“Are you more excited about the book or the podcast?”

I’ve had a few friends ask me that question in recent months because, whenever I’m talking about The Lord Is My Light, I keep pinging back and forth between the two. At this point, it’s hard to fully separate the one from the other.

The volume, releasing this week—a handsome, cloth-over-board book with more than 1,400 cream-colored pages—was started in large part because of the vision for a podcast. And yet the podcast (which launches on December 1) follows each daily liturgy word for word. To me, it’s all one project.

How ‘The Lord Is My Light’ Came to Be

In case you’ve missed me talking about this project, let me bring you up to speed. Back in 2019, I put together a little book that takes readers through all the psalms in 30 days, arranged for three-times-a-day prayer. Next came the Life of Jesus in 30 Days, and then Letters of Paul in 30 Days, both following the same structure for daily prayer. The more people benefited from these prayer books, the more I started fielding requests for a podcast version.

I loved the idea of doing a podcast, but it seemed unwieldy to try to release three episodes a day. What’s more, the kind of podcast I was most interested in wouldn’t be a simple audio companion. I wanted to create an atmosphere of soundscapes—an audio sanctuary that would draw listeners into a sacred space that felt simple, yet otherworldly, with just the right level of ambience and repetition to focus our attention on the Word of the Lord, and to help us join our hearts to the voices praying the words of our forefathers and mothers in the faith.

So, in 2024, I worked on a pilot episode with Scott Slucher and the amazing team responsible for the excellent production of my podcast with the North American Mission Board, Reconstructing Faith. Once the team at Holman heard it, they asked me to put on my liturgist cap and compile daily prayer guides for every day of the year.

What Does ‘The Lord Is My Light’ Daily Liturgy Look Like?

First, I mapped out the main readings for each day of the year, broadly following the outline of the church year, while ensuring every book of the Bible was represented. Once the primary readings were established, I began to surround those readings with additional elements for the daily liturgy, working to keep each day close to the same length and making choices that would align with various biblical themes.

Here’s the pattern for every day.

Call to Prayer

Each day begins with a biblical truth or expression of praise, taken directly from a verse of Scripture or from a traditional call to worship, corresponding thematically to the season of the church year or the daily reading.

Confession of Faith

Next, you recite a passage of Scripture, an ancient creed, a portion of an older confession, or the words from a contemporary statement of faith.

The two creeds most often presented are the Apostles’ Creed and the Nicene Creed. The scriptural passages, creedal in design, include the ancient Hebrew confession of faith called the Shema (Deut. 6:4–5), the apostle Paul’s announcement of the resurrection (1 Cor. 15:3–6), his hymns celebrating the identity and exaltation of the Son of God (Phil. 2:6–11; Col. 1:15–20), and his “trustworthy saying” about the ascended Lord (1 Tim. 3:16).

I include lightly contemporized selections from the confessions and catechisms of the Reformation and post-Reformation era: the Belgic Confession (1561), the Heidelberg Catechism (1563), the Second London Baptist Confession (1689), and the New Hampshire Baptist Confession of Faith (1833). Also featured are the Protestant affirmations that make up the Reforming Catholic Confession, a beautiful summary released in 2017 in commemoration of the 500th anniversary of the Reformation.

As for contemporary expressions of faith among global evangelicals, you’ll encounter the Lausanne Covenant (1974), the Cape Town Commitment (2010), and the Seoul Statement (2024).

Confession of Sin

The confessions of sin that most often recur come from The Book of Common Prayer, including a lightly contemporized form of Thomas Cranmer’s well-crafted 1552 confession. Other expressions of repentance come from Scripture (Ps. 51:1–2), the Jesus Prayer (adapted from Luke 18:13), or ancient cries for mercy (Kyrie eleison, Agnus Dei).

Other confessions of sin are also featured: the fourth-century Liturgy of Jerusalem and St. James, several Puritan prayers from The Valley of Vision, and the words of a wide range of influential church leaders throughout Christian history (Clement of Rome, Ambrose, Gregory of Nazianzus, Augustine, Bucer, Bullinger, Wilberforce, etc.). After every confession of sin comes a verse of Scripture intended to assure the repentant heart of God’s love and pardon.

Canticle

Next comes a hymn or song, typically taken from or inspired by the Scriptures. Not surprisingly, the psalms make up the largest selection of canticles, and I’ve included at least a portion of all 150 psalms.

You’ll also find additional scriptural poems and songs, including those from the prophets, especially Isaiah. Several scriptural songs that show up frequently are Mary’s and Zechariah’s songs of praise from Luke 1 and the songs of the Lamb from Revelation. A couple ancient hymns from church history also appear (the Te Deum and the Sanctus).

Often, the canticles will align thematically with the reading for the day, to bring to the surface the intertextual connections in the Scriptures. For example, a song of restoration from the prophets may precede a reading where Christ’s ministry brings about an initial fulfillment of God’s promise. Or a psalm of David may precede or follow a moment in his life that prompted its composition.

Reading

The readings don’t cover every word of the Bible, but they do feature selections from every scriptural author, so that in the scope of one year, the full chorus of all the inspired writers of God’s Word can be heard.

I’ve used the Christian Standard Bible translation. The design of readings follows, generally, the season of the church year, yet I’ve often linked the readings thematically with other elements of this liturgy, so the intertextual connections between the Old and New Testaments are made clear.

Gloria & The Lord’s Prayer

After listening to God’s Word, you give glory to our triune God—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—now and throughout all eternity. Then, you pray as our Lord Jesus instructed.

Intercessions and Personal Requests

Every day’s liturgy offers a time to pray spontaneously about whatever is most on your heart and mind. Sometimes, this moment will be marked most by praise. Other times, it may be deep lament.

You can intercede for our family and friends, for those in your church, for missionaries and workers in far-flung lands. You can ask for the Lord’s guidance in the day ahead, for wisdom in the decisions you make, for the healing of those you know who are sick.

It may be helpful to keep close a set of cards where you make a list of people you’ve committed to praying for. This time of personal intercession can be as short or long as you need it to be.

Prayer of the Church

The prayers of the church come from a wide variety of sources. Here you’ll encounter our forefathers and mothers in the faith—from the earliest Christians like Clement of Rome, to African church fathers like Athanasius and Augustine, to medieval voices like Anselm, to reformers like Martin Luther, and to preachers like Charles Spurgeon.

You’ll find a range of voices, from the martyr Anna of Freiburg, to the novelist Jane Austen, to the social reformer William Wilberforce, to the missionary Amy Carmichael, to the slave-turned-church-founder Richard Allen.

I’ve lightly adapted and updated these prayers for contemporary use. My hope is that curiosity about the names and dates included here will lead you to learn more about those whose prayers have been passed down to us.

Blessing

The liturgy concludes with a blessing taken from Scripture, an expression of hopeful promise for the Lord to work in and through us.

These daily liturgies provide intentional repetition from week to week, often returning to the same canticle or confession of faith multiple times throughout the year, or repeating a particular confession of sin every couple of weeks or once a month. This repetition is meant to encourage memorization. At the same time, the variety is meant to keep you engaged so you don’t fall into merely rote recitations.

Finding the right balance between familiarity and freshness is more an art than a science. My aim has been to provide a fixed order, designed for a familiar flow of elements, and a variety of prayers and readings to keep the experience fresh.

Several have asked if this can be used for family devotions. The answer is yes! There are instructions in the introduction for how to adapt this daily liturgy for family or church use.

‘The Lord Is My Light’ Podcast

I’m so thankful for the 100-plus people who have lent their voices to the podcast version. We’ve enlisted contributors from across the country and around the world—various regional accents and tones, pastors and laypeople, young and old, men and women, singers and songwriters. Some are names you’d recognize, but no one is seeking credit or attribution.

I’ve asked every participant to not just recite the words aloud but actually address God, so that the recording captures a genuine act of speech directed to God. For my own portions, we’ve recorded a fresh version for every single day—no copying from previous sessions.

Scott Slucher and his team have focused on the sonic experience of the podcast. Each episode will open with a familiar melodic line from an ancient hymn suited to the season of the church year. (For example, “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel” during Advent, “Joy to the World” during the 12 days of Christmas.)

Then we settle into an ambient soundscape that supports the flow of the liturgy. The Scripture reading for the day is set apart with no background music at all, because we want to heighten the stillness of hearing only God’s Word during those minutes. The result is a 10–12-minute audio sanctuary.

Join Us!

The Lord Is My Light as a printed volume begins shipping any day now (and with some retailers has already shipped!). You can order it wherever books are sold, and you begin with whatever the liturgy is for the day you receive it.

For the podcast, you can go ahead and listen to the trailer and subscribe. (Check it out on Spotify or Apple.) Beginning December 1, a new episode will release every day.

I pray you’ll receive this daily liturgy as a gift. These prayers and Scriptures intend to help you place yourself before God, day after day, with open hands. We trust that God, by his Spirit and the power of his Word, will shape us into people who rest in his grace, pray in the truth, and walk in the light as he is in the light (1 John 1:7).

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Thomas Watson is my favorite Puritan. He lived from 1620 to 1686 during a tumultuous period of English history and served as pastor of St. Stephen’s Walbrook in London for 20 years. For the first time, all his works have been collected into one series, handsomely designed and published by Reformation Heritage. I’ve been reading through the first volume, one sermon a day.

In London in 1679, Watson preached a message called “Light in Darkness”—an encouragement to believers in England during a period of distress and despondency. Watson acknowledged the situation was grim. He likened England to the disciples’ boat in the Gospels, in danger of being swamped (Mark 4:35–41). Yet he exhorted his congregation not to mourn the state of the world like those without hope.

Nearly 350 years later, surveying our cultural moment and the darkness in our world, I find wisdom in Watson’s counsel. His sermon remains a ballast for believers in stormy seas. Let me sum up the sermon and lay out his suggestions for persevering.

Promise of Light

There’s no better place to go than the psalms during a time of turbulence. Here, Watson says, we find what we need, “exactly fitted to every Christian’s condition.” If your affections for God are frozen, here you can “fetch fire.” If you’re weak in grace, the psalms give you armor. If you’re feeling faint, the psalms are medicine to reinvigorate you.

For this sermon, Watson chose as his text Psalm 112:4:

“These words are calculated for the comfort of God’s Church in all ages,” Watson says. “This text is like Israel’s pillar of fire, which gave light in the wilderness. Or it is like the mariner’s lantern, to give light in a dark night.”

No matter how dark the moment or how despondent we may feel, we trust it is “God’s great design to lighten his people’s darkness.”

Watson doesn’t shy away from the situation or minimize the severity of cultural decay. No, the uttering of this promise implies even righteous people will experience nighttime. “Godliness does not exempt us from suffering.” Dark seasons will fall over us.

God’s people may even experience “a night of desertion” where the smiling beams of God’s favor are fully withdrawn, leaving only darkness. When the sun is eclipsed and the circumstances dire, believers can shine brightest by responding with faith and patience, and those signs of grace bring glory to God. “We prefer our comforts,” he says, “but God prefers the actings of our graces.”

How do we persevere through dark times? How do we keep from losing hope? How do we move forward? How should we behave in a time of cultural decay? Here are several suggestions I’ve drawn from Watson’s sermon.

1. Remember others who are faithful.

The upright are never alone. Unpacking this verse, Watson describes the upright as full of grace and holiness, full of compassion and charitableness, and full of righteousness and fairness. They fear God. They feed the poor. They do to others as they would have others do to them.

The upright begin with the right principle—faith. They act by the right rule—the Word of God. And they have the right goal in mind—the glory of God.

What spark of light should bring you comfort in a dark world? The realization that “there are many upright ones in the land.” If God’s judgment is delayed, surely it is, in part, because of all the godly who remain faithful. The upright are “the flower and cream of the creation” and “the glory of Christ,” Watson says. It’s for their sake God may choose to extend mercy and grace to a wayward nation.

It’s easy to become so distraught at the state of the world that we overlook the points of light that dot the landscape. Across our country and around the world, we can find thousands of healthy churches. Good organizations engage in God-honoring ministry. There are believers who seek justice. Christians who show compassion. Ordinary churchgoers doing their best to follow Christ daily. Disciples devoted to loving God and loving others.

Watson encourages us to celebrate the contributions of God’s people in the land, to take heart when we see candle after candle—the little points of light that keep the world from succumbing to the shadows.

2. Search your heart and pray.

When distressed at the state of the world, “go into your chambers,” Watson says. By this, he means both the prayer closet and the inner chambers of your heart. Search yourself. Meditate on God’s Word. Lean into mighty prayer.

“Prayer is the wall and bulwark of the land,” Watson says. “The key of prayer, oiled with tears and turned with the hand of faith, unlocks God’s heart.” The vision of prayer in this sermon imagines a warrior striving powerfully in intercession for the world.

Watson’s exhortation is daring: “Prayer finds God free—but it leaves him bound.” The only way Watson can make such a striking statement is by holding God to his promise to never wholly leave us. We believe “Christ Jesus, praying over our prayers again, presents them to his Father and perfumes them with his sweet fragrance, which makes them go up as incense.”

As you mourn the state of the world, look at the state of your heart, Watson says. Don’t neglect the inner self. Is it possible we’re busy serving God but don’t love him? Do we cry for the world but fail to cry out for the living God? “Are we carried up to heaven in a fiery chariot of love?”

It’s pointless to try to set the world right if all isn’t well between us and God. What evidence is there that we belong to heaven? Should we not bemoan the little faith we have and plead for more? Watson challenges us not only to look at the dire and desperate circumstances around us but also to look inside to see how things stand between us and God. The darkness outside should prompt clarity inside.

3. Rest in God’s promise of mercy.

To retreat to the inner chambers of the heart, searching ourselves for signs of salvation and fervor for God, would only lead to more despair if not for the mercy of God. When you see the remaining sin in your heart and mourn the brokenness of our world, take hold of the comfort God has promised to those who mourn! God promises strength for the weary and a crown of glory for the one who endures. Jesus tells us he will never leave us or forsake us. We take refuge in his Word.

God’s promises are sparks that lighten the path when the night is darkest. We remember God’s mercy, the attribute “he loves most of all to magnify,” Watson says. It is mercy that pleases him, “as natural for him to show mercy as for the bee to give honey.” Resting in God’s character and promises, we trust him to extend mercy, even when our country is undeserving.

The mercy God promises isn’t only for salvation but also for healing. Mercy can heal the backsliding of God’s people, Watson says. When we pray, do we believe in the power of healing mercy? Do we really believe God can reclaim the persecutor, soften the hardened heart, and bring back believers who have gone astray? Unless we believe in the power of God to bring renewal, and unless we believe in the heart of God—that he wants to show mercy—we will not pray. We will lose hope.

4. Commit yourselves to the Lord’s protection, and wait for God to move.

Watson urges his congregation to commit themselves to God’s protection, trusting him to safeguard and keep them. To commit your way to the Lord is to entrust yourself to his care. We soldier on, following the Lord’s instruction and trusting him to look on us with favor and love. It’s our responsibility to cast our cares on God, Watson says, and it’s God’s responsibility to take care of us. We are the orphans; he is the guardian. We are the children; he is the father.

We express our faith by waiting for God to move. We wait for the dawn to appear on the horizon. We wait for the night to pass and the morning light to appear. We believe God can and will move. “God can suddenly disperse the black clouds,” Watson says. “God can create light; God can strike a straight stroke by a crooked stick; God can remove the mountains that lie in our way until light arises.”

With patience, we expect and await God’s blessing. We invest ourselves in prayer, trusting we’ll receive rich returns of mercy. We long to see peace and truth prevail. We seek to shine the beauty of holiness against the contrast of a dark night. All our current struggle will be worth it when we witness the triumphal procession of Christ and all the upright honored and renowned “like the wings of a dove covered with yellow gold.”

Watson closed his sermon with Isaiah 30:18, describing the heart of God toward us in seasons of discouragement. Fitting words for a fearful age:

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I have a handful of friends in the world of theology and apologetics who have experienced serious and sustained doubts about the existence of God or the truth of the gospel. Some grew up in church, later became skeptical of their childhood faith, and embraced the label “agnostic” or atheist for a time, but were then drawn back to a more robust and intellectually satisfying Christian profession.

I have other apologist-friends who didn’t grow up Christian at all. They started out on the fence about God and only began to wrestle with the big questions of life once they hit their high school or college years.

One benefit these colleagues have in conversation with skeptics is their personal experience. They can address others’ doubts from a place of having lived with those doubts themselves. They’ve been there.

Unlike these friends, I can’t point to a time I considered myself agnostic or atheist, or even on the fence about Christianity. Though I’ve known seasons of suffering and disillusionment, I have no story of losing, then regaining, my faith. I first believed the gospel as a child, and my earliest confession of faith has only deepened over time.

But even if my testimony isn’t as dramatic as some of my friends’, it isn’t the case that I’ve never dealt with doubts about God and the gospel. I have. I still do.

Doubts I Encounter

In our secular age, faith is one option among many. All kinds of beliefs are contested. Charles Taylor describes our culture as “cross-pressured,” pulled in two directions at once—toward a materialist account of reality and a world of fullness and awe that points beyond itself.

It’s no wonder, then, that believers often fend off doubts and wrestle with faith commitments taken for granted in the past, and unbelievers are often haunted by transcendence that leads them to question their unbelief. In a cross-pressured age, we’re not surprised to see faith coexisting with doubt in some measure. Nor is it strange to see skeptics doubt their doubts.

My doubts regarding Christianity have never ganged up on me all at once, to pin me down and keep me in existential angst. They’ve never caused me to question my identity as a Christian or my place among God’s people. (I’m thankful that’s the case, especially when I hear the stories of friends who have traveled the hard road of faith deconstruction and reconstruction.) But I do deal with doubt on occasion, and new objections about God and questions about our world lead me to ponder Christianity’s veracity.

It’s often said that the ministry of apologetics is beneficial not only for showing nonbelievers the reasonableness of the Christian faith but also for strengthening the faith of believers, helping us remain faithful when doubts arise and linger. I’ve found this to be the case.

So I’d like to share three of the apologetic arguments I keep returning to, that keep drawing me back to the central truths of Christianity. They may not land as powerfully for you as they do for me, but I hope they provide signposts for a few well-trodden paths when your own doubts arise.

Argument for a Creator

The cosmological arguments for the existence of a Creator God lean heavy into logic—the tracing back of everything that is, until we attribute the universe to a cause beyond itself, some kind of necessary being to ground our reality. The ontological argument from Anselm still makes a strange kind of sense, no matter how much it has been pilloried over the centuries. Several arguments from human experience (consciousness, reason, desire, and universal religiosity) build a strong cumulative case.

But it’s the teleological argument that proves most persuasive to me. I can’t get over the design of this world and the level of fine-tuning necessary for human life. Surely the physical constants of the universe don’t fall within such narrow ranges by chance! And the more I consider the order, complexity, and purpose on display in nature, the more I’m convinced there is a mind behind it all.

The argument from design is often described with William Paley’s analogy of finding a watch on the ground. No one would assume the intricacy of the watch is the product of random chance, he says, although some argue this is, in fact, the case—it’s only the appearance of design, wrought by natural selection. (Richard Dawkins is in this camp.)

Others propose a multiverse hypothesis: Of course, we live in a universe amenable to life, because that’s the only kind of universe we could exist in! And if there are a potentially infinite number of universes, each with its own constants, then one like ours is bound to show up somewhere.

For me, the multiverse speculation just pushes the question further back without ever addressing the crux of the design argument. Who or what generates multiple universes, each with its own finely tuned laws? As fascinating as these thought experiments with string theory or inflationary cosmology may be, they avoid the central question.

But let me be more specific: It’s not the argument from design and fine-tuning by itself that draws me back to my belief in a Creator. It’s the teleological arguments plus the human experience of beauty pointing to something beyond the material world—that’s what resonates most with me. It’s the fine-tuning and design we see both in the world and in human cultural artifacts—and what this beauty stirs in the heart. I find all these points of light to be like pinholes in the ceiling of immanence, laying waste the claim that nothing exists beyond this material world.

Peter Kreeft sums up one argument from beauty this way: “There is the music of Johann Sebastian Bach. Therefore there must be a God.” The point is that when we encounter beauty, our hearts are arrested. You’re compelled to love it and know it.

Why is this the case? There must be something about music that goes beyond the notes on the page, that touches the edges of the transcendent. (Not long ago, I heard a commenter on a podcast reference Whitney Houston’s show-stopping 10-minute medley at a 1994 awards show and say something like “I’m not religious at all, but I can’t help but believe in God when I watch that performance.” At first glance, that statement seems nonsensical, yet many people nod along because they know what it’s getting at.)

Something about the teleological argument from design, when combined with the way music works—the intricacy of what makes something beautiful and coherent—packs a powerful punch.

The more we learn about the inner workings of the world, and the more science reveals the complexity of DNA, the more we’re struck by the intelligibility of the universe, a rationality that suggests it comes from a rational Mind. And amid this fine-tuning, there’s music at the heart of everything—something gloriously mathematical, yet irreducible to numbers.

When I reflect on such order and beauty, I find my objections swept away and I’m drawn back to a simple, stunning conclusion: Design points to a Designer. Music points to a Music-maker. Stories point to a Storyteller.

Challenge of Suffering

But then, I press further, and though I’m persuaded by the existence of God, doubts about the Christian view of God arise. Just what kind of story is this? Now the problem of evil rears its head. There’s beauty in the world, sure! But also unimaginable suffering, so much of it unjust and unexplainable. So what if there’s order in creation? What about all the chaos? What do we make of death?

There are the natural disasters that cause so much human sorrow, but also the cruelty of humans toward other humans—all supposedly under God’s providential hand. Why would a good God permit so many heinous acts?

For me, the two most powerful pictures that lay out, in the bleakest terms, the despair and desolation of human pain and evil come from Elie Wiesel’s Night and Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov.

In Night, there’s an awful scene where Wiesel and and the other prisoners at a Nazi concentration camp are forced to watch the execution of three inmates by hanging. One of them is a young boy. The chairs are tipped over, but the boy is too light for the rope to kill him quickly, and so he writhes in agony between life and death for more than half an hour as the prisoners are marched past and made to look in his face. “Where is God?” a man behind Wiesel asks. And Wiesel hears a voice in his heart answer, “Here he is, hanging on these gallows.”

In Dostoevsky’s novel, Ivan Karamazov describes, in horrifying detail, the abuse a little girl endures from her own parents and the torture of a boy thrown to wild dogs. Ivan cannot accept the Christian idea that the grand finale of this world will bring about a resolution that swallows up all such suffering and makes everything worth it. No, he argues, we would not wish such evil on a poor, innocent child even if we knew, in the end, all would be well. No future hope can make up for the child who experiences his flesh torn apart by wild beasts.

These two accounts are devastating expressions of the problem of evil. It’s no wonder we question either God’s existence or the goodness of whatever God exists. No other objection to Christianity feels as powerful to me as this one. When I’ve encountered inexplicable tragedy or senseless pain in the world, I look to the sky and wonder if I’m just screaming into the void after all.

But the more I reflect, the more these objections short-circuit themselves. They’re like a train barreling down the tracks, about to run over my faith, before suddenly running out of steam. For two reasons.

First, Christians are the ones who offer the strongest articulations of this objection, as is the case with Dostoevsky. Ivan the atheist may be communicating his objection, but it’s Dostoevsky the Christian putting those words in his mouth. Christians don’t shy away from the horror of human suffering, perhaps because the central symbol of our faith is a tortured man on a cross gasping for air.

And to the question posed by Night, in that scene with the boy being hanged—“Where is God?!”—the Christian answer transposes the words of Wiesel—“He is here”—into a profession of faith. The cross places God at the center of all suffering and evil.

Second, I can’t fully explain my revulsion to human cruelty and suffering apart from a moral sensibility that must exist objectively, outside myself, not just in my mind. The power of the problem of evil is magnified, not lessened, if I were to take the leap of faith an atheist like Yuval Noah Harari does, by saying human rights are mere fictions we live by, conjured in human imaginations. Or if I were to align with Phil Zuckerman, who advocates a secular life that’s still oriented toward the good, with morality made possible apart from any transcendent being or moral law. These proposals feel like castles in the air.

The reason the problem of evil delivers such an emotional wallop for me is because of the bigger problem of good—the gratuitousness of beauty and goodness in our world, and the consequent ache in our hearts that something has gone deeply wrong, that the world is both glorious and a ruin, that things are not as they’re supposed to be. Some may attribute this feeling to evolutionary instincts or sociological conditioning, but the Christian answer is more satisfying: We find the current state of affairs intolerable and wrong because we were created for something beautiful and right.

Whatever we may say about God’s plan for this world, the story of Scripture reveals a God who, in his love, enters our suffering and sadness so he can turn it inside out and give us something more glorious—a world once broken but one day restored.

I admit that Christianity doesn’t provide a fully emotionally satisfying answer to the problem of evil, especially for someone in the throes of pain or enduring the horrors of human cruelty. Better to sit with someone in grief than blab on with speculations.

But I don’t find other explanations any better. And I don’t find the Bible minimizing or explaining away suffering and evil. Job may get back everything he lost at the end of the book that bears his name, but that’s just one chapter after a slew of counterproductive dialogues and a guest appearance from God that shuts Job’s mouth but never answers his questions.

The problem of evil remains a recurring source of doubt for me, yet I find in the Christian faith a willingness—even enthusiasm—to look this objection square in the face and receive its blow, full force.

Resurrection of Jesus

Now comes the gospel’s central truth, already poking its head into these arguments: the resurrection of Jesus as the preview of the restoration of all things.

Can we acknowledge how strange it is to believe that a crucified man in the first century came back to life? Is there any surprise we would sometimes doubt this story?

As a college student in Romania, at the start of my theological studies, I devoured book after book on the person and work of Jesus. This was the waning period of the “third quest” for the historical Jesus, which reignited scholarly exploration of his first-century Jewish context.

I read up on what the Jesus Seminar claimed to be “authentic” in the Gospels, considered John Dominic Crossan on the parables, listened to Bart Ehrman pick apart the historical reliability of the Gospels, pondered Marcus Borg’s spiritual reading of the resurrection, dabbled in Elaine Pagels’s descriptions of early Gnostic Christianities, perused the works of Jewish scholars like Brad Young, and slowly made my way through tomes written by Ben Witherington, N. T. Wright, and Richard Bauckham.

I walked away from all that reading with a renewed assurance that something extraordinary had happened in Jerusalem in the first century. The only question was what? Was Jesus taken down from the cross and thrown to wild dogs (Crossan’s speculation) or was a mass hallucination responsible for belief in the resurrection (Ehrman’s take)? Did the church reinvent Jesus with exalted language and then dress up Jesus in the Gospels themselves?

The more I studied, the more the cumulative case for the resurrection made (and still makes) the most sense to me. A couple underrated lines of argumentation stand out. Take, for instance, the shift of Christian worship, very early, to Sunday over Saturday. It’s true the accounts of Sunday gatherings don’t imply these first-century Jews dispensed right away with the Sabbath, but the shift of giving priority to the first day over the seventh is gobsmacking when you consider how fast this alteration to more than a thousand years of tradition took place. The only thing that can account for such a massive move is a massive event.

Or take the Christ hymn in Philippians 2 that applies Isaiah 45:23’s declaration about YHWH to Jesus himself. For a people whose self-identity was wrapped up with the prohibition against idolatry—with the first and second commandments from Mount Sinai exalting God and God alone as worthy of worship, it’s unthinkable they would take a famous prophet’s words about God and use them to describe a human being . . . apart from some world-changing event.

A stolen body, the wrong tomb, the mass hallucination—these hypotheses may have varying degrees of merit, but reading the counterexplanations for the empty tomb and rise of early Christianity feels a little like crawling around inside a giant crater, trying hard to explain what impacted the terrain without drawing the obvious conclusion that a meteor hit. The resurrection is the meteor.

The Spirit Who Draws Me Back

I’m thankful to belong to a faith that doesn’t bypass the mind but takes seriously arguments for and against Christianity’s credibility.

Theologically, I recognize it’s not these arguments that have drawn me out of my doubts. It’s the Spirit, making use of God’s Word and God’s people. It’s the Spirit working in my mind through arguments articulated by apologists and theologians over the centuries. But these are just a few I’m thankful the Spirit has used to draw me back to the gospel and keep me believing.

(If you’re a subscriber to my newsletter, I’d love to know what arguments have proven most powerful when you’ve encountered doubts about your faith. If you’d like to subscribe and share your thoughts with me, you can do so here.)

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn—Nobel laureate, novelist, and historian of the Soviet camps where political prisoners were held—is the man who made “gulag” an English word through the success of his book The Gulag Archipelago. A Soviet dissident who was later exiled, he delivered a number of powerful speeches during and after the Cold War, many of which have been translated by his sons and compiled into the book We Have Ceased to See the Purpose.

One of Solzhenitsyn’s speeches was delivered as a BBC radio broadcast in March 1976. It caused an uproar in England. Listeners expected a gushing celebration of Western freedom and democracy but encountered instead a searing critique of the free world’s complacency and compromise.

Longing for a True Word

Solzhenitsyn reached back to 1951 to paint a vivid picture for Western listeners of what it was like when he, as a political prisoner in a Kazakh labor camp, looked to the West as a beacon of freedom and stronghold of hope.

That was the year when Herbert Morrison, Britain’s foreign secretary, persuaded Pravda (the Communist Party’s official newspaper and mouthpiece of the Soviet State) to publish a statement he wrote, without any censorship. If England published Soviet views without censorship, why shouldn’t the Soviets do the same? he asked. The Soviets accepted the challenge.

Solzhenitsyn said, “How eagerly we used to run to the stand where the central Bolshevik newspaper was displayed—a crowd of convicts with shaven heads, in ragged, filthy padded jackets, stamping our clumsy camp boots as we ran.” Their sense of anticipation for the uncensored essay grew every day: “Right now, at long last, even our own subterranean kingdom would be transpierced with the diamond-bright, diamond-hard ray of truth and hope.” Solzhenitsyn and the other convicts couldn’t wait to see the truth laid out plainly in Pravda:

For a Western voice to break through Soviet censorship and be published in the regime’s flagship paper seemed like a crack in the wall of lies that held up the Communist dictatorship. But then the article came out.

“Not one saving word.” That line has stuck with me.

Solzhenitsyn didn’t criticize Morrison’s article for being full of falsehoods. No, Morrison had spoken the truth. But he had said so little. He had misdiagnosed the problem. He had treated the differences between the Soviets and the free world as a mere diplomatic misunderstanding, implying that a little more peace and goodwill would make everything work out, as if the Soviet Union was just a normal country with some bad policies, not a regime that had killed and imprisoned millions of people.

Solzhenitsyn’s broadcast 50 years ago gave voice to his disappointment when the West was given the microphone for one shining moment, but then showed it had nothing to say. The problem with the West, Solzhenitsyn lamented, is a spiritual shallowness, a loss of courage among people who have reduced the purpose of life to comfort. There was no saving word to offer.

Christianity as an Accessory

Reflecting on this essay from Solzhenitsyn, I can’t help but wonder how many pulpits across America deliver commonsense and scriptural wisdom Sunday after Sunday, yet never transpierce the subterranean kingdom of darkness “with the diamond-bright, diamond-hard ray of truth and hope.” And then I wonder about myself and the occasions I converse with unbelievers, how easy it is to say good things, even true things, but to neglect the one saving word that would puncture the prison walls around people in spiritual chains.

It’s possible as a Christian to believe right doctrines and engage in devotional practices, yet misdiagnose the lostness that surrounds us. To think of the gospel as a help, an add-on, just an accessory to a comfortable way of life.

How commonplace it is for people to speak of Christianity as a means of simplifying your life, of making you feel better about yourself, or giving you strength to make it through difficult times, or helping you get along better with family members and friends, or offering financial counsel to maximize your money, or fostering a sense of community through gatherings and rituals. All fine and good, but without the one saving word, such talk is no better than Morrison’s feeble and flippant contribution to Pravda—a smattering of truths that leaves out the capital-T Truth.

More than a decade ago, David Wells lamented this problem:

We don’t have to wonder. A deep, costly, and demanding Christianity is surely off-putting to a segment of churchgoers.

As evangelicals, we take pride in our doctrinal fidelity and distinctive practices, and yet we can easily fall back into a version of Christianity focused primarily on comfort.

• We say our goal is faithfulness to the Bible, but what we mean is—faithfulness to the Bible that leaves our personal peace and affluence intact.
• We say our goal is Christlikeness, but what we mean is—Christlikeness only to the degree our most fundamental commitments will permit.
• We say our goal is love for neighbor, but what we mean is—we’ll love the neighbor it makes sense to love, and look past anyone who doesn’t meet our qualifications.
• We say our priority is the kingdom of God, but what we mean is—we seek the kingdom, only insofar as it remains circumscribed by the American Dream.

We want the church to challenge us at the periphery of our lives, not the center, so that the changes we make are cosmetic and superficial yet still offer us the veneer of pleasant self-righteousness.

“Hard” preaching still has a place in such a world. We love the prophetic voice; we just prefer its sharpest edges never escape the grooves we’ve established. Prophetic on sexuality, but quiet on racial justice (or vice versa). Prophetic on the dignity of Man, but quiet on the idolatry of Mammon.

We gravitate to preachers who will accommodate our sensibilities and decry the sins and evils of the groups we oppose. Something of the prophetic remains, but its serrated edge only cuts one way. The resulting pulpit ministry is a smattering of little truths, diplomatically delivered to never run afoul of the censors of Pravda because it’s shorn of the capital-T Truth that would expose the superficiality of faith today.

World in Chains

Capital-T Truth—the in-breaking word of the gospel—is able to better diagnose both the severity of our societal problems and the radical solution provided through Christ’s cross and resurrection.

Too often, we misdiagnose the problems in society when we see only the surface-level symptoms. Loneliness and isolation. Political polarization. Gender confusion. Sexual dissatisfaction. Racial tensions. Technological distraction. Addiction to our devices.

Surely, the church has something to say to all these symptoms of sadness. And yet, the gospel won’t let us address merely the symptoms with over-the-counter medication; it scans our hearts to reveal the underlying disease. The deeper problem is Sin—both as personal transgression against God and neighbor and as an enslaving force that keeps us in bondage.

Much like the captives in the Kazakh labor camp, the world around us lives in chains. In chains to creature comforts. In chains to false ideologies, bad habits, and harmful preferences. In chains to the toxicity of a therapy culture that has exceeded the bounds of its expertise. In chains to a degraded and devalued perspective on human life. In chains to false philosophies that deny the goodness of being made male and female. In chains to theories of racial classification and superiority. In chains to spiritualities and pseudoreligious practices that promise mystery yet never allow a speck of the truly transcendent, for fear that acknowledging a personal God as Creator might constrain individual liberty.

Into this world the gospel comes as a saving word, a freedom cry. It breaks these chains and more.

When We Love Our Chains

But what happens when we start to love our chains? When we resist yet desire our captivity?

That is the challenge we face today—we’re called to bring the saving word of the gospel to captives who don’t always recognize their bondage.

In Solzhenitsyn’s gulag, the chains were physical, brutal, felt. He and his fellow convicts tramped in their tattered clothes and clunky boots to the newsstand, desperate for a word of truth from the outside world. In our case, the chains are covered in velvet. There’s no healing salve for the chafing caused by our shackles, only lotion to dull our discomfort. No medicine or cure, only a tonic to keep us sedated and compliant in a dehumanizing world.

In The Burnout Society, the German-Korean philosopher Byung-Chul Han contrasts the “disciplinary society” of previous generations with today’s “achievement society.” In one sense, we’re free from our ancestors’ fear of penalties and discipline from superiors, yet what do we do with our newfound freedom? We willingly exploit ourselves. The language of moral prohibition (“Thou shalt not”) has dissolved into a sea of self-improvement (“Be a better you”)—a more expansive and oppressive law than the “Thou shalts” we’ve cast off.

When your self becomes both the project and the product, you may not feel as though you’re dominated by something outside yourself, but your vision is now constrained by the pressure to maximize your own achievements.

Thus, today’s world looks less like Solzhenitsyn and his labor-camp prisoners crying out for the word of truth to lay bare the insanities of our age and more like people under house arrest, chained to our devices and endlessly distracted by the spell they cast. And so, we fritter away our “free time,” playing into the hands of advertisers who’ve mastered the art of monopolizing and monetizing our most precious treasure: our attention. We love the house that has become our prison.

One Saving Word

Solzhenitsyn upset his British listeners when he showed them it wasn’t only the Soviets who were in chains. He diagnosed the spiritual vacuum in the Western world, even with (and sometimes because of) our material wealth. “We have forgotten God,” he said in 1983. The spiritual shallowness he saw decades ago continues to mark our hollowed-out civilization. The rot of complacency and compromise has spread.

As Christians who long to see the gospel take deeper root in our own lives and then transform the lives of the those around us, we must tether ourselves to the good news that every heart needs most, the one saving word that releases us sinners from bondage.

And yet we must admit we don’t always recognize our own captivity to commonplace cultural narratives and invisible spiritual forces. If we’re to open the eyes of people to their cultural captivity, we must have our own eyes opened to the ways we’ve been molded by the world we’re called to oppose.

Renewal can only come from a fresh word rising from a renewed people. It’s not a newspaper message that will break through the hegemony of lies our culture sells. It’s a message embodied in a people—a community of believers whose life together showcases something bigger, more beautiful, more human, than the luxurious prisons we’ve constructed for ourselves, the degrading ideologies and practices normalized by either Big Government or Big Business, or both.

The church, with confidence in capital-T Truth, is the only community with the resources to resist the spirit of this age and then resolve to offer fellow prisoners in invisible labor camps something more than the feeble and insipid chatter everywhere around us: the one saving word that rings the bell of freedom and breaks the chains of bondage.

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October 2026 marks 20 years of Kingdom People, the name I gave to my first WordPress blog, with its tagline: “Living on earth as citizens of heaven.”

The new blog wasn’t my first foray into online writing—no, that had started several years earlier, during my last year as a college student in Romania, with a website for a weekly email I sent (devotional reflections based on the words of Christ). But those early attempts at writing online petered out for a season when my wife and I transitioned with our son, just a toddler at the time, from our life in Romania to a seminary in the United States.

In Louisville, I spent more than a year working two (at one point, three) part-time jobs, doing whatever it took to cover the cost of my classes and textbooks and to keep our weekly grocery run within budget. The financial strain didn’t dampen my excitement as a student, though.

