REAL DEAL MANHOOD

What is True Freedom?

2026-07-01T13:13:18.618-07:00

True freedom is submission to God. Freedom is not casting off all restraints and pursuing
whatever we want. It is embracing the right restraints and aligning our wants with God’s will, so we can pursue what is true and good and beautiful.

Modern freedom is often defined as individual autonomy—the ability to choose without external constraints—but this vision is ultimately empty. True freedom isn’t about the absence of limits but about embracing the right ones, as every meaningful relationship requires sacrificing some freedoms for the sake of love and commitment.

The Bible presents a deeper vision of freedom, not as mere self-determination but as alignment with God’s will, seen in how Israel was freed from Egypt to worship God and how Jesus came to liberate us from sin. In his first sermon, Jesus declared himself the long-promised Liberator, giving up his life so we could be truly free—not for self-indulgence but for a life led by the Spirit. Real freedom isn’t doing whatever we want; it’s wanting what’s good, true, and beautiful, and walking in the freedom Christ supplies.

The Christian life is one of death to self and rising to “walk in the newness of life” (Romans 6:4), and that new life is characterized by thoughts about Him who saved us, not thoughts about the dead flesh that has been crucified with Christ. When we are continually thinking about ourselves and indulging the flesh in sins we have been freed from, we are essentially carrying around a corpse, full of rottenness and death. The only way to bury it fully is by the power of the Spirit who is the only source of strength. We strengthen the new nature by continually feeding on the Word of God, and through prayer we obtain the power we need to escape the desire to return to the old life of sin. Then we will realize that our new status as slaves to Christ is the only true freedom, and we will call upon His power to “not let sin reign in your mortal body so that you obey its evil desires” Romans 6:12

“You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” John 8:32

HT: Trevin Wax

The Gospel Is All About Jesus

2026-07-01T12:59:08.743-07:00

“Now I would remind you, brothers, of the gospel 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.For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures,and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have fallen asleep.Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles. Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me.” – 1 Corinthians 15:1-8

Tragically, many reject God because of the behavior of those who profess to be God-followers. I do know many honest and loving and gracious and generous Christians. Unfortunately, you will rarely see them in newspapers and on television, and in my experience, I don’t see all that many online either. This is very sad. I believe it grieves the heart of God.

How should we respond to this, when it’s brought up as an objection to the gospel? First, I think we should acknowledge to our skeptical friends that there are indeed many hypocrites. (And if you are a hypocrite, then repent, ask forgiveness, and trust God to empower you to no longer be one. And if it happens again, repent again, and get help from those walking with Jesus who can help hold you accountable for your attitude, actions, and words.)

But we also need to explain to our unbelieving friends that it makes no sense at all to reject Jesus because some of His followers, including us, can sometimes be hypocritical!

What, after all, is the gospel all about? Is it about us? No! Consider what we’re told in Acts 16:29-31:

The jailer…fell trembling before Paul and Silas…and asked, “Sirs, what must I do to be saved?” They replied, “Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved—you and your household.”

It’s notable that Paul and Silas were in jail and instead of complaining about it, were singing songs of praise to God. So yes, their example was important. The jailer wouldn’t have been drawn to their faith had they not been visibly different than the average prisoner. The same is true for us in our neighborhoods and workplaces and locker rooms. People should see Jesus in us!

However, note what Paul and Silas did not say to the jailer: “Believe in us—since we’re so great—and you will be saved.” No, they said, “Believe in Jesus and you’ll be saved.” The Good News is not about how great you and I are (thank God for that). It’s about how great Jesus is and the wonderful things He’s done for us.

Regarding the problem of hypocritical Christians keeping people from believing, we should point out that many people of all sorts, including atheists and agnostics and Hindus, don’t live consistently with what they profess to believe. (For instance, some of the most intolerant people I know pride themselves on their tolerance, and are blind to their own intolerance, e.g. toward the sincere beliefs of Christ-followers.)

In other words, Christians don’t own the monopoly on hypocrisy. Furthermore, there are plenty of humble, loving, and generous Christians. People need to open their eyes and see them. Unfortunately, the attention typically falls on false Christians or loudmouths or hypocrites.

This is all part of Satan’s diversionary tactics. But the gospel is all about Jesus. The Jesus that Christians believe in is good, even when His followers violate His teachings. The Bible never says you have to believe in Christians to be saved. (If it did, I could not believe the gospel!) It says you have to believe in Jesus, who said, “I am the Way, the Truth and the Life; no one comes to the Father but by Me” (John 14:6). He’s the One we’re invited to come and see (John 1:46). He’s the only One who can save and transform us.

by Randy Alcorn, founder and director of Eternal Perspective Ministries (EPM), a nonprofit organization dedicated to teaching biblical truth and drawing attention to the needy and how to help them.

A New York Times bestselling author, Randy has written over sixty books, including Courageous, Heaven, The Treasure Principle, and the Gold Medallion winner Safely Home. His books have been translated into over 70 languages and have sold over 13 million copies.

Before starting EPM in 1990, Alcorn co-pastored for fourteen years Good Shepherd Community Church outside Gresham, Oregon. He has ministered in many countries, including China, and is a popular teacher and conference speaker.* Randy has taught on the part-time faculties of Western Seminary and Multnomah University, both in Portland, Oregon.

Ben Sasse - Living With Terminal Cancer

2026-06-30T19:58:40.263-07:00

Ben Sasse is an author, former US senator, former university president, husband, and father. In December 2025, a terminal cancer diagnosis gave Ben a new vocation: to use the time he has left to help the rest of us focus on what really matters.

On Tuesday evening, June 2, 2026, Trinity Forum hosted Ben for a conversation before an audience of 900 in Washington, D.C.

You can watch the interview HERE and/or read the transcript below:

CHERIE HARDER:

Ben, as you can tell, we are so glad you’re here. It’s great to have you here. It’s great to have Melissa, Breck, and your extended family here. Welcome. And before we really dive into it, I think one thing that’s on everybody’s mind is just: how are you? I mean, we’ve been hearing all this news about breakthrough pancreatic cancer drugs. Is there a chance the prognosis is going to change?

BEN SASSE:

Well, let’s go small first. First of all, thank you all for making time. Sorry there wasn’t more to do in DC on a Tuesday. I think it’s the 40th anniversary of the release of Fletch. So we’re all gathered around an important milestone. David Coleman, those comments were dishonest on so many fronts. So thank you for your generosity and lying. But David made me feel bad because I don’t remember at all dropping the ball on getting back to him. I do a lot of morphine management right now. And so on a day like today, I’ve ramped up the last couple days. So I still have enough in my system that I’m not in a lot of pain, but I’m not asleep in front of you either. So I cut my morphine off a lot. But my short term memory is crap. Tim Keller was a friend of mine. We weren’t close, but I cared for Tim and knew him for a while, including during his dying years. He never told me this, but his family has since told me that in his last years, one of the benefits he saw in bad metastasized cancer is he didn’t feel any guilt about not being good at managing his inbox, and I’m not over that yet. And David just made it worse. So yes, I was thinking like I got a to do list tonight when we leave. Cherie, I’ll speak to your specific point. I am an oncology rookie, but we have an amazing team at MD Anderson and they tell us that in 40 years, pancreatic cancer is the most lethal form of cancer, 87% death rate in five years across everybody who has it, but of those diagnosed stage four, which I was, 97% death rate within 12 months. It’s nasty, but in 40 years, there have only been two good headlines and both of them are in the last 60 days. And one of them is my drug, daraxonrasib. And at an oncology conference yesterday, I wasn’t there. But as the story has been told to me by a few folks, there were about 4000 folks, a bunch of super nerd researchers and a bunch of financiers who do pharma investing. 4000 people, when Revolution Medicines was named, broke into a multi minute standing ovation. Those are the makers of my drug. So it’s a Silicon Valley, Stanford spin off, these biotech guys created this drug. Apparently they call it the greasy ball, the molecule that is pancreatic cancer’s route. You can’t find a way to wedge the drug into it. So it’s been considered undruggable. The vast majority of deaths from cancer in the U.S. have a relationship to this same problem with pancreatic, cancer which is you can’t deliver the drug against the molecule. And the breakthrough interaction isn’t just for pancreatic cancer. It’s a new technique that we’ll be able to use for molecular glue. So the the good news is Noah Smith, for those of you who read his Substack, formerly an economist at the University of Michigan, but now just a really good general journalist in America. Noah said, summarizing a lot of the news about pancreatic cancer over the last couple of months, he said, we are very likely at a place where we end cancer deaths within 30 years, not end cancer, but end deaths from cancer within 30 years because of these breakthroughs. So it’s amazing stuff for those of us who know that the curse, post the Garden of Eden is far and wide and we should seek to love our neighbor by restraining evil. And beating cancer is a really great thing that we should all cheer for off the charts. It’s great news for somebody who’s as sick as I am. Probably not soon enough to make a lot of difference, but extra months is a real blessing when you want to love your wife and kids. I was given 3 to 4 months to live in December, and I’m pushing six months already and probably have a bunch more months. And it’s because of this miracle drug.

CHERIE HARDER:

Hurrah! So let’s kind of go back to the beginning. I think most people in the room know you either as a former senator or university president, but before any of that, you were born in the tiny little town of Plainview, Nebraska.

BEN SASSE:

1200 people.

CHERIE HARDER:

Yes, to Gary and Lynn, a high school teacher and football coach and a homemaker who split shortly after you were born. You have made it sort of a lifelong area of study for you, how character and formation happen. What formed Ben Sasse? How did Ben get to be Ben?

