Protection From Satan’s Fiery Darts

On 06 September, 2025 By Gary Yagel

Hi Men,

This is Gary Yagel, producer of the Mission Focused Men for Christ Podcast/Blog. No man wants to fail. Yet, truth be told, most Christian men would say they lose far too many battles, when Satan tempts us. Paul had the same sinful nature we have. He yielded to temptation, as we do. But he did know that God has given us a spiritual shield to protect us from Satan’s fiery darts, but left it to us to raise that shield, when tempted. Today’s episode from a past series examines what the shield of faith is and how we raise it to repel Satan’s attacks.

But thinking that your role in spiritual battle is insignificant is a lie from the Enemy. Christ has called you and me to follow him in his cause of defeating evil and establishing his righteous kingdom over every square inch of human hearts and lives. There is no other man who can replace you in your life, in the arenas you have been called to. If you leave your place in line, it will remain empty. You must be the hero in your own story. There is no extra or stunt man to fill in for you. Winning your spiritual battles matters. You will celebrate for eternity the ones you win tomorrow and the next day and the day after that because each victory has honored Christ. This episode examines how we protect ourselves from Satan’s fiery arrows by lifting up our shield of faith.

One thoughtful author writes, Behind the world and the flesh is an even more powerful enemy, one we rarely speak of and are even more less ready to resist. Yet, this is where we live now—on the front lines of a fierce spiritual war that is to blame for most of the casualties you see around you and most of the assault against you. It is time we prepared ourselves for it (John Eldredge, Wild at Heart).

There IS a dragon to be slain. Our loved ones do need us to be heroic and to fight for them, for ourselves, and for the honor of our King, Jesus Christ who has defeated Satan’s kingdom and claims this world as his own. Let’s learn from Ephesians 6:16 another truth about how to fight this battle: In all circumstances take up the shield of faith, with which you can extinguish all the flaming darts of the evil one. The Roman battle shield looked more like a door than a trash can lid. It was four feet tall and two and a half feet wide allowing the soldier to crouch completely behind it. It was covered with thick leather and metal, that could deflect incoming arrows.

Paul likens this protective shield to the Christian’s faith. Biblical faith is relentless confidence in the goodness of God’s character—that all of his dealings with us and those we love spring from the character of goodness and love—wanting what is best for us. This unwavering confidence in the goodness and love of God is what Satan relentlessly seeks to destroy. We see that in his attack on Eve and on Job.

A. Consider Eve. When we read God’s history of mankind—the Bible, we’ve barely gotten through creation in the first two chapters when we encounter Satan planting the one idea into Eve’s heart that is responsible for more human destruction than any other idea—the lie that God’s goodness can’t be trusted. When this wrong idea captured Eve’s heart, she rebelled, Adam rebelled with her, and humans have been rebelling against God and his law ever since. Satan’s chief strategy to inspire rebellion in Eve’s heart was to make her doubt God’s goodness. Let’s take a moment to study again this tactic of Satan used on Eve.

The Serpent said to the woman, “Did God actually say, ‘You shall not eat of any tree in the garden’?” And the woman said to the serpent, “We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden, but God said, ‘You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the midst of the garden, neither shall you touch it, lest you die.’” But the serpent said to the woman, “You will not surely die. For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil” (Gen 3:2-5).

1. Notice that Satan actually begins the temptation by planting a complete fabrication into Eve’s mind, i.e. the possibility that this unfair God might have put all the delicious fruit trees in the garden just to make them miserable by not permitting them to eat ANY of them. His words, again, Did God really say you can’t eat from any tree. Even though God never said that, as Eve pointed out, Satan still planted the idea that God was the kind of being who could have done something so completely unfair.

2. Satan further undermined Eve’s confidence in God’s goodness by taking her focus off all the wonderful fruit God had given them to enjoy throughout the entire garden and directing her focus on one apparently unfair restriction. EVERY SINGLE other tree in the garden, with its lush fruit for Adam and Eve to enjoy proved God’s GOODNESS—his desire to bless them with GOOD gifts. Later, Jesus would remind us of this wonderful benevolent nature of God: Which one of you, if his son asks him for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a serpent? If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him (Matt 7:9-11).

3. Satan’s attack on God’s goodness continues, For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil” Satan insinuates that: 1) God’s motive is selfishness—he is keeping something good from her and Adam, all to himself, i.e. the knowledge of good and evil, and 2) God’s moral law is fundamentally a restriction on our happiness. Both undermine her confidence in the goodness of God. The truth of course is that his law is given to us out of his goodness—to guide us into blessing. King David said, I will never forget your precepts, for by them you have given me life (Ps 119:93).

B. Satan’s tactics to destroy the faith of Job are different—he has the power to inflict enormous physical, emotional, and spiritual pain on Job. But his strategy is the same—to try to get him to curse God instead of trusting him. Job learns some humility, but Satan fails. In the midst of unfathomable pain, Job, says, Though he slay me, yet will I trust him (13:15). And God’s goodness, hidden for a season of affliction, bursts forth, again in the closing chapter of Job with the words, And the LORD restored the fortunes of Job….And the LORD gave Job twice as much as he had before (42:10) Inscribed on the shield of faith we need to raise against Satan’s attack on God’s goodness are the words, “Though he slay me, yet will I trust him.”

It is noteworthy that Paul begins this admonition to raise our shield of faith with “In all circumstances” (ESV). Because Satan’s desire is to create doubt in our hearts about God’s love for us, the fiery darts of doubt Satan sends our way often result from painful experiences and situations. Tony Evens, in his book, Victory in Spiritual Warfare, notes that Paul tells us to take up our armor in the evil day:

The evil day is the day that all hell breaks loose in your life—when you are under attack. It’s when the finances are so low that you don’t know how you are going to make it through the end of the week. It’s when you’ve lost your job. And there is no new job in sights. It’s when you are breaking down emotionally and have lost your passion for life. It’s when your marriage seems hopeless, your kids have turned away, your health deteriorates, your future looks bleak. It’s when your friend has betrayed you, you’re overcome by an addiction or impulse, or life seems to deliver any other piercing stab.

In view of such trials, it is imperative to realize that FAITH is not an EMOTION; it is an act of the will. Any normal person encountering the difficult, sometimes heart-wrenching circumstances mentioned above will feel an array of emotions including doubts about God—perhaps discouragement, anger, frustration, disappointment, worry, fear, distrust, sorrow, insecurity, resentment, self-doubt, or grief. The feelings are not unbelief, itself, but put our faith to the test. Faith is a decision. It is choosing to trust God despite all the feelings and circumstances that severely undermine confidence in God’s love for you. I heard my son-in-law say through tears and the agony of a heart split open in grief, at the funeral of his 21-year old son, “Though God slay me, yet will I trust him.”

In my own life, in a crisis nowhere near as severe, but nevertheless real, I remember learning that faith is a decision to trust God. Our church was pursuing the crazy agenda of planting a daughter church while going through a building program at the same time. I was a circuit rider, traveling to the daughter church to preach at the 9:15 service, then driving to the mother church to preach at the 10:45 service. In the midst of this process, my lone associate pastor and his wife, both of whom my wife and I leaned upon heavily, felt called away to another ministry. It normally takes 12-18 months to replace a staff person in the church. I remember where I was standing right after I heard that news that Bill and Jeannette were leaving. Wrestling with the fear that I would fall apart emotionally under this stress, I realized I had to make a choice; either trust God or not. I said, “I choose to trust you, God.” Little did I know that within our own congregation was the man God would call to fill that staff position. Two weeks after the first associate and wife left, his replacement started (who, btw stayed at the church longer than I did.) God is worthy of our trust! Faith is not a feeling but a decision to trust God. Hebrews 11:1 tells us faith is the assurance of things hope for—confidence that God has a good purpose WHICH WILL BE REVEALED IN THE END, and the conviction of what is unseen—confidence THAT THOUGH UNSEEN, RIGHT NOW God is working everything together for my good.

There is one aspect of the Roman shield that is especially significant in our culture where men are often isolated. The shields were designed to lock together as mutual defense against the rain of enemy arrows. Stu Weber, in his book, Locking Arms, asks men, “Do you see the critical point here? This is the shield of faith, which by design is interlocked with the soldier next to you. This is the shield of faith utilized in community.” A few years ago, a friend discovered that his infant daughter had a very serious, life-threatening disease. I asked him what he learned about raising your shieled of faith through that experience. Here is what he wrote:

Our faith helped my wife and me deflect the attacks of fear, doubt and despair that we faced. While our faith stood secure in the midst of our trials, we learned how important it was to have the community of faith stand beside us to strengthen our resolve. Have you ever watched a movie showing warriors locking their shields together to block an arrow barrage? Sustaining faith through a major health crisis works this way. Mine was buttressed through these multiple health crises through the faith and prayers of brothers. Of course, the main linking of shields was with my wife, but the many texts, calls, and questions from brothers keeps me going. One brother would not accept "fine" or "okay". He insisted on being real and shared his struggles as well. That helps build faith. It strengthens your shield knowing your brothers are locking arms. I know they are with me and they know I am with them.

Six Reasons for Trusting God

(Components of a Shield of Faith Laminated Together)

1. Trust God because those who trust him will not be in want of any good thing. We will not come to God, if we believe his motive is to deprive us, wound us, or restrict our pleasure. Have you ever known someone who lost a parent through death or divorce and is bitter with God? We must be convinced that God wants what is best for us, or we won’t pursue him whole-heartedly. But God says, Oh, taste and see that the Lord is good! Blessed is the man who takes refuge in him! Oh, fear the Lord, you his saints, for those who fear him have no lack! The young lions suffer want and hunger; but those who seek the Lord lack no good thing (Ps 34:8-10).

2. Trust God because he is the God of all comfort (2 Cor 1:3). Allowing you to suffer does not mean he has closed his heart to you. God became flesh to be our Great High Priest, so that he understands the depths of our pain because he felt that pain himself. Jesus’ compassionate heart was proved for all time, when seeing the tears of Martha and Mary over the loss of their brother, his tears gushed forth even knowing he was about to bring Lazarus back from the dead. Jesus taught that grieving, whenever we encounter the pain brought about by the way sin has broken life in this world, is true godliness. Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted. So, we cannot weep without Jesus entering into our pain and feeling it himself. And having such compassion, he assures us that he will never test us beyond our ability to endure (1 Cor 10:13).

3. Trust God because every single frustration and trial in your life has a good purpose. We all can identify with Alexander and his terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day. His day started badly and grew worse. By evening he says, There were lima beans for dinner, and I hate limas. There was kissing on TV and I hate kissing. My bath was too hot, I got soap in my eyes, my marble went down the drain and I had to wear my railroad train pajamas. I hate my railroad train pajamas (by Judith Vorst). Every one of us has day’s like Alexander’s. As Christians, we realize God is sovereign. We know the promise of God in Romans 8:28, All things work together for good for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose. But we often forget the next verse, which explains HOW all this pain and frustration can be good. For those whom he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son. God’s purpose is to use trials and frustrations to build Christ-like character. We cannot become like Christ in our character without enduring pain. Pain is the fire that refines our inner attitudes. Like working out, present pain NOW leads to RICH SATISFACTION later (even in this life). Jesus taught that the deepest form of happiness (MAKARIOS), translated blessed in the beatitudes, results not from circumstances but from godly heart attitudes. There is truth to the phrase tough times don’t last; tough people do (and the satisfaction of enduring tough times outweighs the pain.)

4. Trust God because his love for us causes him to be commited to our eternal joy. We hate present pain, whether it’s the frustration of careful plans dashed, having our self-esteem trashed, unjust treatment, pouring ourselves into an effort that fails, or our body or our heart blaring, “I hurt.” But, from an eternal perspective, God sees that enduring pain now will lead to eternal joy. For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison (2 Cor 4:17). He loves us too much to sacrifice eternal joy for present relief from pain.

5. Trust God because doing so is especially pleasing to him. In gratefulness for God’ grace, all that he does to forgive my sin, love me unconditionally and turn my evil heart to him, I want to please him. Hebrews 11 teaches HOW. Our FAITH is singled out as especially pleasing to God. Without faith it is impossible to please (God), for whoever would draw near to God must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who seek him (vs 6). Trusting him is personal to God. He declares that our trust in him is more precious than gold. Both Peter and James tell us God, therefore, tests our faith. Peter writes, You have been grieved by various trials, so that the tested genuineness of your faith—more precious than gold that perishes though it is tested by fire—may be found to result in praise and glory and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ (1 Pet 1:6-7). James writes, Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds, for you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness (James 1:2-3). The muscles of faith atrophy if they are not exercised. When it comes to your faith muscles, God plans on taking eternal delight in you being ripped. And so will you!

6. Trust God because he has already proved he is FOR US. In pop culture, taking something by faith is contrasted with having proof. Faith is believing in something even when there is no evidence for it. That is not the Biblical meaning of FAITH. In the famous verse, Romans 8:28, it is true that Christians are to believe that all things work together for good for them. But he goes on to give us the evidence upon which this faith rests: because God is FOR us. If God is for us, who can be against us? (vs 31). In fact, in this eighth chapter Paul specifically tells us all three persons of the Trinity are FOR us. In verse 26, the Spirit himself intercedes FOR us with groanings too deep for words. In verse 32, he tells us that God the Father is FOR us, He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up FOR us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things? In verse 34, Paul tells us God the Son is FOR us. Who is to condemn? Christ Jesus is the one who died—more than that, who was raised—who is at the right hand of God, who indeed is interceding FOR us. The reason our shield of faith protects us from Satan’s flaming arrows of doubt is that we are trusting a truth about God’s character, PROVEN by the facts: GOD IS FOR US!

For Further Prayerful Thought:

1. For you, what is the hardest part of remembering that winning your spiritual battles matters?

2. What circumstances tend to be the occasion for you to doubt God’s goodness and whether following Christ is worth it?

3. Of the six aspect of our Faith Shield mentioned, which “Trust God because…” statement do you most want to remember?

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Steering Conversations to Share the Gospel

On 30 August, 2025 By Gary Yagel

Hi Men,

This is Gary Yagel, producer of the Mission Focused Men for Christ Podcast/Blog. Today’s episode from a past series examines the pair of combat boots that Paul said all Christians should put on to advance Christ’s kingdom. As we walk through life, says Paul, the boots we are to wear are called readiness shoes. As a soldier’s boots need to make him ready to move in different directions quickly, we need to be prepared to go in various directions to share the gospel of peace whatever the circumstances dictate.

Today we continue our study of the armor of God and finish looking at Eph 6:15, where we’re told to put on, as our shoes, the readiness of the gospel of peace. I think most Christian men want to be contagious Christians. We know that sharing our faith is something our Lord wants us to do and when we do seize opportunities to talk with others about Christ the experience pumps joy and energy into our walk with Him. We also realize that if we are to lead our homes well, our wives and kids need to see us modeling Jesus’ love for the lost and a commitment to seeking ways to share him with others. So, we want to be ready, when the opportunity presents itself, to steer a conversation towards the good news that our listener can have a personal relationship with Christ. This episode looks at three ways TO BE READY when that opportunity arises.

It gets my attention when the two primary NT texts that call Christians to share their faith use the same word. In the text we’re studying, Eph 6:15, Paul writes and, as shoes for your feet, having put on the READINESS given by the gospel of peace. Peter tells his readers that Christians should always be READY to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you (1 Pet 3:15). The same Greek word, HETOIMOS translated ready or prepared is used. It means able and inclined to respond without hesitation. Every day, no matter where our feet take us, whatever the situation we walk in to, we are to be READY to share our faith, i.e. to give a reason for the hope that is in us. And we are to do that wisely. Scripture says, The wise of heart is called discerning, and sweetness of speech increases persuasiveness (Prov 16: 21), and The heart of the wise makes his speech judicious and adds persuasiveness to his lips (Prov 16:23). There are probably many ways to be ready. In this episode I pass along three that have helped to me.

A. The first way to BE READY to move a conversation towards discussing Christ comes from understanding the OT background behind Paul’s command in Ephesians to shod our feet with the readiness of the gospel. As Paul writes he is influenced both by the armor of the Roman soldiers guarding him, and the words of Isaiah concerning the coming of the Messiah. Paul knew Isaiah 52:7, How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him who brings good news, who publishes peace, who brings good news of happiness, who publishes salvation, who says to Zion, “Your God reigns.” The good news is that the promised Messiah, God, himself, would rescue Adam’s kingdom from the devastation of its slavery to sin and establish his righteous rule over earth. The good news is the gospel of the kingdom.

Notice how the three descriptions of this kingdom in Isaiah match what Jesus said about the kingdom of God, which he inaugurated. 1) The good news is not just, “We now have a ticket to heaven.” It is peace—shalom has come. The messiah has come to reweave shalom by restoring human relationships broken by sin—our relationship with God, self, others, and creation. Shalom describes the flourishing of all four relationships. 2) The Isaiah text goes on to tell us this good news is of happiness. It is hard to miss the connection between this word and the happiness (MAKARIOS) of kingdom life portrayed by Jesus in the beatitudes, blessed are the poor in spirit, blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, blessed are the pure in heart. The good news of the kingdom is that God gives the Holy Spirit to kingdom members to deliver us from destructive heart attitudes and produce godly, Christ-like character. 3) The third cause for proclaiming good news is salvation. As we saw last week salvation is not just escaping judgement. It is Jesus’ the second Adam’s work to fix the mess the first Adam made—restoring wholeness to everything broken by sin.

The first way to prepare for conversations with the lost is to understand the full-orbed gospel of the kingdom. Things are not the way they are supposed to be. There is pain, frustration, and struggle for humans because the fall has fractured the shalom of harmonious relationship with God, ourselves, others, and creation. A lost person’s openness to Christ is often tied to wanting relief from that brokenness. Last week we used Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs to see that Jesus is the answer to this extensive brokenness. Let’s review what we saw and go deeper.

1. Maslow says mankind’s most foundational need is PHYSIOLOGICAL--for oxygen, water, food, clothing, shelter, and health. But the curse of Adam’s sin upon the ground has caused humans to lack what they need physiologically to flourish. The coming of Christ’s kingdom means that creation itself will be set free from this bondage to decay. Since Jesus’ kingdom brings the renewal of the physical earth, Jesus taught his followers to prefigure the coming physical wholeness of the world by feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, housing strangers. We are to care for those harmed by physical brokenness of earth. The agape love shown by believers in meeting these physical needs is the best way to turn their hearts to Christ.

In John 9, Jesus bumps into a man who experiences the brokenness of Adam’s kingdom by being born blind. Jesus meets that physiological need; he restores his sight. Thirty verses later Jesus led the healed man to saving faith (vs 35-38). In my role as a pastor, I have found that when humans are face to face with their physical frailty, they are open to discussing spiritual things. On one occasion, I was visiting the elderly father of a congregational member in the hospital. He had some church background, but I asked, him, “Has anyone ever explained to you what the Bible says about heaven and hell and the afterlife?” He answered, “No” I said, I’d be happy to come by and visit you after you get out of the hospital a few times and we can look into that together, if you would like to” He said, “Great. I’d like that.” We went through an evangelistic Bible study together and he prayed to receive Christ. We started our joint study with God’s holiness. I remember that because later when this man joined our church, he began his testimony, “Holy, holy, holy is God….” When brokenness of our physical body becomes a reality, that brokenness can be an avenue to lead others to Christ.

2. The next level need that humans seek to satisfy when their physiological needs are met is SAFETY, both physical and emotional. That is why Christians have protected widows from immolation in India and founded orphanages around the world. The brokenness of Adam’s kingdom is also apparent in addictions to porn, alcohol, drugs, gambling and in a host of emotional battles that threaten our internal health like, grief, anxiety, or depression. Many have found Christ, because a friend sent them a booklet on grief or depression that steered them to biblical health for this affliction and ultimately to Christ. It was a neighbor’s battle with anger that opened the opportunity for me to lead him to Christ. One Saturday afternoon when I returned from an all-day meeting, my wife told me that the neighbor we had been reaching out to and praying for wanted me to go see him. I later found out that he had gotten angry in the midst of an argument with his wife and pushed his wife away. That afternoon she had left him. When I walked in his front door, he said, “Gary, I need Christ in my life.” He knew that his anger was a threat to his marriage and came to faith in Christ because he needed Christ’s help to overcome that brokenness.

3. As we continue to think of the gospel—the good news that Christ has come to fix everything broken by sin, we move on to Maslow’s third tier of need—FOR LOVE and BELONGING. As we saw last week both Zacchaeus and the woman at the well in Sychar were experiencing the brokenness of human relationships—both being outcasts of their society. Jesus reached the hearts of both by affirming their value and inviting them into a personal relationship with him. One of the groups suffering from the brokenness of horizontal relationships is those going through divorce. Our church wanted to care for those in our community going through this pain and lead them to the Caregiver, Jesus. So, we began a group called, Second Beginnings, advertised a divorce recovery seminar we held in our community, and launched a follow up support group. We saw the experience of divorce open hearts to Christ in two ways. Many just needed the unconditional love of Jesus to heal their broken heart and demolished self-esteem. Others wanted to walk closely with Christ, because they knew they needed him to make their marriage work, if they every married again. The human need for belonging and love, if it goes unmet is often a pathway that can connect others to Jesus.

4. Maslow calls his next level SELF-ESTEEM. I want to call it the desire to be SUCCESSFUL—to fulfill my responsibilities effectively—to make life work. Some years ago, I was building a relationship with my neighbor, I’ll call Sean, who lived along a path I often walked for exercise. He was very successful at his work, but his wife had recently divorced him. Shortly after that, he lost his job. He started his own business, but then it went bankrupt. When we would visit, Sean would often have his dog sitting on his lap, so I bought some treats for the dog, just to build the relationship. A few weeks later, I stopped by again, and Sean’s dog had just died. As I was walking home, I thought about a pair of diagrams I had seen with circles representing our lives. In the middle of one circle was a throne with ME sitting on it. Inside the circle were all sorts of smaller circles in disarray-representing the various areas of life. The other circle had Christ sitting on the throne and all the other areas of life being ordered and in balance in the circle. I visited Sean again and asked, “Sean would you be interested in looking at what the Bible teaches about making life work?” He said, “Yes.” Those two diagrams became the core of how I shared the gospel with Sean, and he gave his life to Christ.

5. Maslow’s highest level of human need, he calls SELF-ACTUALIZATION. It is the desire for significance--to know that your life matters. Jesus’ approach to Peter was to enlist him in a great cause. “Follow me and I will make you a fisher of men.” It is the desire for a fulfilling life that captured my 16-year-old heart on a Young Life weekend. The message I kept hearing was that Jesus said, “I have come that they might have life and have it abundantly.” I had more fun and enjoyment at Young Life meetings, weekends, and camps than I had anywhere else. So, this message rang true in my heart. I told Jesus at Hill Top Ranch “I am all in.”

I am blessed to have been an Evangelism Explosion Trainer, and I have my own set of Christianity Explored videos, which I have used. These are great tools. But those in today’s world who are under seventy don’t find the EE question, “Have you come to the place in your life, where you know for certain that if you were to doe tonight you would go to heaven?” relevant. Christianity Explored is excellent—but most of the lost folks God has surrounded us with aren’t interested in exploring Christianity. But they are experiencing the brokenness of life on planet earth. Jesus pattern in reaching the lost is to identify that brokenness and tailor the good news to how they can be whole. The gospel is about Christ’s ability to start to fix brokenness RIGHT NOW. Most of the time, sweetness and persuasiveness of speech is showing others how Christ is relevant to them NOW. Think about Maslow’s categories of need or your own categories and put that lens over Randy Newman’s intentionally shaped faith story, which he calls his “so what” story.

“I talked about my experience of being a Christian—of how I now sense a purpose and meaning to life, of how I never feel alone, and how—because I feel accepted by God—I more willingly accept other people. I told how being a Christian makes my marriage better, gives me a clear conscience, and fills me with a sense of optimism and hope.” (Ibid)

I have found that one of the best forms of preparation of readiness to steer a conversation towards Christ is to have spent some time thinking through the various ways that Jesus helps begin to fix our brokenness RIGHT NOW.

B. The second way to BE READY when we have a chance to talk about spiritual things is intentional prayer. Part of the sinfulness of Gary Yagel’s heart is that I just don’t care about the lost, the way Jesus did. If I did, I would be relentlessly dedicated to praying for my lost relatives, lost neighbors, and lost friends. But I like being the keeper of the aquarium a lot more than being a fisher of men. This week, in exasperation over my own uncaring heart, I opened my Evernote APP to my prayer list and put, “Pray for the heart of Jesus for the lost” at the top. I will tell you, in a few months if it worked. Maybe you need to do the same.

I do know, however, that there is another component of intentional prayer that DOES work. Our ministry helps men get connected over a series of what we call Check 6 questions. The fifth question is: Who are the non-believers you are building relationships with and how can I pray for your strategy to share Christ with them? I believe that the best way for all believers to share Christ is in the context of the relationships God has intentionally surrounded us with. But it is so hard to stay focused on building those opportunities. My brothers and I don’t ask that question of each other enough. But when we have, I’ve discovered that God loves to answer this prayer:

After renewing our prayer for each other’s outreach efforts, after the very next match in my racquetball league, my opponent sat down with me for thirty minutes to discuss philosophy and Christianity.
On another occasion, after renewing this prayer commitment, the next week my double-oven went out. I didn’t want to pay an installation fee. So, I asked my next-door neighbor to help me move it in and, afterwards we relaxed for a half hour and he opened up about his life and spiritual pilgrimage.
Another friend and I renewed our commitment to such prayer and he soon had a discussion about spiritual things with the restaurant owner where he often ate lunch at work.
One year as I set goals for the new year, I felt convicted about not sharing Christ enough and my accountability partner and started praying again for outreach opportunities. A few years earlier, I had led a Bible-study in at a pregnancy center for the fathers of the unborn babies. He had married the mother of his baby, but he was now asking me for help in his marriage. My wife and I met with them. His wife had made of profession of faith, but I explained how Christ can help with spiritual strength to love well. I gave him a copy of Mere Christianity, which he read and surrendered his life to Christ.

The command, BE READY, almost implies to me, that we have been asking God in prayer for opportunities. It is a response of being willingly inclined to share Christ wisely. One of the best ways to be so inclined is to have been asking, repeatedly for God to work in that lost person’s life and for opportunities to discuss spiritual things. And if there is any area, I need to be accountable in, it is Check 6 Question # 5: Who are the non-believers you are building relationships with and how can I pray for your strategy to share Christ with them?

C. The third way to BE READY to move the discussion towards spiritual things is to be seeking the right opportunities. This opportunity is NOT the chance to slip the gospel into the discussion but the chance to listen and ask questions. The third way to BE READY to move towards discussing the gospel is to BE AN INTERESTED LISTENER. We often think that effective evangelism requires looking for someone to share the gospel with. But a wiser approach, especially in the 21st century, is NOT looking for people to talk to but looking for people to listen to. Listening to them well will open a window to their soul. John Leonard, author of Get Real: Sharing Your Everyday Faith Everyday writes:

You will not believe how many people will want to talk to you—if you’ll only take off the sign that reads, “Not interested. Leave me alone.” You will not have to go looking for people. They will find you. There will be many people who will “just happen” to be in front of you or behind you in a line. They may be strangers standing beside you at the bus stop or in front of you at the deli counter. They may ask you, “How’s the pastrami?” but what they are really asking is “Do you care enough about me to listen?” They are desperate to talk to someone. They may believe that no one cares, that no one wants to hear their story. They can’t think of any reason to live or wonder if anyone would care if they chose to end their life. When they look at us, what will they see—the sign that says, “I’m not interested; leave me alone,” or the one that reads, “I care; I’ll listen?”

In many ways, the starting point for being able to talk about Christ and his ability to change our lives begins with asking another how his day has been going in a way that communicates that we have the time and are willing to listen to an answer that is longer than “fine.” We must begin by listening not only to communicate genuine care and concern, but because listening will help us know what the Lord wants us to say to the person that he has brought across our path.

For Further Prayerful Thought:

1. Does realizing that Jesus tailored the good news to others based on the way they were experiencing the brokenness of life in this fallen world discourage you because it makes sharing Christ harder, since there is no “one size fits all” or encourage you because it helps you realize how wise we are to be about relationships and the uniqueness of every human?

2. Which 2 or 3 of those in your circle of lost associates and friends has God put on your hearts. What might be missing in their lives compared to what you have in Christ?

3. Is God prompting you to be more intentional about praying for and reaching the lost? What might additional intentionality look like for you.

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Myths That Make Us Fear Sharing Christ

On 21 August, 2025 By Gary Yagel

Hi Men,

This is Gary Yagel, producer of the Mission Focused Men for Christ Podcast/Blog. Today’s episode from a past series is one of my favorites because it shows how our misunderstanding of the word evangelism is at the core of what makes Christians fear sharing their faith. I’m sure that at the end of this episode you will fear sharing your faith far less when you understand what the Greek Word EUANGELIZO, from which we get evangelism, actually means.

Today, we continue our study of the armor of God and come to Eph 6:15, where we’re told to put on, as our shoes, the readiness of the gospel of peace. I think most Christian men want to see God use us in others’ lives to bring the gospel to them. Yet, nearly all would say we fail more in this part of our mission than in any other part. Could it be that it is harder to share our faith than it should be because we have some mistaken ideas of what Scripture says sharing the gospel looks like? That is the question we investigate in this episode.

For many Christians, this is what sharing the gospel looks like: It is having the courage to overcome every piece of emotional intelligence we’ve learned about relationships, and intruding into the life of a co-worker, neighbor, or stranger to tell someone, who doesn’t want to hear it, the gospel message that they are a sinner in need of a savior, and then being willing to suffer rejection if we are accused of being preachy. This “traditional “view has major flaws. It misunderstands the word, evangelism, it misunderstands the gospel, and it misunderstands peace.

The Word Evangelism (EUANGELIZO)

Why have Christians come to this flawed view of personal evangelism that I just read? It may be because the place we look for evangelism models is the book of Acts, which exhibits primarily proclamational evangelism. Joe Aldrich observes,

The early church was planted because of the strong proclamational ministries of the apostles. They preached in synagogues, on street corners, and in marketplaces. …In a new, unreached mission field, evangelism usually begins with proclamation, moves to persuasion, and then as decisions are solidified and converts grow, the gospel becomes a visible presence….Once a thriving church is established, the starting point for evangelism, increasingly shifts from proclamational (confrontational) to presence (relational) (Life-Style Evangelsim).

Most of the examples of gospel sharing in Acts were public, not personal evangelism. However, to translate EUANGELIZO “preach” gives a wrong impression of what evangelism is. There is another Greek word, KERUSO, for preach. Translating EUANGELIZO as preach the gospel is especially troubling in Acts 8:4: Now those who were scattered (Laymen and women--not apostles) went about PREACHING (EUANGELIZO) the word. But preaching is not what they did and not a part of the meaning of EUANGELIZO. This Greek word is composed of EU, which means good and ANGEL, which means messenger. It means being a messenger of good news, not a preacher. Later in the same chapter, in Acts 8:26-40, the same word, EUANGELIZO is used not to refer to preaching but to describe Philip’s interactive conversation with the Ethiopian Eunuch, which began with Philip asking the Ethiopian Eunuch a question. Author, John Leonard observes that the traditional view of evangelism has unfortunately been shaped by the word, preach, which focuses on delivering content. He writes, Traditional evangelism only takes place when we drive home our point over and over again—when we do all the talking. We have gotten the impression that on every page of the New Testament we are commanded to preach the gospel. We know what preaching looks like because we see it in church. The model for traditional evangelism looks a lot like what preachers do on Sunday mornings….

Leonard then speculates that if we think evangelism is essentially preaching, i.e. one way communication to tell people they are sinners who need a savior, it is no wonder we don’t share our faith! He continues, We don’t share our faith because preaching is seen negatively in the culture. We have all said, “Don’t preach at me!” or “Preach to yourself!” The one-way communication style of preaching doesn’t communicate that you care much about the person you are speaking to. Instead, this style is associated with a holier-than-thou-attitude.

Faithfulness to our call to share our faith is not primarily seeking an opening to push the content of the gospel into another’s life! Nor does faithfulness to the call to share your faith require you to violate everything you’ve learned about relationships. Jesus wrote the book on emotional intelligence. It is true that at times Jesus spoke harshly to the scribes and Pharisees! But that is because Christ, the Anointed One, filled the office of Prophet—God’s prosecuting attorney to convict his people of their sin. That is not the way Jesus interacted with others in his everyday, private relationships. Instead, he modeled the pattern for communication given in verses like Prov 16: 21, The wise of heart is called discerning, and sweetness of speech increases persuasiveness, and Prov 16:23, The heart of the wise makes his speech judicious and adds persuasiveness to his lips. Jesus wants us to wisely impact our non-Christians friends for him. Evangelism, EUANGELIZO, is winsomely sharing good news.

The GOSPEL We Share

A thoughtful examination of the word, gospel, in Scripture shows that the gospel Jesus spoke of was the gospel of the kingdom. Jesus had begun his ministry by calling attention to the cataclysmic intrusion of the kingdom of God into time. “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand” (Mk 1:15). The good news that Jesus preached was not just a message of personal private salvation, but the gospel of the kingdom. “And he went throughout all Galilee, teaching in their synagogues and proclaiming the gospel of the kingdom and healing every disease and every affliction among the people” (Mt 4:23). The good news of the kingdom was that the second Adam, Christ, had come to overthrow Satan, sin, and death, the usurpers of Adam’s kingdom and begun to establish his righteousness kingdom over earth, restoring everything broken by sin. The truncated, two-chapter gospel, man has sinned and needs to trust Jesus as his savior completely misses what Jesus said about his “kingdom.” It is only in recovering the entire, four-chapter Gospel, 1) creation, 2) fall, 3) redemption, 4) restoration that Christ’s vital role as the anointed king, (besides being anointed priest, and prophet) makes sense. When we start the gospel story with creation, we quickly learn that the kingdom is Adam’s kingdom, earth. And the fourth chapter (restoration) reminds us that believers aren’t chosen to escape from this world, but to renew this world. Tim Keller writes,

Some conservative Christians think of the story of salvation as the fall, redemption, heaven. In this narrative, the purpose of redemption is escape from this world…If however the story of salvation is creation, fall, redemption, restoration, then things look different...The purpose of redemption is not to escape from this word but to renew it….(The gospel) is about the coming of God’s kingdom to renew all things. (“Our New Global Culture Ministry in Urban Centers” address).

The true gospel is the four-chapter gospel of the kingdom not just the two chapters of fall and redemption-- that we have a plane ticket to heaven, paid for by Christ’s blood on the cross. If that were the true gospel our job right now would be to wait around at the airport. The true gospel is about God’s glorious creation, earth, a mirror of God’s glory, being set free from its slavery to sin and Jesus fixing everything in Adam’s kingdom broken by sin.

The Gospel of PEACE

The Greek word for peace, EIRENE, does not just mean the cessation of hostilities in relationships, but harmonious flourishing in relationships. The corresponding Hebrew word is shalom, which refers to wholeness and health. Going back to creation, God designed humans to have four types of harmonious relationships:

Harmonious relationship with God, depending upon his love as our lifeline.
Harmonious relationship with self, finding our dignity and worth as God’s image bearers.
Harmonious relationship with others, made to connect to others by loving them as we do ourselves.
Harmonious relationship with the creation, assigned the job of discovering and developing earth’s potential.

When these relationships are functioning properly, we experience the fulness of life God intended—shalom. But Adam and Eve’s mutiny against God plunged all four of these relationships into disharmony, chaos and decay.

Their relationship with God with God was damaged, as their intimacy with him was replaced with fear; their relationship with self was marred as Adam and Eve developed a sense of shame; their relationship with others was broken, as Adam quickly blamed Eve for their sin; and their relationship with the rest of creation became distorted, as God cursed the ground and the child-bearing process…. Because the four relationships are the building blocks for all human activity, the affects of the fall are manifested in the economic, social, religious, and political systems that humans have created throughout history (When Helping Hurts, Corbett & Fikkert).

Things are not the way they are supposed to be. But the good news of the kingdom is that Christ has come to fix WHATEVER is broken by sin in Adam’s kingdom—to restore harmony in all four spheres of relationship—with God, self, others, and creation. To effectively share the gospel, we must think carefully about all the aspects of human life that have been broken by sin because we are going to see that Jesus tailored the good news of the kingdom to the point of brokenness being felt by his listeners. Joe Aldrich, in his book, Life-Style Evangelism, calls this inductive evangelism, in contrast to deductive evangelism. He writes: Traditionally, evangelism courses teach people one basic approach to witnessing. They are trained to announce a blanket gospel message suitable for all. Lest we be too critical of such training programs, those who have been trained by them are much more “ready” to share their faith than those who have not been so trained. Nevertheless, we must acknowledge that in personal evangelism, Jesus always seemed to follow an inductive model. Aldrich explains:

The inductive model presupposes knowledge of the individual being addressed. The gospel is then tailor-made to his individual needs. The goal is to discover that point in the individual’s life at which the gospel will become good news, and then share it as such. Jesus’ method of dealing with people followed this adaptive, inductive model. To Nicodemus the ruler, he said, “You must be born again.”—he never used “born again,” a highly conceptual metaphor in any other recorded instance in the NT. He talked to the woman by the well about “living water.” But when the rich young man came up and asked what he had to do to have eternal life, Jesus did not talk to him about living water. Knowing that money was this man’s god, he said, “Sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come and follow me. He was basically calling him to a total switch of Gods. On the other hand, he didn’t tell Zacchaeus, the tax collector who went up in a tree, to give away everything he had. He simply said, Zacchaeus….I must stay at your household today.” By the end of the day, Zacchaeus had decided on his own to give half of his possessions to the poor.