In the MDiv program, I was eager to build on all the theology classes I’d taken in Romania, so I signed up for Greek exegesis classes to dig into the New Testament. I sharpened my skills in interpreting Scripture and understanding systematic theology. My mind was on fire, my heart bursting with enthusiasm about all I was reading and learning. At least once a week, I would peruse the shelves of the seminary bookstore, just aching for the day I could afford all the books I wanted to read. (I remember thinking, If a patron would buy me every book I want to read, I’d write a review for each one, just to show the money didn’t go to waste!)

Month after month, I searched for some kind of ministry position that would ease our financial burden and provide an outlet for me to write and teach again, to share some of the amazing insights I was receiving in seminary. The big disappointment came in September 2006. I interviewed for a full-time staff position at a church, and just when it looked most promising, it fell through. I was crushed. I felt desperate to pastor, to bless others with the incredible truths the Lord was teaching me at the time.

Launch of Kingdom People: October 2006

Just a month after that discouraging turn of events, I decided not to wait for an outlet. I should write again, I told myself. I had thoughts in my head and stories in my heart that had to get out. Writing was the only way I knew how to think through and organize the thoughts ping-ponging around in my mind. So I powered up a WordPress blog and committed to posting every day.

On October 22, 2006, I posted for the first time and laid out a pattern for the weeks to come:

• Sundays: a prayer (usually from church history)
• Mondays: a devotional thought
• Tuesdays: a list or annotated guide
• Wednesdays: a book review
• Thursdays: an article based on something I was reading or wrestling with, or an interview with an author (often about the book I’d reviewed the day before)
• Fridays: a link list called “In the Blogosphere”
• Saturdays: a compelling quote I’d come across in my reading

That pattern provided a recognizable shape for Kingdom People for years to come, even when I adapted it from time to time. For a couple years, I devoted a day a week to reflecting on my cross-cultural mission work in Romania. A feature called “Worth a Look”—a daily handful of links with my commentary—debuted in November 2009 and ran until June 2015. “In the Blogosphere” turned into “Trevin’s Seven” in late 2009 and remained a Friday staple until 2021. (Trevin’s Seven continues on as an exclusive for my newsletter subscribers.)

World of Blogging in the Late 2000s

Younger readers might find the variety of posts from the early days of Kingdom People rather strange. But remember, this was before social media took over everything. Facebook was on the rise, but there was no Twitter (X) yet.

Blogging was personal, not professional. It was a catch-all for whatever any writer felt worth sharing—one day a theological issue, the next day a riff on some cultural trend, maybe some commentary on a news story, or a movie to recommend. Blogs were gloriously eclectic. Just before Facebook and Twitter began to soar, blogs slipped into in that liminal space between the old world of the internet and the new world of social media, sometimes taking on the characteristics of both.

Back then, if you wanted to find like-minded people online, you looked where the search engines pointed you, or you bookmarked sites to return to, or you discovered new voices through a blogroll on the sidebar of a site of a writer you enjoyed. The blog world was built up through regular readers, who frequently left comments and debated with each other. On some blogs, the writer was mainly a host or moderator—it was the comments section that drew in readers. But for me, I always prioritized writing.

What mattered most for blogging in those days was consistency—something new on the site every day. That’s how Tim Challies built up a large readership. (We called him the Blogfather.) Every time you clicked onto his website, you were rewarded with something worth checking out. I quickly connected with him and other bloggers, such as Jared Wilson when he was just one of many contributors to a site called The Thinkings, and Michael Spencer, the “Internet Monk.”

Evangelical Blogosphere

It was a fascinating time in 2006 to dive into the river of blogging, because several currents were flowing and overlapping within the evangelical world. It was a time of convergence and divergence. Collin Hansen had just named the nascent gospel-centered movement the “Young, Restless, Reformed” in a cover story for Christianity Today, and the first Together for the Gospel conference had taken place.

Meanwhile, the Emerging Church discussions that flourished in the early 2000s were beginning to wane, as most of the high-profile leaders drifted toward progressive theology and a revisionist sexual ethic. But the earlier evangelistic enthusiasm of the Emerging Church—seen in the influence of the missionary theologian Lesslie Newbigin—had led many to question the reigning “church growth” philosophy. And that desire for a missional identity didn’t go away; it morphed into the missional wing of the rising gospel-centered movement.

What made the moment so interesting was the drawing together of so many voices in one conversation. The lines of division that would eventually harden were there, but they didn’t yet hinder conversations among people with wildly diverging ministry philosophies.

Growth of Kingdom People

It was an exhilarating time to be a young seminary student working out my theological convictions in real time. A friend of mine has been revisiting my older posts, and he tells me it’s my earnestness that stands out, a youthful exuberance at all I’m learning as I hash out new ideas, review new books, interact with authors, and seek to grow closer to Jesus.

The subscriber count for Kingdom People shot up in late 2007, especially after I had the chance to drive up to Asbury Seminary and sit down with the British theologian N. T. Wright for a wide-ranging conversation that touched on many of the debates over justification taking place within the Reformed world of evangelicalism at the time. Other high-trafficked posts that first year included my takes on various controversies within evangelicalism.

By 2008, the blog was drawing in thousands of readers, and the comments section was active and vibrant. A little community was forming around the blog, and publishers began to take notice. That year, I was asked to pitch some article ideas to Christianity Today. I worked with an editor at InterVarsity Press on a book proposal called Subversive Allegiance. They turned it down in the end, as did every other publisher I sent it to.

But in the summer of 2008, Crossway asked if I would pitch a book to them. I sent the same proposal they’d rejected before, but this time, they saw it as a work of worldview analysis downstream from Francis Schaeffer (whose collected works they published). Holy Subversion: Allegiance to Christ in an Age of Rivals debuted in 2010, when I was just 28 years old, followed a year later by Counterfeit Gospels: Rediscovering the Good News in a World of False Hope from Moody.

Meanwhile, the daily blog just kept going. Day after day. Month after month. A couple moments stand out that strengthened my desire to be a good steward of the platform. The first took place after I published a negative review, having criticized a book because of the author’s stance on an issue that wasn’t central to the overall thesis or thrust. I got an email from the author, who pleaded with me to offer a fairer assessment. He was right, and I was wrong. And I remember realizing then that I wasn’t just a seminarian typing words out there and hitting “publish.” My words were carrying weight.

The second moment involved two conversations in 2008 with intellectual and pastoral mentors. I kept describing the blog as just a side thing—a hobby, not something central to my ministry as an associate pastor at a church in Tennessee. Both men affirmed my desire to keep the local church at the forefront of my attention, but both told me I should stop seeing the blog as “just a side thing.” Many pastors and thoughtful Christians were reading the blog, they said. It would be bad stewardship if I failed to take the blog seriously as an arena for me to deploy my gift in writing.

Kingdom People and Institutional Complexities

The daily blog opened doors for me, not only relationally and in publishing but also professionally. My online presence was one of the reasons Lifeway invited me to join the team and help start a gospel-centered curriculum (which eventually became The Gospel Project). The leaders at Lifeway made blogging part of my job description, trusting it was a win for a steady writer to be on the team—someone constantly engaged in conversation with church leaders, both learning from and influencing pastors.

Yet the move into an institutional role brought a new set of constraints in what I would publish. Not long after I got there, I posted my opinion of a book whose author had adopted a heterodox position. Although Lifeway leaders agreed with me and wound up pulling the book from Lifeway stores, I had jumped the gun and published my perspective without considering the institutional implications, giving little time for processes and procedures to be implemented in such a mammoth organization.

Before, Kingdom People had been a simple WordPress blog, run independently by me. Now, I realized anything I said could become a reflection of the ministry I worked for. I had to learn to think institutionally, to live within certain constraints—to not publish every opinion I might have.

The institutional side became more prevalent in the early 2010s. Blogs began consolidating into “neighborhoods.” Christianity Today started hosting popular bloggers on their site. So did Patheos. I talked with leaders in both those institutions, but settled on The Gospel Coalition as the place where I would feel most at home. So, in January 2012, my blog migrated to TGC, and I eventually settled into a new rhythm—just two columns a week, with a Trevin’s Seven link list on Fridays.

You may notice I just said column. Even though the nomenclature of “blog” and “blogger” persisted, the comments section on TGC blogs went away, and I began seeing myself as a columnist with a devoted TGC page rather than a blogger in the traditional sense.

The early days of blogging had it all—an eclectic mix of interests bouncing around, driven by a blogger’s personality. But once social media soared, all the quick takes, comments, quirky links, inside jokes, and brief reviews of movies or TV shows moved to Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Over time, my posts at TGC became more polished, and the deeply personal posts were fewer, though the latter have never fully disappeared, because that early blogging DNA still remains.

Another shift that occurred when Kingdom People was entering its second decade was my decision to scale back the number of hot takes on whatever “the online discourse” demanded. For years, I had weighed in on all manner of events, offering cultural commentary for the moment—often going viral as a result. But as time went on, I began to see my blog/column as a body of work to be built up over time. I hoped to publish insights that would endure longer than the quick takes that amassed clicks.

Today, I’m most encouraged whenever I get a note from a pastor or church leader thanking me for something I posted years ago—an article that popped up when they were researching a particular subject. Writing online has been a wonderful place to work out my thoughts, and those thoughts, once refined, have often found their way into my lectures and books. I cannot begin to measure the full influence of this blog on my teaching, my speaking, and now my ministry through the North American Mission Board.

Writing, on average, 87,000 words a year online is a discipline that demands a voracious amount of reading, just so I have something of interest to write about. The reading has supercharged my speaking and writing. No longer am I the poor seminary student yearning to buy all the books I want to read; now I’m middle-aged with never enough time to get to all the books on my desk. My pile overflows.

Concluding Reflections

In 2009, Meryl Streep and Amy Adams starred in Julie and Julia, a movie about a young blogger trying her hand at every recipe in Julia Child’s most famous cookbook. Julie found a large audience for her blog and went on to write a best-selling book. I remember watching that movie—the story arc resonated with me (alas, without the bestseller!). I, too, felt like something magical had happened.

In the months after I sat down in that little apartment in Louisville and typed out my first post, my writing struck a chord with people, and they responded: pushing and prodding me, sometimes affirming my views, other times chastising me, yet always staying engaged. The blog was first an outlet, then became a channel, weaving its way through and watering every ministry path I’ve taken in the past two decades.

Since October 2006, I’ve published more than 1.8 million words online. Proverbs 10:19 surely applies to me: “When there are many words, sin is unavoidable.” But I trust the Lord to be patient with my shortcomings and errors—some of which, in hindsight, I can now spot. And I am thankful for readers who have granted me their most precious commodity—their attention. What a joy to write! To consider afresh the awesome privilege of being the people of God’s kingdom, called to live on earth as citizens of the world to come.

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Are evangelicals obsessed with angels and demons? Or do evangelicals not give enough attention to the unseen realm?

How you respond to this question will likely be driven, at least in part, by your background and church experiences, and perhaps your faith tradition.

Some evangelicals have grown up among Christians who see spiritual forces at work everywhere, with territorial spirits causing chaos and invisible angelic battles happening above us—with real-world consequences in society. It’s the world of Frank Peretti’s This Present Darkness. It’s no surprise that these believers grow weary of constant speculation and begin to question pastors and church leaders who extrapolate all manner of angelic and demonic activities from apocalyptic passages in Scripture. At the mere mention of the spiritual world, these Christians may think it best to shut the door to anything that goes beyond the bare affirmations we find in Scripture.

But what do we do with the Christians who came before us? Thomas Aquinas gave a lot of attention to angels in his Summa Theologiae, and he reflected on the question of their nature and activity in multiple disputations. Building on the work of Pseudo-Dionysius from the fifth century, he argued for three hierarchies, made up of three choirs each, thus giving us nine categories of angels in descending order from God.

And the stubborn witness of the church through the ages is that this world is indeed teeming with powers and principalities all around us—perhaps not exactly in line with the charismatic inflection of ’90s Christian fiction but closer to that than to a worldview that minimizes or ignores the unseen.

We must also reckon with the global church, especially the continents where Christianity is growing by leaps and bounds. In societies less secularized than ours, Christians don’t see spiritual forces as peripheral but as central to Christian life and witness.

Esther Acolatse’s Powers, Principalities, and the Spirit surveys the scholarship from around the world and considers the disparity in treatment of angels and demons. She acknowledges the Global South’s tendency toward overinvolvement with the spirit world, due in part to syncretism with primal religions. But she warns Christians in the North and West against another kind of syncretism—Enlightenment-based assumptions that lead us to undervalue or dismiss these powers and their ability to permeate and affect the material world.

Two Books with Different Outlooks

So, which is it? Are Christians prone to reading too much into the biblical text or through the lens of their own experiences, thereby focusing on the spirit world more than is appropriate? Or are Christians giving short shrift to angels and demons, thereby missing the backdrop and influence of the unseen realm in our world today?

Let me point you to two recent books that offer an overview of angels from an evangelical perspective. Both are from excellent scholars with whom I’ve had wonderful interactions over the years. One leans heavily toward the “let’s not speculate” side of the spectrum (aptly describing himself as a “killjoy” for the student overly excited to explore angelology). The other believes biblically based speculation, in conversation with the great Christian tradition and with believers from other parts of the world, can be fruitful.

Minimalist Approach

The minimalist approach is on display in the work of John R. Gilhooly, a professor at Cedarville University, whose 2024 book Angels and Demons: What the Bible Says About Spiritual Creatures does exactly what the title promises. Gilhooly is a “reluctant angelologist”—intrigued by what the Scriptures say about angels, yet finding the Scriptures lead to this unexciting conclusion: “I just don’t think angels are that important.”

Angels and Demons is a splash of cold water for the person prone to the excesses of popular-level treatments of angels in culture, fiction, and charismatic Christian books. Gilhooly doesn’t see the unseen realm of angels and demons as occupying a space anywhere near the center of the Christian faith, and so he pushes back against unhealthy fascination and the downright misleading speculation that results.

For Gilhooly, what’s central in Scripture should be central for us. A never-ending list of questions about angels can become a distraction. Angels are mentioned, yes, but they’re rarely described in detail and their nature hardly discussed. That’s the cue we should take. “If the Bible doesn’t say much about angels, then maybe we should not try to say too much either,” he concludes.

Gilhooly may be a reluctant angelologist, but he has a high view of Scripture’s inspiration and authority. He’s no modernist or antisupernaturalist, which becomes clear as he walks through the important biblical passages about angels, showing us what these beings say and do and what role they play in God’s redemptive purposes.

The book includes a chapter on demonology and then addresses common questions that arise. A sampling: Do I have a guardian angel? No. Are there territorial spirits? No. Do people become angels when they die? No. Who were the the Nephilim? Whatever the answer, it’s got nothing to do with angels or demons. Gilhooly closes the book by quoting every time the word “angel” appears in Scripture.

Angels and Demons comes across as a tonic from a friendly professor a bit wearied by a barrage of questions from wide-eyed students about angels or supernatural encounters and feels compelled to say, I hate to rain on your parade, but it’s not proper to speculate about things the Scriptures aren’t clear on, so you’d do well to keep your focus on the main thing and get on with the Christian life. If it’s not spelled out in Holy Scripture, it’s best not to speculate further.

More Expansive Approach

The second book is Ultimate Guide to Angels and Demons by R. Lucas Stamps at Anderson University. Don’t let the snazzy cover and overstated title, designed for the rack at Walmart, throw you off. This is a work of serious scholarship, filling nearly 400 pages with careful consideration. It’s encyclopedic in its scope, and gorgeous artwork is interspersed throughout.

What differentiates these books isn’t only the length (Gilhooly’s comes in right at 200 pages) but the choice of conversation partners. Like Gilhooly, Stamps devotes attention to angels and demons as described in the Old Testament and then the New, but all throughout his biblical survey, he’s listening to the broader Christian tradition as he engages in interpretation. Then he ventures into the view of angels we find in church history: the patristic era, the medieval era, the Reformation era, and the modern era. The latter part of the book includes a summary of all the biblical and historical material, with Stamps offering his theological and practical reflections on these supernatural beings, before closing with a critique of contemporary approaches and what we see in popular culture.

Like Gilhooly, Stamps is happy to rain on the parade of popular-level imagination about angels. The difference comes from Stamps taking in the full scope of Christian history and theology, leading to a more favorable assessment of the whole enterprise of angelology.

The great need, Stamps believes, in our “desacralized, despiritualized, disenchanted” Western world is the “remystification of the contemporary church.” Stamps commends further reflection on angels for several reasons: (1) because it’s delightful to do so, (2) because the Bible says a lot about them and showcases them in every phase of the biblical storyline, and (3) because such study is theologically and practically beneficial.

Gilhooly sees angels as peripheral, but Stamps sees these beings intersecting with virtually every topic of Christian theology (creation, providence, Christology, ecclesiology, and eschatology). If we care about Christian doctrine, he says, we have to care about angels. And in everyday Christian life, “studying angels and demons enriches our worship, our prayers, our battle against sin, our thanksgiving for the saving work of the triune God, and our hope in the future redemption.”

Two Treatments, Two Worlds

In reading these two books together, even with their different approaches, it’s fascinating to see how often Stamps and Gilhooly agree on their conclusions. Both authors believe the “sons of God” in Genesis 6 are humans, not angels. Both deny that believers can be possessed by demons. Both caution against elaborate exorcism rites. Both show admirable caution regarding extrabiblical speculation.

On occasion, they differ—Stamps is open to the possibility of guardian angels, while Gilhooly gives a categorical no. The biggest difference isn’t in their answers to specific questions but in the world we’re left with as readers. I’d love to get the two of them in a room and host a conversation about this, because it’s here—the question of what kind of world we live in and how it shapes our belief and practice—that I find the point of departure.

For Gilhooly, the unseen realm is whatever is happening behind the curtain. It isn’t intended to be the focal point. We can only know for sure whatever Scripture tells us explicitly, and truth be told, the presence and power of God’s special messengers doesn’t merit the massive speculation it has generated among theologians over the centuries. Of course, there are angels in Scripture, but what matters most is their message. Fascination with the spiritual realm can distract us from directing our gaze to the God who is over all of this world, seen and unseen. Even if the world is teeming with spiritual forces, these mysteries are ultimately unknowable, so the everyday Christian should stay focused on the gospel.

For Stamps, a more robust approach is to be commended. We’d do well to give more attention to the unseen realm, not less, because by doing so we line up with the majority of Christians through the ages (though he acknowledges their excesses at points), and because angelology gives us another way to counter the flattened-out materialist world bequeathed to us by secularism. Yet even more important than these reasons, Stamps believes the Bible itself describes a world in which angelic activity is ever-present.

To this, I think Gilhooly would point out how the Bible mentions angels casually, refraining from detailed description or discussion. In response, I suspect Stamps would say the lack of scriptural explanation itself indicates the sheer normality of the unseen world impinging on the world we can see. Yes, we note throughout the Bible the role of “signs and wonders,” but as Peter Harrison’s Some New World has argued, it would be hard to explain the difference between “supernatural” and “natural” to a premodern Christian because they saw all creation as permeated with God’s presence.

My Two Cents on the Big Question

So, do we make too much or too little of angels? There’s no easy answer, for it’s possible for someone to become obsessed with angels or demonic encounters, or to go overboard in attributing too many circumstances and trials to powers and principalities. In some charismatic circles today, we can find aberrant applications and strange doctrines untethered both from Scripture and church history.

But in the circles I run in, I think we make too little of angels. I’d like to see more exploration, especially in connection with theodicy and the angelic fall. I think even fantasy writers like C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien, who understood something of the ancient mind and the medieval conception of the cosmos, have insights to offer in how we think about the primeval world. I believe we have solid scriptural reasons, backed up by theologians and scholars throughout history, to see angels as active stewards and guardians in the world, and we find clues to help us guess at how their oversight is implemented and hierarchy arranged.

What’s more, in everyday Christian practice, I’m brought face to face with unseen spiritual realities whenever I pray the Lord’s Prayer. To pray for the name of the Lord to be hallowed surely calls for praise not only to ascend from humanity but also to join the chorus of angels around God’s throne. To pray for deliverance from evil (specifically, the Evil One) not only names the fallen angel who is our Enemy but also recognizes that God may answer our plea for help by assisting us with angels unaware.

When I pray against the schemes of the Evil One and his minions, and when, at night, I pray for the protection of holy angels over my house and family, I acknowledge the mysterious nature of the world I cannot see, and I entrust myself to Jesus, King of angels.

Something I often ask myself: If my view of the world seems at odds with the majority of Christians throughout history, why is that the case? Is it because Christians in the past succumbed to unhelpful and unbiblical speculation? Sometimes, for sure. Or is it because I’m more influenced than I realize by the materialist, secular world I inhabit? Surely that’s more often the case.

Look for yourself at the Scriptures. Engage with church history. Talk with Christians in other parts of the world. How much we do we make of angels? I suspect for most of my readers, it’s too little, not too much.

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Not long ago, a friend asked me about an article he’d come across online, one of those stories combining news and analysis that makes the rounds on social media and stirs up conversation among the Twittering class. The gist went something like this: There’s a gender gap in Baptist youth groups (they skew overwhelmingly female), while the Eastern Orthodox are attracting young men who are fed up with the effeminate nature of evangelical worship songs and teaching style.

Analysis like this shows up on a regular basis, often backed by a few anecdotes and hastily assembled statistics. Claims like this frustrate me, not because there’s nothing true in the anecdotes but because the narrative being presented isn’t borne out by the statistics, and because I suspect writers who want a certain narrative to be true will cobble together whatever fits to give their pet project or pet peeve a kind of propulsive power. Don’t you know things are moving in this direction? So get with the program!

Interrogate the Claims

Let’s interrogate the claims in this popular-level narrative. Is there a gender gap between Baptist youth groups and Eastern Orthodox young people? Is it true that Baptist youth groups skew female, while the student ministry in more liturgical denominations is made up primarily of young men? What would it take to establish such a claim?

More than a couple examples from youth ministry in your town, that’s for sure. You’d need to survey hundreds of youth groups across the country, from various denominations, to determine their gender composition. A couple anecdotes from this or that church don’t suffice.

For the second major claim—that worship style is to blame—let’s assume there is a gender gap in American youth groups, with Baptists skewing toward young women and the Orthodox drawing in young men. How would we determine the reason for that gap?

We’d need to survey and interview young men to find out why they opted out of student ministry in a Baptist church and why they joined the Orthodox. We’d need both quantitative and qualitative research that points to worship music and the teaching style as the dividing factor between young men and young women.

No such research exists. Which means the social media stir about young men abandoning evangelicalism because the worship songs are too emotional or effeminate is based solely or primarily on a handful of conversations, or it’s the author’s or commenter’s biases and predispositions driving toward conclusions that prop up whatever version of the church they prefer.

Is Orthodoxy Surging Among Young Men?

Last year, I examined some of the claims about young men flocking to Eastern Orthodox parishes. The articles on this phenomenon are heavy on stories and light on stats. Yes, a handful of Orthodox churches are seeing a large percentage increase in young men, and that’s an interesting story, for sure. It deserves to be reported on.

But there’s a story because of how tiny Orthodoxy is in America. There are four times as many Baptist churches in Tennessee as there are Orthodox churches in the entire country. Percentage increases can seem dramatic when the baseline is small. A church growing from 40 to 80 members can celebrate 100 percent growth year over year, but it’s the same numerical increase as another church across town growing just 10 percent (from 400 to 440 members).

To be clear, I’m not saying there’s no renewed interest in other traditions. There is. In the world of YouTube and Instagram, all kinds of Christian traditions are now “accessible” in ways they weren’t before. Wings of the church that young people were unfamiliar with have now come into view, with the internet giving voice to traditions, large and small, across the spectrum.

So, yes, evangelical pastors and church leaders should expect to encounter young people curious about other traditions, especially Eastern Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism. Gavin Ortlund is doing great work in this area, making a biblical and historical case for Protestantism, often digging into the minutiae of historical events and doctrinal claims as he engages prominent arguments for other traditions.

I’m not denying the renewed interest in other Christian traditions. I’m simply pointing out how easy it is to discuss this renewed interest in a way that fosters a false narrative—that masses of young people are suddenly discovering and converting to Orthodoxy.

It’s easy to find testimonials of young evangelicals converting to Catholicism or Orthodoxy, and the more you come across, the more you might assume a fast-growing trend. But the more significant movement, statistically, is the non-headline-making emptying of the Catholic Church and the much higher rate of Catholics (especially from Latin America) converting to Pentecostalism. These converts don’t publish their testimonies in flagship magazines, but numerically they’re more significant.

Do Young Men Reject Contemporary Worship?

Now, let’s return to the claim that Baptist youth groups have all the girls, while all the guys are flocking to the Orthodox Church in town, supposedly because of a distaste for evangelical worship songs.

I don’t know of any research firm that has tracked at a granular level the rates of participation in student ministry (which would differ from an age-breakdown denominationally) and the reasons students switch traditions. Which means any article or social media post based primarily on anecdotes can be countered with other anecdotes. So here are mine. I get the opportunity to speak at churches from various denominations, and I often attend conferences where I interact with pastors and church leaders. In the Baptist youth groups I’ve observed, there’s no noticeable gender gap.

But even if there were, it irks me to see such a broad-brush condemnation of evangelical worship songs as “effeminate” or “emotional” as somehow responsible for driving young men from the church. The narrative goes something like this: We’re losing young men because our worship services are too expressive, too emotional, too focused on intimacy with God—as if “Jesus is my boyfriend.” All this skews feminine, so it’s no wonder men are attracted to formality and liturgy in songs and prayers.

As I mentioned above, no statistics or surveys prove or disprove this narrative, which is why articles and posts lean on anecdotes (“I talked to a young man at the Orthodox Church who thinks chanting is better than Hillsong!”) and often come from someone with an axe to grind about worship services they view with disdain.

Is Expressiveness Feminine?

But I want to press more on two aspects of this critique. The first is that expressiveness in worship—showing emotion in some way—codes as feminine over masculine. That being demonstrative is somehow emasculating.

Now, I’m not arguing for today’s typical evangelical church service or youth rally as the epitome of worship for young people. There are different modes and expressions in worship, with cultural and regional variations. People with different personality types will gravitate toward certain styles or songs. That’s to be expected. I love both the exuberance of contemporary worship and depth of liturgical services.

My point is that expressiveness is neither masculine nor feminine. It’s men who are commanded to lift up holy hands in prayer (1 Tim. 2:8). It’s King David who danced with all his might before the ark of the Lord (2 Sam. 6). You cannot convince me that a young man singing out at the top of his lungs his love for the risen Christ in an evangelical worship service is effeminate while the young guy with a scraggly beard kissing icons in an Orthodox service is masculine.

Is Modern Worship Just ‘Boyfriend’ Songs?

The second aspect that deserves pushback is the complaint that most modern-day worship songs fall into the “Jesus is my boyfriend” category, that they’re all cringeworthy expressions of intimacy with Christ.

We can find plenty to critique in today’s worship—an inordinate focus on what we are doing in worship rather than what God has done, the neglect of essential Christian doctrines, and the slippage into something entertainment-driven with a loss of God’s transcendence. What’s more, I grew up in the ’90s. I remember more than a few contemporary Christian music hits that could have doubled as simple love songs—a word tweaked here or there—as artists sometimes sought crossover success.

But that’s not the case today. Critique today’s worship songs all you like—the theological views of the churches they come from, the lack of global diversity, historic truths that don’t show up frequently enough in the lyrics—but there’s been positive movement toward a greater focus on the cross and resurrection of Jesus. The overly saccharine “Jesus is my boyfriend” songs are largely a thing of the past.

But Trevin, you say, there are still a bunch of songs that address Jesus in ways that seem uncomfortably intimate, or too personal, or too individualistic! Some songs seem just one step removed from the romantic, and even if it’s clear the song is about Jesus, it’s too much for the masculine men among us!

OK. What kind of songs would you prefer? Something that doesn’t enflame our hearts and or express our affections for God?

Was Charles Wesley effeminate in 1740 for singing, “Jesus, lover my soul, let me to thy bosom fly”?

What about the great Isaac Watts, who wrote “The Voice of My Beloved Sounds”?

Then there’s the theologian (and Crusade champion!) Bernard of Clairvaux (1090–1153):

Read Jonathan Edwards on the “sweet delight” he felt in God when he read the New Testament, longing to be “wrapped up to God in heaven, and be as it were swallowed up in him.” Pray along with Anselm of Canterbury: “Make us with our whole heart to hunger and thirst after you, and with all our longing to desire you” and “Let me seek you in my desire, let me desire you in my seeking. Let me find you by loving you, let me love you when I find you.”

And who can forget Augustine, throughout the Confessions, whose “love song for a Savior,” rendered here by Sarah Ruden startles us with emotional intensity?

Wag a finger at today’s songwriters and worship leaders for being too expressive or too shallow, but just be careful you don’t climb to a perch from which to look down on all the men above, not to mention King David, the warrior poet who panted after the living God (Ps. 63) and said the “one thing” he wanted most was “to gaze on the beauty of the LORD” (27:4).

If the choice is between Michal’s sophisticated embarrassment at worshipful exuberance (2 Sam. 6:16) and David’s reckless abandon—no matter how masculine or feminine such expression codes—I’ll go with David every time.

Final Plea

My plea is, first, to think more carefully about the articles or posts that show up on social media describing conversions or church growth. They may be true, but they usually don’t indicate a real trend. Nor do they prove or disprove one’s preferences in worship.

Second, avoid broad-brush criticisms of today’s worship styles and songs. Ask good questions and be specific with critique when necessary, but don’t become so broad and general in your concerns that you cordon yourself off from Christianity through the ages and make it harder to encounter the Lord in song.

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Sickened. Furious. Fed up. That’s how I felt this summer when I came across a news story about a pastor arrested for sending nude pictures to a teenager on multiple occasions.

I probably wouldn’t have given much thought to this case, as I must confess a level of desensitization at the alarming rate of such stories appearing these days, and because the offender doesn’t belong to my convention of churches.

But this time, the pastor exposed for exposing himself had been a visiting speaker at the Christian school my kids have attended. He had delivered a sermon the week of my daughter’s graduation. We had watched him extend an invitation and call students to come forward and get right with God, to recommit their lives to holiness. According to the police report, it was the very next day that this pastor initiated (not for the first time) a criminal interaction with a minor.

When news of the arrest arrived, we were angry and appalled. The sheer grossness of the allegations. The depths of hypocritical wickedness. The absence of any fear of God. How does a shepherd stand in the pulpit with the holy Word of God, and then prey on the flock, eyeing the “little ones” he can draw into the clutches of his own perverted power plays and sick fantasies?

Abuse Reckoning

It’s been more than two decades since The Boston Globe published the results of an investigation that led to the criminal prosecutions of five Roman Catholic priests and placed the sexual abuse of minors by Catholic clergy in the national spotlight. Subsequent investigations and allegations revealed a pattern of sexual abuse and cover-ups in various geographical areas across the United States.

What had first appeared to be a few isolated cases of abuse became a nationwide scandal, then a global crisis, for the Roman Catholic Church.

Many evangelicals at the time (wrongly) assumed the reason that sexual abuse had become so widespread in the Catholic Church was the extrabiblical demand for priestly celibacy. Now, multiple denominations and churches (even churches that don’t affiliate with a denomination) all around the world have been racked with scandal as sexual abuse has come to light in recent years.

It’s as if the Lord has seen fit to expose the corruption at all levels and remove any reason for denominational or tribal pride. There’s hardly anywhere any of us can look for a church tradition or Christian organization that isn’t, in some way, stained by this evil. The scandal of sexual abuse—the unbearable weight of story after story of spiritual shepherds abusing their authority and preying on sheep—has grown heavier and heavier.

Today, I sense a weariness among many church leaders when it comes to this issue. There’s less interest in litigating the adequacy or inadequacy in how church leaders and organizations have responded in the past. Even though a good number of churches and pastors are better equipped today than they were 10 years ago—stronger policies and procedures around childcare, more knowledge of how to handle allegations or suspicions, when to contact the authorities, and so on—there’s a sad sense of resignation because, at some point, one realizes not every evil scenario can be prevented.

For example, in the case of the man arrested this summer—a traveling speaker from the revivalist tradition—the predatory behavior wasn’t confined to a local church campus where certain protections might have been in place. In the digital age, with smartphones so prevalent, there are more ways for malefactors to engage in their evils.

Honor of the Lord’s Name

When I come across new scandals, I often glance at the comments section. And what strikes me there isn’t the anger on display but the cynicism. The here-we-go-again response. The impression that the church is filled with hypocrites who not only don’t believe what they teach but who use sound doctrine as a mask for their sinful schemes. The cynicism and disgust is palpable.

Who can blame people for such a response? The fallout from the egregious acts of bad shepherds is massive, casting a cloud of suspicion over good and faithful pastors too.

Part of me grows weary. Another part of me wants to weep for the victims. But I think roiling underneath all those emotions is a fierce desire to protect the name of Jesus, to see justice enacted against all who would smear his glory with their atrocities.

In Jeremiah 23, the Lord declares, “Woe to the shepherds who destroy and scatter the sheep of my pasture!” (v. 1). The land itself is in mourning when the shepherds’ “power is not rightly used” and “both prophet and priest are ungodly,” the Lord says. “Even in my house I have found their evil” (vv. 10–11).

We’re right to ask the Lord to expose the rot wherever it is, and to purify his church, and to restore those who have endured such abuse, and, most of all, to clear his name—to show he’s the One who said that anyone who would harm the least of these would be better off with a millstone at the bottom of the sea (Matt. 18:6).

If Jesus turned over tables because the temple leaders had turned the house of prayer for the nations into a den of thieves and robbers (21:12–13), it’s hard to imagine him giving a lesser response to so-called shepherds preying on his precious sheep, using their spiritual authority as a shield to evade detection.

And that brings me to Odysseus in The Odyssey.

Odyssey and the Suitors

The summer of 2026 set off an Oppenheimer-level mushroom cloud of think pieces about Christopher Nolan’s film adaptation of the epic poem from Homer. This piece will not be one of them.

Oh, I could wax eloquent about Nolan’s moviemaking, offer my opinion on which editorial decisions worked and didn’t, the casting choices, and the score. I could point out the adjustments that made The Odyssey more palatable to a society infused with Christianity’s moral sensibilities, especially the characterization of Odysseus as less a trickster and more a man racked with guilt, confessing his sins through a screen to Penelope, with a goddess showing up beside him (the Catholic confessional booth, anyone?). But this paragraph is already straining my promise not to bore you with another take.

What I will point out about The Odyssey’s original story (a part masterfully captured in Nolan’s film) is the end. When Odysseus returns to reunite with Penelope, his bride, he comes undercover. He must first deal with the suitors—the band of insufferable men who have been glutting themselves at his table and taking advantage of his family, hoping to be matched with Penelope so they can inherit all the wealth.

A coworker of mine noted a parallel in the church world. The “suitors” are the pastors and Christian leaders who want the perks of proximity to the Bride, without any real love for her. They gorge themselves on the generosity of God’s family, in ever-ascending games of status-seeking, marked by pomposity and hubris, with no fear of the returning Groom.

In Psalm 50:16–17, God says, “What right do you have to recite my statutes and to take my covenant on your lips? You hate instruction and fling my words behind you.” After a litany of sins and injustices comes this line: “You have done these things, and I kept silent; you thought I was just like you” (v. 21, emphasis added).

Oh, what a critical error! To think God is just like us. Excusing sin the way we do. Assuming he is indifferent to injustice. Failing to reckon with his commitment to the glory of his name. To forget God is holy. You thought I was just like you.

No, the Lord declares, justice will be served. “I am about to attend to you because of your evil acts,” thunders the Lord to the bad shepherds of Jeremiah 23. His anger “will not turn away until he has completely fulfilled the purposes of his heart” (vv. 2, 20). Whether on this side of eternity or after, no atrocity committed against the little ones loved by the Lord will go unpunished.

The Lord will judge. The Lord will clear his name. The suitors will be called to account.

Dark Times and the Light of Faith

The church’s history is filled with dark moments. Sometimes God’s people aligned with imperial power, and soldiers massacred civilians in the name of the Lord. There were times when greed and corruption led priests and bishops to give their blessing to injustice, to the fleecing of illiterate peasants in the centuries leading up to the Reformation, as people desperate to rescue their relatives from purgatory gave what they could from their meager savings and funded the opulent churches and palaces of higher-ups in the church.

There were centuries when Christians colluded with racial classifications in society, creating a caste system that propped up an unjust economic structure. Throughout our history, Christians have found ways to justify great evil, to defend the indefensible.

But in these same dark times, there were always Christians who recognized the melody of Christianity was being mangled. There were believers committed to calling out these atrocities as evil, to making amends, and to rebuilding and restoring the witness of God’s people. Christians were the ones who challenged corruption, violence, greed, and slavery. Christians were the ones who looked at the church in all its messiness and said, “With God’s help, we will wipe away this stain.”

The same must be true for our generation. We must not grow weary in doing good. We look to the promise the Lord makes in Jeremiah 23: “I will gather the remnant of my flock. . . . I will raise up shepherds over them who will tend them. They will no longer be afraid or discouraged, nor will any be missing” (vv. 3–4). Christ the Good Shepherd initially fulfilled this promise in his ministry, and he’ll fulfill it finally when he returns.

The Groom is returning for his Bride. The suitors who ravage the household of faith will receive their comeuppance. If the One coming to judge the living and the dead finds a plundered house on his return, he will expose and eradicate every false shepherd responsible for the rot.

The way we respond in this era matters. We care about the testimony of Jesus Christ and the moral witness of his people. We long for the day when the understandable cynicism so many harbor toward the church will be diminished by the palpable realness of countless churchgoers passionate about holiness and justice.

After one of his parables, Jesus asked, “When the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?” (Luke 18:8). On days like this, I wonder, When the Son of Man returns, will he find any faith left in the church?

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Now firmly planted in midlife, I find myself in frequent conversations with friends and colleagues five to ten years younger than me who are encountering new challenges around their calling and ambitions.

In the exciting years of early adulthood, your trajectory can feel like it’s up and to the right—a degree, a new job, a promotion, a new opportunity. Life seems ever-expanding in those early years of work, marriage, and child-rearing.

But at the outset of midlife, the arc begins to bend. The possibilities shrink. There’s a simmering uneasiness, an angst at feeling hemmed in by the decisions that have brought you to this point. Limitations show up, closing in on you, causing your early ambitions and aspirations in your career or ministry to bump up against the ceiling of reality.

