer it, in the first person, we’ve immediately gone wrong. “Because I…” “Because I believed. Because I have faith. Because I am this. Because I am continuing.” Loved ones, the only proper answer’s in the third person: “Because he…” “Because he…”

The man on the middle cross said I can come.

Think about the thief on the cross. What an immense… I can’t wait to find that fellow one day to ask him, “How did that shake out for you? Because you were cussing the guy out with your friend. You’d never been in a Bible study. You’d never got baptized. You didn’t know a thing about church membership. And yet—and yet, you made it! You made it! How did you make it?”

That’s what the angel must have said—you know, like, “What are you doing here?”

“Well, I don’t know.”

“What do you mean, you don’t know?”

“Well, ’cause I don’t know.”

“Well, you know… Excuse me. Let me get my supervisor.”

They go get the supervisor angel: “So, we’ve just a few questions for you. First of all, are you clear on the doctrine of justification by faith?”

The guy says, “I’ve never heard of it in my life.”

“And what about… Let’s just go to the doctrine of Scripture immediately.”

This guy’s just staring.

And eventually, in frustration, he says, “On what basis are you here?”

And he said, “The man on the middle cross said I can come.”

Now, that is the only answer. That is the only answer. And if I don’t preach the gospel to myself all day and every day, then I will find myself beginning to trust myself, trust my experience, which is part of my fallenness as a man. If I take my eyes off the cross, I can then give only lip service to its efficacy while at the same time living as if my salvation depends upon me. And as soon as you go there, it will lead you either to abject despair or a horrible kind of arrogance. And it is only the cross of Christ that deals both with the dreadful depths of despair and the pretentious arrogance of the pride of man that says, “You know, I can figure this out, and I’m doing wonderfully well.” No.

Because the sinless Savior died,

My sinful soul is counted free;

For God the just is satisfied

To look on him and pardon me.[18]

That’s why Luther says most of your Christian life is outside of you, in this sense: that we know that we’re not saved by good works, we’re not saved as a result of our professions, but we’re saved as a result of what Christ has achieved.

So, it gives to the believer a reminder—and a very important reminder—of the story of God’s love that we get to take out into a broken world. It corrects my tendencies to self-aggrandizement. And it gives me a confidence that I couldn’t otherwise have—a confidence in the gospel. In the gospel. As a student of church history, which you will be if you’ve been around at all, then you know that whenever the Church, big C—or wee c, for that matter—whenever the church loses confidence in the truth, the power, and the relevance of the gospel, it loses any compelling sense of mission. Because what is it going to talk about? It’s got nothing to say. Nineteen fifty-two, James S. Stewart, whom I’ve mentioned, is preaching to the faculty and students at Yale Divinity School. And he warned them—1952, the year I was born—of “a theologically vague and harmlessly accommodating” Christianity which, he said, was “less than useless.”[19]

As I end, let me go back to where I started. And I’m not here to try and say something that we don’t know. I’m just here… The ministry of reminder is the pastor’s responsibility. “I intend always to remind you of these [things],”[20] says Peter, and so do we. So I’m just reminding us of what we know to be true: we are not charged with the political agenda of the left or the right, but we are charged with the biblical message of Jesus Christ and him crucified. To offer to a man or a woman a God who does everything in general and nothing in particular—that kind of gospel is just absolutely hopeless. And it is hopeless because it is not the gospel that is proclaimed by the apostles who went before us.

Think about it. Either in Christ God, the Creator and Redeemer, came right into human life and bore in his own body our sins—either he did—or the gospel is a fabrication. Either he did… In our postmodern milieu, this is the sort of “Well, that’s just your perspective.” No, it ain’t! Either he did, or he didn’t. There is no middle ground. “Well, there are certain parts, and this… I like a bit of this and a bit of that.” Did you ever read Augustine, when he said, “Listen, if we believe what we like in the gospel and reject what we don’t, it’s not the gospel we believe; it’s ourselves”?[21]

So, Paul, by the time he gets to the end of his long letter—the first letter before we get back to the second letter—what does he do? Well, he really comes full circle. By the time he gets to chapter 15, the great chapter on the resurrection, how does he begin?

Now I would remind you, brothers [and sisters], of the gospel [that] I preached to you, which you received, in which you stand, and by which you are being saved, if you hold fast to the word I preached to you—unless you believed in vain.[22]

All that Christ has done for us is of no value to us so long as we remain outside of Christ.[23] And if ever there was a time in the crazy, broken, beautiful, wonderful, fantastic US of A for those who have come to the cross of Christ and have knelt down and have been transformed by the power of the Spirit—if there ever was a moment and a time—surely, it’s this moment, it’s this time, to go out and lovingly, kindly, imaginatively, creatively, crazily say to people, “I’ve got a really good friend, and I’d love to introduce you to him, if you’d be interested.” And then you can just tell them about Jesus, mighty to save.

Now, you’re all frightened now about the clapping and everything and stuff like that. I’m a guest. You can do whatever you want. But I’m going to pray, and then we’re going to have a hymn, brother, right? Isn’t that how it go? It’s “A Mighty Fortress.”

Lord God in heaven, look upon us in your mercy, we pray, and grant that what is of yourself may find a resting place in our minds and hearts; anything that is unclear, that you’ll clear it up; anything that is untrue, that you’ll banish it from our recollection; anything that is unhelpful, that we may forget all about it. Lord, unless we hear your voice, the dulcet tones of speaker number one and the squeaky voice of speaker number two will avail nothing, either now or for eternity’s sake. So we look from ourselves and ask you, we who plant and water, to take care of the growth. To the glory of your name we ask it. Amen.

[1] 1 Corinthians 1:18 (NIV).

[2] James Denney, The Death of Christ: Its Place and Interpretation in the New Testament, 2nd ed. (New York: A. C. Armstrong and Son, 1903), 9.

[3] Alfred Ayer, The Guardian, August 30, 1979, quoted in John R. W. Stott, The Cross of Christ (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1986), 43.

[4] Jester Hairston, “Mary’s Boy Child” (1956).

[5] 1 Corinthians 1:18 (NIV).

[6] 1 Samuel 16:6, 11 (paraphrased).

[7] See Acts 17:21.

[8] 1 Corinthians 2:5 (paraphrased).

[9] David F. Wells, What Is the Trinity? (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 2012), 11.

[10] James S. Stewart, A Faith to Proclaim (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1953), 45.

[11] Acts 2:36–37 (paraphrased).

[12] Bruce W. Thielemann,The Wittenburg Door36 (April–May 1977), quoted in Joseph M. Stowell, “Why I Love to Preach,” inThe Moody Handbook of Preaching, ed. John Koessler (Chicago: Moody, 2008), 69. Paraphrased.

[13] Elizabeth C. Clephane, “Beneath the Cross of Jesus” (1868).

[14] Acts 2:38 (ESV).

[15] See, for instance, John Calvin, Institutes of Christian Religion 1.2.1.

[16] 2 Corinthians 5:14 (NKJV).

[17] Fanny J. Crosby, “Rescue the Perishing” (1869).

[18] Charitie L. Bancroft, “Before the Throne of God Above” (1863).

[19] James S. Stewart, A Faith to Proclaim (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1953), 16.

[20] 2 Peter 1:12 (ESV).

[21] Augustine, Contra Faustum 17.3. Paraphrased.

[22] 1 Corinthians 15:1–2 (ESV).

[23] John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion 3.1.1.

Brothers, We're Great Sinners in Need of a Great Savior

2026-03-30T12:26:00.000-07:00

The story of Holy Week reminds us of the story of the world. And as the Passion of Christ tells the story of the world, it reminds us of our story as well.

We are sinners in need of a Savior.

Not theoretical sinners. Not “nobody’s perfect” sinners. Not “we all make mistakes” sinners. Real sinners—inside and out. Dead in our sins and trespasses (Ephesians 2:1), desperately sick (Jeremiah 17:9), enslaved by passions and pleasures, being hated and hating one another (Titus 3:3)—that kind of sinner.

In need of a real Savior. Not a myth or a metaphor. Not a better version of ourselves. Not a hero of our own making. We need a man like us, and we need a God utterly unlike us. We need a genuinely historical person who transcends history. An eternal Son born in the fullness of time. A dying sacrifice who does not stay dead.

That’s the story of Holy Week. That’s the story of the world. That’s our story—yours and mine. At bottom, the gospel is a simple story, which is why so many simply reject it. We like the hope and joy of the resurrection, but before we get there we have to look squarely at the betrayal, the denial, the abandonment, the jealousy, the hatred, the jeering, and the unbelief that culminated in the crucifixion of Jesus the Christ. Behind the veil of our self-aggrandizement and our self-regard, we are sinners capable of inventing a thousand academic ideas and a million personal excuses so as not to admit we are sinners in need of a Savior.

Ye who think of sin but lightly nor suppose the evil great
Here may view its nature rightly, here its guilt may estimate.
Mark the sacrifice appointed, see who bears the awful load;
’tis the Word, the Lord’s Anointed, Son of Man and Son of God.

If we want to make much of the cross, we must never make light of our sin.

You may proudly wave the rainbow flag, you may protest racial injustice and gender inequality, you may see yourself on the right side of history and be an advocate for all the right causes—but what will you do with your sin?

You may decry the intolerance of fundamentalism and lament the conservative church of your youth, you may be proud of your deconstruction and newfound enlightenment—but what will you do with your sin?

You may stand opposed to the ways of the woke, you may reject Marxism, socialism, and liberal cancel culture, you may know for certain that a man is a man and a woman is a woman—but what will you do with your sin?

You may embrace middle-class values and sing the national anthem with a lump in your throat, you may work hard to provide for your family, you may be happily religious, even a member of a church—but what will you do with your sin?

Who was the guilty who brought this upon thee?
Alas, my treason, Jesus hath undone thee.
’Twas I, Lord Jesus, I it was denied thee:
I crucified thee.

The tough pill to swallow is that those words should be on our lips. The God-denying treason, the ashamed-of-Jesus denial, and the Christ-hating crucifixion—we can’t keep them safely in the first century. They exist in every human civilization and reside in every human heart. The story of your life, and my life, is irreducibly a story of sin and rebellion.

But that doesn’t have to be the end of the story. Faith is believing that we were born one way but can be born again another way. Anyone can be found, if only he will admit that he’s lost. Christianity is the hope of the world for those who have no hope in themselves. The fundamental story of the world is not the story of good guys and bad guys, or of oppressors and the oppressed, but of sinners and a Savior.

That’s the story we must tell to ourselves and tell to the world, because that’s the song of the redeemed and the song of the ages.

Bearing shame and scoffing rude,
in my place condemned he stood,
sealed my pardon with his blood:
Hallelujah! what a Savior!

Kevin DeYoung is the senior pastor at Christ Covenant Church (PCA) in Matthews, North Carolina and associate professor of systematic theology at Reformed Theological Seminary.

What's the Bible About?

2026-03-30T12:11:00.000-07:00

“Now, some people think the Bible is a book of rules, telling you what you should and shouldn’t
do. The Bible certainly does have some rules in it. They show you how life works best. But the Bible isn’t mainly about you and what you should be doing. It’s about God and what he has done.

"Other people think the Bible is a book of heroes, showing you people you should copy. The Bible does have some heroes in it, but (as you’ll soon find out) most of the people in the Bible aren’t heroes at all. They make some big mistakes (sometimes on purpose), they get afraid and run away. At times, they’re downright mean. No, the Bible isn’t a book of rules, or a book of heroes.

"The Bible is most of all a Story. It’s an adventure story about a young Hero who comes from a far country to win back his lost treasure. It’s a love story about a brave Prince who leaves his palace, his throne–everything–to rescue the ones he loves. It’s like the most wonderful of fairy tales that has come true in real life! You see, the best thing about this Story is…it’s true.

"There are lots of stories in the Bible, but all the stories are telling one Big Story. The Story of how God loves His children and comes to rescue them. It takes the whole Bible to tell this Story. And at the center of the Story, there is a baby. Every story in the Bible whispers His name. He is like the missing piece in the puzzle-the piece that makes all the other pieces fit together, and suddenly you can see a beautiful picture.”

- Sally Lloyd-Jones

Calvary's Two Thieves - Which Are You?

2026-03-30T11:56:00.000-07:00

“One of the criminals who were hanged railed at him, saying, “Are you not the Christ? Save yourself and us!” But the other rebuked him, saying, “Do you not fear God, since you are under the same sentence of condemnation? And we indeed justly, for we are receiving the due reward of our deeds; but this man has done nothing wrong.” And he said, “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.” And he said to him, “Truly, I say to you, today you will be with me in paradise.” – Luke 23:39-43

DEVOTIONAL COMMENTARY

Two thousand years ago, three men were crucified together outside Jerusalem. Two were criminals, and one was the blameless Son of God, Jesus. Despite a lifetime of sin, one of the criminals received a promise of eternal life when Jesus said, “Truly, I say to you, today you will be with me in paradise.” The criminal recognized who Jesus was, acknowledged his own guilt, and placed his trust in Jesus. And Jesus graciously provided him assurance of salvation.

Luke’s account of the conversation between Jesus and the criminal is a compact but powerful picture of how we respond to the gospel after the Holy Spirit reveals and awakens us to the truth of who Jesus is.

Both criminals started out taunting Jesus (Matthew 27:44; Mark 15:32: “Even those who were crucified with him taunted him”), but then the second criminal was transformed from rebel to redeemed by the power of God.

The second criminal’s heart posture radically changed, and as he realized Jesus is God, he was filled with a fear of the Lord that led him to rebuke the taunts of the first criminal. He openly admitted his sentence of death was just punishment for the crimes he had committed, while acknowledging that Jesus, by contrast, was an innocent sufferer, a righteous man. Finally, the repentant criminal submitted himself to Christ’s authority as king of an eternal kingdom that cannot and will not be defeated at the cross and pleaded for saving grace: “Jesus, remember me.”

Jesus’s response is astounding. Jesus offered the repentant criminal hope in his final minutes on earth, even as he was bearing the curse of sin. And not merely hope of life after death, but the promise of an eternal relationship with Jesus.

The future Jesus promised was “paradise” because the criminal would be with him. Not just spared from judgment but brought near to Jesus himself. What did the criminal offer Jesus in exchange for this promise?

Nothing. What qualifications did the criminal possess to earn a place in paradise and a relationship with the Son of God? None. No time to change, no works to offer, no way to repay—only a plea for mercy. Luke provides no recitation of this criminal’s good works, his church attendance, the number of times he had read the Scriptures, or his record of tithing.

As Alistair Begg put it, the criminal entered heaven solely because “the man on the middle cross said I could come.” Jesus offered the repentant criminal assurance of salvation and adoption into the family of God on the sole basis of his confession—he was a sinner justly accused and sentenced to death who trusted nothing but the merits and mercy of Jesus for deliverance. And Jesus’s words can be trusted because he is the truth (John 14:6), and what he says always comes to pass.

For those of us in Christ, we are like the repentant criminal on the cross.

We start out as rebels who suppress the truth about God and resist him, and too often seek to use him and his blessings rather than worship him, as the first, unrepentant criminal did. Then the Holy Spirit softens our hearts and opens our minds, and in that moment, we realize we are standing before our awesome Creator, wearing the wretched rags of our iniquities.