The inductive evangelism approach fits hand in glove with understanding that our good news is that King Jesus has come to restore everything broken by sin. It includes broken bodies, broken dignity, broken marriages, broken father/son relationships, broken sexuality, broken values that exalt material prosperity and success over caring for the downtrodden. Jesus tailored the good news of the kingdom to the point of brokenness being felt by his listeners. Let’s do a simple exercise to see how to do this, using a tool, Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs to point us to the various categories of human need, because sin has broken everything.

A. Maslow says mankind’s most foundational need is PHYSIOLOGICAL--for oxygen, water, food, clothing, shelter, and health. But the curse of Adam’s sin upon the ground has caused humans to lack what they need physiologically to flourish. The coming of Christ’s kingdom means that creation itself will be set free from this bondage to sin. Jesus gave a foretaste of this reality by healing the sick, giving sight to the blind, empowering the lame to walk, and himself rising from the dead. Since his kingdom brings the renewal of the physical earth, Jesus taught his true followers to feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, house strangers, clothe the naked, and cure the sick if they could (Matt 25:34-36.) The first message of good news for a starving man is bread. That is why the church historically has always cared for the sick, the dying, the poor, widows the homeless—those harmed by the brokenness of the physical world. The genuine, agape love shown by believers in meeting these physical needs is the best way to turn their hearts to Christ.

B. The next level need that humans seek to satisfy when their physiological needs are met is SAFETY. That is why Christians have founded shelters for battered women, sought to end the sex trade, and founded pregnancy centers to save the lives of unborn children and women from the trauma of abortion. Support groups like Celebrate Recovery are a great way to reach others with the gospel. Addiction to pornography, alcohol, gambling, and drugs have the power to ruin lives. I have spoken to many men who did not come to faith in Christ until they were desperate for his help because an addiction was threatening to destroy their family.

C. The next level of needs Maslow identifies are for LOVE/BELONGING. Jesus knew that this was the path to the heart of Zacchaeus, the outcast traitor. When Jesus spotted him outside of Jericho in a tree to see above the crowds, all Jesus said to him was, Zacchaeus, hurry and come down, for I must stay at your house today (Luke 19:5). A few moments later, Zacchaeus repented of his dishonesty and Jesus remarked, “Today salvation has come to his house” (vs 9). Jesus identified this same need in the heart of the outcast woman at the well of Samaria, there in the heat of the day, instead of at the time the other women went out to get water. He seemed to recognize her thirst for love and pointed to his ability to give her living water. I’ve personally seen those who are lost come to Christ through marriage seminars, so they can better love each other through Christ’s power. In a divorce recovery ministry, I saw many rejected, lonely people realize how much they needed Christ’s love and come to faith. Through meeting with a couple who wanted to be married and showing them that they need Christ’s power to love each other well, I’ve seen folks open their hearts to Jesus. The gospel is the answer to broken human relationships in countless ways.

D. Maslow’s next level is SELF-ESTEEM. Sin crushes the high view we should have of ourselves because we are God’s image bearers. So, feeling clean inside, i.e. being forgiven of our sins is a felt need for some. I would also place a desire to be successful in our responsibilities here. I have seen many non-Christians come into a seminar I was leading called, Great Dads. About 80% of the way through the material, we show overwhelming statistical data that proves that children do better in every area of life—their friendships, their grades, resisting peer pressure, etc. if they have a strong spiritual/moral foundation. Then we point out that the best way for them to build that foundation is through their example, as dads. I can almost see it on men’s faces. They realize they can’t take their kids where they need to be without getting right with God themselves. I also watched men and boys commit their lives to Christ at a breakfast with Joe Gibbs—just saying he needed Christ in his life to make it whole, to make it work.

E. Maslow’s highest level of human need, he calls SELF-ACTUALIZATION. It is the desire to know that your life matters, that it is more than a shooting star that streaks through the sky for a moment in time and then is gone forever. When Jesus called Peter to follow him, he did not say, “You must be born again,” or “I will give you living water.” He miraculously filled Peter’s fishing nets with fish and then said, “Follow me and I will make you a fisher of men.” Jesus’ approach to Peter was to enlist him in a great cause. Rick Warren’s book, The Purpose Driven Life is the most popular book in the world, outside of the Bible. He appeals to most people’s desire to know, “What is the purpose of life? What am I here for?” His book has brought millions to faith in Christ through appealing to the human desire for significance.

Let me close with a final quote from Aldrich. Effective evangelism begins where people are, not where you would like them to be. As the King’s messengers, our challenge is to help others discover how their needs can be satisfied through a relationship with Jesus Christ (Ibid).

For Further Prayerful Thought:

1. Why is it misleading to understand the Greek word for evangelism (EUANGELIZO) to mean preaching the gospel to others?

2. How does understanding the four-chapter gospel help us realize that Christ’s kingdom power is for more than just an eternal life insurance policy?

3. Can you think of biblical examples not mentioned in this episode of Jesus tailoring the good news of the kingdom to the point of brokenness being felt by his listener?

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How Do We Put on the Breastplate of Righteousness?

On 16 August, 2025 By Gary Yagel

Hi Men,

This is Gary Yagel, producer of the Mission Focused Men for Christ Podcast/Blog. As you know, the ancient breastplate, just like the modern-day Kevlar vest, was intended to protect vital organs from harm. So, what did Paul mean when he commanded us to put on the breastplate of righteousness? That is the topic of today’s episode from the past, which is the fourth in our current August-September series from Ephesians 6, Arming for Spiritual Battle.

Do you ever feel like our side is losing in the spiritual battle—that the powers of darkness and evil are winning? Perhaps more specific to our own lives, do you ever wonder why the Christian life is so hard, why sin so easily ensnares us, why our whole-hearted resolve on Sunday to love Jesus better by obeying him more has given way to blatant sin by Sunday night? Today we continue our series, Winning Spiritual Battles Because We Use Our Spiritual Weapons. Paul tells us that to fight evil we must put on the breastplate of righteousness. But most of us don’t even know what the breastplate of righteousness is, much less how to put it on. At the end of this episode, we want everyone to have a clear picture of what this piece of armor is and begin winning more spiritual battles because we put it on.

Sir Winston Churchill famously said, "those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it." In the 1181-chapter world history book, the Bible, by just the third chapter, human beings encounter a spiritual enemy who hates us and constantly seeks to lead us down a path to destruction—i.e. rebellion against God. In the Bible’s meta narrative, Satan and the kingdom of darkness enter in chapter 3 and aren’t destroyed until 1176 chapters later, 3 chapters from the end of the Biblical story in Revelation 20. Since that third chapter of Genesis where Adam and Eve allied their kingdom with the powers of darkness, every page of human history is written against the backdrop of the clash between these alien powers and God’s plan to send Christ to free Adam’s kingdom from sin and its devastation.

Paul gives us his perspective of what is really happening on the stage of world history. He writes, For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places. Do we really think we can stand up against THOSE POWERS without figuring out how to be strong in the Lord by putting on the spiritual armor he’s provided? Is there any reason why THOSE ENEMIES will not tear us to pieces if we do not resist them with spiritual weapons? Could we ever hope to achieve our mission to establishing Christs agenda of righteousness over every sphere of life without taking on the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms who claim this world as their own?

So, let’s dig into our study of the breastplate of righteousness. Right out of the gate, we have a problem. “What is your gut response to the word, righteous? What comes to mind when you hear, Ryan is consumed with being righteous, or Lauren is focused on her own righteousness?” This word does not appeal to us at all. The reason is that it has many very unfortunate, very mistaken connotations. Let’s try to distinguish, the rich biblical meaning of this word from our sadly mistaken, default ideas.

A. First, the biblical concept of righteousness does not at all imply self-righteousness. The Greek word, DIKAIOSUNE, means, that which conforms to the moral will of God. This word does not carry with it, in any way the idea that this righteousness is earned, that it reflects an over estimation of one’s own righteousness, or that this righteousness is in any way a basis for self-justification.

B. Second, DIKAIOSUNE, the word for righteousness, is not used in the Bible primarily to describe the imputed righteousness of Christ to us. Rather, it’s more common use is a call to righteousness of character. It is true that we are justified by grace through faith, alone. In response to faith as a one-time act of grace, Christ has declared us legally righteous. The law has no claim against us to condemn us for our sin. But the term, righteousness has a much richer meaning in Scripture, than just justification, a one-time act. Jesus urged, Seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness.

C. Biblical righteousness is not legalism. Legalism’s focus is on outward rule—keeping. It loads its proponents down with extreme applications of the law, which its advocates make binding. “How could any Christian put his kids in public school,” “Everyone should keep the Sabbath the way we do.” “You watched an R-rated movie?” Jesus said, Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you tithe mint and dill and cumin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faithfulness (Matt 23:23). They paraded their righteousness by making it known that they tithed on the smallest of their crops. Their external, self-righteousness, knit-picking over application was not real righteousness at all.

D. Righteousness is not moralism. Moralism is obeying the moral law as a bargaining chip with God. Moralists might trust Christ for salvation, but are insecure in their love relationship with God. They aren’t sure God will love them if they don’t behave. Instead of the freedom to bask in God’s unconditional love, a moralist has to be good, so God loves him back and God will give him what he wants. Their obedience to God earns them the right to demand that God bless them in the ways they expect blessing. When God doesn’t do that, their faith is shattered. The moral law oppresses them because they have to keep it for God to love them. The reality is, however, as Steve Brown points out, Only those who know God will love them even if they never get better, will ever get any better. When they understand God’s unconditional love, they will love the moral law not hate it, and pursue true righteousness with all their hearts. It is God’s path to life and to pleasing him!

THE APPROPRIATE GARB THAT FITS OUR WORK OF SEEKING RIGHTEOUSNESS

Everyone knows that how he dresses in the morning depends on what he has planned for the day. We put on the breastplate of righteousness because working for righteousness in the world around us is our mission, and it begins with ourselves. Here are 4 reminders that seeking righteousness is our mission:

1. Jesus taught that righteousness is to be our highest priority: Therefore do not be anxious, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ For the Gentiles seek after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them all. But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you. Christ’s mission was to invade Adam’s kingdom, overthrow its invaders, Satan, Sin, and death, and begin to fix everything broken by sin. Jesus is making everything RIGHT, i.e. free from sin. If we think that pursuing righteousness means keeping a bunch of legalistic rules, we have missed the concept of righteousness—which comes from rightness. It is joining Jesus as he makes right whatever in Adams kingdom was made wrong by sin. Believers love the moral law of God because it shows them how life was designed to be lived. David sang to How sweet are your words to my taste, sweeter than honey to my mouth! Through your precepts I get understanding; therefore, I hate every false way (Psalm 119:103-104).

2. We should seek righteousness in our own lives because that is God’s purpose in redeeming us. Jesus, as he launched his ministry in his hometown of Nazareth quoted the great Messianic passage of Isaiah 61:1-3 which says that God’s purpose was to turn his people into OAKS OF RIGHTEOUSNESS. Here is what the kingdom of heaven looks like as we pray for it to spread over earth.

The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me, because the Lord has anointed me to bring good news to the poor; has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to those who are bound; to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor, to comfort all who mourn…to give them a beautiful headdress instead of ashes, the oil of gladness instead of mourning, the garment of praise instead of a faint spirit; that they may be called OAKS OF RIGHTEOUSNESS, the planting of the Lord, that he may be glorified.

3. The fourth beatitude, Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness for they will be satisfied shows us kingdom living and the character of Jesus. John Macarthur writes,

This beatitude speaks of strong desire, of driving pursuit, of a passionate force inside the soul. It has to do with ambition—ambition of the right sort—whose object is to honor, obey, and glorify God by partaking of his righteousness. This holy ambition is in great contrast to the common ambitions of men to gratify their own lusts, accomplish their own goals, and satisfy their own egos (The MacArthur New Testament Commentary).

4. Seeking righteousness of character is not only NOT LEGALISTIC, it is the proper response to God’s grace. It is the way to love God back. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. In the next verse God tells us HOW he wants us to love him with all our hearts. And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart (Deut 6:5-6). Jesus taught us the same thing, If you love me, you will keep my commandments (Jn 14:15).

Christ-followers hunger and thirst for righteousness in their lives and over the world, because they know that is what is best for themselves and all creation. They also know that seeking righteousness (DIKAIOSUNE), i.e. that which conforms to the moral will of God is the best way to please him. Putting on the breastplate of righteousness everyday is to renew your commitment to pursue righteousness that day. It is similar to saying, “lead me not into temptation, but deliver me from evil.” Having said that, we must also say loudly, that righteous character and righteous behavior is impossible to achieve apart from being in Christ, depending upon him for strength.

TAKING UP THE BREASTPLATE OF RIGTEOUSNESS IS ASKING FOR CHRIST’S HELP

When Paul challenged Christ-followers to put on the armor of God he was not only thinking of the Roman guards around him but of Isaiah’s prophecy that only the Lord, himself, could come to establish righteousness over the earth: Isaiah’s prophecy tells us that the messiah would put on righteousness as a breastplate, and a helmet of salvation on his head (59:17). We are to passionately pursue righteousness in our character and rightness for the things broken by the reign of sin; but we are reminded that it is only in Christ, i.e. through our abiding relationship with him and using his supernatural armor, that righteousness can prevail. Putting on the breastplate is asking Christ for help.

THE BREASTPLATE OF RIGHTEOUSNESS IS PROTECTION

The breastplate was the piece of armor that ran from the neck to the middle. It protected the vital internal organs, especially the heart. We have seen what righteousness is: conformity to the moral will of God, i.e. the moral law. We now examine four practical ways that righteousness protects our heart.

1. Imputed righteousness protects our hearts from the devil’s accusations. Knowing that Christ’s righteousness is credited to us (justification) means there is no legitimate accusation against us. The judge himself has declared us doubly “not guilty” 1) because all our sins were laid on Christ and paid for at the cross and 2) his perfect straight A moral report card has Jesus’ name erased and ours written it. If you put this breastplate on, which says across the chest, There is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, Satan, the accuser of believers cannot get through to weaken you with words like, “You hypocrite. Do you really think a Holy God wants to hear you talk again with him about your sin? “If you were really sorry, you wouldn’t commit that same sin again.” “How dare you try to be the spiritual leader of your home. If your family knew what you were looking at online they would never follow you.” Putting on the breastplate of righteousness means reminding ourselves that we are “declared righteous” by the judge, himself.

2. Righteous character protects us from harm.

Righteousness guards the one whose way is blameless, but wickedness subverts the sinner. (Prov 13:6).
In the path of righteousness is life, and in its pathway there is no death (Prov 12:28).

God is not a pragmatist; the ends do not justify the means. Often, we are tempted to fulfill a legitimate goal the wrong way. Making a commitment to be scrupulously honest in business helps protect us from the temptation to bend corners when we have opportunity. Putting their bodies on the altar and making a commitment to God’s standards for sex helps protect a couple from temptation before marriage. Deciding ahead of the party how many drinks are enough helps avoid too many. Job, who was known for being righteous, made a covenant with his eyes not to look lustfully upon a woman, ahead of the temptation. He trained himself to bounce his eyes away from women who are showing way too much of their bodies. Pursuing righteousness brings enormous protection to our lives, just as the breastplate protected Roman soldiers.

3. Righteous character protects us from misunderstanding the Lord's leading.

The integrity of the upright guides them, but the crookedness of the treacherous destroys them (Prov 11:3).
The righteousness of the blameless keeps his way straight, but the wicked falls by his own wickedness (Prov 11:5).

When seeking the Lord’s leading, it is vital to settle the obedience issue first—that you will obey God even if it is the decision you do not want. By intentionally putting this decision on the altar (giving God his RIGHT to rule you) it protects your heart from steering you in the wrong direction. Twice, God warns us, There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death (Prov 14:12, 16:25). A prior commitment to doing the right thing is putting on the armor of righteousness. It helps protect our hearts from being seduced by temptation and leading us the wrong direction. Jesus is, of course, the great example, here. The evening before his trial and crucifixion, ahead of all the mistreatment, pain, and temptation to avoid the unimaginable agony of becoming sin on the cross, Jesus’ settled the issue of his obedience. He pled with the father, “My Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me; nevertheless, not my will, but your will be done” (Matt 26:39). Jesus committed to God’s will either way.

4. Righteous character protects us from being trapped or snared by sin.

An evil man is ensnared in his transgression, but a righteous man sings and rejoices (Prov 29:6).

Consider the differences in the way Joseph resisted the allurement of Potiphar’s wife and the way David yielded to the alluring sight of Bathsheba. When Potiphar’s wife sought to seduce him, Joseph answered her, Potiphar has put everything that he has in my charge. He is not greater in this house than I am, nor has he kept back anything from me except you, because you are his wife. How then can I do this great wickedness and sin against God? It appears by his reasoned response to her that Joseph was already committed to righteousness, before the temptation struck.

In contrast, David did not have a breastplate of righteousness protecting him. By the time he saw Bathsheba on the roof top, David had been consistently violating God’s command that Israel’s kings must not multiply wives: You may indeed set a king over you whom the Lord your God will choose….He shall not acquire many wives for himself (Deut 17:17). David had already married six women when he looked down on the bathing Bathsheba and decided he wanted her, too. His breastplate of righteousness had gaping holes, when it came to sexuality. Not only

that, but the Biblical account of this tragedy begins, In the spring of the year, THE TIME WHEN KINGS GO OUT TO BATTLE….David remained at Jerusalem. The implication is that David never should have been home but with his troops in battle. It is possible that Bathsheba was in the position of being exposed to eyes on the palace roof because she expected no men to be there. David’s disloyalty to his troops is amplified in the biblical account by its contrast to the loyalty of Uriah, Bathsheba’s husband. David’s scheme to make others think the baby was Uriah’s failed because when Uriah reported home to David, he refused to have sex with his wife out of loyalty to his troops, who were NOT with their wives but on the battlefield. David’s breastplate of rightness—loyalty to his troops—was down. Temptation penetrated his heart and brought devastating consequences.

We all face the same forces that took David down—a deep rooted sinful nature, and powerful spiritual enemies who know just how to get us to yield to sin. In this world, we are all going to fail, a lot. But affirming our commitment to righteousness—to doing things the way God’s moral law shows us to live—is preemptive protection for our hearts. It is putting on the breastplate of righteousness. It is saying, Lord, I wear your righteousness today against all condemnation and corruption. Fit me with your holiness and purity especially in these areas that I foresee tempting me—defend me against all assaults that come against my heart.

For Further Prayerful Thought:

What is the motivation for hungering and thirsting for righteousness for one who is confident of God’s unconditional love? How does that contrast with the moralist’s view of the moral law?
What is the difference between seeking righteousness and being legalistic?
How would you summarize Paul’s command to put on the breastplate of righteousness? What stood out to you about HOW to do this?
How is the fourth beatitude (Matt 5:6) a prerequisite for putting on the breastplate of righteousness?

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Loving and Promoting God’s Truth

On 09 August, 2025 By Gary Yagel

Hi Men,

This is Gary Yagel, producer of the Mission Focused Men for Christ Podcast/Blog. Today’s episode from the past wrestles with the challenge of loving God’s trutht--the biblical worldview--so much that we are wise about how we promote that truth in a secular culture. This episode looks back upon the storming of the US Capitol on January 6, 2021 to remind us all that zeal for God’s truth cannot allow us to be careless in how we seek to promote it. No doubt this incident was unfairly reported by the media and promoted relentlessly by the political left. Nevertheless, it is a reminder to us to love God’s truth so much that we are wise and not careless in the way we seek to present it in a secular culture.

Today, we want to address the question, “How do we as Christians impact our culture with biblical truth?” As we process what happened in the last election and the storming of the Capitol since, Christians are divided. Eschewing passivity, many believers feel impelled to speak up on the social media to fight a movement rooted in ungodliness, which they see shaping our culture. They are appalled that younger Christian leaders either don’t seem to see this happening or seem to lack the courage to speak up about it. Other believers are horrified at the views they hear expressed by Christians on social media, which exhibit a kind of “Christian Nationalism” and exhibit Christians to be combative towards those with whom they disagree, violating Christ’s clear command, love your neighbor, not to mention, love your enemy. This episode continues our series Winning Spiritual Battles Because We Use Our Spiritual Weapons by examining how to encircle ourselves with the belt of God’s truth, which must be the starting point for sharing that truth in the culture. Then we consider how to be persuasive as salt and light in the culture, and in particular the dangers of being right, but sharing truth in a HARMFUL, rather than a COMPELLING way.

What do you think is the answer to the question, “Is our mission today, as Christians living in America, to recover America as a Christian nation? In my view, the correct answer can only come from understanding what Jesus meant when he told his followers, “Seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness.”

The kingdom of God, which Jesus proclaimed, and about which Paul spoke (Acts 28: 31), was not the church, a spiritual kingdom up in heaven, a future political kingdom of Israel, or America. The kingdom was Adam’s kingdom, the earth, the development and shaping of which had been assigned to Adam and Eve but usurped by Satan, sin, and death. Jesus, the second Adam, has redeemed Adam’s kingdom from its slavery to these forces and begun to make all things new. The reign of Jesus among human beings:

Begins in the human heart with trusting Jesus’ death alone as the atoning sacrifice for his sins and turning our hearts to love the High King, our Redeemer with all of that heart. That is why seeking first the kingdom begins with leading others to faith.
But Jesus’ summary of kingdom life in Matt 5-7 reflects an astonishing transformation of human attitudes and values, accomplished by the indwelling of the Holy Spirit given to believers as down-payment on the final work of redemption, making us unable to sin, when Christ returns. This transformation of our character to be like Jesus IS KINGDOM WORK. Jesus is much more concerned about fixing OUR HEART ATTITUDES than fixing the rest of the culture.
We are called to seek justice and wholeness over every part of earth by influencing each part of the world around us to be aligned with righteousness (which is synonymous for God’s original design before the fall.) This transformation spreads to the whole earth, not just our nation. Christ-followers cannot view the USA as a special nation that has received a special blessing from God. Our nation is exceptional. It has certainly been blessed by God, because by God’s grace, its founders aligned our constitution with many biblical principles. But we are no more special to God than any other nation. Our efforts in prayer and as responsible citizens to influence our culture towards righteousness please God. That is a core part of our mission. Yet history records that despite fervent prayer and efforts to influence their culture and political system by Christians of every nation, a rejection of biblical truth and an unjust political system prevails, the suffering from which God uses to grow Christ-followers into Christ-like character.

So, the correct view of advancing the Kingdom of God on earth is not being silent on the issues of justice and righteousness in our culture. It is not separating from the culture because God has given up on America and everything is going to go downhill until Christ’s return. Such a view of withdrawal from culture is disobedience to God’s command to Adam and his race to shape culture for his glory. Nowhere does the Bible say God has given up on this world or this culture. At the same time, seeking to influence the culture for truth must never mean doing that in a way that sounds like Christian nationalism. We must not isolate ourselves from opportunities to influence the world around us. Our fundamental calling is TO SHAPE CILUTURE. But now may be a great time to reconsider HOW Jesus taught us to go about influencing those around us with biblical truth.

Advancing Biblical truth in the culture begins by encircling ourselves with the belt of truth and exposing EVERYTHING we believe to the searchlight of God’s Word. Whether we grew up in a majority or minority culture, in material abundance or poverty, inside or outside the church, are white, black, Hispanic or Asian, we must reevaluate the given assumptions we grew up with through the lens of Scripture. Stand therefore, having fastened on the belt of truth (Eph 6:14).

Four Ways to Put On the Belt of Truth and Why We Need to Do It

A. The belt of God’s truth is needed to fix our wrong thought patterns. One of the consequences of the fall is that our sinful nature unconsciously causes us to suppress the truth. You must no longer walk as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their minds, writes Paul. They are darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them, due to their hardness of heart (Eph 4:17-18).

Putting on the belt of truth means immersing ourselves in Scripture. We must re-program our minds because they have been corrupted by the lies of the evil one and of the fallen middle, lower, or upper class culture, which has shaped us. Do not be conformed to this world, writes Paul, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind (Rom 12:2). Tony Evans in his book, Victory in Spiritual Warfare, writes, When you align your mind, will, and emotions underneath God’s view on a matter—his truth—He will then empower you to fight your spiritual battles with the freedom of great mobility and increased stability. By knowing and functioning according to the truth of God, you will be on your way to experiencing victory over anything or anyone seeking to over-come or defeat you

B. Putting on the Belt of Truth requires Christ-followers to be known as those who are honest to the core. Both the eighth commandment, You shall not steal (Ex 20:15) and the ninth commandment, You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor (20:16) require us to be scrupulously honest. Paul commands the Ephesian believers, Having put away falsehood, let each one of you speak the truth with his neighbor (4:25). Paul is not saying it is wrong to tell white lies to surprise someone, nor for the offense to try to deceive the defense about what it is doing, nor that we should ignore healthy relational boundaries to share intimate details of our lives with strangers, nor that we have to be so brutally honest that we tell everyone things that might hurt them. But Jesus IS truth and we can not harbor dishonesty and be faithful to him.

C. Putting on the belt of truth means wanting others to help us see truth we don’t see. It begins with a humility that recognizes that we only see part of the picture. For husbands, it means listening carefully to your wife’s opinion about decisions. For majority culture Christians, it means exposing ourselves to brothers and sister in minority subcultures. As we are able, it means knowing how Christians in other countries of the world live out their obedience to seek first the kingdom of God. It certainly means promoting worldwide missions that believe God has gifted every portion of the globe with cultural and natural resources to be developed and enjoyed by the rest of the world, for God’s glory. In our individual lives, it means seeking wise counsel, having a teachable spirit, and being open to rebuke. Everyday Christian men fail morally, relationally, spiritually, and financially—not because they set out to fail, not because they don’t work very hard, but because of their blind spots. The reality is that our mind has been so corrupted by the fall, and we are so easily self-deceived that we need regular soul contact with a brother in Christ. Speaking the truth in love, writes Paul, we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ (Eph 4:15). Poor is the man who has no brother to deliver him from his self-deception by speaking truth into his life.

D. Putting on the belt of truth means exposing the world and life views around us to the scrutiny of God’s Word. As men, we are to answer God’s calling given to Adam to be protectors of the garden. This means protecting our wives and children from the destructive lies of the Father of Lies, from their own fallen nature, that seeks to suppress truth, and from ungodly thinking from fallen culture, all of which will mold them into a rebel against God if we do nothing. Paul describes this everyday battle and the power of God’s truth to tear down the lies of the culture. For the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh but have divine power to destroy strongholds. We destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God, and take every thought captive to obey Christ (2 Cor 10:4-5).

It is worth noting, however that this description of the spiritual battle for truth concerns combat that takes place in the minds of Christians. The context is inside the church. But, is “battling for truth” the right description of what Scripture says about influencing non-Christians around us and shaping our part of culture? In his book, Talk the Walk: How to Be Right Without Being Insufferable, Steve Brown, says, “Being right is extremely dangerous for a Christian, and, in fact, may be the most destructive danger a Christian ever faces in communicating to those who do not want to hear.” In Matthew 23, Jesus says to his disciples and the crowds, The scribes and the Pharisees sit on Moses' seat, so do and observe whatever they tell you. The Pharisees were right in their orthodoxy. But Jesus said their moral stench was like that of a rotting body. They are the example of what Bible-believing Christians risk becoming like. So, in the remainder of the podcast, I want to address two dangers of being right: 1) the danger of being right but UNDISCERNING in sharing biblical truth, 2) the danger of being right but UNPERSUASIVE in sharing truth.

The Danger of being UNDISCERNING in Sharing Biblical Truth

Jesus said, Do not give dogs what is holy, and do not throw your pearls before pigs, lest they trample them underfoot and turn to attack you (Matt 7:6). Jesus is not calling those made in God’s image dogs or pigs; he is focusing on these two creatures’ inability to recognize the value of spiritual truth. Jesus commands us in The Sermon on the Mount not to indiscriminately throw out biblical truth to those who can’t see its value. The depth of the biblical truth we share with others should be linked to the spiritual condition they are in to receive it. That was what Jesus did. He said things like “let him who has ears to hear, let him hear” (Matt 11:15). He spoke in parables to the crowds but explained them to his disciples. He addressed the sins of the scribes and Pharisees one way, and those of the woman at the well another way. When examined about his true identify, by Pilate, Jesus had a meaningful, six-verse discussion about his kingship (John 18:33-38). But when asked the same questions by Herod who was just looking for signs and wonders, Jesus did not speak a word (Luke 23:6-11). Somehow, he detected that Pilate would value the biblical truths about himself, but that Herod’s would not. So Jesus refused to cast his pearls before Herod. How do we follow Jesus’ example?

We Christians must be careful in what we say, how we say it, and even if we are to say it at all. Jesus cautioned that we should not “give dogs what is holy,” nor “throw your pearls before pigs lest they trample them underfoot and turn to attack you” (Matt. 7:6). The truth we have is precious, dangerous, and explosively powerful in the way it can heal or hurt (Ibid).

Christians should be passionate about standing for righteousness in a culture that they see losing its biblical moorings. Believe me I am still trying to figure what this means and very much admire Christians taking such stands. But it must be asked, “How does posting biblical teaching about God’s design of gender roles, adultery, and homosexuality on Facebook or Twitter follow the principle of only casting biblical truth to those who are ready to value it?” I realize pro-life, Bible-believing Christians are unfairly accused of intolerance. But could it be that Jesus knew that throwing biblical truth out to people in general, before they are ready to value it might actually cause them to stomp it into the ground, where they will never be able to see it again? Here are some practical thoughts about testing whether a non-believer is at a place where he will value your biblical truth.

When asked, Christians can say, “Yeah, I’m a believer and, and it’s the most important thing in my life. If you ever want to hear about it, just ask and I’ll tell you.” Or in my case as a religious professional, when I am asked what I do, I sometimes answer, “I tell people who want to hear about Jesus.” Or perhaps, when Christians think they have a message that will help someone in trouble, they can say, “If you want me to, I’ll be happy to share it with you.” Permission opens the door to speaking truth. If permission is not given, silence is a good practice. (Ibid)

So the first danger of knowing biblical truth is that, in wanting to stand for righteousness, we may think we are supposed to indiscriminately post God’s truth.

The Danger of Being Right But UNPERSUASIVE in Sharing Truth

Here are 5 mistakes Christians make in seeking to advance the Biblical worldview:

1. Expecting to win people to embrace biblical truth through logical argument. When it comes to influencing culture, I naturally default to thinking this means winning arguments with those espousing an ungodly worldview. But how effective can we expect a logical argument on social media to be when God tells us, The natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned 1 Cor 2:14).

2. Thinking that our goal is reaching their head when it is actually to reach their heart. Since our objective must be reaching their hearts, might our time be better spent weeping for the lost, pouring out our tears and prayer for them because they cannot see the destructive nature of their lifestyle—than spent shaping an argument to prove their lifestyle is wrong (which they already know because the moral law of God is written on every heart.) Such prayer will make our hearts tender towards them, and God just might answer those prayers. After all, we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places (Eph 6:12). Moreover, it might just be because our goal is winning the hearts of the lost, that, when Jesus tells us to be salt and light, he doesn’t tell us to use words at all. He says, “Let them see your good works and give glory to your father who is in heaven” (Matt 5:16).

3. Being selective about the sins we confront. Steve Brown says, Christians have to speak truth about what is and what is not sin. However, people will stop listening (and rightly so) when they see how selective their list is (Ibid). Smoking dope, sex outside of marriage, homosexuality make the list, but somehow racial injustice, materialism, self-righteousness, gluttony, and pride tend to get a pass. Such selectivity nearly guarantees that Christians will not reach anyone but church people as they try to influence their culture.

4. The failure to value the common grace God has poured out on our culture. The Doctrine of Common Grace means God prevents Adam’s fallen race from being as evil as we could be. He grants power to all humans to in some measure overcome the race’s total corruption by sin and, being made in God’s image, to impact Adam’s kingdom (earth) in a positive way—helping it reach its full and morally good potential—making good products, passing just laws, rewarding good behavior, caring for the needy, punishing some evil behavior. When Christians never affirm the good accomplished by non-Christians, or the secular culture, but always attack them, it is like saying to a musician friend, “I hate music,” or a football player, “I think football is dumb and teaches violence.” Christians seem to always be putting down non-Christians and their world. How effective is that for winning friends and influencing people?

5. The failure to say “Me Too.” My default thinking is, “To draw people to Christ, I need to grow to be more holy like Jesus. Then they will see him in me.” But in reality, what seemed to draw people to Jesus was not his moral perfection but that he identified with them. The Word became flesh. Jesus sympathizes with weaknesses because “in every respect he has been tempted as we are” (Heb 4:15). What will draw non-believers to us is not our “righteous” life. Many non-Christians think Christianity is for good people and not them. Identification with others builds bridges. If we want our biblical truth to “land” we need to:

Identify with being a sinner; be astounded that God loves you anyway
Identify with weakness; resist sending the message I have it together.
Identify with doubt; I doubt that God is good and the Bible is true, a lot.
Identify with being normal; don’t send the message, Christians are weird.
Identify with worry; I worry about how my kids are going to turn out a lot.
Identify with failure; I mess up so often as a husband it’s a miracle my wife hasn’t left me.

By God’s grace, I may be RIGHT about God’s truth in our culture. But that doesn’t mean anybody is going to listen to me.

For Further Prayerful Thought:

1. Which aspect of fastening the belt of truth around ourselves stood out to you?

2. Why is it important in today’s word to surround our loved ones with truth?

3. How does Jesus’ teaching not to give holy things to dogs or throw our pearls before swine resonate with your experience? Are there times when you have thought that a person is not spiritually in a place to hear this truth?

4. How do Paul and Barnabas follow this teaching from Jesus in Acts 13:44-49. What Thoughts do you have about trying to determine is a potential hearer of biblical truth is in a place to value it or not?

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Praying to Defeat Evil

On 02 August, 2025 By Gary Yagel

Hi Men,

This is Gary Yagel, producer of the Mission Focused Men for Christ Podcast/Blog. Wouldn’t you love to have a vibrant prayer life, to prove repeatedly the mighty power of prayer in your own experience, to taste victory in your battle to see sin overcome, and kingdom righteousness prevail in the spheres where you are praying? Don’t you long for your prayers to bring great glory to God and great consternation and defeat to Satan? This episode completes our study of the six foundational principles that Jesus taught his followers to follow for their prayers to have power. Today’s episode from the past is the second in our current August-September 2025 series, Arming for Spiritual Battle. I think this episode will energize your prayer life just as mine is energized whenever I review these 6 profound principles for praying to defeat evil, taught by our Master.

Today, we continue the series, Winning Spiritual Battles Because We Use Our Spiritual Weapons. Every guy who gets this blog would stand at the door of his house with a shotgun to protect his family physically. But most Christian men feel inept and inadequate at fighting to protect them, spiritually. As we saw last week, Jesus told his disciples the ultimate weapon for defeating Satan is prayer. But if we are going to use this weapon effectively in spiritual battle, we need to understand it. This episode continues our study of what Jesus taught are the six basic parts of effective prayer, in Matt 6:9-13.

As we seek to follow Jesus’ mission for our individual lives, advancing the righteous reign of King Jesus over our heart loyalties and attitudes, as well as implementing his agenda in our role as husband, father, employee/employer, neighbor, church member, steward of resources, and ambassador of the kingdom, we must displace the kingdom of darkness. Just as a military invasion begins with cruise missiles and bombing runs, our efforts to advance the kingdom on the ground must begin with prayer, the only weapon capable of dislodging the enemy from its strongholds. Prayer is such a potent offensive weapon for advancing the kingdom of Christ over earth, that in Psalm 2 we hear God The Father identify prayer as the way Christ’s kingdom spreads. The Father promises the Anointed One, “ASK of me, and I will make the nations your heritage, and the ends of the earth your possession.” As Christ-followers join Christ in ASKING that his kingdom would advance, The Father promises to act.

Jesus teaches the same six principles of prayer in Matthew 6:9-13 and in Luke 11:2-4. The only difference is that in Matthew, Jesus gives an explanation of three of the principles. He explains, may your kingdom come, (Matt 6:10a & Luke 11:2) when he continues may your will be done on earth as it is in heaven (Matt 6:10b). He explains lead us not into temptation (Matt 6:13a, Luke 11:4) when he continues, but deliver us from evil (Matt 6:13b). Jesus amplifies forgive us our debts as we have forgiven our debtors (Matt 6:12 & Luke 11:4) two verses later in Matthew 6:14-15, when he says, For if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you, but if you do not forgive others their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.