And now you feel stuck.

Stuck in a job that once suited your skills, with responsibilities you’ve outgrown.

Stuck with fewer opportunities to move up, to make more, to find more fulfillment, to deploy all the gifts and talents you want to offer.

Stuck with the wear and tear of a marriage finishing its second decade or entering its third, with no clear path for maintaining or reestablishing the close connection you had at first.

Stuck with newly felt obligations toward aging parents, wondering how best to honor your father and mother while being a father or mother worthy of honor to your kids who are growing up fast.

People in this season often wish they could escape their current situation and find the new job, or new city, or new church that might bring fresh resolution to present frustration, but they realize every new opportunity might upend life for the whole family.

There’s also a spiritual conundrum here. Where’s the line between God-given ambition and wounded pride? When is discontentment rooted in self-pity and lack of gratitude, and when is discontentment righteous, a sacred cry of the heart to do more for Jesus and his kingdom? How do you cultivate the kind of holy aspiration that resembles the Old Testament character of Caleb (who asked for a mountain!), and how do you simultaneously find contentment in Christ as you submit to the Lord’s wise providence, no matter the circumstance? How does the divine discontent of wanting to be stretched exist alongside the divine contentment of appreciating your lot in life, finding the boundary lines pleasant even when they feel confining?

There are no easy answers. After a few years of this season of restlessness, the spiritual toll can be significant. Weariness sets in because no change is on the horizon. Day-to-day labors become routine, and frustration abounds. It takes energy to muster the passion you once felt for your work, and that effort only adds to the burden and boredom.

Noonday Demon

The peril for anyone in this situation is acedia. Acedia is a weariness of soul—a spirit of apathy—that leads to detachment from life, even when we remain engaged in regular activities. In the Christian tradition, it’s the forerunner to sloth, one of the seven deadly sins.

Acedia may begin with being tired of day-to-day work, but it manifests most acutely when we grow tired in our souls. We’re weary because everything is wearying. As it persists, we turn away from the summons and reality of divine love. We lose our grip on a higher meaning and purpose for our work. We turn inward—too tired to love, to even want to love.

The monastics called this “the noonday demon.” Imagine yourself in a desert monastery, most of your time spent in solitude. Midday is when the sun is highest and brightest, sending temperatures soaring toward suffocation, with shade as the only escape from the heat. All that can be done is the usual routine of working with your hands and praying the Psalms. This withering experience, day after day, led many a monk to reconsider his life choices, to wonder about fruitful avenues now foreclosed, and to worry his gifts and talents were wasted in such a wasteland.

The arc of midlife is perfect for the noonday demon’s tricks. When we reach this life stage, we don’t succumb to a haze of thoughtlessness. On the contrary, our minds go spinning, filled with thoughts—some unwelcome. We daydream about life in a different city. We fantasize about a better church. We keep checking to see if the perfect job (or just a better job, something different) might open up.

The noonday demon would have us smile at fantasy and frown at reality. Because that’s when we become impatient, resentful, and frustrated. Oozing from us is an attitude of discontentment. Bitterness seeps into other areas of life: an impatience toward your spouse, a harshness toward your kids, an envy toward a colleague, a suspicion toward your supervisors. Wounded pride feeds the fear that no one properly appreciates your contributions.

Self-Sabotage and Self-Diminishment

I’ve seen a number of people fall under the sway of the noonday demon, only to sabotage themselves—either by making impulsive decisions that call into question their character and wisdom, or by growing so cynical and resentful they harm their prospects at being hired anywhere else.

For others, it’s not self-sabotage but self-diminishment. The talons of acedia grip the heart, and spiritual anemia robs them of the energy required for love. They put up walls around the heart. They shrug (whatever!) at the people they work with. They lose any passion for loving those entrusted to their care. They no longer care about either learning contentment in every situation or leaning into holy discontent when they sense the Lord is calling them to something more. They settle for a lovelessness that leaves them less themselves.

Avoiding the Noonday Demon

How can we avoid self-sabotage and self-diminishment?

First, remember we’re Christians, not Stoics. We don’t stuff the hurts and disappointments deep down inside, as if they don’t matter. This fallen world groans. So do we. The ache is real. We do ourselves no favors by denying pain or minimizing its effects on our spirit.

Second, be aware of the traps. All around us are opportunities designed to lessen the discomfort of this season. Some people are drawn to the thrill of new adventure, leading to rash decisions and the typical midlife crisis, with unwise or sinful choices that leave lasting repercussions. More than a few respond by hopping from job to job, never reckoning with the reality that thorns and thistles show up everywhere. The grass may seem greener (and sometimes it is!), but there are always weeds you cannot see, and sometimes it’s best to stick with the thorns you know instead of being surprised by a hidden briar patch.

Others seek satisfaction in the anesthetic of the endless scroll, or gravitate toward friends who reinforce the self-pitying spirit rather than challenge it. The path is littered with diversions and distractions that inhibit our ability to grow into Christlikeness during this season.

Third, keep resentment at bay by pressing deeper into your pain, convinced the Lord has something to teach you about himself and yourself in the weariness of noonday.

Andrew Peterson recounts a lengthy period of depression that left him in despair before a concert at a church in North Carolina, unsure he could go on. Seeing the door to a janitor’s closet open, he slipped in to collect himself. As he poured out his sorrows to the Lord and cried for help, someone walked by and slammed the door, leaving him in the dark. The story may be funny now, Peterson says, but in the moment, it felt like the Lord had answered him not by lifting him out of the pit but by pressing him down further in the mud.

Later in life, Peterson was able to reframe that experience through his song “The Rain Keeps Falling”:

When we feel like we’re at rock bottom, stuck in a tomb and we can’t move the stone, we may be surprised to feel the Lord’s thumb pressing us further into the mud. But it’s not that he doesn’t care. It’s not that he’s cruel. Only by pressing us deeper into the soil can new life emerge. And the rain that won’t stop—the circumstances that cast a dreary pall over the world—is what waters the seed so it can grow. There is beauty that can only sprout from the soil of deep sorrow.

Finally, start to see waiting as a way of learning to more fully manifest patience, a fruit of the Spirit. Maybe your sphere of influence isn’t as big as you’d hoped, your salary not as high as you expected, your gifts and talents not deployed as effectively as you dreamed. The wait for something new doesn’t have to be frustrating. It can slow you down to take in the opportunities around you. As Jen Wilkin says in her new book on aging, “Shrinking possibilities bring expanding clarity. They enable us to become thoughtful curators instead of thoughtless consumers of the days on our calendars.”

Today’s limitations aren’t walls meant to hem you in; they’re the set and scenery—the backdrop—for you to take the stage and step into your role as a lover of God and a lover of people. Stop squinting as you look up to curse the noonday sun, and start seeing—look around at the sunlight falling on the people God has put in your life to love.

Lessons of Midlife

The noonday demon wins whenever we fight boredom with fantasies or whenever we slide into an unhealthy nostalgia. Acedia removes us from reality, taking us out of the realm of responsibility where we have the most to learn and the most to offer. The noonday demon that haunts the middle years wants you to either panic and overreact (to be impulsive and unwise) or to stop feeling altogether (to answer the dullness in your current circumstances with a dull heart and dulled emotions).

If this season of suffering feels like a hot afternoon with no end in sight, take heart. The sun will move. The world will spin. It could be an unimaginable blessing that brings this season of sorrow to a close. It could also be unspeakable suffering that rocks your world and shakes you out of your slumber. Something will break through the haze of noonday. When that time comes, will you have learned the lessons only the desert can teach you?

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I wasn’t sure what part of my son’s wedding would make me choke back tears. I knew it was coming—it always comes at some point, even at weddings where I barely know the couple. But how to handle the wedding of my oldest son?

Lined up outside the covered, open-air chapel, standing next to my wife of 23 years (she looked as radiant as ever), we were still running through last-minute details. How fast to walk. How to follow the wedding director’s cues. Where the photographer would be positioned.

The last time my wife and I walked down the aisle together, it was the recessional at the end of our own wedding, just before Christmas in 2002, on a snowy night in Romania. Now we were walking arm in arm again, this time near the beginning of a processional, as it was our son’s turn to meet his bride at the altar.

Once we took our places in the front row, I turned to watch the other couples proceeding in, and the emotions bubbled up faster than I’d expected. Groomsmen and bridesmaids. Then our younger two children—our daughter, heading to college this fall, arm in arm with our younger son, still in middle school. It was almost as if the future were sweeping in all at once. In a few years, it could be me walking her down the aisle to the smile of her waiting groom.

I had to wipe away tears when our son’s bride appeared at the far end of the aisle, the soft notes of “Canon in D” floating out across the chapel. This is always the moment that undoes me—not only because of my happiness for the bride and groom but because of the gospel overtones embedded in that single procession. The bride, resplendent in white. The groom, already beaming before she’d taken a few steps. The witnesses, risen to their feet to mark the sacred moment. In that brief walk, everything comes rushing together: the love of Jesus for his church, his sacrifice and promise to make her clean, the descent of the holy city in Revelation 21, the angels and archangels in stunned silence as the story of redemption reaches its climax. The covenant, unbroken forever.

A warm May breeze moved through the open chapel as we remained standing to sing two songs chosen by my son and his bride. The first was “The Love of God.”

Could we with ink the ocean fill
And were the skies of parchment made
Were every tree on earth a quill
And every man a scribe by trade
To write the love of God above
Would drain the ocean dry
Nor could the scroll contain the whole
Though stretched from sky to sky

Standing there with those words in my mouth, I felt the love of God on full display, in the sheer excess of grace that would bring a man and woman together in holy matrimony as a testament to the love that is evermore the saints and angels’ song.

The second song moved from the commitment of the Lord to us in the gospel to the commitment of my son and his wife to the Lord in their marriage. “Jesus, Have It All” is a song of surrender—offering to King Jesus the heart, the will, the soul. Our hopes, our dreams, our world. And then the verse that got me:

Jesus, have Your church, Your love, Your bride
The joy for which You freely gave Your life
Radiant in white
Washed and purified
Jesus, have us all

There’s nothing quite like singing those words at a wedding, where the song of salvation mingles with the melody of marital promise.

I made it through the rest of the service dry-eyed, delighting in the simplicity of the ceremony and then swept up in the joy of the recessional. The reception was another highlight—glowing faces, great food, a college friend of Timothy’s who broadcasted songs from a playlist that mixed contemporary songs with songs that have been beloved for decades. Ed Sheeran’s “Perfect” came on at some point, with the line that always gets me:

I found a love to carry more than just my secrets
To carry love,
to carry children of our own.

Then the voice of Karen Carpenter filled the hall. Seated across from my parents, I thought about “We’ve Only Just Begun,” the song that played at their wedding in 1980—just 10 months before they welcomed me into the world. And this, too, made me think of the gospel: the fruitfulness of salvation, how covenant love overflows and brings new life into the world. What magic! That 45 years later, those young newlyweds who sealed their commitment can look not only at their children but at a grandson getting married. Should the Lord bless my son and his wife with children, and should he give me and my wife a long life, we may one day witness the same: our grandchildren entering this most holy estate.

As the evening wound down, my son and his bride walked through a tunnel of sparklers, with friends and family cheering them toward the car that would carry them off to their honeymoon. I stood watching until the taillights disappeared, and I couldn’t help but feel wistful. This moment was different from sending our son off to college a few years ago. That departure was temporary, punctuated by holidays and summers, with his old room still waiting for him. Now he has hived off. He has begun a family of his own, and our home will never be the same. There’s something so right about all of it, so joyful, and yet there’s a sense of finality too. The closing of one chapter, the opening of another.

Through it all, gratitude is the overwhelming emotion. Gratitude for the love he and his wife have for Jesus. Gratitude for the inexpressible gift of being entrusted with children who somehow survived all our wrongheaded notions and imperfect parenting. Gratitude for all that marriage represents—from the coming together of Adam and Eve in Genesis 2 to its fullest expression in Christ laying down his life for the church. And gratitude that on a warm May afternoon, under a chapel basking in plentiful sunshine, I got a glimpse of the old, old story all over again.

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One of Dostoevsky’s most unsettling insights into human nature is counterintuitive.

We live in a world of ceaseless conflict. And when we look for the source of that conflict, we often assume it’s hatred. We hate people and then treat them poorly. It’s because we feel contempt toward others that we sin against them.

But that’s only half the story.

Often it’s the other way around. First, we hurt someone, and only then do we begin to hate them.

Mistreat someone, and over time, your antipathy toward them will grow. Treat someone unfairly, and over time, you’ll feel a growing sense of contempt. The harm comes first. The hatred follows.

A man who berates his wife may not have launched into his first harangues with hatred and animosity. But what started from a lack of love and self-control will eventually turn into seething hatred for her. It’s not the intense hatred that prompts the wrongdoing; it’s the wrongdoing that inflames the intense hatred.

Biblical Record

We see this pattern in the Scriptures. Consider Saul and David. Saul’s jealousy began not with hatred but with insecurity. He was a king rattled by the shepherd boy’s successes. And yet the more Saul pursued David unjustly, the more his obsession metastasized. Every wrongdoing required self-justification. By the end, the man who had once loved David like a son was hurling spears at him and hunting him through the wilderness. The wrongdoing didn’t express preexisting hatred; it generated it.

Then there’s Amnon and Tamar. The text in 2 Samuel 13 is horrifyingly direct: After Amnon violated his sister, “he hated [her] with such intense hatred that the hatred he hated her with was greater than the love he had loved her with” (v. 15, CSB). Amnon wronged his sister, and a cold contempt followed.

Civilizational Pattern

This pattern also shows up in civilizational crises. The Final Solution didn’t begin with fully formed genocidal hatred on behalf of Germans toward the Jewish people. It began with incremental wrongdoings that became so commonplace they barely registered. The German national story was reframed around grievance so that perpetrators could see themselves as the aggrieved masters, the heroes, the wronged party. Wrongdoing against the Jews became commonplace, and then antisemitic hatred swelled in its wake.

The ugliness of American racism didn’t flow from a preexisting fount of hatred toward enslaved black people. No, there were dehumanizing, unjust practices that led to the pervasiveness of irrational contempt throughout society. Centuries of wrongdoing preceded and then reinforced antipathy toward people of color.

Novelist Ken Follett, in Edge of Eternity, put this idea in the mouth of one of his characters: “A man hates the person he has wronged, paradoxically. I think it’s because the victim is a perpetual reminder that he behaved shamefully.”

Heart’s Dark Maneuver

Why does this happen? Because wrongdoing threatens the story we tell about ourselves. We come to hate others because their presence is a verdict that threatens our sense of righteousness.

Pascal diagnosed this tendency:

It’s the “unjust and criminal passion” against the truth that leads to contempt for the person who bears the brunt of our wrongdoing — the one who mirrors back to us our failure to love.

If you look at your life and find you’re in the wrong, you face two choices: Repent and make amends, or harden your heart and reframe the narrative until you’re the good guy. The second path is far more traveled.

This is why Dostoevsky’s Underground Man cannot face the prostitute he gave a glimmer of hope to and then crushed. After wronging her, his resentment intensifies precisely because she represents his own failure. His bad feelings toward her flow from his inability to narrate himself as the suffering but superior man.

It’s also why Stavrogin, in Devils, cannot achieve repentance. His confession chapter (initially suppressed by the publisher) shows a man who has wronged nearly everyone around him and yet cannot surrender his self-image as a figure beyond ordinary moral categories. Genuine guilt would require becoming ordinary. His story ends as it does because death is preferable to such a reckoning.

This is also why we come to hate God. We know deep down we’ve sinned against him in thought, word, and deed. And that knowledge is intolerable to a heart that insists on its own heroism. We cannot be the moral center of our own story if we stand guilty before the One who made us. So the heart makes this maneuver: Rather than hating our sin, we come to hate him for our sin.

Way Out

Repentance is the rejection of that path. It means we stop trying to rewrite the story. We admit we aren’t the hero, and we receive from the One we have wronged most deeply a forgiveness we didn’t earn.

But the gospel does more than remove us from one path. It puts us on another. Just as committing wrongs against someone can lead us toward hatred, a sustained posture of compassion and kindness can move us toward a love we may not feel at first.

In Mere Christianity, C. S. Lewis observed that there are two kinds of pretending. There’s the bad kind, where the pretense replaces the real thing, and the good kind, where acting in a certain way leads to the feelings being aimed for:

To love is to will the good of another. Love is an act of the will, not mere sentiment. And this is why Jesus’s command to love our enemies is more than a moral instruction. It’s a kind of supernatural love that does something to us. Bonhoeffer asked, “How does love become unconquerable?” He answered, “By never asking what the enemy is doing to it, and only asking what Jesus has done.”

Love that flows from what Christ has done for us—not in how we feel, not in what others deserve—throws up a blockade against every path that leads toward contempt. It is Christ’s love that breaks the cycle of hurt and hate. Not willpower. Not good intentions. The love that came to us first, before we deserved it, is the only love strong enough to rip up the false story we tell ourselves.

And that is what the gospel makes possible. We can face the people we have wronged—with contrition, with resolve—because Christ has already faced us in our wretchedness and loved us anyway. Our illusion of being the hero of our story fades behind the shadow of the cross.

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When people ask how long I’ve been working on The Lord Is My Light—the liturgy for daily prayer coming out this fall—I struggle to answer. There’s a sense in which it’s been in development for more than 20 years, from the time an older woman in my Baptist church back home handed me The Book of Common Prayer. That gift whetted my appetite for more prayers from all eras of church history, and I’ve enjoyed finding gems here and there from our forefathers and mothers in the faith that I can make my own.

In the first church I served as a pastor, we had a nicely designed prayer room just off the foyer near the entrance, and every week I compiled materials for a simple daily office for the men and women (mainly older, seasoned saints) who would frequent that room. By adding ancient prayers to my routine, I felt those words becoming mine. Ever since, I’ve been perusing prayer books and marking the most moving and glorious prayers from saints and martyrs of the past.

The Lord Is My Light’s daily liturgy features a “prayer of the church” that draws on wonderful resources laying out prayers from people throughout church history. I’d like to give a nod to the explorers and discoverers who have unearthed, adapted, and repackaged so many of these wonderful prayers. Here are the ones I’ve most appreciated and drawn from often.

Robert Elmer is the finder of finders. His series from Lexham Press features prayers from multiple eras of church history: Fount of Heaven draws from the early church, Grace from Heaven from the Reformation period, Piercing Heaven from the Puritans, and the newly released Joy of Heaven treats us to stirring prayers of praise and confession that give voice to the heartfelt yearnings of believers for personal renewal and corporate revival. Not only are these four volumes a treasure trove of prayers, but their designs are handsome and the books themselves are a pleasure to hold. Elmer groups the prayers according to theme, which makes them easy to navigate, and I’ve returned to this series again and again as I’ve collected and adapted prayers for The Lord Is My Light.

Cloud of Witnesses: A Treasury of Prayer and Petitions Through the Ages, edited by Jonathan Arnold and Zachariah Carter and published by Crossway, is organized by era: the early church (100–800), the medieval church (800–1500), the Reformation church (1500–1700), and the modern church (1700–1900). The appendix includes the prayers in their original languages, biographical sketches of the historical figures involved, and historical introductions that place each prayer in context. Arnold and Carter did fresh translations of prayers previously unavailable in English, and they modernized versions of prayers written in early or middle modern English. Many of these prayers were new to me, and I incorporated portions of more than a few of them in The Lord Is My Light. The design is inviting, the scholarship is careful, and the whole collection rewards slow reading.

Jonathan Gibson’s popular trilogy of liturgies for daily worship—Be Thou My Vision, O Come, O Come, Emmanuel, and O Sacred Head, Now Wounded—brings together some of the best of the Reformation tradition, reintroducing us to familiar names while supplementing with lesser-known figures whose prayers are rich in their expressions of confession and adoration. Gibson’s daily liturgy takes considerably longer to pray through than The Lord Is My Light, but I appreciate his incorporation of the ancient creeds and Reformation catechisms, and the way his historical prayers frame up the Bible reading and personal prayers of intercession. As with everything from Crossway, the design is elegant, with careful attention to readability.

The Puritans continue to be among the most sought-after prayer warriors from the past, as evidenced by the enduring success of The Valley of Vision, compiled and edited by Arthur Bennett. I adapted and modernized several prayers from this collection—often shortening them for space and time—but the fuller prayers I drew from are worth your attention. Also notable is Tim Chester’s Into His Presence, which features 80 prayers from a range of Puritan pastors and writers. Chester, like me, is less interested in the historical curiosity than in people actually praying these prayers as a living and enriching spiritual experience.

Several other collections deserve mention. Conversations with God collects two centuries of prayers by African Americans, and An African Prayer Book gathers prayers from believers across the world’s largest continent. Thomas Oden and Joel Elowsky’s On the Way to the Cross is a 40-day devotional drawing on the church fathers, with rich and resonant prayers at the close of most days. Many prayers in the Christian section of The Oxford Book of Prayer overlap with other collections, but there are gems there that sparkle and don’t show up elsewhere. Kurt Bjorklund’s Prayers for Today canvasses the whole Christian tradition, while Women of Prayer (compiled by Dorothy Stewart) and The Book of Uncommon Prayer surface voices that rarely appear in other anthologies.

It should go without saying that Thomas Cranmer’s legacy as a liturgist looms large over the English Reformation tradition, and nowhere is this more evident than in the various editions of The Book of Common Prayer still available today. My 12th great-grandfather was an Anglican theologian whose work on sola scriptura is still in print. It’s nice to know, whenever I pray through the 1559 Elizabethan prayer book, that someone in my lineage was familiar with these same words and rhythms.

The recently republished 1662 edition by IVP—still the official prayer book of the Church of England—is another worth owning and using. For The Lord Is My Light, I relied most heavily on the 2019 ACNA edition, particularly for the specific wording of the confessions of sin and for the dozens of “collects”—those compact, well-crafted prayers that follow the pattern of the Lord’s Prayer: an address to God, a phrase that focuses on his character and attributes as the basis for a petition, the desired result or benefit, and a closing word of praise.

I could go on, pointing you toward collections organized around individual voices like Spurgeon, Tozer, F. B. Meyer, and John Baillie, but this should be enough to give you a starting place if you’re interested in incorporating more prayers from church history into your devotional life. In The Lord Is My Light, I’m including the dates after every name represented, with the hope that curiosity will lead readers to learn more about those whose prayers have been passed down to us.

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Twice this spring, I was in New York City, and as always, the city filled me with awe.

Craning my neck at the skyscrapers, unable to fit some of them into a single photo, I remarked to a friend that the real marvel isn’t how high the buildings go but how deep their foundations must be to stand that tall. I arrived by plane: breakfast at home in Tennessee, lunch in the Big Apple. I got around by train, covering the length of the island in minutes.

We live in a world of technological wonders.

World We’ve Built

But what happens when technological advance outpaces our moral formation? We’re left barren. And that’s what I’m afraid is happening with recent developments in technology and generative AI.

Brandon Rickabaugh, writing for Comment, warns of a poverty of soul in technological abundance. Much of his article focuses on AI companionship and the way it depersonalizes us. But what got my attention was his account of how a technological mindset reshapes the way we think about spiritual disciplines.

When Persons Become Systems

Rickabaugh notes how we now describe ourselves with mechanistic metaphors. This is something I warned about last year, how we constantly talk about ourselves as if we were machines—a habit more pervasive than most of us realize. That’s why I’m less concerned about robots taking over the world than I am about humans beginning to mirror robots. Robots won’t conquer us from outside; we’ll start to act robotic ourselves and lose something of our humanity in the process.

Here’s where we need to consider spiritual formation, in particular how we view the disciplines and practices that often go along with growth. Count me in as someone who celebrates the many tools and techniques available for Bible reading, prayer, and cultivating community with others in church. (I’m developing prayer resources myself, such as The Lord Is My Light liturgy for daily prayer, in both podcast and book form.) I’m not against tools, and I’m certainly not against technique. I’m happy to talk about both.

But in a mechanistic mindset, spiritual formation shifts away from the steady ordering of the person through abiding in Christ (affecting our thoughts, emotions, desires, will, body, and social presence) and toward a self-improvement plan or behavioral or psychological upgrade.

Disciplines Are Not Deliverables

Rickabaugh defines spiritual disciplines as “embodied practices that help place us where grace can reach us in relational receptivity to God.” He gives examples: “Silence that interrupts self-talk. Solitude that exposes we are not as alone as we feel. Fasting that confronts our habits of control. Confession that breaks the tyranny of self-justification. Worship that directs desire toward God.”

But this isn’t a program that guarantees results. “Spiritual disciplines do not transform us into the image of Christ,” he says. “They create holy space. When practiced in faith, hope, and love, they help us become relationally receptive to the Spirit who does the actual renovating work. Our attention shifts from self-mastery and self-soothing to a self-surrender uninterested in manipulating outcomes.”

This is where the modern technological culture is so insidious, because it reframes our formation as self-help optimization. Spiritual disciplines get slotted into the long list of other steps that can be retooled for regulating our behavior and emotions. Their value is instrumental.

What’s missing in this is God. Or worse, God gets instrumentalized until he’s harnessed for whatever outcome we’re most interested in. In this world, we’ll be vulnerable to every new technology on offer—including the AI chatbot that promises spiritual direction—because we’re already thinking in terms of a programmable system. Taking that step will only further shift the aim of spiritual life “from communion to control, from surrender to self-curation, from transformation to experience management.”

Rickabaugh links this to another topic I’ve written on before—the role of friction and resistance in personal growth. We cannot remove all the difficulty from the path of spiritual formation because the resistance we face—internal and external—is part of the Spirit’s sharpening work in us.

Our aim isn’t to achieve an inner equilibrium but to encounter the God who promises, within the context of the covenant community, to transform our character into Christlikeness. Rickabaugh concludes by pointing to the paradox of our moment:

Re-Formation, Not Optimization

Where, then, do we go from here? He points to several aspects of re-formation:

• the necessity of interior personal presence (prayer, confession, and silence require an inner life of awareness and openness to God);
• a relational rather than mechanical vision of the Christian life;
• the disruptiveness of having our wills confronted by truth that calls us to repentance;
• the resistance that strengthens us and directs our growth toward spiritual maturity; and
• the indispensability of people, the communion of saints who walk this road with us as we seek the Lord together.

The technological world we’ve built is awe-inspiring. But techniques don’t make us more like Christ. It’s the Spirit who accomplishes spiritual formation through Scripture, through the disciplines, through the friction, and in community. Technology can get you to New York. But not to God.

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A couple years ago, John Dickson and I were giving guest lectures for a course at Wycliffe Hall in Oxford. One of his observations stood out to me: Praying is the most frequently enjoined gospel-promoting activity in the New Testament.

Not preaching. Not giving. Not going. Praying.

I tend to think of prayer as what we do before the real work of evangelism begins, or as a last resort when we run into difficulty. But ever since Dickson made that observation, I keep finding that emphasis on evangelistic prayer everywhere I look in the New Testament.

Evangelistic Prayer

You’re probably familiar with this saying of Jesus: “The harvest is plentiful, but the workers are few,” he tells his disciples. You’d think the command that would follow would be something like “So get to it! Enlist the workers and get out there!” But the command is different: “Therefore, pray to the Lord of the harvest to send out workers into his harvest” (Matt. 9:37–38). The workers are few, so get praying. Oswald Chambers comments on this passage:

When the apostle Paul envisioned that “petitions, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made for everyone,” the reason he gave Timothy for this kind of prayer was that it’s “good and pleasing in the sight of God our Savior, who wants everyone to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth” (1 Tim. 2:1–4). Note the connection: Praying for people aligns our heart with the heart of God that desires their salvation. Prayer is connected to evangelistic longing.

Then there’s Colossians 4:2–4: “Devote yourselves to prayer; stay alert in it with thanksgiving. At the same time, pray also for us that God may open a door to us for the word, to speak the mystery of Christ, for which I am in chains, so that I may make it known as I should.”

Dickson points out the irony of this passage. Paul asks for an open door when he’s literally chained. In other words, the missionary is locked up, but the Word is still free. The bonds will not have the last word. God can open doors that circumstances can’t keep closed.

Praying More Evangelistically

If prayer is the most urgent gospel-promoting activity in the New Testament, then we should look for ways to incorporate this important work in our own lives. Here are a few suggestions to get started.

1. Prayer Cards

I like to use 3×5 cards for the people I pray for regularly. Consider jotting down the name of someone you’re burdened for. Underneath the name, write down a passage of Scripture you’re praying would become true in their life. Then rotate through the cards regularly.

A verse like Psalm 34:8—“Taste and see that the LORD is good”—becomes your prayer: that this person would taste the Lord’s goodness, see his grace, grow hungry for what only he can provide. Or for the person laboring under guilt and shame, you pray Psalm 130:3–4, which tells us “with [the LORD] there is forgiveness.”

Naming someone before God, and linking that name to a particular verse in Scripture, will shape your hope for them and will embolden you to speak truth when the right moment comes.

2. Missionary Calendars

Alongside personal intercession, it’s good to pray for those on the front lines of evangelistic work. I use the North American Mission Board’s annual prayer calendar that puts before me church planters, disaster relief chaplains, military chaplains, and other evangelistic ministers. The calendar includes a photo, along with specific prayer requests for the gospel work taking place in that area and through the minister.

Find something that helps you pray for international missionaries, college outreach programs, and other kinds of evangelistic work. (You can find additional prayer resources from the International Mission Board or North American Mission Board.)

The apostle Paul in Colossians 4 was in chains, asking believers in a different city to pray for his gospel work. He saw the believers in Colossae as vital participants in his ministry, through the power of intercession.

3. The Lord’s Prayer

If you pray the Lord’s Prayer daily, or use the Lord’s Prayer as your structure, you can teach yourself to pray evangelistically whenever you lean into that opening section. You can pray for the Father’s name to be hallowed, and his will to be done in the lives of the people you’re bringing before the Lord. Every petition in that prayer has room for the names of people who don’t yet know the Father you’re calling on.

We Can Pray

Though we’re all called to evangelism, some are particularly gifted at it. Evangelistic conversations come easier to some people than to others. No matter what gifts you think you have, or what platform you’ve been given, or how many people God has brought into your life, you can always pray.

You may never be called to a cross-cultural mission field. You may be homebound for a season due to ill health. You may not have the proximity to unbelievers you once had where you worked. Whatever your circumstances, you can still pray. And the New Testament doesn’t see prayer as a lesser contribution to the mission of God.

Dickson’s observation reminds us that the most neglected evangelistic activity in most of our churches is also the most available one. The harvest is plentiful, and the Lord of the harvest is listening.

Pray.

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Every summer, when news comes out from various denominational meetings, you’ll notice a pattern. There’s always a controversial vote. A social media storm. Commentators declare the institution either irredeemably corrupt or finally on the right track, depending on what side they’re on. There’s the noise of newsletters and statements, frequent hand-wringing about the future, especially in light of statistics pointing to decline.

Meanwhile, what makes up the bulk of denominational life continues on, unnoticed and undiscussed. Missionaries board planes to the places God has called them. Church planters continue the setup and teardown in their local school, with dozens on their core team and more than a few who have recently come to faith. Pastors sit with grieving families. Seminary students encounter great texts from church history for the first time, joining a conversation that takes on a denominational shape across generations.

None of these elements makes for a news headline, but they’re all part of the engine of what makes denominational life worthwhile, despite the mess.

Understory

Anne Snyder, editor-in-chief of Comment magazine, has been developing a concept she calls “the understory.” It’s a term she borrows from ecology. The understory is the layer of vegetation that grows beneath the forest canopy. The canopy gets the sun, but the understory does the work. It regulates moisture. It shelters the young growth. It holds the soil in place when the storms hit.

Beneath the understory lies what foresters call the “wood wide web”—an underground network of roots and fungi through which neighboring trees share nutrients, send signals, and hold each other up through drought and storm. Trees that look unconnected above ground are, beneath it, keeping each other strong. Without the understory and the root system beneath it, the forest is just a bunch of tall trees waiting to fall.

Snyder applies this concept to institutional life. What’s needed right now, she argues, is a recognition and a recovery of the small, the hidden, the relational. Churches that stand tall, pastors who are steady and grounded, denominational initiatives that are effective—these efforts are almost always undergirded by the understory and the web of rooted relationships.

What the Canopy Hides

Last fall, I wrote about several challenges to denominational life, including our churches’ tendency to be overexposed to each other. One of the great distortions of the social media age is that it focuses all our attention on the canopy. The controversial vote becomes the story. The incendiary post is what gets shared. The messy ministry situation elicits outrage.

Online algorithms then reward content that provokes negative emotion: a toxic stew of sadness, fear, indignation, or, worst of all, contempt. And because roughly 3 percent of active accounts produce a third of all content online, a tiny, unrepresentative minority ends up defining what the denomination looks and feels like to those watching from outside (and to disconnected people on the inside). Leaders who shape their proposals in response to online outrage often learn this the hard way: It’s the understory, rather than the loudest voices, moving the denomination forward.

Those working hard to improve denominational health (what Jake Meador calls “the stewards”) are hard at work underground, often in unseen ways. It’s not the social media rant that drives the conversation but the private text thread with a number of pastors who love and encourage each other on a regular basis. It’s the email newsletter subscriber who prays for the missionary family featured every week. It’s the church that sends out a core team to start a new church, and celebrates when they hear that the first baptism has taken place. It’s the seminary student receiving from a pastor several theology books he’s longed to read. It’s the prayer chain for a beloved church leader in a state convention or local association, recently diagnosed with a debilitating illness.

The understory is often invisible. It doesn’t generate traffic. But the relational tissue is what keeps the denominational foundation intact when the canopy is swaying in the storms of our current era.

Tending What You Can’t See

I appreciate Snyder’s vision for repair in a broken anti-institutional age. We need builders. Reformers. Restorers. A generation ready to don the gardeners’ gloves and get busy cultivating the soil.

Every pastor who has been in ministry for any length of time knows that ministry is messy. The mission field is messy. Churches are full of broken people making halting progress. Denominations struggle to overcome inertia, to avoid mission drift, to resist cynicism and the pull toward disengagement.

But God is at work in the mess. The Spirit is moving in the understory, strengthening roots, nourishing us through our brothers and sisters in Christ.

When storms arrive (and they will), the stewards well acquainted with the understory will be less inclined to take to the canopy with performative frustration. They’ll be prepared to address challenges through proper channels and do the often unseen work of repair and restoration.

The denominations that make it in an anti-institutional, nondenominational age will survive not because of a better communications strategy or a flashy new initiative that woos other churches to join them. They’ll survive, and thrive, because of faithfulness in the understory. The unseen growth keeps the forest alive and standing when the storms shake the canopy.

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Carl Trueman’s new book, The Desecration of Man: How the Rejection of God Degrades Our Humanity, will likely make my list of Favorite Reads of the Year. Immensely readable for the thoughtful observer of our current cultural climate, it’s also penetrating in its analysis and insight. Trueman brings into view something outside the frame of his Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self—he shows how technology, not merely philosophy, has sped our cultural devolution in recent years.

Because of the scope of topics he covers, no one will escape feeling a level of discomfort in his trenchant diagnoses. Some Christian conservatives will nod along while reading the chapter on sexuality, only to be challenged when they turn the page to see how reproductive technologies such as IVF also fall under his banner of desecration.

Some nonreligious conservatives will breeze through the book, only to be surprised that they—like Roger Scruton—might fit in the same box as Richard Dawkins, because Trueman believes the desire for Christianity only for its benefits is, in fact, another form of nihilism.

Those on the political right will “Amen” the many examples of desecration on the secular left, only to discover there’s no partisan escape, for Trueman also points out the desecrating impulse of those who associate themselves with the right.

Problem With Re-Enchantment

What I found most provocative in Trueman’s thesis is that the recent talk about disenchantment and the malaise of our modern world isn’t enough to explain our cultural battles and anxieties. “We have not disenchanted what it means to be human,” he writes. “Rather, we have desecrated humanity.”

Trueman finds “desecration” a far better way of describing a culture that revels in the destruction of things once viewed as sacred. In this, we hear echoes of Philip Rieff: “Culture and sacred order are inseparable. . . . No culture has ever preserved itself where there is not a registration of sacred order.”

Why does the difference in diagnosis matter? Because if disenchantment isn’t the deepest problem, then a “re-enchantment” that merely opens us up to something beyond the immanent frame cannot be the solution. That impulse will only take us so far—perhaps into acknowledging that nature is mysterious, or that there’s something unfathomable beyond our consumerist way of life. That might be a start, but it isn’t a destination. Trueman writes,

Consecration, Trueman argues, is more than a feeling or sentiment. It has “a distinct, dogmatic, cultic, and moral shape, with all three elements standing in nonnegotiable connection to each other.” He makes this memorable with three C’s: creed, cult, and code.

Some who share our concerns about the malaise of the modern world may agree on two out of three—but all three remain necessary. Consider the renowned neuroscientist Iain McGilchrist, who acknowledges himself as a Christian in some sense, moved by worship (what Trueman calls “the cult”) yet believing that traditional insistence on the creed is misguided. McGilchrist may be an ally in the re-enchantment conversation, as a scientist willing to press beyond reductionist materialism, but those who remain on his plane will lack what’s necessary to see a genuine Christian renewal of society take place. Two out of three isn’t enough.

What This Means for the Church

Trueman’s analysis is provocative and, in the main, right. And it has ramifications for how we think about discipleship and evangelism.

Understanding that the biggest problem is desecration—not merely disenchantment—goes a long way in helping Christians think through the reasons why many in our culture express hostility toward Christian doctrine and especially Christian ethics. It opens a window into the why of desecration: the exhilaration many feel as they tear down the holy. It helps Christians brace for cultural conflict while maintaining a laser focus on local church ministry—reinforcing what we believe and why (the creed), the necessity and formative influence of worship in Word and sacrament (the cult), and the nonnegotiable elements of Christian conduct (the code). A renewal of the culture cannot happen apart from a renewal of the church.

But one could read Trueman’s work and assume the only response is to hunker down and maintain what we have as Christians, preserving the church as an enclave against the storms of desecration. There’s an illuminating moment in a recent conversation between Trueman and Albert Mohler where Mohler acknowledges that many of his tactical or strategic disagreements with other believers boil down to a question of distance: How far is the gap between faithful Christians and the surrounding culture?

If the distance runs along the disenchantment-to-re-enchantment spectrum, there are all kinds of openings to pursue and areas of common ground to cultivate for evangelistic conversation. If the distance is measured by desecration and consecration, the gulf between Christians and the secular left (and right) is far wider.