BEN SASSE:

The German Lutheran stoic in my soul, really doesn’t like talking about myself that much, so I don’t know. I mean, Cherie’s awesome, but what a bad question. Let’s get to something interesting. I don’t know. I’ll give you 3 or 4. [By the way] her team is awesome. They said, do you want Gatorade to not puke? You want sprite to not puke? Good, good. We’ll also put a big bucket behind your chair. So hopefully I don’t need to use it. But I’m managing a wave, so forgive me if I’m sort of squirming around a little bit. Bucket one: incredibly blessed to be raised in a Christian home and be catechized. I went to, Trinity Lutheran Elementary School and, Luther’s Shorter Catechism was a core part of our life to understand the warp and woof of Scripture. Number two—I’m making up a list. Let me just say there are four points. I don’t have any yet, but I’ll stop at four. Number two: my dad was a football and wrestling coach, but all my family, besides my dad, were farmers, so [where] I grew up, we lived in the town, but I would be bused out to work on the farms in the summer for family members. And so I just grew up with a rhythm that work is a core part of what you do to live a life of gratitude and love your neighbor. And, my grandfather, Elmer, used to regularly say that every hour of sleep before midnight was worth two hours of sleep after midnight. I don’t know that there’s a lot of Huberman Lab stuff at Stanford that’s backing this up, but we believed it. We got up really early, and you had to work before you got to do anything else. I wanted to read the sports section every day. And my dad said, you got to read an article on the front page, and you got to read an editorial before you can turn to the sports section. And dad was pretty sports addicted. You learn the sense that there was always work that had to be done to serve other people before the next stuff. You mentioned my parents are the Kramer vs Kramer generation. I was born in ‘72. My parents divorced in ‘73. They were both remarried by ‘76. Divorce is terrible, but I had the least bad version of divorce because my parents were both remarried by the time I was four, and all four of my parents got along. So there was a rhythm to what respective authority looked like in two loving households. And I think that’s only three. So I’ll say the fourth is: man, did Husker football dominate all of my childhood?

CHERIE HARDER:

So you went from the tiny town of Plainview to Harvard, then Saint John’s, then Yale, and then after graduating, you took what might be considered a fairly unusual career move. You worked as the executive director for the National Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals, which is not the typical backstory of a senator. And I’m curious how, if at all, that season shaped your view of public life and civic formation.

BEN SASSE:

That’s interesting. I mean, that wasn’t the motive. Melissa and I got married coming right out of undergrad, and I worked for the Boston Consulting Group in Chicago first. And it was great yuppie sweatshop work in that every year you were going to get two and a half or three years worth of work out of you, because that were the hours. Those were the hours. There’s a subject verb agreement in there somewhere. I was working hard and long and enjoyed a lot of what I was learning, but we looked at how many people were 15 or 20 years down that career path and were divorced and marrying somebody 10 or 15 years younger. Once they had money, then they were going to figure out what the rhythm of work/home looked like. We just thought that was a stupid order to tackle the problem in. so we left strategy consulting, and we’re still wrestling through learning more theology together. Mike Horton was a friend for a long time and theologian at Westminster Seminary in California.And we had been volunteer advisors. Mike was theologically super sharp, but maybe wasn’t that organizationally gifted. And they were raising a lot of money and growing an organization fast and didn’t really have much of a theory of what the business model was. And so I’d been given informal advice, and there was a chance to try to put together a few organizations. I basically was taking business skills from the for profit sector to help some not for profits go through a merger, but the payout for us was getting to be around a bunch of theologians and wrestle through some questions. Our son, who you all introduced, we call him Breck, but his name is actually Augustine Breckinridge Warfield Sasse. Nebraska doesn’t allow you to have that many letters on a birth certificate. Augustine is who we were naming him after, but it’s theologically a bit heady for a 8 or 10 or 12 or 15 (year old) now. On a football field, you can’t shout, go, Augustine, city of God. Woo! So there was a lot of Two Kingdoms Theology that definitely informed my developing worldview and reading a lot of Reformation theology. I don’t want to overplay the Peace of Westphalia or something in our catechetical upbringing, but it was pretty clear that if you believe that government is a good, but it’s a left handed secular good, meaning it’s a provisional good in a world that’s broken, where people want to take your life and your liberty and your stuff, you want to restrain evil. That is a gift. That is a blessing. But it would be weird to make government the center of your worldview. And so the right posture toward government is, in my view, Washington’s phrase later worked out a lot more by Lincoln of the Silver frame and the golden apple. The purpose of government is the silver frame. It can never be the golden apple. Government exists to maintain a framework for ordered liberty, so the more important things can happen by volunteerism and persuasion and love. When you free assemble here, or when you get to invite somebody to marry you, you try to persuade somebody to buy your product or your service, or you try to persuade somebody on ultimate questions at your house of worship, you want a framework which restrains evil but doesn’t try to coerce souls. It just seems to me there’s a kind of a 101 version of Two Kingdoms that all thoughtful Christians should have. And I definitely wanted to read in more depth about that. And so I spent some time helping the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals.

CHERIE HARDER:

You’ve always been known as an incredibly energetic guy. And just to kind of bring us from the National Association of Confessing Evangelicals up the present times: you worked in a consulting group, you were elected by the highest vote margin in Nebraska history to the Senate, you wrote two best selling books, you turned around a small college, you went to the University of Florida. You were in the midst of training for a triathlon when things started feeling not so right. And then you got the news of an unexpected terminal diagnosis. How did you and your family absorb that shock?

BEN SASSE:

Well, first, let’s linger on the stupidity of getting diagnosed while training for a triathlon. Holy smokes. I’m going to get in trouble with my wife because I just recognized that I’m bleeding through my pants right here. One of the downsides of being on a KRAS mutation drug is that it shuts off a lot of cell division, and one of them is skin growth. So I’ve gotten rid of the rash on my face, but my scalp is bleeding now. And I just realized I’m bleeding through [my pants] on my knee, so I apologize. But my wife is like you look super tacky. Honey, why didn’t you wear better pants? And I’m like, you know, I’m cheap. And I bled on the last two pair yesterday. So [anyways,] I wear those 45 pound weight vests when I’m training a lot. Those are great to add extra pressure and fatigue for certain kinds of low impact, things. And it’s okay to do some running with a 45 pound weight vest. It makes no sense at all to wear a weight vest when your back is at this [slanted] angle, riding a bike. And for some reason last fall, I just thought I’m not getting enough time to work out lately. So when I have my weight vest on training for this [triathlon] in the running events, if it’s a day that I’m going to do a little running and a little biking, why not just leave it on to add some fatigue? I didn’t reflect on it. It was just stupid. And all of a sudden I started having mid-October, late October, some really bad back pain that radiated like [when you are] a little kid when you feel like you’re about to throw up in seven seconds. And it would radiate from my back all along the front of my rib cage. And for two weeks, I was pretty convinced that I had probably just pulled a bunch of abdominal muscles because I’d been wearing this weight vest on my bike. After two weeks of ignoring it, we started going to the doc and for two weeks they couldn’t figure it out. Then eventually, I asked for some full body scans and the doc called me back. This [was] the morning before Alex, our middle kid, was going to graduate early from the University of Florida, and I went in for the scans and the doc called me back, and you could just tell he was beating around the bush. I said, would you please just give me a hard fact? At this point, he starts talking about how well, you know, one of the crazy things about our time is oncology care is so different than it used to be. And I’m like, dude, you’ve never told me I have cancer, and you’re telling me that oncology care is a lot better than it used to be? Would you please man up? And he said, ‘are you with family?’ I’m going to pull over. I’m driving and I’m like, I’m okay. I can take it. Just give me a hard fact. And he said, Ben Sasse, your torso is chock-full of tumors. I was like, well, that was answering the call for a hard fact. I know that it has been weird for some of our family and friends to experience the last five months sympathetically and empathetically with us. My mom jokingly says, how come you didn’t return my call yesterday? I know you got time to do a million podcasts. We’re truly not. We do one public day every 10 to 14 days. That’s kind of the cadence we’re in right now at our household. For whatever reason, almost all these things go viral and there’s no false modesty here. I just don’t think I’m saying anything very interesting. I think we live at a super weird time with so much peer segregation, [and] death is universal. The curse. There’s so much Genesis 3, Romans 5, stuff we can do. The universal nature of the curse means everybody [will die], regardless of what Ray Kurzweil or Brian Johnson want to make up. People know that death is real and they’re scared of death, but they don’t have many conversations about it, and they’re not around it because we’re so generationally segregated. So, I sincerely called my wife. We were apart for 15 or 20 minutes just because of the flow of the morning, the day before graduation. Then we were back together, and instantly I felt at peace. The verse to live as Christ, to die is gain. To live as Christ, in that context, is Paul saying that the chance to do something to serve your neighbor on behalf of Christ is an opportunity for ongoing service. Paul is saying that for him to die means you get beyond the curse that is in front of us. I’m not unique to having a death sentence. Every one of you have a death sentence. As we look at the curse and look at death, it’s right to call death an enemy. But it’s also pretty great to be able to add [to] that adjective “final.” To call it the final enemy means then all the bad will be undone and the tears will be wiped away. So we embraced, and Melissa said and felt the exact same stuff. She then did a really crappy job of hiding it from our kid for 24 hours, which was our plan. Our daughters—Corey is turning 25 in a couple of weeks and Alex, who is graduating, is 22. Breck is 15, and we decided that we would tell Corey and then try to hide it from Alex for 24 hours so she could have a normal college graduation. Mom is a really bad poker player. Other than that, it was a pretty good weekend.

CHERIE HARDER:

You know, earlier in our conversation, you mentioned Tim Keller and you have quoted him a couple of times. He also recently died from pancreatic cancer. He said that while he wouldn’t wish pancreatic cancer on anyone. He also didn’t ever want to go back to a time when mortality was not so vivid to him. It’s something you’ve referred to as the prayer of pancreatic cancer. What is it that is gained when one’s mortality is that vivid and present?