Like the repentant criminal, we then confess our sinfulness without excuse and acknowledge that, without help from outside ourselves, we stand condemned to just punishment for our crimes against a holy God.

And then blessed hope breaks through the darkness, for we realize that Jesus lived the righteous life we cannot and willingly experienced an unjust sentence of death on a cross. Jesus died so that he might rise again victorious to establish his eternal Kingdom, into which God brings those who trust Christ alone for salvation.

The same assurance experienced by the repentant criminal is given to all who trust in Christ. If you share in the repentant criminal’s confession that Jesus alone is your hope for salvation from sin, death, and eternal punishment, then Jesus promises that you too will be with him in paradise. Jesus says, “I am the way, the truth, and the life” (John 14:6).

If you trust in Jesus alone, God will keep you in this life until you are united with him for eternity (Ephesians 1:11–14).

That said, we can experience doubts about our salvation. The lies of Satan and our own hearts and minds can shake our confidence in God and our assurance of salvation. This is why our loving God has graciously given us the church, that we might be surrounded by brothers and sisters in Christ who can press in through all seasons of life to encourage us and identify fruit in our lives that is evidence of a heart changed and saved by the gospel.

This Holy Week, spend time rehearsing the gospel to yourself, remembering that your salvation is not by your works but by Christ’s sacrifice and victorious resurrection. Then rest assured of your salvation because Jesus is able to present you blameless before God (Jude 24–25), so you can trust him to bring you to himself, home to heaven.

Remember to joyfully share this blessed assurance with your brothers and sisters in Christ. Look again to Jesus, and rest not only in what he has done, but in who he is.

REFLECTION

• In what ways are you tempted to doubt your salvation? Who or what are you tempted to trust in for your salvation other than Jesus? Bring those doubts and idols to God in prayer, and ask the Holy Spirit to remind you of all that Christ did to redeem you.

• Get together with one or two brothers and sisters in Christ and encourage one another by sharing how you see the gospel at work in each other’s lives.

PRAYER OF CONFESSION & REPENTANCE

Eternal Father, thou art good beyond all thought, But I am vile, wretched, miserable, blind; My lips are ready to confess, but my heart is slow to feel, and my ways reluctant to amend. I bring my soul to thee; break it, wound it, bend it, mold it. Unmask to me sin’s deformity, that I may hate it, abhor it, flee from it. Thy loving Spirit strives within me, brings me Scripture warnings, speaks in startling providences, allures by secret whispers, yet I choose devices and desires to my own hurt, impiously resent, grieve, and provoke him to abandon me. All these sins I mourn, lament, and for them cry pardon. Work in me more profound and abiding repentance; Give me the fullness of a godly grief that trembles and fears, yet ever trusts and loves, which is ever powerful, and ever confident; Grant that through the tears of repentance I may see more clearly the brightness and glories of the saving cross.

ASSURANCE OF PARDON & PEACE

“When Christ had offered for all time a single sacrifice for sins, he sat down at the right hand of God, waiting from that time until his enemies should be made a footstool for his feet. For by a single offering he has perfected for all time those who are being sanctified…Let us now with meekness and boldness enter in the most holy place by the blood of Jesus, which he has opened for us.” – Hebrews 10:12-14, 19-20

CLOSING PRAYER

Almighty God, whose dear Son went not up to joy but first he suffered pain, and entered not into glory before he was crucified: Mercifully grant that we, walking in the way of the cross, may find it none other that the way of life and peace; through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, forever and ever. Amen.

Jesus Traded Places With Us and Declared, "It is FInished!

2026-03-25T20:18:00.000-07:00

Jesus Christ’s final words, hanging upon that cross, were: “It is finished” (John 19:30). What does that mean?

It means that when Jesus Christ showed up twenty centuries ago, he had not come to start a new religion. He had come to end all religion.

Religion is about what we do for God. The message of Jesus—what he called “the gospel” or “happy announcement”—is about what God has done for us.

Religion hands us a stack of bills to pay. The gospel hands us a blank check.

The Central Message of Christianity

The central message of Christianity is not what many people think—including many people who have been attending church their whole lives. Like an adopted orphan who has trouble accepting that his new parents really love him, we all deeply believe that God deals with us on terms of religion, not gospel.

What then is the central message of Christianity?

The core message of Christianity is not that God condemns or judges or punishes. The primary message of Christianity is not that God teaches or commands or instructs. The main message of Christianity is not even that God helps or strengthens or empowers. The central message of Christianity is that God substitutes.

We understand this in theory from everyday life. A substitute teacher fills in for the regular teacher who is out sick that day. A basketball player comes off the bench to sub in for a tired or injured player.

And what was happening when Jesus was on that cross, uttering his final words, “It is finished”?

He was completing his work as our substitute. He was subbing himself in for us, if we will have him. But this was not like one basketball player for another. It was more like a king subbing himself in for a condemned prisoner.

On the cross, Jesus was suffering the death, the sentence of condemnation, that all of us deserve. He exhausted the full penalty that our sin deserved, for any who desire it. And so he said: “It is finished.”

The Devastating Problem

How does this land on you? Maybe it sounds interesting, but not all that compelling.

Perhaps you believe there are people out there who really need some major forgiveness from God—our prisons are full of them. But you’re doing okay. Maybe the notion of a king substituting himself for a condemned prisoner raises your eyebrows—I’m not a guilty prisoner, you may think.

You’re friendly with your neighbors and drive the speed limit. You don’t know what handcuffs feel like and you never dropped out of school. You vote as any thoughtful citizen votes and you try to look out for your fellow human beings. Maybe you’ve even given some money to charitable causes from time to time.

May I be so bold as to share a bit about myself?

All of the above is true of me too. And I’m violating the commands of the God who created me left and right.

Take the Ten Commandments, for example. The first commandment is, “You shall have no other gods before me” (Exodus 20:3). In other words, God should be the number one person in my life that I’m trusting in. But I find myself trusting in myself all the time—counting on my own abilities, trusting in my reputation, enjoying what others think of me, drawing strength psychologically from financial savings. Not a single day goes by that I do not break that command.

The sixth command is, “You shall not murder.” I’ve never killed anyone. But Jesus said we’ve broken that command if we get angry with another person (Matthew 5:21–26). I get angry all the time, even if I’m usually able to keep it beneath the surface.

The seventh commandment is, “You shall not commit adultery.” Once again, Jesus got to the heart of things and said that we’ve broken that command if we lust in our heart toward a woman (Matthew 5:27–30). I’ve broken that one countless times.

I’ve broken the ninth commandment, not to lie, many times—a little bending of the truth, a shaded explanation of something that casts me in a slightly better light. I’ve broken the tenth commandment, not to envy, anytime I’ve looked at another person and wished I had an ability or possession of theirs.

Truth be told, I’ve broken all the commandments.

I’m breaking God’s commands left and right. So are you.

The Even Deeper Problem

But our problem is deeper than just breaking God’s commands.

Breaking God’s rules is the symptom, not the disease. The disease is what the Bible calls “sin.” Sin is the dark twistedness within that causes us to live for ourselves. As we go through life, all we know is to live for Self. Even acts of love or neighborly friendliness, when honestly examined, are really just so that we will feel better about ourselves or so that others will think well of us.

We may not feel that sinful—just as a fish doesn’t feel that wet. But we don’t feel it only because we’re immersed in it all the time.

Think of it this way. If sin is the color blue, it isn’t as if convicted felons have lots of blue and the rest of us are pretty much clean and white. Rather, everything that every one of us says, does, or even thinks has some taint of blue to it. We can’t turn our sinfulness off any more than we can change our eye color.

But when Jesus showed up, he was different. He never broke any of God’s commandments. He was the one person who didn’t live for himself. He lived for others. He laid his life down for others. We view other people in terms of how they can serve the purpose of making my life better. We live a “your life for mine” existence. Jesus stands out brightly across the millennia of human history as the one person who ever truly lived a “my life for yours” existence.

He had no blue.

“I Want to Trade Places with You”

You and I break God’s commands all the time. And deeper than that, we have sin within—lots of blue. And here’s what Jesus is saying to you, right now:

I want to trade places with you.

Jesus kept all God’s commands and was perfectly white—no blue at all. He was the one person who ever lived who deserved not to die.

But he went to the cross and was condemned unjustly and died. He therefore is able to offer himself as the substitute to any who will have the honesty to admit their desperate need for it and take him up on that offer.

Let me be clear: He’s not offering to trade places with you assuming you will resolve to do better from now on.

He’s not offering to trade places with you, but with a clause built into the contract that allows him to step out of the trade if we don’t hold up our end of the bargain.

He’s offering to trade places with you wholesale. Once and for all. No matter what the rest of your life looks like. In this trade, you become as permanently unpunishable as Jesus Christ is, now in heaven. The morally consistent Christian and the morally inconsistent Christian are both as permanently guiltless as Christ himself.

That surprising trade is what Jesus was talking about when he declared, “It is finished.”

He was saying that the full price for sin had been paid for anyone who is willing to receive it. His death on the cross was not just any death—it was the death that absorbed the deserved condemnation of anyone down through the centuries who desires the trade that Jesus offers.

If Jesus wanted you to complete the deal from your end, he would have said, “It is begun.” But he said, “It is finished.”

All that’s left is for you to receive it. Acknowledge your desperate sinful condition and tell Jesus that you would like to take him up on his offer of a trade.

Your badness does not disqualify you for this trade. Your goodness does not qualify you for this trade. What qualifies you is knowing you don’t qualify.

Collapse into the open arms of Jesus Christ. As you say to him of your efforts, “It is hopeless,” he will say to you of his efforts, “It is finished.”

The Way Forward

If you will accept the trade that Jesus offers, everything will change in your life.

I don’t mean you’ll suddenly make more money or get sick less often. Actually, in some ways life will get harder for you if you accept his offer. A prisoner of war escaping from a concentration camp will face more intense attack from the enemy than he ever did inside the camp.

But when you say yes to Christ’s offer, everything changes. You’re alive.

It’s like a baby moving from the womb to the outside world, or a statue coming to life, or a spell being broken. Not only are all your sins forgiven; you get your humanity back. You get your dignity back. There’s a new meaning and direction to your life. You discover a surprising buoyancy and joy from within, a glow and a calm that you can’t explain. Death no longer terrifies you. Your desires start changing, from the inside out. All these are indications that the Holy Spirit has taken up residence within you. God the Son trades places with you, so that God the Spirit can live within you.

You get back the you that you were created to be.

All for free. All of grace. Just by humbling yourself enough to admit that you deserve the cross of condemnation that Jesus went to in your place.

And you will continue to sin. In fact, you will be more aware of your sinfulness than ever before. At times it will feel like you’re getting worse, not better. And that’s why Jesus Christ’s words “It is finished” will be yours to cherish the rest of your life. He never asks for a trade back. Once his completed work counts as yours, it always will. That’s the whole point. It’s done. There’s nothing good you could ever do to add the finishing touch to his work on the cross, and there’s nothing bad you could ever do to take away from his finished work.

Your Actual Life

That’s it. Pretty simple.

You lay down your bad and your good, your irreligion and your religion, and believe the gospel.

You hand Jesus your sin and shame, and he hands you his finished work and perfect record. It’s what he loves to do.

Perhaps at this point you long for all this to be true, but new questions or doubts are bubbling up.

Maybe you’re thinking, “I don’t have it in me to be a very good Christian.”

And Jesus Christ would say to you: I will walk with you every step of the journey. I will be your Friend and Guide.

Maybe you say, “My parents will think I’ve gone crazy and I’ll suddenly be an outsider within my own family.”

Jesus says to you, I will give you a new family.

A place of true acceptance and belonging, among my people. They will be your true brothers and sisters, fathers and mothers.

Perhaps you respond, “I have baggage from my past that no one else knows about.” He says, I do. I know you better than you know yourself. And I still want you.

“You want me in spite of my baggage?”

No, I want you because of your baggage.

“But shouldn’t I leave my sin and guilt behind before coming to you?”

I can’t trade places with you if you do that.

“The thing is, there’s messiness and failure and sin not only in my past but in my present.”

All the more reason for you to accept my offer, and let me trade places with you once and for all.

And perhaps in a final wave of despair and longing, you whisper: “It’s futile.”

And the Lord Jesus Christ lifts your face by the chin, looks you in the eye, and says:

by Dane Ortlund, (PhD, Wheaton College) serves as senior pastor of Naperville Presbyterian Church in Naperville, Illinois. He is the author of Gentle and Lowly and Deeper. Dane and his wife, Stacey, have five children

It is finished.

The Christian Life Is More than ‘Tryin’ to Get the Feeling Again’

2026-02-25T16:30:00.000-08:00

In the 1970s, Barry Manilow had a hit song called “Tryin’ to Get the Feeling Again,” in which he longs
for the emotional intensity he once felt for his lover. He wants again the feeling “that made [him] shiver, made [his] knees start to quiver.” Now, all that is gone and all he’s left with is a sense of yearning.

I wonder sometimes if much of evangelical Christianity could be summed up by the title of that song. Many of us, when we first came to faith, felt electrified by the gospel and captivated by the Spirit. Scripture leaped off the page. Every sermon hit home. Worship moved us to tears. Prayer came easier. We craved togetherness with the community of faith.

But over time, the emotional experience began to feel different. The highs weren’t as high. Our eagerness waned. We kept doing the Christian things that mark out a faithful life: serving others, reading our Bibles, worshiping, and giving. But the initial joy didn’t feel the same. And now, across the landscape are congregations filled with people going through the motions, yearning to feel that spark again. All of us, just “tryin’ to get the feeling again.”

When the Fire Fades

I’m grateful for books that put words to this experience. Kyle Strobel and John Coe’s When God Seems Distant may prove life-changing for believers who wonder what God is doing as spiritual seasons shift and our feelings fluctuate.

For many of us, when those initial excited feelings fade, we wonder if we’ve lost “the love [we] had at first,” as Jesus said to the Ephesian church (Rev. 2:4). If I’m no longer “in love” with the Lord the way I once was, and if I no longer feel the same joy and enthusiasm about spiritual activities, am I backtracking? Am I regressing?

Because we tend to measure God’s activity by our experience, we think he’s only “showing up” when we feel a certain way. We assume he’s near only when we feel passionate.

So what happens when we don’t feel that enthusiasm anymore? We assume one of two things: Either God must be distant or something must be wrong with us. And since we know by faith that God promises to never leave us or forsake us, we’re drawn more to the second explanation. Something’s wrong with me. My faith is malfunctioning. I’m a spiritual fake.

Filling the pews of churches all over the world are Christians who sit for sermons and sing the songs who, in their heart of hearts, are convinced, I’m a spiritual failure because I don’t feel everything I’m supposed to feel.

That assumption makes total sense. It’s also very often wrong.

Season of Consolation

Kyle Strobeland John Coe dig deep into the Christian tradition to reframe that experience. The early years of the Christian life often include a season many pastors and theologians have called “consolation.” It’s the excitement that marks our initial conversion or awakening to God’s love. It’s a gift. It’s like milk for spiritual infants. God, in his kindness, sweeps into our hearts and grants us an experience of joy and sweetness.