Two Cheers for Disenchantment

So here’s where I’d like to give at least one or two cheers for the disenchantment thesis (though with some important caveats I’ve pointed out before). Desecration may mark our culture as a whole, but the intense passion around tearing down the holy is only characteristic of some within it. Most people aren’t involved in active desecration. Yes, they live in Nietzsche’s world of ressentiment and breathe that polluted air, but they don’t necessarily feel his passion. They sense the madness of our current cultural moment, but they aren’t excited by Nietzsche’s madman.

So even if Trueman’s desecration/consecration axis is sharper than the disenchantment/enchantment axis, plenty of individuals experience the latter in a more profound way than the former—and are thus ripe for evangelistic conversations that can open the door to the challenging of deeper assumptions and presuppositions.

On the flip side, Trueman’s analysis will challenge anyone who thinks the desecration/consecration axis lines up neatly along partisan political lines in the United States. There will be no political solution to our current malaise. Trueman points out the transhumanist movement of the tech bros and the war-lording of Christian nationalist fantasists online.

Listen to some people speak of the differences between Republicans and Democrats, and you’d think the distinctions are between total darkness and brilliant light—when in reality we’re all experiencing the various stages of a twilight that now engulfs all the West.

Although we may acknowledge that the transgressive ethos has been more evident on the left than on the right, so that claiming a moral symmetry between the parties would be inaccurate (from a platform perspective, there’s at least something for secular “reality respecters” on the Republican side), nothing that even closely resembles Trueman’s consecrated vision is to be found in American politics today. Only in the church, and even there we have work to do.

Church’s Calling in a Desecrated Age

My takeaway from this book is soberness and hope—an increased passion to see a church unflinching in its assessment of our cultural moment and rededicated to shoring up its beliefs, its worship, and its Christlikeness as indispensable elements for a renewal of mission in the days ahead. Not a church that retreats but one that reaches out with kindness and conviction, offering something that will meet the next generation’s hunger for stability and meaningful moral formation.

Consecration shouldn’t result in a purely defensive posture. We’re consecrated for mission. The church that knows what it believes, why it worships, and how it’s called to live is the same church that can go out—not to preserve or bring back a previous era but to serve as a living reminder to a world that has forgotten what it means to be human.

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Catechisms are making a comeback. I hear regularly from pastors and church leaders who are interested in this question-and-answer method of Christian formation, both for children and adults. In a world with so many competing messages flowing to us through the endless scroll, we need the truth of the Christian faith to be pressed into our hearts.

My experience with catechesis began before I could read. My parents had laminated cards with doctrinal questions, and they taught me to recite the correct answers. This was the beginning of a Christian formation that taught me the faith wasn’t just something we engaged on Sundays. Growing up, we talked about the big questions of life, what it means to follow Jesus, and the truths of Christianity. Our conversations would take place in the house, on the road, at breakfast, and at bedtime. It was catechesis combined with conversation.

World Has Its Own Catechism

Tim Keller used to say that all catechesis is, in some sense, counter-catechesis. For example, the Reformation-era catechisms weren’t only presenting the truths of Christianity but were seeking to show the difference between Protestantism and the dominant culture of medieval Catholicism.

Today, the primary alternative we face is Western secularism, with its own catechism reinforced constantly through ads, music, social media, and entertainment. The secular world disciples people through stories and slogans: Be true to yourself. Follow your heart. Define your own reality.

Our kids are learning to see life according to this catechism before they can read. The research on children and faith formation is sobering. If we think Sunday school for an hour a week can compete with the 35 hours a child spends in school—to say nothing of screens—we’ve badly misjudged the contest.

Deuteronomy 6 lays out a vision of whole-life discipleship. There, we see families talking about God’s Word when in their house and when they walk along the road, when they lie down and when they get up. Discipleship happens in the daily rhythms of life, or it mostly doesn’t happen at all. If we don’t catechize our kids, someone else will. And it won’t be into Christianity.

This is why, several years ago, Thomas West and I began developing The Gospel Way Catechism—a resource designed not just to pass on doctrine but to equip Christians to recognize and respond to the competing stories of our age.

Not This but That

The original adult catechism was released last year, and we’ve been encouraged to see churches and families adopting and implementing this resource.

But from the beginning, we knew a version for children would need to follow. We wanted to help kids navigate the questions of our age—to meet the cultural challenges earlier and with understandable, theological vocabulary to answer them well.

The Gospel Way Catechism for Kids (releasing August 1) is a beautifully illustrated resource built on the same counter-catechetical instinct as its adult counterpart, but adapted for children ages 8–12. The same 50 foundational questions are here (Who is Jesus? Why did God create us? What is freedom? What is sin? etc.), simplified for children while carrying the same “not this but that” instinct.

The catechism’s questions and answers follow a consistent pattern. Each answer gives a clear biblical truth, rooted in a specific Scripture passage. An explanation unpacks the meaning through stories and simple language, and shows how that truth pushes back against what the world tells kids to believe. We want to help them spot the difference between God’s story and the stories competing for their loyalty.

The catechism includes Table Talk questions designed to spark discussion. Each section ends with a Prayer Practice, a practical way of bringing what they’re learning directly to God.

Taken together, these elements aim at something more than correct answers. We want to develop the counter-catechetical instinct: the ability to recognize, almost intuitively, where the world’s story doesn’t line up with Scripture—and to know, with confidence, that God’s story is better.

Passing On What We Have

There’s an old line I come back to often when I think about discipleship in the home: You can’t pass on what you don’t have.

The catechism is a tool, one with an ancient pedigree. The ability to see where the world’s story doesn’t line up with Scripture, to name it, and to point toward something better—that’s the instinct we’re after. It takes root in children who see their parents holding the faith seriously, praying with sincerity, talking about Scripture at the table, willing to say “not this but that” when the world is watching. The Gospel Way Catechism for Kids is designed to put that conversation in your hands.

The secular world is already catechizing our children. This is one way to make sure they can answer back with the truth of God’s Word.

Preorder Bonus: Preorder your copy before August 1, 2026, and receive a free set of flash cards featuring the 50 Q&As from the book. Kids can use these cards to reinforce what they’ve learned. The first 250 entries will receive physical copies before this offer goes to digital download / printable only. Preorder anywhere, then go to the resource’s website, scroll down, and fill out the form to claim your bonus.

We live in a transient culture, and most of us will have several jobs and live in different places over the course of our lifetimes. I often hear from younger Christians seeking wisdom in weighing opportunities for career advancement, or young pastors wondering when it’s time to move on from their current place of ministry. What is the role of ambition? Does a move make sense on a pragmatic level? How do you know if your heart is in the right place? Where might pride be getting in the way?

Sometimes present-day clarity comes from looking backward, and the Council of Nicaea provides an interesting lens for these questions. We just celebrated the 1,700th anniversary of the most important creed in church history, but not to be forgotten are the other decisions that came out of that council. And one of them speaks directly to the question of ministry ambition and pastoral transition—whether a potential move is truly from the Lord and for the Lord.

Why the Church Forbade the Moving of Ministers

Reviewing the Nicene canons is fascinating because it transports you into another era of church history. Some decisions feel familiar and eerily relevant—qualifications and stipulations for those in ministry, for example. Others feel foreign, no longer enforced in any wing of the Christian church, because the problems they addressed were temporary. Then there are canons that are somehow both—familiar in the temptation they’re trying to resist but foreign in the solution offered.

The best example of this familiar/foreign canon is the prohibition of a bishop, priest, or deacon moving from one church to another. Although several of the men present at the Council of Nicaea had left their first bishopric to take another, the council as a whole forbade future moves of this nature.

There were logistical and bureaucratic reasons for this prohibition, but also theological ones. The church fathers worried that ambition would run rampant if transfers were allowed. Bishops in smaller, less desirable sees would start cozying up to influential people in larger dioceses, angling for a better position. Athanasius went so far as to compare a bishop’s relationship to his diocese to marriage. Leaving it for another was akin to divorce and adultery!

This rule didn’t hold.

In rare cases, a bishop’s home diocese was destroyed by invaders, leaving him no choice but to relocate. In other cases, a church council compelled a gifted bishop to leave a smaller diocese for a much larger one where his abilities were urgently needed. That’s what happened when Gregory of Nazianzus was moved to Constantinople. Exceptions were present from the beginning (John Chrysostom being a famous case), and by the late fourth century, Gregory of Nazianzus noted that the rule had been so frequently bent that custom had effectively overridden it.

The Temptation the Council Was Resisting

What the fathers at the council were opposing was a kind of ambition that leads to worldly ladder-climbing in the rungs of the church. Their discomfort with ministers moving from one place to another is plain to see. They wanted the exceptions to be moments of pressing necessity—someone forced into service for the broader church’s needs, not someone maneuvering for a better platform.

This reminds me of something Francis Schaeffer writes in No Little People. After reviewing all the threats that come against the church—secularism, socialism, rationalism, persecution, revisionism—he puts his finger on the greatest problem facing God’s people: “The church of the Lord Jesus Christ, individually or corporately, tending to do the Lord’s work in the power of the flesh rather than of the Spirit. The central problem is always in the midst of the people of God, not in the circumstances surrounding them.”

This leads to Schaeffer’s famous admonition of doing “the Lord’s work in the Lord’s way.” Whatever ambitions we may have as followers of Christ who desire to do great things for his kingdom, we aren’t to “press on to the greatest place” unless Christ himself “makes it impossible to do otherwise.” Schaeffer describes the great temptation we face:

By that word “extrude,” Schaeffer means being “forced out under pressure into a desired shape.” Christians should choose the lesser place until God extrudes them into a position of more responsibility and authority.

Remaining Quiet Before the Lord

Over the years, as I’ve entertained the idea of different places of service—in both churches and Christian organizations—one of my prayers has been that the Lord would preserve me from leadership roles that would diminish my love for Jesus or my love for his Bride. Schaeffer warns about losing the ability “to be quiet before the face of the Lord”:

He then laments what he sees happening again and again in evangelical circles:

No Little Places

Schaeffer’s warning is that we not go out beyond our depth—that we resist the egotistical pressures and selfish ambitions that war inside us, even if we never completely escape them this side of heaven. “The size of the place is not important,” he says, “but the consecration in that place is.” In God’s sight, “there are no little people and no little places. Only one thing is important: to be consecrated in God’s place for us at each moment.”

Schaeffer’s words remain prophetic. And in a way, they echo the concern of the fathers who gathered in Nicaea 17 centuries ago—even if the proposed solution looks very different. What we should all wrestle with and want is to be wholly committed to God in the place where God wants us: “Being what he wants me to be, where he wants me to be.”

O Lord, help me to see myself in your sight, so that pride will wither, decay, die, perish. Humble my heart before you, and replenish it with your greatest gifts. As water rests not on barren hill summits, but flows down to nourish the lowest valleys, so make me the lowest of the lowly, that spiritual riches may abound in me. When I am tempted to think highly of myself, grant me to see the crafty power of my spiritual enemy. Help me to stand with clear vision on the watchtower of faith, and to cling with determined grasp to my humble Lord. If I fall let me hide myself in my redeemer’s righteousness, and when I escape, may I ascribe all deliverance to your grace. Keep me humble, meek, and lowly. Amen.

(Adapted from The Valley of Vision)

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I admit there’s a side of me that swells with patriotic fervor at the feats of American ingenuity. Take the engineering marvel of the Artemis II mission, or the stunning power and surgical precision of our military on display in recent months.

But I also shudder at the speeches of American leaders who boast of our military prowess, sometimes even invoking God’s name over rhetoric that rivals the self-assurance of ancient empires. That kind of hubris makes me think of the architects who declared the Titanic unsinkable.

Dare we test Almighty God? Have we put our trust in the strength of the military or the impressiveness of modern-day chariots? The apostle Peter tells us that God opposes the proud. Have we reckoned with the fact of that divine opposition?

I’m convinced we don’t take pride seriously as a sin—either in ourselves or in others. We live in a world overflowing with self-promotion, where arrogance is reframed as swagger and narcissism passes for self-confidence. We have lifted up leaders whose egos are so massive we no longer flinch at their self-aggrandizement. Boasting marks our culture today. It’s now normal.

Sin Behind So Many Sins

In evangelical circles, we tend to focus on sins that are easily spotted and categorized. Pride—because it’s harder to nail down, because it takes so many forms, because it stands behind so many other sins—often gets a pass.

No matter how entertaining we may find the braggadocious, pride remains a spiritual parasite. It attaches itself to greatness because that’s where it can do maximum damage, pushing us like Icarus toward the sun. Pascal called it “a strange monster, and a very plain aberration”—the signal that humans have fallen from their exalted perch and are clawing their way back.

The Psalms speak of this sin more than many of the ones we obsess over. Arrogance crowds out God (Ps. 10:4). The Lord rescues the humble and brings down the haughty (18:27). The psalmist prays for God to cut off “the tongue that speaks boastfully” (12:3). Wickedness is flattering ourselves in our own eyes (36:2). The Lord cannot endure “a proud look and an arrogant heart” (101:5). A holy and majestic God delights to notice the humble, and he takes note of the proud to repay and rebuke them (138:6; 119:21).

In Proverbs, arrogant eyes head the list of seven things God finds detestable (Prov. 6:16–17). Lady Wisdom herself hates arrogant pride (8:13). Pride precedes disgrace and cuts us off from wisdom (11:2). The form pride most commonly takes is casual self-assurance, boasting about tomorrow’s plans with no reference to God as sovereign (27:1–2). But the Lord says he will tear down the house of the proud (15:25). “Pride comes before destruction, and an arrogant spirit before a fall” (16:18).

The mother of our Lord praised God for bringing down the mighty and lifting up the lowly (Luke 1:46–55). And Jesus extended this legacy in his parables, his table conversations, and his woes to the Pharisees. “You are the ones who justify yourselves in the sight of others,” he said, “but God knows your hearts. For what is highly admired by people is revolting in God’s sight” (16:15).

Augustine Knew the Monster Firsthand

We often remember the church father Augustine for his preconversion life of sexual sin—his illicit lover and his famous prayer (“Grant me chastity, but not yet”). But the more I read Confessions, the more I notice how pride runs just as deep and just as long, and arguably does more damage.

Augustine describes his younger self as ambitious, obnoxious, always looking to be the center of attention, convinced that when he didn’t understand something, the fault must lie with the teacher or the text. “I was a top student in the school of rhetoric,” he wrote, “and I was glad and proud and blown up with arrogance.” He was proud of his pride.

After his conversion, Augustine saw the monster for what it was. “‘Pride is the beginning of sin.’ And what is pride but the craving for undue exaltation? This is undue exaltation—when the soul abandons him to whom it ought to cleave as its end, and becomes a kind of end to itself.”

Seen in this light, pride is a living lie, a self-constructed unreality that imprisons the soul. It turns us inward, folding the soul over onto itself until we shrivel into near-nothingness. “To exist in himself, that is, to be his own satisfaction after abandoning God,” Augustine wrote, is “not quite to become a nonentity, but to approximate to that.”

Worship yourself, and you become less than yourself. Worship God, and you become more than yourself.

Contagion We Celebrate

Unchecked pride in the leaders we elect and exalt will lead to disaster, because leaders shape the souls of their followers. When Scripture condemns a king for how he “made Israel to sin” (1 Kings 15:30, ESV), it doesn’t mean the king forced the people to transgress God’s law. It means the king’s sin spread like a virus and ravaged the people.

It’s more like a contagion than coercion. And that’s because character flows downhill. Pride at the highest levels becomes an avalanche that buries everyone below. When we champion the proud and boastful, we aren’t merely minimizing “personal flaws.” We’re merrily heading toward the destruction that Jesus promises will be the destination of every proud heart.

I’ve focused here on our leaders, and that’s understandable. But it’s pride that would have us point the finger everywhere but into our hearts. It’s possible to take pride in how we oppose pride. It’s the sin most skilled at disguising itself as virtue, most capable of hiding in the folds of our righteousness. We’ve all inhaled more of its pollution than we’d like to admit.

We are a proud people in a proud age, and we don’t fully know how proud we are. Peter’s word is the only fitting response: “Humble yourselves under the mighty hand of God.” Lord, have mercy.

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This week, John Houmes and Brad Edwards devoted an episode of their excellent podcast PostEverything to my series of articles on the crowd culture rising in the wake of expressive individualism, especially my latest piece, “When the Tribe Eats the Church.” They took the diagnosis further than I had gone, bringing into view the work of René Girard as well as the relevance of double imputation in our theology.

I recommend listening to the whole episode (Spotify, YouTube, Apple), but I wanted to share a few of their insights here.

Why the Tribe Feels So Good

Early on, Brad quoted Eugene Peterson’s observation that throughout history, people have sought religious meaning in three ways apart from God: through the ecstasy of alcohol and drugs, through the ecstasy of recreational sex, and through the ecstasy of crowds. That third category deserves more attention than it usually gets. Brad wrote an article about this for The Dispatch last year, where he said,

Brad showed where “crowd culture” leads once it comes into contact with a yearning for significance in our modern world: We make meaning by making enemies. It doesn’t take much to gather a crowd. All you need is a plausible source for grievance—someone responsible for the gap between the world as you think it ought to be and the world as it is.

The online era has made it easier than ever to spread ressentiment, because social media platforms have built-in incentives that reward outrage as a way of grabbing your attention. And, as Brad put it, much of this online ecosystem isn’t conducive to building anything of value; it only burns down what others have constructed.

Mechanism Beneath the Madness

This is where John introduced the French literary critic and anthropologist René Girard. (If you’re looking for a crash course in Girard’s thought, I recommend Luke Burgis’s accessible treatment in his book Wanting.)

Girard’s central insight is that human desire is mimetic. We don’t arrive at our desires independently. We learn what to want by watching others, especially those close to us, those we admire or envy. We want what our models want, often without realizing we’ve borrowed the desire in the first place.

When two people or two groups end up wanting the same thing, a rivalry forms. As the rivalry intensifies, the object of desire becomes less important than defeating the rival. The rivalry itself becomes the engine. Political victory, for example, is no longer about some shared vision of flourishing or something we’re working toward; it’s about conquering them before they conquer us. “You don’t hate them enough!”

What is the community’s solution to this escalating rivalry? Girard pointed to the scapegoat mechanism. When mimetic rivalry builds toward chaos, a community unites, usually against a person or group. The scapegoat is identified, accused, and expelled. And remarkably, the expulsion seems to work. Peace returns. Order is restored. The community experiences what feels like purification and justice.

That’s why it’s so hard for crowds to resist this urge. The purity spiral is a social technology that delivers a short-term sense of unity and relief. As John put it, the tribe doesn’t experience the expulsion as violence but as cleansing.

Gospel Counter

The church ought to stand out in a world of scapegoating crowds. Why? Because the church is constituted on the good news of Christ bearing our guilt and shame. Jesus stepped into the scapegoat mechanism as the only truly innocent One.

Every other scapegoat in human history has been accused and expelled by a community that told itself a story justifying the violence. But the resurrection busted up those false stories. It vindicated the One who gave himself for us as our sacrifice. It exposed the injustice and transformed the impulse.

Brad sees even more gospel resources that speak directly to this moment: Christ wasn’t merely the innocent scapegoat. Through the doctrine of double imputation, we know he not only took our guilt; he also gave us his righteousness. The wondrous exchange! That means, in the once-for-all sacrifice of Christ, we’ve already received what the scapegoat mechanism promises but always fails to deliver: true righteousness, true justice, real purity, and enduring peace.

If it’s true that peace through tribal purification is a pale and temporary imitation of what we already possess in Christ, then when Christians join the scapegoating crowd, we’re acting contrary to the gospel. We’re living as if the once-for-all sacrifice wasn’t sufficient and it’s up to us to generate our own unity, perfect our purification, or implement perfect justice through expulsion.

The line from Brad that has stuck with me is this: Our need to find scapegoats is a confession of our insecurity in Christ. This means that whenever we succumb to the temptation to manufacture our identity or grasp for significance through opposition—apart from who we are in Christ, and apart from the embodied life of the local church—we are, in practice, denying the gospel we proclaim.

Toward a Better Engagement

The point of all this isn’t to chastise ourselves or others for being frustrated at the lack of fulfillment of our aspirations or desires in the temporal realm. Nor is it to claim that all controversies or debates are somehow inappropriate or un-Christian.

It’s to remind us, as Christians, that our desires and aspirations are reoriented by the gospel, such that the gap in what is and what could be doesn’t drown our hearts in ressentiment but becomes the place where hope takes root—a hope for lasting change flowing from the gospel, not earthly, unjust ways of getting whatever we want. It’s to remind us, as Christians, that many of the internal squabbles of the church can be chalked up to the fun of fighting phantoms, where we keep dividing and subdividing into tribes that cannot possibly bear the weight of significance we want them to give us.

If we truly believe we battle not against flesh and blood, but that sin, death, and the Evil One are our true enemies, then we’re free to engage in debate and to take part in controversies from a position of security in who we are in Christ, not the pursuit of tribal belonging to one of the many political or ecclesial subgroups on offer.

We’re free to pick the right battles, not just the easiest that arise in front of us, and to fight from love and for love. We’re able to see and resist the injustice in our scapegoating tendencies, to differentiate between the true Enemy and his unfortunate prey, to see through the manufactured controversies of so much online discourse, and to celebrate and live in light of the world-altering sacrifice of Christ.

The church that has received the once-for-all scapegoat has no need to invent one.

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Last year, I had the privilege of participating in a preaching conference at Beeson Divinity School with the British theologian Alister McGrath, who gave three lectures on preaching. These were followed by responses from me and other scholars.

In building on one of McGrath’s lectures, I offered several takeaways, including this one: Know your people well enough to anticipate their objections.

Apologetics and Anticipating Objections

McGrath reminded us that faithful preaching begins not only with a deep grasp of the gospel but also with attentiveness to our listeners. “Identify the connections that resonate with this group,” he said, noting that the connections may differ from one audience to another.

Knowing your people means anticipating how your words will land. What questions might arise? What points of resistance might you encounter? What assumptions will your people bring to the text?

Tim Keller excelled at this. He made space in his sermons for what he called “apologetic sidebars”—a moment when you recognize something might need more explanation, or something someone in the room might find hard to believe. It was never the whole sermon, but it was a signal: I know you’re here, and I’m speaking to you too.

I’ve sought to do the same in my preaching over the years, for two reasons. First, you speak directly to the skeptic or seeker who may be attending out of curiosity or courtesy. You tell them they’re seen and welcome. Second, you model for believers how to engage the questions their friends and coworkers raise. The preacher becomes not just a herald of truth but a guide for navigating real conversations in the real world.

Abdication and Avoiding Objections

Doug Webster, another preaching professor at Beeson, added a wrinkle to my suggestions. He said that knowing your people well can lead you to anticipate your hearers’ objections and then go in the opposite direction. Instead of anticipating and answering, we anticipate and abdicate.

“We know our congregations so well there are topics we won’t bring up,” he said. “We know our people too well. We know the danger of speaking to certain issues which we know are biblical.”

Knowing your congregation well enough can lead to stronger preaching—responding to potential objections—or it can lead to softening and evading truths, tiptoeing around the sacred cows your church doesn’t want you to touch. It can produce not sensitivity in service of persuasion but sensitivity in service of silence.

Charles Spurgeon remarked on this tendency: “Cautious reticence is, in nine cases out of ten, cowardly betrayal,” he told his students. “The best policy is never to be politic, but to proclaim every atom of the truth so far as God has taught it to you.”

With that old word “politic,” Spurgeon means strategically calculating, governed by shrewdness rather than faithfulness, weighing what’s safe to say more than what’s true to say. It carries the connotation of managed impression, tactical omission, telling people what we think they can handle rather than what we know they need. The best policy is never to be politic. True pastoral wisdom counters worldly calculation.

Subtler Temptation

But Webster’s and Spurgeon’s warnings go further than we think. The cowardly preacher isn’t always the one who goes quiet. Sometimes he’s the one who goes loud, but only in a particular direction.

Consider what Paul tells Timothy about itching ears (2 Tim. 4:3). We tend to read that passage as a warning against churches that accumulate teachers who go soft on sin. But what itching ears often crave is not soft but selective preaching—whatever will affirm them in self-righteousness.

A congregation can be thoroughly coddled by a pastor who thunders every week, so long as he’s bombing the right targets—the people outside. The teetotaling congregation wants a pastor who condemns alcohol. The politically conservative congregation wants one who rails against progressive ideology. The socially progressive congregation wants one always quick to indict systemic injustice.

The preaching may be loud, even courageous-sounding—but if it only ever steps on the toes of people who aren’t in the room, it’s still, in Spurgeon’s sense, politic.

This is why knowing your congregation well isn’t enough. You must also know yourself well enough to be aware of where you’re most prone toward cowardice. The faithful preacher will be alert to the needs of his people, yes, but also to the fear of man in his heart.

Good preaching requires us to be not just contextually aware but contextually courageous. Context doesn’t change the truth, but it does change what it costs to proclaim it.

Proclaiming Every Atom

Spurgeon was right that the best policy is never to be politic. But the politic preacher isn’t always easy to spot, and we all fall prey to this tendency, often without realizing it. We may preach hard and long, fill our sermons with uncomfortable truths, and still be giving our people exactly what they want, while avoiding what they need.

What we need are preachers with the kind of self-awareness and congregational knowledge that lead to proclaiming “every atom of the truth.” To be so gripped by love for God’s Word and love for God’s people that we pay whatever it costs to say what they need to hear.

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Whatever happened to the seven deadly sins?

For centuries, theologians, philosophers, and poets treated pride, envy, sloth, gluttony, lust, wrath, and greed as a diagnostic of the human soul in its self-centered sickness. These sins were the biggest windows into the condition of humanity’s broken-down house, the particular ways the soul curves in on itself rather than turning upward to God.

Modern Lens for Sin

A couple weeks ago, political commentator Jonah Goldberg wrote about a shift in how our society views sin in general, and the seven deadlies in particular. They’ve been reframed, he said. No longer are they evidence of personal moral failure as much as the result of a psychological condition or systemic cause.

Consider envy. John of Damascus called it “sorrow for another’s good.” Kant saw it as the propensity to view the well-being of others with distress. Both recognized it as spiritually and socially corrosive. But serious studies of this deadly sin have largely disappeared, perhaps because envy has become useful as a motivating force for political grievance. It’s harder to name envy as sin if it’s what’s powering your coalition.

Pride has undergone a remarkable transformation. Wikipedia now begins its definition by saying it’s “a primary emotion characterized by a sense of security with one’s identity, performance, and/or accomplishments.” What was once the queen of sins—the root from which all others grow, the posture that places the self above God—is now a personality trait, even a virtue. The opposite of pride isn’t humility but shame.

The others have undergone similar revisions. Gluttony has become, in Goldberg’s phrase, “a purely aesthetic, self-referential sin against yourself.” Whether reframed as a metabolic disorder or an identity to celebrate, the way we talk about this deadly sin shows how the very concept of an “ideal behavior outside ourselves” has vanished.

Wrath is recast as vengeance and retribution, even among Christians who now applaud political figures for the mobilization fueled by their performative fury. Sloth, once seen as spiritual torpor and indifference to duty, is now a systemic failure or a psychological diagnosis.

Goldberg believes this reframing leaves us without the appropriate tools to grow as human beings. We’re stuck as victims, either at the mercy of forces bigger than ourselves that keep us morally wounded, or no longer even able to spot the moral darkness in us at all. We end up expecting the government to validate what the ancients called vice, and we keep at arm’s length the people who would call us toward virtue.

Church’s Sin Migration

If Goldberg diagnoses the world, theologian Kirsten Sanders offers a parallel diagnosis for the church. In her essay “God Is Your Father, Not Your Dad,” Sanders traces a migration happening in Christian communities: the drift from a view of sin as soul-sickness to a view of sin as relational distance from God.

To be sure, both pictures—sin as sickness and sin as estrangement from God—can be found in Scripture. The trouble comes when we let the second picture eclipse the first.

When we recast sin as primarily a matter of feeling far from God rather than being in an objective state of rebellion against him, the solution gets altered. We no longer need a physician who prescribes a cure for a dying patient; we go looking for a therapist who helps us understand our feelings. “Is our nature truly impaired,” Sanders asks, “or are we simply suffering the consequences of false beliefs about ourselves?”

I can’t help but point out how much of contemporary Christian music has already made this shift. Many hit songs focus solely on how our faith in God is supposed to make us feel, and how a better understanding of the gospel brings about personal peace and victory.

To be clear: There’s nothing unbiblical about this result. But there’s certainly something unbalanced, and a lopsided view of our sin problem and the gospel solution distorts how we preach, how we counsel, how we sing, and what kind of God we believe we’re worshiping.

The reframing of sin solely within the category of personal growth and identity robs us of the transformative power of truly encountering God as he’s described in Scripture. Sanders reminds us of this: The only way we can take comfort in a God powerful enough to truly provide for the widow and the orphan is if we also recognize his almighty power in making the ocean and everything that swims in it. You don’t get the full benefit of the nurturing Dad without the fearsome Father.

The therapeutic migration of sin subtly reshapes the church’s posture. Sanders writes,

She notes that the mainline churches of the late 20th century traveled this road and discovered that “people don’t, in fact, need a God who exists to reinforce their self-esteem.”

What We Lose When We Lose Sin

Both Goldberg and Sanders are circling the same problem from different directions. When sin is reframed—whether by social science or therapy culture—we end up with a smaller God and a shrunken gospel.

The biblical teaching on sin isn’t primarily psychological. As Thomas West and I write in The Gospel Way Catechism, the deepest source of misery in the world isn’t ignorance, injustice, or the failure to be true to ourselves. It’s our cosmic treason against our Creator and his rule. Sin corrupts creation, wrecks relationships, and enslaves us to the Evil One. Our problem doesn’t begin horizontally, against one another. The vertical dimension comes first, against God.

That vertical direction of sin isn’t merely a sense of estrangement or the sadness of feeling far from him. If that were the case, the solution could happen solely at the level of psychology—changing how we feel. No, the vertical dimension of sin reminds us that our sickness and estrangement is real. Our problem isn’t only that we feel estranged from God; it’s that we are estranged from God. That means the solution will be more than self-help.

The cross is a radical solution because sin is a radical problem. Our greatest need isn’t for a Savior who will die to make us feel better about ourselves but for a Savior whose death will pardon rebels, a Great Physician whose blood can heal our sin-sick hearts, a Liberator who sets us free from our captivity.

Goldberg, as an unbeliever, can only point to the loss we experience in the wake of this revision. He sees that the ancient vocabulary of virtue and vice carried wisdom we’ve casually discarded. He argues that serious students of human nature had important things to say long before social science arrived to systematize and medicalize it all.

Sanders pushes us further. If we confine our theology to the therapeutic frame, we end up with a thinner anthropology. Worse, we wind up with a smaller God who no longer inspires our worship or compels our obedience.

Scripture gives us a view of sin large enough to require the gospel. Unless we understand what we’ve been saved from, we’ll never fully grasp what we’ve been saved for.

Sin is ugly. The gospel is beautiful. But you need to see the first clearly before the second can take your breath away.

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Every now and then, I’ll run into a fellow Christian who is (rightly) fed up with the fakery found in the church—the smiles that hide pain or the spirituality that masks sin. They’ll tell me, “I don’t want to be like all the hypocrites out there.”

I say “Amen” to that. But usually not to what comes next. They’ll say something that conveys this attitude: Rather than striving for holiness and stumbling, I’m better off aiming lower and staying consistent. If my heart isn’t in it, better to disengage altogether! At least then, no one can accuse me of not practicing what I preach.

In this case, the Christian takes Jesus’s warnings against hypocrisy and wields them against Jesus’s call to seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness. The avoidance of hypocrisy becomes the acceptance of moral mediocrity.

What Hypocrisy Actually Is

We need to distinguish between the kind of hypocrisy Jesus excoriates and the stumbling attempts of sincere believers to live according to his commands. The world often conflates the two; the church should not.

It’s true the church has its share of hypocrisy and corruption. The stories are innumerable: the family-values warrior exposed for soliciting a prostitute, the financial-stewardship speaker jailed for embezzlement, and the list goes on. Nothing unites Christianity’s opponents more than hatred of hypocrisy.

Hypocrisy among Christians is real, but the outrage it produces is, in a twist of irony, itself Christian. You won’t find a fiercer critic of religious pretense than Jesus himself. Which is why disdain for Christian hypocrisy is, in a very real sense, a hidden compliment. When the world chastises Christians for failing to live up to the teachings of Jesus, what’s being said is this: We expect more from you. It’s an implicit acknowledgment that Jesus’s teachings are beautiful.

Still, we must differentiate between the person who strives for righteousness and stumbles and the hypocrite who stumbles but pretends not to. Hypocrisy isn’t the gap between Christian ideals and the Christian life. Hypocrisy is the refusal to acknowledge the gap.

Jesus reserved his sharpest words not for those who fell short but for those who wouldn’t admit their shortcomings. The Pharisees weren’t condemned for having standards too high. They were condemned for performing righteousness while concealing corruption—for polishing the outside of the cup while the inside was full of greed and self-indulgence.

The solution to hypocrisy, then, isn’t to lower your aim. It’s to be honest when you miss.

Hypocrisy and Aspiration

Theologian Ross McCullough asks a profound question: “Are we to be a Church without hypocrisy . . . or are we to be a Church whose hypocrisy runs in the right direction?” In other words, when we fail, will it be in pursuit of something marvelous? He continues,

There’s an unfortunate “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” mentality in this description of dragging ourselves toward holiness, when the Spirit is the One who works in us to accomplish his purposes. We don’t drag ourselves; we are lifted.

Still, there’s something right in the aspiration that inspires this analogy. Growing in righteousness is daring and bold. It’s ambitious. You proclaim the victory of the cross of Christ over the outermost reaches of your sinful heart, and you mop up the Enemy as you go. Because Christ has conquered sin and death, you’re on offense, no matter how much the life of sanctification may feel like defense.

“There is a kind of integrity to hypocrisy as well,” McCullough says. “It is the refusal to change one’s beliefs in the face of one’s weaknesses.” I love that. Those who hold high ideals and yet stumble haven’t betrayed their convictions. They’ve refused to let their failures diminish their ideals. We will not change our aim just because we often miss the mark.

Rightly understood, this is a form of faithfulness, not duplicity. The real tragedy isn’t when you stumble but when you stumble and then rewrite what you believe to justify your fall.

Repentance, Not Perfection, Is the Posture

It is not hypocritical to pursue holiness and fail. Hypocrisy shows up when our holy aspirations are no longer marked by humility and dependence. Which is why Jesus doesn’t begin the Sermon on the Mount with a call to strive but with a beatitude for beggars.

Poverty of spirit is the entry point. The knowledge that we’re all spiritually bankrupt is what keeps us from putting on the airs of a hypocrite. We’re at the end of our rope, with nothing to offer and no illusions left. That is where the road to holiness begins. With open, empty hands.

Don’t confuse striving in the Spirit with self-righteousness, when it’s actually the fruit of repentance. And don’t use the hypocrisy of other Christians as an excuse to evade the call to holiness. Shoot high. Repent often.

Repentance has a fragrance; hypocrisy, a stench. And moral mediocrity, dressed up as humility, is just a different kind of rot.

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There’s a paradox you’ll encounter the longer you walk with Jesus. The more you experience the light of his love, the more clearly you see the remaining spots and stains in your life. Progress seems lacking. Stumbles continue to mark your journey. The more you know the Lord’s love for you, the more you feel your unworthiness and your dependence on his grace.

This doesn’t mean you’re going backward. I call it the paradox of the brightening path.

What the Light Reveals

Proverbs 4:18–19 sets two images side by side.

The path of the righteous is one of ever-increasing clarity. On the bright path, you see more of the landscape, more of your surroundings, more of yourself. On the dark path, it’s the other way around. The darkness narrows your vision until you’re stumbling over things you can’t even identify.

Here’s what the paradox looks like in practice. Maybe you’ve made real progress against pornography, but you’re still aware of just how deep the tentacles of lust reach into your heart. Maybe you’ve stopped tearing people down behind their backs, but you notice how easily your first impulse is still to think badly of others. Maybe you look back at a season of fear, and you grieve an opportunity you let slip by.

It’s natural to look at your past regrets or present struggles and think, I must be getting worse. But that’s not what’s happening. You’re finally seeing clearly. The sun is rising. And the sunlight is showing you sins you couldn’t see in the hazy stirrings at the dawn of your salvation.

As Jack Miller used to say, “Cheer up! You’re a worse sinner than you ever dared imagine, and you’re more loved than you ever dared hope.”

So, the closer you get to God, the less you tend to notice your own progress. Perhaps that’s why the righteous in Matthew 25, when Jesus names their acts of kindness, respond with genuine shock: “Lord, when did we do that?” They can’t recall their good deeds—maybe because they weren’t thinking about their good deeds at all. They were focused on the people they were called to serve.

That’s what it looks like to walk toward the light. You put others before yourself, and when you do look at your life, you’re likely to see the remaining stains more than the progress. But the light is still getting brighter.

What the Darkness Conceals

Now, the opposite is also true, and it’s worth pondering. We need to take the warnings in Proverbs seriously.

The dark path is insidious precisely because it blinds gradually. Wickedness doesn’t announce itself. It grows through small compromises, “innocent” indulgences, fleeting moments of lost resolve. As the path darkens, self-deception increases. You lose touch with reality so slowly you don’t notice it happening. You start by choosing the path. But eventually, the path chooses for you.

This is why Proverbs sounds the alarm about staying off the wicked path before it forms your steps—not because God is a killjoy but because he knows how paths work. Every step confirms you in a direction. And the dark path is dangerous because it never feels like a trajectory. “The safest road to hell is the gradual one,” wrote C. S. Lewis, “the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.”

What makes the bright path different isn’t that it makes you feel better. It’s that it helps you see more clearly, including the ways you still fall short. The discomfort of that clarity is actually the sign you’re still walking toward the light. Even the apostle Paul still saw himself as the “chief of sinners” in need of the Lord’s mercy.

The Lord Who Is Our Light

When we encounter this paradox, we persevere by deepening our wonder at God’s love for us. We look at Jesus Christ, again and again. Remember, before Christians were even called Christians, the movement was known as “the Way.” That’s not accidental. Christianity involves a way of life. But this path isn’t ultimately a set of principles or practices. The Way is a Person.