BEN SASSE:

I think that work is awesome. The chance to love your neighbor and work hard and produce is awesome. Workaholism is a pretty terrible form of sin, and I’ve been guilty of it kind of my whole life. I don’t do psychoanalysis well, but I kind of think I can look back to me at 8 or 10 years old and self-medicating when something was hard or something hurt by just going and working harder. And there’s a lot about that that I still want to defend. Churchill when he would be down around certain kinds of knowledge work would go and lay bricks. I think being able to go and do manual labor can and should be good therapy. Serving your neighbor and getting over yourself is really important. The idea that we can build a storehouse that’s going to be lasting is a stupid lie. I can’t even grow skin. I can’t build a storehouse that’s going to change the fact that I am a finite sinner who needs a savior. I get to do the trade where I bring the sin and Jesus brings the forgiveness. At that moment, we all get to be little kids saying, ABBA, Father again forever. And all the good that we ever experienced needs to be received as a gift, not as the outcome of my labor. It’s great that justification I don’t get to cooperate in. But getting to cooperate in sanctification is great, and getting to work is great. But at the end of the day, it’s still a gift from the Lord and I. We talk about Ecclesiastes a lot at our house, and you can read the beginning of Ecclesiastes and think it’s nihilism, right? Like it’s all vanity. It’s all a chasing after the wind. It’s all pointless. That’s not what the author is saying. He’s saying it’s vanity and a chasing after the wind if you think you can corral it and put yourself at the center as opposed to receive it as a gift. And so I Iconfess that I kind of lost the thread. Where did we start?

CHERIE HARDER:

I was asking you about what’s gained by such a vivid knowledge [of your mortality].

BEN SASSE:

Oh, yeah. Thank you. The ability to tell the truth in your prayer about the fact that we are totally dependent, and there’s no functional deism that’s ever going to either be true or satisfy us. I’m not the toughest guy on earth, but I’m pretty tough in terms of the kind of work I did as a kid. I have a moderately high pain threshold. I was in really terrible pain from Halloween until mid-December and couldn’t figure out what was going on. We got an $800 water bill [during that period]. Something like that. I was basically spending the whole night in the shower every night. I found a way to release the handle and get the water to scalding. If I would just lie on the floor in the shower and have it hit the center of my back, it could take away a little bit of the pain, but it was rough. So until I got the diagnosis and then starting a couple days later, the morphine and then daraxonrasib [all of these things] have shrunk my tumors by a ton. So I’m not nearly in the pain I was in. But I look back now and I’m super grateful that I had seven hellacious weeks of pain because there was just no ability to be tempted by workaholism. Oh, I’ll just work through this one. I’ll go build better stuff. I’ll get another job or resume entry or deposit in [my] bank account. We’re mortals, and I don’t think I’d ever felt mortality as much as when I was in a lot of pain. And so David Gibson, a Scottish pastor who wrote a book called Living Life Backwards, which is basically a commentary on Ecclesiastes. He says that Ecclesiastes or more broadly, the wisdom literature, is wisdom that comes at you from behind as a punch, meaning that if it’s face on, it’s like theory you could be taught, and experiential learning is from behind. You’ve already passed through something, and it’s a punch. But then later he says in the book [that] it’s a punch you ultimately are thankful for. We suffered a little bit in the fall, and it was not fun, [but] I’m really grateful for it.

CHERIE HARDER:

Since getting your diagnosis, you have definitely pursued, we could say, the end of the road less traveled, a sort of contra the tech bros. You have not pursued uploading your brain or downloading your consciousness. If anything, it’s been more like the “Embodied Finitude Tour.”

BEN SASSE:

That’s a great tattoo. The Embodied Finitude Tour with stops in southeast D.C., June 2nd. Follow us to Scranton, June 30th.

CHERIE HARDER:

On top of that, you’ve launched a podcast about pursuing hope, joy, and meaning in lives. So why have you why have you pursued this unusual route? What impact do you most want to have?

BEN SASSE:

We’re not doing that much. we’re declining almost everything. And in God’s providence, a lot of interviews have gone viral. And I again, think there’s a sociological thing going on where we live such weirdly rich lives that people are insulated from experiencing multi-generational living, and they’re not around death. So I think there’s a curiosity about it. Then once somebody has shared Ben Sasse, end of life content, it serves you more. We’re not doing a lot. But then people that forwarded previous stuff, it kind of goes viral again the next time. So the first bucket is there’s not not a lot of content we’re providing, but I have thought for a long time that there is a common grace theological acuity. Is that the right adjective in our time? That denying death allows you to think [about] something like that clavicular guy and looks maxing. Like if people are gawking at it just because it’s stupid, then I can understand how it becomes a little bit viral. [However] anybody who actually cares about like, ‘can we scrape down the jawline to be perfectly symmetrical on both sides?’ It feels like the only way you could do that is being delusionally in denial about the fact that we’re mortals. Like there’s just so much shallow stuff that we spend a lot of time on, and I think it’s tragic. I think living through the digital revolution as we all are is a really interesting moment to live. But I disaggregate the consumption and production pieces of it. As consumers, middle class Americans are already the richest people any time and place in human history and about to get lots and lots richer. Great. But more consumption when you’re already rich. We have a lot of data—that doesn’t really make anybody happier. It’s just a new baseline. Arthur Brooks talks about it as the arrival fallacy. Whatever becomes the new lived experience median norm that you expect doesn’t actually bring greater joy or pleasure. It’s just a reset moment that now becomes the baseline floor. The real question about this revolution is at a productive level. How do you get leverage out of getting to work better and more meaningfully to serve your neighbors? You got to think about that difference between production and consumption. I think our consumption is so shallow that I’ve wished, and I’ve said this publicly for a long time before I had a terminal diagnosis, that there was a way we could have more meaningful conversations about death because it is a common grace blessing to shatter our self-idolatry. I didn’t really choose to die in public, but I just felt like you had to tell your family and friends. And in a world that’s partly digital, when stuff went viral, even though you’re turning down most interviews, you do some and it looks like you’re dying in public, and then it becomes a little bit of a calling to defend what you believe. I’ve been surprised how many people in the limited number of interviews we’ve done, what a high ratio of them ask, are you mad at God? I don’t fault anybody for the question, but we just don’t identify with it at all. Like if the law is straight and I am crooked, it seems weird to think the thing that’s wrong is the law. The thing that’s wrong is me. Anything that I get that’s good is more than I deserved. Saying that seems surprising to people, but I think it’s an opportunity for Christians together to explain it to our neighbors.

CHERIE HARDER:

Boy, there’s so many different directions we could go there. I want to pick up on one of the things you said about consumption and production. This is an idea that you’ve developed for many years that essentially part of raising young men and women of character is to focus on production rather than consumption. We’re kind of at a point where the felt need for production is kind of in decline. There’s an increased desire to kind of make one’s money through crypto or online gambling. Now we are on the cusp of an AI revolution, which may well make it unnecessary for people to actually produce work. What does it mean for formation and for the next generation if productive activity is no longer economically necessary?

BEN SASSE:

Yeah I think you’re hitting your nail right on the somewhere your hammer right on the head of the nail. There’s a metaphor in there somewhere. I think you’re spot on that. The debate about UBI, I think, is nearly inevitable. Unless we don’t even get to have the debate because we just drift straight into everybody being on welfare. I think that’s disastrous for human anthropology and for human souls. I think it’s disastrous for a free republic. But I do think it’s the conversation that’s coming soon. And so the overly simplistic debates about the digital revolution and the jobs apocalypse are sometimes just optimism versus pessimism or accelerationism versus safety. I don’t know if this one might possibly be different than all the past times when it looked like there might be a technological revolution that created a jobs apocalypse, but I’m mildly on the optimistic side of the midpoint in the debate, which is the unbundling and rebundling of jobs will probably lead to net job creation, not actually a jobs apocalypse.I think that two things happen in route one. Work becomes discretionary for a lot more people because a lot of people become rich. And I think a lot of the new jobs potentially are much less meaningful and much less satisfying. So I know that, you know, you have a couple of reporters here and some of this is streaming. So I’m just acknowledging what I usually try to duck so that I don’t end up caricatured in it. I don’t want to spend a lot of time talking about online porn, but I think we know that the outcome of that experientially is disastrous for people’s souls. I tend to talk about OnlyFans models that sell foot fetish pictures, right? So skirt just south of porn maybe a little bit, but say I don’t see for the consumer or the producer in this transaction that it’s meaningful. And when you believe that people are created with dignity, we should care not just about the economic stats on some sheet, about whether or not there are jobs, but whether or not these are jobs that on Friday night people—I’m saying Friday night as just stereotypical as the end of a work week—think [they] did something meaningful where somebody needed [them] that week, where you lived a life of gratitude to God by doing something that benefited your neighbor. We all know that there are very few variables that ultimately drive human happiness. There’s some stuff that’s genetic, but it’s basically, do you have a family? Do you have a few deep friendships? Do you have a theology to make sense of death and suffering? And do you have meaningful work? And statistically, in the sociology of happiness literature—and here I’m just stealing from Arthur Brooks—but in the sociology of happiness literature, the highest statistical correlate to happiness is meaningful work. I believe all four of these matter family, friends, theology and work. But statistically, in the social science literature, it looks like having somebody who needs you at work, that there’s something that you do that benefits someone else is the highest correlate to happiness. And I just don’t buy that’s going to come from selling fetish photos of your feet. I don’t mean to be a know-it-all by saying that, I think most everybody kind of knows that. I’m in an argument, a healthy wrestling argument with people I like, with some friends in Silicon Valley. And because I’m not an unmitigated accelerationist at a national security level, [of course] I want the U.S. to win all these things versus the CCP. I’m a regulatory skeptic of a lot of stuff in the space, but because I’m not an unmitigated zealot about the accelerationist position, I have some buddies who basically want to caricature my view and say, oh, well, you’re probably worried about ubiquitous robot sex or something. Like, yeah, I’m really worried about that. I think when the average age of male exposure to porn is like ten years old in America and the frontal lobe isn’t formed, that’s not good for them. An extreme libertarian position that says not only government stay out of the way, but any debates about virtue and self-restraint and self-control stay out of the way. I think that’s a really naive position to hold, and I think it’s worth thinking about the curves. I got to get my x and y axis right. When you do the history, we didn’t have any data during nomadism, but if you do agrarianism, industrialization, and now, the knowledge economy, we know once upon a time it took 95% of American people in a civilization working in agriculture to feed your community. Today in the U.S., it’s well under 2% of Americans working in agriculture. Yet the total output is much higher than it’s ever been before. We know that in the late 1950s, 32% of Americans worked in big tool economy jobs—worked in factories. Today, it’s less than 7% of Americans. You can have debates about globalization and trade. I’m a free trade zealot, but you can differ with me on that. The simple fact is, today’s less than 7% of Americans working in industrialization produce more output than the 32% of Americans who were working in industrial callings in the 1950s. And so we know what these curves look like. The knowledge economy is going to have a declining number of workers once the AI revolution is fully present among us. So the question is, what is the next phase of work? And I think it’s likely going to be some version of, best way to say it, relational jobs, worst way to say it, influencer jobs. I’m not sure that the debates we’ve been having about Ohio and the burned over Rust Belt District and declining brawn jobs [that they] are going to say, “well, that was really bad, but going from knowledge economy jobs to influencer jobs on Instagram, that’ll be just fine for human souls and satisfaction. I think we know that’s not going to be the case. We have to figure out what it looks like to be able to do productive labor because we’re image bearers of God. God worked for six days and then rested, and we now get to move the Sabbath to day one. So we get the gifts of grace first, and then we live a life of gratitude. But we’re meant to do productive work. We’re not meant to conceive of ourselves chiefly as consumers. I think that anthropologically, we got a big thing in front of us.