But the season of consolation isn’t permanent. The impermanence isn’t because God is stingy but because he is fatherly. The New Testament assumes we’ll grow. Paul rebukes the Corinthians because they’re still drinking milk when they should be ready for solid food (1 Cor. 3). The Christian life is developmental. Babies aren’t meant to stay babies. Yes, the early season of faith may have been marked by emotional intensity, but that doesn’t mean it was marked by maturity.

We were spiritual newborns, wide-eyed with wonder at the beauty of God and the gospel. That’s a beautiful experience, and we ought to thank God for it. That’s when God flooded our hearts with desire for him. That’s when the beauty of God lifted us out of the mud long enough for us to see the mountains. We should want to experience that kind of wonder as we progress in our faith. (I wrote The Thrill of Orthodoxy to call us press deeper into the reality and wonder of Christian truth so we see and feel the gospel’s dazzling power.)

But here’s the reality. As we draw closer to God, we’ll encounter deeper layers of unbelief, self-reliance, fear, pride, envy, lust, and anger still residing in our hearts. As beautiful as the season of consolation may be, another season follows . . .

Season of the Desert

Strobel and Coe turn to a biblical image to clarify what many of us experience next: the desert. What did Moses tell the children of Israel? “Remember that the LORD your God led you on the entire journey these forty years in the wilderness, so that he might humble you and test you to know what was in your heart, whether or not you would keep his commands” (Deut. 8:2, emphasis added).

God’s deliverance wasn’t the end of the story. The desert was next. The desert was a test, designed to excavate the heart.

The same is true for us. In the early days, the waves of consolation lift us. Later, the waves subside, and we begin to notice what’s beneath the surface. All the junk at the bottom of the lake starts showing up as the waters of consolation are drawn back, and we see what’s really in our hearts. The anger we thought was gone returns. The compulsions we assumed were defeated reappear. The pride we didn’t know we had still puffs up our ego. Suddenly, the spiritual life feels less like floating and more like trudging.

Counterfeit Solutions

When the Christian life doesn’t feel the way it used to, we assume we’ve got to do whatever it takes to generate that feeling again. So we look for methods, techniques, and hacks. We hunt for the spiritual equivalent of a coach at halftime who will pump our will full of passion so we can make it through another week.

Sometimes we do this with worship. Sometimes with camp. Sometimes with conference culture. Sometimes with “new routines” and “fresh strategies” and a constant search for the next spark. Sometimes with spiritual disciplines.

Strobel and Coe worry that we turn to willpower to manufacture the feeling of consolation again. We cultivate a “good Christian” persona. We pray like we imagine a good Christian would pray. We talk or act in pious ways. But in truth, we’re offering God an avatar, not ourselves. And then we wonder why we’re bored. Or why it feels fake. Or why we don’t see the change we’d like.

The better approach is to recognize and acknowledge why it’s difficult to be present in our prayers, why we struggle to believe God’s Word, why we resist this excavation of our hearts. Following the example of the psalmist, we shouldn’t come to God with polished piety. We should start wherever our heart is in the moment. Why do the wicked prosper? Why is my soul downcast? Why has God abandoned me? Why don’t I feel what I should right now? That’s honest prayer. Drawing near to God in truth.

What’s better? Feeling “on fire” for the Lord, or feeling the fire of the Lord that exposes and burns away our sins? To be honest, I like the feeling of being “on fire” way more than I like feeling the fiery conviction of holiness that unveils my remaining sin and self-righteousness. But it’s the latter experience that marks true growth into godliness.

Read the Seasons

One of the gifts of Strobel and Coe’s book is the language it recovers from the Christian tradition. The walk of faith may begin with the feeling of consolation, and there may be seasons when those feelings return. But it’s precisely walking by faith and not by sight (or by feeling!) that takes us into the desert, and sometimes into deeper desolation, when God seems absent, not just distant.

In the end, though, the goal of the journey is communion with God: to know him, to abide in him, to receive him and to offer ourselves back to him, to trust and depend on him as we walk.

When God seems distant, don’t assume he doesn’t care. And don’t assume the experience means something’s wrong with you. This is often God’s way of maturing us. Strobel and Coe say it’s better to ask not “How do I get the feeling back?” but instead “Lord, what does faithfulness look like here?”

Faithfulness in desolation means showing up just as we are, not with an eye to impressing God or anyone else. We acknowledge the feeling of distance. We persevere in obedience even without immediate emotional reward. We no longer try to cover up our inadequacy with “good behavior.” Instead, we expose our hearts and admit what needs healing,

Draw near to God. You draw near. Not the version of yourself you wish were true, but you in all the mess that the desert has uncovered. That’s the walk of faith.

by Trevin Wax - vice president of resources and marketing at the North American Mission Board and a visiting professor at Cedarville University. A former missionary to Romania, Trevin is a regular columnist at The Gospel Coalition and has contributed to The Washington Post, World, and Christianity Today.

Biblical Masculinity is Sacrificial Responsibility under God, Carried Out in Ordinary Obedience that Rarely Draws Applause

2026-02-25T12:04:00.000-08:00

As G. K. Chesterton once warned, men are being discipled with their feet firmly planted in midair, as G.
K. Chesterton once warned. When you’re trained to live suspended between contradictions, you don’t move forward with confidence. You drift wherever the cultural winds happen to blow.

The air we’re breathing right now is confused, and that confusion shapes how men think about themselves, their homes, and their responsibilities. It presses in quietly at first, then loudly, until many men no longer know what obedience even looks like.

It began in a garden, long before there were headlines to argue over or trends to follow. Genesis shows us a good design at the beginning. God created man and woman in His image, different by design and meant to complement one another in ordered harmony.

Then the order fractured in a way that still echoes today. Eve stepped into leadership God had not given her, and Adam stepped back from leadership God had commanded him to carry. When it all fell apart, Adam did not bear the weight of his failure and instead pushed responsibility onto his wife.

Sin did not erase what God made good. It bent it out of shape and twisted what was meant to function in harmony into a pattern of conflict. The design remained, but it was no longer operating as it should.

That distortion shows up in predictable ways. Women are tempted toward control, and men are tempted toward abdication and blame. We see the pattern everywhere because the pattern has been with us from the beginning.

This tension did not originate in culture. Culture amplifies what the Fall introduced and then sells it back to us as progress. A feminized world is not the result of strong women, but of sinful distortion in women and sinful abdication in men.

The answer to Adam’s failure is not better techniques or stronger personalities. It is a better Man who did not fail when obedience was costly. Where Adam stood silent, Christ spoke truth and stood firm.

Where Adam withdrew when responsibility pressed in, Christ stepped forward and embraced the cost of obedience. Where Adam blamed his bride, Christ bled for His bride. The contrast is not subtle, and it is meant to reshape how we think about leadership.

Christ restores manhood by reordering obedience, not by inflating ego or celebrating dominance. His model of strength is quiet endurance under the authority of the Father. He shows us that real leadership absorbs cost instead of shifting blame.

Men do not mature past the cross, and they do not outgrow their need for repentance. They grow by staying near it, returning again and again to the place where pride is put to death. Formation begins there and only continues if it remains anchored there.

Biblical masculinity is not domination. It is sacrificial responsibility under God, carried out in ordinary obedience that rarely draws applause. You do not learn manhood by watching culture, and you do not recover it by reacting to culture. You learn manhood by looking at Christ and ordering your life under His authority.

What Acting Like Men Actually Looks Like

Scripture is concrete about formation and does not leave masculinity in the realm of vague sentiment. It calls men to be watchful, to stand firm in the faith, to act like men, and to be strong. That is not bravado, but obedience with backbone.

Acting like men looks like paying attention to spiritual danger instead of drifting through temptation. It looks like standing firm when truth is unpopular and costly. It looks like leading in repentance before leading in direction.

It also looks like bearing weight instead of dodging it. It looks like choosing obedience when comfort would be easier and compromise would be rewarded. These habits are formed slowly through repeated, costly choices.

Men are not formed by comfort, and they are not strengthened by endless affirmation. They are formed by responsibility carried over time. You either take responsibility for your formation, or you allow the world to deform you into something weaker than you were meant to be.

The disorder we see around us did not start in courtrooms or classrooms, and it did not originate in political movements. It started in a garden when God’s order was rejected. That rejection still multiplies confusion wherever it takes root.

When God’s order is dismissed, confusion spreads into every sphere of life. When men abdicate their God-given role and responsibility, distortion follows close behind. The pattern is ancient, and the consequences are still with us.

The world does not need louder men who perform strength. It needs stronger men who practice obedience when no one is watching. It needs men who carry weight instead of performing outrage.

The call placed on men is simple in its clarity, but not easy in its cost. It requires watchfulness, firmness, and strength that grows through obedience. Stand watch, stand firm, act like men, be strong, and go and do likewise.

Note: This article is an adapted from a recent sermon by Virgil Walker

A New Heart – The Righteousness of Christ

2026-02-24T20:27:00.000-08:00

When we despair of ourselves, we repent of these self-justifying schemes and allow
ourselves to be shaped by God, covered in Christ’s righteousness, and reborn with a new heart.

In an exchange with Erasmus of Rotterdam in 1525, the reformer Martin Luther debated the matter of free will with the great Humanist thinker. At the end of his treatise, De Servo Arbitrio [On the Captive Will], he told Erasmus, “You and you alone have seen the question on which everything hinges, and have aimed at the vital spot.” [1] For Luther, how you understand the human will is imperative for understanding how God works through the gospel to bring faith.

What does it mean to have a bound will? To answer this question, we must take a step back. For Luther, humans are creatures of the heart, that means that everyone is captivated by something or another. Whatever we make of the will, it is beholden to the heart. And this captivation is not an easy ride. The human heart is stormy, swaying under the spell of four different emotions:

A human heart is like a ship on a wild sea, driven by the storm winds from the four corners of the world. Here it is stuck with fear and worry about impending disaster; there comes grief and sadness because of present evil. Here breathes a breeze of hope and of anticipated happiness; there blows security and joy in present blessings. These storm winds teach us to speak with earnestness, to open the heart and pour out what lies at the bottom of it. [2]

For the Reformer, we are not natural born Stoics indifferent to our emotional reactions but instead we are creatures under the spell of our passions.

Whatever we think about the will, it is not neutral, like a customer choosing options in a big box store or a diner at a buffet line but instead as indebted to and driven by fear, grief, hope, and joy. But there is good news. The gospel comes to open our hearts, enjoy Christ, and liberate us from our defenses. Luther likened us to beasts of burden ridden by either God or the devil and our hearts as being controlled by the one holding the reins. Throughout the Scriptures we learn that God loves his own. Given that truth, our hearts should be captivated by God, but they become ensnared in idols, projections of our sense of value and worth. For the most part this projection is tied to merit. We use our idols to verify to our weak egos that we matter (see The Denial of Death by Ernst Becker).

All humans are captivated by something or another and look to that power to uphold them and validate the meaning of their lives

Preachers must be vigilant with how they address their hearers. Your hearers, of course, live in a context, whether a city, suburb, or the country, driven by a political stance, and beholden to whatever glitter or entertainment that captures them. To be sure, all humans are captivated by something or another and look to that power to uphold them and validate the meaning of their lives. All humans live from an ideal that gives them meaning. But there is evidence that purely secular approaches to establishing meaning, such as the quest for authenticity, are no longer working. Otherwise, why would so many be anxious and depressed?

In Luther’s day and in some versions of religion, it is impossible to untether “free will” from the attempt to acquire merit. In this perspective, Christ is, at best, an accessory. Speaking some years ago in a local church about the theology of the cross (for which Christ is never an add-on), a man countered me by saying, “You can talk all you wish about a theology of the cross, but I have landed a well-paying job, a great house in the burbs, and a beautiful wife. I just don’t experience a theology of the cross.” I instinctively replied, “take your pulse!”

Bound to Justify Yourself

All people with bound wills will look at Christ as an accessory. In Moralistic Therapeutic Deism, secular people evaluate religion in a twofold way: they see religion, first, as making people ethical and, second, as helping people emotionally. Now, this way of looking at religion reduces it to its utility. It has no sense of honoring God for his own sake and possibly little sense for loving your neighbors for their own sakes. But the gospel as a promise cannot be reduced to its usefulness. It is God’s means to rescue people from sin, death, and the devil. It is not translatable into a program to help us successfully navigate life, let alone accrue merit for eternal life. Of course, if our lives are grounded in the gospel, we can have access to the assurance that they are lived out wholly within God’s embrace. That can afford us a modicum of security in this life. The point is, whenever you preach, you are preaching to an audience of bound wills.

The gospel as a promise cannot be reduced to its usefulness. It is God’s means to rescue people from sin, death, and the devil.

How should that shape your preaching? All those to whom you preach are folks captivated by something or another. That means, everyone to whom you preach lives as if they have a crush on someone or something. (Do you remember the hold that crushes had on you when you were an adolescent?) We are creatures of desire. Augustine was right that our hearts are restless until they rest in God. That which we desire provides us with our sense of meaning, value, and purpose. Paradoxically, there is a sense that our desires choose us rather than we choose them. Not only do they choose us, but they possess us. Some years ago, a class gave me pushback that they were all individuals who “did their own thing.” My response to them was, if that is the case, then why are you all wearing the same designer label jeans? In their imaginations they were striving to be unique individuals and thereby become authentic. But what was really driving them was the unrecognized desire to fit in with their peers.

Luther taught that God’s law, if taken seriously, would prove to us our inability to keep it from the heart and so prevent us from using it to achieve merit. He showed that the law would give us “self-knowledge,” the awareness of our inability to make ourselves to be no longer incurvated, turned-in-on-ourselves, and love God for his own sake. The more the law hammers this truth home, the more likely we would despair of ourselves. Again, paradoxically, such self-despair is a good thing. It shows us that self-justification will never give us the security in our relationship with God that we crave. It shows us the futility of attempting to justify ourselves and so allows us to become open to God’s work on us. That is, God can really begin to work his mercy and goodness in Christ for you when you stop trying to prove your worth. We experience a “new intellect and will” giving us the power to “curb the flesh and to flee the righteousness and wisdom of the world.” [3] Of course, this means that Christian life is a battlefield between old and new.

There are a lot of ways that people use to justify themselves. As seen above, some might use their belief in their financial success at improving their relationship with God. Others might find their ultimate meaning in the politics which they hold dear. Others might find it in their success in whether they are movers and shakers in their place of employment or their families. In all these schemes, Christ is marginalized as an accessory. When we despair of ourselves, we repent of these self-justifying schemes and allow ourselves to be shaped by God, covered in Christ’s righteousness, and reborn with a new heart.

As Luther points out in his Postil for the 3rd Sunday after Easter, many of those to whom you preach wrestle with God in hiddenness. [4] They deal with the deus absconditus, perhaps even stronger, a Christus absconditus. Christ no longer seems present and kind. Instead, he seems to have disappeared. Such an absent Christ leaves us exposed to the law’s accusations of not living up to its goals. Many people suffering from the experience of an absent Christ find themselves caught or trapped in temptation, anxieties, adversities, and many forms of suffering. Christ is present as merciful when he is preached.