Jesus doesn’t give wisdom the way Confucius or Socrates did. He is Wisdom. He’s not like Buddha offering the fourfold path. He is the Path. “I am the Way,” he said. “I am the Truth. I am the Life.” When Proverbs calls us to walk in the light of dawn, it is—across the whole arc of Scripture—calling us toward Christ himself, the Light of the world. The Light that overcame the darkness.

When you fix your eyes on Jesus, when you behold the life-giving love of his cross, everything else comes into focus. Your uncertainty about the future. Your regrets about the past. The stubborn sins you’ve confessed so many times. All of it comes into focus because we live in the light of Christ.

The light of Christ is the light of love. To walk in the light, as he is in the light, may make us feel like we’re getting worse, but that’s only because we’re seeing the depth of our sin better. As our knowledge of our persistent sin increases, so must our gratitude for Jesus’s persevering love toward us. The Lord has “shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of God’s glory in the face of Jesus Christ” (2 Cor. 4:6). So take heart! Embrace the paradox of the brightening path.

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“Everybody goes to hear Mr. Spurgeon—at least once.”

That’s how Henry C. Potter opened his account of a Sunday evening at the Metropolitan Tabernacle in 1877. Potter wasn’t just a casual observer. He was rector of Grace Church in New York, and he wrote up the experience for Frank Leslie’s Sunday Magazine. The piece has been forgotten, but a friend researching Spurgeon rediscovered it and sent it my way.

Potter’s account is one of the most vivid firsthand descriptions I’ve encountered of Spurgeon in his prime. You feel like you’re there—in the hansom cab, at the door, squeezed into the pew, listening to 7,000 voices sing. And at the end of his commentary, Potter distills Spurgeon’s preaching power into three words that have stuck with me.

The Journey and the Building

The Metropolitan Tabernacle was a long journey from where most visitors to London would stay. You had to cross the Thames and navigate through the neighborhood Dickens had immortalized around the tavern Elephant and Castle, before arriving at a massive stone structure: 208 feet long, 106 feet wide, soaring 89 feet from floor to lantern. It seated 7,000 in two rows of galleries. When Potter visited, on a “thick and drizzling” London evening, every seat was taken.

The interior was shaped like an elongated oval, designed so that every seat was “almost equally good for seeing and hearing,” and the pastor was pushed “into the midst of his audience.” Potter found his way to a reserved seat—secured, he realized, by a contribution he made to Spurgeon’s Orphanage on his way inside—with a clear view of both platform and congregation. A good investment, as it turned out.

The Crowd, the Service, the Prayers

What Potter describes next is almost cinematic. The regular members filter in first, one at a time and in groups. Then the great doors open. The crowd that has gathered on the front steps pours in: “like nothing else in the world so much as some black, fluent mass let into a sinuous and intricate mold, in and out among whose tortuous windings it finds its way until every crevice, every small interstice seems to be solidly full.” At that same moment, the gas lamps come on, and the full immensity of the building reveals itself for the first time.

Then Spurgeon himself appeared, climbing the stairway with a fellow minister. He moved painfully to his seat, visibly compromised by gout. During the prayer, he stood with one knee resting on a chair.

In between songs, Spurgeon read the passage from the Gospel of John that recounts Christ’s encounter with Mary Magdalene after the resurrection. He offered running commentary, and Potter found this the most impressive feature of the whole service. There was, he wrote, “a singular discernment in his comments, and an apt choice of phrase by which a shade of meaning was thrown into strong relief.” Potter wished he could reproduce “the spirit of tenderness and reverence which brooded over the whole.”

Then came a brief prayer—“direct [and] comprehensive” and down-to-earth. It wasn’t a formal collect, but neither was it off-the-cuff. It was a well-crafted prayer “unexpectedly free from anything to offend even the somewhat fastidious taste of a liturgist,” Potter noted. After a hymn came the sermon.

The Preaching

Spurgeon took the pulpit in physical pain. When he preached, he drew chairs to either side and leaned heavily on them.

The text was Psalm 42, and the subject was spiritual depression. Potter acknowledges that nothing in the sermon was novel. The power came from the “directness of illustration, the essentially concrete rather than abstract presentation of the truth, the mingled vigor and tenderness with which, one after another, the preacher sketched the daily sorrows and discouragements of his hearers’ lives.” Spurgeon at this stage of his ministry seemed to be reading only two books: “the volume of human nature and the Bible. But with both these his familiarity was evidently intimate.”

Then there was the voice—“clear, penetrating, and persuasive,” blending what Potter called a “trumpet quality” with a tone of pleading and pathos. And of course, there was the man himself—his face bearing the traces of physical suffering and yet radiating “an expression of simple, unaffected, tender earnestness which rises upon you at once.” No one who watched him could doubt, Potter wrote, that he was “a man whose heart was in his work and who was doing it with absolute and genuinely unconscious self-forgetfulness.” That’s what Potter calls the reality of the man.

The Three Words

“Mr. Spurgeon’s power seemed largely to consist in directness, persuasiveness, and reality. I think it will be owned that these are among the ‘notes’ of good preaching anywhere.”

Directness. Persuasiveness. Reality.

Not a striking appearance. No evident genius. No particular eloquence. Not theological sophistication. What filled that building week after week—what drew bishops and skeptics and the working poor of South London alike—was a preacher who spoke directly, who aimed to move and not merely inform his hearers, and who was real. The congregation could sense that the man behind the sermon meant every word.

Spurgeon’s words carried weight because he was the real deal.

Window Worth Opening

Potter closes with a description of the congregational singing, when thousands of voices in near-perfect tune and time were taught a new hymn verse by verse until the whole mass had caught it and were singing “with the ‘swing’ and fervor of a marching host.” He concludes that Spurgeon is worth hearing, but that next to Spurgeon comes the singing of his congregation.

I love that last observation. The power of the preacher led to the praise of the people. Isn’t that what every preacher longs for? To lean into the preaching to the point of unconscious self-forgetfulness, to be an overflowing fountain of truth, spilling over the listeners we plead with and seek to persuade, with the hope that all the waters of truth will gather again and erupt into a geyser of praise.

I’m grateful Potter wrote down these impressions. Reading this account, I felt stirred by the portrait of this preacher. Very few of us will ever fill a tabernacle, but all of us called to preach can seek to be direct, persuasive, and above all, real.

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The tribe is hungry. You can see it in the endless line-drawing, the degrees of separation, the guilt by association that passes for discernment in too many evangelical circles. A reader named Jacob recently asked me a question that helped me understand why.

Jacob noticed a connection between two columns I’d written that appeared the same week. The first was about the mob mentality and crowd culture rising in the wake of expressive individualism. Now that the “find yourself and express yourself” philosophy has largely exhausted itself, we’re being drawn toward group identity to fill the void of significance and meaning that a self-generated identity cannot sustain.

The second was “Stop Being Shocked When Christians Disagree with You”—in which I used the famous feud between the Puritans John Owen and Richard Baxter to argue for tempering our expectations that Christians will be uniform on how best to address the pressing issues of our day. My encouragement was to expect disagreement among faithful believers, assume a posture of curiosity, and not abandon charitable persuasion as a means of engaging debatable matters. Sometimes our surprise at disagreement is precisely what heightens the tension and makes friendly relations with brothers and sisters nearly impossible.

Jacob wondered whether these two columns are related. Perhaps one reason Christians are so shocked when other Christians disagree is connected to the resurgence of crowd culture—the way we increasingly find our sense of meaning and purpose in the tribe we most closely associate with.

When the Tribe Becomes Everything

There’s surely something to that diagnosis. It touches on one of the perennially appealing aspects of fundamentalism—a term I use not as a pejorative but as a descriptor of a mindset marked not only by what we believe as Christians (often ranking nearly all doctrinal positions and practices at the same level of importance), but also by what separates us from other Christians and why fellowship should be broken with those who don’t adequately separate from believers deemed to be in error.

At its best, fundamentalism commends strong convictions and fosters warm fellowship within communities bound together by their opposition to the outside world or to compromised churches. At its worst, it becomes brittle and insecure. When people raised in such environments come into closer contact with sincere believers outside their tribe, they can wind up questioning everything—including, ironically, the fundamentals of the faith that all Christians everywhere confess. When everything is treated as a first-order issue, any doubt at any point can cause the whole edifice to crumble.

The reality is that we’re witnessing the rise of new forms of revisionist Christianity and a resurgence of fundamentalist identity simultaneously—and in both cases, the lines are as often drawn around political views as they are around theological affirmations.

Whether it’s the fundamentalist enclave devolving into an online world of ever more radical right-wing beliefs, or the progressivist mindset devolving into little more than left-wing talking points baptized in Christian rhetoric, the appeal in both cases is the sense of community. It’s the feeling of being beleaguered and outnumbered, pressing up against your compatriots in battle against the bad guys, that generates a sense of significance and purpose.

Exhausted by looking inward to discover and express who we are, we now look around desperately for the affirmation of others—the sense of identity that comes from drawing close to those who share our affinities and outlook.

Purity Spiral

This explains why so much energy in evangelical circles is devoted to line-drawing, often with degrees of separation straight out of the old fundamentalist playbook.

If you quote that author, well, don’t you know she’s a friend of so-and-so, and so-and-so once said this and she never disavowed him, so . . . Or if you appreciate that pastor’s take on one issue, you should know he once promoted someone with a bad take on a different issue—how could you be so undiscerning? Or if you found this article helpful, don’t you know it comes from a website that also published a bad take on Trump (pro or con, depending on which tribe you’re in), and so everything from that source should be suspect . . . And on and on it goes.

Because people increasingly find their identities in the purity of their enclaves, no outside influence can be permitted to infiltrate. And lest you think I’m speaking primarily about the MAGA right, this tendency is every bit as strong in anti-Trump circles where progressive pieties go unchallenged. Reading widely and generously becomes nearly impossible in this environment, and so do broad associations and friendships.

With individual identity so fragile, embattled, and embittered, it’s no wonder people retreat to their cocoons and long for a world where everyone is closely aligned. The problem, of course, is that disputes don’t disappear—they morph into new lines drawn over smaller and smaller matters.

This is why, across the left and right, in political and ecclesial circles alike, we see Christians excluding one another from fellowship, allowing suspicion to reign, and castigating believers for openness to “problematic” persons—often over disputable matters that once fit comfortably under the same tent of fellowship.

Community, Not Crowd

So my answer to Jacob is yes: The devolution of expressive individualism into crowd culture heightens the shock Christians feel when they encounter fellow believers who disagree with them. The impulse to find solace and identity in others is ever-present.

Yet at its best, the church isn’t a crowd but a true community. The church is where we’re reminded that we’re loved by God and chosen by grace. The church is where we’re fortified in our faith and strengthened to stand against a culture often hostile to the demands of Christ’s Sermon on the Mount. There’s an indispensable element of looking around in the Christian life—loving our brothers and sisters, covenanting to walk with them, and enduring the storms of debate and discouragement when our siblings inevitably let us down.

But communities can devolve into mere crowds. When our identity is defined primarily by tribal alliances, we’re less likely to endure the ordinary disagreements and troubles of church life. We’re more likely to disengage—to retreat into the online world of complainers and commiserators, and then fall back into an individualized spirituality where only those most closely aligned with us qualify for fellowship.

The solution is to look up first, to God and his Word, and then around to his people as we submit to Scripture together. How we do this, in our communal lives and individual devotion, is a matter for further reflection. But surely the gospel that stands above and outside of ourselves is the only antidote to both the lonely world of expressive individualism and the unthinking world of the crowd—giving us the firmness of conviction to stand on truth no matter the cost, and the generosity of spirit to encounter and endure those it can sometimes be hard to love.

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A couple of months ago, I mentioned one of the projects I’ve been working on: The Lord Is My Light. It’s a daily liturgy for prayer and Bible reading, releasing as both a prayer book and a daily podcast.

I’ve heard from many readers excited about this project and asking for updates, so here’s a closer look at what’s been happening behind the scenes.

Book

It’s been a labor of love going back through all 396 daily liturgies, ensuring everything—from the font to the headings to the readings and canticles—is formatted in a way that accents the beauty of God’s Word and these ancient prayers of faith.

We’ve chosen a cream-colored paper with a finish that’s smooth to the touch, sitting right in that sweet spot of thinness (so everything fits into one volume) without sacrificing opacity (so it won’t bleed through like the paper you find in many Bibles).

The volume will be hardbound in the same dark blue we used on Letters of Paul in 30 Days—beautifully designed, sturdy, and reliable, with a single ribbon marker so you always know exactly where you are. That is one of the features I care most about: no flipping around trying to find the right prayer or passage. Even elements that recur daily (the Gloria, the Lord’s Prayer), weekly (the words of comfort after Confession of Sin), or biweekly (the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds) are all present in the text for that day.

We also decided against printing verse numbers for the biblical texts, so the experience feels more like a Reader’s Bible. You can lose yourself in the Word without subconsciously keeping a count of how much you’ve read. The proofing process has been moving smoothly, as we confirm all the passages are quoted and formatted correctly.

Podcast

For the podcast, I’m excited to be working again with Scott Slucher, my producer for Reconstructing Faith. His team is already well into recording. One thing I insisted on from the start: No use of artificial intelligence. Every voice on this podcast will be a real person, reading Scripture or praying these prayers as their own, so that whenever someone tunes in, they’re joining another person in prayer to the Father.

The response from contributors has been encouraging. We have voices from across the country and around the world, various regional accents and tones, pastors and laypeople, young and old, men and women, singers and songwriters. Some are names you’d recognize. But everyone is going without attribution, because the point isn’t the one praying, but the One we’re praying to.

One of the things I’ve been intentional about is how contributors approach the material. I’ve asked everyone to come not as a reader but as a pray-er—not just reciting words aloud but actually addressing God, letting the recording capture a genuine act of speech directed to God. When someone is praying the words of Augustine or Luther or Amy Carmichael, I’ve encouraged them not to imagine how those figures might have sounded, but to receive the words they composed and make them their own. The image I’ve given everyone is this: Picture yourself kneeling by your bedside, alone, taking these words and lifting them to God in his presence.

For my own portions, we’re recording a fresh version for every single day—no copying from previous sessions. That means hours of sustained prayer in each recording block, often praying the same texts repeatedly, which has been both spiritually renewing and mentally exhausting. (I have a newfound appreciation for the monks who prayed through all the Psalms every week!)

Audio Experience

One of the most exciting elements has been crafting the sonic experience of the podcast. Each episode will open with a familiar melodic line from an ancient hymn suited to the season of the church year. (For example, “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel” during Advent, and “O Sacred Head, Now Wounded” during Lent.)

Then we settle into an ambient soundscape that supports the flow of the liturgy: call to prayer, confession of faith, confession of sin, canticle, Scripture reading, Gloria, the Lord’s Prayer, personal requests, prayer of the church, and a blessing. The Scripture reading for the day is set apart with no background music at all, because we want to heighten the stillness of hearing only the Word of God during those minutes.

The goal is a 12-minute audio sanctuary—a space where the listener hears the Word of the Lord, surrounded by the confessions and prayers of the church through the ages, and is reminded that the saints who came before us pondered these same texts and erupted in the same praise for the same unchanging gospel.

Most of my work is now complete. The printing and production of the volume, and the editing of the daily podcast episodes, are in the capable hands of a team committed to bringing this vision to life. What remains is the waiting, and the hope that what we’ve built together will serve the church well for years to come.

The Lord Is My Light releases November 1 in print, and December 1 (just in time for Advent) as a podcast. More details to come. In the meantime, I’d covet your prayers.

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For years now, I’ve longed to see more songs and hymns that remind us of our mission as ambassadors of Christ’s kingdom.

Mission-focused songs are surprisingly rare, and the ones we do have often take the approach of “Onward, Christian Soldiers”—a song with biblical resonance, for sure, but one that relies on a rallying cry to rise up and fulfill our duty. What’s been missing, in my view, are mission-of-the-church songs that inspire us by setting the missionary task within the fuller context of God’s redemptive plan.

This gap is surprising, given we’re witnessing the rise of a generation of young believers who take seriously the Great Commission and the call of Christ to discipleship among all nations. Just think of Cross Con, a winter gathering drawing thousands of young people to the cause of world missions. Or the commissioning ceremonies of the International Mission Board, where young families are sent to unreached people groups with tears and prayers and great hope.

At Cedarville University, where I often preach and teach, this same spirit pervades the campus—an annual missions conference, GO mission trips, and students who are already asking how their careers can serve the spread of the gospel.

Seeds of a Song

A year and a half ago, worship pastor Channing Gillespie sent me a snippet of a song lyric, set to a melody: O how beautiful the feet / of the ones who bring good news. He invited me to contribute additional lyrics and help him refine a chorus centered on taking “Christ to every nation.” Through audio messages, texts, and emails, Channing and I went back and forth over several weeks until we had crafted an initial draft of a missions song.

From there, we connected with Bryan Fowler, a singer-songwriter who partners with Keith and Kristyn Getty and who has given the church some wonderful songs and hymns (“All Sufficient Merit” and “Come Jesus Come” are two of my favorites). Bryan has teamed up with Dave Aubrey, and under the name Stillcreek they’ve been releasing beautiful worship and devotional songs, including an ambitious project: a song for each of the 22 sections of Psalm 119.

Bryan, Dave, Channing, and I spent more than a year shaping and refining the song, both melodically and lyrically. In mid-March, we debuted the song at Cedarville University’s chapel because of the university’s strong commitment to developing young people who will live in light of God’s mission. Today, the song is available on Apple and Spotify or wherever you get your music. Chord charts are here, and there’s also a lyric video.

What follows are the lyrics and some of my commentary. We hope this new song will bless and benefit your church.

Verse 1

O how beautiful the feet
of the ones who bring good news
that the Son of God has come
full of grace and truth.

At the cross, He bore our sin
then He overcame the grave.
Now His resurrection life
reaches far to save.

The one lyric that never changed was Channing’s first line. Also left unchanged was the melodic opening, a nod to “This Is My Father’s World.” We wanted to place Isaiah’s image of beautiful feet bringing good news up against the portrait of a good, yet fallen, world being reclaimed by the Son of God.

The first verse is dedicated to the person and work of Christ, who is the basis for the Great Commission. In just a few lines, we pass through the incarnation, the life and ministry of Jesus marked by grace and truth, his substitutionary atonement, and his resurrection. The gospel motivates the missionary task and leads us to the missionary heart of the chorus.

Chorus

So we’ll take Christ to every nation
Christ to every land
in every generation
beginning to the end.
Lifting high the name of Jesus—
the Great I Am
we’ll proclaim His worth in all the earth
until he comes again.

Key to the chorus is the generational scope—we’re joining a long line of believers, from the time of Christ until his second coming, all committed to the missionary cause. My favorite line: “We’ll proclaim his worth in all the earth until he comes again.” What more could drive our mission than the worthiness and glory of the returning Christ?

Verse 2

Let our voices testify
let our lives be on display
filled with power from above
to declare His name.

He is with us as we go
shining forth the light of faith
by His Spirit bringing peace
to the darkest place.

When we first began work on this song, I’d just returned from a trip to South Korea, where I attended the Fourth Lausanne Congress, the largest worldwide gathering of evangelical leaders in history. Standing in that room with brothers and sisters from every corner of the globe, I felt the weight and the wonder of what God is doing in his church.

The motto for the Congress was “Let the church declare and display Christ together”—an emphasis on showcasing Christ’s beauty in both word and deed. This was the inspiration for the beginning of verse 2, that God’s people would be both active in words of life (“Let our voices testify”) and deeds of love (“Let our lives be on display”). The rest of the verse reminds us of Christ’s promise to be with us to the end of the age, and the Spirit’s role in bringing restoration (shalom) to a broken world.

Verse 3

So with joy, O church, press on
there is work yet to be done
till the Lord receives His prize—
every tribe and tongue.

For the day is drawing near
soon the wedding bells will ring
as the nations one by one
gather for the feast.

We wanted this song to inspire believers toward missions by highlighting the glorious future that awaits us as God’s children. The last verse flashes forward to the end of all our missionary efforts. Bringing together multiple images from Revelation, we press on (with joy!) to the Day when the Lord will receive his prize—every tribe and tongue.

The marriage supper of the Lamb is on the horizon, with the new Jerusalem coming down from heaven as a bride adorned for her groom, and then the nations bringing their cultural tributes to Christ the King, as all peoples gather around his table.

Chorus 2

And we’ll praise Christ from every nation
Christ in every land
with every generation
and there will be no end.
Lifting high the name of Jesus—
the Great I Am.
We’ll proclaim his worth in all the earth
forever and Amen.

The song closes with a reworking of the chorus. One day, the missionary task will be complete, but the worship that is mission’s ultimate aim will go on forever. With people from every nation and land, alongside people from every generation, the song that begins with beautiful feet ends with a feast—an eternal celebration of the worth of Christ in the new heavens and new earth.

“Christ to Every Nation” is now available wherever you stream music, with lyrics and chord charts available for church use.

The stories of Jesus have so many twists and turns that you, seeing the headline for this column, are probably already spinning up surprising moments.

• Is it the shock of watching the scorned Samaritan—and not the Jewish religious leaders—stop to help the dying man on the road to Jericho?
• Or the response of the wicked tenant farmers who kill the vineyard owner’s son and throw him out?
• Maybe it’s the posture of the father when the prodigal returns from the far country—his willingness to endure the shame of the community by running down the street to embrace him.

All these moments were designed to shock the original hearers. After 2,000 years of retelling, we’ve grown so accustomed to them that we no longer feel their force.

But one parable stuns me, no matter how many times I read it. (Some scholars, including Klyne Snodgrass, would classify it as an analogy rather than a parable proper.) It comes in the middle of Luke’s Gospel, easy to read past. But it contains one of the most breathtaking images in all of Scripture (and it’s barely even the point).

Read it slowly, and pause over the picture Jesus paints.

The Verse You Almost Missed

Be ready for service and have your lamps lit. You are to be like people waiting for their master to return from the wedding banquet so that when he comes and knocks, they can open the door for him at once. Blessed will be those servants the master finds alert when he comes. Truly I tell you, he will get ready, have them recline at the table, then come and serve them. If he comes in the middle of the night, or even near dawn, and finds them alert, blessed are those servants. (Luke 12:35–38)

The overall point is urgency: Be ready, keep your lamps lit, stay alert for the Master’s return. All of that is expected.

But then one line is smuggled into the story, and it flips everything upside down. Did you catch it? When the master returns from the wedding banquet, he will serve them. The servants welcome him home, and then he gets ready, dresses himself for the occasion, seats them at the table, and brings them the meal.

It’s as if King Charles returned to Buckingham Palace, put on the clothes of a waiter, and served dinner to his wait staff. Or Lord Grantham came home from a journey, greeted the servants lined up outside Downton Abbey, and ushered them inside to take their places at the table in the dining hall.

John Piper urges us to meditate on the image of the sovereign Son as a table waiter:

This is the picture Jesus paints of his return. A complete reversal of expected roles. We will sit. He will serve.

What the Master Plans to Do

That’s why I call this the most astonishing moment in Jesus’s parables. The surprise doesn’t come from the fact of his return; it comes from what he intends to do when he arrives.

The church father Cyril of Alexandria saw in this passage a portrait of our happy Savior, one who knows we’re “weary with toil” in this world, who delights in the opportunity to comfort us, to set before us “spiritual banquets” and spread “the abundant table of his gifts.”

I think of the scene in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe when Aslan is on the move and the spell of the endless Narnian winter begins to break. A merry party of Narnian animals in the wood—a squirrel with his wife and children, two satyrs, and a dwarf and old dog-fox—sit around a table with heaps of plum pudding, with decorations of holly. Father Christmas has been there, and he has laid out an impromptu feast for these poor, long-suffering creatures.

Jesus is the Master who serves his servants. It’s as if God himself is overflowing with the enthusiasm of a grandmother on Christmas Day, who can’t wait for her guests to taste what she’s been laboring over all day in the kitchen. The joy of the giver fills the feast.

J. C. Ryle believed this to be “one of the most wonderful promises made to believers” because it means there’s no limit to the honor Christ will bestow on those ready to meet him at his return. Our King will delight in delighting us.

Too Glorious to Be the Point

What strikes me most is how casually this verse appears. It’s not the central point of the passage. It’s almost incidental to the main exhortation. It feels like a throwaway line about what the master will do when he comes home, yet what it contains is staggering.

The plans of the Lord for those who love him must be so vast, so layered, so lavish that even a mind-bending picture of the coming feast can be dropped into a parable almost as an aside. Which raises a question worth pondering: If something this glorious can be mentioned in passing, what else is God planning for his children that we can’t even imagine?

The Lord who will one day dress himself as a servant to bring us to the table is a Lord worth watching for. So let’s keep our lamps lit, hearts awake, faces turned toward the door. The Master is full of surprises.

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College students aren’t the only ones who wrestle with big decisions, but there’s something about that season of life that makes the weight of choices feel especially acute. As a father to a son about to graduate from Cedarville University and a daughter about to graduate from high school, I feel the weight of the big decisions they’ve made and continue making.

There’s the choice of school. Then the choice of major. Then the choice of a career path. The choice of a church. The choice of whom to marry. The choice of where to live. Every decision can shape the rest of their lives.

Ironically, the more choices we have, the more paralyzed we may feel. My friend Alan Noble puts words to what many young people experience: “The more choices we have and the higher the stakes feel, the harder it is to choose anything at all.” What’s worse, in today’s world, we don’t just make decisions; we often base our identity in them. As Noble writes, “You aren’t just looking for the right career; you’re looking for a calling that can justify your life.” No wonder we freeze.

So how can God’s Word help us discern the will of God?

Wisdom, Not a Trail of Breadcrumbs

Some Christians come to the Bible expecting semimystical guidance—a verse that will signal to you exactly what job to take, a story that will help you know whether to move, a constellation of circumstances that tell you to lean further into the right romantic relationship. Others wait for a perfect peace, a gut feeling, or a dream. Doesn’t Jesus say our heavenly Father takes note of every sparrow that falls? Surely he cares about our every step.

Yes, he cares. But nowhere does Jesus tell us to expect the Bible to serve as an instruction manual with step-by-step directions. The Scriptures offer something better: wisdom.

Simon Chan, a professor in Singapore, defines discernment this way:

That’s what the wisdom literature of Scripture (especially Proverbs) is designed to give us. Not a decision for every situation, but the wisdom that will form us into the kind of people who can discern what’s best in any situation. The goal isn’t simply to make the right choices. It’s to become the right kind of person, developing, as Chan puts it, “a kind of spiritual sensitivity that comes with long experience.”

Map, Not a GPS

Craig Bartholomew describes wisdom as knowledge of “the paths that lead to life, shalom, and flourishing”—a map that helps us know the landscape so we can live in line with the grain of the created order. A map isn’t a GPS. A GPS dictates every turn. Stay in the second lane. Turn right at the next light. You have arrived at your destination. The Bible doesn’t work that way. It gives you a lay of the land, not step-by-step instructions.

Dallas Willard once compared the world to a playground where the Father tells his children to go enjoy themselves. There are fences, of course—God’s commands that keep us from harming ourselves and others. Love God. Love your neighbor. Don’t lie. Don’t steal. Care for the weak. But within those fences, there’s so much freedom. Go for it. Swing, slide, climb, run.

Now, you can push that analogy too far. The Bible portrays the world as a battlefield, and we’re to live on mission for God’s kingdom. But the picture of the playground captures something true about the Father’s heart. God isn’t waiting to catch you making an unwise choice. He wants you free to act in faith.

What if you make the wrong decision? Well, you might. But that’s when you trust that God’s providence is bigger than your choices. When you get off the right road, that’s when God acts like a GPS. He reroutes you. He can redeem even the unwise choices you make along the way. Here’s what I tell young people fretting over the fear of making a bad call: If you think you have to get everything right the first time, you’ll be afraid to make any decision at all.

Paths to Follow, Paths to Avoid

Proverbs 4 gives two directions at once. The father tells his son to follow in the footsteps of the wise, and to stay off the path of the wicked.

The positive side means you don’t make big decisions alone. You invite older believers, pastors, professors, parents, and friends who know you well to speak into your life. Discernment grows in community, not in isolation. You look up to God and around to others.

The negative side means you pay attention to cautionary examples, not just inspiring ones. The woman who gossiped her way into friendlessness. The man who lost his family through adultery. The person who chased conspiracy theories until they couldn’t tell fact from fiction. The point isn’t to look down on them but to recognize that none of us is above the same temptations.

The path of the wicked doesn’t just describe where someone ends up. It describes how they got there. Step by step. Small choices that compound over time. Verse 17 turns to the metaphor of eating and drinking wickedness and violence, a picture of sin ingrained so deeply it changes your desires, so that what once horrified you now feels natural. You start by choosing a path. Eventually, the path chooses you.

Questions Wisdom Asks

So what does it look like to walk wisely when the big decisions come? Kevin DeYoung says the will of God isn’t a crystal ball. The biggest question isn’t “Where should I live?” but “Do I love the Lord with all my heart?”

Wisdom asks a different set of questions. Not: What makes me look best? What path is easiest? But: What brings glory to God? What is good for my neighbor? Where can my gifts be most useful?

You’re not waiting for the perfect option. You’re going after the good and trusting God with the results.

Going to the Bible for direction like a GPS will leave you perpetually waiting for the next instruction. But the map is already in your hands. Familiarize yourself with the terrain—what God says about who you are, what you’re made for, and how to walk well. Then take the next step, trusting the providential care of a Father who knows the way.

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Last year, I made a case for “reading as rebellion,” a way of clawing back attention from the corporations and platforms seeking to colonize our minds. The response was encouraging. Many people, young and old, want to rebel by reading more.

But the follow-up question is practical: How? Wanting to read more is one thing. Becoming a reader, in a world designed to prevent the kind of deep focus reading requires, is another.

The Problem Isn’t Just You

A recent essay by Carlo Iacono, a university librarian writing in Aeon, prompted me to reflect more on the practical side of this question.

Iacono’s article challenges the usual hand-wringing about the death of reading. Anxiety over new media is nothing new. In the late 19th century, more than a million boys’ periodicals were sold weekly in Britain—the “penny dreadfuls,” tales of sensational crime and horror. Victorian commentators worried about the degradation of youth and the demise of serious thought. Before that, novel-reading itself was the existential threat, described as a “fever,” “insidious contagion,” or “reading mania.”

The problem today, Iacono insists, isn’t screens but design. Treating “screen culture” as a unified phenomenon is, in his words, a category error. The same device that delivers algorithmically curated outrage also contains the complete works of Shakespeare. The problem isn’t the technology but its design.

Iacono points to research from Gloria Mark, a professor at UC Irvine, who has tracked attention spans on screens for two decades. In 2004, people averaged two and a half minutes on any screen before switching tasks. By 2016, that had dropped to 47 seconds. The common conclusion is that screens must be destroying our ability to focus. But Iacono points out how the fragmentation correlates not with screens in general but with specific design patterns: notification systems, variable reward schedules, the infinite scroll. These aren’t properties of the medium. They’re choices made by specific companies for specific economic reasons.

The evidence is right in front of us, Iacono says. That’s why the young man who can’t get through a novel can watch a three-hour video essay on the decline of the Ottoman Empire. The teenager who struggles with a short attention span can spend hours in a complex video game, coordinating teammates while adapting strategy in real time. Millions of people listen regularly to audiobooks or enjoy long-form podcasts that teach history, theology, or philosophy.

The younger generation can concentrate when the environment invites it. But social media platforms exploit the same psychological mechanisms that make gambling addictive, and the unpredictability of what you’ll find keeps you checking.

Why does this matter? Because it helps us consider a more appropriate response. If the problem is screens, full stop, then the solution is retreat. Summon the willpower to put down the device and pick up the book. But if the problem is design, then the solution involves your environment. As Iacono puts it, “Your inability to focus isn’t a moral failing. It’s a design problem. You’re trying to think in environments built to prevent thinking.”

Build Different Spaces

Iacono’s most useful concept is what he calls “containers for attention”—bounded spaces and practices where different modes of engagement become possible. He observes that the people who engage in the life of the mind aren’t necessarily more disciplined.

Others haven’t learned this yet:

If the solution isn’t discipline alone but also architecture, we’ll need to consider different defaults and create different spaces, with particular rhythms. This is an ancient Christian instinct. Long before the attention economy existed, the church understood that formation requires environment. You can’t just decide to become a certain kind of person; you arrange your life so that becoming that person is easier than not. Secular observers back up this insight, as James Clear’s Atomic Habits makes clear: The nudges in our environment matter.

For reading specifically, that means making small architectural decisions: a chair without a phone nearby, a set time, a physical book rather than a screen. It means treating areas of your home the way you treat the movie theater, as spaces where different rules apply, where the pull toward distraction is deliberately weakened.

Iacono contrasts feeds and focus. “One happens in an ecosystem designed for contemplation, the other in a casino designed for endless pull-to-refresh.” Reading worked for so long, he argues, not because text is magic but because books came with built-in boundaries. They end. Pages stay still. Libraries provide quiet. These weren’t features of literacy itself; they were features of the habitat where literacy lived. If we’re to cultivate the life of the mind today, we’ll need to imagine new habitats for focus.

Most Radical Container of All

Which brings me to the church.

A few years ago, I argued that the sanctuary should stand alongside the cinema as one of the last holdouts against the colonization of attention. The cinema works because it enforces a container. The expectation is that you’ll surrender your phone, devote two hours to a single story, and experience something at a level of intensity that multitasking would destroy. And if we can do that for a film, surely we can do it for the Word of God.

The church is for feeding, yes, but the food is God’s Word, not the junk food of our feeds. It’s a purpose-built habitat for orienting ourselves toward the One who most deserves our gaze. The rhythms of a worship service—gathering, confessing our faith, confession of sin, singing, hearing the Word of the Lord, feasting at his Table, being sent out—are an architectural structure. They’re designed to reorder us, to draw our attention upward before strengthening us for the Lord’s service.

Felicia Wu Song, in Restless Devices, describes the psychological cocktail of constant digital connection: pleasures, anxieties, felt expectations, all mixed together and poured into every moment of free time we have. The church, at its best, can be an antidote to that cocktail. Not as an escape from the real world but as an entry into a more real one. She describes the church as a “counterspace” where we’re confronted with time-tested truth and reminded of who we are.

To choose to leave your phone in the car when you’re at church is to make an architectural decision. It’s saying, For this hour, I’m building a container. I’m making depth easier than distraction. I’m giving my attention to the One who gave everything for me.

Smarter Rebellion

My earlier column urged reading as rebellion. I stand by that. But an insurgency requires strategy, not just resolve. It’s not a fair fight when we try to read in a space engineered to prevent reading, or try to worship in a space where the feed’s slot machine is pulling for our attention.

So build the container. Arrange your chair. Silence notifications. Find your library, your quiet room, your sanctuary. Reading as rebellion will happen not by summoning superhuman willpower but by making one small architectural decision at a time.

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I read a book last year that I’ve continued to ponder: Tim Cooper’s When Christians Disagree: Lessons from the Fractured Relationship of John Owen and Richard Baxter. It’s a story I wasn’t familiar with—how two titanic figures of the Puritan era allowed theological differences, but more, differences of personality and posture, to develop into a lasting dividing line between them. The book has many takeaways, including the role that temperament plays in our intramural evangelical squabbles.

But perhaps the biggest takeaway is this: Faithful men and women who love Christ and his church, who want to see the gospel spread and take root, who remain committed to personal piety, may not see eye to eye on some of the most critical issues of their time.

Collapse of Charitable Expectation of Difference

What I see increasingly, especially in the fracturing of evangelical alliances and the breaking of friendships over the past decade, isn’t just disagreement (that’s to be expected!) but shock that disagreement exists at all. Many Christians today assume that faithfulness will produce uniformity: that committed believers, reasoning from Scripture, will all arrive at the same conclusions on disputed points of doctrine, or on the application of neighbor-love in the realm of politics, or on the church’s posture toward new cultural challenges.

And when differences arise, we question not only the maturity or faithfulness of a brother or sister but also the sincerity of their faith. Hidden motives get attributed to those who, because of their background, their location, or the particular way they’ve applied biblical reflection to their cultural context, simply read the moment differently than we do.

This shows up across the evangelical spectrum. On immigration, a debate over wise and humane policy gets sorted into sin versus righteousness. Disagree with your self-assured brother or sister, and your dissent becomes evidence of spiritual immaturity, or capitulation to sin, or culpable ignorance of both Scripture and the present crisis. It’s as if Jefferson’s phrase about self-evident truths has been transferred from the Declaration of Independence to one’s own reading of Scripture. It’s so clear, right?

Whether the cry is to enforce the law and preserve cultural cohesion or to welcome the stranger and love your neighbor—there’s no longer any room to debate how best to hold competing goods in tension, because everyone is so shocked that a fellow Christian might make different judgment calls.

The same dynamic appears on climate change and creation care. Christians in the United Kingdom and the United States often hold sharply different instincts about what our duties are, and I’ve felt backlash from both directions: Shock among brothers and sisters in the United Kingdom that I’d question the Church of England putting so much emphasis on climate change. Shock among brothers and sisters in the United States that I’d argue creation care is part of the conservative Christian heritage. (It’s in Tolkien. It’s in Schaeffer. It’s in Teddy Roosevelt, for goodness’ sake.)

On race and justice, if you question the legitimacy of recent DEI implementation, you’re accused of upholding white supremacy. If you acknowledge that racist prejudice can shape societal structures, you’re a race-baiter and cultural Marxist. When the only two options are “practically Communist” or “basically a Klansman,” is it any wonder that honest conversation among Christians becomes nearly impossible? We could multiply examples like these.

What Does Winning Look Like?

In conversations over the past few years—in denominational life and broader evangelicalism—I’ve tried to talk believers down from the ledge of assuming an unassailable rightness, of seeking to discredit those they disagree with. I remind them that there have always been pastors and churches marked by stronger or lesser forms of political engagement, always been Christians distributed across a spectrum on the contested questions of any era.

The existence of disagreement doesn’t require a sinister motive. It doesn’t mean one group or another is compromising the church or selling out for worldly approval. To assume the worst—that a brother who sees something differently is a subversive operative or part of some coordinated effort to steer the church toward danger—is to make nefarious what has always been normal: Christians disagreeing about what faithfulness looks like.