CHERIE HARDER:

One sort of interesting and fairly depressing correlate of the rise of the influencer economy has been a huge surge in loneliness. You’ve written a great deal about just how an epidemic of loneliness has affected our personal health and wellbeing. But even more than that, [how it has affected] our civic health and wellbeing. The average number of friends someone reports having has fallen almost half and this seems to affect young men the most. You, as in many ways, are an outlier in this area. You have sustained a circle of close guy friends from college, perhaps earlier on. For the young men out there who might be struggling, I would love to get your thoughts on what does it mean to be a good friend. You know, what have you learned over the years in your own friendships and how [do you] sustain them?

BEN SASSE:

Thank you. I feel incredibly blessed to have 9 or 10 guys that I am still very close to, and the vast majority of them are friendships that were formed at 18 to 24 years old. Maybe just first a point on your loneliness intro: the University of Arizona had a study come out a month or two ago that showed that the share of Americans that have zero close friends has quadrupled since 1990. It’s not a majority of Americans, but it’s a significant share of Americans. I think it’s 35ish percent, but it’s a quadrupling since 1990 of people who have no close friendships. I think it’s pretty obvious that when you work alongside someone in a shared task, in a shared cause, the chances that you get to become good friends are a lot better than something that is merely a discretionary consumption choice. Should we do this one hobby together? Occasionally, there’s no thickness that binds you together like something that feels more foxhole-ish because you really needed each other. The richer we get, the stranger it will be to have lasting friendships. I think if you think of spousal friendship as well as age of family formation, [they continue] to drift later. One deep friendship doesn’t happen for a lot of people until a lot later or never. It also becomes a model for friendship that you don’t get to have when you’re 18 or 20 or 22 years old. It’s a lot harder to form these things later than earlier. One more stat, of 60 year old men, 61% define their wife as their best friend of 60 year old women. Only 29% define their husband as their best friend. It’s funny, like, I definitely tell it to set it up as a punch line but it’s also super tragic in a world where you’re unlikely to have the experiences again at 40 or 45 or 50 or 55 years old that you got to have at 18 or 20 or 22 years old. What’s obvious in that data is that women are better than men, on average, at forming new friendships when disruption occurs, and men are much less good on average, at forming new friendships when disruption occurs. We’re entering a world where disruption is going to be ubiquitous. I don’t think I have any great lessons, but I have a couple of thoughts. One of them is [related to my] time at the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals. Some of my friends are people that I got to work with there or learn from there. Wrestling through big worldview questions [and] reading long form stuff together can bind you together. There are a lot of people that I share short form crap with, mind rot videos that are funny, so I’m not against it, but we should recognize that it is cotton candy. It’s not a meaningful substitute for reading and deliberation or traveling together. Some of my best buddies are guys I’ve traveled the world with, and it can sound super privileged or entitled to say I’ve traveled the world. No, I mean, I traveled the world. I see Eric Gregory here. Our friend, Scott Brady, and I traveled Europe together in 1992 and ‘93. We literally lived on six bucks a day for like, half a year. so this is not a super privileged thing. We had a eurail pass. And then if you wanted to be in a city two days in a row, you would never stay in that city. Day one and three, you would be in that city so you could take an overnight train out for 12 hours to sleep. And then the next night, you’d take the overnight train back for 12 hours. Who needs a shower once a week? Once every ten days is fine. Why would you pay $12 for a hostel if you can sleep for free on the train? and so the root of the word travel is the same as the root of the word travail. It is not luxury vacation. It is a journey to try to go and see and explore and understand the world. It’s a kind of working together. So I think core work together is essential. But I think reading together, worshiping together, traveling together, there are lots of ways that you can mix your labor with someone else and build a friendship that lasts. Last point here: for those of us who are living through what will, if it works out, be thought of eventually as the hybrid revolution, not merely the digital revolution. What you want is place, embodiment, ensoulment community. What you want is physical material bodies because we’re not abstract spirits. We’re embodied souls. What you want is place that then gets augmented by the benefits of the digital revolution, not the digital revolution and the possible chance to use [technology] as an excuse to let my consciousness drift from the time and place where I’m actually breaking bread with people or making babies with someone or communing with people. You want this to supplement, not supplant those things. And we get that. I think part of the reason why I have the 9 or 10 good buddies that you mentioned is because we use WhatsApp every day. So even if sometimes you’re only together every six months or every 24 months we’re still all kind of current on what’s happening in each other’s lives.

CHERIE HARDER:

[I have] so many things to ask you. We’re going to get to reading in a second, which you brought up, but I want to camp a little bit on manhood in that these are confusing times for young men. I’m so glad your son, who’s 15, is with us. But there’s—

BEN SASSE:

I just want to say something against the lad. I’ve lost two inches in seven months. I’ve gone from 5’11” to 5’9”. I haven’t gotten a good explanation from my docs about why a tumor pressing on your spine makes you shorter. But I’ve gone from 5’11” to 5’9”. And [he is] so cocky, he’s gone from like 5’2” to 5’6.5” in the same period. So like, our lines are converging and he’s not going to grow a foot in the year, but he seems to have closed on me by a foot in the year and I’m tired of him. He just claimed 5’7.5” which is a one inch exaggeration since yesterday. Back to you, ma’am. Yeah, he’s super disrespectful.

CHERIE HARDER:

So for young men like Breck, on one hand, there are those who would stifle, even stigmatize, boyish energy, male risk taking, even call masculinity itself, label it as toxic. And on the other hand, you have a lot of toxic, deeply toxic behavior, either excused as merely masculine boys will be boys, or worse, valorized as some kind of alpha male status symbol or prerogative. When you’re a star, they let you do it. Worse, it seems like the biggest voices and influencers are usually of the latter camp. What advice do you give to Breck and would you give to other young men about what it means to be a man?

BEN SASSE:

Well-framed question, and I want to lower expectations at the front that I don’t think I’m any expert on this, but I’ve been thinking about it a little bit. What is the purpose of power? What is the purpose of, sometimes, violence? It’s to protect. It’s not for offense. It it’s for defense. It’s for preservation. And so my dad was a football coach. And weirdly, I’ve joked that when you’re 54, and you don’t have a terminal diagnosis, nobody thinks you’re that wise. [When] you’re 54 and you get a terminal diagnosis. All of a sudden you’re supposedly super wise. I’m on a lot more drugs than before. I don’t think I’m wiser. Maybe a little less self doubt about just saying what you think if you’re on 55mg of morphine, but I get invited to speak to a number of football teams. Now, this is new. So I’ve done some high school stuff, and I’ve turned down some college stuff, but I was thinking about saying yes to a college heading into the end of the summer. And I’ve been reflecting a little bit on what a well disciplined football team does. They use violence in a very precise, controlled way for a specific objective. And all of the other places they police that there’s no violence. You don’t hit after the whistle, you don’t hit somebody on the sidelines. You don’t bully somebody in the locker room. You don’t spit on somebody at the handshake, like you’re using the violence for a very particular purpose. And you execute sufficient self control and group ethos development about what is and isn’t appropriate among us. And so I guess I’ve been thinking a lot about the nature of what it looks like to grow in self-discipline, self-governance, self restraint, self control. So you don’t have to have other discipline, other constraint, other governance, and other control. It aligns with the dignity of what humans are for also, and I won’t go long here because I want you to take the floor back. But I have been thinking a lot about the institutionalization of childhood, and I think it’s pretty bad overall, but I think it’s obviously bad for the vast majority of boys, the idea that you should be inside sitting still on passive receive mode for the vast majority of the waking hours every day, I just think is incredibly stupid. I think eventually, I don’t know if it’s ten years from now or 50 years from now, we’re going to look back on this moment, and we’re going to think it’s weird how long factory model schooling outlived factories. Nomads didn’t educate this way. They didn’t do work/home this way. Agrarians didn’t educate this way. They didn’t do work/home this way. The factory model for work is 175 years old, and the factory model for childhood at a mass scale is only about 110 years old. and contra a lot of, I accidentally wanted to do historiography for a minute, and I’m real proud of myself that I caught myself. There’s a theory that, isn’t it great the way during progressivism of the 1870s to 1910s and 1920s we did this wonderful thing of growing? Truancy laws and compulsory attendance laws. As if this was something that was done on behalf of poor people like the the spread and rise of American public schooling in the factory model was overwhelmingly about separating Catholic kids from their parents and their parish. That’s what it was for. I think we now know that work and home being as separated as they’ve been, has lots and lots of downsides and the digital economy [has been] for good and for ill. Ultimately among intentional parents and workers [it has been] for good, being able to have more scheduled control and choice about when you prioritize family stuff and when you get your focused work done and what kind of work you can do alongside other people. I think eventually the 40 hour a week institutionalized factory model school will not be replaced with some new 40 hour thing. It will be replaced by a 2 hour thing and a 10 hour thing, and a 5 hour thing, and a 15 hour thing and some “digital this” and a “new community that” and better youth sports and different things are going to disrupt that factory model. When that comes, I think we’re going to look back on this moment and wonder why we assumed that the passivity was possibly going to produce entrepreneurial, self-motivated workers who could navigate the disrupted economy of the post-digital revolution. And we’re going to know that we did this for way too long, and we should be encouraging more self ownership, autodidacticism and entrepreneurial disruption among 12 and 14 and 16 and 18 year olds, and especially 14 and 16 and 18 year old boys.