Last week we saw how radically different prayer for Christ-followers is from the religious repetition of holy sayings regimented for certain prayer times in other world religions. These times in Judaism were 9 AM, 12 PM, and 3 PM. The two rote Jewish prayers to be recited were the Shema, Deut 6:4-9, and the Shemoneh ‘esreh, which means eighteen, because if consisted of 18 rote prayers to be recited. Jesus’ teaching about prayer was entirely different; it was not formal, structured, external, regimented words spoken to God as ritual, but an intimate, heart-driven conversation originating from a living, dynamic relationship with The Father. Let’s review the first three prayer principles, which we examined last week, before digging into the final three. So, by way of summary,

1. The principle of ADOPTION: Matt 6:9 Our Father in heaven, which gives us the ENVIRONEMNT for prayer. His help, and spiritual power don’t have to be pried out of his tight-fisted hands. Through Christ we are God’s adopted children and, as it happens, our particular father LOVES TO GIVE GOOD GIFTS TO HIS CHILDREN, especially spiritual power through the Holy Spirit. Jesus says, What father among you, if his son asks for a fish, will instead of a fish give him a serpent; or if he asks for an egg, will give him a scorpion? If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him (Lk 11:11-13)! It is noteworthy that Jesus had used nearly identical words in his Sermon on the Mount (Matt 7:9-11), but in the Luke account, Jesus substitutes Holy Spirit for good gifts. Both are true. God loves to give good gifts to his children. But the best gift is the power of the Holy Spirit at work in our lives. I believe that Jesus viewed prayer much more as reporting to our forward battle station and launching a prayer assault against the kingdom of darkness for the advance of Christ’s kingdom of righteousness than he does, emailing headquarters with a list of our needed provisions. It is emailing that list, which we will get to in a moment. But prayer, as God designed it, is relentlessly fighting the enemy who wants to destroy you and your family and besmirch the reputation of God. It is being the man, the protector, that God designed Adam to be. “Your sonship,” says Jesus, “means being indwelt by the Holy Spirit, who is the producer of spiritual fruit in our lives. The first prayer principle to remember, is ADOPTION, the environment of prayer. We come to God as his beloved child, calling him Father, a father who loves to give good gifts and especially the power of the Holy Spirt to those who ask.”

2. The second prayer principle is ADORATION: vs 9 continues, Hallowed be your name. The MOTIVATION for Prayer. May your name be honored. May you be glorified. May your name be held in high esteem by the whole world. Jesus modeled this aspect of praying at the beginning of his prayer in John 17, When Jesus had spoken these words, he lifted up his eyes to heaven, and said, Father, the hour has come; glorify your Son THAT THE SON MAY GLORIFY YOU.” A few verses later, Jesus reveals that this desire for The Father to be glorified was the focus of his life, I glorified you on earth, having accomplished the work that you gave me to do. (Jn 17:4). At the heart of the request, “May your name be hallowed” is “a burning desire that the whole world may bow before God in adoration, in reverence, in praise, in worship, in honor, and in thanksgiving” (The Sermon on the Mount). The more our prayers are rooted in ADORATION—our desire to see the name and reputation of God honored, the more power they possess.

3. The third prayer principle and one which very often is neglected in our prayers. It is ADVANCING the kingdom: vs 10 May your kingdom come. The PURPOSE of prayer. “The focus of your praying,” says Jesus, “should be the advance of my kingdom of righteousness over earth.” Praying “May your kingdom come (i.e. may your will be done on earth as it is in heaven)” is the primary purpose of PRAYER because it is the primary purpose of Christians’ LIVES. We are to seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness in human hearts and in the culture all over the earth, every square inch of which, King Jesus claims as his own.

In the book of Acts, Peter and John were arrested, warned not to proclaim the gospel, and released. In response, the church gathered to battle for the advance of the kingdom through prayer. In this prayer, they quoted Psalm 2. The opening verses of Psalm 2 speak of the cosmic rebellion against Yahweh, Why did the Gentiles rage, and the peoples plot in vain? The kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers were gathered together, AGAINST THE LORD AND AGAINST HIS ANOINTED. Psalm 2 continues, telling us that Yahweh laughs at their supposed power. Why? Because his answer to the rebellion of the kingdom of darkness is to send Christ, the Anointed One, to recover Adam’s lost kingdom. Palm 2:6 records God saying, As for me, I have set my King on Zion, my holy hill. (vs 6) Psalm 2 then describes the words of Yahweh to His Son recorded from the point of view of Jesus. The Lord (Yahweh) said to me (Christ), “You are my Son; today I have begotten you. Ask of me, and I will make the nations your heritage, and the ends of the earth your possession (vs 7b-8).

Notice the process to which Yahweh points for the spread of Christ’s kingdom. ASK OF ME and I will make the nations your heritage. What is Jesus doing right now? Scripture tells us, he is ASKING. He is at the right hand of the father interceding. What is he asking for? His church to be empowered to make disciples of the nations. All authority has been given to me, said Jesus. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations (Matt 28-18-19). Starting with our own sinful hearts being transformed, Christ’s kingdom of righteousness expands out into the world from nation to nation through the ASKING of the Son. Whatever his reason, God has ordained that the powers of darkness must be dislodged from the spiritual ground they hold by ASKING, i.e. by PRAYER made in Jesus’ name. In Matt 6:33, part of the same sermon that contains the Lord’s Prayer, Jesus teaches Christians that their main responsibility is to seek first the reign of Jesus righteousness over every aspect of their lives. That means loving Jesus more, praising his perfections more fully as we grow to know who he really is, growing in love, joy, peace, patience, kindness goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control, loving my wife well, going on the offensive to pray for those in my circle of friends who are lost, etc. etc. But here is the point: The only way this advance of kingdom righteousness will succeed is by first loosening Satan’s hold on that domain through prevailing prayer. So, Jesus teaches us that a major part of daily prayer is praying, May your kingdom come. May your righteous agenda prevail in my heart attitudes and in shaping every sphere of life where I have influence.

The first three prayer principles express a focus upwards towards the Lord—experiencing his presence, motivated to see his name honored, and seeking to advance Christ’s kingdom in specific ways through our lives. The final three principles focus on our own needs, physically, relationally, and spiritually.

4. The fourth principle of prayer is identified by the word ALL. Pray for ALL I need. Give us this day our daily bread. We’ve seen the environment of prayer, the motive of prayer, the purpose of prayer. Now we see The DEPENDENCY of Prayer. What a marvelous thought—that the god who created the entire universe, who is the god of all space, time, and eternity, who is infinitely holy and totally self-sufficient, should care about supplying our daily bread. This petition is an invitation to bring every need—physical, mental, emotional, relational, and spiritual to him. Whatever I need TODAY to get me through, is my request to God, my Father, who is also named, Jehovah Jireh, The Lord will Provide. Jesus knew our human propensity to worry and he gives us his prescription for it. Name the things you are worried about. Specifically ask me to provide whatever you need, and you will know the joy of seeing me provide. Paul writes, Don’t worry over anything whatever; TELL GOD EVERY DETAIL OF YOUR NEEDS in earnest and thankful prayer, and the peace of God which transcends human understanding, will keep constant guard over your hearts and minds as they rest in Christ Jesus. (Phil 4:6-7).

One of the best ways to implement this prayer principle is to write down specific requests, keeping a prayer journal. Here are two entries from mine—one from my early days of learning to trust Christ and one from two weeks ago. 1) After graduating from Penn State, I worked two years for the government and saved the money to go to seminary. But as I returned my third year, I was $1500.00 short. When I got back to school, I contracted with a church to pay me $700 for the work study program. Still needing $800, I stopped by the student union to check on mail that might have come in over the summer. In my box was a scholarship check for $800.00.

This past December as we sent out a letter to our financial partners for year-end giving, we faced a daunting challenge. We normally raise about 30% of our budget through yearend giving. Because Covid 19 hurt our donors and stripped away my speaking opportunities, we brought a $15,000 deficit into December causing our year end target to b over $29,000. What was worse, those we could count on to give large year-end gifts were not in a position to give anything. But on December 31, I opened the mail to a notice that a friend of our ministry had donated $15,000 of stock. Others stepped in with the other half and we raised the full amount. God loves to supply our needs. I think I understand that a little bit because as a father, nothing pleases me more than providing what my children need to flourish.

5. The fifth prayer principle is ADMISION of sin. Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors. This principle focusses on the HONESTY of prayer. Jesus identifies the two most foundational of all poisons to human relationships—a guilty conscience and an unforgiving spirit. This fifth principle of prayer reveals that Jesus’ concern about how past wounds can impact our hearts is so great that he made this matter one of the top six concerns in prayer. “Prayer,” says Jesus, “is listening to your conscience. Have you offended another human?” Jesus has commanded earlier in this sermon, If you are offering your gift at the altar and there remember that your brother has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar and go. First be reconciled to your brother, and then come and offer your gift. It is also vital to confess our sins against God regularly to him because we cannot walk with God, who is Light, and continue to walk in darkness. We need to confess our sins to God to maintain open fellowship with him and because the more we seek God’s forgiveness for OUR sins against HIM, the more we are empowered with grace to forgive OTHERS who sin against US. Jesus knows that resentment towards those who have wronged us is a poison that will destroy us from within. Moreover, being forgiving towards others is to Jesus, a distinctive mark of being his follower. Those who are forgiven, must be quick to be those who are forgiving.

Some years ago, on a warm spring evening before Covid, a young Korean exchange student—a leader among the Christian students at the University of Pennsylvania, walked from his flat down to the corner to drop a letter to his parents in the mailbox. Turning away from the mailbox, he stepped into a gang—eleven leather jacketed teenagers who attacked him with their fists, knives, and a lead pipe. Later, when he was discovered by the police, he was dead. All of Philadelphia cried out for vengeance. The DA obtained legal permission to try the boys as adults so they could be given the death penalty. Then a letter arrived from Korea, from the dead boy’s parents and twenty other relatives. It read:

Our family has met together and we have decided to petition that the most generous treatment possible within the laws of your government be given to those who have committed this criminal action….In order to give evidence of our sincere hope contained in this petition, we have decided to save money to start a fund to be used for the religious, educational, vocational, and social guidance of these boys when they are released… We express our hope with a spirit received from the Gospel of our Savior Jesus Christ who died for our sins.

Jesus, knowing that both guilt and bitterness destroy relationships teaches us as a regular part of prayer to confess our sins and search our hearts to be sure we have forgiven others.

6. The final prayer principle given by Jesus is ALERTNESS to temptation. Lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil. This principle teaches us that ANTICIPATING POTENTIAL TEMPTATION is part of daily prayer. I must admit this expression puzzled me for years. Why would I have to ask God not to lead me into temptation. He is holy. James says, Let no one say when he is tempted, “I am being tempted by God,” for God cannot be tempted with evil, and he himself tempts no one. Yet, there has to be something very important here, to be included as the sixth prayer principle. Not only that, but Jesus told his three best friends, Peter, James, and John twice in the Garden of Gethsemane, Pray that you may not enter into temptation (Luke 22:40, 46). I believe the clue to understanding this petition and Jesus admonition in the Garden of Gethsemane is noticing the way that Mark and Matthew translated Jesus words in Gethsemane. They translate whatever Aramaic word Jesus actually used, not just as pray (which Luke did) but as WATCH AND PRAY that you may not enter into temptation (Mk 14:38, Matt 26:41). This admonition is repeated by Peter who commands, Be sober-minded; be watchful. Your adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour (1 Pet 5:8).

I believe that in the Lord’s Prayer, a pattern for daily prayer is given for us to follow. Jesus is saying, Think about the day ahead. Where might you be tempted? Where might God’s providence lead you that you might be tempted and prepare ahead of time to be alert and resist. I’ve been walking with Christ for over fifty years, and the only time I can remember doing this was when an X girlfriend visited my wife and me and I asked my accountability brother, Rick, to ask me about every second she stayed with us. Other than on that occasion, I don’t think I’ve ever thought to do this. Yet, Jesus was very concerned that we do this. Twice, he urged Peter, James and John, “Watch and pray that you may not enter into temptation.” Could it be that many Christian men are losing spiritual battles because we don’t realize that this is how Jesus taught us to pray—to start the day with a few seconds of thought about where the temptation to sin might strike?

Prayer, as Jesus taught it, is not a bunch of nice feelings wrapped up in a sweet request to God to heal Lauren’s 83-year-old next door neighbor who fell Thursday. God cares about her. But what Jesus taught is that prayer is WAREFARE. It is the way the kingdom of righteousness prevails over the kingdom of evil. It is the men of today’s church who need to heed this call to arms. It is the men who need to reclaim prayer as the way to fight for our loved ones against the triumvirate, Satan, sin, and death who (though ultimately defeated), if unopposed in this world will bring enormous devastation into their lives. I close with some words that have been an inspiration to me.

Prevailing prayer is the most divine ministry you will ever have. Nothing is more Christ-like or involve more cooperation with Christ. No form of Christian service is so universally open to all and so high in Christ’s priority for all Christians as prevailing prayer. It is Christ’s desire, Christ’s call, and Christ’s command. Lord, teach us to prevail (Mighty Prevailing Prayer, by Wesley Duewel)!

For Further Prayerful Thought:

What would you say to a believer who said he thought that reciting the Lord’s prayer at the end of his daily bible reading is what Jesus taught?
What struck you about Jesus teaching us to tell our heavenly father what our practical needs are? Have you ever thought about keeping a prayer journal?
Why does it make sense that one of the six prayer concerns we should have is looking at past events to see if there is unconfessed guilt or resentment towards another?
How can you be more watchful of temptation coming into your life?

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The Weapon Satan Fears Most

On 26 July, 2025 By Gary Yagel

Hi Men,

This is Gary Yagel, producer of the Mission Focused Men for Christ Podcast/Blog. I want to thank you for helping us pass the quarter-million episodes downloaded milestone. We are grateful to God that you are finding the podcast helpful.

Please consider letting other men know about this tool.

Beginning today and continuing through August and into September we will continue to release a new episode every Sunday evening. But they will be former episodes that we think are still valuable in 2025. As we pursue our mission of seeking the spread of Christ’s kingdom agenda of righteousness over our heart loyalties, heart attitudes, and every sphere of our lives, Paul reminds us that this battle for righteousness to rule is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places. To win, we must fight with the spiritual weapons Jesus gives us. So, I never tire of being reminded of what these weapons are and how to use them. That is why our new August series from the past is Arming for Spiritual Battle.

Using the Spiritual Weapon Satan Most Fears

As we seek to run well the race marked out for us i.e. advance the righteous reign of King Jesus in our own lives, the lives of those we love and throughout our world, we must overcome the kingdom of darkness. In his wisdom, God has ordained one, primary offensive weapon that overthrows the kingdom of darkness: prayer. Jesus said to Peter, “Satan has demanded to sift you as wheat, but I have prayed for you “(Luke 22:31-32). One veteran missionary writes,

There is nothing on earth that Satan so fears as prayer. He cannot triumph over prevailing prayer. Satan is more afraid of your praying than of your pure life or zealous witness. One’s life may be a beautiful witness that cannot be silenced, but prayer is a militant force that has the potential of defeating Satan, destroying his works, and driving him out of places and lives he claims as his own. (Wesley Duewel, Mighty Prevailing Prayer.)

Could it be that we and are loved ones are losing spiritual battles because we’re not really fighting those battles through prayer, as Jesus wants us to? The next two episodes study what Jesus specifically told us are The Six Basic Parts of Prayer.

The background for this request is enlightening. Jesus had already taught them how to pray in the Sermon on the Mount, two years earlier in his ministry. Since then, they had been sent out by Jesus with instructions Proclaim as you go, saying, ‘The kingdom of heaven is at hand.’ Heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the leper cast out demons (Matt 10:7-8.) They had returned from one of their missions saying, “Lord even the demons are subject to us in your name.” Yet, afterwards, on a separate occasion, the disciples were unable to cast out a demon. They must have been intrigued by Jesus’ explanation: This kind cannot be driven out by anything but prayer. (Mark 10:29). Jesus clearly teaches that Satan cannot stand against PRAYER.

In response to his disciples’ request, “teach us to pray,” in Luke 11, Jesus gave six principles for effective prayer. They are the same 6 principles given in Matt 6:9-13 in the Sermon on the Mount, popularly known as The Lord’s Prayer. This teaching is not intended as a rote prayer to be recited in church liturgies; rather it is a prayer pattern that covers the six most foundational truths about prayer, a kind of skeleton that needs to be clothed with specifics of our situation. We know that Jesus did not intend this “How to” model primarily to be recited, because in the two verses immediately before the Lord’s Prayer Jesus said, “When you pray, do not heap up empty phrases as the Gentiles do, for they think that they will be heard for their many words. Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him.” False religions commonly employ the mindless repetition of rote, “sacred” prayer phrases, substituting a kind of self-hypnotism for prayer. The prayer methodology Jesus teaches could not be more different. Let’s dig into these 6 prayer principles from the pattern of Matt 6:9-13.

1. ADOPTION: vs 9 “Our Father in heaven.” The ENVIRONEMNT for Prayer. Prayer, as Jesus taught it, begins by remembering that those who belong to Christ don’t need a Rosary, a prayer wheel, prayer beads or pre-written words to be recited to draw near to God; prayer is coming to our heavenly Father, who loves us more than we can know. We are able to draw near because of our justification, i.e. Christ’s righteousness is imputed to us, turning away the just wrath of God the Judge. Instead, he declares us righteous. But salvation doesn’t end there; it is followed by adoption. As J.I. Packer observes,

Justification is a forensic idea, conceived in terms of law and viewing God as judge…But contrast this now with adoption. Adoption is a family idea, conceived in terms of love and viewing God as father. In adoption, God takes us into his family and fellowship, and establishes us as His children and heirs. Closeness, generosity, and affection are at the heart of the relationship. To be right with God the judge is a great thing, but to be loved and cared for by God the father is a greater thing. (Knowing God).

Because of our adoption, we pray to our heavenly FATHER:

Who runs to us, like the prodigal’s father with arms wide open whenever we turn towards him,
Who desires to bless us even more than we desire to be blessed,
Whose ambition for us transcends our imagination,
Who delights in his children, finding great pleasure when we spend time with him in prayer.

“The first prayer principle to remember,” says Jesus, “is ADOPTION, the environment of prayer—you come to God as his beloved child, calling him Father.

2. ADORATION: vs 9 continues, “Hallowed be your name.” The MOTIVATION for Prayer. Notice that it is also the first request in the pattern Jesus gave us. May your name be honored. May you be glorified. May your name be held in high esteem by the whole world. This desire for God to be glorified was the focus of Jesus’ entire life (John 17:4). No wonder he taught his followers to begin their prayer, “May your name be glorified.” We were created to glorify God. The chief end of man, says the Westminster Shorter Catechism, is to glorify God and enjoy him forever. On the surface this may seem selfish of God; but I believe that whatever most glorifies God will ultimately most benefit us.

Not only are we made for God’s glory, but the deepest longings of our heart are satisfied by loving our Lord WITH A HEART THAT WANTS MORE THAN ANYTHING ELSE TO SEE HIS NAME HELD IN HIGH ESTEEM BY EVERY BEING IN THE UNIVERSE. This petition points to the motivation for our requests in prayer. Lloyd Jones in his classic work, The Sermon on the Mount observes that this petition is rooted in “a burning desire that the whole world may bow before God in adoration, in reverence, in praise, in worship, in honor, and in thanksgiving” (The Sermon on the Mount) What are some practical ways this desire can express itself in prayer?

a. Take a moment early in your prayer to express words of adoration to the Lord. This petition reminds us that our life purpose is to honor God, so why not honor him at the beginning of your prayer by choosing an attribute of his that has been especially meaningful lately and praising him for it.

b. Appeal to God’s honor and reputation in your requests, following Abraham’s and Moses’ example. In Genesis 18, Abraham secured the safety of Lot by reaffirming that God would not slay the righteous with the wicked. Moses, in Deut 9:28, urges God not to destroy the wicked Israelites appealing to God’s reputation—lest the land from which you brought us say, “Because Yahweh was not able to bring them into the land that he promised them.”

The more our prayers are rooted in ADORATION—our desire to see the name and reputation of God honored, the more power they possess.

3. ADVANCING the kingdom: vs 10 “May your kingdom come.” The PURPOSE of prayer. “The focus of our praying,” says Jesus, “is the advance of his kingdom of righteousness over earth.” Even in Jesus’ day, there was confusion over the term kingdom of God. Jesus was NOT saying that one of the six pillars of daily prayer is asking Jesus every day to come back to earth soon! Rather, Jesus explains what “May your kingdom come” means in the next phrase. Verse 10 continues, May your will to be done ON EARTH AS IT IS IN HEAVEN.” In heaven, there is no sin; righteousness reigns. The kingdom coming refers to the advance of Christ’s kingdom of righteousness over earth. The more that happens, THE MORE THE KINGDOM OF EARTH WILL BE LIKE THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN. That is what it means to pray for God’s kingdom to come—that God’s righteousness from heaven will spread over the earth. As we saw last week, this is what Jesus is talking about a few verses later, when in verse 33 he commands, “Seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness,” It is to SEEK the rule of King Jesus and his righteousness over our heart loyalties and our heart attitudes. It is recovering Adam’s call to develop the potential of the earth while seeking the restoration of rightness—fixing everything broken by sin in every sphere of our lives.

The reason so many Christians today mistakenly think that praying for Christ’s kingdom to come means asking daily for him to come back is that they have been erroneously taught that the coming of the kingdom of God in the NT is primarily future. To the contrary, the NT teaches that the kingdom of God comes in two stages. Jesus has already inaugurated that kingdom but will return to consummate it. He has defeated the usurpers of Adam’s kingdom. The proof that Satan, sin and death are defeated is Jesus’ resurrection—the curse for Adam’s sin—death and the decay of the physical world—has been ultimately broken. Jesus is the firstborn of the new creation. His ascension means he has taken back the throne of this world. Paul prays that the Ephesian Christians will be able to grasp their power right now to advance Christ’s kingdom.

I pray that you may know… what is the immeasurable greatness of his power toward us who believe, according to the working of his great might that he worked in Christ when he raised him from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly places, far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and above every name that is named, not only in this age but also in the one to come. And he put all things under his feet and gave him as head over all things to the church, which is his body, the fullness of him who fills all in all (Eph 1:18-23).

Although Jesus is king RIGHT NOW, during this church age, he allows his kingly authority to be resisted. He has decisively broken the backs of Satan, sin, and death, and taken back Adam’s throne. But these enemies remain during this church age—in a sense conducting guerilla warfare against efforts to advance Christ’s kingdom in Christ’s ascension power. They can only be driven out and overcome in the power of Christ, fighting with the spiritual weapons he gives us. That is why prayer is our greatest weapon. To pray, “May your kingdom come” is to ask God to bring our own heart loyalties and attitudes into submission to the King. It is to request Christ’s power to share the gospel and for his power to enable others to surrender to Christ’s kingship. It is to seek Christ’s power to undergird our efforts to bring about rightness, wholeness in every sphere where we have influence, as we try to implement Christ’s agenda of righteousness. In this age, the ADVANCE of Christ’s kingdom is accomplished very largely through prayer. Wesley Duewell, one of our generation’s leaders in worldwide prayer writes,

Prevailing prayer is God’s ordained means for extending His kingdom, for defeating Satan and his empire of darkness and evil, and for fulfilling God’s eternal plan and bringing into effect His good will on earth. It is God’s means of covering the earth with his blessings. Prevailing prayer is God’s priority strategy for our (the current church) age (Mighty Prevailing Prayer).

Praying “May your kingdom come (i.e. may your will be done on earth as it is in heaven)” is the primary purpose of prayer because it is the primary purpose of Christian’s lives. We are to seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness in human hearts and in the culture all over the earth, every square inch of which, King Jesus claims as his own. As we saw last week, to seek requires an intentional focus, a step-by-step plan. What Jesus is teaching us this week is, “Saturate that plan in prayer. Accompany your PLAN and EFFORT to seek Christ’s righteous rule in a particular sphere of your life with PRAYER that Christ’s righteous rule (KINGDOM) will prevail. Although modern warfare has changed dramatically, the Iraq war provides a useful analogy for spiritual warfare. It began with a full day of bombing, before ground troops invaded. God has ordained prayer as the foundational means of dislodging Satan’s hold on various spheres of life. Here is a great example of kingdom prayer at work:

Some women from a church in Fort Collins, CO understood this truth and began to pray for Christ’s kingdom of righteousness to prevail over a strip club, called The Hunt Club, near their church. One night, Aaron Bekkela received a message from one of his strippers, “My mom and her friends are praying for you.” Several years later he came to faith in Christ. He then felt prompted to prod the two co-owners, his brothers, to sell the business. Instead of continuing the business he sought to find a group of Christians who would buy the property and re-purpose it into a ministry center to the community. A man named Rob Cowless, visited the strip club, and Bekkela’s proposal. In his words.

When we passed through a second doorway, we entered the locker room. Again, it was a dirty, nasty place with only a concrete floor. In the middle was an oversized vanity setup—a mirror some six feet long with bulb lights all around—where the dancers did their makeup before going onstage. Surrounding on all sides were rows and rows of metal lockers. I was stunned as I stared at several with pictures of children taped onto the metal doors. Who were the boys and girls in these photographs? In another moment it hit me; these were the kids these women were trying to feed and clothe by working in this place. A knot began to tighten in my throat. Here, behind the scenery of what men viewed as a sensuous house of glamour, was the total opposite. A lot of these women came here night after night trying to hold their lives together.

Rob Cowless and his wife, Joy, decided to join with Aaron; they began to pray for the kingdom of God to be further manifested on a plot of ground in Fort Collins, CO, known at the time as The Hunt Club. They raised the funds to buy out the three owners. Aaron immediately returned his third to contribute to the renovation of the building. When they closed the doors of the club they were able to assist over twenty of the former employees with transitions to new careers, helping with everything from rent and utilities, to groceries, counseling, and even tuition for going back to school.

A few months later, The Genesis Project was launched from the completely renovated property, with the goal of reaching out both to those who patronized The Hunt Club and those who worked there. Before long they developed after school ministries for the children in the trailer park behind the building and Kids Café so that during the summer, low-income kids who qualified for free lunches during the school year had a midday meal. One man came by the new ministry center with tears in his eyes and said, “I lost my marriage here.” Later, through tears, Aaron told Rob, “In the early days, my job was recruitment of good-looking coeds from Colorado State. I told them that they could graduate debt free by working just a few nights a week. Some would, but I knew most would end up dropping out of school, sucked into the vacuum of the business, destroying their futures.”

Satan claimed a patch of ground in Fort Collins, called The Hunt Club. Christ’s warriors, beginning with a heart-broken mom because her daughter had taken a job as a stripper, fought the kingdom of darkness over that patch of ground through prayer. To pray, “May your kingdom come” is to do a whole lot more than put in a request for Jesus to come back soon. It is to lay hold of tremendous spiritual power promised to the followers of Christ who unrelentingly, PRAY.

For Further Prayerful Thought:

1. Why is it important to you to remember that your prayers are directed to one who has adopted you into his family at great cost?

2. Why is the name of God worthy of supreme honor. How can you increase the passion for your life to bring the Lord honor?

3. What would you say to gently correct someone who thought that praying, “Thy kingdom come” means to ask Jesus to return to earth soon?

4. What was the most exciting part of the story of the Kingdom of Christ prevailing on a piece of ground in Fort Collins, CO?

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Two Nutrients Daughters’ Hearts Need from Dad

On 02 July, 2025 By Gary Yagel

Last week we observed that no one can nurture a child as well as his own or her own mother. In a similar way our job as fathers is to provide what our girls need to flourish—to become all that God created them to be. This episode examines two ingredients required by every daughter’s heart to be able to thrive.

Twenty years ago, I found myself wrestling with what to do about my exhaustion. I had five children at home, an elderly father with Alzheimer’s living with us, a growing church that had added staff and was requiring more of my time, and an increasing desire on my part to pursue a DMin degree to sharpen my ministry skills to benefit our church. What Ied me to my decision was something obvious; yet, it was something I’d never seriously considered. That is the fact that many other pastors could lead my church, and would lead it when I left. But no one can be a father to my kids but me. My decision was to cut back on the hours I was devoting to the church, and postpone the pursuit of my DMin 7 years until 4 of my 5 children had left home.

It’s been said that there are three categories of dads:

Uninvolved dads (those physically gone or emotionally disconnected).
Involved dads (most Christian dads fit this category)
Strategic dads (those who proactively seek to understand what their children need from them to thrive)

This episode is intended for strategic dads who want to now how to help their daughter flourish. Strategic dads also have the benefit of believing in creation; so they know that God created males and females to be different, in order to complete each other. Therefore, we understand that some of the needs of daughters will be different than the needs of sons. Michael Farris, the proud father of 6 daughters and 4 sons wrote an insightful book entitled, What a Daughter Needs from Her Dad: How a Man Prepares His Daughter for Life. He underscores a very important principle about understanding a daughter. He writes, At the foundation of building a proper relationship with your daughter, you must realize that she is a woman in the making. And thus, you will have to realize that her emotional needs and priorities are going to be infinitely closer to those of your wife than to your own.

Sadly, there are Christian fathers who are hearing that making any distinctions between male and female is sexist. Those who believe that myth will fail their daughters. Creation tells us that daughters have to be different from sons because sons, alone, cannot fully bear the image of God. Only sons and daughters, as they complete each other in relationship, can fully represent who God is. Biblical Christians celebrate the uniqueness of femininity; they don’t apologize for it, and certainly don’t demean it.

So, lets return to Farris’ profound point about raising daughters: At the foundation of building a proper relationship with your daughter, you must realize that she is a woman in the making. And thus, you will have to realize that her emotional needs and priorities are going to be infinitely closer to those of your wife than to your own. The rest of the episode examines two needs that Scripture explicitly says husbands are to meet in their wives; so they are needs a father must meet in his daughter’s heart. This information is not only biblical, but 80% of it comes from interviews I conducted with 5 godly women of various ages.

From God’s command to husbands, Love your wives…nourishing and cherishing her (Eph 5:26-29), we want to consider 4 practical answers to the question:

A. How Does a Father Help His Daughter FEEL UNCONDITIONALLY LOVED?

1. By providing the security she needs. The best way to do this is by loving her mom well. This foundation of her family is the love of her mom and dad for each other. If that footing is shaky she will feel insecure. She needs a dad who loves her mom, unconditionally despite what her mom may look like on the outside. Also, a daughter needs to be shown that her father cares. A lot of times Dads can assume they tell their children “I love you” often enough, or that their daughter automatically knows they do; but hearing it and hearing it often means a lot. Here is a quote from a woman I interviewed,

A daughter needs to know that her father’s love for her will not diminish. She needs to feel secure and safe in that love. A father protects and defends with a passion that expresses love that will not change. His love gives strength and comfort. No matter what life brings you know he will be there. My father was in the Coast Guard, so I grew up with ships being part of our life. My Dad’s love was my anchor.

2. The second way a daughter needs to know she is loved is by you proving she is important by relentlessly devoting your time to her. One daughter writes:

I can never remember a time when my father, as busy as he was, was not there for me. One thing that stands out most in my mind is that he never missed a ball game that I played, be it home or away! I played field hockey in the fall, basketball, in the winter, and softball in the spring. My dad always came to every game, and his voice was the one I heard over the crowd cheering me on, or telling me how to play better. It didn’t matter if it was forty degrees outside and raining; he would be the only parent on the sidelines in a field hockey game. In a gym full of opposing fans three hours from home, I remember hearing my dad encouraging me to block out when going for a rebound.

This may not seem like a great deal to many. But to a young girl on the brink of womanhood, unsure, insecure, and a lot of time confused, it was nice being able to look into the stands and see my dad. Always there, always rooting me on, whether it be praise or correction. His actions were a reaffirmation that he was there not only to watch my games, but also to cheer me on in life. I never felt he was too busy for me, even though he was a very busy man. He made time to take an interest in what was important to his little girl. I knew that if he was interested in what I enjoyed, then he must be interested in me as a person. What a great thing to know that your father is always there, always waiting in the stands to cheer you on.

On a practical note, another woman provides helpful insight: I have observed that sometimes dads have trouble finding something in common with their daughters to bond over. You don’t always need something in common- let her tag along with you when you’re running errands, invite her to throw the football or help you wash the car, teach her to ride her bike, or enter her world by playing tea party with her, taking her on “dates,” helping her with her homework, etc.

3. A third way a dad needs to help his daughter feel unconditionally loved to listen to her heart. To feel loved a daughter needs to know that her dad is listening intently. This seems like common sense, but it is hard to do. One daughter writes, Put away your phone when she is talking to you and make eye contact with her. Show an interest by asking questions, “How do you think you played?” Remind her that she can always come to you and that you always have her back. Try to overcome our masculine tendency to listen in order to fix the problem and, instead, listen to understand her feelings. How did that make you feel. Overcome our male tendency to always teach, and ask for her opinion. What do you think?

4. A daughter needs her father to set firm boundaries and follow through with consequences always reminding her that he loves her but not her actions. Scripture assigns discipline to fathers and “daddy’s little girl” needs painful consequences for disobedience as much as his sons do. However, in my view, Emerson Eggerichs makes a valid point when talking about the differences in the discipline of sons and daughters. One of our interviewees sums up,

I think the advice from the book, Love and Respect In the Family is good. This is a paraphrase. “Be gentle when correcting her, especially in your tone. Girls take personally what is said to them and how it is sad, and can feel rejected and unloved when they are criticized. Girls are more likely to respond to encouraging or soft methods of correction, not in-your-face coaching or yelling. Also, don’t ask them to stop crying or hold in their feelings.”

So, the first need that our daughter has is the need to feel loved. And we’ve summarized four practical ways for dads to meet that need. The second need to meet in a daughter’s heart, in order for her to flourish is verbal affirmation. We take this need of a daughter from what Prov 31 teaches about the need of wives:

Her husband praises her: “Many women have done excellently, but you surpass them all.”

B. How Can a Father Help His Daughter BUILD A STRONG SELF-IMAGE

1. Constantly affirm her worth and value. She needs to have her father to, first, pay attention to who she is. He needs to notice her interests, strengths and personality, and motivations. He needs to remind her that she is a unique treasure and precious to him and God. The word, treasure, is the epitome of affirming that she is special, valuable, and unique. Her father needs to help her see and develop the gifts she’s been given and pay attention to who she wants to be. One woman describes why this is such a deeply felt need:

Outside of her home, a daughter is constantly bombarded with messages that she is not skinny enough, not beautiful enough, not smart enough, and just not enough. When she can come home to a refuge where she is told she is enough, that is what she needs to be able to go back out in the world of “not enough” messages again. She also needs to know that her dad messes up from time to time, and it’s okay to mess up, too.

2. Affirm both her outward beauty and inward beauty. The majority of the women interviewed said, “She needs to know that her father thinks she is beautiful” (referring to physical beauty). One woman added, “and help her understand that the desire to be beautiful is the way God made her.” It is true that Peter teaches fathers and daughters to see that beauty in a woman is so much more than outward appearance. It is also the unfading beauty of her character. Over-emphasizing her physical beauty can lead to insecurity, because that will fade with age and it is unwise to weigh our physical appearance too heavily in our view of ourselves. In my counseling experience, the most outwardly beautiful women struggle the most with insecurity.

Nevertheless, it is also possible to over-emphasize the inner beauty of character.

Over-emphasizing a daughter’s character can make her feel that it is done because she lacks outward beauty. Furthermore, Peter’s admonition to focus on the inner beauty of godliness, which a woman has greater control over than her physical appearance, should not be seen to condemn a woman’s God-given desire to be physically beautiful (with modesty). Scripture itself calls many women beautiful, referring not to their inner but outer, physical beauty. Christianity does not teach a dualism that makes the spiritual more important than the physical! The beauty of this physical world matters. In fact, my personal opinion is that part of a woman’s fundamental calling in exercising dominion over the earth is to make the world, (starting with herself and her home) beautiful. If women were not involved in the cultural mandate, I believe we would see mostly male functionality in our culture—not a lot of beauty!

I want to close this episode with two true stories given to me by the women who kindly answered my survey: Here is the first, from the world of teenagers:

I teach middle school students, and I see many girls literally fight tooth and nail because someone said some lie about them or called them a name. So, I was surprised at the wisdom that one of my little 6th graders shared with me as she worked on her project during lunch.“You know, I don’t need to wear those short skirts and I don’t need to fight with girls because of the lies they say. I know who I am.” I asked her to explain, and she went on to say her daddy had raised her to know she was beautiful and valued by Christ. If she was loved by her daddy and God, then why would she need to prove her worth by fighting or prove her beauty through the clothes she wore? What you wouldn’t know from just reading this story is that her daddy was at the time incarcerated. But though he was not physically present, he was still active in her life, even calling in for parent teacher conferences. The values he instilled in her had an obvious impact on her.