Preachers as Fools for Christ

Luther interprets this experience as a way by which God reinforces the reality that an exercise in our free will to secure our worth falters. Certainly, Luther is an advocate of good works. But works are only good when they are done neither from a slave mentality which fears punishment in hell nor from the quest to secure payment or reward in heaven like a hireling. Instead, works are good when we live to supply our neighbor’s needs and not use our neighbor for our own benefit. In faith, God’s love, which is ever gushing, flows through us to accomplish good in our various vocations in the world. When experiencing God in hiddenness, we discover that our works cannot secure Christ’s presence. Only the word can do that. Our wills may be bound to believe that through our choices we can accrue merit. But merit does not cut it with a God who is committed to be merciful. Echoing Paul, Luther believes we encounter our own foolishness in this thought. Yet Christians also embrace the foolishness of trusting in Christ alone: we become fools for Christ.

Again, as preachers your job is to hand over the goods. Give Christ to your people. Luther often preached as if his mouth was Christ’s own. It is an effective tool for delivering the gospel.

Placing Salvation in the Best of Hands

When I preach, some tell me how much they appreciate that I emphasize that God’s grace is “for you.” Too many other preachers present the gospel as if it were a program for either personal or social improvement. Bound wills need to hear that Christ forgives them and plants a whole new heart within them.

Renewed men and women to whom the Spirit has brought faith will work to make the world more just and peaceful.

Preaching to bound wills is less about offering the congregation a program for self-improvement and more about delivering Christ’s benefits, bringing the goods of forgiveness of sin, life, and salvation. Many preachers are rightfully concerned that Christianity can impact social health within the world. The best way to do this is to secure anxious consciences in Christ and bind up those who are deeply wounded. Renewed men and women to whom the Spirit has brought faith will work to make the world more just and peaceful.

A preacher who understands the nature of the will as the crux of theological understanding and especially how it impinges on the preaching task might join in rejoicing with Luther at the end of his treatise on the will, in one of the greatest passages in all his writings:

For my own part, I frankly confess that even if it were possible, I should not wish to have free choice given to me, or to have anything left in my own hands by which I might strive toward salvation. For, on the one hand, I should be unable to stand firm and keep hold of it amid so many adversities and perils and so many assaults of demons, seeing that even one demon is mightier than all people, and no one at all could be saved; and on the other hand, even if there were no perils or adversities or demons, I should nevertheless have to labor under perpetual uncertainty and to fight as one beating the air, since even if I lived and worked to eternity, my conscience would never be assured and certain, how much it ought to do to satisfy God. For whatever work might be accomplished, there would always remain an anxious doubt whether it pleased God or whether he required something more, as the experience of all self-justifiers proves, and as I myself learned to my bitter cost through so many years. But now, since God has taken my salvation out of my hands into his, making it depend on his choice and not mine, and has promised to save me, not by my own work or exertion but by his grace and mercy, I am assured and certain both that he is faith and will not lie to me, and also that he is too great and powerful for any demons or any adversities to be able to break him or snatch him from me. [5]

God’s mercy is nothing that a “free will” would choose. But mercy is what sinners need and what God offers them for Jesus’ sake. To deny “free will” is no downer. Instead, it affirms that everything is in the best of hands in God’s will. “Not my will, but thine be done” (Luke 22:42). So, preachers: Be bold in your calling as one of God’s delivery guys. No other message in today’s world is as important as preaching the gospel as God’s promise to forgive sins for Jesus’ sake

by Mark Mattes is associate professor of religion and philosophy at Grand View College in Des Moines, Iowa. He is the author of "Martin Luther’s Theology of Beauty," "The Role of Justification in Contemporary Theology," "Imaging the Journey," and "Law and Gospel in Action."

2026-02-04T18:24:00.000-08:00

Tom Cruise received his first Academy Award recently, an honorary Oscar presented at the sixteenth
annual Academy Governors Awards. He told the assembled gathering, “Making films is not what I do, it is who I am.”

He added, “I will always do everything I can to help this art form. To support and champion new voices, to protect what makes cinema powerful. Hopefully without too many more broken bones.”

Equating what we do with who we are, our performance with our identity, is not a worldview unique to Mr. Cruise. We are made with a “God-shaped emptiness,” to paraphrase Blaise Pascal. But if secularized people will not turn to God, they will turn to anything else to fill the void. For many in a materialistic culture, our gods are therefore material measures of success such as performance, possessions, and popularity.

Accordingly, perhaps we should not be surprised that Gallup is now reporting the current “drop in US religiosity” as “among [the] largest in the world.” In 2015, 66 percent of US adults said religion was an important part of their daily life. Today, only 49 percent agree. This seventeen-point drop “ranks among the largest Gallup has recorded in any country over any ten-year period since 2007.”

“The capacity to live within a meaningful story”

In a brilliant analysis of our cultural moment, the author and cultural commentator John Seel asserts that “we are living through a civilizational inflection.” He describes this inflection:

The late sociologist Philip Rieff called our moment a Third Culture—a social order that has severed its link to the sacred. First Cultures, in his analysis, lived within mythic transcendence; Second Cultures, such as Christendom, drew moral authority from revelation. The Third Culture rejects both. It affirms freedom without form, choice without covenant, progress without purpose, overwhelmed with information without the capacity to live within a meaningful, orienting story.

It was not always this way.

I have begun reading American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson by Joseph Ellis. In it, the acclaimed historian explains the background behind Jefferson’s immortal Declaration of Independence assertion:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.

According to Dr. Ellis,

These are not quite the words Jefferson composed in June 1776. Before editorial changes were made by the Continental Congress, Jefferson’s early draft made it even clearer that his intention was to express a spiritual vision: “We hold these truths to be sacred & undeniable; that all men are created equal & independent, that from that equal creation they derive rights inherent & unalienable, among which are the preservation of life, & liberty, & the pursuit of happiness.”

I like Mr. Jefferson’s first draft much better than the final version. Even the noted skeptic of orthodox Christianity believed that we live in a world ordered by the “sacred.”

However, many Americans would apparently not agree with him or with me today.

“Those who make them become like them”

Of course, as anyone knows who has ever built a jigsaw puzzle, the problem is that the wrong piece will not fill the right hole. Wedging the “self-evident” into the “sacred” doesn’t replace the sacred.

Idols made by humans “have mouths, but they do not speak; they have eyes, but do not see; they have ears, but do not hear, nor is there any breath in their mouths” (Psalm 135:16–17). Terrifyingly, “Those who make them become like them; so do all who trust in them” (v. 18).

In a letter to the editor, British writer G. K. Chesterton observed, “The answer to the question, ‘What is wrong?’ is, or should be, ‘I am wrong.’ Until a man can give that answer, his idealism is only a hobby.”

The solution to what is wrong with us is not doing more of what makes us wrong. Self-reliant self-fulfillment does not fulfill the self, as the current epidemic of depression, anxiety, and other mental health issues illustrates.

“Riches I heed not, nor man’s empty praise”

To this point, my analysis of secularized culture may not feel relevant to spiritual people reading a spiritual article like this. But we must beware that the same is true even of religious self-reliance: working for God is not the same thing as walking with him.

Oswald Chambers was right: “We will set up success in Christian work as the aim; the aim is to manifest the glory of God in human life, to live the life hid with Christ in God in human conditions.”

Brother Lawrence testified, “There is not in the world a kind of life more sweet and delightful than that of a continual conversation with God.” When we agree with Paul—“Whatsoever you do, do all to the glory of God” (1 Corinthians 10:31)—we will experience the “glory of God” in our souls. And not until then.

The hymn writer prayed:

Riches I heed not, nor man’s empty praise:
Be thou mine inheritance now and always;
Be thou and thou only the first in my heart;
O Sovereign of Heaven, my treasure thou art.

Who—or what—is your “treasure” today?

by Jim Denison, CEO Denison Ministries

Brothers, Endurance Is Formed Through Suffering

2026-02-03T08:52:00.000-08:00

Scripture: “We rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance.” — Romans 5:3

“For you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness.” — James 1:3

Thought: Endurance is never learned in theory. It is learned under load. Scripture is blunt: suffering produces endurance.

God assigns pressure because pressure reveals weakness and then strengthens it. The soul, like muscle, grows only by resistance. In that way, you can say that pressure is a privilege.

The Puritans rejected the idea that hardship was a sign of God’s absence. John Owen insisted that affliction was one of God’s chief tools in sanctification, because it loosens our grip on false comforts. Suffering humbles us, slows us, and strips us of illusions—especially the illusion that we are sufficient.

This is why endurance cannot be microwaved. It requires time under tension. Trials that linger do something quick fixes never can: they teach patience, dependence, and trust. God is not cruel in suffering. He is precise. He shapes men by weight, not ease.

Endurance grows when a man stops asking why this hurts and starts asking what God is forming.

Reflection: Where you are tempted to escape, God may be inviting you to stay. What you call delay, God may call development. Endurance grows when suffering is received, not resisted.

Call to Action: Stop asking, “How do I get out?” Start asking, “What is God forming in me here?”

Prayer: “God of all comfort, help me not to waste my suffering. Form endurance where I want relief, and maturity where I want escape. Teach me to trust You under the weight. Amen.”

Thanks to https://betterman.com/

CONTINUED

Endurance Requires a Long View of God

Scripture: “The steadfast love of the LORD never ceases.” — Lamentations 3:22

“For the LORD disciplines the one he loves.” — Hebrews 12:6

Thought: Endurance lives or dies on theology. If God is viewed as a means to comfort, endurance will collapse the moment comfort disappears. But if God is understood as sovereign, wise, and good—even when unseen—endurance becomes possible.

The Puritans spoke often of trusting the hidden hand of God. Jeremiah Burroughs taught that contentment and endurance flow from confidence in God’s ordering of events, not from understanding them. God’s purposes are often concealed, but His character is not.

Men lose endurance when they shrink God to their expectations. They endure when they expand their view of Him. A long view of God recognizes that discipline is not rejection, delay is not neglect, and silence is not absence. Endurance is sustained not by explanations, but by assurance: God knows what He is doing. Faith endures when the soul rests in who God is, not in how circumstances feel.

Reflection: Ask yourself honestly: Do I trust God’s heart when I don’t like His methods? Your theology will determine your stamina.

Call to Action: Write down one attribute of God you need to remember today [faithfulness, wisdom, sovereignty]. Anchor your endurance there.

Prayer: “Unchanging God, when my strength fails, let my trust remain. Help me endure not by answers, but by confidence in who You are. Amen.”

Thanks to https://betterman.com/

The Redeemed Man Serving in His Church

2026-01-18T15:45:00.000-08:00

My wife and I are blessed with nine children, five of whom are boys. As I write this chapter, my oldest son just turned twenty-one, and my next oldest son is heading off to college. So, when I think about this book, and my chapter in particular, I can’t help but think of the young men in my own household. The thought in my mind is not just “What do I want men to know about serving in the church,” but “What do I want my sons to know about serving in the church?”

Before talking about anything else, I want my sons (and every other man for that matter) to notice four words in the title of this chapter.

The first word is “redeemed.” As Christian parents, I trust that we pray for more than morally decent, responsible, respectful, hard-working adult children. We must pray that our children would be genuine, born-again, blood-bought Christians. Every man reading this book must endeavor to know his own soul and be sure that he is, first and foremost, a redeemed man.

The second word is “church.” It isn’t enough for the Christian man to read his Bible and pray, or to be a part of a Bible study during the week, or to get involved in a campus ministry while in college, or to read good theology books, or to listen to good Christian podcasts, or to listen to good sermons while he’s driving in the car. The redeemed man must be involved in a church. In one of the last books that he wrote before he died, John Stott said this about the importance of the church: “I trust that none of my readers is that grotesque anomaly, an unchurched Christian. The New Testament knows nothing of such a person. For the church lies at the very centre of the eternal purpose of God.”¹ Stott was right. An unchurched Christian is a contradiction in terms.

The third word is “his.” I understand that some people don’t like putting a possessive pronoun before the word “church.” The argument is that we shouldn’t speak of “my” church, “their” church, or “pastor so-and-so’s church” because the church belongs to Christ and not to us. While I appreciate the caution, it seems to me there is something healthy about referring to “my” church or speaking about the Christian man and “his” church. The possessive pronoun reminds us that the Christian isn’t merely a member of the universal church; he must belong to a specific local church—a body of believers that meets in a specific place, at a specific time, under the leadership of specific men. The word “his” also underscores that we don’t need more church hoppers. The mature man doesn’t float from church to church, flitting in and out of different congregations as his mood (and his weekend schedule) dictates. God calls men to belong to a local church and to be in that church every Sunday unless providentially hindered (such as by illness, death, emergency) or unless necessary travel (such as family vacation or essential work commitments) means he will worship in a different church.

The fourth word is “serving.” I almost missed this word myself. I started to write about the three words that I want my sons to notice, and then I came back and realized I had skipped what may be the most important word in the title. The goal is not simply to have redeemed men who join a good church and sit in the pew Sunday after Sunday. All of that is foundational and indispensable. But the call of God is more than signing up and showing up. The call of God is to serve in the church. This call may mean serving in church office as an elder or deacon. This may mean, for an even smaller subset of men, serving as a pastor or staff member in the church. But those are just the most obvious ways to serve. Whether a man ever holds ecclesiastical office or not, he is still called to be a serving member of the church. He must be more than a consumer of fine preaching, quality programs, or excellent music. Certainly, his church involvement must consist of more than making good business connections, making himself look good in the eyes of others, or simply making his wife happy. The redeemed man is in his church in order to serve his church, because in serving the body of Christ he serves Christ Himself.

Set Apart to Serve

When I think about redeemed men serving in the church, my mind goes immediately to the many fine elders I have served with. I know too many pastors have horror stories of the immature, untaught, sometimes even unconverted men they have had to serve with on the session (the governing elder board). By God’s grace, I don’t have those stories. With very few exceptions, the men I’ve served with have been sincere, hard-working, and eager to do God’s work in His ways.

I could talk about many such men, but I’ll just mention one. I’ll call him Tom, so as not to embarrass him if he ever reads this book. Tom was one of those pillars in the church, the kind of unflashy, but stalwart individuals that every church needs. For decades, he worked a blue-collar job—a tough, monotonous, on-your-feet-all-day kind of job that, in my opinion, sounded harder than being a pastor. Although he was often tired, I didn’t hear him complain. He worked his normal job, and then gave hours and hours after that to the church. I’m pretty sure he didn’t make a lot of money, but I know he gave consistently and generously. He showed up every Sunday morning and evening. He and his godly wife raised four children, all of whom are walking with the Lord. He liked to read history especially. He took seriously his responsibility to care for the members in his elder district. He volunteered for committees. He discipled younger men. He and his wife welcomed people in their home. He read his Bible every morning. And often, when he shook my hand after church, he’d look me in the eye and say, “I want you to know I pray for you every day.”