When I survey the hellscape of online Christian interaction, I want to ask the loudest voices a simple question: What does winning look like? Do you think the leaders you oppose will simply disappear? That they’ll repent in dust and ashes and bow to your superior judgment? That their churches will shut down? That you’ll tarnish their reputations so thoroughly that no one will ever benefit from anything they say again? That everyone who agrees with you on one point will blacklist them on every point?

Sorting pastors and leaders into “safe” or “suspect” over differences of political prudence, or writing someone off over a single misstep or disputed position, isn’t a sign of spiritual strength. It’s intellectual insecurity. To flatten a fellow servant of Christ into a single disagreement is to impoverish yourself. Those who are truly discerning will remain open to what’s helpful, reject what isn’t, and resist the pull toward wholesale dismissal. Disagreements between brothers and sisters are a permanent feature of the church. They always have been, and they’re not going away.

Way Forward

None of this means differences don’t matter, or that no one is ever right or wrong. That’s relativism. Shrugging at every dispute will get us nowhere.

If that’s the case, how do we move forward? I hope we can get better at making the most persuasive and charitable case for the positions we hold, while remaining open to critique and refinement. We should expect faithful Christians to disagree with us. We recognize that churches will often have different instincts, different cultures, different postures. And whenever we don’t see eye to eye, we should work hard not to assume the worst about those whose conclusions differ from ours.

There will be no unconditional surrender in today’s evangelical civil wars. No total victory. No unquestioned defeat. So that leaves us with harder, slower work: hearing a brother or sister out, pinpointing the real place of disagreement, praying for and cheering on those we differ from, and partnering wherever genuine alignment exists.

Owen and Baxter never fully reconciled. That’s the cautionary tale Cooper tells. But they spent decades in the same country, serving the same Lord, contending for their convictions. Neither one disappeared. And today, we appreciate them both, even if they couldn’t appreciate each other. That’s worth remembering.

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Last month, I described a cultural shift from expressive individualism to what some are calling “mob identity”—the move from “find yourself by looking inside yourself” to “find yourself by looking to a group to define your identity.” In response to that column, multiple pastors reached out to me, from different parts of the country, recognizing this development in their own contexts.

A young man preparing to plant a church in New York City told me he saw both expressive individualist and group identity aspects in his community, sometimes in the same person. He’d recently been in a coffee shop on the Upper West Side with a young believer, an artist seeking to make something of beauty in a culture that increasingly sees beauty as either a luxury or an escape. While they talked, an ICE protest erupted across the street at the entrance to Columbia University. A strange juxtaposition. Here was a conversation about the God of all beauty, happening in real time against the backdrop of a world that feels, to many, like it’s perpetually on fire, everything coming apart at once.

Widen the view and you realize this loss of meaning and this search for significance, within the context of societal breakdown, isn’t just a big-city phenomenon. It characterizes this present moment across the country.

Two Dead Ends, One Deeper Problem

In Rethink Your Self, I described three basic orientations to life, each with a different starting point. You can embark on your quest for identity

• by looking in (defining yourself by your deepest desires),
• by looking around (finding your identity through community and belonging), or
• by looking up (finding your life in the God who has created and redeemed you).

Western culture over the past several decades has been dominated by the “look in” approach—the assumption that the purpose of life is to discover who you really are and express that identity to the world.

But as I noted in my earlier column, that approach is shifting. As the insecurities of expressive individualism become more manifest, and as the loneliness of this way of life becomes inescapable, more and more people are looking for a stable place to ground their identity. And here’s where the “look around” approach becomes attractive once again.

But take note: This isn’t a simple return to the culture of traditional societies where “look around” is most prevalent. What looks like a correction to expressive individualism is actually an evolution. Why? Because the self remains in the driver’s seat; it’s just that now the individual is choosing to base his or her identity in tribal belonging rather than self-expression. You choose to align with your group. The group then tells you who you are. And you choose to display that identity to the world as a signal of your values and virtue.

Why does this development matter for evangelism? Because both the “look in” and “look around” orientations share the same underlying assumption: The resources for human flourishing are available to us if we can just arrange things correctly. Whether it’s more individual freedom or more group solidarity. Whether it’s fewer constraints on the individual or more belonging for the group. The argument isn’t about whether the world is broken or whether we share in that brokenness. It’s about which lever, pulled hard enough, will finally fix us and, by extension, the world.

But both roads lead to a dead end. Neither the self nor the tribe can bear the weight of what we’re asking them to carry.

Follow the Hope to Its Logical End

Both the expressive individualist and the identity-politics devotee are functioning, at some level, as frustrated idealists. They yearn for a better world, a world that’s freer, more accepting, more communal. They’re exhausted by the gap between what they long for and what they see. They’re angry that the world they want hasn’t arrived yet, and they often assume something or someone is holding them back.

So, where do we start in conversation with people like this? With questions, not arguments. You don’t argue someone out of something they were never argued into. And most people don’t adopt a posture toward the world because they were convinced of good arguments. They land there because of hope.

That’s why questions are key. The goal is to help people follow their own hopes further than they’ve followed them themselves. Ask them to articulate what they see as the biggest problems in the world. Dig a little deeper to see who or what they believe is responsible for those problems. Ask them what would need to happen to bring about resolution or healing. Probe whatever “fixes” they suggest, to help them see that whatever they assume would be permanent would more likely be temporary.

These aren’t trick questions. You’re drawing out someone’s perspective, helping them consider their life and why they see the world the way they do. Many people live with a mix of hopes and dreams, frustrations and hurts. The Christian, by unearthing the initial longings that drive a person’s search for identity and happiness, can then help someone trace the proposed solutions to their logical end.

What we find is that most of the solutions on offer—whether it’s expressive individualism or the newer amalgamation of individualism and identity politics—would require a change in human nature that their view of the world can’t account for or accomplish. Fewer constraints won’t resolve the selfishness that corrupts freedom. More group cohesion won’t resolve the pride and tribalism that corrupt solidarity.

As Christians, we know sin infects everything. We know we need salvation outside ourselves. And so, in the end, all these conversations ought to lead to this question: And if that doesn’t work . . . what then?

Gospel Longings, Misdirected in the World

The good news is, the longings underneath expressive individualism or crowd identity aren’t dismissed by the Bible. We can acknowledge God-given longings that sin has misdirected.

The hunger for justice is real, and right. The longing to belong—the hope for a community that can hold together across difference, for a solidarity that doesn’t require an enemy to sustain it—is real, and right. The desire for a renewed world, for beauty that isn’t just an escape but evidence that brokenness won’t have the final word, is real, and right.

Christianity doesn’t dismiss these longings. Even though, yes, the Scriptures will expose the lies we’re prone to believe, and even though the gospel subverts all human efforts to satisfy these longings, we believe the Christian story promises fulfillment at a depth no political movement or tribal identity can reach. Justice that gets to the root of the issues we face. A community marked not by opposition to shared enemies but by devotion to a shared Lord. A restoration that isn’t man-made and uncertain but guaranteed in the end, because the One who promised it rose from the dead.

Better, Richer Hope

In evangelism, our response to a resurgent “look around” approach—whether it’s progressive identity politics or conservative versions of nationalism—must be to follow the way of Jesus. To those who would “look in” first, Jesus says to deny ourselves, to find ourselves by losing ourselves. To those who would “look around” first, Jesus relegates every group identity (including the family) to second-tier status under his reign.

Only looking up reorders us in a way that gives true dignity to the self without making it ultimate. Only looking up elevates the beauty of community without making the tribe an idol.

If it’s true we’re entering an era marked by the combination of expressive individualism and group identity, the world will need a church that shows what it looks like when we look up before we look in or around. A church that can show a world grasping for freedom and solidarity what it looks like to truly belong—to God and to one another.

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Count me among the chorus of those cheering for Disney Pixar’s newest film, Hoppers. It’s the best Pixar endeavor in years—an energetic and likable protagonist in Mabel, a memorable storyline, and the kind of comedy that earns its laughs from character and plot rather than from potty humor or knowing adult winks.

An early scene won me over. A young Mabel sits with her grandmother on a rock just outside a forest glade, and, naturally, she at first resists the whole idea of just . . . sitting there. But after Mabel’s grandmother leads her to be still, the glade begins to awaken. Leaves float through the air, animal life emerges, the sounds of creation become gloriously evident.

In a world of busyness and constant entertainment, Pixar is doing something subversive: reminding us what it looks like to sit still, open your eyes, and truly see again.

We’ve Traded Reality for a Deeper Boredom

In The Body of This Death, Ross McCullough describes our era as one of “diversions” that are “superficially satisfying but profoundly boring.” Reality, he says, is the opposite: superficially boring but profoundly satisfying.

Isn’t that an apt description of our world? We’ve all seen the glazed eyes of a child who has forgotten what it’s like to touch grass, to be present to the real rather than the virtual. But it’s not just kids. Adults, too, are superficially satisfied with distraction yet profoundly bored—untethered from the world in front of us.

The endless scroll, the ever-beckoning notification, the newest arrival on whatever streaming platform we mindlessly open every evening: These are symptoms of an overstimulation that leads not to curiosity and wonder but to acedia and numbness.

The word “boredom” doesn’t appear in ancient languages, surfacing only in the 1600s. (Webster doesn’t track its first known use in English until 1853.) People in earlier eras certainly tired of all the grinding tasks necessary for survival, but they didn’t describe their lives as boring, in part because death felt ever-present and leisure was the privilege of royalty. Nowadays, even those under the poverty line have access to constant entertainment. We all live like kings. And we’re often bored like them too.

Our diversions are, in part, a sign of our hearts’ restlessness. Pascal was right: “If our condition were truly happy we should not need to divert ourselves from thinking about it.” Chronic unhappiness drives us toward whatever removes us from the present, and entire industries now exist not only to satisfy that itch but to inflame it.

The peril of endless diversion is that we begin to feel we’re missing out if we’re not fully up to speed on everything happening. Alec Benjamin’s song “Dopamine Addict” captures the dread of being without a phone, feeling “like [you’re] out of touch,” unable to shake the sense that you “need that crutch,” “need that rush.” In reality, what we’re missing is reality itself. McCullough writes:

Startling Wetness of Water

Justin Poythress recently wrote about C. S. Lewis and that fine word “quiddity”—which Poythress defines as “the ‘thatness’ of something. Your house is in that neighborhood rather than another. Your spouse is wearing that shirt. You’re sitting in that chair with that view to eat that meal. Notice and appreciate that, instead of sinking into your phone because that isn’t enough.”

This is why, with Lewis, I have such love for G. K. Chesterton and his lifelong astonishment at everyone’s lack of astonishment. “The world will never starve for want of wonders,” he said, “but only for want of wonder.” And, “There are no dreary sights; only dreary sightseers.” In a letter to his fiancée, he wrote,

That’s quiddity. Chesterton captures the childlike sense of everything being new. The world remains endlessly fascinating; every discovery can be met with wide-eyed enthusiasm. But that capacity is endangered now. The screen gives children fewer opportunities to skin their knees, fall off a bike, get stung by a bee, or feel the itch of grass after rolling down a hill.

Rebels of the Real

I want to push back against the superficial satisfaction of my diversions and reengage the more profound delight in the world around me.

For more than a year, I’ve been using the Merlin app to identify birds. My heart leaped at the first signs of spring a few weeks ago, when I saw the return of robins hopping across the yard, their melodies merging with the cardinals and wrens, interrupted by the squawk of a grackle. On a teaching trip to Oxford last year, I delighted in the songs of the blackbird, melodies you simply won’t hear in Nashville, a beauty the Beatles captured in the song by that name.

Satan’s goal is to make us more like zombies than humans—unthinking creatures who are also unthanking, empty of the gratitude that should fill us as we look to the Creator and Giver of all good gifts. That’s why I appreciated Hoppers. The film reminds us what it looks like to bask in the beauties and wonders all around us, to be startled by a sunset, alert to the mourning dove, arrested by the majesty of a tree.

As believers, we see this world as charged with grandeur. And so we take our place in the great chorus of praise rising from every corner of creation to the Conductor of the symphony.

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It took a while, but I finally finished plodding through Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Demons (translated as Devils in the Michael Katz edition I’m reading, also known as The Possessed). I plodded, because that’s the only pace that makes sense when tackling one of those doorstop Russian novels that can be both exhilarating and exhausting. It took 400 pages before the story started getting interesting! As much as I love Dostoevsky, this wasn’t Crime and Punishment or The Brothers Karamazov.

In the end, one theme pressed itself on me—one with serious implications for theological study. A little theology can be dangerous. Little in the sense of being too small, too light, too thin to bear weight. And little in the sense of having enough learning to feel proud but not enough to be humbled.

A little theology tempts us to confuse theological knowledge with moral virtue. And that’s a big mistake.

When Learning Outpaces Moral Seriousness

In “The Dangers of a Little Learning,” Aaron Alexander Zubia makes the point that a classical education that sharpens the mind without forming the heart can turn great ideas into dangerous playthings. The result is brilliance without moral gravity and intellectualism without wisdom.

Zubia turns to Dostoevsky’s Demons to illustrate the point. When truth, goodness, and beauty are treated lightly (or worse, wielded for performance’s sake), ideas lose their authority, society loses its bearings, and villains rush to fill the void. A great education, Zubia reminds us, doesn’t in itself produce moral virtue.

History bears this out. Stalin read Shakespeare. Hitler admired Don Quixote. Mao memorized and composed classical poetry. Mussolini appreciated Dante. None of them lacked exposure to the great works of human imagination. What they lacked was the moral formation to receive beauty as a summons to humility rather than a tool for domination.

Playing with Big Ideas

Demons dramatizes what happens when young people play around with ideas without appreciating their weightiness. The novel shows “the dangers of developing minds that can articulate—and argue for—any point, while failing to form hearts that lovingly cling to truth, goodness, and beauty.” Another danger Dostoevsky describes is the temptation to use big ideas to cultivate a personal brand, to signal sophistication, to maintain elite status as someone “in the know.”

The intelligentsia, in Dostoevsky’s telling, isn’t driven by the pursuit of truth so much as by the maintenance of prestige. The educated want to keep up with the latest fads. They grab on to whatever ideas happen to confer cultural capital. Ideas become props in a performance. And, Zubia says, “the performative misuse of ideas saps the life out of society, ails it, and corrupts it.”

Theological Knowledge Isn’t the Same as Spiritual Maturity

The danger Dostoevsky describes in general education applies just as well to theology. When we study theology, we aren’t merely handling concepts. We’re dealing with the knowledge of the living God. We’re probing into the holy of holies, peering into mysteries far beyond our intellectual grasp. We’re reckoning with the depth of our sin, the cost of our redemption, the gravity of divine love and justice, and the promise of new creation.

One danger of theological education is assuming that biblical knowledge is a reliable indicator of personal character or spiritual maturity. It isn’t. Theology can awaken the heart, but it can also deaden it. Doctrine can become a plaything, a sparring tool for colleagues, a way of sorting people into tribes and signaling one’s place in the inner ring.

When your soteriology or your eschatology or your sacramental theology becomes more a badge of enlightenment rather than a prodding to worship, your theology has fallen short. It has become a mask for pride rather than a source of humility. It’s entirely possible to be the most theologically sophisticated person in the room and yet have a heart cold toward God and indifferent toward others.

Formation Must Keep Pace with Instruction

Theological educators—pastors in the church and scholars in the academy alike—must be on guard against theological education that outruns character formation. Someone once remarked to me that a person holding a particular theological view couldn’t possibly be a “mature Christian.” What struck me was both the presumption (the certainty about someone’s spiritual condition) and the assumption (that Christian maturity can be measured by doctrinal precision).

No. It isn’t true. I’ve known Christians with only a rudimentary understanding of theology, yet their spiritual depth put many seminary-trained believers to shame. The widow with her mite beats the seminarian with his degree. To miss this, or worse—to be unable to see it—is already a sign of malformation.

What’s more, theological exploration can become a means of evading obedience: a way to rationalize our indifference to the poor, to shrink the circle of neighbors we’re willing to love, or to dull Scripture’s moral demands. That is when Kierkegaard’s rebuke becomes appropriate: “Christian scholarship is the Church’s prodigious invention to defend itself against the Bible, to ensure that we can continue to be good Christians without the Bible coming too close.”

Why a Little Theology Is Dangerous

Theological education must not be aimed at degrees or status. It must be suffused with wisdom and virtue because it’s ultimately ordered toward worship. When theology loses its weightiness—when God becomes manageable, debatable, or brandable—it has already gone wrong.

A lack of gravity is often the clearest sign that theology is being pressed into the service of other ends: power, reputation, influence, performance. In that sense, a little theology really is dangerous. Dangerous because it’s too thin to sustain reverence, and dangerous because it gives just enough knowledge to inflate our pride but never cultivate our sense of awe.

A little theology can be a dangerous thing.

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I’ve been enjoying David McCullough’s Pulitzer Prize–winning biography of Harry Truman recently, especially for the way it gives us such a vivid portrait of the man—his decency, stubbornness, loyalty, and down-to-earth nature.

But there’s a moment in Truman’s presidency that shows what happens when the hidden burden a leader carries erupts into an uncharacteristic lack of composure and self-control.

Truman’s Scathing Letter

It was late 1950. American troops were retreating in Korea, pushed back by massive Chinese forces. Washington was filled with dread: Was this the start of World War III? Should the atomic bomb be used again? Tensions between President Truman and General Douglas MacArthur were mounting. The world seemed poised on the edge of catastrophe.

Then came a personal blow. Charlie Ross, Truman’s press secretary and lifelong friend, suddenly keeled over and died of a coronary occlusion. Just hours later, Truman stepped in front of reporters to make a statement. His voice broke. “I can’t read this thing. You fellows know how I feel anyway . . .” Tears streamed down his face as he turned and walked back to his office. The burden of the global crisis was now compounded by personal grief.

That night, Truman and his wife attended a concert at Constitution Hall where their daughter, Margaret, sang before 3,500 people. The reviews were mixed. The next morning, The Washington Post published critic Paul Hume’s assessment: Margaret was “attractive on stage” but “cannot sing very well.” She was often flat, he wrote, and lacking professional finish. “It is an extremely unpleasant duty to record such unhappy facts about so honestly appealing a person.”

When Truman read the review, he exploded. He dashed off a furious 150-word letter, sealed it, affixed a three-cent stamp, and sent it on its way. “I’ve just read your lousy review of Margaret’s concert,” he began, calling Hume an “eight ulcer man on four ulcer pay” and warning that if they ever met, the critic would “need a new nose, a lot of beefsteak for black eyes, and perhaps a supporter below.”

The words were so coarse and uncharacteristic that when they surfaced, Margaret insisted to the press they couldn’t have come from her father. But the letter was legitimate. Tabloids ran with it. Americans began questioning the president’s “mental competence and emotional stability.” Mothers and fathers wrote to the White House, furious that while their sons were dying in Korea, the president seemed preoccupied with a music review.

Hume, to his credit, responded with grace: “I can only say that a man suffering the loss of a friend and carrying the burden of the present world crisis ought to be indulged in an occasional outburst of temper.”

Age of Celebrated Outbursts

Reading this story now can sound almost quaint. In the last decade, we’ve grown accustomed to questions about whether our presidents display the “mental competence” or “emotional stability” required for the job. Today, it’s commonplace for politicians to flaunt their lack of impulse control—and for much of the populace to cheer it on as authenticity. “He’s just being real.” Or “She’s telling it like it is.”

We’re an unserious people, and the people we elevate often reflect that unseriousness.

We’re also malformed by technological devices that encourage us to vent whatever we feel in the moment. To weigh in with our hot take. To express outrage, frustration, and contempt. To scoff and mock. To own the opposition. To destroy the other side.

We’ve normalized a lack of impulse control among ourselves and our leaders. What’s worse, we’ve celebrated the outburst as the sign of authenticity. We don’t expect decency from our leaders because we don’t delight in decency ourselves. The scathing takedown has become attractive, even admirable. Truman’s letter, back in 1950, was seen as an unfortunate lapse in judgment, a failure of restraint in an office that called for dignity. Today, many would celebrate his mistake as a sign of strength.

Virtue We No Longer Admire

The truth is, a lack of self-control is always a sign of weakness, not strength, no matter how many political partisans attempt to reframe it.

Self-control and self-sacrifice remain moral virtues whether or not they’re culturally in favor. Rightly held, their orientation is outward: toward the good of others, toward the strengthening of institutions, toward the selflessness required to carry hidden vulnerability without making others bear the cost of our impulsiveness. A society cannot flourish without citizens who admire and cultivate these virtues, and who require them of their leaders.

Neither can the church. Scripture lists self-control as a qualification for pastors (1 Tim. 3:2; Titus 1:8). The person without it is described as “a city whose wall is broken down” (Prov. 25:28). The fruit of the Spirit begins with love and ends with self-control, and those bookends are no accident (Gal. 5:22–23). You cannot become a loving person without self-control, because loving someone else will always cost you something. You’ll never make the costly, selfless decisions required by love if you cannot master the selfish impulses most likely to derail you.

To dismiss these concerns as quaint is to deny the moral architecture of the world. Leaders who don’t exercise personal restraint, and who don’t put in place people who can help them resist their impulses, corrode our institutions.

The partisan applause may be loud. The outbursts may provide an initial rush. But the leaders who truly strengthen a people and the pastors who truly shepherd a church are the ones who learn to carry grief, pressure, and provocation without letting their worst impulses dictate their conduct. Leadership doesn’t begin with authority over others; it begins with authority over oneself under God.

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When considering a classic work originally written in another language, the choice of translation can feel daunting. And it matters more than we sometimes realize. A good translation can heighten the reading experience and sharpen our understanding of what the original author was up to.

My favorite example comes from Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables. Near the end of the novel, when Marius and Cosette visit the elderly and ailing Jean Valjean, Marius finally understands the depth of Valjean’s sacrificial love. Valjean has acted valiantly and heroically, at immense personal cost, to secure their redemption and happiness. Marius exclaims (here’s the original French),

Julie Rose’s excellent translation renders it this way (note the bold):

Perfectly accurate. But notice what Christine Donougher picks up when she translates the same line with an ear tuned to biblical resonance. Hugo is deliberately echoing the Latin Ecce homo (John 19:5), linking Valjean’s self-giving love to Christ himself:

Rendering that line as “Behold the man” illuminates Hugo’s intent. This is the kind of nuance that can elevate a reading experience from good to great.

Why Translation Choices Matter

Over the years, I’ve had a similar experience reading Fyodor Dostoevsky in multiple translations. For Crime and Punishment, I find Michael Katz nearly unbeatable; he ably captures the suffocating atmosphere of frenzied distress. For The Brothers Karamazov—which I’ve read in Romanian, in the older Constance Garnett translation, and in more recent versions by Pevear and Volokhonsky, Ignat Avsey, and Katz—I appreciate them all, even if I ultimately lean toward Garnett or Katz.

Russian literature scholar Gary Saul Morson explains what’s at stake:

That brings us to Augustine’s Confessions.

Coming Home to Augustine

Here is a classic book most Christians have heard of, but far too few have read. It gives us the life story of one of the most influential theologians in Christian history—an autobiography that was composed as a prayer of thanksgiving. A tale of human dissolution overcome by divine deliverance, that culminates with contemplation of the beauty of God’s being.

Looking back through my journals, I see I first began reading Confessions when I was 18 years old. I returned to it as a newlywed during one of the dark, snowy winters I lived in Romania. Both times, I was reading Albert C. Outler’s 1955 translation, with its now-dated but once-standard use of “thee” and “thou.”

Over the years, I returned to Augustine often, but my love for the book was reinvigorated by Sarah Ruden’s translation in 2017, which captures more of Augustine’s literary flair and emotional immediacy. That translation didn’t come without controversy, with James K. A. Smith objecting to Ruden’s rendering of dominus as “Master” rather than the more traditional “Lord.”

Several years ago, I adopted a new practice: reading Confessions at the beginning of each year, each time in a different translation. Since then, I’ve revisited Ruden but also read versions by Peter Constantine, Henry Chadwick, Frank Sheed, Maria Boulding, Anthony Esolen, and Thomas Williams. This annual read-through has become a spiritual reorientation for me, a way of tuning my heart at the year’s outset.

Sampling Various Translations of Augustine

The thing to remember about Confessions is that you can’t really go wrong. (The lone exception may be the widely used R. S. Pine-Coffin translation from 1961—which Peter Kreeft memorably dismissed as “worthy of his name . . . a dead translation.” By contrast, Kreeft says Sheed’s version is “as living as molten lava.”) Augustine’s fire breaks through almost every rendering. His devotion, ardor, worship, philosophical curiosity, gratitude for salvation, and horror at sin remain palpable.

So if you’re just beginning, my advice is simple: Pick one and dive in. This will (hopefully!) not be the last time you read Confessions, nor the last translation you explore. Once you realize that, the pressure is off.

Still, for readers who want a sense of what distinguishes these translations, here are a few observations. I’ve chosen one of Augustine’s most beloved passages and placed it side by side in multiple versions.

Outler, 1955

Here’s the first translation I encountered. Despite its dated diction, Outler’s version remains influential, especially in academic and ecclesial settings. His great strength is theological reliability paired with reverent prose, designed for mid-20th-century readers steeped in biblical cadences.

Sheed, 1942

Sheed’s translation is often celebrated for its spiritual vitality and rhetorical power. With an elevated style, it pulses with devotion and urgency, making it a favorite for readers who want Augustine’s prayerfulness to feel alive. It’s available in a handsome new volume from Word on Fire.

Chadwick, 1991

I have often recommended Chadwick’s Oxford translation as the best “all-purpose” edition of Confessions. It combines literary grace, philosophical precision, and theological sensitivity, making it suitable for serious readers, students, and pastors alike.

Boulding, 1997

Boulding’s translation is distinctive for presenting some of Confessions in poetic form, including this portion of Augustine’s prayerful address to God. It’s especially beloved among contemplative readers who experience the text less as argument and more as doxology.

Ruden, 2017

Ruden’s translation is notable for her attempt to restore Augustine’s emotional intensity and rhetorical playfulness. She brings out the strangeness, boldness, and immediacy of the Latin, helping modern readers hear Augustine as a living voice.

Constantine, 2018

The esteemed translator of many classic works, Constantine renders Confessions in a way that reflects his reputation as a master stylist. This version is often commended for its clarity, smoothness, and its contemporary literary feel.

Williams, 2019

Williams offers perhaps the most philosophically precise English Confessions available. Scholars and students value his translation for its conceptual clarity. I also appreciate his claim that “Augustine does not quote Scripture; he speaks the language of Scripture as his own language” and his decision to rarely put biblical quotes or allusions in quotation marks.

Esolen, 2024

Esolen’s translation builds intentionally on the best of earlier English renderings while expanding the reader’s linguistic palette. I appreciate the rich vocabulary, poetic beauty, and sensitivity to both classical and Christian literary tradition. It has quickly become one of my favorites.

So, Where Should You Start?

My friend Tony Reinke has assembled several helpful side-by-side comparisons of another paragraph—Augustine’s self-description of sin—including translations not listed here, though his survey stops at 2017.

In the end, I return to where I began. You can’t really go wrong with Confessions. Pick a translation. Enter the prayer. Walk the road. And meet again the Lord who stirs us to delight in praising him, “because you have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you” (Chadwick).

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Talk to Christians about why they don’t pray as much as they want or think they should, and you’ll hear a familiar set of reasons.

• Busyness and distraction. Our schedules crowd out prayer.
• Then there’s guilt and inadequacy: I don’t know how to pray well, so I guess I’m not very good at it.
• Spiritual dryness and the absence of immediate payoff: I don’t feel closer to God when I pray, and many of my prayers seem to go unanswered.
• And, of course, self-sufficiency. We don’t pray because we don’t feel we need God’s help in our daily endeavors.

All these explanations have some truth to them. But I suspect there’s an understated reason for our prayerlessness, one that often sits beneath the others and may even supersede them.

If You Knew Me, You Would Ask

In John 4, Jesus encounters the Samaritan woman at Jacob’s well. When she arrives to draw water, Jesus asks her for a drink. Startled, she questions why a Jewish man would ask such a thing of a Samaritan woman. And Jesus replies, “If you knew the gift of God, and who is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would ask him, and he would give you living water” (v. 10).

In other words: If you knew me, you would ask me.

Applied to prayer, two realities come into view: the power of Jesus and the heart of Jesus. If you knew his power, you would ask, confident he can act. If you knew his heart, you would ask, confident he wants to.

Most Christians I know have little trouble affirming God’s power. We believe he can answer prayer. We confess his omnipotence. We trust his ability.

What we struggle with more is God’s disposition toward us. Does God want to respond? Does he delight to hear from us? Is his heart inclined toward generosity or stinginess?

Father Who Gives Good Gifts

Jesus addresses this question in the Sermon on the Mount. After urging us to ask, seek, and knock, he ties prayer to the benevolent heart of God:

Prayerlessness, then, often has less to do with doubting God’s power and more with wondering about God’s heart. If you knew who you were talking to, you would ask. You would know the Father’s heart is turned toward you in love. You would trust the eagerness of Jesus, our interceding brother. You would lean into the Spirit, who groans with and for us.

John Piper captures this connection in Desiring God:

The inverse is just as revealing. Those who pray regularly do so because they see God as generous, a great Gift-giver who delights in blessing his children. A virtuous cycle then gets going. We pray to know God’s heart better, and as we come to know his heart toward us, we find ourselves praying more.

Trust the Heart of God in the Hard Seasons

Of course, trusting God’s heart doesn’t mean every request will be granted as we’d like. In seasons of suffering, trusting God’s goodness can be difficult. Calvin Miller gave voice to this tension: “In desperate times, living becomes an altar where you pray and sing because the only good news of the day is that God lives longer than you do.”

To trust God’s fatherly heart means we also trust his fatherly knowledge, a wisdom far surpassing our plans and perspective. God knows what we really want, not just what we think we want.

This brings us to the biblical word that best names God’s heart toward us: hesed—steadfast love, covenant faithfulness, loving-kindness that endures forever. Michael Card defines hesed this way: “When the person from whom I have a right to expect nothing gives me everything.”

That is the posture God takes toward us in Christ. It’s the heart that motivates his work of salvation and sustains our work of prayer. As John Starke describes it, prayer is grounded in the “divine hospitality available to us that makes God our constant friend and transforms prayer into communion.”

And that’s why prayerlessness is never ultimately a technique problem. It’s a knowledge-of-God problem. When we fail to pray, it’s because we’ve forgotten who invites us. But when we remember, and when we glimpse the Father’s smile, praying no longer feels like a soldier performing his duty but like the reflex of a child leaping into Dad’s outstretched arms.

If you knew him, you would ask.

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One of my favorite quotes from G. K. Chesterton goes like this:

Writing demands thinking, which is why it requires what John Stott once called PIM—“pain in the mind” time. It’s slow, often agonizing work, this process of thinking, revising, and pressing an idea until you’ve considered it deeply.

I often tell aspiring writers that there’s no way to avoid the work. Not if you want to truly write, rather than merely enjoy the afterglow of having written something. Not if you want to really think, rather than dash off an idea and watch generative AI spit out something you can slap your name on.

I love veteran writer Lynn Vincent’s description of a typical writing session:

For some reason, we’re tempted to believe writing should come easily. As if words ought to gush effortlessly from our hearts and minds onto the page.

Yes, there are moments like that, times when you’re deep into an article or sermon or book project, and you lose track of time and enter a state of flow. They’re wonderful. They’re also rare. More often than not, the flow comes only after the slog. You won’t arrive in the meadow of inspiration until you force yourself through the thicket of thinking.

I love the bluntness of Stephen King: “Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration, the rest of us just get up and go to work.”

If you’re looking for a hack or shortcut that will make writing easy, I’m afraid there aren’t any.

Prepare the Way for the Work

That said, there is good news. There are ways to prepare the way for writing. You can’t eliminate the painful part, but you can make the process more endurable.

I’ve come to agree with James Clear on developing good habits: “Motivation is overrated. Environment often matters more.” Or, as he also says, “You don’t have to be the victim of your environment. You can also be the architect of it.”

Over the years, I’ve leaned on a number of environmental cues that help trigger my brain into writing mode, even when I’m not feeling particularly motivated or inspired. The basic elements are simple: time, place, sound, and cost.

One of the most important practices for me is an annual summer writing retreat. I drive nearly three hours to a quiet place in East Tennessee overlooking a lake. I treat it like a monastery of sorts—three days and nights with just me and the Lord. I know the room. I know the view. Breakfast and dinner are provided (I skip lunch).

Unplugged, surrounded by stillness, I’m able to focus intently on a book or major project. I surround the work with times of prayer, Scripture reading, and long walks where I talk with God about what I’m working on, the challenges I’m facing, and how I hope to serve him through my writing. That place is holy ground to me.

Notice what’s at work here. There’s a specific time. There’s a specific place. There’s quiet and beauty. And there’s a cost. I’ve paid for the room. I’ve driven a long way. I’ve cleared the calendar. All of that creates a sense of pressure: You’re here for a reason. Don’t waste this.

Sometimes, that pressure can backfire and feel paralyzing, which is why the spiritual aspect matters so much. In the moments of desperation or stress, I remember I’m not writing alone. I can confess my anxiety, ask for help, take breaks, and return to the work again. The goal is progress, not perfection. A draft. An outline. Something I can keep refining once I return home.

Train Your Brain to Write on Cue

On a more regular basis, I try to create a similar effect on a smaller scale.

Most Friday mornings, I spend a few hours writing at North Wind Manor, the space hosted by The Rabbit Room. It’s a place designed for artists and writers, complete with a fireplace that once belonged to J. R. R. Tolkien. Friends of mine often show up. There’s conversation, laughter, homemade biscuits, and all the tea or coffee we can drink.

It’s a communal, coffee-shop kind of environment, which means I use noise-canceling headphones when it’s time to focus. I also have a playlist I turn on every Friday morning. Over time, my brain has learned the cue. Same place. Same time. Same sounds.

Once again, the building blocks are there. There’s a cost (a half-hour drive). There’s intentionality. There’s ambience. All of it says, Whether you feel like it or not, you’re here to write. So get to it. And most weeks, once I sit down and start, I do.

Habits of Writing

None of this removes all the pain. Writing will always require PIM time. You still have to show up. You still have to do the work.

But willpower alone isn’t enough. Pay attention to the environments where your best thinking happens. Notice the places, sounds, and rhythms that help you focus. Then, as much as you’re able, return to them. Build a little cost into the process. Give your brain the signals it needs.

Over time, those small, intentional choices about where and when you write may be the difference between talking about writing and becoming a writer.

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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

Strobel and 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.

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For more than a decade, I’ve been writing about expressive individualism—the outlook that says the purpose of life is to look inside yourself, discover who you really are, and then express that identity to the world.

Several years ago, Tim Keller told me that in New York City he was seeing the loneliness and loss of meaning produced by this way of life pushing people in a new direction. Many, he said, were beginning to look for identity, belonging, and purpose inside a group or tribe. He wondered whether the next phase of our culture would be a strange hybrid: expressive individualism blended with group-based identity politics.

I think Keller was right, and others are now noticing the shift.

Luke Burgis has suggested that while the 20th century was the century of the self, the 21st may be shaping up to be the century of the crowd. That’s a bit of an overstatement. The last century gave us mass movements that swallowed individuals into mass graves. Still, if you compare the last few decades of the 20th century in the West with the first quarter of the 21st, Burgis is pointing to something real. The emphasis has moved from finding yourself on your own to locating yourself within a group.

Alan Noble describes this shift not as “crowd culture” but as “mob identity.” He writes,

More and more people are shaping their sense of self through powerful group affiliations rather than as independent individuals. This isn’t a rejection of expressive individualism so much as its evolution. The self is still in the driver’s seat in determining where identity will be based, but now it seeks authenticity and affirmation through belonging, conformity, and visible alignment with ideological, political, ethnic, or cultural tribes.

Social media accelerates this process by flattening complexity into “us versus them” and punishing disagreement within the group. The result is often mob-like behavior: swarming, scapegoating, and groupthink.

Why the Turn to Identity Politics?

Why has identity politics risen so quickly and with such intensity?

Mary Eberstadt offers a compelling explanation. In Primal Screams, she argues that questions of identity (“Who am I?” and “Where do I belong?”) press on younger generations because so many have grown up without stable sources of formation. For Eberstadt, the collapse of the family plays a central role in this shift, leaving many searching elsewhere for connection, stability, and meaning.

In that vacuum, ideological tribes step in to offer belonging, purpose, and solidarity. The result often looks less like ordinary political disagreement and more like religious fervor, complete with confessions, heresy-hunting, sacred texts, and forms of indoctrination.

I’m inclined to see the rise of identity politics less as a cause than as a symptom—an attempt to fill a deeper loss of meaning in our culture. When there’s no shared sense of purpose beyond the self, no larger story to give life direction, people naturally gravitate toward finding significance in group belonging. The crowd offers moral clarity, emotional fulfillment, and the reassurance that one’s life is tied to something important.

Freddie deBoer, a writer and media critic, traces some of the harsh energy of cancel culture to this same hunger for meaning:

Ironically, this intense moralism often shows up not among the poor and marginalized but among the educated and economically comfortable. As Musa al-Gharbi has argued, many of today’s fiercest identity-based conflicts function less as movements for justice and more as status competitions among elites who already hold cultural power. When material needs are largely met but deeper questions of meaning, purpose, and belonging go unanswered, moral fervor rushes in to fill the gap. What looks like compassion for the oppressed often masks a deeper struggle among the well-off to justify themselves, distinguish themselves, and be part of a cause that feels morally serious.

What This Means for the Church

So what does all this mean for the church?

In a culture desperate for belonging, churches will feel pressure to become religious expressions of whatever identity their members most strongly cling to. Visit multiple churches in different regions (or even in the same town) and you’ll notice that congregations often reflect differences of history, language, class, and culture. The danger today is that these ordinary distinctions might harden into defining markers, intensifying divisions rather than showcasing how the gospel transcends them. Just as individuals can elevate certain identity markers above their identity in Christ, so can churches.

For Christians, the church must be part of the answer both to expressive individualism and to its mob-identity remix. The church can push back against expressive individualism by re-forming us around a different center—not the self but God.

In a culture that tells us to “look in” and go it alone, the church insists faith is communal. We’re shaped by shared worship, shared confession, and shared hope. And as the family of God, the church strengthens households by giving parents, singles, children, and the elderly a shared identity rooted in grace. When families flourish, the church supports them. And when families fracture or fail, the church steps in, not as a substitute for God’s design but as a place of healing and stability for those left unmoored.