The second story shares some words spoken by this daughter as she looked back on her father’s life to try to describe what he meant to her. She writes, At my father’s memorial service I said that even as a grown woman, there was just something about feeling like Daddy’s little girl, knowing that in his eyes I was the prettiest, smartest, funniest, most talented girl in the world. That’s how I felt and that sums it up.

Dad's, we have enormous power to build up our daughter's sense of self-worth!

For Further Prayerful Thought:

1. In Matthew 3:17, as Jesus, God The Son Incarnate, was about to embark on his career, he heard the audible words of God The Father from heaven saying what every child wants to hear from his or her father. What are those words and how do they related to what we’ve examined about a daughter’s needs?

2. What stood out most to you about a daughter’s needs?

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The Harm of Undervaluing or Overvaluing Motherhood

On 02 July, 2025 By Gary Yagel

In today's world, many of our female loved ones are engaged in a very personal spiritual battle about their identity and calling as women, and how motherhood fits into that calling. This episode shows how the mistake of overvaluing motherhood will hurt them but also how undervaluing motherhood can be devastating. Only the biblical worldview gets this balance right; so that is our topic today.

Our wives, daughters, and granddaughters recognize intuitively that gender differences are not superficial, but deeply connected to their very sense of identity. Mothers with children at home are torn between their career, which they have devoted years preparing for and their call to motherhood. One woman describes her inner tumult when she got pregnant as a graduate student.

I was profoundly ambivalent about this pregnancy. What would having a child mean for my future? How could I have children and still grow professionally? The only way I knew to pursue my deepest interests, to fulfill my calling before the Lord, was in the world of ideas through academic study. But having a child seemed to pose a profound threat to the possibilities of continuing my studies. When men have families, most are able to continue working in their chosen fields (though admittedly, they often do make tradeoffs between family and career advancement.) At times, I confess, it struck me as decidedly unfair that women should experience such intense pressure to chose between the two major tasks of adult life—between pursuing a calling and raising the next generation (Total Truth, by Nancy Pearcey)

After she had her baby, she, like many career-focused women, was astonished at the intensity of the love bond she formed with her newborn. On the one hand, she did not want to leave him to go back to her career; yet she believed that she had gifts that matched the calling she could only pursue in the world of academia.

This workplace vs home choice, faced by modern women, is not a dilemma that has been faced by woman throughout most of history, because the workplace WAS the home. To illustrate this truth, let’s take a look at family life (in America) before the Industrial Revolution separated the workplace from the home.

In the Colonial period in America, families lived much like they have lived for millennia. The vast majority lived on farms or in peasant villages. Productive work to make a living was done by family households, often including members of the extended family, apprentices, servants, and hired hands. Stores, offices, and workshops were located in the front room. Living quarters were either upstairs or in the rear. (Interestingly that design was followed in building the US White House in the 1790s). The integration of home with work had huge implications for family life. Nancy Pearcey points out:

The husband and wife worked side by side on a daily basis, sharing in the same economic enterprise. For a colonial woman….marriage “meant to become coworker beside her husband...learning new skills in butchering, silversmith work, printing, or upholstering—whatever special skills the husband’s work required.” A useful measure of a society’s treatment of women is the status of widows and historical records show that in colonial days it was not uncommon for widows to carry on the family enterprise after their husband died—which means they had learned the requisite skills to keep the business going on their own.

Of course, as in nearly all societies, women were also responsible for a host of household task, requiring a wide range of skills: spinning wool and cotton; weaving it into cloth, sewing the family’s clothes, gardening and preserving food; preparing meals, making soap buttons, candles, and often developing a “cottage industry” that produced additional family income through her creative skills. Colonial America was not a panacea. Yet the wife partnering with her husband at home, both in earning a living and raising the children, seems quite similar to the portrait of godly womanhood revealed to us in Proverbs 31. The fact that work and child-rearing took place at home meant that mothers were able to combine economically productive work with raising children. It also meant that fathers were much more involve in raising children than they are today. In the colonial period, the husband and father was regarded as the head of the household. Pearcey explains how working at home beside their family members facilitated the fathers’ leadership:

In their day-to-day work, fathers enjoyed the same integration of work and child-rearing responsibilities that mothers did. With production centered on the family hearth, fathers “were a visible presence, year after year, day after day” as they trained their children to work alongside them. Being a father was not a separate activity to come home to after a day at work; rather it was an integral part of a man’s daily routine. Historical records reveal that colonial literature on parenting—like sermons and child-rearing manuals—were not addressed to mothers, as the majority are today. Instead they were typically addressed to FATHERS. Fathers were considered the primary parent, and were held to be particularly important in their children’s religious and intellectual training (Total Truth).

The Impact of the Industrial Revolution on the Family

The Industrial Revolution built a chasm between the workplace and the home. During this era of history (1770-1870), the development of steel, expansion of the railroads for transporting goods, and use of steam as a power source to replace human labor, led to the building of factories and mass production. Whereas men used to work at home with their wives and families, they had little choice but to follow their work out of their households and fields, and into factories and offices. These are some of the results of this transformation of society:

The physical presence of fathers at home dropped sharply. Leadership is always based on the quality of the leader’s relationships with his followers. Men, in particular, build relationships by doing things together. The damage to a father and husband’s ability to lead his home by separating home from work has been incalculable.
The most striking feature of child-rearing manuals of the mid-nineteenth century (the height of the Industrial Revolution) is the disappearance of references to fathers.
Because in America, the home had always been the place where children are taught moral character and religion, women began to be looked up to as those who were custodians of religion and moral character. Kenneth Keniston writes, The family became a special protected place, the repository of tender, pure, generous feelings embodied by the mother, and a bulwark and bastion against the raw, competitive, aggressive, and selfish world of commerce embodied by the father (All Our Children; The American Family Under Pressure.) Men, reflecting the sinful passivity of Adam, were all too willing to leave raising the children and leading the home to their wives.
This was a stunning reversal. In colonial days, husbands and fathers had been admonished to function as the moral and spiritual leaders of the household. But now men are being told that they are naturally crude, appetite-driven animals who need to learn virtue from their wives.
The identification of religion with women and children begun at this time continues to this day as documented by David Murrow, in Why Men Hate Going to Church. For example, Pew research published an article in 2016, entitled, In the U.S., Religious Commitment is High and the Gender Gap is Wide.
The impact of this work/home divide may have been worse for women. The home ceased being a locus of economic productivity. Instead of enjoying a sense of economic indispensability, women became dependent—having to live off the wages of their husbands.
Because household industries were replaced by factory products, women at home with their children were no longer able to utilize the full array of their gifts but only those relating to motherhood and household tasks.
Not surprisingly, this cultural expectation that women should be at home, and not at work spawned the feminist movement, which was rooted in the rights of women to have their own career outside the home.
Wives who used to be economically productive and care for the family with their husbands are now alone in their work; this natural partnership is gone.
In short, he woman’s role as a mother became OVERVALUED. She is criticized if she doesn’t find, essentially all of her fulfillment by being home with the kids, and she is now the primary parent, if not the spiritual leader at home, instead of a partner helping her husband to raise the children.

Here is an attempt to put a biblical lens over the damage done by the Industrial Revolution to our culture’s understanding of motherhood and fatherhood.

1. There are some who want to blame the rise of technology for this problem and return to cottage industries. But the most effective way to fulfill mankind’s creation command to develop the potential God build into planet earth is through technology. The ideal is not a return to agrarian society. In fact, technology itself along with Covid 19 are causing more mothers and fathers to work from home and schedule meetings through zoom. Who knows what impact this might have in reversing the trend of work taking both fathers and mothers out of the home!

2. The church failed to adapt to the culture. When the church saw the new economic reality that the workplace was oftem gpoing to be separated from the home, church leaders should have responded by challenging their men to overcome being away so much by putting extra effort into building their relationships with their wives and children and into leading their homes well. Sadly, this never happened, and despite the recent rise of the men’s movement, the majority of churches still don’t equip men to be spiritual leaders at home.

3. The church never should have allowed the Industrial Revolution confine the exercise of women’s gifts almost exclusively to the homefront. Although God’s curse, which falls on Eve for her sin, is felt in her relationship with her husband and children, revealing her primary calling, Eve is also gifted and called with Adam in Genesis 1 to develop culture, i.e. to exercise dominion over the earth. The call to motherhood can be overvalued, producing feelings of frustration and guilt in hearts of women who don’t feel entirely fulfilled by being wives and mothers.

4. Overvaluing motherhood can also thoughtlessly wound women who long to be married or long to have children but can’t. The whole concept of a woman finding her identity in being created as a necessary ally for her husband or through her nurturing role as a mother can be extremely frustrating and painful for women who are single or childless. This pain is amplified today because the Industrial Revolution removed the workplace from the home. Single women’s extended families i.e. adult brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews no longer surround her at work. More than ever the church must remind its single and childless women that all the femininity described in the creation of Eve, in Proverbs 31, and in Paul’s letters can be fully lived out within a single woman’s extended family and church home. But she needs our open hearts, sensitivity, and welcoming love to do so.

UNDERVALUING MOTHERHOOD

Sharon Slater has devoted her life to analyzing cultural trends that impact the family. She summarizes radical feminism’s strategy to undermine motherhood:

First convince women that motherhood is meaningless, degrading, and confining, and that childcare is an unfair burden placed on women. Convince them that fulfillment can only be found in competing with men and advancing equality in the workplace. Teach them that postponing or sacrificing professional pursuits for the benefit of their children and family is too much to ask. Better yet, repeal all laws and policies that recognize any differences between men and women. Eliminate special protections or incentives that encourage motherhood, childbearing, or the raising of one’s own child and remove “harmful” symbols that stereotype women, like Mother’s Day (Stand for the Family).

Despite the token visibility given to motherhood because today is Mothers Day, I don’t think there has ever been a time in America when the opinion makers, in our case the social media, have so relentlessly promoted successful womanhood as having a career, while at the same time neglecting mothers who successfully live out a higher calling to motherhood. The biblical worldview is that a woman has gifts that go beyond motherhood, but that motherhood is at the core of her design. Gen 3:20 says, The man called his wife’s name, Eve, because she was the mother of all living (Gen. 3:20). “Eve” sounds like Hebrew for life-giver. Women give physical life to humanity, a task so great and so significant that it cannot be quantified.

A second influential force in our culture that devalues motherhood is the transgender movement. TSER (Transgender Student Educational Resources) promote, a fractured view of human personhood through its Gender Unicorn model. They teach that every individual has the right to determine: 1) his/her biology (through a sex change or hormone treatments), 2) his/her romantic and 3) sexual orientation, 4) his/her gender identity, and 5) his/her gender role. This worldview denies that physical differences (a woman’s womb, breasts, or estrogen) have any significance in determining healthy romantic or sexual attraction, gender identity, or her gender role. Transgenderism is the extreme case of a woman denying the truth that her body reinforces every month; she is designed to be a mother.

Guys, we need to avoid being passive men and step up to protect our women from these harmful ideologies that are wounding them. Devaluing motherhood injures mothers who often don’t realize that their culture has trained them to overvalue their career and undervalue their home. It is destructive for society, because a mother’s nurture is so vital for physical, emotional, and spiritual health. But it especially harms children. No one can meet her child’s need to be nourished as well as his mother can. She cannot delegate that responsibility. Mother Teresa, a great advocate for mothers, tells the story of a boy whom the sisters found on the streets of Calcutta:

He was living with his mother in a box. The sisters took the boy back to the orphanage, bathed him, fed him, and gave him a clean bed to sleep in. The next day he disappeared. They found him back in the box with his mother. Once again they took him back to the orphanage and once again he ran away. Mother Teresa said she learned a very important lesson that day. A mother, even a mother in a cardboard box, was more important than the physical comforts that the sisters could provide (Ibid).

Whereas masculine love provides whatever others need to flourish, a woman’s love is giving herself—surrounding loved ones with her personal attention and care. It is nurture. Although Western culture has greatly devalued the feminine call to motherhood and to be nurturers, in God’s economy, giving personal care and love to those who surround her life is the highest of callings. So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love (1 Cor 13:13).

For Further Prayerful Thought:

1. How can understanding colonial culture where work took place at home, help you understand the conflict that today’s mothers have between making a cultural contribution (vocation) and motherhood?

2. How can you lead the way to help men understand that the separation of home and workplace means they have to work harder to build relationships with their family members, so they can lead their homes well?

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Required for Becoming Godly, Confident, Daughters

On 02 July, 2025 By Gary Yagel

At the core of masculinity is helping those around us flourish, i.e. reach their fullest potential. That is what Adam was place in the Garden to do. Today begins a three-week series about helping our daughters and granddaughters flourish. For the first three weeks of May, our topic is Raising Godly, Confident, Daughters and Granddaughters. This episode explains how to help them develop a biblical understanding, sometimes called a biblical worldview of womanhood. Helping her to build this perspective is absolutely vital for her to build confidence in the way she was created, and if called to be a wife, have marriage that honors Christ.

Today’s episode is about shedding any false stereotypes and helping our ladies build a biblical worldview about gender, becoming godly, confident women who understand and celebrate their femininity. We want them to confidently be able to answer the question, “What does it mean that God created them female?” Although daughters will fight tooth and nail (as they should) to defend the truth that girls are equal to boys, deep down those who are healthy don’t want to be like boys: they want to be what they were designed to be…women. They recognize intuitively that gender differences are not superficial, but deeply connected to their very sense of identity. Theologian Paul Jewett, reminds us:

Sexuality permeates one’s individual being to its very depth; it conditions every facet of one’s life as a person. As the self is always aware of itself as an ‘I,’ so this ‘I’ is always aware of itself as himself or herself. Our self-knowledge is indissolubly bound up not simply with our human being but with our sexual being (Man As Male and Female).

Our wives, daughters, and granddaughters need us to affirm God’s creation design of them. Beyond that, in a world where they continually interact with those who espouse other world views, be they feminists, traditionalists, egalitarianists, or LGBTQ advocates, we need to help our female loved ones understand, celebrate, and winsomely articulate the biblical worldview of womanhood. Before we look at the biblical view of gender, though, it is important to identify two mistakes to avoid in helping another develop a biblical worldview.

1. The first mistake to avoid is implying that their generation, i.e. modern secular culture represents the evil world to which Christians must not conform. Demonizing modern culture in general because many of its worldviews are unbiblical, profoundly misunderstands the biblical view of CULTURE. Because all humans are assigned the creation task to build culture, and all humans are made in God’s image, there is much in modern, “secular” culture that Christians should affirm. Besides farmers, truckers, and grocers whose work is used by God to provide our daily bread, art and music celebrate his creation and technology finds new ways to make life better. The secular world is also quite capable of identifying injustice and opposing it, way before Christians do.

It is true that William Wilberforce, who labored 24 years to abolish slavery in Britain and many of his followers were Christians. So were Harriet Beecher Stowe, who wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and many of her followers. But it is equally true than many non-Christians opposed the evil of chattel slavery before many Bible-believing Christians did. In our day, feminists, who sadly are mistaken in their egalitarian approach to marriage, have rightly seen the injustice of closing doors of opportunity to women and sounded the alarm about Christian women allowing themselves to be beaten by their husbands because of their mistaken understanding of the Biblical teaching to be submissive to their husbands. Feminists have also identified the hurtful way that churches almost always link femininity to marriage and the family, unfairly causing single women to feel like second class citizens. Although my denomination believes leadership responsibility in the home and church family is assigned to men, the culture’s focus on the injustice of denying women the opportunity to use their gifts is fomenting a welcome reexamination (in my view) of some of our traditions. Some would argue that this is a slippery slope, but the church must always examine its practices to see if they are based on Scripture or tradition.

A biblical worldview makes us unafraid to recognize truth, even though it is proclaimed by fallen worldviews. Instead, a biblical worldview recognizes the ring of truth in the injustices that others point out and the validity of their contribution to the culture, as those made in the image of God. Nancy Pearcey, in her book, Total Truth, explains how she learned this lesson at L’Abri in Switzerland.

I returned to L’Abri and discovered how liberating a worldview approach can be. There is no need to avoid the secular world and hide out behind an Evangelical subculture; instead, Christians can appreciate works of art and culture as products of human creativity expressing the image of God. On the other hand, there is no danger of being naïve or uncritical about false and dangerous messages imbedded in secular culture, because a worldview gives the conceptual tools needed to analyze and critique them.

2. The second way to fail when helping a daughter embrace a biblical worldview is to critique another’s unbiblical worldview without a heart of compassion for those misled by it. Pearcy points to the heart of her mentor, Francis Shaefer:

When expressing the pessimism and nihilism (belief that life is meaningless) expressed in so many movies, paintings, and popular songs, he demonstrated profound empathy for those actually living in such despair. “These works of art are expressions of men who are struggling with their appalling lostness,” he wrote. “Dare we laugh at such things? Dare we feel superior when we view their tortured expressions in art?” The men and women who produce these things “are dying while they live; yet where is our compassion for them” (Ibid).

As we seek a biblical worldview of gender, we do it with sorrow in our hearts for human sin, which has corrupted God’s design of humans as male and female. The Bible has been used as a weapon both to justify oppression and justify rebellion. So, let’s turn to a careful examination of the Bible’s teaching about gender so that we are equipped to winsomely guide our loved ones into spiritual health.

The first mention of gender in the Bible occurs with the very first mention of human beings. In the image of God, he created him. Male and female, he created them (Gen 1:27). This means that our femaleness or maleness is not incidental to our identity, but constitutes our very essence. Kathy Keller, co-author with Tim of The Meaning of Marriage, writes,

Every cell in our body is stamped as XX or XY. This means that I cannot understand myself if I ignore the way God designed me, or if I despise the gifts he may have given to help me fulfill my calling. If the postmodern view that gender is wholly a “social construct” were true, then we could follow whatever path seemed good to us. If our gender is at the heart of our nature, however, we risk losing a key part of ourselves if we abandon our distinctive male and female roles.

The biblical account shows that Adam and Eve were created with absolute equality. Both are made in the image of God, equally being given the mandate to exercise dominion over the earth. Men and women together, in harmony with one another, must carry out God’s mandate to build civilization and culture. Immediately after making us male and female, God tells us to be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth (Gen 1:28). Here, as his image bearers, we are to continue God’s action of creating. But obviously, this calling to create human life is something we can only carry out together! Neither sex has all that is needed. Only in complementary union can we do it. These verses describe the physical reality that points to their total complementarity—they have been designed to fit together perfectly!

Genesis 2 reveals more about Adam and Eve’s complementarity. When God sees Adam alone, a male without a female to complete him, God says, “It is not good.” The aloneness of Adam is the first thing in the universe that God finds imperfect.

No existing animal could complete Adam. So, we read I will make him a helper fit for him. In English, the word helper sounds demeaning, like a low-wage earner who sweeps the floors. The Hebrew, however, has no such negative connotation. The word translated “helper” is ezer, which cannot imply inferiority, since God Himself is called our ezer. The concept is to supply strength that is lacking. Ezer could be translated, suitable helper, necessary ally, or strong assistant. Although many of the interactions between male and female presume the context of marriage, I believe that this revelation of God’s purpose for creating Eve reveals a creation truth. Women are naturally better at partnering with others to accomplish a task than are men. A woman as a CEO in business or on a leadership team may be contributing her femininity to her business through her strength at building, or helping to build, a team.

“Fit for him” or “matching him” translates a Hebrew phrase that literally means “like opposite him.” Kathy Keller explains,

The entire narrative of Genesis 2, in which a piece of the man is removed to create the woman strongly implies that each is incomplete without the other. Male and female are “like opposite” to one another. They are like two pieces of a puzzle that fit together, because they are not exactly alike nor randomly different, but they are differentiated such that together they complete a complex whole. Each sex is gifted for different steps in the same Great Dance.

What a glorious picture! Yet, in our Western democracy, when Scripture applies these creation principles to the Christian home and the church, Paul’s teaching feels harsh, chauvinistic, and unfair:

Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife even as Christ is the head of the church, his body, and is himself its Savior. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit in everything to their husbands. Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her….(Eph 5:22-25).

Let a woman learn quietly with all submissiveness. I do not permit a woman to teach or to exercise authority over a man; rather, she is to remain quiet (1 Tim 2:11-12).

It has been said that heresy is truth out of balance. Even with the explanation of the creation roots behind these commands, these will likely be rejected by many daughters and granddaughters unless they are taught in balance with the other biblical truths that constitute the worldview. Here are some of those truths.

All Christians are commanded to be submissive to one another (deny themselves) in some way. Husbands are to deny themselves by laying down their lives for their wives, wives by yielding to their husband’s leadership.
Headship taught by Paul has zero connotation of “lording over” others. Headship is modeled by Jesus in Phil 2:5-11. Though Jesus was equal with God, he emptied himself of his glory and took on the role of a slave. Jesus shed his divine privilege without becoming any less God, and he took on the most submissive role—that of a servant, putting his view of headship into practice by washing his disciple’s feet.
Husbands as heads of their wives are therefore servant leaders; wives are to be strong helpers. Both make themselves slaves to the other, but in different roles. The example for both is Jesus.
Godly manhood is defined in creation as a man giving himself up to cause those in the garden to flourish (avad) and be protected (shamar).
Women in general are not commanded to be submissive to men in general; rather, Christian wives who say, “yes” to the husband’s promise to love them are choosing to respect his leadership in their home.
Submission does not mean silently accepting a husband’s decision when she thinks it is wrong. To the contrary, loyalty to him means telling him when she thinks he is wrong, but in the end trusting God to work through her husband who is accountable to God and takes responsibility for the final decision.
In the Church, which Paul calls the household of God, the same pattern of love and order is to be followed as the Christian home: men are to lead.
The historical setting in which the women were told to be silent was the authoritative determination by the synagogue elders of the orthodoxy or heresy of a visiting rabbi’s teaching. That authoritative function of serving as an elder was assigned by Paul in the New Testament to men. Woman are welcome to use their gifts in any way that a non-ordained man can.
In the two spheres where men are given leadership, the home and the church, they are accountable to the elders of the church for their behavior.

Questions for a Conversation with Daughters or Other Christian Girls/Women

1. What messages do you hear through the social media about womanhood?

2. What do you think the Bible teaches about the value of women?

3. What do you believe the Bible teaches about why Eve was created?

4. What do you think the Bible teaches about differences in roles between husbands and wives in marriage?

5. How would you defend from the Bible the truth that women are equal to men?

6. How does it make you feel when you read Ephesians 5:22 “Wives submit to your own husbands as to the Lord.”

7. If the Bible’s teaching about something as profound as a wife’s role in marriage is not relevant to us because Paul was influenced by his culture, how do you know which other parts of the Bible are not true, because they were shaped by culture?

8. Since the Bible says that Jesus submitted to the Father’s will, do you believe Jesus (God the Son) is inferior to the Father?

9. Does the submission of a citizen to a police officer mean the citizen is inferior to the police officer or the submission of a church members to church elders mean they are inferior to the church leaders? If not, why do some people say that a wife submitting to her husband means saying she is inferior?

10. Do some of your friends scoff at the Biblical view of marriage roles? How does that make you feel?

For Further Prayerful Thought:

1. The best way to teach female loved ones the biblical worldview of gender is by exhibiting godly manhood. What are some places you can improve your commitment to helping others flourish?

2. What have been the objections you have heard to the biblical worldview of gender. Which parts of the biblical picture might they be missing?

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Countering the Culture’s Devaluing of Marriage

On 28 June, 2025 By Gary Yagel

As we close out this Fatherhood Month series, we return to the Andrew Tate phenomenon that is impacting teen guys in our churches, with which we began this series. Tate is a former kickboxing champion-turned-social-media-influencer who has become so popular among young men for his views on masculinity that he has ten million followers on X. Tate’s message to our rising sons about marriage typifies the anti-family messages and policies coming out of Hollywood, progressive government leaders, the media, academia, and corporate America that are impacting our guys. University of VA Researcher, Brad Wilcox, describes Tate’s influence in his excellent book, Get Married. He writes:

“The biggest voice in the online manosphere today—with more than twelve billion views on TikTok alone—is no fan of marriage. Andrew Tate, former kick boxer, who has been described as the ‘king of toxic masculinity,’ has made it clear that he does not think much of our oldest social institution. ‘The problem is, there is zero advantage to marriage for a man,’ said Tate. ‘There is zero statistical advantage. If you use your mind, if you use your head instead of your heart, and you look at the advantages to getting married, there are absolutely none.’”

But the facts discovered in Wilcox’s research show that Tate is dead wrong. The facts show, for example, that:

Both men and women who get and stay married accumulate much greater wealth than people who don’t marry.
Married men and women with families report more meaningful lives compared with their single and childless peers.
Couples who take a “we-before-me” approach to married life, for instance sharing joint checking accounts—are happier and less divorce-prone than couples who do not.
Couples who form “family-first” marriages—with frequent date nights, family fun time and chores done with the kids—enjoy the happiest marriages.

This episode shows how my book, Men Helping Sons, is written to attract our sons to marriage by presenting the biblical worldview of its glorious design.

The Biblical worldview of civilization reveals God’s design for marriage to be the foundation of civilization. To begin with, God’s design of Adam and Eve to complete each other in the loving union of marriage is God’s fundamental purpose for creating humankind—that is, to bear the image of the Triune God. Furthermore, in Genesis, the institution of marriage is given before the institutions of the church or civil government. For this reason, it should not surprise us that marriage and the sexual union that are fundamental to it are under assault by God’s enemy. As protectors of our families, assisting them to take captive every thought making it obedient to the truth revealed in Christ (2 Cor 10:4-5), we must counter the anti-family cultural forces that undermine the glory of God’s design of marriage and the family. Here is a summary of chapter four of Men Helping Sons.

Chapter 4: God’s Creation Design of Marriage

Discuss: Both. As you consider what you’ve heard or know about marriage, why do you think God invented it? What do you think an ideal marriage would look like?

Note: Of course, marriage involves sex, a topic that is embarrassing and private. There are no questions in this section that ask you to reveal private matters. In fact, the leader, not the son is assigned to read all of the section, “The Bible’s High View of Sex.”

Four Biblical Purposes of Marriage

A. A fundamental purpose of the male-female love union in marriage is to reflect the image of God. God exists as the Trinity, the union of three persons who love one another, which is why John tells us that God is love. So, God creates an image of himself—the being called “man.” But that single being “man” exists as the union of two persons, male and female. Notice the way the use of the singular and plural for man parallels God as both singular and plural. Then God said, ‘Let us make man in our image, in our likeness...’ So, God created man in his own imagine, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. Each gender is designed with deficiencies that only their opposite-gendered spouse can meet. Thus, through the union of marriage, male and female complete what is lacking in the other and, in their union, bear the image of God.

Discuss: Both. Since God designed manhood and womanhood to be incomplete without the other gender, why don’t we celebrate this interdependence and value the other gender more?

B. A second purpose for marriage is revealed in Genesis 2:18, where marriage is designed by God as the remedy for the aloneness of Adam. The LORD God said, “It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him. Each part of the creation narrative closes with God’s statement: “And it was GOOD,” until the creation of man. After Adam is created, God says. “It is NOT GOOD that man should be alone. In naming the animals, Adam realizes that none can be a true partner to him. They cannot alleviate his loneliness. So, God creates woman to be his partner, soulmate, and lover.

God’s plan to eliminate loneliness is for marriage partners to pursue LOVING INTIMACY. Eve is created with a spirit, heart, and body which correspond to Adam’s (“bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh”). Genesis 2:24-25 gives the familiar portrait of marriage; Therefore, a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh. Notice this two-step description of marriage. It is first the joining of lives. The man leaves his father and mother and joins lives with his wife. They share their ideas (minds), their decisions (will), and their feelings (emotions). Then this joining of lives is celebrated by the joining of bodies in sex.

As a gesture symbolic of personal trust and surrender, it requires a setting or structure of perfect surrender in which to take place. It requires the security of the most perfect of reassurances and commitments in which two people enter, which is no other than the loving contract of marriage.

Discuss: Both. How does this paragraph compare to the way sex is portrayed in movies, TV shows, and social media?

So, marriage is the joining of both lives and bodies. But the text doesn’t end there. It continues, pointing to the objective that marriage is intended to achieve. And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed. Marriage is the one safe arena where husband and wife are naked, body, soul, and spirit—laid bare and vulnerable to each other. Adam and Eve’s like natures, combined with their covenant pledge of unconditional love, makes safe the experience of baring their hearts and bodies to one another. It enables them to experience loving intimacy, i.e. oneness of spirit, oneness of heart, oneness of body that sex is designed to promote.

The Biblical design for loving intimacy in marriage requires the pursuit of BOTH oneness of soul and oneness of body. Joining bodies in sex apart from joining lives in marriage is wrong. But so is joining lives in marriage without joining bodies in sex. Biblically, body and soul belong together. Christians don’t just share the gospel, they feed the hungry. Unlike pagan philosophies like Gnosticism, Christianity has always upheld a high view of the physical body and therefore of sexual union.

C. A third purpose of marriage is to give us a foretaste of the joy we will experience when we are forever spiritually united in love to Christ our bridegroom. We, the church, are betrothed to Christ as his bride. The final return of Christ to receive us to himself is portrayed as the wedding of the lamb. The richest pleasures of sexual union are a foreshadow of the intense joy that will be ours when we are united to Christ, spiritually, forever. This astonishing truth is spelled out by Paul, For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife and the two will become one flesh. This is a profound mystery, but I am talking about Christ and the church. The sexual union of marriage takes Paul’s mind to our spiritual union with Jesus.

Discuss: Leader. When you were growing up, how were you taught to view sex. Did this view rightly or wrongly reflect God’s design?

Discuss: Both. Do you think the average non-believer thinks of God as having a positive view of sex or a negative one?

D. The fourth purpose of marriage is to create a safe environment into which the next generation of God’s image bearers are born and nurtured. We read, And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it.” The family is the most foundational institution on earth. God established it before the church or civil government. The family is the mechanism through which God planned for humanity to continue beyond Adam and Eve.

Headed by one man and one woman united to one another by the covenant of marriage, the family is the environment designed by God for the nurture of children. Only after entering into the covenant of marriage are the perfect conditions met for the creating of a child, conceived as a result of his mother and father’s passionate lovemaking to celebrate their covenant promise never to forsake the other. It is God’s perfect design of the greatest possible security for a child—a family in which both a mother and a father are present to care for him and are in love with each other.

Discuss: Both. God’s design does explain why it is tough raising kids as so many must, as a single parent. What have you observed about the difficulties for kids and parents if both parents aren’t present in the home?

The Bible’s High View of Sex

Here is a summary of the eight points that are read by the adult leader (with the supporting material and interactive questions missing):

A. It is a wonderful, God-designed attraction that drives adult males and females towards one-another. One author notes, Strong sexual feelings are common to all normal men. They are determined more by hormones than by evil desire. They are not sinful in themselves. Sex is designed to be the pleasurable, powerful glue that binds husband and wife together during the tumultuous process of overcoming their selfishness to merge their lives together. It provides the bonding power needed to build their marriage as the foundation of their home.

B. Sex is utter, vulnerable, nakedness—safe only when we expose our nakedness to one who has vowed in a public covenant never to reject us. We all sense the vulnerability of nakedness. We instinctively feel uneasy if we are naked in front of another. Such modesty is God’s way of saying “Total nakedness is not safe (even in romance) until each partner has vowed publicly to unconditionally love the other.”

C. Sex is the outer, physical joining of two bodies, which celebrates the inner joining of two hearts, souls, and lives in marriage. It is like celebrating the sacrament of Communion. We take the bread and drink into our bodies, physically partaking of the bread to celebrate the spiritual reality of being united to Christ. Similarly, in sex we physically partake of each other’s bodies to celebrate the spiritual reality of our hearts and lives being united to our spouse in love. As celebrating communion strengthens and renews our love relationship with Jesus, so sexual union strengthen and renews our love relationship with our spouse.

D. God loves the lovemaking of husband and wife. God not only created sex for our pleasure, but he also URGES us to drink deeply of it! Dennis and Barbara Rainey write, In the Song of Solomon, God enters the bridal chamber, where the newlyweds lay entwined in each other’s arms. He raises his hand over them and blesses them. His benediction urges them to feast on the joy of their sexual union. “EAT FRIENDS: DRINK AND IMBIBE DEEPLY, O LOVERS.”

E. Married couples are urged by God to be drunk with sexual love for each other. God tells us that the best defense when it comes to married men staying faithful to their wives is a great offense. “May your fountain be blessed, and may you rejoice in the wife of your youth. A loving doe, a graceful deer—may her breasts satisfy you always. May you ever be intoxicated with her love.”

F. The male sex drive is God’s good gift to us. A man naturally desires release regularly, driving a husband to his wife whose arms and body surround him with the love and nurture he needs more than his independent nature likes to admit. Two female writers try to explain the male sex drive to fellow wives this way: “A man has seventeen sexual glands, which is stored in an inner sack in the testes. When the sack fills up, his testes tell his brain, ‘Do something quick before I explode.’ A man’s need for sex is not all in his mind; his sexual command center demands release from the accumulated buildup.”

G. Premarital sex, called fornication was a capital offense in Israel. God’s law is given to protect us from harm. He wouldn’t attach such severe sanctions to sex outside of marriage unless he knew some things that we don’t know about how harmful it is. The joining of the most intimate parts of us to another’s most intimate parts is like glueing two pieces of paper together. But when sex isn’t connected to the permanence of marriage, when the casual partner moves on, it is like trying to separate those two pieces of paper. It can’t be done without tearing both partner’s souls. Sex cannot be emptied of its profound reach into our inner selves. We all know that sexual assault is much more traumatic than physical assault. Our bodies heal from physical assault: but the soul of a woman who is raped may never heal because sex isn’t just physical. We all know that. It touches the deepest inner parts of us.

H. Love for Jesus calls us to put our bodies on the altar as a living sacrifice. After devoting eleven chapters to helping the Romans understand God’s gracious plan of redemption through the death of his Son to atone for our sins, in Chapter 12:1 Paul tells us what the only logical response to such love can be. With eyes wide open to the mercies of God, I beg you, my brothers, as an act of intelligent worship, to give him your bodies, as a living sacrifice, consecrated to him and acceptable by him (J.B. Phillips). Saving sex for marriage is not the result of a low, prudish view of sex, but a high one. It is true that premarital chastity is enormously beneficial to the health of our future marriage. But for the Christ follower, what is even more important is that it honors Jesus.

Men, here are three ways you could help men and high school guys study this booklet together:

Ask your men’s ministry to consider studying Men Helping Sons Embrace Biblical Manhood at its monthly men’s breakfasts (from September to January), to which your high school guys are invited. Each of the five chapters would be discussed after breakfast in a group of 5 or 6 guys composed of a mix of men and high school guys, with one of the men leading the discussion.
Give it to the father of a high school guy.
Give it to a youth pastor to study with his high school guys

Let me close by asking, “How might a Christian high school guy be impacted by these words, which close out Men Helping Sons Embrace Biblical Manhood?”

DARE GREATLY to Show the World Manhood That Is Being Redeemed by Jesus

You have now seen the high bar of biblical manhood. Don’t let it overwhelm you; let it challenge you. There may have never been a time when our nation more needed the rising generation of Christian men to show it Christ’s power to redeem masculinity—restoring manhood to God’s intended design. But, have no illusions. Should you accept the challenge to show the world manhood that is being redeemed by Jesus in a fresh way after completing this study, you will be in for the fight of your life. To sacrificially love others, unselfishly serve others, selflessly protect others while exhaustingly seeking to win their hearts will require you to struggle, daily, to die to yourself. Such a lifelong battle with deeply embedded selfishness is certain to bring many defeats.

Remember, however, your call to display manhood that is being redeemed by Jesus does not require perfection. But it does require leaving the sidelines and getting into fight! As Teddy Roosevelt said so well,

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena; whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs and comes up short again and again; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, and spends himself in a worthy cause; who, at best, knows in the end the triumph of high achievement; and who, at worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with the timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.

Will you tell Jesus you are stepping whole-heartedly into the arena to fight to show the world manhood being redeemed by Him?

For Further Prayerful Thought:

Which of the four purposes of marriage most stood out to you. Why does it make sense that God’s design for conceiving a child is a husband and wife united in the covenant of marriage who have promised to love each other, “till death us do part?”
What stood out most to you in the Bible’s High View of Sex? Which of these truths do you wish you knew earlier?
How do you think this material on marriage and sex might change a high school guy’s view of God and sex?

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Supporting Sisters by Celebrating Biblical Womanhood

On 21 June, 2025 By Gary Yagel

This past week, the Supreme Court upheld Tennessee’s law, which blocks all transgender medical treatments on those under 18, including puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgeries. This ruling is an encouraging sign; but it is also a reminder of the torrential flood of polluted messages coming from social media, shouting for the past twenty years that gender identity is fluid, different gender roles are unjust, and same-sex attraction is normal. This entire month our podcast/blog focus is providing help to our boys to withstand the cultural pressure squeezing them into its false, destructive views about masculinity and femininity. This episode might surprise you because it argues that our rising generation of guys needs to understand God’s design not just of their own masculinity—but God’s design of femininity as well.