Tom would be the first (and last) to tell you that he wasn’t perfect. He’d list the gifts he didn’t have in abundance. He’d tell you what he wasn’t good at. He’d demur, without any false humility, that he wasn’t sure he was qualified to be an elder. But he was a great elder. Better yet, he was (and is) a great Christian. And that’s crucial, because there is no being a truly great elder or a great pastor or a great man in the church without first being a great Christian. “Be thou an example of the believers,” Paul exhorted Timothy, “in word, in conversation, in charity, in spirit, in faith, in purity” (1 Tim. 4:12). That’s a lot of ground to cover, but that’s what my friend Tom was like, and that’s what godly manhood looks like—to be exemplary in what we say with our mouths, where we go with our feet, what we do with our hands, what we believe in our heads, and what we do with our sexual thoughts and sexual parts. After more than twenty years in ministry, I still find 1 Timothy 4:12 challenging, convicting, and inspiring.

When the church in Jerusalem was struggling to minister to the widows in Acts 6, the answer was to find godly men to address the problem. The situation was volatile. Some women were being overlooked in the daily distribution, and the oversight looked like ethnic prejudice to boot (v. 1). The apostles knew they couldn’t ignore the problem, but they also knew they were not the ones to directly fix the problem. Their God-given priorities were prayer and the ministry of the word (v. 4). The God-given solution was to find “seven men of honest report, full of the Holy Ghost and wisdom, whom we may appoint over this business” (v. 3). Not just any old warm bodies, but men they could trust, men who were good with people, men who were spiritual in the deepest sense of the word.

We know that women also served in the early church (Rom. 16:1), no doubt in integral and invaluable ways (see, for example, all the women mentioned in the rest of Romans 16). But the spiritual temperature of the church will always have a hard time rising higher than the spiritual temperature of the men in the church. That’s not a statement of comparative worth between the sexes. It’s a statement about reality—the way God made human beings and the way He made the church. Godly women flourish when they have godly men in the church to serve and to lead. It was a judgment upon ancient Israel when they had women to rule over them (Isa. 3:12), not because every man is apt to be a better ruler than every woman, but because it is a sign of spiritual declension when strong, wise, just, compassionate men—to govern and to rule—are nowhere to be found.

Older Men

The New Testament says more about what men should be like in the church than what men specifically should be doing in the church (other than possibly serving as officers). That makes sense because no amount of competence can make up for a lack of character. If we don’t want to be “barren” or “unfruitful” in our knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ, we must be growing in godliness (2 Peter 1:5–8). One of the few character texts addressed specifically to men is found in Titus 2. There Paul tells Titus what particularly he ought to tell the older men, the older women, the younger women, and the younger men. Let’s look at the first and last of those categories.

In Titus 2:2, Paul admonishes “the aged men” to be marked by six qualities: sober, grave, temperate, sound in faith, in charity, in peace.”

(1) Sober may have reference to alcohol, but the term means more than that. To be sober is to be balanced. The problem with alcohol isn’t alcohol per se; the problem is with imbalanced intake of alcohol. God is telling older men to be measured, even-keeled, and balanced. After walking with the Lord for many years, older men should be less inclined to get tipped over to one side or the other. They don’t fly off the handle with anger. They hear both sides. They are consistent. Godly men are calm, clear-headed, not governed by the mob, not willing to give in to negative peer pressure. Older Christian men should be anchors.

(2) Older men should also be grave. This doesn’t mean dour, grim, and joyless. Think of the word gravitas. It suggests someone who is dignified, serious about the right things, and worthy of respect. We live in a society where people are famous for being famous. The digital age promises instant notoriety, instant influence, and insta-everything. The church, on the other hand, needs men who know how to love and care for their wives for decade after decade, men who know how to raise godly children, men who prioritize substance over sizzle.

(3) Older men must also be temperate. We sometimes laugh at cranky old men, but irritability and rage are not fruits of the Spirit. To be temperate is to be self-controlled. Older men ought to have a measure of discipline in their lives—in prayer, in the word, in conversation, in what they eat, in what they watch, in how they spend their time.

(4) Older men are to be sound in faith. This does not mean that the older man has every question answered or never has a single doubt. But it does mean that his life is marked by a profound trust in God. The older man has been through the highs and lows of life. He should be able to look back and say,

Hitherto Thy love has blest me;
Thou hast brought me to this place;
And I know Thy hand will bring me
Safely home by Thy good grace.²

(5) Older men should also be sound in charity. I remember from a previous church an older man I sat next to in the choir. He was smart, well-educated, funny, and happy. He also had a number of quirks and not a few, um, senior moments. He was a godly man too. I knew that his wife had health problems because she never came to church. When I heard that she was in the hospital again, I asked what it was like to care for her as her health deteriorated. Without a word of complaint, he rattled off all he had to do for her, where he had to take her, and how he had to give her pills, change her clothes, and keep her washed. “Oh,” I said, “It must be hard having to do that for. . . .” I didn’t finish the sentence, because I didn’t know how long he had been caring for his invalid wife. Then he filled in the blank: “Twenty-seven years.” Here was a man sound in charity.

(6) Finally, older men are to be sound in patience. Oh, how the church needs saints who finish well. Anybody can be impressive at twenty five, but what about sixty five, seventy five, or eighty five? Too many Christians fizzle out. They press on at first but end up coasting. The Christian race takes endurance. If you are a seasoned saint reading this, don’t put the controls on autopilot. Don’t waste twenty years of your life in trivialities. Of course, we are bound to slow down. Spending time with grandkids is good. Hobbies can be pleasing to the Lord. If we live long enough, we will retire from a job, but we don’t retire from the kingdom. Winston Churchill lived an amazingly full life, and then he became Prime Minister. The church needs Christian men who run the race all the way through the tape. After winning the gold medal in the 1924 Olympics, Eric Liddel was asked the secret of his success in the 400 meters. Liddel replied, “I run the first 200 meters as hard as I can. Then, for the second 200 meters, with God’s help, I run harder.”³

Younger Men

After beginning his exhortations by singling out the older men, Paul finishes his instructions to Titus by mentioning the younger men. Somewhat surprisingly, Paul only has one command for the younger men: “be sober minded” (sōphronein, Titus 2:6). Verses 7 and 8 apply to the younger men too, but they are strictly speaking Paul’s instructions for Titus as an example to younger men. There is only one direct command for the younger men, and it’s not at all original. Closely related Greek words are used in verse 2 (sōphrōn, translated “temperate”), verse 5 (sōphrōn, “discreet”), and again in verse 12 (sōphronōs, “soberly”). So, is Paul going soft on the young men with this one meager command?

Not at all. Paul issued instructions that were not, by and large, exclusive to any one group, but addressed that group’s particular challenge. Take the older men. They are into the second half of their lives, so God is concerned that they be dignified, worthy of respect, and finish well with patience and endurance. Older women, without kids in tow, might wander from house to house, talking more than they should. God is concerned that they not be slanderers, but examples and teachers for the younger women. On the other hand, the younger women, for their season of life, need exhortations regarding the family and the home. In each case, there is some overlap, but the commands are chosen to fit what that specific group needs to hear.

It seems likely, then, that Paul hits on this characteristic of godliness because it is the one that young men struggle with most, and perhaps the type of virtue that young men aspire to least.

Being sensible and disciplined is not what teenage boys and college-aged men are known for. Harnessed by the Spirit, young men can be bold, fearless, courageous, and accomplish great things. Ruled by their hormones and their not-yet-fully-formed brains, young men can push each other to be wild, foolish, and careless. The ungodly man will not just stumble into a less than sober minded life; he will look for it. Self-control, for young men, is often an area of vice not a virtue.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. We mustn’t think that the only kind of masculinity is toxic masculinity. God made men to be strong, aggressive, risk-taking, protective, and self-sacrificing. If young men are to serve well in the church, they must show themselves to be sober minded sexually (channeling the sex drive into marriage), sober minded emotionally (putting to death fits of rage), sober minded socially (proving to be responsible, dependable, and reliable) and sober minded spiritually (pursuing Christian service and Christian maturity with the same passion that they pursue sports, career, hobbies, and adventure). Throughout church history, young men have been catalysts for missionary movements, for reforming the church, for bettering their homes, and for reaching their neighbors with the gospel. A zealous young Christian man with wisdom, discernment, and self-control is a holy weapon in the hand of God.

The Manly Virtue of Magnanimity

We learn another character quality crucial for serving the church from John Witherspoon, who was the president of Princeton (then called the College of New Jersey) from 1768, when he arrived from his native Scotland after a career in pastoral ministry, until he died in 1794. Twice during his presidency—in 1775 and again in 1787—Witherspoon preached a message before commencement on a theme we don’t hear a lot about today. “My single purpose from these words at this time,” he told his all-male students, “is to explain and recommend magnanimity as a Christian virtue.”⁴

The heading above calls magnanimity a “manly virtue.” By that, I don’t mean that magnanimity is unique to men or that women are not also called to this trait. But I do think magnanimity is a virtue particularly befitting to manhood, and that manhood bereft of magnanimity is especially lamentable. When the apostle Paul enjoined the Corinthians to be strong, to stand firm in the faith, and to “quit you like men” (1 Cor. 16:13), he was calling men and women to courage, but he was also embracing the notion that fortitude in the face of opposition is what we associate with manliness.

According to Witherspoon, magnanimity entails five commitments: (1) “to attempt great and difficult things,” (2) “to aspire after great and valuable possessions,” (3) to face “dangers with resolution,” (4) “to struggle against difficulties with perseverance,” and (5) “to bear sufferings with fortitude and patience.”⁵ In short, the magnanimous Christian is eager to attempt great things and willing to endure great hardships.

Witherspoon took for granted that the world approves of magnanimity. His concern was that some might conclude that calling men (like his Princeton graduates) to strength and valor and ambition does not fit with the tenor of the gospel. Christians have often struggled to know how godliness and manliness mesh. But virtues, Witherspoon insisted, can never be inconsistent with each other. He noted that while the gospel would have us mourn for our sin and cultivate a humility of spirit, we are also “called to live and act for the glory of God and the good of others.”⁶

Christianity is not opposed to ambition, but ambition will look different for the Christian. “Everyone must acknowledge,” Witherspoon said, “that ostentation and love of praise, and whatever is contrary to the self-denial of the gospel, tarnish the beauty of the greatest actions.”⁷ True greatness does not lie in self-promotion, endless bravado, and passing along our own praise.

Likewise, manliness does not mean we must be larger-than-life gunslingers and gladiators who swagger into town ready to kill or be killed. There is more than one way to be brave and many ways to be strong. Not everyone will be gifted with brains or brawn. Not everyone will have the opportunity for world-altering heroism. “But,” Witherspoon noted, “that magnanimity which is the fruit of true religion, being indeed the product of divine grace, is a virtue of the heart and may be attained by persons of mean talents and narrow possessions and in the very lowest stations of human life.”⁸

If magnanimity calls us to attempt great things, it also compels us to endure great suffering. Merriam-Webster defines magnanimity as “loftiness of spirit enabling one to bear trouble calmly, to disdain meanness and pettiness, and to display a noble generosity.” Would that our leading Christian voices, and Christian men in particular, were models of this kind of magnanimity! While we all should disdain pettiness, there is something particularly discomfiting when a man feels the need to advertise the offenses against him and swing at every offender. The magnanimous person does not bear grudges, does not wallow in self-pity, does not demand penance, and does not stoop to settle every score.

In the end, the two parts of magnanimity are inseparable, for the great man is measured not only by what he does but by what he does not do. We would do well to be more like David pardoning Shimei than the sons of Zeruiah looking for the next enemy to execute. Bearing burdens, eschewing meanness, and setting an example of noble generosity is not just a saner and more effective way to live; it is the way of the cross. For the manly virtue of magnanimity is the way of the One who accomplished great things by defeating His foes, even while crying out, “Father forgive them; for they know not what they do” (Luke 23:34).

The redeemed man who would serve in his church—no matter what specific tasks, offices, or responsibilities he signs up for—must be a man we can look up to. He may be ordinary in gifting, in resources, in abilities, and ordinary in a dozen other things, but he must be exemplary in virtue. The men in our churches need not make any apologies for being men, but they do need to keep their eyes on Jesus in order to see what true manhood looks like. We must press hard after the manly virtue of magnanimity, for such is the Savior we serve.

This article is Kevin DeYoung's chapter from The Redeemed Man, a book that aims to help men answer Christ’s call to become a man in His image—the kind of man the world needs.

Kevin DeYoung is the senior pastor at Christ Covenant Church (PCA) in Matthews, North Carolina and associate professor of systematic theology at Reformed Theological Seminary.

Why the Church Matters More Than Ever

2026-01-12T20:20:00.000-08:00

New Atheists like Richard Dawkins spent the better part of two decades preaching that science, not religion, was our key to unlocking the mysteries of the universe. Disenchantment was supposed to free humanity from believing in “fairy tales” like Christianity.

But this worldview has proven unlivable. People are still searching for spiritual meaning. The rise of artificial intelligence has ushered in an era of reenchantment, with AI proselytizers using unscientific, mystical, and even religious language to describe the technology’s transformative potential for humanity. They have likened their role as midwives birthing a nonhuman supersentience or as prophets summoning gods.

This reenchantment is not value-neutral. AI is not being developed in an ideological vacuum. Rather, its design is indelibly shaped by quasi-religious beliefs rooted in digital gnosticism—a dualistic worldview that seeks transcendence over the material world by leveraging digital technology.

Ancient Greek Gnosticism viewed the material world as a cosmic mistake, a prison from which to escape and ascend to a more true spiritual existence by divining “secret knowledge.” For digital gnostics, the limitations of embodied life are existentially vexing. Every inefficiency, from the ordinary frictions of community to the inevitability of death, must be overcome through technology. And the downstream implications—for both the church and religious belief in America—are legion.

More than 80 years ago, C. S. Lewis issued this warning in The Abolition of Man:

“There is something which unites magic and applied science [technology] while separating them from the “wisdom” of earlier ages. For the wise men of old the cardinal problem of human life was how to conform the soul to objective reality, and the solution was wisdom, self-discipline, and virtue. For the modern, the cardinal problem is how to conform reality to the wishes of man, and the solution is a technique.”

AI is the digital gnostic’s messiah. It offers every user the gift of knowledge and power, untethered from wisdom and virtue. So much so that artificial general intelligence (AGI) has been called humanity’s “last invention,” after which it will supposedly be able to do all future inventing for us. If so, our “technological Rapture” is just around the corner.

Digital gnosticism then, is the “good news” that we will be saved by merging with the machine, allowing AI to optimize us for eternal life (as in Bryan Johnson’s “Don’t Die” movement) or using AI to project our consciousness across the universe.

I wish I could say this was science fiction, but these are genuine beliefs flooding a culture now lacking the gravitational pull of Christianity at its center.

This is why the church is needed more than ever. As I wrote in The Reason for Church, “the church is not merely the sum of individuals who believe the same thing and live in the same geographic area. Every church is a living, breathing embodiment of the gospel story” (emphasis added).

As such, weekly worship is a “strange, thin place between a fallen world and the God who helps us make sense of it all.” It’s no wonder that widespread dechurching has only made people more desperate for meaning and less discerning in where to search for it.

Recently, a Google employee at our church who works with AI asked the students in our youth ministry, “Where do you go when you have questions you don’t think your parents will be able to answer?” About a quarter of them said ChatGPT. We already trust online influencers more than institutions, and 42 percent of adults use AI for emotional support. Digital divination—trusting a chatbot to tell us the truth about reality—doesn’t require a leap of faith.