At the same time, the church can resist mob mentality by reminding us that belonging to Christ relativizes every other identity. Many of those identities don’t disappear, but they’re no longer ultimate. We’re defined not by tribal loyalties or ideological badges or ethnic origin but by the blood of Jesus.

Week after week, gathering together teaches us to look up before we look around or look within. Christ is our champion. And the primary enemies we face are not our neighbors but our own sin, the schemes of the Evil One, and the last enemy to be defeated—death. Through preaching, prayer, baptism, and the Lord’s Supper, we’re drawn into a family that both celebrates God’s work in us and redirects us when we wander.

This vision of the church also confronts the temptation toward performative justice: the urge to prove our righteousness through outrage, signaling, or alignment with the “right” causes. Freed from the need to justify ourselves, we’re finally able to love our neighbors not for the way they increase our status but as people made in God’s image. This kind of belonging resists shallow affirmation and unthinking conformity. It requires humility, patience, and love across real differences.

With a God-centered outlook, we come to realize we’re formed neither by turning inward nor by dissolving into the mob but by belonging together to Christ, for the glory of God and the good of the world.

If it’s true that this might become the century of the crowd, the world will need a church that’s more than a mirror of a mob.

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One of our family’s guilty pleasures is Survivor. My wife and I discovered the show after we moved back to the United States from Romania. My parents had several seasons on DVD, and we watched them shortly after our first son was born.

I’ve come to think Survivor is still the best game on television—tweaked and altered just enough each season to keep things fresh (and to provide endless fodder for fans who either embrace or loathe the latest experiment that tinkers with the formula).

Anyone who watches Survivor wonders what it would be like to be on Survivor. Could you endure the weather and the elements, the petty bickering, the social maneuvering, the endurance challenges, the constant hunger?

But one experience marks contestants today in a way that wasn’t the case when the show began 25 years ago (50 seasons ago!): spending a month without the smartphone we’ve grown accustomed to having beside us at all times.

Survivor Without Screens

Rachel LaMont, the winner of Survivor 47, recently appeared on The Quigley Dreamcast and described what it was like to get her phone back at the end of the game.

Rachel said that for about a month after the show, she was “pretty phone-averse.” Having tasted a different way of being, her return to normal work was jarring. Living outside without mirrors or screens for a month, then going back to sitting in front of a phone or laptop for nine hours a day, felt intolerable.

And yet she acknowledged the resignation most of us feel. In today’s society, it often seems like “there’s nothing you can do.” Screens are simply part of life.

When Rachel talks about Survivor, she talks most about the experience of time itself—how it felt slower and fuller. You could “really be present.”

We often say time flies and our memories don’t work well, but Rachel thinks that’s because we’ve lost the capacity to really pay attention. We’re multitasking constantly, doing too many things at once, never fully present anywhere.

Since coming home, she acknowledges the good her phone makes possible—all the connections and communication with friends and family—while still despising the dependence it creates.

Rachel’s experience names a tension most of us live with every day.

Catch-22 of Connection

We feel we need our phones. But we don’t always want our phones. We rely on them for work, relationships, and basic activities of life, even as we lament how much they rob us of attention and presence.

Speaking of attention, the problem has grown so dire that Netflix filmmakers now alter scripts to explain what’s happening on-screen, assuming viewers will be scrolling on another device while half watching on their laptop or TV. In this environment, sitting still for a two-hour movie feels like a win. What this level of distraction says about our minds (and what it portends for our ability to focus long enough to read and learn) is alarming.

And yet, there’s reason for hope.

Stirring Dissatisfaction Among Christian Students

In recent years, I’ve noticed something taking shape among Christian college students. This is anecdotal but consistent across campuses I visit. A student at Cedarville University told me that several friends in his group deleted Instagram entirely. Students at Liberty University described a group of guys who limited their social media use to seven minutes a day, and gave one another their screen-time passcodes so they couldn’t get around the restriction.

I know of churches seeking to cultivate a different culture among their staff, urging one another to keep phones out of reach during family hours. Youth groups that collect phones in a box at the door. High school students who meet up in town and agree ahead of time not to pull out their phones during dinner together.

Just as schools that once rushed to give every student an iPad are now reversing course, these young Christians are showing the rest of us something important: We don’t have to be slaves to our technology. We have agency. We have freedom.

It shouldn’t take a stint on Survivor to remind us there’s a real world beyond the omnipresent screen. We can push back. We can silence our devices. We can make them work for us again, instead of living as though we work for them.

It’ll take discipline, courage, and partnership with others. But I’m heartened to see pockets of Christian young people choosing a different future for themselves and their families. A generation relearning how to look up may yet recover what the rest of us forgot how to see.

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The refrain has been repeated often enough over the past 50 years that it now passes for common sense: The big problem we face is that we don’t love ourselves enough. We must learn to respect ourselves, love ourselves, and accept ourselves. You are enough in a world that tells you you’re imperfect or needy in some way.

There’s an element of truth in this counsel, especially for those who assume the religious path requires self-loathing, or the kind of self-hatred that diminishes our sense of worth as people made in God’s image. But then there are these unsettling words from Jesus himself:

Since Jesus also told us to love our neighbors as ourselves (implying that love for self is natural, even good), his requirement here cannot mean an unqualified hatred of one’s own life. Nevertheless, in our context today, we’re too quick to explain away rather than sit with this startling saying.

Augustine and the Fear We’ve Lost

Augustine, in a famous sermon “on the ten strings of the harp,” preached at Chusa around AD 420, dared to read Jesus in a way that resists our instinct to soften the blow. He put forward a striking interpretation of Jesus’s words in the Sermon on the Mount about “[settling] quickly with your adversary” (Matt. 5:25–26). God’s Word is our adversary “because it commands things against the grain which [we] don’t do.”

Augustine turned to Psalm 86:15, noting how popular it was to emphasize that the Lord is “compassionate and gracious, abounding in faithful love.” But the text goes on to say “and truth.” The Lord abounds in truth. If the text had stopped before that line, Augustine told his listeners,

Augustine believed the psalmist’s emphasis on truth rules out “the smugness of misplaced presumption” and instead awakens “the anxiety of sorrow for sin.” A healthy fear of the Lord must remain, even if we aspire to follow God’s commands out of love rather than fear of judgment.

When God Refuses to Be Made in Our Image

But is it really possible to follow the Lord out of love and not fear? Back in Augustine’s time, people were saying, If the Lord really wanted us to obey him out of love and not fear, he wouldn’t have made all these threats against sin. He would have come to be indulgent to everybody and pardon everybody, and he wouldn’t send anyone to hell.

To this presumption, Augustine responded with a majestic vision of God’s holy otherness. And here is where our modern preference for “self-love” over “self-hatred” comes under scrutiny in his sermon:

For Augustine, the issue wasn’t whether we love or hate ourselves but whether we love God and are satisfied in him—and then learn to see ourselves in light of his holiness. It’s the desire for God’s beauty that drives us to conform ourselves to his will.

Then Augustine presses further and makes us modern readers squirm:

Everything about that paragraph jars us. God hates us as we are? And we should agree with him and hate ourselves too? What about the reality of God loving us as sinners?

Hating the Fever, Not the Patient

Augustine quickly clarifies by turning to the metaphor of illness.

Augustine doesn’t think of the self as a static thing, to be either loved or hated wholesale. It’s a dynamic reality, shaped by what we love, so that at every moment, our self is in a particular state: a state of illness, a state of health; a state of sin, a state of righteousness; a state of struggle, a state of rest.

Seen in this light, to “hate yourself when sick” makes sense if you despise the state of sickness and its effects. You want health. You long for your self to be in a different state. And therefore, the compassionate doctor is right to hate your fever and to work relentlessly for your healing.

Courage to Hate Our Fevers

Recovery begins with the desire to be a different version of yourself, to progress into a better state. Healing demands that doctor and patient agree to “persecute” the disease. Health requires hatred—not of the person God has made but of the sinful disease that disfigures that person.

Augustine’s language is severe. The Puritan pastor Thomas Goodwin’s is more tender, though no less serious. Goodwin writes,

To put it another way: God loves the person he created you to be, and he hates what sin has done to you. His compassion toward you is matched by his relentless opposition to the disease that enslaves you.

The question that comes to us from a sermon more than a millennium old is this: Do we hate our fevers enough?

Do we hate the distorting effects of sin?

Do we hate the anxiety-addled, lust-ridden, money-obsessed, power-hungry, self-righteous, selfish, sinful versions of ourselves that keep us in a diseased state and prevent us from becoming who God calls us to be?

Or do we presume on God’s kindness, forgetting that he abounds in faithful love and truth—that his Word stands over us in judgment, even as the Word made flesh has come to heal?

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For more than a year now, I’ve been working on and off on a project conceived of as book+podcast. I’m close enough to the finish line to share the name with you: The Lord Is My Light: A Liturgy for Daily Prayer.

The Lord Is My Light is a structured plan for prayer and Bible reading. It arranges biblical texts to highlight themes and connections in God’s Word and then surrounds them with confessions and prayers drawn from the breadth of Christian history. At its heart is a simple hope: that regular, prayerful meditation on God’s Word, week after week and season after season, might shape us over time into people who walk in the light.

Many of you are familiar with my 30 Days series of prayer books on the Psalms, the life of Jesus, and the letters of Paul. Those volumes follow a three-times-a-day rhythm, guiding readers through particular portions of Scripture with consistency and focus. Readers of that series have often asked for a once-a-day version, and for something that would carry them beyond one section of Scripture into the grand sweep of the whole Bible.

Those requests became the seed of this project. Then the seed grew. (Boy, did it grow!)

‘The Lord Is My Light’: The Book

The Lord Is My Light will cover every day of the year, with additional readings to account for the way Easter shifts the church calendar. In the end, the volume will contain 396 daily liturgies, with a word count that exceeds 475,000. I didn’t fully grasp the size of the task when I began. I do now.

What has sustained me through the long process is the conviction that this kind of reverent attentiveness is needed now more than ever. We live in a distracted age, trained for speed and marked by fragmentation. A daily liturgy slows us down. It trains our loves. It reminds us that we belong to a long line of forefathers and mothers in the faith who have read these same Scriptures and prayed their hearts out to the same Lord.

In partnership with Holman Bibles, we’re now in the final design phase. We’re working carefully toward what we hope will be not only a biblically rich prayer book but also a beautiful and usable one. Something sturdy enough for daily use and inviting enough to return to day after day. I feel both relief and awe to be at this stage.

‘The Lord Is My Light’: The Podcast

For The Lord Is My Light, Holman is also developing a companion podcast. I’m just as excited about the podcast as I am the book, and a little nervous about it too.

The vision is ambitious: a well-produced, daily audio liturgy that walks listeners through the same prayer rhythm, using multiple voices, steady pacing, and ambient music designed to clear space for giving full attention to the Lord, who is our light. The goal of the podcast isn’t commentary or teaching but attentiveness to the Word of the Lord and responsiveness in prayer.

This audio project has required even more collaboration. I’ve begun reaching out to pastors and friends, singers and songwriters, composers and producers. As the recordings begin, the one thing I’m adamant about with everyone who lends their voice is this: We will not record believers just reading the prayers but actually praying them. I want every listener to be truly joining another voice in prayer and, together, ascending to the throne of grace.

As with the book, there is still work ahead. More decisions to be made. More recording and listening required. I covet your prayers for this part of the project as well, that it would serve the church faithfully and help cultivate, day after day, a quiet attentiveness before the living God.

Coming: Advent 2026.

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Christianity Today began a series a little more than a year ago that traces all 70 years of the magazine’s history. Each installment walks through older issues, showing what news and commentary looked like in the 1950s and 1960s. I’ve read every release with interest. It’s like stepping into a time machine, perusing the archives to see what occupied the minds of evangelical pastors and church leaders in a different era.

What stands out most in these archival trips isn’t how foreign the commentary feels, but how familiar. Familiar in two ways. First, in the topics addressed. Second, in the way those challenges were framed as new, unprecedented, and urgent, often with the language of “crisis” applied to the cultural moment.

A Shaking World, Once Again

Here’s an example that captures what appears throughout the coverage, as commentators sought to awaken Christians to greater faithfulness in light of the times. Note the language used to describe the era:

The world is shaking. Catastrophic developments. A revolutionary age. Multiple crises. This was written in 1960.

Sexual Chaos and Technological Fear

The similarities extend to subject matter as well. Consider the sexual revolution. In 1965, editor in chief Carl F. H. Henry called for “moral indignation” in response to the spread and exploitation of sexual immorality:

Note the “never before” language, alongside concern that new technologies were amplifying moral corruption. A few years earlier, in 1958, Christianity Today lamented how easily obscene material could be purchased, even in Washington, DC:

If smut sold at newsstands in 1958 was alarming, one can only imagine how those editors would respond to today’s reality, where pornographic material is easily accessible, even to children, through the privacy of a smartphone.

Discouraged Pastors in a Supposed Golden Age

As the pattern continues, the sense of déjà vu only grows stronger. Church leaders frequently expressed discouragement and helplessness in the face of cultural change and spiritual apathy. Ministers and laypeople bemoaned nominal Christianity:

It’s worth remembering that this was written at the tail end of a historic surge in church attendance that filled pews and launched ministries throughout the 1950s. Even during periods we now romanticize as spiritual high points, faithful pastors felt weary, disillusioned, and unsure how to respond.

Division Has Always Haunted the Church

Nor is evangelical division a recent problem. In 1961, an editorial lamented the fractured state of the movement:

Evangelical infighting didn’t begin with social media. It’s been a common challenge of the movement, just as it has been for local churches going all the way back to the Corinthians.

Faith, Politics, and Public Relevance

Questions about the church’s role in public life also loom large in these archives. In 1960, Christianity Today worried about a Roman Catholic president but discerned a deeper cultural shift:

That concern proved remarkably prescient. It connects to an even older debate from 1956 that still resurfaces today: Is America a “Christian nation”?

On the one hand, editors warned churches against politicizing the gospel, the ever-present tendency to exploit “religion as a weapon of ideological conflict,” when “God is to be worshipped and served for God’s sake” and “righteousness is to be sought for righteousness’ sake.”

On the other hand, they warned against withdrawing from public life altogether. In 1958, they feared churches were failing to engage society robustly, especially amid the Cold War:

Old Anxieties About New Technologies

Even concerns about technology feel strikingly modern. Columnists worried about advertising techniques that relied on subliminal messaging and psychological manipulation . . . in 1959. An analog version of today’s concerns about the “algorithm,” if you will.

They also foresaw how technological dependence could reshape church life, with congregations relying on “special lighting, microphones, and other electronic gadgets” and the gospel itself in danger of being marketed like a product.

Many today wonder if Christian colleges and seminaries will survive the upheavals in the world of academia. Well, in 1958, the headline was “Can the Christian College Survive?” Apparently, back then, colleges faced similar problems:

We Haven’t Lived Through the Worst of It

I could go on. Christians in the 1950s wrestled with the ethics of artificial insemination. Commentators worried about the distractions plaguing the youth—“our entertainment-loving children” who aren’t “interested in the rigorous discipline that makes scientists and men of learning. Rather than in studies, they are majoring in football.”

They lamented the commercialization of Christmas, calling it “an occasion for inexcusable excesses” marked by “blatant commercialism.” Debates over the church’s role in race relations were ever-present, with both positive and negative views of the aims and methods of the civil rights movement.

After reading through these archives, I’m struck by how easily I fall into the trap of believing our moment is uniquely troubled. Things feel more chaotic than ever, we tell ourselves. Therefore, the church must act differently, urgently, even desperately, because this crisis surpasses all others.

But measured against history, this claim doesn’t hold. Many believers came of age during world wars that claimed tens of millions of lives. Pastors shepherded churches through the Great Depression. Earlier generations endured plagues that wiped out entire cities, persecution that sent Christians to prisons or to their deaths, and political upheavals that shattered ancient civilizations. Even now, in many countries, public worship is illegal, Scripture is contraband, and faithfulness carries immediate physical cost.

It’s true, today’s challenges are real. But not unrivaled.

This is why the insistence that we face the greatest crisis ever reveals something less about the moment and more about ourselves. It’s generational narcissism, the temptation to view our struggles as uniquely severe and our responsibilities as uniquely heroic. Every generation is prone to it. And every generation must learn, again, the discipline of faithfulness without panic, courage without exaggeration, and hope grounded not in the urgency of the times but in the steadfastness of God.

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Peter Kreeft has a new book out, a statement nearly always true no matter the month of the year. Nearing his 90th birthday, he remains one of the most prolific Christian writers alive today, rivaling the prodigious output of G. K. Chesterton and others. His latest book focuses on what he calls the two greatest novels ever written: The Lord of the Rings and The Brothers Karamazov.

As a longtime admirer of both works (I read Dostoevsky’s masterpiece again last year, for what I think was the sixth time), I can’t disagree with his selections. So I was curious to see what fresh insight he might draw from these novels, two books that continue to flow with wisdom long after the popularity of most others fades.

Ordinary Hope vs. Deep Hope

One chapter in particular is worth lingering over. Kreeft reflects on the nature of hope, contrasting ordinary hope with what he calls deep hope. Ordinary hope is often rooted in calculation. A bet on good odds. It’s the hope that arises when success is still a possibility, no matter how unlikely.

But deep hope is different. It’s the kind of hope that arises after ordinary hope dies. Hope against hope. The kind that Chesterton said “exists only in earthquake and eclipse.” It’s a confidence not grounded in statistics or circumstances but in the underlying order of things, in the conviction that life will ultimately triumph over death and that it’s good and right to desire and will the good.

Ordinary hope may come and go, depending on the circumstances or what we think the chances may be. But deep hope is heavy, so heavy it can make the heart light.

Star That Pierces the Darkness

To illustrate this kind of hope, Kreeft turns to a memorable scene in The Lord of the Rings. Frodo and Sam are deep in Mordor, drawing closer to the heart of evil. All the last bits of ordinary hope are gone. Frodo is asleep. Sam is keeping watch. And in that moment of utter despair, something catches Sam’s eye.

Kreeft tells us this is the scene Tolkien said he couldn’t read without weeping.

What makes that moment so powerful? It’s the sudden awakening of deep hope. A hope not grounded in self or chance or likelihood but in something metaphysical. A cosmic, objective foundation underlying all things. A good and living God is there. Kreeft puts it this way:

Tim Keller loved this passage too. He appreciated Tolkien’s contrast between Sam’s defiance (when he was still looking at himself) and hope, when his courage came from looking away from himself and up to the heavens. Deep hope is what helped Sam fall into “a deep untroubled sleep.”

When the situation is dire, the world tells us to look into our hearts. To screw up our courage. To banish our fears. But Christian hope is different. It comes from outside ourselves. It’s a joy that pushes fear into its proper place and keeps it from becoming all-consuming.

When the Shadow Is Small and Passing

When Keller was first diagnosed with cancer, he went through a risky surgery. And yet, in a moment fraught with peril and fear, he experienced something remarkably similar to what Tolkien described Sam seeing in Mordor.

He wrote about it in Hope in Times of Fear:

When the darkness descends, we need more than optimism. We need more than defiance. What we need—what Tolkien saw, what Keller clung to, what Kreeft writes about—is deep hope. Hope endures not because the odds are good but because the Storyteller is.

In the end, light and high beauty will outlast the shadow. And that even the smallest glimpse of that light—seen by a hobbit in Mordor, or a pastor in a hospital bed—can make us weep for joy.

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The title of this column is deliberately vague. By dealing with a censorious spirit, I mean both watching out for the temptation to adopt this posture toward others and knowing how to respond to people who adopt this posture toward us.

This sin is insidious because it can hide under the banner of “discernment,” when in reality the sin often being exposed isn’t in the person under attack but in the wicked assumptions of the one doing the attacking. (I sometimes wonder if one of the primary spiritual effects of social media—especially X—has been the cultivation and the exposure of this spirit in ourselves, to the point it begins to feel “normal” or, worse, righteous.)

Jonathan Edwards devotes significant attention to this problem in Charity and Its Fruits, his masterful series of sermons on 1 Corinthians 13. He connects a censorious spirit to Paul’s description of love in verse 5, which reads in the KJV, “[Love] thinketh no evil.” The ESV translates the phrase as “is not . . . resentful,” with a footnote pointing to the underlying Greek: “does not count up wrongdoing.” The CSB and NIV similarly say that love does not keep a “record of wrongs.”

Three Ways a Censorious Spirit Shows Itself

Edwards sees in this phrase not only a tendency to brood over past offenses but a readiness to look for new ones—a disposition eager to spot fresh evils in others. He identifies three manifestations of a censorious spirit. What follows is a lightly updated version of his language.

1. A censorious spirit shows itself in an eagerness to judge the spiritual condition of others. That is, it is quick to pass judgment on those who profess faith, condemning them as hypocrites.

Here we see the trigger-happy person, ready to fire off missiles at any perceived hypocrisy among people whose aspirations are sincere and whose reputation is sound. Often this posture springs from a lack of spiritual grounding or gospel security. Feeling inadequate due to our own sins, and when confronted with the holiness and love we see in others, we may nurture a wicked desire to knock believers down a peg or two.

This is the bitter fruit of an ironic pairing: self-righteousness (the desire to elevate ourselves) joined to insecurity (the fear that we don’t measure up). There’s something deeply twisted about eagerly pointing out hypocrisies in others that we work hard to conceal in ourselves.

2. A censorious spirit shows itself in a tendency to judge the character of others harshly. It overlooks their good qualities, assumes they lack virtues they actually possess, minimizes what is commendable in them, exaggerates their faults, or even accuses them of sins of which they are not guilty.

This temptation feels especially close to the surface in our polarized culture. It’s not hard to see people on both sides of the political aisle engaging in this kind of censoriousness toward the other. More troubling, though, is how often the same spirit appears in the church.

One thing that has long stood out to me is how generous God is in commending the faith and faithfulness of his people. The heroes of Hebrews 11 all bear unmistakable marks of sin and corruption (Samson makes the list?!), and yet the author, under divine inspiration, is eager to shine a light on their faith.

God also promises that nothing good we do will go unseen or unrewarded. He notices not only our secret sins but also our unnoticed obedience. To resist a censorious spirit, we should consciously reverse the tendency Edwards describes and train ourselves to notice what God himself is pleased to see.

3. A censorious spirit shows itself in a tendency to judge the actions of others uncharitably. It reveals itself by placing the worst possible interpretation on people’s actions—not only by assuming wrongdoing without sufficient evidence, but also by assigning bad motives to actions that are plain to see and could reasonably be understood in a good and charitable way.

This one stings because I know I’m guilty of it far too often in my relationships. Negative assumptions about words or actions that I could just as easily interpret neutrally, or even generously, are kryptonite to relational health. It stings for another reason too: I’ve been on the receiving end of this spirit, both personally and professionally.

I fear the health of our churches and institutions has been deeply compromised by the widespread habit of assuming the worst rather than believing the best—to the point that we become unable to recognize real goodness in people we disagree with.

Edwards highlights the loving counterpoint to this spirit: “When they are obliged against their inclination to think ill of another, it will be no pleasure to them to declare it, but they will be backward to speak of it.”

Responding to the Censure of Others

Having examined how a censorious spirit can take root in our own hearts, let’s now consider how to respond when that spirit is directed at us. Edwards counsels us to rest in Christ and to refuse to grant censorious people the satisfaction of seeing their arrows hit the mark. He writes, in effect,

Of course, this is far easier to fake than to truly accomplish. We can recite “sticks and stones” all day long, while inwardly receiving wounds that don’t heal quickly. There may indeed be moments when defending one’s honor or setting the record straight is necessary.

Still, there’s something deeply freeing about allowing the Lord’s perfect knowledge to become our shield—to say, in effect, “The Lord sees” and to leave judgment in his hands. It’s also possible to trust that fair-minded observers (those not driven by resentment or censoriousness) can discern the spirit of the flame-thrower and grenade-launcher and will not give credence to any and every accusation rising from that cauldron of hellfire.

Censoriousness and the Gospel

Only the gospel can heal us of a censorious spirit, because the gospel reveals a God who is not censorious but generous and gracious beyond imagination. His posture toward us is not that of a perpetually disappointed Father but of a delighted Dad who cheers on every stumbling step toward righteousness.

And only the gospel can protect us from the censure of others, because in the end he is our refuge and strength, our shield against lies and attacks, and our sure promise that justice will have the final word.

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There is something about social media that convinces everyone they’re an expert on everything . . . and that everyone else is waiting to hear their opinion. The platforms train us in this direction before we’ve even said a word.

“What’s on your mind?”

“What’s happening?”

Then our algorithm-determined feeds deliver the news, controversies, and outrageous statements most likely to provoke a reaction or keep us scrolling.

None of this is news, of course. But in an era when nearly everyone feels the obligation to weigh in on nearly everything—to register concern about the newest scandal, declare allegiance in the latest political tussle, or signal proper outrage over whatever tragedy or injustice now renders us all responsible to have a well-formed opinion—I’m increasingly grateful for artists and authors, singers and songwriters, who know their lane and stay in it.

Pressure to Comment on Everything

Over the past decade, I’ve watched writers, singers, and performers whose artistic work I admire start offering commentary on every cultural flash point. Some of it leans right. Some of it leans left. In almost every case, even when I happen to agree with the substance of their Twitter rant or Instagram post, I wince.

I want to say to a songwriter whose music has sustained me, or an author whose words have steadied my faith: No one is asking for your thoughts on this year’s election cycle. No one expects you to be an expert on geopolitical issues. No one is better off when you try to prove that you belong to the right political tribe. We come to you for beauty. We look to you to lift us out of the churn of the moment, not to mirror back all the anxieties and polarizations that already exhaust us.

I’m not saying artists should disengage from the world’s pain or retreat into a hermetically sealed aesthetic bubble. My plea is for faithfulness to vocation. Beauty shapes us in ways argument rarely does, and art performs a kind of moral and spiritual formation that cannot be replicated by commentary.

Beauty Pulls Us Up

In the foreword to Winfield Bevins’s book How Beauty Will Save the World: Recovering the Power of the Arts for the Christian Life, we find a striking description of beauty’s formative power:

That description stands in sharp contrast to the mechanics of online discourse. Beauty doesn’t demand an immediate reaction. It invites attention, patience, and contemplation. Beauty works under the surface, forming affections more than marshaling arguments, shaping our aspirations more than sharpening our opinions.

Preserving Space for Beauty-Making

Many of today’s artists feel an enormous pressure to “say something” and weigh in online on every passing controversy. Part of that drive comes from the feeling that our culture is unraveling. We sense that things are coming apart, and we assume that by staking out a position we might help hold the fragments together.

Sometimes this impulse arises from genuine lament. Sometimes from fear. Sometimes from the desire to reassure the people whose approval matters most to us that we’re still on the right side.

But the world is already exhausting enough. And that’s why I’m especially thankful for artists, musicians, and writers who resist the pull to turn their social media accounts into a running commentary and instead devote their energies to making something beautiful. To make something of beauty, we must reserve space for deeper reflection, a depth that generates artifacts graced by goodness and truth.

Artists who fulfill this vocation won’t dash off opinions as public signals of belonging because they’re too busy laboring over songs, stories, and works of art that will endure beyond the current cycle of outrage.

Yes, there may be moments when an artist might lend their voice to a cause especially close to their heart, and that still seems fitting. But today there’s no shortage of causes, no scarcity of commentary, and no end to the expectation that public figures must continually signal where they stand.

Social media has collapsed the distance between artists and audiences, and that proximity can be a gift. But when it enables politics to encroach on every sphere of life, something essential is diminished. The mystique of the artist evaporates. The space reserved for beauty narrows. The hope of preserving a realm devoted simply to making something good and true, apart from constant ideological signaling, begins to slip away.

Tending Little Fires

What we need most from the artistic community is precisely what they’re most equipped to offer: creativity, not commentary. Art opens up space and sharpens our vision, reflecting the cracked iconography of humanity while pointing toward wholeness. We need art that acknowledges the groaning of creation yet holds out the hope of restoration secured not by short-term cultural victories but by Christ.

Paul Kingsnorth, near the end of his provocative book Against the Machine, encourages us toward a vision that stands apart from the never-ending torrent of words online. He calls us to build new things out in the margins. To resist exhausting our souls in the heightened battles of every controversy and instead “to prepare the seedbed for what might, one day long after us, become the basis of a new culture.”

One doesn’t have to agree with all of Kingsnorth’s jeremiad against contemporary culture to see the beauty in his admonition to light “particular little fires—fires fueled by eternal things, the great and unchanging truths—and tend their sparks as best we can.”

That is my plea.

We need artists who will tend those small fires. Who offer light rather than heat. Who know their lane. Who can preserve a hearth that diminishes despair, a fire dedicated to warmth and renewal. In an age addicted to commentary, the refusal to utter the hot take may be one of the most countercultural—and most necessary—acts of creative courage an artist can perform.

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There is no sin as sticky as self-righteousness. And that’s because self-righteousness springs from a sense of our own rightness. With clenched fists, we hold tight to it, because rightness is bound up with our view of ourselves.

I know this from sad experience. To admit I’m wrong—to acknowledge that wrongful actions aren’t canceled out by good intentions, or that in the heat of conflict my wife or my kids may be more often right than I am—would drive a spear into the heart of my self-estimation. So I deflect. I defend. I explain. I justify. I need to prove I’m right to stay upright, elevated over those closest to me. I thrash around, trying to keep myself afloat above the waters of selfishness that would otherwise drown me.

Self-righteousness is the defense we erect so we won’t be knocked off-balance. It’s our attempt to preserve the pristine picture we have of ourselves, to keep our self-image from shattering.

Baggage of Self-Righteousness

One of the most memorable episodes of Everybody Loves Raymond centers on a suitcase sitting on the staircase landing. After returning home from a trip, Ray and Debra each assume the other will eventually haul it upstairs. Days pass. No one moves the suitcase. Both husband and wife begin to seethe, rehearsing all the reasons why it’s only right for the other to carry the load, pleading their case to other family members. Every time they see the suitcase, they grow more entrenched in the rightness of their cause, more determined not to give in.

The best moment comes at the end of the episode, when Ray returns home early from a business trip and apologizes for his stubbornness. Just when it looks like reconciliation has arrived, it becomes clear that Ray’s action is still self-motivated. He came home early as a display of remorse intended to impress his wife with his goodness. With pursed lips, Debra sighs and then announces she’ll move the suitcase: “I’ll be the one who got it.”

In an instant, the dispute flips. It’s unacceptable for Ray that Debra be the reasonable and mature one. “No, no, no!” he cries. “Let the record show that I got it!” After an entire episode devoted to arguing over who won’t move the suitcase, the couple now battles over who will.

On the surface, the episode resonates because it captures the low-stakes absurdity of family conflict. But the deeper reason it shines is that it exposes human nature. Ray and Debra both feel the need to safeguard their elevated view of themselves, to be morally superior to the other. Whether it’s “I’m the better person, so I shouldn’t have to move it” or “I’m the better person, so I’ll be the one to move it,” the conflict is ultimately about preserving each person’s high self-estimation from being punctured.

This passion for keeping our vision of ourselves intact explains so much. It’s why we reflexively defend ourselves when criticized. It’s why people of one political persuasion struggle to acknowledge when the other side makes a good point. It’s why we excuse the failures of leaders we admire while condemning, without qualification, those we oppose. It’s why, on contested matters, we jump to the interpretation that best confirms our priors and reinforces the rightness of our tribe. It’s why so many of us struggle in marriage, or fail to connect with our kids, or fall out with people in church who disagree with us. We do whatever we can to hold the high ground, to steady ourselves on a perch of moral superiority.

Self-righteousness is insidious and pervasive, extending its tentacles, trapping and blinding us. Often, our motivations remain hidden even from ourselves. In Confessions, Augustine observes how God upends human assessments of behavior: “Your witness condemns many deeds that receive human praise,” he writes. “For it often happens that the appearance of an act belies what the agent has in mind.”

Holiness and Grace That Topple Us

The only way out of the trap of self-righteousness is a renewed encounter with both God’s holiness and God’s grace.

God’s holiness, first. Because the blazing purity of divine perfection upends our claims to our own rightness. Self-righteous people may appear “holier than thou,” but that illusion only works when we compare ourselves to other sinners. Held up to the light of God’s holiness, every rag of righteousness is stripped away.

And then God’s grace. Because a heart-level grasp of grace leaves no room for boasting. Grace knocks us Humpty-Dumpties off the wall, shattering our self-image and destroying the self-righteous facade. But grace doesn’t leave us in pieces. It restores and renews us. We no longer need to cling to an image of ourselves as less sinful, more perceptive, or more “right” than others. We’re free to take in the true picture of ourselves in light of the holiness that reveals our need for grace.

An encounter with true holiness and true grace is the first step toward growing in real righteousness. And yet the danger of self-righteous pollution remains ever-present. Remember: The distance between righteousness and self-righteousness is a chasm, but crossing it takes just a step.

Law-Keeping vs. Grace-Giving

Self-righteousness poisons relationships. So does defensiveness and the instinct to excuse ourselves. What keeps relationships alive is the opposite: humility, confession, repentance. When you fail (and you will), you don’t spin or deflect. You tell the truth. You allow the carefully curated image of your “best self” to collapse in front of another person.

And when others fail you, you face a choice. You can play the law-keeper, holding them to a standard you’ve never managed to keep yourself. Or you can be a grace-giver, forgiving freely, the way the Father has forgiven you. One way reinforces your pride. The other topples it . . . and then leaves room for love to grow.

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The older I get, the more I realize just how many people are carrying invisible weight.

Struggles with adolescent children. The pressure of launching sons and daughters into adulthood while hoping and praying they’ll carry with them a love for Jesus and a passion for his kingdom. Marriages entering their second or third decade, strained by changing bodies and shifting priorities. Friendships that go bad, not with dramatic betrayals but with small disappointments that leak trust over time. Mental health challenges that alter personalities, muting a few traits while amplifying others. Church turmoil that shows up in leadership failures, fractured vision, or exhaustion from unresolved conflict.

What sometimes surprises me isn’t the number of people struggling but how many feel alone in their struggle, as if they’re the only ones dealing with a particular burden or disappointment. They’re not. Behind the curated images on social media and the happy families at church, the strains are there—an especially difficult adolescent, a spouse’s sudden loss of spiritual fervor, or a father’s disorientation regarding his future job prospects.

What people need is encouragement. But not the soft version.

Encouragement Is Strengthening More than Soothing

Too often, encouragement gets reduced to comfort. It’s reassurance without resolve, a version of sympathy that never rises above affirmation. It’s the kind of encouragement that says “Everything will be OK” without pressing deeper into what faithfulness looks like when things, most definitely, are not. It may feel warm, even kind, but it’s a little like handing a cup of hot chocolate to someone starving. Warm and tasty, but there’s no nutrition in marshmallows.

Scripture envisions something sturdier. When the New Testament speaks of encouragement, we see a connection to endurance, obedience, and action. Paul urges the Romans to “encourage one another” (1 Thessalonians 5:11), in the context of his call to perseverance and hope. The author of Hebrews exhorts believers to “encourage each other daily . . . so that none of you is hardened by sin’s deception” (Heb. 3:13). Encouragement isn’t merely emotional reinforcement but spiritual strengthening.

The word itself points us in that direction. To encourage isn’t just to soothe; it’s to put courage into someone—to strengthen the will, to stiffen the spine, to remind a weary saint why the path is worth walking and how to keep going.

I’ve learned this most clearly when I’m the one in need. When I’m struggling—whether in marriage, parenting, ministry, or faith—I don’t only need friends who understand me. I need friends who help me endure. Friends who can see the landscape, who neither deny the struggle nor dramatize it, and then help me see the path through it. That kind of encouragement asks something of me. It prompts me to be ready for action. Ready to persevere. Ready to pursue goodness and beauty, even when the cost is high and the outcome uncertain.

Think of the coach who sees the score, the clock, and the strength of the opposing team—and still puts the ball back in your hands. No, victory isn’t always guaranteed, but quitting isn’t an option. Courage calls us forward.

No wonder Scripture ties encouragement so closely to courage in the face of fear. Again and again, God’s word to his people isn’t “Relax” but “Be strong and courageous” (Josh. 1:9). Paul tells the Corinthians, “Be alert, stand firm in the faith, be courageous, be strong” (1 Cor. 16:13). Even comfort, in the Christian sense, is meant to fortify. God “encourages us in all our troubles, so that we may be able to encourage those experiencing any trouble” (2 Cor. 1:4, Mounce).

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, writing under immense pressure, reminded us,

Courage to Give and Receive Encouragement

Here’s the paradox: real friendship requires courage long before encouragement ever enters the picture. Friendship requires vulnerability. Initiative. A willingness to step toward someone without knowing whether the gesture will be welcomed or declined. In a world where relationships are often transactional—built on status, usefulness, or shared pursuits—deep friendship is tough.

It takes no courage to maintain a network of acquaintances. It takes no courage to add Facebook friends. It takes no courage to pour out your troubles to a chatbot. But courage is essential if you want to invite someone into the unvarnished reality of your life and to stay present when they invite you into theirs.

Encouragement matters because endurance matters. Life will throw punches. Disappointment will come. The encouraging friend isn’t the one who denies the pain or rushes past lament. The encouraging friend stands ringside and puts courage into you, calling you up and forward.

If you want to encourage someone, don’t minimize the struggle. Name it. Listen. Then remind them of the good they’re pursuing. Point them back to God’s promises. Speak hope that’s anchored, not vague. And, when appropriate, call them to the next faithful step, no matter how small, no matter how costly.

And if you need encouragement, don’t settle for the soothing substitute. Seek out people who love you enough to tell you the truth and believe in you enough to call you forward. Receive courage as a gift, and then, when you’re able, pass it on. Because true encouragement isn’t about feeling better. It’s about summoning the courage that helps us endure.

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

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

These are questions we’d do well to wrestle with, and they came to me while reading the new edition of Christopher Wright’s The Mission of God: Unlocking the Bible’s Grand Narrative. This second edition responds to critiques of the original volume (now 20 years old), adding new material and extensive footnotes that bring Wright’s proposal into conversation with more recent scholarship.

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

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

Turn Around These Questions

In the last two pages of his book, Wright confronts some of our most common assumptions by turning our questions around.

Below, I’ve reworked several of the piercing questions he poses, in the hope that they might help reorient our thinking toward God and his purposes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

God-Centered Frame

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

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

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At the close of every year, I share a list of the books I most enjoyed reading—usually a mix of theology, cultural analysis, biography, and fiction. Here’s hoping a few of this year’s favorites make their way onto your Christmas wish list or spark gift ideas.