The Bible teaches that the differences between male and female are not arbitrary or accidental, but intentional. The identity and roles of male and female in Scripture are not interchangeable. They are designed to be different so that they can complete one another. Therefore, you can’t understand masculinity without understanding that we were created to be half of a unit called “man,” which requires womanhood to be complete. Knowing HER strengths are given to cover MY weaknesses, as we PARTNER together helps men live out their calling. For example, when my wife says, “Turn here, watch that car, turn left,” and I am tempted to say, “stop bossing me,” because I feel stupid, I can remember that she was given to me to be my necessary ally; she is just trying to help me, which is her calling. When she stops in front of the mirror when we are running late for church, and asks, “How do I look?” I can conquer my impatience by remembering that she is made to be beautiful and bring beauty into the world. When she is emotionally drained, I can help her by remembering that Eve was the mother of every living thing (Gen 3:20), designed to be a nurturer and recognize that being with her grandchildren, and especially holding her grandbabies, fills her emotional tank.

The biblical teaching of male and female being intentionally created differently and by their union in marriage, completing one another in love, is visibly portrayed in the way their bodies fit together, making love. This biblical view of intentional male/female differences in Genesis 2 is described by the English word complete, from which we get the word complement. (This is different from compliment, to give praise). To complement is to stand beside and fill the weakness of a partner. The biblical understanding of this creation design is called complementarianism. In their book, The Grand Design, Owen Strachen and Gavin Peacock give a good working definition of this creation concept unmistakably taught in Scripture.

“Complementarity (is) the way in which men and women find happiness in owning their God-given identity and filling their God-given roles. Equal in dignity and worth, men and women share much in terms of Christian discipleship. But we are not the same. Unlike what egalitarianism would argue, men and women have different roles to play in life. We thus cannot agree with the idea that men and women alike lead in the home and church, as our egalitarian friends would say. The gospel of grace does not erase sexual difference and role distinctions: the gospel actually opens our eyes to savor the divine design and our God-formed responsibilities.”

Complementarianism is the antidote to the culture’s gender blender attack upon God’s design of male and female. The significance of this design for all of life is so important to God that of the 1189 chapters in the Bible, God took half of the first chapter (after explaining the six days of creation) and all the second chapter to explain how male and female are equal, different, and to relate to one another as God’s image-bearers. That is, they are two persons joined in married love, imaging the loving union of the three Persons of the Godhead who, in love, are one. Perhaps it should not surprise us that Satan is attacking God’s creation design of male and female to complete each other since God chose it to image him. But why do our sons need an explanation of biblical womanhood?

Six Practical Reasons Men Need to Understood God’s Feminine Design

A. So they know what to look for in a wife. The best path to successful marriage is to marry a woman dedicated to pursuing God’s design of womanhood. That seems obvious. When I was looking for a mate during my college years, I decided I was not going to marry a feminist or a woman who had inclinations in that direction. After I fell in love and was thinking of asking a woman to marry me, I said to God, “She is so strong-willed, I don’t know if I am strong enough to lead her.” But I sensed God saying, “Gary, a strong will is a good thing. What matters is that it be submitted to me and committed to the Bible’s teaching of complementarity.” That definitely described Sandy. I also sensed God saying, “Not only that, but I am calling you into ministry. You need a strong, capable partner.” Forty-four years later, she is just as strong-willed, and just as perfect for covering my weaknesses. So, we need to give sons a portrait of the kind of woman they should pursue.

B. Sons need to understand God’s feminine design so they know how to help a female fulfill her potential. Adam was placed in the garden to work it. The Hebrew word, AVAD, means to help those in the garden reach their full potential. This is the concept behind Paul saying to husbands, Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, that he might sanctify her, …so that he might present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish. I am to die to myself to help her reach her spiritual potential—inner, spiritual beauty. Understanding God’s design of femininity helps me know what that picture of godly womanhood looks like so I can help her reach it. I can’t help her reach a goal I don’t see.

C. Sons need to understand God’s feminine design so they can love a female well. The word used in the command to husbands is AGAPE. This word does not describe a feeling; it describes a relentless commitment to sacrifice whatever is necessary to meet another’s needs. Such love, therefore, requires understanding how God has designed her in ways that are different than he designed men. The first thing a guy learns in marriage is how different his wife’s needs are than his own! For love to reach its greatest fulfillment, it needs to be coupled with discernment of the other’s needs. Perhaps that is why Paul said to the Philippian Christians: My prayer for you is that you may have still more love—a love that is full of knowledge and wise insight (1:9).

D. Sons need to understand God’s feminine design so they know how to partner best with a female. As we’ve seen, manhood is only half of the unit. A guy needs to know how to best partner with women in general and unless called to remain single, how to partner with his wife, when the day of marriage comes. An effective leader of any partnership discerns the strengths of his team members, so he knows how to delegate and maximize the potential of the entire team. Peter has this partnership in mind in the term, joint-heirs, when he writes to husbands, Show honor to the woman as the weaker vessel, since they are joint-heirs of the grace of life (I Pet 3:7). Showing honor to women makes sense when we understand their feminine design; we better realize how their strengths are the very ones we lack, thus how valuable they are!

E. Sons need to understand God’s feminine design so they know how to provide the understanding a female needs. As we saw last week, one of the most important needs of a wife’s heart is to feel understood. Part of fallen male culture is to put down women because of their feelings, or because girls in athletics often place “togetherness” above winning. But deep in a woman’s heart is the longing to feel understood. I believe that is the deepest need of a wife’s heart. I can say I love her, but if she doesn’t feel like I know and understand what is going on in her heart, she won’t feel loved, no matter what I say. Perhaps that is why God led Peter to command, Husbands, live with your wives in an understanding way (Ibid). Giving any female the gift of understanding is enhanced by discovering what God has revealed about her feminine design.

F. Sons need to understand God’s feminine design because a godly woman pursuing God’s creation design will be attacked unmercifully. As we saw last week, God placed Adam in the garden not only to be its gardener, but to be its guardian. Adam was assigned to protect those in the garden, including his wife and kids. He should have protected Eve from Satan’s lies before the fall, and Christian men are called to protect their loved ones from Satan’s lies today. Satan is the ultimate egalitarian, having ascended the Mountain of God “to be like God”—to be on an equal footing with God. Here is a text that most scholars believe describes not just the king of Babylon but the Evil One behind his pride.

How you are fallen from heaven, Lucifer, son of Dawn! How you are cut down to the ground, you who laid the nations low! You said in your heart, ‘I will ascend to heaven; above the stars of God I will set my throne on high; I will sit on the mount of assembly… I will ascend above the heights of the clouds; I will make myself like the Most High.’ But you are brought down to Sheol. (Is 14:12-15).

Satan rebelled against God’s authority structure and tempted Eve with the same sin, “You will be as God, knowing good and evil.” Unfortunately, a godly woman living out the call to godly womanhood will not only be sneered at by the secular culture but by many inside the church. For example, Beth Barr doesn’t hesitate to attack Dorothy Patterson, the wife of Paige Patterson, former president of Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, for promoting oppressive patriarchy. “She insisted that a divine hierarchy existed in the marriage relationship," writes Barr. Barr continues to demean Patterson for teaching that sinful secular culture “promoted feminism and blurred the boundaries between male and female roles.” (Actually Dorothy Patterson was exactly right.) The rest of Barr’s book, The Making of Biblical Womanhood, attempts to delegitimize the clear teaching of Scripture, with the same tired argument of the past that the Bible’s authors were corrupted by the abusive patriarchy of their culture and NOT speaking God’s Word. Our girls—sisters, daughters, wives--who dare to fly in the face of egalitarian Western culture deserve our praise for their courage and need our support in their stand for biblical truth.

For the above reasons Men Helping Sons Embrace Biblical Manhood, is written to take our sons through a brief study of God’s glorious design of womanhood. The following is a condensed version of Chapter 3. I’ve included the questions in the text to give you a flavor of the interactive nature of the study. Chapter 3 begins:

Discuss: Both. What are some examples in our culture of women being treated as “objects,” rather than precious human beings of infinite value? What are some of the messages sent to young women on TV and in social media about how a woman finds worth?

The Issue of Submission

Scripture is not apologetic about the call of a Christian wife to be submissive to her husband. Paul commanded, Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife even as Christ is the head of the church, his body, and is himself its Savior. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit in everything to their husbands. The Apostle Peter was equally clear, Wives, be subject to your own husbands…For this is how the holy women who hoped in God used to adorn themselves, by submitting to their own husbands. Neither does the NT equivocate about the leadership in the household of God, the church, which logically is to follow the same pattern. Paul was clear, I do not permit a woman to teach or to exercise authority over a man 1 Tim 2:12.

It is widely believed in Western culture that these commands prove that Christianity is misogynous—a worldview with prejudice towards women at its core. This accusation brings to mind the words that are often attributed to Mark Twain. “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you in trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so.” It is argued that the Bible teaches a system of oppressive patriarchy, which empowers men with the authority to abuse women and generates an unjust, unequal division of power in the home and church. However, this idea that Christianity mistreats women just ain’t so.

To be sure, some men, claiming to follow the Bible, use their positions and power to horribly abuse women. Many wives holding a mistaken view of biblical submission, stay enslaved in codependent relationships with abusive, alcoholic husbands. But such treatment of women is the opposite of what Jesus modeled and what Christianity teaches.

Contrary to the sexism that biblical Christians are often accused of exhibiting, Jesus modeled a revolutionary treatment of women with counter-cultural respect and dignity. From Jesus’ healing of the woman with an issue of blood, to the raising of the widow’s son from the dead, to his protecting of the woman caught in adultery, to his affirmation of the woman who washed his feet with her hair, Jesus was radical in the way he treated women as the full equals of men—having intrinsic value because they, like men, are fully made in God’s image. Such treatment took place in a culture where the Rabbi’s prayer book said, “Blessed art thou who has not made me a woman.” We should also recognize how radically countercultural Jesus’ invitation to Mary to “sit at his feet,” was. The phrase, “sit at the feet of” was a technical term for admitting a student to formal spiritual training. To the Pharisees, this was scandalous. Rabbi Eliezer the Great famously said to his son that he would rather burn the Torah than teach it to a woman.

In contrast, Christianity has always affirmed that women are full members of the body of Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. Any discussion of the complementary roles that men and women fill in marriage and in the church must begin by affirming the equal status and value of women with men.

Discuss: Both. Evaluate the feminist argument that a submissive role makes you an inferior person. Does an athlete have less human value than her coach? Does an employee who obeys his boss prove that he thinks he is inferior to the boss? Is a human child less valuable than her parents, since the Bible says to obey them?

The argument that submission proves inferiority is false. Any ordered group of humans has a structure of authority and responsibility. The assignment of different roles to men and women in the home and church household is accompanied by a call to mutual submission. Paul’s passage on roles in marriage is part of the “family codes” found in Ephesians 5. It begins, in verse 21, with: submitting to one another out of reverence for Christ. Paul then gives specific instructions about how this submissive spirit works in filling paired relationship roles: to both wives and husbands, both children and parents, both slaves and masters. Deference to each other’s roles is required of all believers. One wise wife who realized the freedom she enjoyed because of God’s gender role design, said, “I define submission as knowing when to duck so that the Lord can hit my husband when he needs it.”

It is out of reverence for Christ that a wife submits to her husband and out of reverence for Christ that a husband denies himself to sacrifice for his wife. The glory of the gospel is that Christ has come to redeem our marriages from the devastation of our sin. That is why a godly husband unreservedly and unashamedly embraces Christ’s command to lead his home and love his wife sacrificially. It is why a godly woman embraces whole-heartedly and without apology her calling to be submissive to her husband. It’s for Jesus’ honor!

Eve’s Creation Reveals Her Design

Here is the outline of the second half of chapter 3 from Men Helping Sons:

Eve is designed to be a necessary ally. Then the LORD God said, “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him” Gen 2:18. The Hebrew word, EZER, which is translated “Helper” sounds demeaning, like a low-wage earner who sweeps the floors. The Hebrew, however, EZER has zero such negative connotation. It is used repeatedly in the Psalms to describe God! For example, consider Psalm 46:1 God is our refuge and strength, a very present EZER in trouble. A better translation of helper fit is necessary ally.
The essence of femininity is to be a giver of life, a nurturer. The man called his wife’s name, Eve, because she was the mother of all living Gen 3:20.
A woman is specially gifted to manage her home well. Proverbs 31 portrays an array of feminine gifts that are in this skillset, which are not given to men.
A woman’s specialty is also beauty. Women are called to be beautiful and bring beauty into the world. After God takes Job's children away from him during his trial, God blesses Job with more children. To emphasize this blessing, Job 42:15 says, And in all the land there were no women so beautiful as Job's daughters. As biblical authors appeal to the male compulsion to be strong to call them to the inner strength of character, biblical writers appeal to women’s innate desire to be beautiful but steer them towards the lasting inner beauty of holiness.

Guys, the women in our lives who pursue Godly womanhood are under assault in our gender-blending culture. Twenty-five years ago, when I saw feminism assaulting my twin daughters, I gave them each a book on their 16th birthday that called them to godly womanhood. One was Let Me Be a Woman by Elisabeth Elliot. The other, equally good, was Fearlessly Feminine by Jani Ortland. I want to close with Jani’s call to our beloved females, because as men we must do everything we can to support them in this call. She writes:

“I am calling us to exult in our God-given femininity. We must welcome His Word and His ways in our lives. We must stop bringing to God OUR vision of what a woman should be, as if he didn’t consider our generation and culture when he penned his eternal message to us. I want to help nurture in us a new joy in being what only we can be—godly women, godly wives, godly mothers. I want to help us reclaim territory we have yielded to the feminist movement as we have watched it flit around us. Let’s stop playing with popular culture and by God’s grace, fearlessly embrace all that He honors in a woman.”

May God help us and our sons support our courageous women.

For Further Prayerful Thought:

What are some examples from your world that reveal the gender-blending worldview that is undermining God’s design of creation differences between men and women?
Which arguments for men and young men to understand God’s revealed design of women make the most sense to you?
What do you think of the Gospel Coalition’s argument by John Piper and the late Tim Keller that egalitarianism is a flat-out denial of the teaching of God’s Word, i.e. that there is no exegetical way to support egalitarianism from Scripture?

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Showing the World God’s Glorious Design of Masculinity

On 14 June, 2025 By Gary Yagel

To those of you who have the privilege of being fathers, Happy Fathers’ Day. I want to begin this episode with a question: What do you think of the prayer, “God forgive us for aiming too low and hitting the target every time?” Do you want to go through life aiming low so you can hit the standard of mediocrity? Is that what you want the defining word for your life to be, mediocre? "He was a mediocre father. His commitment to Jesus was…mediocre." If you receive this blog, I doubt very much that mediocre is the adjective that you want describing the caliber of your commitment to godly fatherhood.

To aim low, when it comes to our efforts to guide our sons into godly manhood is to fail them and to fail the Lord. Toxic, self-centered, masculinity is real in this world; it has harmed countless women. Its only cure is the gospel of Jesus Christ, which transforms. If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come (2 Cor 5:17). Answering Jesus’ call to Christian men to show the world his power to fix broken manhood, restoring it to its self-sacrificing design, has never been more important. This episode examines the very high bar of what God designed manhood to be and calls us to pursue it.

Let’s take a moment to review where we’ve come in this June series. In the first episode, we examined the rising popularity of kick-boxing champion Andrew Tate among Christian teen guys as evidence that many in the rising generation of males are tired of being emasculated. With no positive vision of manhood that matches their masculine shape, many boys and men turn to online gurus who assure them, contrary to the message they get everywhere else, that their masculinity is good. The attraction of Christian teens to the broken masculinity of Andrew Tate should be a wake-up call to the church. If the church does not challenge our boys with a call to biblical manhood, they will be attracted to broken ones. To better understand the crisis of identity that young men face today, we identified five obstacles to them embracing the biblical call to godly masculinity.

Obstacle #1: the damage men have done to women by using their positions of power and authority to exploit them. Masculinity would not be under such severe attack if there weren’t so many women harmed by toxic expressions of it.

Obstacle #2: cultural Marxism being spread by Western colleges and universities, which views life through the lens of all men being oppressors.

Obstacle #3: the culture’s embrace of egalitarianism, which defines all structures of authority as oppressive and advances the deception that requiring submission to a boss, police officer, coach, or parent is demeaning (which we all know is not).

Obstacle #4: voices in the church retooling old arguments that attempt to label Paul’s teaching, if not all of the Bible, to be corrupted by surrounding culture, and not God’s inerrant truth.

Obstacle #5: the silence of complementarian church leaders who may express cultural sensitivity to unpopular biblical worldviews in preaching but who might not realize the devasting impact their silence is having on the rising generation of young men who cannot succeed in traveling through the cultural onslaught we just identified without the help of the church.

Last week, we began with Jesus’ observation that those who ignore God’s Word, building their lives instead upon a foundation of cultural lies, (e.g. about gender and sexuality), build their lives on a foundation of sand—something that as fathers, we must not let our children do. God has ordained that society itself is built upon the foundation of the family, and the family rests upon the foundation of marriage between one man and one woman, the first institution established by God before the church or civil government. The foundation of marriage rests upon the uniting of two different creatures, male and female, whose differences, God went out of his way to emphasize in Genesis 2. We noted last week that God chose an intentional parallel structure to describe his creation of Adam, and Eve:

The creation of Adam begins with an explanation of why he was needed. When…there was no man to work the ground then the Lord God formed the man (Gen 2:5-6). Adam is made FOR the ground. The creation of Eve begins with an explanation of why she was needed, Then the Lord God said, “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him.” Eve is created FOR Adam, to be his companion and lover.
Adam is given a name that means ground (ADAMAH). Eve is given a name that means out of the man (Gen 2:23). The word for male is ISH the word for woman is ISHAH.
Adam is made from the ground (Gen 2:7). Eve is made from the man. She, unlike any other creature, is fashioned from part of another creature—the rib of Adam (Gen 2:21-22).
Adam’s creation calling is to work the ground (Gen 2:9-15). Eve’s creation calling is to assist the man (Gen 2:18, 20).
When Adam sins, what is cursed is the ground (Gen 3:17). When Eve sins, what is cursed is her relationship with the man & his kids.

God created very different scripts for Adam and Eve. But our kids are swimming every day in polluted cultural waters that deny male-female differences and are flooding into the church undermining the difference in roles assigned to Christian husbands and wives—roles that lead to a flourishing marriage and portray Christ and his relationship with his bride, the church.

THE MANHOOD SCRIPT

Excerpts from Chapter 2, Men Helping Sons Embrace Biblical Manhood.

(Remember that questions for the adult and son to interact with each other are sprinkled all through each chapter in the book, which are left out of this excerpt.)

Godly manhood is a calling. Christ wants to redeem every Christian man’s fallen, self-centered masculinity and restore him to the original design God displayed in creating unfallen Adam as a male. Christ came to fix everything broken in this world, including masculinity. In the Second Adam, men are empowered to become the Christ-like man Adam was designed to be. This chapter looks at that man.

A. Adam is placed in the garden to cause it and its inhabitants to flourish. In Genesis 2:15 we are told that Adam is put into the garden to work it (ESV). The Hebrew word is avad, which is also translated cultivate. It means to make fruitful, to cause to reach its full potential. Adam is to provide what the garden (which includes its inhabitants—his wife, kids, and clients) needs to thrive. Men may want to be heroes, ourselves, but Scripture says that successful manhood is measured by the degree to which we are hero-makers. Remember Jesus’ words, “Whoever would be great among you must be your servant.” Life reinforces this truth. Successful businessmen serve their customers well. Successful coaches help their players reach their full potential. Effective managers equip those they lead to be the best they can be.

1. When it comes to providing materially for the family, Scripture makes clear that Eve fully shares Adam’s mandate to build culture through vocation and that her gifts are required for the economic success of the family. However, Adam is assigned the primary responsibility for providing what his family needs, materially, to flourish. Eve loves by nourishing, i.e. the giving of herself. But Adam is more specifically assigned to cultivate the garden. i.e. provide from one part of the garden what another part needs (e.g. water in the garden to irrigate the pear tree, pears from the garden to feed humans, etc.) This refers to a man’s vocation. Scripture says God created us with specific work in mine.

2. Adam’s call to provide also means supplying what his loved ones need emotionally to flourish. Here are a few ways to fill their tanks:

Listen with understanding. Christian counselor Paul Tournier observes, “No one can develop freely in this world and find a full life without feeling understood by at least one person. Perhaps that is why Peter commanded; Husbands live together with your wives in an understanding way.
Use words to affirm. When Jesus began his ministry, he heard the audible voice of his heavenly father say the two things every son and daughter most want to hear from their fathers; I love you and I’m proud of you. “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased.”
Cultivate compassion. Jesus wins our hearts as the Great High Priest who sympathizes with our struggles. For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are. Jesus was known for his compassionate heart.

3. Adam’s call is also to provide what his wife and children need spiritually to reach their full spiritual potential. In Ephesians 5:25-27, Paul challenges husbands to sacrifice themselves to present their brides to God as spiritually beautiful, without spot or wrinkle. A man is also to provide what his sons and daughters need to thrive spiritually. Such a calling is clear in Genesis18:19 when God says, For I have chosen him (Abraham), that he may command his children and his household after him to keep the way of the Lord by doing righteousness and justice. In the NT, Paul reflects this same understanding of the creation calling of fathers when he says, For you know how, like a father with his children, we exhorted each one of you and encouraged you and charged you to walk in a manner worthy of God. God makes husbands and fathers responsible for their families’ spiritual growth.

We know that leading requires being out in front, So, we have great incentive to follow hard after Jesus, so we can lead from our lives. But remember, spiritual leadership is not so much perfection as it is direction. Effective spiritual leaders still fall, and our families are well aware of that fact. But effective leaders get back up quickly heading back in the same direction—following Jesus.

B. Adam is placed into the garden to protect it. Genesis 2:15 continues, The LORD God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and KEEP it. The Hebrew word is shamar, which also means to guard, watch-over, and protect. The word is used of soldiers, shepherds, priests, custodians, and government officials. Rick Phillips writes, “This calling to keep rounds out the masculine mandate of the Bible. A man is not only to wield the plow but also to bear the sword. Being God’s deputy lord in the garden, Adam was not only to make it fruitful but to keep it safe” (The Masculine Mandate).

To appreciate this aspect of Adam’s calling, we Westerners must think outside our own culture, where birth control is widespread and infant mortality is low. In God’s design, the female in this male/female union is the one to bear children. In most historical settings, she would continually be pregnant during her child-bearing years. How perfect is God’s design for her partner to have the calling and ability to be her provider (avad) and protector (shamar), when her special calling to motherhood makes her especially vulnerable throughout much of her adult life.

1. Men are called to protect their families physically. On July 14th, 2024, Army Reserve Veteran and volunteer firefighter, Corey Comperatore, was sitting in the bleachers behind the podium at a political rally with his wife, Helen, and daughter, Allyson. As the speaker, Donald Trump, turned his head to look at the screen on his right, Comperatore heard the crack of a rifle. He immediately dove on top of his wife and daughter. After the ensuing chaos, as Helen and Allyson pushed out from under Corey, they discovered that one of the bullets had fatally hit him. His obituary includes these words:

"Corey's life was a reflection of his faith. He was a man of God who loved Jesus with every fiber of his being. His actions were guided by his unwavering belief and he inspired those around him to live with purpose and grace. His ability to lift the spirits of everyone he encountered was unparalleled. His courage was not the boisterous kind; it was the courage of quiet resilience, the strength to be vulnerable, and the bravery to lead with love. Corey's legacy is not just in the major milestones he achieved but in the small acts of kindness that marked his everyday life."

2. Men are called to protect their families from destructive ideas. Ideas have consequences; bad ideas have victims. Here are some examples of evil ideas resulting historically in great suffering.

Whites are superior to blacks—racism, slavery and segregation.
Males are superior to females—infanticide of baby girls.
The Arian race is superior—Nazism’s holocaust slaughter of 6 million Jews.
The wealthy are rich because they stole the poor’s share of the pie—Marxism’s Slaughter of over 85 million people.

Because ideas have such consequences, Paul makes clear that spiritual leaders must protect their followers from destructive ideas that can enslave them, just as the above evil ideas have enslaved their adherents. For the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh but have divine power to destroy strongholds. We destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God, and take every thought captive to obey Christ. Here are a few false, anti-biblical worldviews in our culture.

Humanism: The elevation of the welfare of humans and opinions of humans to the highest level of importance, in disregard of God.
Egalitarianism: A denial of the God’s creation of marriage roles and authority structure for the home and church. It is based on the false notion that anyone commanded to submit to authority is inferior to the one assigned authority
Moral Relativism: The belief that truth, morality, and other values are culturally determined, and that absolute right and wrong do not exist.
Naturalism: The denial of the truth that the order of the creation points logically to an orderer from outside of creation, a creator to whom humans are accountable for their actions.

3. Men are also called to protect their families from spiritual attacks, which Adam failed to do. The ESV Study Bible points out: “The man’s role is to be not only a gardener but also a guardian. As a priest, he is to maintain the sanctity of the garden.” Adam was standing right next to Eve when she was tempted. He remained silent, passive. The ESV study notes continue, “Adam’s sin was both an act of conscious rebellion against God and a failure to carry out his divinely ordained responsibility to guard or ‘keep’ (Gen. 2:15) both the garden and the woman created as a ‘helper fit for him.’” A big part of protecting our family members, spiritually, is praying for them. Jesus said to Peter, Satan demanded to have you, that he might sift you like wheat, but I have prayed for you that your faith may not fail. And when you have turned again, strengthen your brothers.

C. Adam is called to leave his home to pursue his wife. After God reveals the first two parts of Adam’s masculine calling in Genesis 2:15 and explains Eve’s creation in verses 18-23, God wraps up Adam’s calling with regards to Eve, specifically. Therefore, a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh. And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed. He is one who pursues her.

1. Pursuing her means we are the initiator; she is the responder. C.S. Lewis noted, “God is so masculine that all of creation is feminine in comparison,” meaning that God is the initiator and creation answers by coming into existence. Manhood initiates in the pursuit of a woman. We risk rejection by asking her out, asking her to dance, and eventually asking her to be our wives. She decides how she will respond. The world of classic dance understands the creation design. A great male dancer leads; a great female dancer knows how to seamlessly follow.

2. We pursue her to pour out our love for her. We all know Paul’s command to husbands: Love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her. The Greek word for “love” is agape, which describes, sacrificial, loyal, fierce, undeterred devotion. This is the call to manhood—the relentless sacrifice of ourselves for the sake of another. Love is a choice not a feeling. When we love her no matter what we are feeling, putting our arms around her even when she has just hurt or disappointed us, we make it easy for her to love us back. God created a woman to be a natural responder.

The best preparation for marriage is for a man to learn to love others with this agape (self-sacrificial) love. Paul gives us a concrete picture of it. This love of which I speak is slow to lose patience—it looks for a way of being constructive. It is not possessive: it is neither anxious to impress nor does it cherish inflated ideas of its own importance. Love has good manners and does not pursue selfish advantage. It is not touchy. It does not keep account of evil or gloat over the wickedness of other people. On the contrary, it is glad with all good men when truth prevails (1 Cor 13:4-7).

D. Men are called to strength. At the end of King David’s life, he summoned his son to his bedside and said: Be strong, and show yourself a man, and keep the charge of the Lord your God, walking in his ways and keeping his statutes, his commandments, his rules, and his testimonies that you may prosper in all that you do and wherever you turn. At the close of Paul’s letter to the church at Corinth he wrote, Be watchful, stand firm in the faith, act like men, be strong. The Apostle John, addresses subgroups of people in the church praising the young men for their strength. I write to you, young men, because you are strong, and the word of God abides in you, and you have overcome the evil one. Neither David, nor Paul, nor John was talking about working out. They refer to inner strength of character and fighting a spiritual battle. Solomon is challenged by his father to faithful, unwavering obedience to God’s Word. Paul challenges the men in the Corinthian church to be strong warriors in the spiritual battle, being watchful and unrelenting in raising the shield of faith. John commends the young men for being strong spiritual warriors in combatting The Evil One.

Men, here is a portrait of manhood as it was designed to be. Let's lead our sons to join us in setting the bar high, showing the power of Christ to restore broken manhood because in doing so, we show Jesus, the perfect man, to the world. Jesus is worthy of the best effort we can offer him.

For Further Prayerful Thought:

Why not go easy on ourselves and set the bar of masculinity that we live out low. After all, who likes to serve and sacrifice for others?
When you consider that the first call of manhood is to sweat so others prosper and die to ourselves so that others flourish, does that inspire a sense of noble calling or inner resistance to living a life of sacrifice for others?
Which component of the call to protect loved ones from destructive ideas, stood out most to you. How can you do a better job with such protection?
Since men want to be strong, why does the call to spiritual strength given by David, Paul, and John not inspire Christian men better to be spiritual warriors?

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Why Recovering God’s Manhood Script Matters

On 07 June, 2025 By Gary Yagel

Jesus closed his most famous message, the Sermon on the Mount, with the warning that those who ignore his words build their lives on the worst possible foundation—sand. Our sons, daughters, and grandchildren who build their marriages and families by ignoring God’s design of created gender differences and assigned gender roles build on a foundation that is bound to collapse like sand. In contrast, said Jesus, are those who build their lives on obedience to his Word, which would include God’s delineation of created gender differences in Genesis and assigned gender differences in responsibility in their marriages and homes. This group builds their family on a foundation as solid and secure as rock.

Which foundation will your sons, daughters, and grandchildren build their marriage and family upon? You can have a lot to do with the answer. This month’s series, Men Helping Sons Embrace Biblical Manhood, explains a tool by that name. It is a five-week study for high school sons led by dads, youth leaders or men’s ministries, which you can use or help promote. Today we examine six reasons that helping our sons follow God’s Manhood script MATTERS.

Walter Trobisch, in his book, I Loved a Girl, recounts a legend from India about the creation of woman:

The Creator created woman and gave her to the man. After one week, the man came back and said, "Lord, the creature that you have given me makes my life unhappy. She talks without ceasing and torments me intolerably, so that I have no rest. She insists that I pay attention to her all the time and so my hours are wasted. She cries about every little thing and leads an idle life. I have come to give her back to you, because I can't live with her."

The Creator said, "All right," and he took her back.

After a week passed, the man came back to the Creator and said, "Lord, my life is so empty since I gave the creature back to you. I always think of her—how she danced and sang, how she looked at me out at the corner of her eye, how she chatted with me and snuggled with me. She was so beautiful to look at and so soft to touch. I liked her laugh so much! Please give her back to me."

The Creator said, "All right." And gave her back.

But three days later, the man came back again and said, “What shall I do? I can't live with her, and I can't live without her!”

The legend observes that males are BOTH frustrated by females and attracted to them. The reason is that they are so different from us. We can’t live with them easily, because their way of operating is so opposite to ours. But we can’t live without them, because we are powerfully attracted to them as negatively charged electrons in a battery race through the circuit, towards the opposite, positive pole.

The very first mention of human beings in God’s creation account stresses that his creation design of human beings is binary. He made them male and female. There is no hierarchy of value; both share equally the dignity of bearing God’s image. Both share in the cultural mandate, to exercise dominion over their kingdom, earth. As the Triune God is three different persons joined in love, God created his image, “man” as the union of different beings to complete one another. Notice that “man” is both singular and plural, just as God is both. Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness…So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. Since he exists as the loving union of the tree distinct Persons of the Trinity, God designed the unit called “man” to be the loving union of two distinct persons, man and woman to complete one another in love. This union of two separate beings is exhibited in the way their bodies fit together in the sexual union of marriage.

Both the differences that frustrate us and those that generate male-female magnetism result from God’s deliberate design of males and females differently. He intentionally created Adam with weaknesses that only a woman could fill and Eve with weaknesses that only a man could fill. By design, each gender provides what the other lacks. Eve completes Adam by supplying what he lacks, and Adam completes what is missing in Eve. God calls this unit “man” It is worth noting that

God devoted just five verses in Genesis 1 to emphasize Adam and Eve’s equality, but twenty-one verses in Genesis 2 to emphasize their differences. Their differences are intentionally highlighted by God’s parallel structure of Adam and Eve’s creation:

Adam is made for the ground. The creation of Adam begins with an explanation of why he was needed. When…there was no man to work the ground then the Lord God formed the man (Gen 2:5-6).
Adam is given a name that means ground (Gen 2:7). Here the word for the man is ADAM and the word for ground is ADAMAH.
Adam is made from the ground (Gen 2:7).
Adam’s creation calling is to work the ground (Gen 2:9-15).
When Adam sins, what is cursed is the ground (Gen 3:17).

In a perfect parallel structure, God explains Eve’s creation:

Eve is made for the man (Gen 2: 18,20). The creation of Eve begins with an explanation of why she was needed, Then the Lord God said, “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him.” The next verses summarize a search through creation for such a helper with ended with the words, But for Adam there was not found a helper fit for him.
Eve is given a name that means out of the man (Gen 2:23). The word for male is ISH the word for woman is ISHAH.
Eve is made from the man (Gen 2:21-22).
Eve’s creation calling is to assist the man (Gen 2:18, 20).
When Eve sins, what is cursed is her relationship with the man & his kids.

God’s design for humans is that each gender delight in what the other gender brings into the relationship to complete it. For this reason. God emphasizes the equality of Adam and Eve in the first chapter of Genes; both bear his image and exercise dominion over their kingdom, earth. But God puts even more emphasis on each gender valuing the other by devoting four times as much space to emphasizing how different male and female are designed to be. God wrote different creation scripts for men than he did for women. Those scripts are fundamental to living out what we have been created for. But as Owen Strachan & Gavin Peacock observe:

“Today, the sexes have lost the script for their lives, and so many of us don’t know what role to play in life. Try asking a male friend at a coffee shop, ‘What is your manhood for? What is the purpose of being a man?’ Or try querying a young woman at the local university, ‘What meaning does womanhood have? Does it matter at all?’…Outside of affirming feminism, transgender identity, and shape-shifting sexual orientation, it’s taboo today to speak of manhood and womanhood in any fixed way. This is true in secular circles and it’s increasingly true even in Christian circles” (The Grand Design: Male and Female He Made Them).

WHY RECOVER GOD’S MANHOOD SCRIPT?

(The rest of this text is taken from the new booklet, Men Helping Sons Embrace Biblical Manhood, but the interactive questions are left out.)

A. The first reason is that God thinks it is important. There are 1189 chapters of the Bible, God’s revelation to us. After the creation of the world God devotes part of the first and almost all the second to explaining how Adam and Eve are fully equal, created to be different, and are to relate to one another. Understanding these truths is of utmost importance to God!

B. Healthy males want to develop their masculine identity. Author David Murrow makes this point in summarizing what psychology tells us about men. He writes,

“Boys grow up in a feminine world. A boy spends his first nine months inside a woman’s body, and after he is born, a multitude of women—his mom, babysitters, nursery and daycare workers, and schoolteachers—care for him. At some point, however, a boy must break from the feminine and begin to define himself as something different from the mother, from whose body he sprang. Psychologists call this separation/individuation. A boy must reject…her feminine ways and take his place in society as a man. A male who fails to separate, psychologically from his mother faces a lifetime of gender confusion, abuse, or dysfunction. “

Every one of the thirty trillion cells in a male body has XY chromosomes and in the female body XX. Embryologists now know that at eight weeks, the presence of the XY chromosome in the human embryo causes the male’s whole body to develop differently than a female’s body, including his brain. One scholar points out, “Sexuality permeates one’s being to its very depth; it conditions every facet of one’s life. As the self is always aware of itself as an “I,” so this “I” is always aware of itself as himself or herself. Our self-knowledge is indissolubly bound up not simply with our human being but with our sexual being” (Jewett, Man as Male and Female).Understanding God’s design for manhood matters to males because we are hardwired with an inner compulsion to be masculine.

C. Godly males want to attract godly females. God created the magnetism between female and male. So, it stands to reason that the more we become godly men the more a godly female will be drawn to us. For example, in the dance of man with woman, God has assigned the man the role of taking the initiative, just as Jesus, our Bridegroom, took the initiative to leave heaven to pursue us, drawing us to himself with the cords of love. A woman naturally finds her heart drawn to masculine men who are not passive, or tentative in pursuing them but consistently take the initiative in each new phase, as the relationship grows.

Have you ever noticed how often a beautiful woman marries an average-looking guy? I think I know why. Whereas a man looks for a woman to love, a woman looks for a man who will love her. Her attraction to him is much less related to his looks than it is to his confident ability to love her consistently, making her feel treasured, cherished, and loved.

This truth has tremendous implications for guys getting ready to date. Smart guys put more energy into learning how to be attentive to a girl’s needs and make others feel valuable than into worrying about their looks. The masculine strength to consistently love her is just one part of God’s masculine design of manhood. Women can’t help but be attracted to the godly masculinity to which God designed them to be drawn.