But what if our divining isn’t a digital facsimile? What if there are ghosts in the machine? Scripture reminds us that the spiritual world is just as real as the material one. God exists, miracles happen, and angels and demons are at work. Because we wrestle “against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places” (Eph. 6:15), we can’t categorically dismiss reports that, as Rod Dreher put it, “evil discarnate intelligences use [AI] to communicate with people.” If the cardboard and plastic of a Ouija board can be a gateway to dark spiritual forces, why not digital ones and zeros?

Whether AI is merely reflecting our superstitious hopes and fears back at us or there is a ghost in the machine, Deuteronomy 18 wouldn’t list using mediums, divination, and necromancy as “abominations to the Lord” if there were no spiritual risks.

Digital gnosticism will ultimately prove just as futile as secular materialism. We are creatures made of dirt and breath. We will never transcend our need for the fullness of existence. And in Christ, we have it.

Because American individualism has always been more than a little gnostic, we often see our union with Christ as a merely spiritual reality. We treat church as optional, but it never would have occurred to Paul that one could be spiritually in Christ without fully and physically abiding in Christ’s body. It is only in the church, Paul says, that “the manifold wisdom of God should be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places” (Eph. 3:10).

If we want to be reenchanted by the gospel and inoculated to digital gnosticism, we will need a rechurching even greater than our dechurching. We can start by devoting ourselves to a local church and participating in the ordinary means of grace—Word, sacrament, and prayer. In our gathered worship and witness, we rehearse the drama of redemption. In serving our neighbors and loving our enemies, we resist artificial intelligence with otherworldly love.

AI may offer “a shadow of the things to come, but the substance belongs to Christ” (Col. 2:17, ESV). God loves us too much to let us go on existing without him. That’s why I believe reenchantment will include a greater openness to the gospel. It is therefore the church’s task—nay, privilege—to welcome digital gnostics into a true and better enchantment.

Brad Edwards is the lead pastor at The Table Church in Lafayette, Colorado. He is the author of CT’s Book of the Year, The Reason for Church, and cohost of the podcast PostEverything.

Edwards' book The Reason for the Church is Christianity Today's 2025 Book of the Year

Facing Death, Ben Sasse Points to Life

2026-01-06T17:49:00.000-08:00

Two days before Christmas, former Nebraska Sen. and University of Florida President Ben Sasse
announced he has been diagnosed with Stage 4 pancreatic cancer. His tweet was a gut punch to anyone who knows Sasse and to the many around the nation who have admired his presence in public life. A statesman through and through, Sasse embodies an aspirational politics that even those who viscerally disagree with him seem to admire. Well wishes came from across the political divide, as bitter ideological foes united to pledge to pray for a gifted political talent fighting cancer at age 53.

Yet, despite his years of public service, it’s the way Sasse announced his diagnosis that might be his most important contribution to American political life. It reflects the deep and serious theological beliefs that animate the former senator’s life.

“Advanced pancreatic is nasty stuff; it’s a death sentence,” he wrote. “But I already had a death sentence before last week too — we all do.” This is the undeniable reality that Christians such as Sasse embrace. Death comes for all of us, and few know when their last breath will be. The New Testament book of James reminds us, “Yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes” (James 4:14). To be sure, Christianity isn’t mere nihilism, for believers also understand death to be an intrusion on God’s original created order, the final foe that Christ, in his resurrection, defeated. The Apostle Paul says that the Christian faith allows believers to look at death and say, “Where is your sting?” (1 Corinthians 15).

Sasse echoes this, attaching his announcement to the season of Advent. “As a Christian, the weeks running up to Christmas are a time to orient our hearts toward the hope of what’s to come.” What’s to come, he says, is the real Christian hope of a new world, a world devoid of the pain and tragedy of this one:

Not an abstract hope in fanciful human goodness; not hope in vague hallmark-sappy spirituality; not a bootstrapped hope in our own strength (what foolishness is the evaporating-muscle I once prided myself in). Nope — often we lazily say “hope” when what we mean is “optimism.” To be clear, optimism is great, and it’s absolutely necessary, but it’s insufficient . . . A well-lived life demands more reality — stiffer stuff. That’s why, during advent, even while still walking in darkness, we shout our hope — often properly with a gravelly voice soldiering through tears. Such is the calling of the pilgrim. Those who know ourselves to need a Physician should dang well look forward to enduring beauty and eventual fulfillment. That is, we hope in a real Deliverer — a rescuing God, born at a real time, in a real place. But the eternal city — with foundations and without cancer — is not yet. Remembering Isaiah’s prophecies of what’s to come doesn’t dull the pain of current sufferings. But it does put it in eternity’s perspective.

To many, this may come across as pie-in-the-sky, a comforting myth that helps you get away from the cold, hard reality of death. But Christians really believe there is another world coming, that this broken reality will give way to a world made right by the one who made it. Christians really believe that because Jesus rose again after his death, we too will rise again, body and soul. This is the hope about which pastor Tim Keller wrote in his final days. It’s what allowed Dietrich Bonhoeffer to whisper, before he was executed by the Nazi government, “This is the end, but for me it is the beginning of life.”

The hope of the eternal doesn’t erase the reality of cancer in a fallen world. True Christian hope is not flippant about death. The 11th chapter of the Gospel of John tells the story of Jesus, standing before the rotted corpse of his friend Lazarus, weeping and overcome with rage. Christian theology teaches that death is an aberration, an intrusion into God’s good creation, the work of an unseen enemy. It is an attack against God himself, who fashioned humans in his image. Even the most devout Christian doesn’t welcome a terminal diagnosis, doesn’t shrug when loved ones are taken early. Because we see humans as God sees them, we are repulsed by death, sickened by violence, and must be defenders of human life.

Sasse rightly pledged to fight his cancer and we should all pray that God, through the human instruments of advanced medicine, heals his body and gives him many more years. Death isn’t natural—to fight death with the materials of God’s creation—is the natural thing. Yet, the inevitability of what comes for us can be faced with an otherworldly kind of joy.

Keller writes:

"Christians have a hope that can be “rubbed into” our sorrow and anger the way salt is rubbed into meat. Neither stifling grief nor giving way to despair is right. Neither repressed anger nor unchecked rage is good for your soul. But pressing hope into your grief makes you wise, compassionate, humble, and tenderhearted. Grieve fully yet with profound hope!

"The Christian resists a culture of death–a cheapening of human life through violence of any form–yet accepts as reality that Christ, in his life, death, and resurrection, has defeated it and offers himself as a promise of new and eternal life."

This is why Sasse, the college professor, might be offering the world perhaps his greatest lesson: how to face the prospect of death well. Sasse, whose discourses on civics on the Senate floor still inspire and whose books on American cultural maladies are widely read, is now offering his life as a template for millions of Americans who might walk a similar path.

Nobody, including Sasse, chooses to sign up for such suffering. Nobody would, as Sasse wrote, want to think that they may miss the milestones of life. Even among believers, few, if any, among us understand the complex mysteries of a God who allows cancer to take hold of some of our best people in the prime of life. Yet, such a sober reality can help clear the mind and focus the heart on the things that really matter. It can give us a gratitude for each day we are granted, for the little blessings we overlook. Our petty disagreements, our nonstop partisan bickering, our junior-high level social media dramas seem to melt away when faced with our own mortality.

Sasse’s thoughtful announcement comes at a time when Americans have few models of suffering well. On the one hand, tech entrepreneurs publicly muse about transhumanist utopias, where the body is mere hardware to be upgraded and extended indefinitely. On the other hand, there is the advancing Orweillian horror of “death with dignity,” where the sterile answer to a less-than-ideal life is no life at all. Governors in New York and Illinois recently signed expansive legislation that mirrors Canada’s expanding Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD) regime.

To fight against cancer with joy and hope, to suffer well in the face of his own mortality, is a kind of counter to these insidious social movements that seek to deny our humanity. And Sasse offers the rest of us the perspective we need to live with purpose for however many days we have left on this earth.

As a middle-aged man not much younger than the former senator, I read his words with much grief. I wondered how I’d face a similar future, with my own children in high school and college. I wept, not only for him and his family, but for an America that desperately needs his voice.

Yet I was inspired by a man who, facing the worst days of his life, is meeting them with true Christian hope and joy. I’m moved by a husband and father who will fight this disease with courage and yet will cling to the Christian hope of the life to come. In facing death so publicly, Sasse may teach us, if we listen, how to really live.

By Daniel Darling, director of the Land Center for Cultural Engagement at Southwestern Seminary

Reorient Your 2026 With These Questions

2026-01-06T12:52:00.000-08:00

What Do You Fit Into God's Story

We ask good questions in the Christian life. But are they God-centered? Here’s a look at how turning our
questions around can reorient us toward God’s glory.

Is the way you view your life truly God-centered?

Is the gospel a part of your life? Or does the gospel frame your life?

In his update of his classical work on the mission of God, renowned bible scholar Christoper Wright summarizes the biblical storyline stretching from creation to new creation. It’s a story grounded in the reality of God and his mission to redeem the world: “He is the originator of the story, the teller of the story, the prime actor in the story, the planner and guide of the story’s plot, the meaning of the story and its ultimate completion. He is its beginning, end, and center.”

Once you grasp the radically God-centered nature of reality (and the Bible’s account of history—past, present, and future), you can’t help but rethink the kinds of questions we instinctively ask about the Christian life. We get demoted. God gets exalted.

Turn Around These Questions

Below, some challenging questions that might help you reorient your thinking toward God and his purposes.

We often ask: Where does God fit into the story of my life?
Better to ask: Where does my little life fit into the great story of God’s mission?
The first question assumes my life story is the baseline into which God must somehow fit. But God’s mission is the frame for our lives, not the other way around.

We often ask: What is God’s purpose for my life?
Better to ask: What purpose does my life have within God’s purpose for all life, wrapped up in his mission for the whole of creation?
The first question assumes we should be looking for a tailor-made purpose designed exclusively for ourselves. The better question places our individual callings within the larger, sweeping purpose God has for the world.

We often ask: How can I apply the Bible to my life?
Better to ask: How can I apply my life to the Bible?
The first question subtly assumes my life is the central story, to which Scripture must somehow apply. But the Bible is the reality—the true Story—to which we’re called to conform ourselves. The goal isn't merely to apply disjointed bits of the Bible here and there but to inhabit the whole biblical story, embracing both its demands in the present and its hope for the future.

We often ask: How can we make the gospel relevant to the world?
Better to ask: How does God intend to transform the world to fit the shape of the gospel?
The first question assumes the gospel must be adapted to fit the world’s frame. The better question recognizes that gospel proclamation and demonstration are meant to display God’s redeeming work as it unfolds in human history.

We often ask: What activities and priorities make up the mission God expects from his church?
Better to ask: What kind of church does God desire for his mission?
The first question narrows “mission” to a set of tasks or programs. The second recognizes the church as the people of God, chosen and called to extend and embody the mission of God in all its biblical fullness, in both word and deed.

We often ask: What kind of mission does God have for me?
Better to ask: What kind of me does God want for his mission?
The first question shrinks the notion of mission down to an individual’s calling. The better question starts with God’s overarching mission, so that we then assess our lives—our character, gifts, and obedience—in light of his worldwide purposes.

God-Centered Frame

Reframing our questions places us where we belong. The Christian life isn't less meaningful when God is at the center but more so. We discover our significance not in seeing ourselves at the center of the story but by inhabiting the grand narrative the Scriptures set before us.

When we stop treating God as a supporting character in our personal story and instead see ourselves as participants in his great redemptive drama, our questions begin to change. And when our questions change, so does our orientation. We learn to ask not “How do I fit God into my life?” but “How does my life fit into the story of God’s glory?”

By Trevin Wax -- who is vice president of resources and marketing at the North American Mission Board and a visiting professor at Cedarville University. A former missionary to Romania, Trevin is a regular columnist at The Gospel Coalition and has contributed to The Washington Post, World, and Christianity Today. He has taught courses on mission and ministry at Wheaton College and has lectured on Christianity and culture at Oxford University. He is a founding editor of The Gospel Project, has served as publisher for the Christian Standard Bible, and is currently a fellow for The Keller Center for Cultural Apologetics. He is the author of multiple books, including The Gospel Way Catechism.

When the Creator Came He Found Dead Men Walking

2025-12-29T04:16:00.000-08:00

No, it wasn’t a zombie apocalypse. The Creator and Giver of life came to the world he had created and
found dead people walking around everywhere he looked. How sad it must have been for Jesus, who breathed life into humanity, to be face-to-face with dead humanity. And how sad it was for him to recognize that although they were dead, they didn’t know they were dead, and because they didn’t know, they didn’t hunger for the life that he had come to give them. How sad it is to have the one thing people desperately need, but they’re not interested in what you have to offer.

Life was born in that manger; it’s what the Christmas story is about. Life was born among the dead so that the dead would come to life. Now, I’m not talking here about physical death, but rather spiritual death. But consider the power of this word picture. This may sound crass, but it confronts us with what it means to be spiritually dead: the one person you expect nothing from at a funeral is the deceased. Because the person is dead, he is unable to relate to you, let alone rescue himself from his sad state. Consider that:

1. A dead man has no awareness that he is dead.

2. A dead man has no ability to cry out for help.

3. A dead man can’t breathe life into himself.

4. For a dead man to live, a divine miracle must take place.

Listen to the description in Ephesians 2:1–9 of every sinner apart from the life-infusing grace of the Messiah, Jesus:

“And you were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience—among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind. But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved—and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast.”

Because we were dead in our sins, we were completely without any ability to rescue ourselves. We were stuck in our sins and trapped in a cycle of rebellion against God, slaves to our passions and objects of God’s wrath. Not only were we dead, but we were also doomed, and not only were we doomed, but we were also helpless. Here you find the essence of the Christmas story. Here is where it preaches to us about God’s abounding love and his amazing grace. Because we were not able to act for ourselves to change our condition, God acted on our behalf. And because he is boundless in love and plenteous in mercy, he acted for us and not against. If God had acted against us, his judgment would have been right—we deserved his wrath. But the birth of Jesus told the world of dead people that God was not going to act in anger but in mercy. He was not going to mete out punishment but rather grace. He wasn’t going to strike us with his holy sword of vengeance but rather gift us with his life-giving Son.

The birth of that baby tells you that the story of humanity would not end with the walking dead. It would not end with slavery to sin and separation from God. The birth of Jesus is God acting radically in human history to give life to dead people. How would that happen? Well, the One who was life would take on all our sin and die so that we would not only have life right here, right now, but fullness of life with him for all of eternity. The One who is life died for the dead so that the dead would have life forever.

The birth of Jesus tells you something else. Because of what Jesus would do in his life, death, and resurrection, because he was willing to die to give life, we will live, but death will die. The birth of the ultimate life-giver, Jesus, guarantees the death of death. In the life and work of that baby in the manger all the effects of sin will be defeated, the worst of them being death. As the children of God, we will not only live, alive in heart and alive to God, but we will be invited to the one funeral we’ll actually want to go to. We’ll be invited to the funeral of sin and death, because sin and death will die because of the redeeming work of the One born in Bethlehem.