CHERIE HARDER:

So earlier you mentioned how important reading was to the formation of your friendships, and you’ve written several times about just the importance of deep reading really informing not just friendships, but forming people. And of course, there’s a challenge there because reading is in decline. We overall are reading less. We’re reading difficult literature less, we’re reading in groups less, and we’re spending more and more time on devices who are engineered to basically hijack the attention that’s required for deep reading. So I want to ask you both what is lost by that and what can be regained. Relatedly, you’ve also written about the priority that you and Melissa have placed on building a family bookshelf of weighty works that helped basically ground an ongoing conversation within your family and even your extended family. I would love to hear you talk about the importance of reading books, how you built your own family bookshelf, and what books you think people under 30 should be sure to read.

BEN SASSE:

Yeah, that’s fun. Thank you. I’m glad we’re staying till midnight. First, just a little small point. You said, reading together. Boy, do we miss out if we don’t ever read together. And it’s also sing together and make music together and do lots of other things together. How strange it is that now we think of music as something that you just buy from some maybe at its best singer songwriter or maybe performing artist hired actor to do this thing. It’s great to have some of that. I’m glad we had radios and the next iteration, but [it’s] better still to have somebody in your family or more than one person in your family pull out a guitar or a fiddle or a piano and then sing together. We were with some friends over this weekend and multiple days. We ended up passing out hymnals and everybody just started singing together. I suspect that lots more people want that as lived experience, but it’s a collective action problem that it’s hard to start doing, and we need to figure out how to do it and be willing to do the awkward thing. I have 20 something daughters, and so, you know, I’ve read some of the literature about how much less they dance than people danced in the 80s, my middle school and high school years. And I mean, I was terrible, but there’s no video record of it. So I don’t have to suffer from some stupid moment, except for the people there who can still tell the stories about the overbite, you know I think that was a Saturday Night Live reference, but I’m not sure. The reading together point I think is super important. We still do that at our house. We’re two thirds empty nesters, but Melissa and Breck and I still read books together in the evenings. Not multiple nights a week, but regularly. That is special and needs to be socialized. We use the phrase “the rereadables” about the five foot shelf of books. Like what books? You only got so many days or weeks or months left in your life. How many pages you’re probably going to read, how many books are you going to get read, and how many times do you want to just take the gamble on reading something new that may or may not be worth your time? Do it definitely, but don’t exclusively do it. Also reread good things over and over so that you can form a canon. The canon is always going to have debates. That’s part of the point, but it’s great to have some shared books with people. I know a lot of people who were at Stanford, pre, during, and post the ‘87, ‘88 “hey hey ho ho, Western Civ has got to go.” And after those marches and when Stanford, through their shared curriculum overboard later, some of the alumni when surveyed, said they didn’t necessarily agree with what was in the canon, but they’d rather have a canon they disagreed with than no canon because it was a shared experience, even if you didn’t think those were the right books. So you said [for] people under 30. We’ve been reading a lot of C.S. Lewis lately. I wish if I had more time, I could find people who’d read Rousseau’s Emile with me. He’s terribly wrong about almost everything. And still, what an awesome book. I mean, let’s think about how broken this dude is. His wife dies, and he has four kids, and he dumps them at an orphanage so that he can have more time to write a book about parenting. His anthropology is just wrong about everything but it’s a really instructive way to get to a counterargument. That’s an example of a book that I think is incredibly flawed, and yet I wish I could read it a few more times with people in common. I could do a lot more popcorn, but MLK, letter from the Birmingham Jail is something that we’ve reflected on again recently.

CHERIE HARDER:

Well, there’s so much more I’d love to ask. In just a minute or two, we’re going to take questions from those of you in the audience. But before that, one last question, and I’m actually going to draw on the beautiful article your daughter Alex wrote for the Free Press. And she said this: Tell me three true things about yourself. If I had to define the parenting style of my father, Ben Sasse, in one sentence, it would be those seven words. After any success or failure, whether jumping with excitement or drenched in tears, my dad asked us to recite three things one that reaffirmed our relationship to God, one that reaffirmed our family’s unconditional love for us, and one that reaffirmed qualities we most valued, like perseverance or grit. Ben, tell me three true things about yourself.

BEN SASSE:

My wife gets all the credit here, she’s the one who started it. But the three questions are about unconditional love from God, unconditional love and acceptance in this family, and now go kick some ass. Like, go be gritty, like go, go fight, win. If you don’t win, the other two things are still true. You’re not earning your salvation and you’re not earning your place in our family. You’re loved, you’re blood, and now go be gritty. Those are roughly my three. I know that my Redeemer lives. I’m unconditionally loved. I have an amazing friend. There’s a lot of stuff that’s not fun right now, and I’m going to spare you. The conversations we have with my hospice doc [are intense]. But Melissa’s going to be my friend to the end. I’m trying to not open up a can of pansy ass here, so I got to go to something more of a joke. February 21st, 1990. I peed down my leg and finished seventh in the state wrestling tournament in Nebraska. And I was supposed to win that tournament the summer before. There’s sort of like a preview for folks who wrestle year-round. There’s a summer state tournament. I won the state tournament easy [the] summer between junior and senior year and in the state tournament, that really mattered, I got seventh instead of winning. I think for five weeks, like from the end of February until April 1st, I don’t think the sun ever shone in Nebraska. It was such a terrible thing to have a terrible wrestling tournament. And now at 54, no joke. I’m super glad I lost. Hhaving won that tournament would have taught me a lot less than losing. You have to be the parent to know to say that. And your kids don’t know that when they’re 17 and they lose something big, they really think it’s the end of the world. They have to know points one and two are true, and then the grit is formed. I again, as the son of a football coach, I know Nick Saban a little bit and I like him just fine, but I kind of get annoyed at how much credit he gets for the way he talks about the process, because this is not unique to him. Every good football coach ever has had the same idea, which is, I don’t golf, but I get the logic of if you miss a shot golfing, when you walk up to the next shot, you should have that last shot be gone out of your consciousness. Now is the time to go and do the thing that’s in front of you. Not have regret about the shot that you just missed. I have many fights with Elon Musk, but one of the things that I am fascinated about, about his spectrum psychology and therefore entrepreneurship is the people around him claim that when they were trying to catch the rockets, when they would miss and it would splash down and the catch of the rocket was a failure, he felt no regret. Like he wasn’t embarrassed about somebody who was going to say, I told you so. It was just a new data point as he built toward the next catch. Like immediately he was living Nick Saban’s “The Process.” It seems to me that’s the only way to live. The vast majority of life is being able to, when something’s great, cherish it [and not] linger when something’s bad. I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m looking forward.

CHERIE HARDER:

Yeah. So now we’re going to take a few questions from those of you in the audience.

Audience Question: Thank you very much for being here today. It’s been great to listen to you, even though I’m a Democrat. I think my question, just like looking at your career in retrospect, you’re obviously a very accomplished person, and we all know that you don’t achieve the things that you’ve achieved without working extremely hard and you’ve kind of alluded to it. But I guess the question I have as someone beginning my career is like when you’re actually in the moment, what is it that drives workaholism and like, when is it work? Workaholism versus just being very committed to your career. What does that feel like? And then how do you know when it’s time to maybe step back, start focusing on your family? Should it be balance the like the whole way through? Like, how do you look at that? Thank you.

BEN SASSE:

Thanks. I think a lot about different chunks of time—the day, the week, the season, the year. It’s pretty interesting that the day is firmly rooted in nature. The year is firmly rooted in nature. The month is, you know, 29 versus 30.5 days is a little different. But the month exists in nature and the tides and the moons. The week doesn’t exist in nature. The week is a theological gift and the switching of the Sabbath from the end of the week to the beginning of the week is pretty

foundational to my identity as a Christian, right? I’m not working to earn something. And then I get to take a break. I get the gift of grace at the beginning of the week, and then I go live a life out of gratitude to that. But it’s not my identity. My identity is in the gift. It seems to me that, you had multiple portions of your question, but the middle portion was on work versus workaholism. Workaholism is the idolatry of trying to self justify and build an identity or build a name for ourselves to build a storehouse that’s sufficient to insulate me against the vicissitudes of seasons and harvests and time. That’s foolish. I can’t do it. I’m not going to succeed. I’m going to get metastasized cancer, or you’re going to have, you know, a bus hit you right at the at the end of the day, we are finite mortals. We can’t earn an identity. We receive an adopted identity as a gift. Then we get to live in response. Then let’s go kick some butt like, let’s go grit it out and do meaningful stuff. I think it’s pretty interesting to not feel underperformance when that rocket’s crashing down into the sea, and you want to solve the engineering riddle of figuring out how we’re going to catch that rocket. A small version of the theology of the week seems to me to also be acknowledging our need for rest daily. Right? Can I, can I stop working? And at the times when my workaholism was at its worst and I—maybe a parenthetical thought—my repentance to my family about workaholism didn’t come after a terminal diagnosis. It was about 3 or 4 years ago that I went to my family and said, I have a problem and I want to repent of my workaholism. the terminal diagnosis is maybe a time where I’ve talked about it more in public, but this was a handful of years ago, and I definitely knew the times when the addictive behavior or the OCD stuff was the worst, and that was when you couldn’t turn off work to go to bed. You couldn’t look at the product of your day, whether it was successful or not, and be grateful that you had the chance to invest in that kind of service. So to me, the week is the theological picture because it’s such an outlier to nature, but in the Lord’s Prayer, being able to pray, give us this day our daily bread means gratitude for basic needs met. Then you get to live a life that’s pretty dang fun. And there’s a lot of diverse callings in this room that are interesting, but they’re not going to bring about heaven. They’re provisional and they’re driven by gratitude.