D. Understanding God’s creation design of male and female is essential for making male-female relationships in general work throughout life. Although marriage is not on the minds of most high school guys, picking up what they can about the feminine creation design is valuable before marriage. After marriage may be a bit late; most divorces are filed for by unhappy wives whose husbands did not realize how different their wives’ needs were from their own. In fact, not learning about a woman’s emotional makeup ahead of marriage has caused a large majority of female divorcees to say that their married years were the loneliest years of their lives (Stephen Arterburn and Fred Stoeker, Every Woman’s Desire).

Not only is understanding femininity essential before marriage; it is invaluable for preventing potential male-female misunderstandings in general. At one stage in my marriage, I read a Christian counselor’s observation that men tend to use words to communicate decisions and ideas, but women tend to use words more to communicate feelings. Thankfully, that realization came to mind in a critical conversation with one of my twin daughters.

Both girls had decided independently to go to Covenant College, but Karen took a while longer than her sister to decide. Fast forward. As we pulled up the driveway to drop off the girls at Covenant College with my five kids in my van and a u-hall trailer behind, Karen said, “I don’t want to be here.” Every part of my masculine soul wanted to turn around and say to her, “Don’t you think it’s a little bit late to say that?” But I actually realized she wasn’t questioning her decision; she was telling me how she felt. She was afraid—afraid her college roommate might not like her, dreading being eleven hours away from our close-knit family, fearful that she wouldn’t fit in with the girls on her floor. I held my tongue but then heard her seven-year-old brother say through tears, “I just don’t know why you have to go to college so far away.” We all had a big cry and moved on.

God says the wisdom of Scripture is more precious than jewels, and nothing you desire can compare with her. Her ways are ways of pleasantness, and all her paths are peace. This claim is certainly true in understanding what God has revealed about his glorious design of femininity and masculinity. It leads to pleasant paths of shalom, which is the Hebrew word for flourishing.

E. Discipleship is the call to show the power of Christ to restore manhood and womanhood, broken by sin, to the pre-fall, creation design. The target of male discipleship is restored godly manhood. The target of female discipleship is restored godly womanhood. When both Peter and Paul call Christ-followers to discipleship, their challenges to women and men are different. Consider Peter’s way of motivating Christ-like character in women. Do not let your adorning be external—the braiding of hair and the putting on of gold jewelry, or the clothing you wear--but let your adorning be the hidden person of the heart. How motivating is this appeal to you? Compare such words with Paul’s appeal to male leaders at Corinth. Be watchful, stand firm in the faith, act like men, be strong.

F. A fractured view of sexual personhood has captured the minds of many teens today, leading them down a destructive path. The fifth reason for understanding God’s gender design is to be able to thwart a view of sexual personhood harming those we care about. This view is being promoted by Trans Student Education Resources, through their Gender Unicorn graphic. This fractured view of sexual personhood splits apart five aspects of sexuality, proclaiming that every human is free to choose and change all five. He/she then lives a fractured existence. Here is their definition of each fractured part:

Gender identity: deciding for yourself that your identity is male, female, or bisexual regardless of your anatomy.
Gender expression (role): the way you express your gender, adoption of expectations for your gender.
Sex assigned at birth: the designation on your birth certificate as male or female was merely the opinion of parents/doctors.
Physical attraction: sexual orientation, same-sex, heterosexual, or bisexual attraction. This is distinct from emotional attraction. So, a man can be in love with his wife but do his sexual thing on the side with a fellow homosexual.
Emotional attraction: romance. Separating emotional attraction from physical attraction is the basis for prostitution and the sexual abuse of women and children. It is evil.

Some Christians argue that love requires us to embrace feminism’s attempt to overthrow the Bible’s “unjust patriarchy” and our transgender friends’ attempts to choose their genders. But Paul said love does not rejoice at wrongdoing but but rejoices with the truth. As Christ-followers, whose eyes have been opened to the truth of God’s Word, we see both the destructive power of the Gender Unicorn view of sexual personhood and the glory of God’s design of male and female differently to complete each other. Our conversion causes us to savor, not apologize for God’s gender design. Strachan and Owens observe:

"When we trust Christ as our Savior, the beauty of God’s design comes into view. Our conversion opens our eyes to the nature and purpose of our God-given sex. We see the body not as a blunt instrument for our lusts, but as the gift of God for his glorification. We see our relationships with the opposite sex not as a power play, but as an opportunity to serve others in the name of Christ. We see the plan of complementarity, the roles we have the privilege of filling, not as a sentence to misery but as a summons to happiness" (The Grand Design).

Not only does the comparison between the Gender Unicorn view of sexual personhood and God’s gender design lead us to embrace God’s design ourselves. It also urges us to take a stand in our culture. Jesus assigned us to be light to the world and salt that retards the decay of sin on earth. Strachan and Owens, again rightly point out: "When it comes to understanding gender, Christians have something far, far better to offer our children and culture. It is not human disintegration—the splitting apart of one’s biological sex from one’s sexual identity and sexual role, or the separation of physical attraction from emotional attraction. It is an integrated view of body and soul that sees God’s design of male and female to be glorious. Our culture desperately needs to hear our message" (Ibid).

For Further Prayerful Thought:

It is hard to overstate the prominence that God gives to his manhood and womanhood scripts in the first two of 1189 chapters of his revelation. Why do you think Christians today don’t think more about those scripts?
What do you think of the statement, “Healthy males want to develop their masculine identity?” How is the identity of a male Christian like the identity of a female one and how is different?
Which of the six reasons given that God’s “manhood script” should matter to high school guys most stood out to you?

WOULD YOU HELP US SPREAD THE WORD?

The content above is from the first chapter of the new booklet, Men Helping Sons Embrace Biblical Manhood. How valuable do you think it would be for a teen guy to process this content with some older guys, especially his father, but also a youth pastor or other men in the church? Can you imagine what would happen if just ten percent of the Christian dads in America pursued this journey to biblical manhood with their sons—how that would radically change their relationship, the impact it would have on our culture, how the world would see Jesus through self-giving manhood displayed by Christian guys?

One way you can help us is by posting a message like the following on your Facebook page with the link to our bookstore along with copying the book cover below. Here is some possible wording:

“A Christian ministry I support is celebrating Fatherhood Month by letting the Christian community know about a new 5-week journey to biblical manhood for high school guys, which they have just published, to be led by fathers, youth leaders, or men’s ministries. It is Men Helping Sons Embrace Biblical Manhood: A Five-Week Study for High School Guys Designed for Dads or Youth Leaders to Lead.”

Here is the link to our bookstore and below is the image of the book cover to be copied to your Facebook page. Thanks so much for your help.

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Why is Andrew Tate Popular with Young Christian Men?

On 31 May, 2025 By Gary Yagel

Thanks for joining us for our June Fatherhood Month celebration series, Men Helping Sons Embrace Biblical Manhood. We begin this series with a look at a new phenomenon that is impacting young Christian men. Evangelical Pastor, Seth Troutt, ran into this phenomenon while speaking at a junior high winter camp. He saw eight eighth grade boys sitting in a circle in the woods during free time. He walked up to them and asked, “What are you gents talking about?” For a few moments, they resisted answering. But one caved and answered, “we’re watching an Andrew Tate video.” A few months later a pastor of a large church full of college students said to Troutt “We’re having an Andrew Tate problem, especially among our high school and college boys.”

For those unfamiliar with Andrew Tate, he is a former kickboxing champion-turned-social-media-influencer who has become popular among young men for his views on masculinity. Tate has become a phenomenon among young males including many Christians. He has over ten million followers on X. According to one U.K.-based market research consultant, in 2023, one in three 16 to 25-year-old men said they had a positive view of Andrew Tate. Regarding his influence on American Christian teen boys, Nancy Pearcey, author of The Toxic War on Masculinity, wrote recently on X: A former graduate student of mine now teaches at a high school, and she sent me an email saying, “All my male students are fans of Andrew Tate. They are even including quotes from Andrew Tate in the yearbook.” I asked, “Where do you teach?” She answered, “At a classical Christian school.” I believe that young Christian men are paying attention to Andrew Tate because he is pushing back against the cultural pressure that is emasculating men. This episode examines closely five identifiable components of that pressure, coming not only from the culture but from the church.

Let's begin by digging deeper into the Tate phenomenon. Shane Morris, of the Colson Center, puts his finger on the attraction of young males to Andrew Tate’s message. He writes, “Mainstream culture, under the influence of progressive and feminist ideas, has for years dismissed everything distinctive about men as “toxic.” Male strength, competitiveness, and physicality have been denounced in pop culture and medicated in schools. The idea of fathers leading a home has been mocked ceaselessly on television, and boys have been subtly taught there’s nothing they can do or aspire to that girls can’t do better” (Andrew Tate’s Counterfeit Masculinity, January 29, 2025).

As one Tate interviewer said, “Our culture’s message to young boys today is, ‘Stop being yourself. Sit still. Stop joking. Suppress your aggression. Share your feelings. Obey. Female qualities are virtuous, masculine qualities are oppressive.’” Many in the rising generation of males are tired of being emasculated. With no positive vision of manhood that matches their masculine shape, many boys and men turn to online gurus who assure them, contrary to the message they get everywhere else, that their masculinity is good. The attraction of Christian teens to the broken masculinity of Andrew Tate should be a wake-up alarm to the church. If we do not present our boys with a biblical call to masculinity, they will be attracted to broken ones. I want to say that again. If the church does not challenge our boys with a call to biblical manhood, they will be attracted to broken ones.

FIVE OBSTACLES TO BOYS EMBRACING BIBLICAL MANHOOD

A. The Reality of Toxic Masculinity. In 2017 the public was shocked and repulsed to learn that many high-profile men were acting as if they were sexually entitled to a degree that no one realized. The hedge fund billionaire, Jeffry Epstein, got away with trafficking young women for many years with the collusion of high level celebrities and politicians. USA Gymnastics team doctor Larry Nassar sexually abused hundreds of young girls. Following the exposure of numerous sexual-abuse allegations against film producer Harvey Weinstein in October 2017, the #MeToo movement began and spread virally as a hashtag on social media. This exposure has been a welcome force for righteousness.

But the #MeToo movement was just a visible, culture-wide recognition of the awful abuse of women that has taken place in every culture of the world. Every Calvinist must agree that men have had the positions of power in every culture and because of their depravity, have abused women. Not only has the church been slow to address this evil in the culture, but it has also been slow to address this evil in the church, especially churches with all male leadership. In the past, extreme views of male headship have caused Bible-believing pastors to counsel wives to remain submissive to their husbands despite being abused, the church leadership being way too slow to demand repentance of abusers or else be excommunicated. Too often Christian wives have been counseled to “forgive” their husband’s unfaithfulness and take him back sexually, when she should never do that without strong evidence of his repentance. Forgiving does not mean trusting an untrustworthy man enough to give yourself to him. The harm that toxic male behavior and bad male leadership have caused to girls and women even inside the church is immeasurable. No wonder so many women object to Biblical teaching about masculine authority. No wonder so many women are driven into the feminist fold. Consider the story of Nancy Pearcey, author of The Toxic War on Masculinity. She writes,

I had two fathers, a Public one and a Private one. I loved and admired my public father. He was a respected university professor with a strong work ethic. He was willing to pay steep tuition costs for all six of his children to attend a Lutheran elementary school. On Sundays, he made sure we were all neatly lined up in church at the front of the sanctuary. Dad was ambitious, intelligent, and charming.

My Private father was a completely different man. At home he frequently went into rages that terrorized the entire family: shouting, punching and kicking. He would call us pigs and stupid idiots. He was open about his violence, saying, “Do this or I’ll beat you.” Then he carried through on his threats….He was careful to hit us where the bruises would be covered by our clothing, so that no one at school or church ever suspected. Watching my siblings get beaten was as traumatic as experiencing it myself…About halfway through high school, I abandoned my childhood religious upbringing. Not surprisingly, given my experience with my father, I was drawn irresistibly to the feminist movement, devouring all the classic books, from Betty Friedland’s, The Feminine Mystique to Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, to Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics, and many more.

I have yet to meet a feminist who has not been deeply wounded by a man. Men use their power to harm women. That fact has created a cultural and personal reaction to any traditional or biblical views that assign men authority or power.

B. The Influence of Critical Theory in Today’s Culture. Critical theory, also known as cultural Marxism, is rooted in Karl Marx’s worldview that the definitive lens for viewing culture is conflict between two classes, the oppressed, proletariat workers and the oppressor, rich, bourgeoise land and factory owners. Class struggle against the oppressing privileged class in this worldview justifies the murder of business owners and seizure of their property. Under Moa Zedong, Marxism enflamed violent hatred in Chinese peasants towards the wealthy, justifying the brutal annihilation of factory and land owners. History reveals that eventually 65 million Chinese lost their lives through Mao’s evil Marxist policies.

Cultural Marxism (critical theory) began with Italian Marxist Antonia Gramsci, who extended this oppressor/oppressed lens into every aspect of culture. Thus, not only are laborers oppressed by business owners, but the poor are oppressed by the rich, blacks are oppressed by whites, women are oppressed by men, homosexuals and transgendered oppressed by cisgendered people. Poor nations are oppressed by wealthy nations, immigrants wanting to cross our borders are oppressed by Americans citizens who want closed borders. Palestinian Muslims are oppressed by Israel giving Palestinians the right to be antisemitic and call for the annihilation of Jews “from the river to the sea.” Gramsci called the force that enables these oppressors to oppress “unjust, cultural hegemony,” which means the social, cultural, ideological, or economic influence exerted by a dominant group.

This ideology was embraced by the Frankfurt school, which in 1935 crossed the Atlantic and settled in at Columbia University, in NYC. These critical theory proponents expanded Marx’s oppressor/oppressed economic lens to every sphere of social injustice. All inequities are caused by the cultural power of the OPPRESSORS, which these OPPRESSORS cling to through their religious, political, social, and cultural structures. These structures, such as Christianity, the US Constitution, the free market, accurate history, and the structure of the family bestow unjust privilege and so, must be torn down to accomplish social justice. Any legitimacy given to the structures that give power to the oppressors to oppress, must be destroyed. Patriarchy is at the top of the list.

We’ve seen that individual fallen men have exhibited toxic masculinity. But part of the insidiousness of critical theory is that guilt is assigned not for individual acts of oppression but for simply belonging to critical theory’s determined “oppressor class.” By definition, males are the oppressor class of females. Nancy Pearcey recounts that a student of hers received a message from a female classmate that said, “You are a white, privileged male. You have nothing to say, so just shut up and listen.” Masculinity, according to critical theory, is, by definition, oppressive. And patriarchy, which gives males privilege must be torn down. The culture in which the rising generation of men swims daily tells them that their manhood is repulsive, automatically making them evil oppressors.

C. The Culture’s Widescale Embrace of Egalitarianism. For over fifty years, Second Wave Feminism has been teaching through social media platforms and woman’s studies curricula in colleges and universities that the Bible teaches an unjust patriarchy. It is argued that since Eve is created to assist Adam and since leadership in the home and church is assigned to men, the Bible reflects the oppressive patriarchy of unenlightened biblical writers. Here is a sample of accusations cited by Pearcey against the biblical teaching of complementary roles:

“At its core, complementarian theology is one of inequality and hierarchy. And inequality breeds abuse” (The Huffington Post).
“The theology of male headship, ‘feeds the rape culture that we see permeating Christianity today’” (cofounder of #ChurchToo).
“Because complementarian theology promotes a power differential between men and women, it fosters the sort of abuse of power that devolves into sexual abuse” (The Huffington Post).
“The inherent logic of patriarchy says that if men have the right to power and control over women and children, they also have the right to enforce that control. It is this control-over component of patriarchy which makes it vulnerable to violence and abuse” (Sexual Abuse in Christian Homes Churches).

The problem with these accusations is that they ignore the data from the social sciences. Objective data shows that it is the biblical view of godly manhood that causes flourishing. Pearcey cites irrefutable evidence. “Compared to secular men, devout Christian family men who attend church regularly are more loving husbands and more engaged fathers. They have the lowest rates of divorce. And astonishingly, they have the lowest rates of domestic violence of any major group in America" (Ibid).

D. The Assault on God’s Gender Design from Inside the Church. Here are a few examples:

“It is no secret that abuse is prevalent in conservative churches that embrace headship theory” (Adventist Today).
“Complementarian theology ‘is a breeding ground for abusive marriages.’ The problem is not just an occasional ‘rotten apple’ but a ‘rotten theological tree,’ giving rise to sexism and misogyny” (Religion Dispatches).
“I believe that male headship theology makes abuse more possible and more likely. I believe that power differences between equals are emotionally, physically, sexually, and spiritually destructive” (Christians for Biblical Equality).

The most recent egalitarian attempt to undermine God’s design of masculinity and femininity is Beth Barr’s book, The Making of Biblical Womanhood. Here is a summary of her argument from Kevin DeYoung, writing for the Gospel Coalition. “The idea of ‘biblical womanhood’ is nothing other than Christian patriarchy, and the only reason it continues to flourish is because women and men blindly continue to support it (p. 216). For too long, Barr argues, the system of Christian patriarchy has place[d] power in the hands of men and take[n] power out of the hands of women" (The Making of Bibilical Womanhood: A Review Volume 46--Issue 2 Gospel Coalition).

Barr never even tries to refute clear biblical teaching that can't be ignored, texts like Ephesians 5: 22-24: Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife even as Christ is the head of the church, his body, and is himself its Savior. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit in everything to their husbands. Barr simply pushes these clear complementarian texts aside and attempts to discredit those who faithfully hold to them like John Piper. For example, she argues that Paul’s use of feminine images like a pregnant mother, a mother giving birth, and even a nursing mother “easily refute” Piper’s position. But as DeYoung points out, she never answers a single one of Piper’s arguments that:

"God has revealed himself to us in the Bible pervasively as King, not Queen, and as Father, not Mother. He argues that the Son of God came into the world as a man, that the priests in Israel were men, that the apostles were all men, that men are given the responsibility to lead, protect, and provide. Piper acknowledges that emphasizing a “masculine ministry” can be seriously misunderstood and misapplied. He also underscores several times that a “masculine ministry” is for the flourishing of women and that women contribute in fruitful partnership to the work of ministry. Again, Barr has every right to disagree with Piper’s vision for ministry, but that disagreement should deal with his specific arguments…Time and again, Barr quickly pushes aside any evidence that might challenge her thesis" (Ibid).

The egalitarian denial of gender roles in the home and church is serious.

The author of egalitarianism is Satan, himself, whose rebellion was rooted in his refusal to submit to God’s order of creation desiring to be equal to God.
When God cursed Adam for his rebellion, God began not with because you ate the fruit, but with the words, “Because you have listened to the voice of your wife and have eaten of the tree.” God begins with his displeasure at their reversal of the created order. Adam was to be Eve’s head. Eve was to rule over the reptile kingdom, exercising dominion with Adam over the earth. But in eating the forbidden fruit, Adam followed Eve and Eve followed the serpent. In Genesis 2:15, Adam was assigned responsibility to protect the garden and its inhabitants. But when the garden and Eve were attacked by Satan, he remained passive. Our rising generation of sons does not need the help of egalitarians to be passive. It is part of the fallen nature we inherited from Adam.
Egalitarians set up a straw man of biblcal patriarchy. They substitute the concept of Roman patriarchy, which was literally, father rule (PATER ARCHOS) for what the NT teaches. Roman fathers had the power of life and death. If a Roman father did not like the look of his newborn child and turned his thumb down, the child would immediately be taken out and drowned. Such absolute power was NOTHING like the fatherhood descrubed in the OT and NT, which followed the rule of law. OT fathers were accountable to obey the Law of Moses. NT fathers were accountable to NT church elders to treat their wives and children with Christ-like love.
Egalitarian efforts to set up a variety of straw men they can shoot down is made easy by our "sound bite" culture. How can we blame a teen girl who rejects what the Bible says about gender roles when she says, “The Bible says that Eve was made to be Adam’s helper, and I don’t accept the idea that my calling in life is to wash floors and clean toilets for men.” Full biblical gender-role teaching is extensive, glorious, and calls men to sacrificial love. But phrases and statements taken out of context are easily used to generate doubts about biblical gender teaching. The Hebrew word for helper is in fact EZER, which is used numerous times in the Psalms for God himself being mankind’s helper. There is NOTHING demeaning about the word—but that is not the way it comes across, especially when manipulated by egalitarians.
Egalitarianism destroys the masculine motivation to lead.

E. The Silence of Complementarian Pastors. I understand that proclaiming the Word of God needs to be done pastorally and sensitively. In egalitarian Western culture, to speak about wives submitting to husbands will be offensive to many. And it can be reasonably argued that a sermon on countercultural topics like abortion, or God’s gender design risks causing the lost members of the audience to think they must adopt a pro-life political position or embrace complementarianism to come to faith in Christ. But this episode is a reminder to pastors, ruling elders, and fathers, that there is another group sitting in the pews on Sunday mornings, besides a few unbelievers. That group is young men, who are being crushed by the attack on their very identify as males. They need US to point them towards the glorious, biblical vision of godly manhood. They don't need us to be apologetic about God's gender design of male and female differently to complete one another; they need us to celebrate that design because God has chosen it to image himself. Is your church leadership committed to doing that?

This month you’ll be hearing about a new tool available on our website called, Men Helping Sons Embrace Biblical Manhood. It is an interactive, 5-week study designed for fathers, youth leaders, or men’s ministries to go through with their high school sons. From the perspective of creation, fall, redemption, restoration, it examines what Scripture says about masculinity, femininity, sex, and marriage in a format that is rich with questions to generate interact with high school guys.

The Andrew Tate phenomenon is real. It shows us our teen boys' desperate need to understand God’s design of themselves as they are about to become men. Whether or not your church preaches complementarianism from the pulpit or finds a way to use this new resource—please don’t be silent about God’s gender design. I think you will agree with Martin Luther’s observation that shrinking back from proclaiming all of Scripture, because part of it is counter-cultural, at some point becomes unfaithfulness to Jesus. Luther said, If I profess with the loudest voice and clearest exposition every portion of the truth of God except precisely that little point which the world and the devil are at the moment attacking, I am not CONFESSING Christ, however boldly I may be professing Christ. Our boys need their church leadership to proclaim the whole counsel of God.

For Further Prayerful Thought:

What are your thoughts about the growing popularity of Andrew Tate even among Christian men?
Which parts of the secular culture’s attack on masculinity stood out most to you?
Which parts of the church’s egalitarian attack on biblical teaching or Bible- believing church leaders reticence to celebrate the glory of God’s gender design bother you the most?

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You Can’t Ignore the Holiness of God and Experience His Presence

On 25 May, 2025 By Gary Yagel

The great theologian Augustine prayed famously, “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in You.” King David would have been the first to affirm Augustine’s observation about human nature in general and his own longings. He begins Psalm 63 with the words. You, God, are my God, earnestly I seek you; I thirst for you, my whole being longs for you. David knew that he was created to enjoy a love relationship with God. But the event from David’s life that we study in this episode reveals David learning an important lesson about God’s presence: You can’t enjoy that presence if you ignore the holiness of God.

As you know, the foundation of this podcast is the belief that God designed men to be mission-focused. If we capture men’s hearts with the greatness of our mission as Christ-followers, men are hard-wired to sacrifice what it takes to accomplish that mission. But most Christian men have a fuzzy view of what that mission is.

Certainly, that was the case for me. When I began a career as a pastor and church planter, I realized that I could too narrowly define my mission as the success of the church I was planting, instead of defining my mission as dying to myself to meet my wife’s needs, devoting myself to helping my kids reach their full potential, glorifying God through the spiritual fruit of my attitudes, and sharing Christ with a neighbor who never ends up coming to my church. I knew that the best safeguard against becoming a workaholic pastor was to define my mission holistically as a Christ-follower. So, I retreated with the Lord and studied every passage I could find that addresses our mission. I discovered that every one of these numerous descriptions can be placed into one of three categories. First and foremost, we are called TO Christ to enjoy a love relationship with him. Second, we are called TO BE LIKE Christ, to exhibit Christ-like attitudes. Third, we are called TO EXERCISE DOMINION for Christ, i.e. to spread his kingdom rule over ever sphere of human life. In thirty years of helping men stay focused on their mission, I’ve never been able to improve upon this three-fold understanding of our call from Jesus.

Today’s episode addressed the first component of our mission—called TO Christ to enjoy a love relationship with him. This mission imperative was summarized by Jesus as the Great Commandment. "Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength” (Mk 12:30). God’s commands to us are always for our benefit. Since we were created FOR a personal, love-relationship with God, Jesus commands what is best for us. “Love the LORD your God,” says Jesus, “That is your mission.” God’s presence in our lives is what Jesus’ atonement for our sins has accomplished both now and for eternity. The Father sent Jesus to remove the guilt that separated us from him so that we could experience a personal relationship with him. Scripture uses metaphors of the two closest human relationships that exist—that of a husband’s delight in his bride and of a father’s delight in his child to describe what Christ’s death has accomplished. Before we look at what David learned about God’s presence with him, let’s think about the significance of God’s personal presence in our lives.

GOD’S PRESENCE IN OUR LIVES MEANS EVERYTHING TO US

A. God’s presence with us completes us. We were created FOR a relationship with God, which is only possible because we, unlike the rest of creation, are made in his image. We have the spiritual and moral capacity to know and love God, which no other creature has. Blaise Paschal described this heart hunger for fulfillment as “a God-shaped-vacuum.” Fallen human nature seeks to fill that vacuum with false gods that fail to fill a vacuum that only God truly can. David expresses this yearning in Psalm 63:1-2, my soul thirsts for you; my flesh faints for you, as in a dry and weary land where there is no water.

B. God’s presence fills our love tank. We are not designed to walk through the ups and downs of life alone. As the space-walking astronaut outside the space capsule needs to be attached through an oxygen line to the ship, humans need a constant supply of love. Though sin broke the lifeline, the cross restores it. We can breathe in and out companionship with the God who loves us, just as Adam and Eve walked with God in Eden in the cool of the day. As we saw last week, David constantly poured out his heart to God knowing that what he was feeling was understood. Later, Scripture would reinforce this one-on-one privilege, urging us to draw near to Jesus, our Great High Priest. For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin (Heb 4:15). Although Scripture tells us that we need companionship with humans, not just God, the significance of this life-transforming intake of God’s love is hard to overstate. Instead of being unconsciously impelled to have to vent our experiences, feelings, and opinions in conversations with others, Christians with love tanks filled through fellowship with God are released from self-preoccupation to take an interest in others, listening to their experiences, feelings, and opinions. David’s Psalm 63 words to describe his love tank being filled were in verse 3, Your constant love is better than life.

C. God’s presence reinvigorates our soul. God did not create us to be bored. He gave us hearts with passions that need to be ignited. He gave us hearts that need to be reinvigorated. In my work with guys struggling with porn, we recognize that lust often strikes a bored heart. The very nature of sexual arousal is to get our hearts beating fast. God knows that the merging of two lives together in marriage requires enormous work and self-denial. So, he gives couples the thrill of sex—not always a twenty-one-gun salute but nevertheless a thrilling experience of explosive pleasure that gets the heart racing. Paul seems to be aware of the boredom vulnerability of our heart, which exposes us to sexual temptation. He both urges couples to keep satisfying their spouses sexual cravings and points out that there is a greater thrill for Christians—the thrill of knowing and being loved by the God of the universe. “You were made for God and God is the answer to your deepest longings” (1 Cor 6:13). David compares the pleasure of praising God to other great pleasures in life when he says, My soul will be satisfied as with fat and rich food, and my mouth will praise you with joyful lips (vs 7).

D. God’s presence gives us daily connection to our purpose. What a privilege it is to get up in the morning and say, “Good morning, Lord. How can I honor you today?” How awesome to talk with my CO throughout the day about his mission for me, knowing that HIS MISSION MATTERS ETERNALLY. Everyday, God’s presence in our lives reminds us of our calling to seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, i.e. to surrender to him with my heart allegiance, with my inner attitudes—and by seeking to accomplish his agenda in every sphere of my life in all the spheres where he has given me influence. Notice David’s sense of purpose in the first verse of Psalm 63. O God, you are my God; earnestly I SEEK you.

E. God’s presence in our lives is a source of strength. It is walking with God personally all day long that provides the instinct to go to God for help. Both externally, because of the relentless demands made upon us, and internally, because of inner brokenness and reflexive wrong attitudes, the presence of God with us is the avenue to the strength we need. We are walking daily with the one who is the Great High Priest, so it is natural to with confidence draw near to the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need (Heb 4:16). In Psalm 63, David refers to constantly depending upon God for help in verses 7-8. for you have been my help, and in the shadow of your wings I will sing for joy. My soul clings to you; your right hand upholds me.

GOD’S PRESENCE IN THE OT

The Bible is God’s story of the four chapters of the Gospel of Jesus, creation, fall, redemption, restoration. Chapter one, creation, shows Adam and Eve designed FOR a personal relationship with God. But as we all know in chapter two of the Gospel story (fall), Adam and Eve’s rebellion caused them to be thrown out of the Garden and the presence of God. In Genesis 12 God begins the process of redeeming his people from sin and restoring them to intimacy with him by establishing a covenant of belonging with Abraham and his children summarized in the phrase “I will be your god, and you shall be my people.” 400 years later Moses continues to foreshadow this restoration to his presence by establishing the Priesthood and building the tabernacle. Inside this portable, roofless tent was the place where sacrifices were made for sin. The innermost portion, called the Holy of Holies, contained the Ark of the Covenant, a wooden chest, overlaid with gold which was the mercy seat, the throne on which Yahweh sat. Two gold cherubim faced each other with their wings covering the mercy seat. On it the shekinah glory cloud was seen to dwell during the day and the pillar of fire at night.

When it comes to our topic, the presence of God, the tabernacle communicated two truths that were in some ways a paradox. On the one hand, the portable nature of the tabernacle communicated that God was with his covenant people wherever they went. The shekinah glory cloud led them by day and pilar of fire by night. The cloud and fire hovered between them and the Egyptian army protecting them before God parted the Red Sea. When Israel set up camp, the cloud and pilar of fire visibly dwelt over the Ark of the Covenant. On the other hand, the entire priestly system instituted by Moses was a divinely inspired drama to communicate that without the shedding of blood there is no remission of sin and without remission of sin, no one could enter the holy presence of God.

All this is background for 2 Samuel 6. As we come to this chapter, David has defeated the Jebusites, taken Jerusalem as his capital, and completed the construction of his palace there. The presence of God meant as much to David and his kingdom as it does to us. So, he decides to bring it to Jerusalem.

David again gathered all the chosen men of Israel, thirty thousand. And David arose and went with all the people who were with him …. to bring up from there the ark of God, which is called by the name of the Lord of hosts who sits enthroned on the cherubim. And they carried the ark of God on a new cart and brought it out of the house of Abinadab, which was on the hill. And Uzzah and Ahio, the sons of Abinadab, were driving the new cart, with the ark of God…And David and all the house of Israel were celebrating before the Lord, with songs and lyres and harps and tambourines and castanets and cymbals.

And when they came to the threshing floor of Nacon, Uzzah put out his hand to the ark of God and took hold of it, for the oxen stumbled. And the anger of the Lord was kindled against Uzzah, and God struck him down there because of his error, and he died there beside the ark of God. And David was angry because the Lord had broken out against Uzzah… David was afraid of the Lord that day, and he said, “How can the ark of the Lord come to me?” So David was not willing to take the ark of the Lord into the city of David. But David took it aside to the house of Obed-edom the Gittite.

So, David declares a national holiday and puts together the parade to beat all parades. The whole nation lines the streets for this once-in-a-lifetime experience. The popcorn and hotdog venders are making a killing. The news media has its cameras stationed all along the parade route. Bret Baier has done an interview with Abinadab, the man who stored the ark. As the parade makes its way to Jerusalem you hear it coming from miles away—hundreds upon hundreds of cymbals crashing, tambourines shaking, trumpets blaring. The King, himself, leads the parade whooping it up, running, jumping, acting like a mad man. Then, sitting on a brand-new oxcart you see it, the throne of Yahweh, in all its regal splendor, its gold cherubim ablaze in the sun. Behind it are thirty thousand top war heroes in David’s army, decked out in their dress blues, boots polished to a spit shine, swords glistening in the sun. Closer and closer they come, the volume of the crowd nearly deafening you. You notice the oxcart tip to the one side slightly and suddenly a hush comes over the crowd. David wonders what’s wrong. He turns back and begins to run towards Uzzah who is on the ground. When he gets there, Uzzah is not breathing. An onlooker tells David, “He reached up, took hold of the ark, and instantly fell to the ground dead.” Now David is angry. He’s not sure who to be angry at. Uzzah? God? Himself? David continues on to his palace in Jerusalem and spends three months figuring out what went wrong.

THE LESSON DAVID LEARNED: YOU CANNOT EXPEREINCE GOD’S PRESENCE AND IGNORE GOD’S HOLINESS

The explanation for the disastrous death of Uzzah was that David, in seeking the Lord’s presence in Jerusalem, failed to take into account the most fundamental characteristic of God—his holiness.

A. David discovered that, because of God’s holiness, God had given Moses very specific instructions about how to move the Ark that were ignored by the priests. It was NEVER to be touched. The Ark had rings at each of the four corners through which two poles were to be inserted by the two Kohathites carrying the ark by the poles. The Ark should never have been on the cart.

B. The lesson is that what is unclean cannot be in God’s holy presence and live. That reality had been repeatedly communicated by God to his people.

When God was in their presence visiting Mount Sinai to write the Ten Commandments with his own finger, the people were warned “Even if a beast touched the mountain it shall be stoned” (Ex 19:16).
Moses, known as the friend of God, was not permitted to see God’s face. God explaining, “you cannot see my face, for man shall not see me and live” (Ex 33:20).
The only human allowed into the Holy of Holies where the Ark dwelt was the high priest once per year, and then only after he had undergone an elaborate cleansing ritual and made numerous sacrifices for his sins.
The priests were very aware that God’s holiness could kill the priest if he touched the ark. So, they sewed little bells into the high priests garment and on the Day of Atonement, when he entered the Holy of Holies, they listened for the jingling of those bells so they could tell if he was still alive and moving. If it went quiet, and he were struck dead, they were prepared because they tied a rope around the High Priests leg so that if he were struck dead, they could pull his body out from the Holy of Holies.

C. At the core of Uzzah’s vocation was understanding the holiness of God. Remember Uzzah was a Kohathite. Here is their job description:

This is the service of the sons of Kohath in the tent of meeting: the most holy things. When the camp is to set out, Aaron and his sons shall go in and take down the veil of the screen and cover the ark of the testimony with it. Then they shall put on it a covering of goatskin and spread on top of that a cloth all of blue, and shall put in its poles…. And when Aaron and his sons have finished covering the sanctuary and all the furnishings of the sanctuary, as the camp sets out, after that the sons of Kohath shall come to carry these, but they must not touch the holy things, lest they die.

The full-time job of everyone in their tribe was the care of the sacred objects kept in the tabernacle. For years, he’d been schooled in the disciplines of his calling. He knew that the cardinal rule in his work was never touch the Ark of the Covenant. Like an electrician for whom the mere touch of the high voltage wire meant certain death, Uzzah, if he had understood God’s holiness as any Kohathite should have, he would have known that touching the Ark meant instant death.

D. Uzzah’s death reveals what real filth is, in they eyes of God. R.C. Sproul writes,

Uzzah assumed that his hand was less polluted than the earth. But it wasn’t the ground or the mud that would desecrate the ark; it was the touch of man. The earth is an obedient creature. It does what God tells it to do. It brings forth its yield in its season. It obeys the laws of nature that God has established. When the temperature falls to a certain point, the ground freezes. When water is added to dust, it becomes mud, just as God designed it. The ground doesn’t commit cosmic treason. There is nothing polluted about the ground. God did not want his holy ark touched by that which is contaminated by evil, that which is in rebellion to him, that which by its ungodly revolt had brought the whole creation to ruin and caused the ground and the sky and waters of the sea to groan together in travail waiting for the day of redemption. Man. It was man’s touch that was forbidden.

THREE TAKE-AWAYS

A. We need to celebrate God’s holiness. This Hebrew word, QUDASH, means to cut, or to separate. Among the implications of this attribute is that God’s moral characteristics are infinitely greater than ours. We may love; but compared to the excellence of God’s love there is a great chasm. God’s goodness is so good, there is a chasm separating it’s moral perfection from human goodness. God is “set apart” from humans in his moral perfections. The consistency of God’s moral perfections is an enormous blessing to us and contrasts to the false God, Allah, who can change his mind and character upon any whim.

B. We need to learn to hate evil. Because God is holy, holiness is required for the health of every component of life on planet earth. Every sin is a step towards destruction. I smile inside at those who are afraid that if we fully understand God’s grace it will lead to sin. Nothing could be further from the truth. The greater my understanding of the depth of my own sin—the heinousness of it, the destruction of it—the more I celebrate grace, being mercifully delivered from the consequences of it. Having been delivered from such tyranny, why would I ever want to pursue such destruction again? Envy of the wicked reveals a very shallow understanding of sin. Sin is the antithesis of LIFE.