So at Christmas remember that beneath the angels, the shepherds, the wise men, Mary and Joseph, and that rented barn is this amazing story of life and death. And because it’s a story of life and death, it’s a story of amazing grace. The birth of Jesus is a sure sign that God will act where we cannot act, and he will act with life-giving grace. Celebrate that Jesus came to give life, because it’s the one gift we could never, ever give ourselves.

By Paul Tripp, Come Let Us Adore Him Devotional (December 27)

The Longest Night of the Year

2025-12-26T17:40:00.000-08:00

The darkness has been gathering for a while now. It wasn’t particularly obvious at first—a lengthening
shadow here, a loss of an hour there. But as the weeks progressed and the hands of time were set forward, an undeniable gloom has settled in and with it, a chill. Things that once flourished in light now lie dormant. We go to sleep in darkness and wake in the same.

To be fair, the night has been coming due for a while now. Those high days of summer when we were carefree and daylight seemed to stretch on forever were always going to exact a price. But the loss of light was so gradual that we didn’t really notice it until we were sitting in darkness. And now, those of us in the Northern Hemisphere find ourselves facing the longest night of the year.

Meteorologically speaking, the winter solstice is easily explained: It is the moment when the Earth’s poles are tilted to their most extreme positions in relationship to the sun, resulting in an exaggerated gap in sunlight between the Northern and Southern Hemispheres. While the global South basks in the light of summer, the tilt of our planet’s axis places the North in darkness. The further north you go, the greater the disparity so that Oslo, Norway, will experience only six hours of daylight while Fairbanks, Alaska, will have less than four. Closer to the Arctic Circle, there will be no discernible sunlight at all—full days of darkness for places like Murmansk, Russia, and Utqiagvik, Alaska.

Those are the facts anyway. But the existential reality of the winter solstice is less reasonable and at least for me, deeply portentous. There’s a heaviness to it, and for some, a visceral despair as the loss of sunlight prompts physiological imbalances in the form of Seasonal Affective Disorder As a child, I remember my father speaking of the encroaching night with a sense of reverence and even humility. My father spent most of his day working outside, so for him the loss of daylight meant the loss of working hours and, to some degree, productivity, which in modern life also implies meaning.“The shortest day of the year is coming,” he’d warn as if he were a prophet and it was his solemn duty to prepare us for what was coming.

So like the Earth preparing for winter, I find myself shutting down as darkness descends. It is harder to wake in the morning, and I’m less eager to venture out in the evenings. My mind tells me that I should be active and engaged, fighting against the chill, pushing back the boundaries of the night. Conditioned for productivity and abundance, I flood the house with lights, crank up the heat, and push through. And yet, I also find my body telling me to wait. To accept that there are dark forces beyond myself and that all my energy and efforts cannot stop them from cycling through.

In such moments, I take comfort in the particularly propitious alignment of the winter solstice with the liturgical season of Advent.

At least in the Northern Hemisphere, these weeks gradually bring us to the year’s darkest darkness even as they also deliver us to Christmas. Modern observances often treat Advent as an extension of Christmas, with celebrations and feasting beginning immediately after Thanksgiving, but Christians as far back as the fourth century have prepared for the coming Christ child by sitting in the darkness. Much like the season of Lent, these weeks are for fasting, prayer, and repentance. Strangely enough, we’re supposed to feel unsettled and lost.

In her book length treatment of Advent, Fleming Rutledge puts it more directly:

“Advent is the season that, when properly understood, does not flinch from the darkness that stalks us all in the world. Advent begins in the dark and moves toward the light—but the season should not move too quickly or glibly, lest we fail to acknowledge the depth of the darkness. As our Lord Jesus tells us, unless we see the light of God clearly, what we call light is actually darkness … Advent bids us take a fearless inventory of the darkness without and the darkness within.”

In this way, the Earth may be better attuned to the purposes of darkness than we are. While we insist on revelry and abundance, nature is content to receive such seasons and sit in night. What for us can be the busiest time of the year becomes for her a time of patience and quiet—a time dedicated to the hidden work of decay, the breaking down and dissolution of the past year’s excesses in preparation for future life.

But as much as Advent is a season of darkness, it is also a season of expectation and it is vital that we remember that the night delivers us to the morning.

“Advent” derives from the Latin word, adventus which means “coming” or “arrival.” Something—Someone—is coming and we are waiting for that coming. Christians are waiting for the One whose justice and kindness far outpaces our own. So that even as the shadows lengthen and night descends, even as the things that operate in darkness feel like they grow stronger each moment, hope is not lost. For just as you cannot see the glory of the stars at noonday, it takes the chill of a winter’s night to clarify what is Light and what is Dark. And it is by these same pinpoints of light that we will be guided.

In the final book of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, J.R.R. Tolkien describes such a reality. As the heroes Sam and Frodo are engulfed by the ever-deepening shadows of Mordor:

“…there, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tor high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty forever beyond its reach.”

Today, we may sit in darkness, but we wait in hope. Whether you’re feeling the weight of strained relationships, economic pressures, or civil unrest, the invitation of Advent is to know that you are not alone in the darkness. There is a Light beyond us, and that Light is coming to us. So we entrust ourselves, our neighbors, and our world to the God who is Emmanuel–who has and is and will come. And soon we will celebrate.”

- by Hannah Anderson: A Dark Season at Advent

A Christmas Message for the Post-Christian

2025-12-26T13:45:00.000-08:00

C.S. Lewis once pointed out that Christianity does not begin by telling us how to behave, but by telling us
what is wrong.

There is a particular kind of person who feels most irritated by Christmas. Not the outright unbeliever, not the pagan who senses a mystery he cannot name, but the one who has already “been there.” The post-Christian knows the story. They know the carols, the manger, the angels. They have opinions about it all. They have moved on.

Or so they think.

This is the person C.S. Lewis had in mind in “A Christmas Sermon for Pagans” when he spoke of those who are sick and do not know it. Not because they are immoral, or foolish, or uniquely corrupt, but because they have lost the ability to feel their need. They once heard the diagnosis and now believe themselves immune.

The post-Christian does not usually say, “I reject Christ.” They say something softer and far more dangerous. They say, “I know all that already.” They believe the faith has been outgrown, like a childhood coat. They remember the rules more clearly than the mercy, the prohibitions more clearly than the promise. And so they assume the cure was nothing more than a moral program they have since replaced with something more flexible, more adult, and more reasonable.

Christmas arrives and irritates them because it refuses to stay in the past. It insists on returning every year like an unanswered question. Lights go up. Songs drift through grocery stores. Old words reappear. “Prepare the way.” “Watch.” “Wake.” The post-Christian tells themselves it is nostalgia, or marketing, or cultural debris. But something underneath them stirs anyway.

Lewis once pointed out that Christianity does not begin by telling us how to behave, but by telling us what is wrong. That is precisely what the post-Christian resists. They do not want to be told they are unwell. They prefer to believe the trouble lies elsewhere. In systems, structures, history, bad actors, anything but the human heart.

So they trade sin for psychology, repentance for self-expression, forgiveness for explanation. They learn to narrate themselves endlessly. They understand their wounds. They trace them carefully. They name every fracture in the family tree. And still the ache remains.

This is the quiet irony of the post-Christian life. They have thrown off guilt, yet cannot find rest. They have rejected judgment, yet live under constant accusation. They have abandoned absolution, yet they continue to rehearse their failures in their heads. They have learned all the language of healing except the one thing that actually heals.

Christmas does not argue with them. It does not try to win them back by force. It simply stands there and tells the old story again, slowly, stubbornly, like a bell that refuses to stop ringing.

It says the problem is not that you lacked information. The problem is not that you failed to try hard enough. The problem is not that you grew up in a bad church or heard the faith poorly explained. The problem is older, deeper, and far less flattering.

The world is sick. And so are you.

Lewis was blunt about this. He insisted that Christianity only makes sense if something has gone seriously wrong. Not slightly wrong. Not inconveniently wrong. Fatally wrong. Christmas dares to say the same thing without raising its voice.

The post-Christian bristles. They do not want a savior. They want a solution.

It tells us that no amount of education, therapy, reform, or self-curation can mend what is broken at the root. It tells us the reason we cannot save ourselves is not that we have not yet discovered the right method, but because we are the problem we keep trying to solve.

This is where the post-Christian bristles. They do not want a savior. They want a solution. They want improvement, not resurrection. They want Christmas without the confession that makes Christmas necessary.

But Christmas refuses that bargain.

It insists that the cure comes from outside us. That help does not rise from within. That the center of the story is not human potential but divine interruption. A God who does not wait for us to climb toward him, but comes down into our confusion, our fatigue, our self-justifications, our well-polished unbelief.

This is why the incarnation offends modern ears. A teacher we can admire. A moral example we can adapt. A spiritual insight we can integrate. But a God who enters the world as a child because we cannot rescue ourselves? That is harder to dismiss and harder still to accept.

Christianity insists, stubbornly and repeatedly, that something had to die before anything could live.

Christmas does not shout this. It whispers it. Candles instead of spotlights. Silence instead of spectacle. A pregnant pause in the year that asks one uncomfortable question: What if you were wrong about what you needed?

Not wrong in the sense of ignorant, but wrong in the sense of misdiagnosed. What if your restlessness is not boredom, but hunger? What if your cynicism is not wisdom, but exhaustion? What if your distance from the faith is not maturity, but grief you never finished grieving?

Lewis once noted that Christianity does not promise comfort first, but honesty first. Christmas follows the same order. It tells the truth before it offers joy. It names the darkness before lighting the candle. It waits.

And then, quietly, it says this.

The cure is not an idea. The cure is not a principle. The cure is a person. A person who does not recoil from your doubt, your resentment, your past church wounds, or your practiced indifference. A person who enters history precisely because history cannot fix itself.

Christmas does not exist to make you feel nostalgic. It exists because without intervention, the story ends badly. Christmas is the season that remembers this without apology.

If you are post-Christian, Christmas is not here to drag you back. It is here to ask whether you ever truly left the question behind. Whether the ache you keep managing might actually be an invitation. Whether the cure you dismissed is still standing at the door.

The lights will come on soon enough. The songs will swell. The Child will arrive, unarmed, unguarded, unimpressive by every modern metric.

And Christmas will have done its work if, even for a moment, you wonder whether the faith you thought you outgrew might still know something about you that you have not yet dared to face.

The night is long.

The world is unwell.

And the cure does not wait for our approval.

by Donavon Riley, pastor, author, and writer at 1517

Masculinity Is Self-Rule Before World Rule

2025-12-18T10:55:00.000-08:00

Masculinity is self-rule before world-rule. That idea used to be obvious.

Across civilizations, religions, and generations, men were not first measured by what they could conquer, command, or correct. They were measured by what they could restrain. Anger. Appetite. Ambition. Ego. Before a man was trusted with authority over others, he was expected to demonstrate authority over himself.

That assumption ran so deep it rarely needed to be explained.

But something changed.

When Anger Started to Feel Like Strength

Periods of cultural instability always produce the same temptation. When order collapses, anger begins to feel like clarity. Volume feels like courage. Aggression feels like masculinity.

It’s understandable. Weak leadership provokes reaction. Feminized institutions invite revolt. Men who have been ignored, mocked, or sidelined start looking for something solid to grab.

Anger offers that solidity. It sharpens the edges. It simplifies the world into friends and enemies. It feels decisive.

But Scripture never treats anger as a qualification for leadership. It treats it as a liability.

“Whoever is slow to anger is better than the mighty, and he who rules his spirit than he who takes a city.” (Proverbs 16:32)

That verse doesn’t deny the value of strength. It reorders it. Taking a city is impressive. Ruling your spirit is rarer.

The Reversal We Barely Noticed

Somewhere along the way, masculinity quietly flipped its order of operations. Instead of self-rule leading to authority, authority became something to seize first, with character expected to catch up later. If it ever did.

Reaction replaced formation. Outrage replaced discipline. Confidence became a posture rather than a pattern of life. That reversal feels powerful in the moment. But it produces men who are brittle rather than strong.

A man who cannot govern his temper cannot govern a household.
A man who cannot receive correction cannot be trusted with command.
A man who must stay angry to feel strong is already confessing weakness.

How Authority Has Always Been Tested

Long before platforms and comment sections, institutions that actually lasted operated on a simple assumption: authority is entrusted, not claimed.

Across households, churches, armies, and trades, men were evaluated by a few basic duties. They weren’t edgy. They weren’t complicated. But they worked.

Care.
Does this man steward what has been placed in his hands, or does he burn through it to prove a point?

Obedience.
Is he visibly submitted to lawful authority, or does he only respect power when he holds it?

Accounting.
Can he give an honest account of his actions and their fruit, or only defend his intentions?

Loyalty.
Is he anchored to real people and real obligations, or to a tribe that exists mostly online?

These aren’t soft virtues. They are stabilizing ones.

A man who fails here may still sound confident. He may still be right about many things. But he is not yet trustworthy.

The Trap of Performative Masculinity

One of the great dangers of the moment is mistaking posture for power.

Rhetorical aggression can look like leadership. Contempt can masquerade as discernment. Constant opposition can feel like courage.

But Scripture does not define masculinity by how sharply a man critiques the world. It defines it by how faithfully he orders his life. Elders are required to be sober-minded, self-controlled, gentle, disciplined. Not because those traits are weak, but because authority without them destroys rather than builds.

Anger might rally a crowd. It cannot shepherd souls.

Christ as the Measure

This is where everything clarifies.

Christ did not inherit authority because He seized it. He did not rule by outrage. He did not posture for dominance.

He obeyed the Father. He ruled Himself. Then He was given all authority in heaven and on earth. That order matters.

Any vision of masculinity that cannot survive that comparison is not biblical. It is brittle.

A Harder Path Than Outrage

It is easy to be angry online. It is hard to be faithful in obscurity.

It is easy to identify enemies. It is hard to rule your spirit.

It is easy to demand order from the world. It is far harder to submit yourself to real authority, real accountability, and real responsibility.

But that harder path is the only one that produces men fit to lead.

Masculinity is not proven by how loudly a man resists cultural decay. It is proven by the order he maintains over himself, especially when no one is watching.

Self-rule comes first. World-rule comes later, if at all.

And when that order is honored, authority no longer needs to be announced. It is recognized.

By Virgil Walker who serves as a Teaching Pastor at Redeemer Bible Church in Gilbert, Arizona. He is also the co-host of the Just Thinking Podcast and is a featured writer at Sola Veritas, Standing for Freedom Center, and TPUSA’s BLEXIT movement.

“Nothin’ From Nothin’ Leaves Nothin’.”

2025-12-03T08:06:00.000-08:00

Without a savior, sin always rules

In his book “What Americans Believe,” George Barna points out that 87% of non-Christians and 77% of
self-described born-again believers agreed with the statement “People are basically good.” In other words, our culture, by and large, has discarded the idea of original sin.

The sophisticated among us roll our eyes at the concept of innate human corruption. We snicker at the notion that certain actions, thoughts and behaviors are still deemed to be sinful. The very idea of sin seems a bit too Victorian to us. “It is judgmental and prudish,” we say, and we are quick to condemn anyone who dares suggest that we are anything less than good people.