Audience Question:

Mr. Sasse, thank you so much for being here. I’m a student, so I’m a fairly young person, and you had a lot of really good pieces of advice for people my age [about] education, family, technology. So I was just wondering if you had some thoughts on practical steps you would take as a student or as a young adult, to live a life that sort of really gets the idea of our reliance on God and understands that while still serving Him well. How would you prepare for that as a young person?

BEN SASSE:

And do you mean particularly while you’re a full time student?

Audience Question:

I mean, I’m a full time student, but also just as someone who’s sort of still growing into their lives, building a career, family, that sort of thing.

BEN SASSE:

Maybe two. Two small but very concrete things. One is C.S. Lewis’s essay, Learning in Wartime, I think is an excellent essay. Thinking about how could you possibly study things that are seemingly theoretical or abstract when there’s so much urgent stuff around you where there’s need. There will always be urgent stuff around you that has need. God created us to think his thoughts after him and be fascinated by the structure and diversity of the creation. It’s so much more diverse than we can possibly understand. But I’ve made jokes not being very musically inclined. in some of the podcasts, I never got back to the podcast in that earlier answer. Sorry about that I got to write David Coleman back. I got to follow up with Dangling Participles and an answer to a question in front of my friend Cherie. I’ve made jokes about the relationship between abstract math and music. A handful of times on some podcasts over the last six months. 8/5 is a structure that’s in a lot of music, and there’s something in our brains that seems to yearn for closure in a lot of different and harmony stuff where we’re not satisfied, there’s something incomplete when you don’t finish the last note of that song. And I’ve been stunned at how many big brains have written me notes or letters or emails taking that thought, which I thought was just kind of throwaway line from mine. And they said, well, what do you think the language of heaven is, Sasse? Do you really think we’re all going to learn Hebrew or everybody’s going to learn English or there’s some lost language? Don’t you think the language of heaven is probably going to be music like, whoa, more morphine please. I had never thought about that. There’s a reason why somebody is suffering 2 miles or 20 miles from your house that could always disrupt you from being able to think and study more theoretical stuff. And yet we’re also made to explore the diversity of creation. So I think Lewis is really interesting in that the second thing, and slightly more concrete, but related to the comments I was making critical of institutionalized schooling, I think we should always recognize that schooling really is just a tool, and we should think of tools like that as training wheels. What would it look like when the training wheels aren’t there? And I’m all for more. I don’t want to get near a debate, especially when Coleman introduced us. I see Jeremy’s here from CLT. I was meaning to fight the UC system about the decline of standardized testing. Now I’m just bracketing that so you can know why I look like I’m an errant thought here. We need lots of rigor around testing, to be sure. And yet when you go from 14 to 17 to 20 to 23 to 26, at some point, you shouldn’t give a rip about grades anymore, right? The point should be I want to wrestle with these ideas, and I want to be in conversation with other people who’ve read these books. I think we should have the idea, the end in mind early on that “Mother May I” around schooling is just a temporary thing to learn. Some habits, seven and nine year olds are not going to do without some accountability, but we should get beyond the grades in a hurry to being actually intoxicated by the ideas.

CHERIE HARDER:

And we’ll take one last question.

Audience Question:

Thank you Senator.

BEN SASSE:

This guy is scary.

Audience Question:

Thank you for the comments and for the witness. Faith is obviously hugely important in your life. I wonder if you could share how you think your life would be different without your faith or what would be missing in your life if you didn’t have it? Or conversely, what it’s given to you that that you wouldn’t have if, if you weren’t a person of faith?

BEN SASSE:

There’s the old philosophical adage that the only real question at the end of it all is suicide. And it seems to me that you either distract yourself or everything would become pointless if you agree that death and mortality and finitude are real and you don’t think there’s any future. I think we’re relational beings and God, the Trinity, [has an] internal relationship that overflowed in love and a choice to create and that bizarrely, God desires relationship with us. If that weren’t true, I don’t know why anything else would ever conceivably matter. And so I think the way you get around that the self-medication would be either to deal with that grand abyss or constant distraction. And I think we look at a lot of our neighbors and there’s never been as plentiful opportunity to self delude and self distract as there is right now. I held up the phone earlier, that supercomputer can be used for amazing good. It can also be an unbelievably ubiquitous liar, trying to be a casino in our pocket, distracting us from anything serious. It seems like real adulthood is the ability to turn that off, to sit still, to think long and to wrestle with questions about the good, the true, and the beautiful. And it’s kind of inconceivable to me that you could say, I think there’s nothing else, but let’s still take a trip to Cancun next weekend. Why? It seems pointless to me. So I am unbelievably grateful for having written texts. At our house this weekend we had a devotional that centered on Romans 5, and after Paul has outlined what it looks like to be justified and forgiven, he moves into what suffering is, and it just seems so self-evidently true that suffering can produce perseverance, character, and hope. And I can’t imagine any of us—not Ben Sasse with a terminal diagnosis, but all 900 of us with terminal diagnoses—I can’t imagine dealing with theodicy and suffering without a sense that there was a future with redemption.

CHERIE HARDER:

We’re going to conclude with the last word from Ben.

BEN SASSE:

I will not be anti-climactic. I will simply say I already lost a bet. My 15 year old son pointed at his watch a minute ago because he said, “you won’t actually end by 8:30, Dad. You’ll run long.” So I just want to say thank you to you Cherie, and to your team for hosting us. And there is not time to run through all of the names that we feel such great gratitude to. But Melissa and I, in the last two days as we were heading here, got texts from dozens and dozens of you that we wish we could go out for a drink with after this. And we have been just so touched by your prayers. And to say sincerely, in the second half of Ephesians there is a transition point in the letter where Paul basically says there are four things that characterize Christians. It is a life of gratitude. It is singing, constant singing. What a weird thing to be in a list of only four. Number three singing together. So now it’s half. It’s two of the four. And number four, not thinking of yourselves more highly than you ought, but rather wanting to find a way to get into a service posture. We have had so many family and friends wanting to figure out how to serve us during these last five and a half months. And regularly people will say, well, what can we do besides pray? Like, we’ll definitely pray, but like we want to do something else. Can we bring you more food? And we’re like, honestly, dude, we’re throwing away so much food. Like people have been so generous. Your prayers are real. We feel them. And who knows in God’s providence what the instrumentalities are. But we’re also on a miracle drug now we had a 3 to 4 month life expectancy 5 and a half months ago because for the first time in 40 years, there’s a drug that’s making a difference in pancreatic cancer. And I’m going to die of this, but I would much rather have extra months with my wife and my son as we planned for it than to have just dropped dead immediately when we were diagnosed. I’ll be back in the hospital in Houston tomorrow morning. And at MD Anderson, which is an unbelievable facility, amazing team we have and amazing work that they do in general. 36 people die a day of cancer. That’s the scale of this hospital. And every time we’re there, people come up to us and they feel like we’ve done something to serve them because we’ve been talking about the hope of the resurrection in the face of cancer. And I’m gratified by that chance to give somebody, some stranger, a hug when you’re in line at the clinical trial protocol drug weird pharmacy that they got on the ninth floor. I’m also aware of how many people we’ve met there who are suffering alone. there are a ton of people at that special hospital that don’t have anybody there with them when they’re getting their care. We’ve never once felt alone. We’re grateful to God for the hope of the resurrection. But also incredibly grateful to you all that we’ve felt your prayers and your friendship and we’ve never once felt alone. Thank you.

CHERIE HARDER:

Thank you very much. Thank you and good night.

Thinking About My Dad

2026-06-02T20:55:06.845-07:00

The word “Father” is perhaps the most significant name of the God of the Bible. It occurs 1,488 times and sets Christianity apart from all other religions.

God could have called himself anything but He chose to reveal himself as Father. It was Jesus’ favorite term for addressing God the Father. He prayed “Abba” – papa, daddy – a word of endearment, affection and intimacy. That was something unprecedented in Judaism and in world history. Amazingly God invites us to call him "Abba, Father.” As a dad and grandfather, I’m humbled to think I have been bestowed with a title that God claimed for himself.

For this Father’s Day let us remember that human fatherhood is patterned after divine fatherhood. Every one of us human fathers is an imperfect reflection of our perfectly loving, heavenly Father. Yet the foremost call of every father in this life is to live in such a way that his children glimpse what God the Father is like.

For many of us Fathers’ Day is not easy because we had or have a difficult relationship with our earthly father. Growing up we may not have really known him even if we lived with him. I know something about that. My dad wasn’t there for me. He was absent and we were estranged for much of my life.

My Dad and I never played catch, or hunted or fished together. We never worked on cars, hugged, or just hung out. He never saw me play ball, learn to swim or ride a bike or graduate from high school and college or get married. We never really talked about sports, sex or much of anything else.

He never told me what it means to be a man, or about God and the things of God. I never heard the words, “I’m proud of you son”, “You have what it takes” or “I love you son.”

For most of my life my father was not there. Many of you know the wound of an absent dad. A man’s deepest wounds are not physical but wounds of the soul that render an orphan heart. They often come from the most important man in our lives.

God commands us fathers to care for our children as our Father in heaven lavishly cares for us and to teach them about and live lives of truth, honor and unconditional, sacrificial love.

Forty-six years ago at age 33, I came to faith in Jesus Christ and discovered “the greater love of the Father” that no earthly father can give. I read in Psalm 68:4 that “He is father to the fatherlessness” and realized that I was not fatherless. My real Father is my Heavenly Father - the one we call “Our father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name.” He is Abba Father! Poppa ---Daddy!

In time, by God’s grace, I came to see my need to forgive my father for his absence. I also came to see his sin and brokenness. I began to pray for his soul. As his health deteriorated, my dad confessed and repented before the Lord. Then before drawing his last breath 28 years ago, he made things right with me and the rest of my family.

My dad died in faith and because of that this one thing I know for sure - my dad will be a bigger part of my future than he ever was of my past!

If you’re a father, you can reclaim the damaged relationship with your children and others through Christ. You can commit to leaving legacy to your children of a father who loves them and their mother with the unconditional, sacrificial love of God.

Likewise, God can reconcile you to an absent dad. In Malachi 4:6 we read that God "will turn the hearts of fathers to their children and the hearts of children to their fathers…” That’s exactly what God the Father did for me and my dad! The God of all comfort can fill your aching void and reconcile your broken relationships.