C. Reflecting upon God’s holiness ignites our passion to know the Word of God and live it, everyday. Uzzah was part of a tribe that had neglected the clear teaching of Scripture, to their peril. David said to God, With my whole heart I seek you; let me not wander from your commandments! I have stored up your word in my heart, that I might not sin against you (Ps 119:10-11).

For Further Prayerful Thought:

What does God’s presence in your life mean to you?
How would you summarize the lesson David learned when Uzzah was struck dead as they moved the Ark to Jerusalem.
What are your thoughts about remembering the holiness of God in our everyday lives. Why might that be important?

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Restoring Spiritual Passion When We’ve Failed

On 18 May, 2025 By Gary Yagel

Here is a truth taken from our own lives: YESTERDAY’S spiritual passion doesn’t supply TODAY’S spiritual energy. Fired up hearts through Scripture inspiring us or by seeing God’s hand answering our prayers ignite our passion for the moment or day. But all too quickly, that passion cools, as the rain from a new day’s storms falls—circumstances that go all wrong, obstacles that make simple tasks harder than they should be, our own disappointing failures. Spiritual passion seems to dissipate quickly, and before we know it, we are discouraged, disheartened, and unmotivated.

The classic example of the ebb and flow of spiritual passion is of course, Elijah. I don’t know what the etymology is of the phrase mountaintop experience, but certainly Elijah’s showdown with the prophets of Baal on Mt Carmel fits that description. It was the culmination of 3.5 years of intense prayer for the nation of Israel to repent from its idolatrous worship of Baal so that God would remove the curse of the drought upon the land. After Baal is unmasked as a false God who could not send fire to consume the sacrifice, the fire of Yahweh fell. We read, And when all the people saw it, they fell on their faces and said, “Yahweh, he is God; Yahweh, he is God.” And Elijah said to them, “Seize the prophets of Baal; let not one of them escape.” And Elijah brought them down to the brook Kishon and slaughtered them there (1 Kings 18:38-40). Elijah prayed intently and the rain came, ending the curse of the drought. Elijah was so energized by this massive spiritual victory that he ran 18 miles down the mountain to Jezreel.

But at the bottom, Elijah slammed into a jolting reality check. One key person in Israel had not repented, Queen Jezebel. She vows to execute him within 24 hours, sending him running for his life and overwhelming him with such discouragement that he pleads with God to take his life. Such dramatic spiritual highs and lows are not confined in Scripture to Elijah; we see the same pattern in the life of David as well. This episode looks at one of the lowest points in David’s life, how he recovered his spiritual passion, and the lessons we can learn from him.

Two characteristics that I love about Scripture are that it is logical and that it is realistic. Because God is the most fantastic being in the world and loves us more than we can comprehend, logic demands that I love him back passionately every moment of everyday of my life with all my heart and mind and soul and strength. Yet, realistically, that ain’t happening. My passion for God ebbs and flows. That is why I am excited about this episode. Apart from his later sin with Bathsheba, this episode finds David at one of the lowest points of his life—and shows him fighting his way through his despair and depression to recover his confidence in God.

Let’s set the stage. This crisis takes place before David becomes king of Israel, when he is still being hunted by Saul who sees David as a threat to his throne. David reasoned that his best chance to stop Saul from hunting him down was to move into Phillistine territory, where he and his six hundred men became mercenaries for Achish, the King of the Phillistine city of Gath. Achish, in turn, gave him the nearby city called Ziklag where David, his two wives, his 600 men and their families settled down. Because they are Achish’s mercenaries and bodyguards, when Achish seeks to join forces with the other Philistine Kings in battle against Saul and Israel fifty miles away, David and his men travel with Achish to the battle lines. But the other Philistine Kings will have none of David and his men. They refuse to trust David’s troops and send them and David home. We pick up the story in 1 Sam 30:1.

Now when David and his men came to Ziklag on the third day, the Amalekites had made a raid against the Negeb and against Ziklag. They had overcome Ziklag and burned it with fire and taken captive the women and all who were in it, both small and great. They killed no one, but carried them off and went their way. And when David and his men came to the city, they found it burned with fire, and their wives and sons and daughters taken captive. Then David and the people who were with him raised their voices and wept until they had no more strength to weep. David's two wives also had been taken captive, Ahinoam of Jezreel and Abigail the widow of Nabal of Carmel. And David was greatly distressed, for the people spoke of stoning him, because all the people were bitter in soul, each for his sons and daughters (vs 1-6a).

DAVID’S DEPLETED CONDITION

He and his men were physically drained from their return trip.
He was overcome with the grief of losing his entire family—both wives and all his children.
He must have been doubting himself. How could he have been so stupid to have left such a small force to protect the city when he knew the Amalekites weren’t that far south of Ziklag?
He couldn’t rely on his own friends for support since he knew many of this group were complaining about David’s bad decision.
He faced a possible insurrection with some speaking of stoning David. He had lost his men’s respect, which was just about all he had to offer them.
His own confidence in Yahweh must have been shaken. How could God let this happen? David had refused to lift his hand against Saul, and strategically won the confidence of Achish, who had been Israel’s enemy, to find a safe place for his men and their families. After David outsmarted these two enemies, God allowed a third enemy to rise, up who wasn’t even on David’s radar, burn down his city, and take every wife and child of his men as Amalekite slaves. How many pounds of David’s flesh did God want?

And yet, we read in the rest of verse 6, But David strengthened himself in the LORD his God. What a powerful tribute to David’s character. Tough times don’t last. Tough people do. Let’s consider David’s history, and the rest of Scripture to discover how and why, with his spiritual and emotional tank on “E”, David strengthened himself in the LORD his God.

DAVID STRENGTHENS HIMSELF IN THE LORD: 4 LESSONS FOR US

A. David had built the habit of being honest with God about his feelings. David weeps all day because of his grief. David models a vital truth for maintaining a healthy relationship with God in his Psalms—he starts out by telling God how he really feels. That includes the spiritual highs and the spiritual lows. Note this pattern in just a few of the numerous examples from Psalms.

Psalm 3:1-2. O Lord, how many are my foes! Many are rising against me; many are saying of my soul, “There is no salvation for him in God.”
Psalm 9:1-2. I will give thanks to the Lord with my whole heart; I will recount all of your wonderful deeds. I will be glad and exult in you; I will sing praise to your name, O Most High.
Psalm 10:1. Why, O Lord, do you stand far away? Why do you hide yourself in times of trouble
Psalm 13:1. How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me?
Psalm 17:1-2. Hear a just cause, O Lord; attend to my cry! Give ear to my prayer from lips free of deceit! From your presence let my vindication come!
Psalm 18:1-2. I love you, O Lord, my strength. The Lord is my rock and my fortress and my deliverer, my God, my rock, in whom I take refuge.
Psalm 22:1-2: My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from saving me, from the words of my groaning? O my God, I cry by day, but you do not answer, and by night, but I find no rest.

The Psalms are flooded with examples of David taking his emotions to God.

B. When David faced trials, he had built a pattern of looking back and remembering God’s past faithfulness. David could have recalled how God gave him victory over Goliath, or how he and his men were surrounded by Saul who was closing in on them when Saul suddenly got a message that the Philistines were getting ready to attack Israel. We also see this component of David’s walk with God in the Psalms. In psalms that reveal David’s faith being tested, David nearly always recalls God’s faithfulness in the past to renew his confidence for the future.

Psalm 3:4. I cried aloud to the Lord, and he answered me from his holy hill.
Psalm 34:4-6. I sought the Lord, and he answered me and delivered me from all my fears. Those who look to him are radiant, and their faces shall never be ashamed. This poor man cried, and the Lord heard him and saved him out of all his troubles.
Psalm 56:13. For you have delivered my soul from death, yes, my feet from falling, that I may walk before God in the light of life.
Psalm 138:3. On the day I called, you answered me; MY STRENGTH OF SOUL YOU INCREASED.

C. David strengthens himself in the LORD by understanding what Peter and Paul would later teach about God’s determination to test his loved one’s faith. In Psalm 11 for example, we see David's refusal to think the solution to trials is to flee from them. Instead, he trusts God's sovereignty and recognizes God’s determination to test the character of the righteous. He writes, The Lord is in his holy temple; the Lord's throne is in heaven; his eyes see, his eyelids test the children of man. The Lord tests the righteous (vs 4-5). Peter would later make the same point writing to first century Christians, You have been grieved by various trials, so that the tested genuineness of your faith—more precious than gold that perishes though it is tested by fire—may be found to result in praise and glory and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ (1 Pet 1:6-7). James, the brother of Jesus, stresses the same truth to his readers. When all kinds of trials and temptations crowd into your lives my brothers, don’t resent them as intruders, but welcome them as friends! Realize that they come to test your faith and to produce in you the quality of endurance. But let the process go on until that endurance is fully developed, and you will find you have become men of mature character with the right sort of independence (James 1:2-4).

It is likely that David strengthened himself in the LORD his God by knowing that the horrific trial of losing his home and family was part of a three-stage process God employs to grow our faith. In fact, wise observers recognize that nearly every successful endeavor has these 3 stages, a) beginning to pursue the objective, b) encountering and overcoming opposition, c) accomplishing the objective.

Anne and Ray Ortland, in their book, You Don’t Have to Quit, pose this question: “Is there a secret that could help you stick it out through your darkest, most trying situations, until you emerge truly victorious?” They then suggest that the answer to overcoming despair and rekindling the passion needed to endure trials may be understanding the three stages of nearly all significant accomplishments. They continue, “When you think about it, everybody’s had those periods of dark trying situations. And the people who have made it have come through a time sequence—a time sequence that could be the clue to your making it, too: A) They began, in some new situation or effort; B) They hit problems and somehow worked their way through them; C) They came out on top.” The Ortlands point to many biblical examples of this three-stage reality including the rebuilding of Jerusalem’s wall by Nehemiah.

In prayer, God gives Nehemiah a vision for rebuilding the wall around Jerusalem. That’s stage A. God provides all that he needs, and Nehemiah ingenuously captures the hearts of the people to rebuild the wall. But before they even start, they hit stage B—opposition—the demoralizing efforts of Sanballat and Tobiah the Ammonite. The people push through these efforts to discourage them and quickly build the wall to half its needed height. But then they find out that Sanballat and Tobiah had formed a band of warriors to attack them as they worked—even stronger resistance. So, Nehemiah splits his workforce in half—one group building the wall—the other holding weapons. But resistance from Sanballat and Tobiah continues. They try four times to trick Nehemiah into meeting with them to kill him and falsely accused Nehemiah of wanting to be king of Jerusalem as his motive. But the people persevere all the way through stage B until in Nehemiah 6:15 we read, “So the wall was finished in 52 days.” They got to stage C. I can’t help but think of the quote of Vince Lombardi, “Press on. Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence.” It may feel like we are losing. But the most meaningless statistic in a ball game is the score at halftime.

As we often mention in this podcast/blog Christ-followers are called to BE LIKE Christ—to demonstrate Christ changing the attitudes of our hearts. So, stage A is setting out to exhibit Christ-like attitudes. Stage B is encountering tough circumstances that test our heart attitudes, especially our faith, but choosing to trust God with a biblical perspective that leads to Christ-likeness. Stage C is letting endurance grow so that in Jame’s words, we have become men of mature character with the right sort of independence. David, son of Jesse began the process of becoming Israel’s king, stage A, with his anointing by Samuel and defeat of Goliath while a teenager. For probably 15 years, David endured stage B, while Saul chased David around Palestine trying to kill him—the very unjust actions that had driven David and his men to King Achish and the establishment of their families and homes in Ziklag. But David reached stage C!

D. The fourth step to strengthen ourselves in the Lord is to seek God’s leading and then releasing God’s renewing power by choosing to act on that leading. David’s story continues.

And David said to Abiathar the priest, the son of Ahimelech, “Bring me the ephod.” So Abiathar brought the ephod to David. And David inquired of the Lord, “Shall I pursue after this band? Shall I overtake them?” He answered him, “Pursue, for you shall surely overtake and shall surely rescue.” So David set out, and the six hundred men who were with him….

God then providentially led them to an Egyptian slave who knew where the Amalekites had camped.

And when he had taken him down, behold, they were spread abroad over all the land, eating and drinking and dancing, because of all the great spoil they had taken from the land of the Philistines and from the land of Judah. And David struck them down from twilight until the evening of the next day, and not a man of them escaped, except four hundred young men, who mounted camels and fled. David recovered all that the Amalekites had taken, and David rescued his two wives. Nothing was missing, whether small or great, sons or daughters, spoil or anything that had been taken. David brought back all (vs 16-19).

When God promises us strength, we’ve got to choose to believe it is there and act. Faith, we are told in Hebrews 11:1, is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. It is being sure of something even though we don’t see it. If God is calling us to persevere through an experience that we know we don’t have the strength to endure, God has promised us what we need. “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness” (2 Cor 12:9).

HOW TO FAIL F0RWARD

We would be negligent in examining this passage if we did not identify it as a great example of David coping with his failure—the failure to leave enough troops behind to protect the city he was responsible to protect. Though we don’t know what specific lessons David learned through failure, here is a wise, biblically-rooted, perspective about failing, from John Maxwell.

1. Appreciate the Value of Failure. Each time you fail, know that you’ve traveled another mile farther on the road to your potential. Soichino Honda, the founder of Honda Motors, offers this insight: “Many people dream of success. To me success can be achieved only through repeated failure and introspection. In fact, success only represents one percent of your work that results from 90 percent of that which is called, failure.”

2. Don’t Take Failure Personally. If you are in the habit of assassinating your own character or questioning your talent every time something goes wrong, stop it. Making mistakes is like breathing; it is something you will keep doing as long as you’re alive. So, learn to live with it and move on.

3. Make Failure a Learning Experience. Failure isn’t failure unless you don’t learn from it. Thomas Edison said, “I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work.” He also said, “Our greatest weakness lies in giving up. The most certain way to succeed is always to try just one more time.”

4. See the Big Picture. Failure is not final. There will be other days. Almost every successful person has overcome failure. For example, Tom Landry, Chuck Noll, and Bill Walsh accounted for nine of the fifteen Super Bowl victories between 1974 and 1989. Guess what else they have in common? For years, they also had the worst first-season records of any head coaches in NFL history. If they had based their potential for coaching success on the snapshot of their first season they probably would have quit. But life is not a snapshot—it’s a moving picture.

5. Don’t Give Up. Over two centuries ago a young fellow at age 22 lost his job as a store clerk. The next year he became a partner in a small store, which failed. The next year he fell in love and courted a girl for four years who then said, “no.” At 37 in his third try he was elected to the state legislature, but two years later he lost the reelection. At age 40, he had a nervous breakdown. At age 41, his four-year-old son died. At age 45 he was defeated for the Senate. At age 47, he was defeated for vice president. AT age 49 he was again defeated for the Senate. At age 51 he was elected president of the United States. Of course, his name was Abraham Lincoln, considered by many to be the greatest president we have ever had.

6. Trust God's Grace. I want nt to add to Maxwell’s list this further point. God let David fail by leaving Ziklag not properly guarded. But God also sovereignly caused the other Philistine Kings to refuse to include David and his men in the battle against Saul, sending them home just in time to be able to still track the Amalekites down to get their families back.

For Further Prayerful Thought:

What aspects of David’s depleted condition in 1 Samuel 30:1-6 stand out to you? With which of them do you most identify?
What stood out most to you about the four ways that David strengthened himself in the LORD his God?
Why might it bring encouragement to those facing trials to realize that nearly every worthwhile endeavor has three stages

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Chemotherapy for Sin

On 10 May, 2025 By Gary Yagel

One of the most dreaded words in the English language is cancer. And, if one receives this diagnosis, a second dreaded question arises: Has it spread? We all know that, if a tumor is malignant, it is critical to remove all of it.

In the beatitudes, Jesus paints a portrait of spiritual vitality and health into which Christ’s kingdom members are being transformed. But at the root of that transformation process is cutting out the cancer of sin. Such excision of sin requires both confessing it, the first beatitude, and grieving over it, the second beatitude. The combination of these two attitudes is called repentance.

The problem is that Christians can be lured into a kind of shallow, incomplete repentance that is destructive. It might be compared to surgery to remove the cancerous tumor that misses part of the tumor. Paul calls it “worldly sorrow that leads to death.” In contrast,” says Paul, is “godly sorrow leading to repentance.” This godly sorrow corresponds to getting all the tumor and then using chemotherapy to destroy what is microscopic and missed. This kind of sorrow is the heart attitude Jesus refers to in the second beatitude. “Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.” It is an attitude that is exhibited by David. It is described in unmistakable detail in Psalm 51, which he wrote after being confronted with his sin of adultery with Bathsheba and murder of her husband, Uriah. It is chemotherapy for sin.

As we saw last week, in Jesus’ portrait of kingdom living in Matthew 5-7, Jesus identifies eight foundational heart attitudes that characterize his kingdom members, introducing each one with the Greek word, MAKARIOS, which scholars translate, blessed. But “blessed” is inadequate to capture the meaning of MAKARIOS. “Blessed” sounds like God will like me better if I have these attitudes. But MAKARIOS means much more than favor with God. It describes the richest possible fullness, happiness, and contentment. Right off the bat, Jesus teaches us that happiness, i.e. pleasantness in life is NOT determined by our circumstances. It is determined by our inner attitudes. This truth is expressed in Proverbs 15:15, All the days of the afflicted are evil, but the cheerful of heart has a continual feast. Cheerfulness is an attitude choice as is complaining or thankfulness. We might ask, “why is choosing the attitude of sorrow for our sins, i.e. heartfelt contrition, a life-giving attitude?” I believe that fully grieving over our sins, as David demonstrates in great detail in Psalm 51 cleanses us. It is like chemotherapy, completing the process of full repentance.

Last week, we began to put a magnifying glass over this heart attitude that David revealed in Psalm 51. We continue to examine the structure of this Psalm with a review of last week:

A. DAVID RECOGNIZES THE AWFULNESS OF HIS SIN

Verses 1-6

We observed five components of this admission in verses 1-4.

Our sin is too severe to ever excuse, leaving us no hope but the mercy of God.
We feel dirty in the presence of a holy God because we ARE dirty, the only detergent for our cleansing being the blood of Jesus.
Our sin was not a slip up. To the contrary, sin has spread to every part of us including our desires.
Our sin is not merely breaking an impersonal law in some rulebook but a personal violation of our relationship with our God.
God is 100% justified in his punishment of our sin, which means that the more we grasp the depth of our sin the greater will be our love for Jesus because he who has been forgiven much, loves much.

In verses 5-6, David summarizes these four verses, saying “Instead of being one in whom truth and wisdom dwell, I am one in whom sin dwells.” I was brought forth in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me. Behold, you delight in truth in the inward being, and you teach me wisdom in the secret heart.

B. DAVID SEEKS RESTORATION OF HIS RELATIONSHIP WITH GOD

Verses 7-9

Sinful choices not only destroy us, they put a wall between ourselves and those we’ve offended. This fact of human life rests beneath Jesus’ command to his followers. If you are offering your gift at the altar and there remember that your brother has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar and go. First be reconciled to your brother, and then come and offer your gift. It is interesting that this command comes in the context of Jesus' warning against anger, and sharp, demeaning words that cut into the tenderest part of a human— his self-esteem. As husbands and fathers, we need to remember that when we sin against our wives or kids, asking God’s forgiveness is not enough; we must seek theirs. We need to keep the pathway between our hearts open, not blocked by wrongs we’ve never owned and apologized for or resentment will build incrementally, putting permanent distance between us and our loved ones hindering our leadership.

But, of course, Psalm 51:7-9 addresses the wall David’s sin built that stops access to the Holy God. This break is experienced ultimately and permanently with the non-believer who refuses to repent and trust Jesus’ death alone for his salvation. But it is also true that the failure to repent puts a distance into our fellowship with God in this life. David addresses the break in fellowship. Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean; wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow (7). One commentator observes:

“Purge me with hyssop alludes to the cleansing of the leper, sprinkled seven times with the sacrificial blood into which the bunch of hyssop was dipped as a sprinkler. Or it may refer to ritual cleansing for those who had come into contact with a dead body. In either case, it ended with the forthright pronouncement, ‘and he shall be clean’ a promise which David takes up in the first person.”

In both cases the unclean person who was cut off from the assembly was restored to fellowship. David continues in verse 8, Let me hear joy and gladness; let the bones that you have broken rejoice. Think of all the Psalms David had written that were filled with the joy of praising and worshipping God. e.g. Psalm 100. Make a joyful noise to the Lord, all the earth! Serve the Lord with gladness! Come into his presence with singing! Know that the Lord, he is God! It is he who made us, and we are his; we are his people, and the sheep of his pasture. Enter his gates with thanksgiving, and his courts with praise! Give thanks to him; bless his name! For the Lord is good; his steadfast love endures forever, and his faithfulness to all generations.

That was the kind of joy David was missing because of his offensive sin to his God. David’s phrase, “Let the bones that you have broken, rejoice” refers to a custom of Palestinian shepherds. When they had a strong-willed lamb who kept going astray, who would not listen and follow the shepherd, they had to take drastic measures, or the lamb would be eaten by predators. As a last resort, the shepherd would break the front legs of the lamb so it could not wander from the flock. When the flock moved, the shepherd would carry the lamb over his shoulders. In this way, a bond would form with the lamb and when his legs healed, he wouldn’t stray but would follow the shepherd’s voice.

I suspect that there isn’t a man who gets this podcast/blog who hasn’t had to have God break his front legs at some point—all we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned everyone to his own way. And God carried us and still might be carrying us so that we get familiar with his voice.

Verse 9 continues, Hide your face from my sins, and blot out all my iniquities. David loves God so much that he can’t bear to have God look upon him in his sins. He is so ashamed of his failure to love God with the obedience God deserves, that he begs God to hide his face from the revulsion of his rebellion. He can’t bear to be repulsive to God when he so desperately wants to be loved by God. His only hope is to cast himself upon God’s mercy. David has zero power to earn forgiveness—no ability to make the horrible guilt go away. He begs God to do what only he can, Blot out my sins. This of course is the story ultimately of the cross.

C. DAVID SEEKS RENEWAL THROUGH GOD’S GRACE AT WORK WITHIN HIM

Verses 10-12

Just as Jesus taught that heart transformation, i.e. spiritual fruit is produced by abiding in Jesus the Vine, David looks to his relationship with God to provide the spiritual might he needs going forward. Notice his six requests:

Create in me a clean heart—God only you can change the selfishness of my heart motives.
Renew a steadfast spirit within me—God strengthen me inwardly with the strength I’ve known before with unwavering obedience to you.
Do not cast me from your presence—God don’t shut me off from yourself for you are the very source of spiritual power to please you.
Don’t take your Holy Spirit from me—God, I know that past victories have only come from your Holy Spirit’s power. Please don’t take away that help.
Restore me to the joy of your salvation—God, joy has always come from the victories by which you brought Israel and me your salvation. Make salvation from slavery to lust bring the same joy.
Grant me a willing spirit, to sustain me—God my heart is desperately wicked. I will rebel if left to myself. Please give me a willing spirit to sustain me or I will be right back here confessing my horrible sins again.

D. DAVID KNEW THAT SALVATION INCLUDES RESTORATION IN THIS LIFE

Verses 13-15

David understood that the gospel is not just that sinners are forgiven but that they are restored and participate in that restoration in the culture. Notice how David looks forward to being used by God to promote righteousness.

Then I will teach transgressors your ways, and sinners will turn back to you. David’s influence for the kingdom of righteousness will be restored.
Deliver me from blood guiltiness, O God of my salvation, and my tongue will sing aloud of your righteousness. David knew he deserved to die for murdering Uriah. But God’s forgiveness for this horrible crime would not lead to David cheapening the moral law. Being saved from the punishment he deserved would make him sing of God’s merciful salvation and the glory of God’s righteous law all the more.
O Lord, open my lips and my mouth will declare your praise. Perhaps because David knew the truth Jesus would later speak, “one who is forgiven much loves much,” David tells God that his heart will be so tuned back into adoration of God that all God needs to do is pry open David’s mouth and praise will automatically flow.

E. RESTORATION IS ALSO A FOCUS OF THE SECOND BEATITUDE

In Matthew 5:4, Jesus not only taught that training our heart into an attitude that mourns over our own sins and the harm done to the world because of sin is a foundational attitude for flourishing, in the second half of the beatitude, we read that part of the blessing for this kind of mourning is BEING COMFORTED. What does Jesus mean by this statement? I believe that Scripture teaches that God, himself, will comfort us and he will comfort us three ways.

1. We will be comforted by total, complete forgiveness. For the one who has owned up to his sin with a contrite heart, recognizing his spiritual poverty and need of the shed blood of Christ to cleanse him from his sin, there is TOTAL forgiveness. We are doubly declared righteous (justified). Christ-followers trust Christ’s death as payment for the punishment we deserve. The law has no further claim against us because our debt is paid. But also, Christ’s perfect life of obedience is imputed to us, meaning that at the top of Christ’s straight A moral report card, his name is erased and ours is written in. I love the way the Phillips paraphrase translates Romans 8:33-34. Who would dare to accuse us, whom God has chosen? The judge himself has declared us free from sin. Who is in a position to condemn? Only Christ, and Christ died for us, Christ rose for us, Christ reigns in power for us, Christ prays for us!

2. The second way God comforts us is giving us hope that God can still weave together the dark threads of our sin into a beautiful tapestry that glorifies him. Our comfort lies not only in forgiveness, but in the fact that even though every decision we have made to disregard God’s law has brought destruction into our lives, if we repent, God has given us his amazing promise to turn those ugly scars into beauty marks. Jesus came not just to forgive but to restore, beginning his ministry by reading the great messianic text, Isaiah 61 that described his ministry of restoration. Notice the words, comfort, and mourn.

The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me, because the Lord has anointed me to bring good news to the poor; he has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to those who are bound; to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor, to comfort all who mourn; to grant to those who mourn in Zion—to give them a beautiful headdress instead of ashes, the oil of gladness instead of mourning, the garment of praise instead of a faint spirit; that they may be called oaks of righteousness, the planting of the Lord, that he may be glorified (Is 61:1-3).

The ESV Study Notes explain the fuller picture behind Jesus’ claim to be fulfilling this prophecy of the Messianic Suffering Servant. “Jesus’ mission includes proclaiming good news to the poor and liberty to the captives (in the OT this meant release for those enslaved in exile, but more is included here, since “liberty” elsewhere in Luke—Acts refers to forgiveness of sins.) Sight to the blind includes both the physically blind and the spiritually blind. Liberty for those who are oppressed included, in Jesus’ ministry, healing the sick, casting out demons, forgiving sins, and ethical teachings that promote social justice.”

Notice the way Jesus' work of fixing everything broken by sin is portrayed as restoration in the Isaiah text:

Jesus was sent by the Father to bind up the broken-hearted. The Hebrew says literally, “He comes to put a bandage on the heart’s wounds.” Though many are celebrating their mothers today there are many mothers grieving over the loss of their children and children grieving the loss of their mom. In this life, Jesus, HIMSELF promises to bind up the broken hearts of all who grieve the loss of loved ones. I know several men in their forties who have lost sons in their twenties. I cannot fathom their pain. I can only find hope in the promise that Jesus will personally bind up their torn and broken hearts.
Notice how closely this Isaiah 61 language matches what Jesus taught in the second beatitude. The Messiah comes to comfort all who mourn; to grant to those who mourn in Zion—to give them a beautiful headdress instead of ashes, the oil of gladness instead of mourning, the garment of praise instead of a faint spirit. God is in the business of restoration. His specialty is comforting those in pain because of sin. By his grace he is turning our lives around to give us a diadem of honor instead of the ashes of repentance and shame on our heads. He is restoring us to the life he intended for us to experience—enjoying the oil of gladness upon us instead of regret and remorse for our sins. He is reshaping and redirecting our lives so that we go through life wearing a cloak of renown instead of being clothed in feint-hearted self-doubt. This glorious triumph over sin and its effects begins with a broken and contrite heart over our sin and that of others.

3. The third way God comforts us is with the joy of our future destiny, when there will be no more death, or mourning, or crying, or pain. The more sin breaks our hearts because of its destruction in our loved ones, our world, and in our own hearts, the more precious is the truth that IT DOES NOT WIN. John, in his great vision of the destiny of those who belong to Christ, wrote:

Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God. He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away (Rev 21:1-4).

F. FINAL THOUGHTS ABOUT BROKEN HEARTEDNESS OVER SIN

Verses 16-17

Psalm 51:16-17 continues with a summary of what David has said up to that point. For you will not delight in sacrifice, or I would give it; you will not be pleased with a burnt offering. The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise. This message is identical to the second beatitude, which we might translate this way: O the bliss of the man whose heart is broken for the world’s suffering and over every particle of his own sin, for he will taste the joy of restoration to what he and this world were created to be. And be will be undergirded by the joy of knowing that one day everything broken by sin will be remade, renewed, and restored to even greater glory and beauty.

For Further Prayerful Thought:

How would you defend the argument that confessing our sins is not enough; we need to grieve over them?
What most stood out to you about David’s confession of his sin in Psalm 51?
How does Jesus’ claim to be the messianic suffering servant whose ministry is described in Isaiah 61 show that his mission goes beyond going to the cross so we could be forgiven for our sins? What clues in Isaiah 61 and the second beatitude point to Jesus’ current work of restoration—fixing whatever was broken by sin?

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The Second Most Christ-like Attitude

On 04 May, 2025 By Gary Yagel

Early in Jesus’ ministry, on a small mountainside outside of Capernaum, Jesus picked up his verbal pen and painted a portrait of human life when it is restored to the way it is intended to be, by his power to overthrow sin. This portrait of kingdom life begins with eight heart attitudes that comprise righteousness. Today we examine the second of these beatitudes, not only because it is so fundamental to spiritual flourishing, but because it was clearly portrayed in King David’s heart after he was confronted with his adultery with Bathsheba and murder of Uriah by the prophet Nathan. This priceless attitude is a broken and contrite heart. Jesus said, Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted (Mt 5:4).

Jesus began his portrait of kingdom life, called the Sermon on the Mount, with a cameo of eight, character qualities of kingdom members, called the beatitudes. They are a picture of what the human heart looks like when King Jesus rules our attitudes. He telegraphs to us the fact that they are the path to human flourishing by beginning each beatitude with the word, blessed (MAKARIOS). This Greek word was the term used to describe the island of Cyprus, known as “The Happy Isle” because it was thought that Cyprus was such a paradise that one would never have to go beyond its coastline to find the perfect, happy, completely fulfilled, life.

The first and most important beatitude explains the secret that opens all the resources of Christ’s kingdom—recognizing our own desperate spiritual poverty. Blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Then Jesus moves on to the far less understood but second most important beatitude, Blessed are those who mourn for they shall be comforted (Mt 5:4). When we realize that “blessedness,” i.e. MAKARIOS refers to heart satisfaction, well-being, and joy, the startling paradox of Jesus’ words in this beatitude becomes apparent. It is as if he is saying, Happy are the unhappy. Happy are the sad. So, we must ask, “What kind of sorrow can it be that Christ wants us to experience, and which brings MAKARIOS—the joy of Christ’s blessing?

We must answer emphatically that Jesus is NOT talking about human pain and sadness in general; he is not a masochist! He is not talking about the disappointment of losing a ball game or not getting the job you hoped for. He is not talking about the broken heartedness of your mate rejecting and divorcing you. He is not talking about the grief of losing a loved one, the mourning that takes place in a funeral home. Rather, the mourning he is referring to is broken heartedness over sin and the devastation it brings. We know this is the kind of mourning Jesus has in mind for three reasons:

1. The context. The first beatitude is acknowledging our spiritual poverty as those enslaved by sin. The second beatitude quite naturally follows, i.e. grieving and mourning over that spiritual poverty—that sinful inclination. Using theological terms, we say the first beatitude is about confession. The second beatitude is about contrition. The first beatitude is about our mind acknowledging sin, the second beatitude is about our heart grieving over that sin. This is the heart described by David in his Psalm 51 confession of adultery and murder, when he says “a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise” (vs 17).

2. The second reason we know that the sorrow Jesus commends is grief over sin is the verb tense of the word, mourn. The verb tense indicates “habitual action,” a regular mourning that is part of everyday life. It is unlikely that Jesus was saying, “happy are those who must go through the agony of losing a loved one over and over again.” It is more likely that he was referring to those who deeply grieve over their sins as a regular part of their walk with him. This attitude of mourning over sin is explained by James, who writes, Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you. Cleanse your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded. Be wretched and mourn and weep. Let your laughter be turned to mourning and your joy to gloom. Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will exalt you (4:8-10).

3. The third clue about the mourning to which Jesus refers is Jesus’ own mourning over human sin. Why did Jesus weep at the grave of Lazarus when he knew he was about to raise Lazarus from the dead? I believe that at that moment, Jesus looked down the corridors of time to the tears shed at funerals time and time again because of heart-wrenching sorrow; and it was ALL brought about by human sin. As we observed a few weeks ago, on Jesus’ way into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, Luke recounts,

And when he drew near and saw the city, he wept over it, saying, “Would that you, even you, had known on this day the things that make for peace! But now they are hidden from your eyes. For the days will come upon you, when your enemies will set up a barricade around you and surround you and hem you in on every side and tear you down to the ground, you and your children within you. And they will not leave one stone upon another in you, because you did not know the time of your visitation” (19:41-44).

Jesus wept over the consequences of Jerusalem’s sin. Their sinful, hardened hearts caused them to refuse to recognize Jesus as the Messiah. Jesus saw the cost of that sin and when he foresaw that pain, he wept.

Kingdom people, says Jesus, are those who weep inwardly over sin…their own sin and the sin of others. Sin is spiritual cancer. It always destroys. The wage it always pays is spiritual, emotional, physical destruction. Paul wrote to the Galatians,

Do not be deceived: God is not mocked, for whatever one sows, that will he also reap. For the one who sows to his own sinful nature will FROM THAT NATURE REAP CORRUPTION, but the one who sows to the Spirit will from the Spirit reap eternal life (6:7-8).

The second beatitude teaches us both to mourn over our own sin and to mourn over the way sin brings devastation across the globe. Let’s consider sin’s impact on the culture and our response to it.

JESUS TAUGHT THAT SIN IN OUR CULTURE SHOULD PRODUCE GRIEF IN US

As you hear often on this podcast, Christ calls us to engage culture, partnering with the Holy Spirit in his work to restore it to righteousness. Jesus goes on in this same sermon to call believers to hunger and thirst for righteousness to invade their own hearts and spread across the land (5:6) to take a stand for righteousness despite persecution (5:10-12), to be the righteous salt that retards the decay of sin, to cast the light of truth onto every dark corner of evil in our culture (5:13-16), and above all to seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness. But BEFORE we seek to spread righteousness over the earth in these verse (5:6-6:33), WE ARE COMMANDED TO WEEP OVER THE WAY SIN HAS BROKEN US AND EVERY HUMAN. These repeated calls to be agents of restoration in our culture are preceded by the call to first get our heart right toward sinful humans and broken culture, by weeping for the way sin has enslaved and broken us all. It is noteworthy that Jesus followed this pattern when he entered Jerusalem for his final week. He first allowed his heart to be broken with grief over the sin that had enslaved his beloved people, weeping for Jerusalem. ONLY THEN did he cleanse the temple to restore righteousness. The order of Jesus’ teaching in this sermon matters. Grieving over my own sin and the suffering it brings must precede the building of other godly attitudes, like hungering and thirsting for righteousness to spread over the earth or suffering persecution for righteousness’s sake.

The significance of the second beatitude is underscored by the recognition that there are many wrong ways Christians can respond to evil in the culture. 1) We can envy those who seem to get away with violating God’s law—like couples in love who just sleep with each other instead of fighting the tough battle to wait until marriage for sex or the non-tithing neighbor who just bought the Jaguar convertible. 2) We can be judgmental towards the sinners around us who don’t go to church, use bad language, drive recklessly, and corrupt the morals of our kids. 3) We can be angry and hostile towards the sexually broken members of the LGBTQ community, especially the social activists who are harming children by pushing their destructive, immoral agenda. We must stand against their efforts, but when Christ reigns in our hearts, our attitude towards evil in the world is to weep. Weep over our own awful disloyalty to our creator and Lord—and weep over the horrible devastation and pain that sin brings into the lives of others. John Stott, in his book, Christian Counter Culture, writes:

Jesus wept over the sins of others, over their bitter consequences in judgement and death, and over the impenitent city which would not receive him. We, too, should weep over the evil in the world, as did the godly men of biblical times. “My eyes shed streams of tears,” the psalmist could say to God, “because men do not keep your law.” Ezekiel heard God’s faithful people described as those “who sigh and groan over all the abominations that are committed in Jerusalem.”