The whole idea of sin has gone the way of the horse and buggy. It is an outdated and useless concept that has been replaced by more modern ways of understanding the human being and human experience. Men and women are born good, and suggesting that anyone comes into this world with a corrupted nature and is guilty of sin is, well, a sin.

The irony, however, of denying this biblical understanding of human nature is that if you boil it all down to its basic premise, it is really nothing more than the celebration of what Scripture calls the “fall.” That is, the fall of everyone wanting to “be as God” and thereby deciding for themselves what is right and wrong, just and unjust, and true or false. It’s the fall of us declaring who is male and who is female and even presuming to define life and death.

Such autonomous power is to become our own God, for we no longer need him to know the difference between good and evil.

In our denial of a sovereign, we have, ironically, found one. We are the ultimate ruler. There is only one king, and it is us. We will bow to no one else.

St. Paul warned of this 2,000 years ago in his letter to the Romans. He told us the danger of worshipping the created rather than the Creator is that it inevitably leads to bondage rather than freedom. Elevating ourselves over God always leads to slavery to sin, either ours or someone else’s.

The lessons of history have proved repeatedly that when men make this mistake, the consequences are dire. Millions have suffered in the prisons and died in the furnaces from such idolatry.

The paradox in all of this is that admitting the existence of our depravity is the only bulwark against it. As G.K. Chesterton famously argued, “Original sin … is the only part of Christian theology which can really be proved,” and the best minds in human history (such as Jefferson, Adams, Washington and Monroe) “all took positive evil as the starting point of their argument.”

In other words, our Founders understood that “when there is no king in the land, everyone starts doing what is right in their own eyes,”(Joshusa 17:6) and culture collapses under the weight of human depravity. They did believe we needed a king, and his name was Jesus. Or, in the words of Thomas Paine: “Where, say some, is the King of America? I tell you, friend, he reigns above.”

At its core, the “No Kings” movement is really nothing more than a repeat of the millennia-old cycle of the original sin. Eating the fruit of the forbidden tree, these people become their own monarch as they haughtily rise and shout, with the maniacal confidence of Diderot, “We will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest!”

We dare not, however, forget that if the French Revolution teaches us anything, it is this: When you take God out of the public square, it creates a vacuum that will quickly be filled with despots and demagogues. Shouts of “No Kings” always lead to someone who is only too willing to use the guillotine to secure his reign.

Back in the 1970s, Billy Preston sang, “Nothin’ from nothin’ leaves nothin’.” He was right. Sooner or later, “you’ve gotta have somethin’” to fill the void. Chaos always demands a correction. We all will have a king. It will either be the one we see in the Bible or the one we see in the mirror.

Without a savior, sin always rules.

Dr. Everett Piper (dreverettpiper.com, @dreverettpiper), a columnist for The Washington Times, is a former university president and radio host. He is the author of “Not a Day Care: The Devastating Consequences of Abandoning Truth” (Regnery). He can be reached at epiper@dreverettpiper.com

Cellphones: Blessing or Curse

2025-12-02T12:19:00.000-08:00

Recently, writer Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist, posed this question to ChatGPT:

“If you were the devil, how would you destroy the next generation, without them even knowing it?”

Here’s a bit of the answer he shared in a Free Press article:

“I’d keep them busy. Always distracted” and “I’d watch their minds rot slowly, sweetly, silently. And the best part is, they’d never know it was me. They’d call it freedom.”

Mr. Haidt wrote, “It seemed to be saying, if the devil wanted to destroy a generation, he could just give them all smartphones.” He came to this after studying why Gen Z, the kids born between 1996 and 2012, experienced an increase in mental health problems beginning in the early 2010s.

Sometimes, truth also comes packaged in unorthodox places.

The Babylon Bee online satire site had a recent headline, “Jesus Heals Demon-Possessed Man by Taking Away His Cellphone.” “Multiple reports indicated that the man’s rages, convulsions, and foaming at the mouth were instantly healed as soon as Jesus removed the man’s smartphone from his hand,” the story reads. “At publishing time, witnesses had reported that Jesus had told the man to go and scroll no more, or something worse might happen to him.”

Christians familiar with biblical accounts of Jesus’ miracles, plus his admonition to the woman caught in adultery to “go and sin no more,” will get this immediately.

Yet you don’t have to be a Christian to question whether smartphones have been a blessing or a curse. Clearly, they are both. Remember what it was like trying to connect with someone arriving at an airport? Or losing written directions on the way to a destination? Or not having change for a pay phone? Scratch that last one if you’re younger than 40.

The convenience has been astonishing. The world’s accumulated knowledge is at our fingertips. You can talk face-to-face with friends, loved ones and business acquaintances around the world, but the price has been steep.

A story broke last year in The New York Times about a remote Amazon tribe getting internet access and cellphones and developing social pathologies within two years. The tribe says the paper exaggerated, and it has filed a defamation lawsuit.

Nonetheless, the social effects of ubiquitous cellphones are obvious. Every weekday, on a nearby corner, middle and high school kids wait for a school bus. Every one of them has his or her head down, engrossed in a cellphone. No one is talking. No girl is flirting with a boy. No boys are comparing sports scores. At least not in person.

When we encounter these teens on neighborhood walks, we’re often surprised and saddened that they won’t even return a friendly “Hello.”

Apple founder Steve Jobs introduced iPhones in January 2007, and by the 2010s, they were everywhere. With instantaneous communication, Big Tech has created an environment in which kids are fed constant opinions and, often, dark themes. They can become victims of scathing psychological attacks or become part of a peer group assaulting another student. They can watch videos ad nauseam on TikTok, access pornography, create deepfakes and read posts that make their parents out to be ogres if they exert any discipline whatsoever glued to their phones angels” or make them subject to “spiritual degradation.” All too often, he writes, it’s the latter.

Personally, I have no doubt that God exists, came miraculously in human form 2,000 years ago to save our souls, and is still doing so. In any case, Haidt is on to something important. He offers “four norms” that could help: No smartphones before high school, no social media before 16, phone-free schools from kindergarten through 12th grade, and more independence, free play and responsibility in the real world.

Children, he says, need “to do hard things, over and over, and suffer setbacks and losses, in order to become strong, independent adults.” In other words, they need to develop character, something about which the Bible has much to say. For example, “Whoever walks in integrity walks securely, but whoever takes crooked paths will be found out.” (Proverbs 10:9)rampant. Throw cellphones into this mix, and you have a perfect storm.

A committed mother and father can make an enormous difference. For those lacking such a foundation, faith in a loving God goes a long way. “He will heal the broken-hearted and bind up their wounds.” (Psalm 147:3) The Apostle Paul offered a timeless antidote to angst and cynicism that could apply even to overuse of cellphones: “Whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.” (Phil. 4:8)

Robert Knight is a columnist for The Washington Times. His website is roberthknight.com.

The Cross is Not Neutral

2025-12-02T10:32:00.000-08:00

“The great line that divides humanity is not political, economic, social, or ethnic. No, the great fault line
is Jesus.”

When Mary and Joseph took young Jesus to the temple, they didn’t know that Simeon, a righteous man, would be waiting there for him. The Holy Spirit had told Simeon that he would not die before he saw the “Lord’s Christ” (Luke 2:26). Simeon took Jesus in his arms. What an amazing scene. Imagine being chosen by God to hold the young Messiah in your arms! As he held Jesus, Simeon spoke these words:

Lord, now you are letting your servant depart in peace,
according to your word;
for my eyes have seen your salvation
that you have prepared in the presence of all peoples,
a light for revelation to the Gentiles,
and for glory to your people Israel. (Luke 2:29–32)

After Simeon spoke his words of blessing, worship, and prophecy, he turned to Mary and said, “Behold, this child is appointed for the fall and rising of many in Israel, and for a sign that is opposed (and a sword will pierce through your own soul also), so that thoughts from many hearts may be revealed” (Luke 2:34–35). These would have been hard and confusing words for the young mother of the Messiah to hear.

Simeon captured the inescapable truth about the identity, person, and work of Jesus.

When you are presented with the truth of Christ’s birth, God’s declaration of who he is, the testimony of his miracles and ministry, and his own self-testimony, you cannot be neutral about Jesus. Spiritually, you either rise or fall with your response to him. It is not enough to say he was a good prophet and teacher. You either say he is the Messiah Savior and bow before him and cry out for his grace, or you reject him and your need for his grace. You either worship him, or you mock him. You either confess your need for him, or you turn in independence away from him.

There is no neutrality in the shadow of the cross.

The great line that divides humanity is not political, economic, social, or ethnic. No, the great fault line is Jesus. When Simeon told Mary that a sword would pierce her soul, he was, of course, speaking of Calvary, when Mary would watch as a spear pierced the side of her Messiah son. What agony awaited this young mother.

The cross of Jesus either is your hope in this life and the one to come, or it represents the death of a man you do not love and do not need. There is no neutrality in the shadow of the cross.

So, today, what will you do with Jesus? Will you bow in worship and gratitude, or will you take life in your own hands and walk away?

This article is adapted from the Everyday Gospel Christmas Devotional by Paul David Tripp.

The Hope of Christmas

2025-12-02T10:13:00.000-08:00

No matter what this Christmas season holds, the Bible proclaims good news—God offers hope to all
through the gift of his Son.

For many, the word Christmas brings thoughts of fun with friends and family and the enjoyment of giving and receiving gifts. For them, as the song says, “It’s the most wonderful time of the year!” But for others, Christmas is a painful reminder of broken relationships, lost loved ones, or financial hardships, any of which makes the season the most difficult time of the year.

Whatever feelings we have this Christmas, the Bible explains that there is good news that can give us hope and joy no matter what our Christmas season is like. But before we can benefit from this good news, we must first understand the “bad news.”

The Bad News: We are all separated from God

God did not create us like robots to automatically love and mechanically obey him. The first man and woman chose to disobey God and to go their own willful way. Each of us since then has been born sinful and disobedient toward God. All this results in spiritual separation from him.

The Bible says . . .

All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. Romans 3:23

The wages of sin is death. Romans 6:23

People have tried many ways to bridge this separation between themselves and God.

The Bible says . . .

There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way to death. Proverbs 14:12

Your iniquities have made a separation between you and your God. Isaiah 59:2

No bridge reaches across that separation . . .
except one.

The Good News: God has provided a bridge—the cross

Jesus Christ died on the cross and rose from the grave. Though he was God’s sinless Son, he became a human and took our place in order to pay the penalty for our sin. By doing that he bridged the otherwise uncrossable gap between God and us!

The Bible says . . .

For there is one God, and there is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus. 1 Timothy 2:5

Christ . . . suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring us to God. 1 Peter 3:18

God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. . . . The free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord. Romans 5:8; 6:23

Christ died for our sins, . . . he was buried, . . . he was raised on the third day. 1 Corinthians 15:3–4

God has provided the only way to forgiveness of sin and eternal life. But each person must make a choice.

The Choice: Accept or reject Jesus Christ

In order to receive the forgiveness of sin and the eternal life offered to us by God, we must repent of our sin and trust in Jesus Christ as Lord, Savior and Life.

Jesus says . . .

I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. John 14:6

The Bible says . . .

To all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God. John 1:12

We have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. Romans 5:1

For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. John 3:16

What is your decision?

Will you receive Jesus Christ right now and trust in him alone for forgiveness and eternal life? The Bible says that is the only way to find freedom and peace with God.

60 Years of Hearing the Gospel in “A Charlie Brown Christmas”

2025-12-02T06:22:00.000-08:00

2000 or so years ago there were probably heated conversations in Israel about how many terms Quirinius would serve as Governor, the political ramifications of Caesar’s Census, the new tax rates, the terrorist threat level, and when a great political leader would come to usher in the Kingdom of God on earth. Seems like not much has changed today.

Many in those days missed that first Christmas because of the human gravitational pull for political saviors. Even today many think the gospel is a political message or good advice for better living rather than God’s sovereign grace and power to save sinners. No one back then was looking for the hope of the world and the glory of God in a feeding trough in Bethlehem. Yet God the Son humbly put on flesh, stepped into time and space, and chose to live with us and for us. John 1:14 says literally, “He pitched his tent among us, and we saw His glory.”

A Charlie Brown Christmas is the animated television special based on the comic strip Peanuts, by Charles M. Schulz. It made its debut on the CBS television network on December 9, 1965. It tried to turn counter the culture’s counterfeit Christmases and to remind and the audience then and ever since that Jesus is the reason for the season. It concluded its 26-minutes with Linus responding to Charlie Brown’s frustration about the commercialization of Christmas when Charlie shouts, “Isn’t there anyone who knows what Christmas is all about?” Linus, hearing his friend’s question, carried his blanket on stage and recited the following from Luke 2:8-14:

”And in the same region there were shepherds out in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night. And an angel of the Lord appeared to them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were filled with great fear. And the angel said to them, “Fear not, for behold, I bring you good news of great joy that will be for all the people. For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is Christ the Lord.And this will be a sign for you: you will find a baby wrapped in swaddling cloths and lying in a manger.” And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God and saying,“Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace among those with whom he is pleased!”

You may recall Linus’ blanket was his ever-present security and companion. In all Charles Schultz’ cartoons Linus was never without it except one time. At the exact moment in the story when Linus recites the words, ‘Fear not…a Savior is born, which is Christ the Lord” Linus drops his precious blanket. This wasn’t an accident. Charles Schultz, a Christian, was quite intentional in presenting the gospel.

In this seemingly innocent moment, Linus delivers a powerful reminder of the true meaning of Christmas. We are to “fear not”, for Jesus is born. We are to “love one another” (John 13:34). We needn’t rely on material things for security, we have God with us, “Immanuel”, (Matthew 1:23) Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior - the true meaning of Christmas.

Also, amid the big, bright, colorful, shiny artificial trees, Charlie Brown chose the least of them, a little, wooden tree with just a few branches. Shortly thereafter, Linus uses his blanket to wrap about the base of the tree and says, “Maybe it just needs a little love”. In that moment, the tree “awakens”, stands tall and firm. A reminder that no matter who we are, no matter how many sins we’ve committed, a God's love makes all the difference in where we will spend eternity.

Jesus’ birth, His perfect, obedient life, and His atoning death all in our behalf free us from our sin, fears and anxieties, idols, earthly security blankets…and from death. In Christ alone, we find our security, significance, and satisfaction, and receive the greatest joy by loving, treasuring, and delighting in Him.

BTW, here’s a bit more about why the secular network broadcast the gospel.

Charles Schulz, the creator of the Peanuts comic strip, was also a devout Christian. CBS asked Schulz to create a Christmas special featuring the Peanuts characters. He agreed with one requirement, that they allow him to include the story of the birth of Jesus. Although network and affiliate executives were hesitant and tried to convince him otherwise, Schulz was insistent. As a result, for the past 60 plus years, millions of people have watched and “A Charlie Brown Christmas” and heard the story of Jesus and “what Christmas is all about.”

May you and your family see and savor Jesus in the glory of Christmas Advent Season! May we all boldly and joyfully share the reason for the season – Jesus Christ, our Lord, Savior and Life

(BTW, the video clip of this gospel scene in the program is HERE