Before we get to the list, though, I should mention two books that deserve a spot every year I read them.

• As is my tradition, I began the year with Augustine’s Confessions, this time in Anthony Esolen’s new translation. It didn’t disappoint. There’s a literary flair on display here that rivals Sarah Ruden’s excellent work.
• Later in the year, I reread The Brothers Karamazov through Michael Katz’s recent rendering, having been riveted by his Crime and Punishment translation (my #5 pick from 2024). Katz has become one of my favorite translators, and I’m eager to enjoy his take on Dostoevsky’s Devils in 2026.

With those two touchstones out of the way, here are the 10 books that stood out in 2025.

#1. EVERYTHING IS NEVER ENOUGH
Ecclesiastes’ Surprising Path to Resilient Happiness
by Bobby Jamieson

For the first time since 2019, a general nonfiction book of theology tops my list. Like its biblical counterpart Ecclesiastes, Jamieson’s book is something of an enigma, but the kind that stirs up curiosity and wonder rather than confusion. Jamieson offers us memorable pictures, well-crafted sentences, and thoughtful questions so that we see life on earth as a gift and look to our Creator for redemption and restoration. I happened to read it just before my birthday this year, and it prompted a midlife reflection. God calls you to enjoy your life, and that’s serious business. Thankfully, “the Creator is constantly flinging gifts at you faster than you can catch them,” Jamieson writes. Even when life turns out differently than we hoped, Jamieson counsels us, “Be present to the present’s presents. Present your full self fully to what the present presents you, and you will receive its full helping of enjoyment. Enjoyment depends on the ability—even the discipline—to be fully attentive to the goodness on offer.”

#2. THE WIDE WIDE SEA
The Final, Fatal Adventure of Captain James Cook
by Hampton Sides

Whenever Hampton Sides sets out with sailors toward the edge of the known world, he’s bound to find his way onto my list—as he did back in 2014 when his In the Kingdom of Ice was my #2 pick. The Wide Wide Sea is so astonishing it occasionally feels unbelievable. Sides brings to life Captain Cook’s epic voyage around the world, an odyssey that led Cook into contact with native peoples whose worldviews and customs stood in striking contrast to those of their English visitors (and even the English often debated the right course of action). The collision of these cultures—marked by danger, curiosity, exploitation, desire, and honor—makes for a gripping narrative. Drawing from an abundance of journals and reports, Sides reconstructs each episode with vivid detail, helping us feel both the peril and the promise of every decision made at sea.

#3. NUCLEAR WAR
A Scenario
by Annie Jacobsen

I realize it’s odd for a terrifying book about nuclear war to appear among my favorite reads. But I couldn’t put this book down. Drawing on declassified documents and interviews with high-level officials, Annie Jacobsen reconstructs with journalistic precision what would happen in the first hour of a nuclear exchange: the instant devastation, the collapse of global systems, and the frightening speed at which the world could unravel. What made this book stand out wasn’t only its realism but its effect. It left me shaken, yes, but also profoundly grateful. By facing the fragility of existence head-on, it led me to meditate on dependence and mercy and to remember that every breath, every ordinary day, is a gift upheld by God’s hand.

#4. THE REASON FOR CHURCH
Why the Body of Christ Still Matters in an Age of Anxiety, Division, and Radical Individualism
by Brad Edwards

After a book that reminds us how fragile the world is, it feels fitting to turn to one that reminds us where true stability is found. The Reason for Church is one of the most important books of the year. It offers an incisive, insightful analysis of the acids eroding institutional health today, from the heart of a pastor who loves Jesus and his Bride and wants to see disciples made and formed in Jesus’s likeness. Instead of a mere diagnosis, Edwards offers a hopeful alternative: the church as God’s greenhouse for grace, where weary exiles are restored and remade into the likeness of Christ. Excellent!

#5. TIM KELLER ON THE CHRISTIAN LIFE
The Transforming Power of the Gospel
by Matt Smethurst

Matt Smethurst has done us all a service by digging deep into Tim Keller’s sermons (not just his published work) and summing up key points of his teaching on the gospel, prayer, suffering, friendship, and more. Drawing from decades of material, Smethurst distills the essence of Keller’s theology and pastoral heart into 10 rich chapters. The result is part biography, part theological guide: a “Keller’s Greatest Hits” that captures the grace, humility, and Christ-centered vision that shaped one of the most influential pastors of our generation. This book reinvigorated my commitment to believe the gospel Keller preached and live the way he lived—rooted in grace, radiant with hope.

#6. THE BEATITUDES THROUGH THE AGES
by Rebekah Eklund

After focusing the third season finale of my podcast, Reconstructing Faith, on the Beatitudes, I picked up this remarkable book, which combines historical analysis and contemporary reflection on the sayings that open Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount. Reading it felt like listening to a centuries-long choir, each voice distinct yet harmonizing around Jesus’s words. I was moved, challenged, at times frustrated, and often inspired as I traced how believers through the ages have wrestled with and rejoiced in these radical teachings. Above all, I came away refreshed by Christ’s call to align my life with his beautiful, upside-down vision of the world.

#7. THE PASSAGE OF POWER
The Years of Lyndon Johnson: Volume 4
by Robert A. Caro

This was the year I finally tackled Robert Caro’s monumental four-volume biography of Lyndon B. Johnson (all 3,552 pages!). Each volume is a masterclass in narrative history, tracing Johnson’s relentless climb to power with vivid detail and moral complexity. But the one that stayed with me most is the most recent (though now more than a decade old), which chronicles his vice presidency and sudden ascent after John F. Kennedy’s assassination. Caro doesn’t merely write biography; he builds a world. His storytelling is unmatched, his research staggering, his prose electric. And like countless other readers, I hope that Caro, now 90, will live to complete the long-awaited fifth and final volume.

#8. MERE CHRISTIAN HERMENEUTICS
Transfiguring What It Means to Read the Bible Theologically
by Kevin J. Vanhoozer

I gravitate toward theologians who do two things: make me love Jesus more and make me hungrier to dive deeper into God’s Word. Kevin Vanhoozer always does both, and his latest book is no exception. It not only sharpened my understanding of Scripture’s interpretation but also deepened my appreciation for the transfiguration and how that event’s beauty and mystery shine light on our Bible reading. This is the kind of book only a lifetime of careful, patient study can produce—the fruit of decades spent wrestling with the text, avoiding dead ends, and illuminating the paths that lead us closer to the Word made flesh.

#9. THE CONSOLATION OF PHILOSOPHY
by Boethius
&
AFTER STOICISM
Last Words of the Last Roman Philosopher
by Thomas M. Ward I’m not sure how I made it this far in my writing life without ever reading Boethius (AD 480–524), but I’m glad I finally did. The Consolation of Philosophy has endured for a reason—it’s one of those rare works that speaks across the centuries, blending reason and faith, philosophy and poetry, to wrestle honestly with suffering, fate, and divine providence. Reading it alongside Thomas Ward’s insightful companion volume helped me see how Boethius’s reflections still resonate in our modern search for meaning.

#10. A HEART AFLAME FOR GOD
A Reformed Approach to Spiritual Formation
by Matthew C. Bingham

I gleaned a great deal of wisdom from this book. Too often, evangelicals feel the need to borrow spiritual practices from other traditions to make up for what seems like a weakness in our own. I’m certainly eclectic in my approach to spiritual formation, but I remain convinced that God’s Word stands at the center of all genuine growth. That’s where Matthew Bingham’s book shines. He engages other traditions with charity and curiosity, assuming the best of his dialogue partners while gently drawing us back to the riches of the Reformed heritage. (An example from my own study: spontaneous meditation.) In the vast castle of Christian tradition, Bingham reminds us not to rummage in the broom closets when there are rooms overflowing with neglected treasures. 

MUST MENTION

CONNECTING SCRIPTURE NEW TESTAMENT
A Study Bible of Biblical Allusions and Quotations

This is a fantastic resource that belongs on the shelf of every serious student of Scripture. Benjamin Gladd and G. K. Beale have produced a remarkable tool for tracing the Bible’s inner harmony. The volume highlights Old Testament quotations in blue and allusions in green, with concise commentary that unpacks the web of intertextual connections. Few resources so beautifully display the cohesiveness of God’s Word to us.

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For years, this column featured a weekly list called “Trevin’s Seven”—seven links to the most interesting articles I’d come across that week.

In 2021, when I revamped my twice-a-week email newsletter, Trevin’s Seven found a new home there as a regular Friday feature. It’s now available only to subscribers (it’s free to sign up!), but as the year draws to a close, I thought it fitting to bring it back here—just once.

Instead of my usual list of weekly finds, here are seven pieces from the past year that stayed with me—articles that informed, challenged, or delighted me long after I first read them.

1. The Not at All Secret History of Nicaea (Susannah Black Roberts)

This year marks 1,700 years since the Council of Nicaea, and this deeply researched, vividly written essay brings that pivotal moment in church history to life. It clears away centuries of confusion and conspiracy theories to show what really happened in AD 325: a global gathering of bishops standing firm for the apostolic faith against theological novelty and imperial pressure.

In a year that calls us to remember the Nicene Creed we still confess, this piece reminded me how the church’s courage at Nicaea safeguarded the truth that Jesus is “true God from true God.”

2. We Live like Royalty and Don’t Know It (Charles Mann)

This introduction to the “How the System Works” series in The New Atlantis hooked me from the first image: Jefferson’s ink freezing. Charles Mann then widens our frame to the invisible systems that let ordinary Americans live with comforts unimaginable to a president two centuries ago. With clear prose and moral clarity, it pairs gratitude with responsibility: the food, water, energy, and public-health “cathedrals” we inherited must be understood and stewarded for the common good.

The whole series is worth your attention, but this opening essay sets the table beautifully—showing how wonder can lead to wisdom, and wisdom to civic love.

3. Canada Is Killing Itself (Elaina Plott Calabro)

This is a long but worthwhile report from The Atlantic (30–45 minutes to read). Elaina Plott Calabro painstakingly—and with as much fairness as possible—paints a picture of the culture surrounding assisted suicide, gleaning perspectives from participants, “providers,” and opponents. Reading it made me nauseous.

Calabro traces the rapid expansion of euthanasia: at first limited to the sickest patients, who were already at the end of life, now broadened to anyone with serious medical conditions, with proposals to make the practice available to those with mental illness and even to minors. A few weeks after sharing this as part of Trevin’s Seven, I wrote more about this movement.

4. Augustine’s Confessions: A Simplified Reading (John C. Cavadini)

Here’s a masterful overview of Augustine’s Confessions—13 key points (plus a bonus)—by John C. Cavadini. It’s not short, but it’s immensely clear and rewarding. I plan to print it out as a companion for my next journey through Confessions, which, as is my custom, will be the first book I read in January.

5. In the Music Business, 80 Is the New 20 (Ted Gioia)

Not every link I share is as weighty as a long essay on theology or history. Here’s a short Substack I’ve returned to several times—Ted Gioia on how old songs now make up nearly 75 percent of all music streaming. Half the market is “deep catalog,” meaning songs more than five years old.

Gioia takes us from tribute bands to AI “resurrections” of dead artists, showing how the music world is stuck in rewind. It’s a quick, fascinating read (and a little haunting if you love discovering new music).

6. Chuck Colson’s Last Word (John Ehrett)

A fascinating look at Chuck Colson’s personal copy of James Davison Hunter’s To Change the World—a book Colson read and annotated shortly before his death. John Ehrett traces the spirited debate unfolding in Colson’s margins, where Colson pushes back against Hunter’s elite-centered theory of cultural change and defends the power of worldview formation from the ground up.

The article not only reopens a vital conversation about Christian engagement in what some describe as the “negative world” but also lets us see Colson’s mind at work.

7. The Light of ‘The Brothers Karamazov’ (Karl Ove Knausgaard)

This beautiful reflection on The Brothers Karamazov explores how Dostoevsky’s final novel—written after the death of his young son—wrestles with grief, faith, and the mystery of what it means to be human. The author captures the novel’s restless energy and its chorus of unforgettable voices, all circling the same haunting question: What are we living for?

Karl Ove Knausgaard won’t allow his own introduction to replace the novel, though, confident that his interpretation will “dissolve as soon as you open the book and begin to read it anew.” He continues, “This is what makes ‘The Brothers Karamazov’ a great novel. It is never at rest.”

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A longtime reader wrote me recently after listening to one of my recent sermons. It dealt with Jesus’s piercing question to the disabled man at the pool of Bethesda in John 5: “Do you want to be healed?” In reflecting on why Jesus asked this profound question, I made the comment, “Jesus is not just coming for your health. He’s coming for your heart.”

My friend acknowledged a persistent discomfort with that kind of language—the idea of being “owned” by anyone, even God. Yes, the Scriptures teach we’re bought with a price (1 Cor. 6:19–20), but the idea of God possessing us can be taken the wrong way. Perhaps this sense of unease stems from sinful resistance, he thought. Yet it also reflects a fear of losing agency when we come to Christ. If God already made us and if he sustains us, why say he still “wants our hearts”? Doesn’t that sound redundant—or worse, coercive?

It’s a good question. And I suspect others may feel similarly: that when we speak of God coming after us, we picture a seizing force rather than a saving love. What are we to do with this language? Is it helpful or misleading?

Offense of Possessing Love

To start, we must admit that God’s grace can feel threatening.

C. S. Lewis once described himself as “the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England,” hunted down by “the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom [Lewis] so earnestly desired not to meet.” Francis Thompson’s poem “The Hound of Heaven” opens with that haunting flight—“I fled Him, down the nights and down the days”—only to end with the realization that the One pursuing him is Love himself.

Victor Hugo captured the same truth in Les Misérables. When Jean Valjean encounters the priest’s mercy, Hugo writes, “He had the indistinct feeling that this priest’s forgiveness was the greatest assault and most tremendous attack he had ever experienced.” Grace comes like a flood bursting through the dam of pride and rearranging the landscape of the human heart. It overwhelms, not because it violates but because it transforms.

And the Scriptures are clear: We do belong wholly to God.

• “The earth and everything in it, the world and its inhabitants, belong to the LORD” (Ps. 24:1, CSB).
• “You are not your own, for you were bought at a price” (1 Cor. 6:19–20, CSB).
• “You are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his possession” (1 Pet. 2:9, CSB).

Augustine prayed, “You have made us for Yourself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in You.” That restlessness is the ache of wanting to belong. We want to be found, to be claimed, to be ransomed. God’s claim on us isn’t that of a tyrant seizing a subject but of a Creator reclaiming what’s rightfully his and healing what sin has disordered.

Of course, when the Spirit takes possession of us, he doesn’t erase our will but renews it. “Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom” (2 Cor. 3:17). We’re most truly ourselves when we’re most fully his.

Romance of Divine Pursuit

Nothing I’ve said so far should make us picture God as a collector of souls, a divine taskmaster assembling trophies. Scripture gives us a far more intimate picture.

The Lord says through Hosea, “I will take you to be my wife forever. . . . And you will know the LORD” (Hos. 2:19–20, CSB). Christ is the Bridegroom who pursues his Bride, the church, not to enslave her but to unite her to himself in love.

To say “Jesus is coming for your heart” is to echo Scripture’s covenant language:

• “I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine” (Song 6:3).
• “I will give them a heart to know me” (Jer. 24:7).
• “The Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost” (Luke 19:10).

When a groom pursues his bride, his love doesn’t diminish her—it dignifies her. Love’s exclusivity (“You’re mine”) isn’t about ownership in the crude sense but about mutual devotion and joyful belonging. He yearns for her affection. He wants union with her. We’d consider it strange if a young man in love shrugged off his wife’s dalliances with other lovers. God’s jealous love (Ex. 34:14) isn’t insecurity but holiness. He desires all of us, body and soul, because he has given us all of himself.

The Heart God Comes For

So when I say “Jesus isn’t coming just for your health; he’s coming for your heart,” I mean that God’s goal isn’t to improve us but to indwell us. He wants more than to shower us with material or even spiritual blessings: He himself is to be our blessing. “He gives himself as prize and reward,” Bernard of Clairvaux wrote. “He is the refreshment of the holy soul, the ransom of those in captivity.”

God doesn’t merely demand our obedience; he delights in our affection. God pursues your heart not so he can possess something he lacks but so he can be united with someone he loves. He wants communion, not mere compliance.

And yes, for sin-crusted hearts marked by radical individualism and autonomy, this pursuit can feel like an invasion—but that’s because we’ve grown so accustomed to slavery that freedom feels threatening. The One who says “You are mine” (Isa. 43:1) is the same One who says “I have loved you with an everlasting love” (Jer. 31:3).

The grace that claims us is the grace that frees us. To belong to him isn’t to lose ourselves but to find ourselves in the One who will never let us go.

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Regular readers of this column are aware that I’m finishing up a year-long liturgy for daily prayer, built on the same pattern and structure as my 30 Days Series. Newcomers to this way of structured prayer sometimes tell me they struggle at first to make the words of other Christians their own—to pray someone else’s words as if they came from the heart. Incorporating written prayers can feel inauthentic or forced, especially for those who’ve grown up in traditions where spontaneity is the sign of sincerity and formulaic or repetitive prayers are minimally used, if at all.

As someone whose prayer life has mixed both the spontaneous and the written, I’ve often made a case for written prayers by (1) pointing to the precedent of praying the Psalms and then (2) likening our prayers using the words of saints from years gone by to the desire of a little boy trying on his father’s shoes. At first, the shoes feel too big and clunky, yet over time, you can feel your heart expanding toward the intensity and clarity found in the prayers of the past.

For more than two decades now, I’ve been collecting prayers from faithful Christians across centuries and continents, and I’ve found that taking the words of our forefathers and mothers in the faith and making them our own is one way I can orient my heart toward asking for—and desiring—what’s best.

Structure and Spontaneity

I recently came across another analogy that advocates for incorporating written prayers into our prayer life. Singer-songwriter Andrew Osenga’s new book, How to Remember: Forgotten Pathways to an Authentic Faith, looks at prayer through the eyes of a musician, and he compares it to the difference between jam bands and players with intention.

“I’ve never liked jam bands,” he writes, “which might sound odd for a guitar player who really, really loves listening to great guitar players. But dudes playing notes just to play notes is not always that fun to listen to. The great players, though, play with intention. There’s a structure to it. A cadence, a kind of logic. Setting, conflict, resolution. A beginning, a middle, an end.”

As he considers the relationship between spontaneity and structure, he recognizes that “being spontaneous is not the only form of being genuine, nor is it always the most honest.” The same is true with prayer. What feels effortless in the moment often rests on long practice and learned form.

We’ve all been there. We know a few things to pray. We say whatever comes to mind, but whatever comes to mind often sounds like what we’ve heard others say, or whatever we feel in the moment. Praying alongside our forefathers and mothers expands our vocabulary of faith, giving us better notes to play when we improvise.

“There is no better teacher for a musician than to learn the music of better musicians,” Andrew writes. And the same goes for prayer. Structured prayers aren’t opposed to our spontaneous prayers—they work in symbiotic relationship. The written prayers heighten our spontaneous prayers, and the spontaneous prayers breathe life into structures that can become rote or routine.

Prayer as Communion, Not Performance

Now, there’s a big caveat to this analogy—one Andrew himself recognizes. Prayer isn’t performance. Not when we really pray. We’re opening ourselves up before our Father.

In The Gospel Way Catechism, Thomas West and I define prayer this way:

The Bible’s vision of prayer isn’t performative; it’s profoundly personal. It’s not just a monologue where we speak our thoughts into silence; it’s a dialogue, a heartfelt conversation with God, an openness to receive and respond to his Word. Prayer is an invitation to encounter the Trinity:

• You present yourself before your Father in all your mess, with all your doubts and frustrations, trusting that the God who knows you still loves you.
• You pray in the name of Jesus, a humble confession that you don’t have the standing to approach God on your own; you rely on the Son’s merit to enter the Father’s throne room.
• You pray with the Holy Spirit as your guide, who brings light and direction to the journey, a skilled translator who perfectly renders your groans and sighs to the Father.

Three aspects of prayer form a harmonious symphony. Praise magnifies God’s glory, confession deepens our intimacy, and petition reinforces our reliance on his wisdom and care. Praise is when the magnitude of God’s beauty and awesomeness overwhelms us. It’s an eruption of the soul’s delight. Confession is when we realize how far we’ve missed the mark and want to be forgiven. Petition is when we share our desires, concerns, and needs with God.

So where do written prayers fit? We’re taught to pray by those who came before us. We follow their patterns, inhabit and grow into their words. As Andrew writes,

Amen. The combination of structure and spontaneity is one of the often missed secrets to learning how to pray. The best prayers are neither riffs nor recitations but rehearsals in love—where form shapes the heart and freedom lifts the song.

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Instead of a column today, I’m pointing you to a podcast (video and audio).

In this two-hour conversation on Room for Nuance with Sean DeMars, recorded at my house back in May, I was able to go deeper than I usually do in interviews. We look back on my early days of blogging, my years in Romania, the birth of The Gospel Project, and the books and convictions that have shaped my ministry. We talk about the joys and challenges of writing, Bible translations, the value of long-form work, and what it means to engage the world with both truth and grace.

If you’ve ever wondered about the stories beneath the articles or the thinking that goes into the resources I help create, this interview gives us space to slow down and explore those themes with a level of honesty and nuance that shorter formats rarely allow.

Special thanks to Sean DeMars for the invitation and for creating an excellent podcast that dives deep with his guests!

Surveying the evangelical landscape these days, I sense that much of the frustration expressed across warring camps has less to do with methods or principles and more to do with temperament and calling. In many of today’s debates about posture and practice, we’ve witnessed a collapse of context—a blurring of vocations—as if every faithful Christian leader should approach the moment in the same way.

You can see this confusion in recent videos urging believers toward a brand of cultural engagement and evangelism that resembles Charlie Kirk’s political punditry more than Tim Keller’s pastoral legacy, as if both men were called to the same vocation. They weren’t.

Tim Keller ministered for decades as a pastor of local churches (first in rural Virginia, then in New York City). His call as an evangelist and pastor was not to win policy debates or mobilize political movements. The work of a shepherd is fundamentally different from that of an activist who operates through campus events, social media clips, and podcasts.

That’s not a criticism of political pundits. We need politicians and pastors, pundits and preachers. What we don’t need is the false expectation that pastors should be more like pundits.

Confusion of Callings

This confusion surfaced again in a recent dustup over where to draw the line between the pulpit and punditry. Some argue that since people already consume podcasts and political commentary all week long, the pastor should step into that space and become the primary voice shaping their worldview. That sounds plausible, but this move ends up doing two contradictory things at once: it diminishes and distorts the pastor’s calling.

It diminishes the pastor’s role by pulling him down into the same cacophony of voices that fill the rest of the week. In striving to “cut through the noise,” he risks becoming part of it. The distinctive voice of Scripture—the one thing the pastor is primarily called to echo—gets drowned out.

It also distorts the role by expecting pastors to speak authoritatively on an ever-expanding list of issues that touch the political realm. One quality I’ve always appreciated in John Piper is his restraint in this area. He rarely speaks to specific economic policies or the intricacies of political life, not because he lacks convictions but because he knows the limits of his expertise. When asked why he doesn’t weigh in on every news headline, Piper once explained,

That humble posture is part of what makes Ask Pastor John so powerful. Piper knows where to steward his voice and where not to. Albert Mohler has a different calling. He hosts a popular podcast that offers a daily briefing of the news with his commentary. Mohler isn’t a pastor. He’s a Christian leader weighing in on areas of concern for conservative Christians in the public square.

I’m sure I’m not the only one who has benefited over the years from both Mohler’s and Piper’s ministries. And I appreciate that they’re not the same. They have different callings. That’s a beautiful thing.

Limits of the Pulpit

We shouldn’t expect pastors to be omnicompetent. Such expectations inflate the office beyond its biblical design and, ironically, flatten the contributions of lay Christians called to engage in law, politics, economics, and other fields.

History warns us here: Mainline denominations stumbled when their leaders began issuing statements on every policy issue under the sun. They went way beyond merely articulating biblical principles and began prescribing political solutions well outside their expertise.

We need faithful Christians in politics and, yes, even in punditry. But we shouldn’t expect pastors to fill that role. Erick Erickson, a popular pundit on the right (and a Presbyterian) made this point recently:

Kevin DeYoung has sounded the same note:

If this sounds like an excuse for silence or a retreat from bold witness, then listen to J. Gresham Machen, the stalwart defender of orthodoxy whose century-old Christianity and Liberalism still convicts and clarifies:

We need pundits who view the world’s problems through the lens of Scripture and the wisdom of the church. But we mustn’t confuse that calling with the pastor’s.

Distinct and Beautiful Calling

In my 2011 book Counterfeit Gospels, I warned against both a quietist gospel that would deny or diminish the social implications of the good news and an activist gospel that would subtly push the cross from the center of the church’s proclamation and put a cause (even a good one) in its place, as the unifying force for the church.

For several years, most of the criticism I received came from readers who wanted to see the church mobilized for social causes more associated with the political left. That’s not surprising, since research has shown progressive Christians are much more likely than conservative Christians to bring political punditry into the pulpit. But today, gospel centrality is under fire from those who want churches mobilized for the political right. When it comes to the resurgence of the Religious Right, the gospel-centered types are in the way. So be it. I’m going to keep banging the same drum—being gospel-centered in season and out of season.

Thank God for pastors. Thank God for pundits. Thank God for pastors who are not pundits. 

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Growing up, a number of movies got replayed constantly in our house. The Wizard of Oz was one of them. The Sound of Music was another. My parents loved Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals, and the one we considered best was the story of the Von Trapp family.

In celebration of the film’s 60th anniversary, a new 4K version has been released—stunning in its beauty. The detail is so clear you can see a single hair out of place on Christopher Plummer or Julie Andrews. The color, the sound, the quality . . . If not for the difference in movie-making style, you’d hardly believe the film is six decades old.

But beyond the restoration’s beauty, what stands out on rewatching The Sound of Music today is not only its visual clarity but its moral clarity.

Constellation of Loves

You probably know the plot, based on a true story. Maria, a lively novice, is sent from an Austrian convent to become governess to seven children, whose widowed father, Captain Von Trapp, must decide between love, family, and country as the shadow of Nazism falls across Europe. If you can get past a few expressive-individualist and moralistic tendencies in “Climb Ev’ry Mountain” or “Something Good,” you’ll find the rest of the film suffused with Christianity—set starkly against the darkness of Nazi fascism.

The movie moves quickly from romance to drama—from cathedral wedding bells to the giant swastika flag draped across the town square. As a child, I was riveted by the final act: the family’s last performance, the tense award ceremony, and the suspenseful escape from the Nazis seeking to draft the captain into the Third Reich.

What makes the film powerful isn’t just its music or cinematography. It’s love—better yet, a constellation of loves, rightly ordered. Love is what matters most when resisting the corruption of compromise.

Called to the Love of God

First, there’s love of God. The church stands at the center of the film’s moral vision. Maria wrestles with vocation: Is she called to a life in the convent as a nun? Or to the honorable estate of marriage? She desires to do what is right, and she’s willing to sacrifice personal happiness to fulfill God’s purpose. That’s why her gradual realization—that God’s will and her desires may not be opposed but aligned—feels so deeply satisfying.

Maria’s story reflects a Christian understanding of calling that resonates with anyone who has sought God’s will amid uncertainty. Because she puts God first, her eventual love for Captain Von Trapp becomes not a distraction from holiness but a channel of it.

Love of Family Restored

Then comes love of family, especially in the face of grief. I choked up at the scene where Captain Von Trapp hears the children singing for the first time in ages. In his grief over the loss of his wife, he has hidden behind a gruff, hardened exterior. He walks into the room, and as the music melts his heart, he joins in the song. When the final notes fade, a hush falls—the children hesitate, watching him—until he shifts his posture ever so slightly, a long-lost signal of openness. Then they rush into his arms. It’s the return of their father, the collapse of the walls he built with his pain.

This, too, is love: love for the family member in suffering. Forbearance. Patience. Unconditional kindness, even when unreciprocated—a willingness to keep the candle of love burning, hoping for the return of the person you knew before the shadows of sadness settled in.

Disordered Loves and Corrupted Loyalties

The Sound of Music also depicts disordered loves. The baroness, the captain’s initial love interest, longs for luxury and comfort. Her desire for ease outweighs her love for the family, so she plans to send the children away to boarding school. Her disordered desire for status and a life of freedom has stifled the properly ordered love she could have shown the captain and his family.

Then there’s Uncle Max, who cheerfully admits his overriding desire for wealth. Because his love of money outweighs his love of country, he simply goes with the flow, doing whatever it takes to survive in dark times. We see him hesitate when asked to show support for Hitler—his heart isn’t with the Third Reich, but neither is it with the Austrian patriots. His disordered love drives him to adapt and prosper under any regime, content to make money and enjoy the comforts of polite society.

Of course, it’s the disordered love of nation—the idolizing of one’s ethnicity—that drives Hitler and his supporters, and that darkness becomes the backdrop for the film’s drama. This is embodied most clearly in Rolf, the young man courting Liesl, the eldest Von Trapp child. The innocent romance that begins with charm and song is soon suffocated by Rolf’s warped desire to be seen as strong and loyal, a young man willing to do anything for the Nazi cause.

Against them stands Captain Von Trapp—a portrait of rightly ordered love for family and country. His tearing of the Nazi flag is one of cinema’s great moral gestures: a man refusing to let his nation’s slide into evil eclipse his conscience. His courage throws Uncle Max’s compromises into sharper relief and becomes the moral center of the story.

Endurance of Goodness

It’s the ending, though, that stays with me. Where does the family hide before escaping over the Alps to Switzerland? The convent. The one place of transcendence, where the sounds and smells of worship remain even as evil encroaches.

The nuns are no fools. Like the Hebrew midwives defying Pharaoh, they resist quietly but effectively. They stall the soldiers and sabotage their cars, whatever it takes to protect the innocent. Once the soldiers are in the sanctuary, the dark tones and creepy shadows illustrate the sense of violation. The holy space has been invaded.

And where does the family hide? Among the gravestones in the convent cemetery. They are literally shielded by the tombs of the saints who have gone before—witnesses whose faithfulness long preceded the Third Reich and whose memory will outlast it.

Clear Moral Vision

The Sound of Music remains beloved not merely for its songs or scenery but for the Christian moral vision at its core. Yes, it’s a romance, filled with classics like “My Favorite Things” and “Do-Re-Mi,” but those moments of joy exist within a moral universe ordered by love: love of God, of family, of church, of country.

Because we’ve watched these loves ordered rightly, the film’s final act—the family’s resistance to tyranny—rings true. They can defy the darkness because their loves have been refined by light.

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A few years ago, an author asked me to endorse a new book that would provide an introduction to Christianity. There was much to commend in the work—the clarity of the gospel, the moral vision of Christianity, and some practical guidance for beginning the life of faith. But one thing initially kept me from lending my name to the project. Something not minor but fundamental was missing: Christian care and compassion for the poor.

The Christian’s commitment to the less fortunate—or better said, the Christian’s own recognition of an inner poverty of spirit that leads to generosity toward those in financial or physical distress—was an essential part of catechesis in the early church. But it was missing here. Thankfully, the book hadn’t gone to print, and the writer acknowledged the oversight and eagerly made a few welcome additions to the text.

Forgotten Command

It’s easy to forget the poor. We can get so focused on our activities of wealth-building, consumption, and self-protection that we lose sight of those in need. Sure, a natural disaster may jolt us awake to brothers and sisters who’ve lost everything, but we often overlook the ongoing struggle of people who live paycheck to paycheck, just hoping to make ends meet, or those who fall behind, whether because of societal injustice or family breakdown or the consequences of personal choices.

When the apostle Paul makes his appeal for justification by faith in his letter to the Galatians, he demonstrates his credentials by recounting the other apostles’ blessing and instruction, and then he says this: “They asked only that we would remember the poor, which I had made every effort to do” (Gal. 2:10).

There’s a world of meaning in that one brief instruction. First, the needy must have been top of mind for the apostles—otherwise, they wouldn’t have come up. Second, the exhortation assumes it might be easy to overlook the poor, to forget the church’s commitment to their well-being. Hence the command: Don’t let the poor drift from your sight or your heart. To forget the poor isn’t merely neglect but disobedience. Third, Paul is quick to point to his record of compassion as a mark of apostolic faithfulness. Church leaders should be known for their ministries of mercy.

All this lines up with something Martin Luther said: “After the preaching of the gospel, the office and charge of a true and faithful pastor is to be mindful of the poor.”

The Church That Forgets the Poor Forgets Her Lord

Reading through the sermons of the church fathers—especially John Chrysostom—you can’t help but notice their persistent and passionate concern for the poor. Warnings against wealth’s deceitfulness, denunciations of greed, rebukes for those unmoved by others’ needs—they appear in nearly every sermon.

At times, I’ve wondered if the fathers went too far with this emphasis. But then, when I return to the New Testament, I’m confronted by similar words from Jesus and the apostles. It’s Jesus who warns that every heart will have a master—God or Mammon—but never both. It’s James who excoriates the rich who oppress the poor and exposes the one who virtue-signals with words of compassion but withholds the deeds of mercy. It’s Paul who warns that the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil.

Perhaps the question we should ask isn’t why the church fathers thundered so frequently about justice and compassion for the poor but why we’re so quiet.

In Luke’s version of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus says, “Blessed are the poor,” and then, “Woe to you who are rich.” We cannot conveniently spiritualize this saying, as if it were merely about attitude, and nothing to do with one’s circumstances—for Jesus himself teaches that our hearts follow our treasure.

To be poor in spirit means you’ve experienced God’s severe mercy. He has stripped away your illusions of self-sufficiency. You’ve come to the end of yourself. When the living water of Jesus floods the desert of your soul, you become both emptied of self and filled with God. Out of that fullness flows generosity—a love that seeks out the broken, the hungry, the destitute. The gospel that humbles you before God compels you to kneel beside your neighbor.

This is why Christianity has been good news for the poor, the downtrodden, and the marginalized—because kingdom people are poor in spirit. And to the degree our wealth keeps us from poverty in spirit, we distort the gospel we seek to proclaim. Let’s be clear: A church indifferent to the poor doesn’t resemble New Testament Christianity.

Image of the Poor Christ

Charles Spurgeon reminded his congregation that the Christian who is poor bears Jesus’s likeness:

Christians may differ in their views of how best to care for the poor—what role the government should play, what the local church can do, how we balance relief and development—but amid those debates, we must resist two temptations.

The first is to excuse inaction or indifference by appealing to piety or politics, setting aside the clear call to serve. The second is to think of the poor as other—as if they belong to a separate class of humanity. They don’t. They’re image-bearers of God. We all share the same origin and end: We bring nothing into this world, and we take nothing out. What’s more, if the poor are Christians, they’re our brothers and sisters. We are family. As members of God’s family, we enjoy the privilege of fellowship and the responsibility of generosity.

Remember the Poor

The way we treat the poor reveals what we truly believe about Jesus. From the beginning of Scripture to the end, God identifies himself with the lowly and draws near to the weak. For our sake and for our salvation, Christ became poor. To love him, then, is to love those he loves: the hungry, the suffering, the overlooked.

The church’s history of holiness displays this truth. And every renewal of the church begins here: in bending low, in listening to the cry of those in need, and in joining God’s work of mercy that lifts the lowly and fills the hungry with good things. To forget the poor is to forget our Lord.

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Several weeks ago, I spent time with a remarkable book on mental illness from a Christian perspective: A Quiet Mind to Suffer With: Mental Illness, Trauma, and the Death of Christ by John Andrew Bryant. This book offers a series of profound theological reflections discovered through the valley of mental unrest—truths that apply to everyone, including those not afflicted in the same way.

It’s all too easy to see our lives unfolding before the Lord and focus primarily on our callings, our roles, our gifts, our service. And there’s good reason for that. Scripture urges us to make the most of the time, for the days are evil; to place our talents and treasures in the Lord’s hands and trust him to bring fruit; to live faithfully as sons and daughters, parents and grandparents, coworkers and friends. In describing our Christian life, it’s natural to tell our stories in ways that highlight what we’ve done or can do—who we are in the world. But sooner or later, every story we tell must yield to the intrusion of serious suffering.

In times of testing—whether physical, mental, or spiritual—when we enter the wilderness, much of what we take for granted can be stripped away. In moments when intense suffering has struck my own life, I’ve felt robbed of words, so stunned I couldn’t pray or even form the thoughts I’d bring before the Lord. Sometimes the fog is so thick and the shadows so deep, we feel bereft of consolation. Then the fear rises: the fear of failure, the fear of falling away from God’s love, the fear of losing our sense of calling or any hope of making a meaningful contribution to his kingdom.

The apostle Paul wrote of affliction that left him “completely overwhelmed, beyond his strength,” to the point he “despaired of life itself.” Yet he saw beyond the “sentence of death” to God’s purpose in suffering: “That we would not trust in ourselves but in God who raises the dead” (2 Cor. 1:8–9).

What Suffering Cannot Steal

Suffering steals: joy and peace, hope and balance, strength and stability, competence and companionship.

But there’s one thing suffering cannot steal—and that’s where Bryant draws our attention:

Bryant found solace in the steady rhythms of prayer and praise—the small liturgies that tether us to Christ’s promise when all else gives way. This sense of dependence was most acute for Bryant in seasons of mental anguish, but his insight reaches far beyond his particular malady. Sooner or later, pain will visit each of us, and when it does, it will surely steal away many of the ways we think of ourselves as Christians.

There may come a day when physical ailments keep me from traveling and speaking. When the best days of leadership lie behind me. When grief reshapes the landscape of my heart and diminishes my relationships. When my mind’s ability to write fades, and words no longer come. When memory dims, and I no longer recognize the faces of those I love.

And yet, even if every light were to fade, one truth would still glow: I’m a child dependent on my Savior. Bryant writes,

Grip That Holds You

The life of faith is the life of dependence—childlike trust. Suffering may ransack your world, but as a child of God, you cannot be kidnapped. When everything falls and fails, your dependence remains.

Even when your lips can no longer whisper, “Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a sinner,” the voice of your Savior will say, “You are mine.”

Every-moment dependence on God is the deepest reality of your life. It never shrinks; your awareness of it only grows. And in the end, faith is expressed not by the strength of your grasp on God but by quietly nestling into his everlasting arms.

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