Dave Brown is director and pastor-at-large of the Washington Area Coalition of Men’s Ministries (WACMM), a non-profit, non-denominational organization that helps pastors, church staff and men’s leaders across the region in their ministry to men. He also pastors at Restoration Church DC in Washington DC.

Five Great Books on the American Revolution

2026-06-02T14:48:21.748-07:00

As we celebrate America's 250th anniversary, renowned Christian historian Dr. Thomas Kidd has recommended the top histories about the American Founding. Check them out below:

1) Gordon Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (1991). This is arguably the finest book on the Revolution and its consequences, and more readable than his equally brilliant Creation of the American Republic.

2) David Hackett Fischer, Paul Revere’s Ride(1994). Fischer’s evocative story places Revere in his proper colonial context. After reading this, you’ll understand why it was impossible that Revere would have ever said “The British are coming!”

3) Pauline Maier, American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence (1997). A definitive history of the Declaration, its creation, and the way that Americans came to revere it as a quasi-sacred document.

4) James Byrd, Sacred Scripture, Sacred War: The Bible and the American Revolution (2013). Byrd has dramatically transformed our understanding of how the Bible was actually used in the Revolution. He counted the number of times particular passages were cited in Revolutionary-er a publications. So, for instance, did the Patriots deal with Romans 13 and its strictures against rebellion? It turns out that this passage was the most commonly cited one during the Revolution. I regularly assign this book in courses.

5) Maya Jasanoff, Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World (2011). One of the best books on the Loyalists in the Revolution, Jasanoff’s fascinating account shows why so many Americans – including many evangelical Christians – found themselves defending the British Empire and what she calls the “Spirit of ’83.”

Men and Women Are Equal, Not the Same

2026-05-26T07:10:26.555-07:00

Let it be known: Men and women are not interchangeable. They are equal in dignity, worth, and standing before God, but they are not the same.

Men and women are created in the imago Dei [Gen. 1:27]. Both are worthy of love, honor, and respect. But equality does not mean or require sameness. Men and women are different on many, many levels.

Biologically, men tend toward strength, size, and physical protection. Whereas women are uniquely designed for resilience, life-bearing, and nurturing, capable of sustaining and caring for life in ways men cannot.

Emotionally, women often exhibit heightened sensitivity, with greater empathy, intuition, and emotional attunement. Men often lean toward resolve, problem-solving, steadiness under pressure, and protective instinct.

Relationally, women tend to cultivate connection, often drawing people in, building community, and fostering a sense of belonging. Men tend to establish direction; they will initiate, lead, and take responsibility for others’ well-being.

These differences are not defects. They are gifts. They are not opposites in conflict. They are complements. Like a melody and harmony, they are different by design, each with a distinct function and purpose that make a beautiful song.

We do neither sex justice when we erase the glory of their God-given design. Men and women are most complete when they stand together, not when they compete to become the same.

Scripture calls a husband to live with his wife "in an understanding way, showing honor to the woman as the weaker vessel" [1 Peter 3:7]. That phrase, "weaker vessel,” is not an insult. It is a summons. Peter is not saying women are lesser. He is reminding men that strength is not given for domination, but for protection.

A man is not the weaker vessel because God placed a unique weight on his shoulders to lead, love, protect, provide, and sacrifice. Not because he is more valuable, but because he is more accountable.

Chronologically, Eve sinned first. She was tempted, took the fruit, and ate. Then she gave it to Adam, and he ate [Gen. 3:1–6]. Yet Scripture places the responsibility on Adam. In Romans 5, Paul repeatedly traces sin and death back to "one man…" That man is Adam:

"Sin entered the world through one man…" [v.12]
"Death reigned from the time of Adam…" [v.14]
"Many died by the trespass of the one man…" [v.15]
"Through the disobedience of the one man the many were made sinners" [v.19]

Eve is not mentioned. Adam is accountable. Why? Because Adam was given responsibility. He was created first. He was entrusted with God’s command. He was the head of his household. When God came into the garden, He came looking for Adam [Gen. 3:9]. Even though Eve took the first bite, Adam was responsible for what happened under his watch.

God gave Adam weight long before the fall. And when he refused to carry what God gave him, chaos ensued. God is not a God of chaos, but of order. From the opening pages of Scripture, you see it… Light separated from darkness, land from sea, man from woman. Distinction is not accidental, it is intentional.

And that order is not oppressive. It is life-giving. When God’s created order is embraced, things flourish. When it is denied, chaos and death ensue.

In the home, a man who carries responsibility with humility and courage creates a sense of safety. Not control, but security. His leadership is not loud or domineering; it is steady, sacrificial, and present. A woman, free to fully live in her strength, wisdom, and relational depth, brings warmth, beauty, and life to the home. Children grow up seeing strength and tenderness working together, not competing. They learn what love looks like with skin on it. They learn that authority can be trusted and that care is strong.

But when that order is denied, the home begins to fracture.

If a man abdicates, withdraws, or refuses to carry, someone else must pick up the weight. Often, it’s the woman. And when she is forced to carry both her design and his, something begins to bend. Resentment creeps in. Exhaustion sets in. The home may still function, but it loses its balance. The music is still playing, but it’s out of tune.

Or the opposite… When a man overreaches, using strength to control rather than serve, the home becomes unsafe. What was meant to protect begins to crush. This is why Dallas Willard said, "The primary work of God is finding men to whom he can entrust his power…" Abuse or neglect will break a home. Biblical masculinity is neither control nor passivity. It is entrusted strength, a strength that is submitted to God, shaped by love, and poured out for the good of others.

In the church, God’s order is meant to display something bigger than us; it is a living picture of Christ and His Bride. When men step into their God-ordained roles [pastor, elder, overseer] with humility and strength, the church is strengthened. Not because men are better, but because they are bearing the responsibility God gave them. When women are honored, empowered, and fully engaged in the life of the church, using their gifts, wisdom, and discernment, the body becomes whole rather than fractured.

But when we reject God’s design, two things usually happen: men disappear and women are diminished. If men disengage, the church becomes passive, overly cautious, and thin on conviction. It may be kind, but it lacks backbone. Truth gets softened. Courage fades. If women are sidelined or undervalued, the church becomes cold, rigid, and relationally shallow. It may be doctrinally precise, but it lacks warmth and care.

God never intended either extreme. His design is not domination or erasure. It is interdependence under His authority.

In the broader culture, the effects multiply. When men are told there is nothing uniquely required of them, they will default to nothing. Passivity, escapism, addiction, and aimlessness rush in to fill the void. A man without a call to carry will eventually find something lesser to hold… comfort, pleasure, control, or nothing at all.

When women are told their distinct design is a limitation rather than a strength, they are pressured to live against the grain of their creation. And even if they succeed by the world’s standards, there is a quiet dissonance. Success without alignment always comes at a cost.

We are watching this play out in real time. Confusion in identity/roles has created an instability in families. Confusion in identity/roles has created a splintered church. Confusion in identity/roles has created a culture that is both louder and more fragile than ever.

When you reject God’s order, you don’t get freedom. You get fragmentation. But if we return to it, men and women will find their unique place and the peace that comes with it.

God’s design is not a cage. It is a framework for flourishing. It tells a man… "Carry the weight I’ve given you. Not with pride, but with purpose."

It tells a woman… "You are not an afterthought. You are essential, powerful, and integral to what I am building."

And it tells both… "You were never meant to compete. You were meant to reflect Me, together.

When that happens, when men carry, and women cultivate under God’s good design, you don’t just get order. You get life.

by Dr, Chris Harper, a speaker, writer, and disciple-maker serving as the CEO of BetterMan. He received his Masters degree from Dallas Theological Seminary and his Doctorate from the Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary.

How To Resist the Devil

2026-05-26T06:37:51.232-07:00

Be sober-minded; be watchful. Your adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour. Resist him, firm in your faith, knowing that the same kinds of suffering are being experienced by your brotherhood throughout the world. (1 Pet5:8–9)

As we submit to God, trusting our troubles into his care and keeping, we maintain control over our thoughts and emotions, fixing our eyes on him in a spirit of watchful expectation. This is the third time in the letter Peter has instructed God’s people to be “sober-minded,” or self-controlled. Here in 5:8 sober-mindedness is about safeguarding ourselves from the devil’s schemes. Until the Lord returns or calls us home, we will have to contend with this formidable enemy. Peter calls him our “adversary,” which is utterly appropriate, given that his mission is to destroy God’s glory by destroying God’s people. Peter likens the devil’s work to a ferocious lion that prowls around in search of prey. For most of us, our exposure to lions is limited to zoos and movies, so we don’t get just how terrifying this image was to the very first readers of Peter’s letter. To them, lions were the ferocious beasts let loose in Roman amphitheaters to tear people limb from limb.

That’s exactly what the devil tries to do to Christians, but ultimately he can’t succeed because Jesus’s power is greater. In the short run, though, he does all he can to discourage our faith, tempt us to sin, and paint God in an unloving light. He may be a ferocious lion now, but he won’t be forever. That role is reserved for “the Lion of the tribe of Judah,” who is Jesus himself (Rev. 5:5).

The devil’s prowling conveys the idea of stealth, of sneaking up on an intended victim, which is why God’s people must also be “watchful” (1 Pet. 5:8). Being wise to the ways of the devil is especially important during seasons of suffering, because we are more vulnerable to temptations like doubt and unbelief.

So being sober-minded and watchful is vital, but those traits aren’t by themselves sufficient to avoid the devil’s schemes. Peter says we must also actively “resist him.” We do this not by attempting to rebuke him or cast him out, as some claim. We simply don’t have the power to go head to head with the devil. The way to resist is by immersing ourselves in God’s word. We resist by feeding our faith in the company of God’s people. We resist by obeying God’s commands and seeking to please him. And we resist by prayer.

To this Peter adds that knowing we aren’t alone in our suffering is another aid in resisting the devil’s attempts to devour (v. 9). Suffering is more difficult to bear when we think that no one understands what we’re going through. Shared hardships have a bonding effect as sufferers offer sympathy and encouragement to one another.

Lydia Brownback is the author of several books in addition to the Flourish Bible Study series, including the On-the-Go Devotionals for women; Finding God in My Loneliness; and Sing a New Song. She is a regular speaker at conferences and events and is passionate about teaching God's word.

Our Battle with Anxiety

2026-05-25T13:20:04.566-07:00

In recent decades, more and more has been written about the gross epidemic of anxiety and loneliness in
the culture and in the church.

In my last 27 years of pastoral ministry, I’ve noted these terrific battles have been growing parts of my counseling and mentoring. Too many of us are even anxious to talk about them with other believers. In my own case, I’ve learned that when I treasure and delight in Christ more and more, and as I more routinely preach the Gospel to myself, I'm less anxious and less isolated.

Below is a brief devotional piece by Alistair Begg about anxiety.

1 Peter 5:6–7
“Humble yourselves, therefore, under the mighty hand of God so that at the proper time he may exalt you, casting all your anxieties on him, because he cares for you.”

Anxiety can creep up at times when we least expect it and quickly overwhelm us. Or it can take up unwelcome and apparently permanent residence in our lives. Few people do not experience it; it may take on different faces, and it may be propelled by different circumstances, but the issue itself is remarkably common.

When we face anxiety, we often try to ignore it by distracting our minds: “Let me listen to some music. Let me go for a drive. Let me run a mile. Let me do something… just let me run away!”

Notice, though, that in this verse, Peter does not say we are to deny, ignore, or flee from anxiety. Instead, we should be “casting all [our] anxieties on him.” The Greek word for “cast” here is a decisive, energetic action word. It could be used to describe throwing out a bag of trash. We don’t put painstaking effort into moving it; we simply grab it and hurl it into the bin. Likewise, instead of going through our days pressed down by the burden of anxiety, we are to throw it, hurl it, upon the Lord.

To do this requires us to give up our pride—our desire to control and triumph over circumstances. Being humble is what enables us to give our worries to God: humility’s presence leads to anxiety’s absence. When we attempt to take matters into our own hands through too much worry, we indicate an absence of humility; we’re more concerned with ourselves than with our heavenly Father, or we’re more determined to navigate our own course than to leave it to Him.

There will always be a circumstance that can make us anxious. Peter doesn’t address any specific circumstances, though; rather, he addresses the anxiety produced by the circumstances. Our anxiety itself is what we cast upon the Lord, doing exactly what the Bible says to do: humbling ourselves under God’s hand, saying, “My Father knows best. He cares for me better than I can care for myself.” When worries weigh us down, we can refuse to be burdened by them by calling to mind the Lord’s willingness to help.

You might be struggling through today, wondering how you’re going to make it to tomorrow. Perhaps it’s been a long time since you knelt beside your bed and truly cast your burden upon the only one who is able to carry it, saying, “God, I cannot live my life with this burden on my back.

Take it. It’s Yours.

If that’s you, don’t hesitate any longer. Cast your anxieties into the loving arms of your heavenly Father and experience the freedom and peace only He can provide.

QUESTIONS FOR THOUGHT

How is God calling me to think differently?
How is God reordering my heart’s affections — what I love?
What is God calling me to do as I go about my day today?

FURTHER READING

Luke 12:22–34 - Do Not Be Anxious

22 And he said to his disciples, “Therefore I tell you, do not be anxious about your life, what you will eat, nor about your body, what you will put on. 23 For life is more than food, and the body more than clothing. 24 Consider the ravens: they neither sow nor reap, they have neither storehouse nor barn, and yet God feeds them. Of how much more value are you than the birds! 25 And which of you by being anxious can add a single hour to his span of life?[a] 26 If then you are not able to do as small a thing as that, why are you anxious about the rest? 27 Consider the lilies, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. 28 But if God so clothes the grass, which is alive in the field today, and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, how much more will he clothe you, O you of little faith! 29 And do not seek what you are to eat and what you are to drink, nor be worried. 30 For all the nations of the world seek after these things, and your Father knows that you need them. 31 Instead, seek his[b] kingdom, and these things will be added to you. 32 “Fear not, little flock, for it is your Father's good pleasure to give you the kingdom. 33 Sell your possessions, and give to the needy. Provide yourselves with moneybags that do not grow old, with a treasure in the heavens that does not fail, where no thief approaches and no moth destroys. 34 For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.

The New Testament Difference: Being Indwelt By The Holy Spirit

2026-05-06T10:52:00.000-07:00

Sometimes, I hear people talk about the different men and women of the Old Testament, and there is a hint
of jealousy. They may say it, or just insinuate it, but here's what they communicate...

'What would it have been like to hear God's voice and see him move in such powerful ways? I wish it was the same for us as it was for those whose stories we read about in scripture. When I get to heaven I can't wait to ask David, Elijah, or Moses what it was like.' But I think it will be just the opposite in heaven.

Before we can ask David what it was like to slay a giant, to win the battles, he'll say, Tell me what it was like on earth to have the Holy Spirit inside of you, giving you strength when you are weak.

We might say to Elijah, What was it like to call down fire from heaven before the prophets of Baal and to raise that boy from the dead? And I think Elijah might say, yeah, he actually ended up dying again. You tell me what it's like to have God living inside of you. What was it like to live life on earth with the Holy Spirit giving you joy when you're depressed or giving you the power to overcome that sin in your life?

We might say to Moses, What was it like to follow the cloud by day and the fire by night? What was it like to meet with God on that Mountain? And Moses might say, I had to climb that mountain to meet with God. You tell me what it was like to have him dwell in you everyday. What was it like to have the Holy Spirit giving you directions when you didn't know what to do or where to go?

Kyle Idleman, “Not a Fan: Becoming a Completely Committed Follower of Jesus”

Stop Lying and Believing Lies About Your Choice Sin

2026-05-06T05:27:00.000-07:00

Rosario Butterfield

"...It's a sin to tell a lie, but it's also a sin to believe a lie. And so, there is no such thing as a gay man or a
lesbian woman or a transgender woman (and then you can fill in all of the different categories that come under the umbrella, LGBTQ).

“And the reason is because, in Genesis where we have to start, we are given our identity. Our identity is in the image of God, bearing it as a man or as a woman. There are two kinds of people in the world—a man or a woman.

“A man who says he's a gay man is a man with a sin pattern that Jesus came to help set him free from if he will mortify it, repent, believe, go to war. It's very hard to do that. I'm not suggesting it's easy, but that is our job, and you know what? It's not just somebody whose indwelling sin is homosexuality who happens to have that call. It's everyone, because we are all born in the sin of Adam. And it is because of the sin of Adam that we have sin in our nature.

“And that quite frankly means that every person in this room needs to wake up every morning, drive a thousand fresh nails into your choice sin and do that before breakfast and then do the same thing before lunch. And if you do that, Satan's gonna get a little tired of you.

“But here's the problem, homosexuality is the only sin pattern with a civil rights group behind it. And therefore, people who are deceived, as I was and Christopher [Yuan], by the lusts of our flesh have a cheering community behind you, and this is where you get the rub.

“You see, it used to be that the church was clear and the world was the world, but because we have wolves in shepherds' clothing, we have way too many young people who are leaving the true church and claiming, 'Well, my same-sex attracted pastor told me it's not a sin to be gay.'

And you know, we are to be wise as serpents and gentle as doves. I want to be gentle with the people who are trapped in the lie of LGBTQ, but I am not gentle with the wolves...I quite frankly think they need to get a job selling insurance until they repent..."

Rosaria Butterfield is a former tenured professor of English and women’s studies at Syracuse University, converted to Christ in what she describes as a train wreck. Her memoir, The Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert: An English Professor’s Journey into Christian Faith (Crown and Covenant, 2012), chronicles her conversion. Rosaria is married to Kent, a Reformed Presbyterian pastor in North Carolina. She is a mother, grandmother, author, and speaker.

Raised and educated in liberal Roman Catholic settings, Rosaria loved books and philosophy. In her late twenties, allured by feminist philosophy and LGBTQ+ politics, she adopted a lesbian identity. Rosaria earned her PH.D. from The Ohio State University (1992), then served in the English department and women's studies program from 1992 to 2002, earning tenure in 1999. Her primary academic field was critical theory, specializing in queer theory. Her historical field was 19th-century literature, informed by Freud, Hegel, Marx, and Darwin, with a special interest in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. She advised LGBTQ+ student groups, co-authored Syracuse University’s domestic partnership policy for same-sex couples, and actively lobbied for LGBTQ+ legal advancements alongside her lesbian partner.

In 1997, while Rosaria was researching the Religious Right “and their politics of hatred against people like me,” she wrote an article against The Promise Keepers. Local Reformed Presbyterian pastor Ken Smith responded to that article, and Rosaria regularly met with Ken and his wife, Floy, over dinners in their home. Ken and Floy became a resource on the Religious Right and the Bible they loved. Eventually, they became her confidantes. In 1999, after reading through the Bible multiple times under Ken and Floy’s care, Rosaria converted to Christianity.

Rosaria has written four books: The Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert (Crown and Covenant, 2012), detailing her cataclysmic conversion and the Lord’s beautiful faithfulness. Openness Unhindered (Crown and Covenant, 2015) answers many of the questions Rosaria received about identity, repentance, and faith before the Supreme Court’s Obergefell decision (2015). The Gospel Comes with a House Key (Crossway, 2018) chronicles how the Lord used a humble couple’s simple invitation to dinner to draw her - a radical, committed unbeliever—to himself. Inviting readers into her house, Rosaria shows how we can use hospitality in evangelism in a world that increasingly despises Christianity. In Five Lies of our Anti-Christian Age (Crossway, 2024), Rosaria identifies the cataclysmic shift against the Christian faith in our post-Obergefell world by identifying how LGBTQ+ has become the reigning idol of our day codified into law. Offering gospel hope to people trapped in the lies of our culture and helping parents of children who have become casualties of these lies, Five Lies of our Anti-Christian Age helps Christians “contend for the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints” (Jude 3), and to do so with joy.

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