So, it is mourning over sin, that Jesus both models and calls his followers to exhibit in the second beatitude. It is grief over the impact of sin in our culture. But it begins for members of Adam’s fallen race, with grief over our own sin. This heart jewel—broken-heartedness over our own sin—has numerous facets that we can see reflected in Psalm 51, all of which are marks of true repentance. Let’s seek to bring those facets into the light.

RECOGNIZES THE AWFULNESS OF HIS SIN.

When thinking about having the right attitude, it is helpful to realize that our attitude is always determined by our perspective. For example, if I am on my phone crossing the street and a stranger, grabs me shoving me to the street where I tear my pants and cut my knee, my attitude will be anger….until, a split second later I see a Mack truck go flying over the spot on the road where I was just standing. With that perspective, my heart attitude becomes gratefulness. The godly sorrow Jesus talks about results from changing our perspective about sin. David has much to teach us about how to rightly view our sin. Reaching that bar make take some “perspective realignment” on our part.

A. Perspective adjustment #1. My sin is so offensive that my only hope is your mercy. Verse 1: Have mercy on me O God, according to your steadfast love; according to your abundant mercy blot out my transgressions. Be gracious to me according to….what?

because I deserve your forgiveness
because I’ve had a tough life
because I slipped and didn’t really mean it
because I’ve done great things—won many battles—for you
because in other areas of my life, I try to please you.

No. According to only one thing—God’s willingness to forgive.

According to Your steadfast love
According to Your abundant mercy

David is saying, “God if you are not merciful, I am finished.”

B. Perspective adjustment #2. Feeling intensely dirty because I am. Verse 2: Wash me thoroughly from my guilt. And cleanse me from my sin. There are two Hebrew words that David could have used for “wash me.” The one means “wash by rinsing.” The other means “wash by scrubbing.” David chose “wash by scrubbing.” David is saying, “The dirt, the evil, the filth in my heart is deeply ingrained.” Jesus would later say, Out of the heart come evil thoughts, murders, acts of adultery, other immoral sexual acts, thefts, false testimonies, and slanderous statements. These are the things that defile the person (Mt 15:19-20). Jesus makes crystal clear that sin is not just an action, it is corrupt desires.

This component of true repentance is extremely relevant to a movement led by Preston Sprinkle and Greg Johnson today who, in an attempt to be compassionate towards those who experience same-sex attraction, are promoting what has been called Side B gay Christianity. Side B gay “Christians” admit that homosexual sex is sin, and don’t practice it. But they accept the assumptions borrowed from cultural Marxism that their “identity” is to be gay. Thus, same-sex desire is not repented of; it is elevated as a category of victims for whom it is normal to experience same-sex desire but heroically remain celibate. However, this heretical movement does not promote true repentance. True repentance is to hate same-sex attraction itself because it is evil, not excuse it as normal. Paul was very clear that Christians are to actively seek to put to death sinful DESIRES, not just BEHAVIOR. Put to death therefore what is earthly in you: sexual immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and covetousness, which is idolatry. True repentance grieves over same-sex attraction. It might look to others with the same struggle with this sin as brothers in a common battle with sin. But it would never use that sinful struggle to suggest that it be the basis for their identity, link evil, same-sex attraction with the name of Christ, much less celebrate that identity as normal for them.

C. Perspective adjustment #3. This was not a slip up—I have the disease. It has invaded my life. Verse 3: For I know my transgressions, and my sin is ever before me. David is saying, “God, you know me. I have a rebel’s heart.” This is what the term total depravity means, not that I am as evil as I can possibly be, but that sin is in my bloodstream, throughout every part of me. David knows that he is like the little girl who might look outwardly obedient. When her parents tell her to sit down or be spanked, she stubbornly sits down. But then she says, “I may be sitting down to you, but I’m standing up in my heart.” It is not just actions that are sinful but heart attitudes.

D. Perspective adjustment #4. Sin is not just breaking a law in some impersonal rulebook; it is the violation of a person—GOD. Verse 4a: Against you, you only, have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight. Our sin is a personal offense against the being who

who created us
who delights in us
who wants us so much he adopted us
who loves to give us good gifts to enjoy
who went to hell for us so we wouldn’t have to

It is God in whose face we spit when we sin. It is

his command we disobey
his goodness we doubt
his promise we refuse to believe
his love we distrust
his name we dishonor

Perhaps David’s words Against you, you only, have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight are the more striking because it wasn’t against God alone that David had sinned. He violated Bathsheba, destroyed her marriage and murdered Uriah. But the grief he had brought to God’s heart seems to have been felt so intensely by David that it pushed aside EVERYTHING. His mourning over his sin consumed him. That is a contrite heart.

E. Perspective adjustment #5. I deserve every ounce of punishment my sin has brought. Verse 4: I’ve done what is evil in your sight, so that you may be justified in your words and blameless in your judgment. Nathan had delivered to David, the message from God of what his punishment would be. Notice God’s justice

David’s wives would be given to someone else who would lie with them in broad daylight/ This was done by David’s own son Absolam.
A sword would never depart from his house—one of his sons murdered another of his sons.
The child conceived would die, breaking the heart of Bathsheba.

My God, who is the most wonderful being in the universe, is deserving of utter trust in the goodness of his command. My creator, to whom I owe each breath, has the right to expect complete surrender to his purpose for creating me. My redeemer, who purchased me from destruction by shedding his own blood is worthy of nothing less than total allegiance. And yet my heart rebels. I am guilty of cosmic treason. I deserve to be cast out of God’s presence forever.

The more it dawns upon me that I deserve hell, the greater my allegiance to Jesus will be. Let’s close this examination of true repentance with one of the best examples of it—one of everyone’s favorite stories, from Luke 7:36-47.

Jesus went into Pharisee's house and reclined at table. And a woman of the city, who was a sinner, when she learned that he was reclining at table in the Pharisee's house, brought an alabaster flask of ointment, and standing behind him at his feet, weeping, she began to wet his feet with her tears and wiped them with the hair of her head and kissed his feet and anointed them with the ointment. Now when the Pharisee who had invited him saw this, he said to himself, “If this man were a prophet, he would have known who and what sort of woman this is who is touching him, for she is a sinner.” And Jesus answering said to him, “Simon, I have something to say to you.” And he answered, “Say it, Teacher.” “A certain moneylender had two debtors. One owed five hundred denarii, and the other fifty. When they could not pay, he cancelled the debt of both. Now which of them will love him more?” Simon answered, “The one, I suppose, for whom he cancelled the larger debt.” And he said to him, “You have judged rightly.” Then turning toward the woman he said to Simon, “Do you see this woman? I entered your house; you gave me no water for my feet, but she has wet my feet with her tears and wiped them with her hair. You gave me no kiss, but from the time I came in she has not ceased to kiss my feet. You did not anoint my head with oil, but she has anointed my feet with ointment. Therefore, I tell you, her sins, which are many, are forgiven—for she loved much. But he who is forgiven little, loves little.

For Further Prayerful Thought:

How would you summarize the meaning of the second beatitude, Blessed are those who mourn for they shall be comforted?
Jesus called us to grieve over our own sin and the destruction sin brings into others’ lives before he presses on to the call to spread the kingdom of righteousness over the earth. Why might this order be important?
As we looked at five perspective adjustments that we might have to make about the awfulness of our sin, which are expressed by David in Psalm 51 which ones stood out to you most.

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How David Was Defeated By Lust

On 18 April, 2025 By Gary Yagel

Men hate to lose at anything. Vince Lombardi said, Men, winning isn’t everything. It’s the only thing. As we continue our series on the life of David we examine how David lost a battle that brought devastation into his own life and great suffering to his family.

On one occasion a bird watcher spotted a golden eagle. Locking his binoculars on it he watched as the magnificent creature soared in majesty—nothing but regal eloquence in flight, climbing, gliding, soaring higher and higher almost effortlessly. Such a sight is a great analogy for the early years of King David’s life, as he climbed from the place of lowly shepherd boy to the heights of national leadership as king. In thirty years, David experienced unparalleled success as he rose to power. No king of Israel would ever be as well loved by the people, as victorious in battle, or as faithful to the Lord.

But as our ornithologist continued to watch the golden eagle’s flight, something went terribly wrong. The majestic creature stopped soaring higher and then began a sudden plumet. Moments later it lay dead on the ground. Bewildered, the observer found his way to the lifeless mass, wondering what had happened. As he examined the eagle, he discovered the answer. Still curled up in its talons was a weasel, no doubt the prey that the eagle was expecting to provide it the pleasure of a meal. But as the weasel was drawn close to the big bird’s body for flight, it had managed to sink its teeth into the breast of the eagle sending the majestic creature crashing to earth. 2 Samuel 11 is the chapter that records the deadly bite of the weasel in David’s life. What he expected, as he drew Bathsheba to his body, was a feast of pleasure. What he got in the end was a deadly wound that sent him crashing downward. David was taken down by temptation, specifically by sexual lust. Let’s look at how lust defeated him.

In the spring of the year, the time when kings go out to battle, David sent Joab, and his servants with him, and all Israel. And they ravaged the Ammonites and besieged Rabbah. But David remained at Jerusalem. It happened, late one afternoon, when David arose from his couch and was walking on the roof of the king's house, that he saw from the roof a woman bathing; and the woman was very beautiful. And David sent and inquired about the woman. And one said, “Is not this Bathsheba, the daughter of Eliam, the wife of Uriah the Hittite?” So David sent messengers and took her, and she came to him, and he lay with her. (Now she had been purifying herself from her uncleanness.) Then she returned to her house. And the woman conceived, and she sent and told David, “I am pregnant” (2 Sam 11:1-5). Let’s make some observations:

1. David had been sowing the seeds for this kind of defeat for years. Back in 2 Sam 5:13, we read, And David took more wives and concubines from Jerusalem, after he came from Hebron, and more sons and daughters were born to David. David had placed himself above God’s law as an exception to God’s design of marriage between one man and one woman. Ever since David took a second wife, he had been violating Dt 17:15-17, You may indeed set a king over you whom the Lord your God will choose.…he shall not acquire many wives for himself. The man who saw Bathsheba naked from a roof had never leaned to say “no” to his sexual appetite.

We might think that if any man in Israel should be able to turn away from the temptation to have sex with another man’s wife, it would be David. With multiple wives and concubines his sex drive had to be sated, right? But that is not how lust works. God seems to have designed sex so that satisfying our sexual desires sinfully inflames our illicit sexual desire, making it harder to resist temptation next time. The more we indulge our sexual appetite in the wrong way, the stronger that appetite becomes. Applying this principle to the use of porn, Jerry Kirk writes,

"At the University of California, Irvine, Dr. James L. McGaugh has conducted research suggesting that memories of experiences that occurred at times of sexual arousal are difficult to erase. Thus powerful, sexual memories keep reappearing on his mind’s memory screen—stimulating and arousing him. Every time he masturbates to those fantasies, he is like one of Pavlov’s dogs, rewarded by his orgasm, which reinforces the memory" (How Pornography Harms).

So, the first truth from David’s example is that losing the battle with lust today strengthens lust for its next battle with me, tomorrow. By NOT winning the battle with illicit cravings NOW, but giving in, I guarantee a harder battle with illicit cravings IN THE FUTURE. The only alternative to sexual self-control is increasingly out-of-control sexual cravings.

2. When the temptation struck, David had no Jonathan in his life. Jonathan had been killed years before on Mt Gilboa. David, like most powerful leaders, had no one in his life watching his back. He had no one sit him down years before this incident with Bathsheba and say, “David your military success is great, but what about Deuteronomy 17:16, which says clearly that Israel’s kings must not have more than one wife. What are you doing, thinking about taking a second wife?” And when David sent Joab out to lead the army in his place, no one said, “I know you are getting older, but when a king sends warriors out to battle, they need their king leading the way.” When it comes to battling lust in the twenty-first century, the stakes are too high, the battle too fierce, the enemy too wily, the attacks too frequent, the cost of defeat too severe for any Christian man to fight his spiritual battles alone—yet many are trying to do so. The second observation from David’s example is that David had no one watching his back. Do you?

3. When temptation struck, David was not where he should have been. That fact is certainly emphasized as this story begins, In the spring of the year, the time when kings go out to battle, David stayed at home. David’s loyal soldiers lay on rocky ground inside a tent; David was taking a nap in his luxurious palatial bedroom. David’s men left the comforts of home for the hardship of war; David left the hardship of the war he instigated to enjoy the pleasures of home including his harem. David’s men fought till they had no energy left; David slept till he was bored. David was in the perfect situation to fall to the pull of lust. When Jesus taught us to pray, “lead us not into temptation” he was teaching us that it is wise to think through the situations that bring us temptation. Over the years, I compiled this list for the battle with lust.

OUTER Conditions When the Craving for Illicit Sexual Pleasure Is Most Appealing

Something sexually stimulating crosses your path. (Can’t do much about this).
You are alone with the opportunity to pursue illicit sexual pleasure. Your wife is gone for the weekend and porn sites pull on your desires.
You are far away from anyone who would know about your little private pleasure excursion. I knew a man away on a business trip who drank too much and had a one-night stand with a woman from work. He lost his entire family because his wife divorced him and got custody of the kids.
It is the middle of the night, and you can’t sleep.
You are in a situation that has a past association with sexual pleasure.

INNER Conditions When the Craving for Illicit Sexual Pleasure Is Most Appealing

Your emotional tank is on “E.” Pleasure replenishes the emotional tank.
Boredom—sexual stimulation gets the heart beating.
Anger—perhaps towards wife who is repeatedly sending “busy” signals.
Discouragement—bad feelings cause a yearning for pleasure (good feelings).

So, our third observation in contrast to David’s example is to be alert to situations where temptation might strike, so we can avoid them or anticipate the temptations they could bring.

4. David notices naked Bathsheba and continues to feast his eyes on her. Archibald Hart describes the male sex, drive, Strong, urgent, forceful, and impatient, the sex drive dominates the mind and body of every healthy male. Strong sexual feelings are common to all normal men. They are determined more by hormones than by evil desire (The Sexual Man). The blunt truth is that because of David’s multiple wives and concubines, David had been feasting his eyes on lots of naked women; why should Bathsheba be any different? Unlike the godlier Job, David did not bounce his eyes away from the scene of this exposed woman. He did not protect her dignity. Job 31:1 tells us that Job made a covenant with his eyes not to look lustfully at a young woman. This discipline of bouncing our eyes away from half dressed women is vital for two reasons. 1) If I gawk at sexually provocative images, it trains my daughters to think that what gets a man’s attention is dressing provocatively. 2) Continuing to gaze, as David did, opens the door to lust. The best strategy for defeating lust is beating it when it is furthest from my heart—at the beginning, when it just requires bouncing my eyes, before my sexual engine starts revving up. This, of course, is what David did not do.

5. David’s sexual desires are ignited. The more David watches, the more the weasel sinks its teeth into David’s flesh. I’m reminded of James’s description of temptation, Each one is tempted when he is carried away and enticed by his own lust. Then when lust has conceived, it gives birth to sin; and sin, when it has run its course, brings forth death. (1:14). The word for lust is EPITHUMIA, which means, literally, over-desire, or run-away desire. We associate lust mainly with intense sexual desire, but the word means any kind of intense desire. What James is saying is, each one of you is tempted after your normal desire becomes run- away desire, which then entices you to sin. It is a normal desire to want to have order in your home, but when that desire becomes a run-away desire causing you to explode at your kids because they made a mess, you sin. The fruit in the garden of Eden was desirable to Eve, but when her desire for it became run-away desire, she sinned. Any red-blooded man would have been attracted to Bathsheba’s beautiful body, but David’s continued look enabled Satan to fan the embers of God-given sexual desire into blazing run-away desire.

Dietrick Bonhoeffer writes: "In our members, there is a slumbering inclination toward desire, which is both sudden, and fierce. With irresistible power, desire seizes mastery of the flesh. All at once, a secret, smoldering fire is kindled. The flesh burns and is in flames. It makes no difference whether it is sexual desire, or ambition, or vanity, or revenge, or love of fame or power, or greed for money" (Temptation). Temptation begins by stoking sexual desire into out-of-control lust.

6. Temptation provides the OPPORTUNITY to satisfy the desire UNRIGHTEOUSLY. Notice the opportunities: 1) Uriah, Bathsheba’s husband was away. 2) The text implies that her bathing was ritual bathing marking the end of her period—so David knew she wasn’t having her period, 3) He could easily find her through his servants. 4) His status as King enabled him to require her to come to his palace. 5) Only a few servants would have to keep this secret since the palace was relatively deserted. Back in James 1:15, we read, after lust has conceived, it gives birth to sin. Lust is conceived by the sperm of intense desire meeting the egg of opportunity. David chooses to step across the line of the moral law giving birth to sin. Again, Bonhoeffer describes the process. "At this moment, God is quite unreal to us…The devil doesn’t fill us with hatred of God but with forgetfulness of God. The lust thus aroused envelops the mind and the will of man in deepest darkness. The powers of clear discrimination and decision are taken from us. It is here that everything within me rises up against the Word of God." (Temptation).

When the craving for sexual gratification is ignited and there is opportunity for sexual sin, there is only one alternative: FLEE. Joseph flees from the seductions of Potiphar’s wife. Paul writes to the Corinthians, Flee fornication (1 Cor 6:8), and to Timothy, Flee youthful lusts. But David doesn’t do that. His run-away desire for Bathsheba is controlling him. He asks about her and even, when he discovers that Bathsheba is the wife of Uriah, one of his thirty Mighty Men, the most courageous and loyal men in the nation, it makes no difference. The weasel’s deadly teeth are squeezing tighter. David must have her. And so, he does.

7. David seems to get away with his sin, but he does not. One of the deadliest parts of sin is that its destructive consequences almost never happen immediately. David thinks he’s gotten away with it, but Bathsheba gets pregnant. It has to be his baby, since she had just finished her period. He schemes to bring Uriah home to sleep with his wife, so everyone thinks it’s his. Let’s pick up the story there,

When Uriah came to him, David asked how Joab was doing and how the people were doing and how the war was going. Then David said to Uriah, “Go down to your house and wash your feet.” And Uriah went out of the king's house, and there followed him a present from the king. But Uriah slept at the door of the king's house with all the servants of his lord and did not go down to his house. When they told David, “Uriah did not go down to his house,” David said to Uriah, “Have you not come from a journey? Why did you not go down to your house?” Uriah said to David, “The ark and Israel and Judah dwell in booths, and my lord Joab and the servants of my lord are camping in the open field. Shall I then go to my house, to eat and to drink and to lie with my wife? (2 Sam 11:7-11).

Can you imagine the dagger of guilt that must have pierced David’s heart at that moment? Out of unwavering allegiance to David, Israel’s army, and Israel’s God, Uriah would not go near his own wife. This picture could not contrast more sharply with David’s lust, contempt for God and his law, scorn for his troops, and betrayal of Uriah the pilar of loyalty to David, in taking URIAH’s wife. What more could God do to open David’s eyes to his sin than to show him this stark contrast? But David’s heart was so hardened by sin, that instead of falling to his knees and begging his loyal subject’s forgiveness, he ends up deciding to murder him! I want to tell you, when I think of this conversation, and see the way sin blinded David’s conscience, IT TERRIFIES ME. David doesn’t get away with his sin. His sin hardened his heart so much that he murders one of the most loyal, faithful men in Israel.

TAKE-AWAYS FOR US FROM DAVID’S FAILURE

A) We need to hate evil and maybe FEAR it. Paul commands the Romans, Abhor evil (12:9). He warns the Galatians, Do not be deceived: God is not mocked, for whatever one sows, that will he also reap. For the one who sows to his own flesh will from the flesh reap corruption, but the one who sows to the Spirit will from the Spirit reap life that continues forever (6:7-8). The pain that David caused himself and others would take three or four podcasts to cover; it was enormous. One of his sons rapes one of his daughters, another son murders that brother—it was awful. I want to tell you; the reason I have an accountability partner and some of the men I know have accountability partners is FEAR, in particular FEAR of LUST. We KNOW it can take us down IN AN INSTANT, crushing those we love, and bringing shame on the name of the One who died for us.

B) When we must say “No” to our sexual appetite because we are single or are married to a wife who is sending busy signals, we need to put an end to the childish thought that God’s laws about fulfilling our cravings are unfair. Listen to the grieving heart of God because David did not trust him enough to obey him. After citing all that he had done for David, God says AND IF THIS WERE TOO LITTLE, I WOULD ADD TO YOU AS MUCH MORE. Why have you despised the word of the Lord, to do what is evil in his sight? (2 Sam 12:7-8). God’s heart as our father is to lavish us with good gifts. The truth is that God wants married husbands and wives to be drunk on sexual love for each other (Prov 3:19). So, what do you do when your sex drive craves sex 3 times a week and she wants sex once a month? The answer is NOT what some Christian counselors say, “Suck it up you don’t need sex.” According to the Word of God a thriving sex life is part of a flourishing marriage. And God’s design is for each spouse to give to his spouse the gift of his or her body for the mate’s enjoyment. But what if that isn’t happening?

TRUST GOD. He knows about the mismatch. In a fallen world nothing is perfect in marriage. But God is in the business of moving what is broken, selfish, and a source of conflict towards healing and restoration and fulfillment. Trust God and ask him to move the sexual part of your marriage towards his design for fulfillment. Then watch what he does!

C) King David was that soaring golden eagle, the best Israel had to offer. But the best king broke four of the ten commandments in just this one story: You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife (10th), you shall not commit adultery (7th), you shall not steal (8th), you shall not murder (6th). The primary lesson of the story of David and Bathsheba is that sin is too strong for any human, even a man after God’s own heart. ONLY JESUS can defeat sin. This is a liberating truth, because it gives us the courage to bring our struggles with lust into the open. God never intended any man to fight his spiritual battles alone. To do so is TO LOSE THEM. Joe Dallas says, "Sexual sin thrives in the dark. If you’re caught up in any sexual vice, one thing is certain; the secrecy surrounding your behavior is what strengthens its hold on you. However ashamed you may feel about admitting your problem to another person, the reality is this: YOU CAN’T OVERCOME THIS ON YOUR OWN. IF YOU COULD, WOULDN’T YOU HAVE DONE SO BY NOW?" (Every Man’s Battle Workshop).

D) We must let failure drive us towards Christ and not away from him. After being confronted by Nathan, and told that God forgave him, David took his failure to God writing Psalm 51. One of the names of Satan is “The Accuser of the Brothers” because he wants to heap shame upon us because of our sin—especially sexual ones. Don’t let him get away with that! A veteran warrior in the battle with lust points out:

"It isn’t the sinless man who makes it to the end; rather, it’s the man who’s learned to pick himself up after he stumbles. If your struggle seems relentless, remember this; when you commit yourself to sexual integrity, you commit yourself to a DIRECTION, not to PERFECTION. You may stumble along the way—that’s no justification for sin, just a realistic view of life in this fallen world. What determines the success or failure of an imperfect man is his willingness to pick himself up, confess his fault, and continue in the direction he committed himself to. Remember Paul’s approach: 'Forgetting those things that are behind, I press on towards the mark of the high calling'" (Ibid).

For Further Prayerful Thought:

How is the story of the weasel taking down the eagle similar to lust’s takedown of David?
What are the outer conditions and inner conditions when sinful sexual lust is most appealing to you?
How would you summarize the price tag of David’s sexual sin?
How is David an example of letting his failure drive him TO God and not AWAY from God. (You might want to look at Psalm 51—written after David was confronted by Nathan.)

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The Resurrection of Jesus’ BODY Not Just His SOUL Matters

On 18 April, 2025 By Gary Yagel

A pair of scholars has made it a practice to poll Christians to see if they grasp what Jesus said his mission was. They report,

"We have asked thousands of Evangelical Christians in numerous contexts this most basic question—why did Jesus come to earth?—and fewer than 1 percent of respondents say anything even remotely close to the answer that Jesus Himself gave. Instead, the vast majority of people say something like 'Jesus came to die on the cross to save us from our sins so that we can get to heaven.' While this answer is true, saving souls is only a subset of the comprehensive healing of the entire cosmos that Jesus’ kingdom brings and that was the centerpiece of his mission" (Corbett & Fikkert, When Helping Hurts).

Jesus described his purpose in the following words, when he launched his ministry. “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor” (Lk 4:18-19).

Was Jesus claiming to be the Messiah promised by Isaiah who would usher in a kingdom unlike anything the world had ever seen? Could Jesus be the king in whose kingdom justice, righteousness, and peace would prevail forever? Would Jesus’ kingdom bring healing to the parched soil, the feeble hands, the shaky knees, the fearful hearts, the blind, the deaf, the lame, the brokenhearted, the captives? Would his kingdom bring the year of jubilee for the poor? Jesus’ answer to all these questions was a resounding “yes.” Jesus came to do more than die on the cross to save us from our sins. If we miss that, we will never be able to be faithful to the mission our Master assigned us.

The Messianic prophecy that Jesus claimed in his hometown synagogue to be fulfilling portrays Christ’s Kingdom of wholeness and righteousness prevailing over all creation. Jesus came to overthrow the tyrants who had usurped Adam’s throne of Kingdom Earth and brought devastation into every sphere of it—Satan, sin, and death. Jesus came not to rescue Christians from this sin-infested earth by giving his followers a ticket to heaven but to restore this sin-infested earth through the power of the resurrection, using us to spread this restoration. That is the true gospel, the Gospel of the Kingdom, which Jesus preached. But as Fickkert and Corbett discovered, many Christians today, especially those with Fundamentalist roots, have reduced the true gospel to a partial gospel. They would define the gospel as these two fundamental truths:

I must recognize that I am sinful and broken.
I cannot fix my own brokenness, so I need a savior, Jesus, to redeem me.

While sin and personal salvation are undeniable realities, they are not the complete gospel. They are not the gospel of the kingdom, which, as we saw last week, is the only gospel that Jesus proclaimed. If personal sin and salvation are all that is important to Christians, we have settled for a two-chapter gospel: 1) the fall, 2) redemption. If you think about it, this gospel doesn’t require Jesus’ physical, bodily resurrection. Since he paid for our sins at the cross, he could have just risen spiritually and ascended to heaven, where he stands at the gates of heaven and admits into the holy presence of God those who have trusted in his atoning work at the cross and turn away those who trust in their own works for salvation.

However, the resurrection of Christ’s physical, material body shows that God’s story from Genesis to Revelation is a four-chapter gospel about his creation. The resurrection of Christ’s physical body speaks volumes about the meta story of God’s plan for creation and our part in it. Understanding that story has practical consequences for our everyday lives. It answers significant questions that most humans have: Why am I here? What is God’s purpose for my life? Why is the world so broken? It teaches that eternal life is not US getting to HEAVEN but HEAVEN coming to EARTH to renew it and prepare it to be the eternal seat of God’s throne.

The fact that Jesus’ resurrection was not just a spiritual resurrection, but the resurrection of Jesus’ physical body is so important that when the Council of Nicaea convened in the 4th century, it intentionally refuted this two-chapter, spiritualized gospel (Docetism) in the creed it wrote to insure that believers understood that Jesus’ incarnation and resurrection took place in real, physical flesh. The importance of this truth is still recognized today, in the Apostles’ Creed, “I believe in the resurrection of the body and in the life everlasting.” It is noteworthy that this council, in seeing how precious God’s physical creation is to him, issued a mandate that all the towns in Christendom big enough to have a cathedral were to build hospitals to care for the physical body.

Belief in the bodily resurrection of Christ tells us that God has begun to redeem his whole CREATION from the decay of sin. Although today’s "two-chapter gospel" Christians do affirm the resurrection of the physical body, many have lost the understanding of its significance. God’s original intent to have man rule over and develop the potential of CREATION, and the biblical teaching that the second Adam will ultimately restore all of CREATION are inadvertently left out of the gospel story by many Christians today. Here are the four chapters of the true gospel.

1. CREATION (the way things were, along with God’s intention for Adam & Eve to develop its potential, rule it for God, developing culture that reflects God’s image)

2. FALL (the reason the world is so broken—Adam’s kingdom rule usurped by Satan, sin, and death)

3. REDEMPTION (God’s people set free by King Jesus from slavery to Satan, sin, and death—tasting and showing the world the way things could be)

4. RESTORATION (the way things will be—creation renewed with no more sin, sorrow, or pain.)

The four-chapter gospel answers the questions of meaning, origin, and ultimate purpose. It restores to Christians raised on the two-chapter gospel the importance of creation. Tim Keller writes:

Some conservative Christians think of salvation as the fall, redemption, heaven. In this narrative, the purpose of redemption is escape from this world; only saved people have anything of value, while unbelieving people in the world are seen as blind and bad. If, however, the story of salvation is Creation, Fall, Redemption, Restoration, then things look different. In this narrative, non-Christians are seen as created in the image of God and given much wisdom and greatness in them (cf Ps. 8) even though the image is defaced and fallen. Moreover, the purpose of redemption is not to escape the world, but to renew it…It is about the coming of God’s kingdom to renew all things. (cited in All Things New, by Hugh Whelchel.)

Much of the Bible-believing church today has its historic roots in a form of Christianity that held a two-chapter view of the gospel. Here is what results from devaluing creation. You might recognize some of these strains.

A. The two-chapter gospel doesn’t give a clear picture of our true destiny. Instead, it puts the emphasis on “going to heaven” when the complete story is that heaven comes down to renew the earth. King Jesus comes down from heaven to overthrow the tyrants ruining Adam’s kingdom, Satan, sin, and death. Those who have died before Christ’s final return will be united with their physical bodies and we will dwell eternally with God himself on a renewed earth where there is no more sin or decay.

B. The two-chapter gospel doesn’t give a full picture of what we were created FOR—our mission. Christian discipleship often completely ignores God’s creation mission for Adam and Eve. A true understanding of redemption is that Christians recover their creation calling to “secular” vocation—to develop the potential of God’s creation. God created humans in his image to be workers, just as he is. Sin corrupted our work ensuring that humans toil and sweat in their labor. Our redemption in Christ means recovering our original calling to our vocation—knowing that salvation is not escaping from this earth but being a part of God’s four-chapter plan to renew creation. T. M Moore describes the four-chapter gospel view of work:

"So the creation has been “subjected to futility,” Paul says, and we who have become the sons and daughters of God, who understand his purpose for his work, have been called in our work to repair, renew, and restore the original beauty, goodness and truth of God….Our work only takes on full significance when we see it in this light, as part of God’s ongoing work to bring everything to a higher state of goodness (Rom 8:28). So, no matter what our job, or whatever your work may be, God intends that you should devote your labors to something greater than personal interest, economic prosperity, or social good, alone. God intends your work to contribute to the restoration of the creation, and the people in it, to raising life on this planet to higher states of beauty, goodness, and truth, reflecting the glory of God in our midst." (TM Moore, “Work, Beauty and Meaning: A Biblical Perspective on the Daily Grind.”)

C. The two-chapter gospel creates a false sacred/secular divide. By ignoring the significance of creation, the two-chapter gospel creates a divide between what is spiritual and what is secular. Hugh Whelchel, in his booklet, All Things New, writes, "This divide is responsible for the popular mindset that our relationship with God is compartmentalized to church-related events and activities. Quite the contrary, our response to God should reverberate into every facet of life: at home, at work, in our families, in our communities and at church." Christ claims every part of our lives and every square inch of creation as his and wants us to pursue his righteous rule there. That is what seeking first the Kingdom of God means.

D. The two-chapter gospel leads to separation from the world that God commanded us to shape FOR Him. Since humans are made in God’s image and God is the supreme ruler, God gave humans a kingdom to rule. Genesis 1 reveals God’s command to the first humans, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.” But in some circles, Christians have completely abandoned this calling because of a misunderstanding of John’s command, “Love not the world, neither the things of the world.” This command has been mistakenly understood as a call to separate from non-Christians and their activities. Here are some reasons why this interpretation cannot be correct.

John the author of this prohibition in his letter is the same author who said in his gospel that God so LOVED the world that he gave us his only begotten son. He uses the same word KOSMOS. God loves his creation. So, world cannot refer this material, physical creatioin, which includes the lost.
John qualifies exactly what he means by the “world” we are NOT to love. For all that is in the world—the desires of the flesh and the desires of the eyes and pride of life—is not from the Father but is from the world. He is referring to the fallen world-system of evil. We are to avoid the desires of the flesh (SARX). This is not the word for body, which is SOMA but describes our fallen, corrupted desires. We are to avoid the lust of the eyes, which seems to refer to over-desire for material things that we set our eye upon, which can lead to idolatry, envy, covetousness, materialism. We are to avoid the pride of life, also translated, vainglory, which is a corrupted view that over-desires respect, success, and accomplishment. John clealy uses this term, world, not for the sphere where humans live but for the sphere under Satan and evil's influence.
John’s command in his letter to “love not the world” is best understood in terms of what he recounts Jesus saying in his gospel in John 12:31, Now is the judgment of THIS WORLD; now will the ruler of this world be cast out. It is the world corrupted by Satan and sin that we are to never love.

Christians should be careful about identifying the current culture as “the world.” The culture is not the world we are to hate. The culture is made up of ideas and inter-personal relationships that we are to love so much that we actively seek to redeem it, because God loves his world and appointed us to shape it. Cultural values are a composite of both biblical truths and the lies that emanate from Satan’s kingdom of evil. That is the part of culture which we are never to love or compromise with.

E. The two-chapter gospel leads to an escapist view of redemption. It views salvation as private, personal salvation only, a bus ticket to heaven. Christians are left with no understanding of what they are supposed to do while they wait for the bus, except to not be worldly and evangelize. This translates into a negative attitude towards non-Christians and the culture. Missing chapter 1 of the gospel, creation and chapter 4 of the gospel, restoration of creation, "two-chapter gospel" adherents miss the value of God’s creation, including unbelievers who bear the image of God. Ignoring God’s command to develop culture, they have no inclination to partner with non-believers who, through common grace, have much to contribute in God’s work to repair, restore, renew, and develop the glory of his creation. The true gospel calls us to spread Christ’s kingdom of shalom, reweaving the fabric of the culture in which all the key relationships that make up culture have been torn by Adam and Eve's sin. As Fikkert and Corbett remind us,

"Their relationship with God was damaged, as their intimacy with him was replaced with fear; their relationship with self was marred as Adam and Eve developed a sense of shame; their relationship with others was broken, as Adam quickly blamed Eve for their sin; and their relationship to the rest of creation became distorted, as God cursed the ground and the child-bearing process…because the four relationships are the building blocks for all human activity, the effects of the Fall are manifested in the economic, social religious, and political systems that humans have created throughout history" (When Helping Hurts).

Jesus’ mission was to overthrow sin’s reign everywhere in culture, not just in the personal lives of believers. That is what it means to seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness. That is what it means to be salt and light in the culture—as salt, to retard decay, as light to expose injustice and show the kingdom of righteousness to the world. It is to join in God’s redemption of his glorious creation right now. God has strategically placed each of us in our specific family, job, church, neighborhood and community so that we can repair, restore, renew, and develop the glory of his creation right there and right now.

F. The two-chapter gospel reduces our mission as Christian men to sin management. If your vision of Christianity is sin management, how much does it capture your heart? Although fighting for righteousness in our own lives is a high calling and central to our mission, battling personal sin is not a big enough vision to capture the hearts of men in the same way that the four-chapter gospel does. Dave Murrow, in his book, Why Men Hate Going to Church points out, “Every man wants to be a hero, to become a great man. Boys do not dream of sitting in a cubicle; they dream of slaying the dragon, rescuing the princess, and absconding with the treasure.“ Males want to be engaged in a mission that is worthy of the best they have to give. Buried in men’s hearts is a willingness to make great sacrifices for a mission that is worthy of their full devotion; but too often in our churches the remnants of the two-chapter gospel are producing a vision of discipleship that fails to engage that capacity. If discipleship is primarily about our personal struggle with sin, it will not capture their hearts.

In contrast, the four-chapter gospel has the power to connect the dots between men’s willingness to fully devote themselves to a great cause and the great cause for which Jesus came to planet earth—the overthrow of Satan, sin, and death—and the establishment of his righteous kingdom over the planet. Jesus began his ministry by calling attention to the cataclysmic intrusion of the kingdom of God into time. “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand” (Mk 1:15). Jesus came into the world to recover Adam’s kingdom from the usurpers of Adam’s throne—Satan, sin, and death— and reverse the curse brought upon the cosmos because of sin. In the same way that the curse spread decay, brokenness, and death throughout Adam’s entire kingdom, so Jesus’ mission to bring healing and restoration is cosmic in its scope.

As Christ-followers, we enlist in the great cause of our master, seeking the reign of Christ’s kingdom of righteousness over every square inch of life. King Jesus has come to reconcile to himself all things (Col 1:20). He is putting into right relationship everything he has created. He is using his power to fix everything in the universe that was broken by sin. Tim Keller writes, “The kingdom of God is the renewal of the whole world through the entrance of supernatural forces. As things are restored under Christ’s rule and authority, they are restored to health, beauty, and freedom.” (Ministries of Mercy: The Call of the Jericho Road). The four-chapter gospel is the reason that this podcast/blog, Mission Focused Men for Christ, defines our threefold mission as Called TO Christ—to whole-hearted loyalty to our king’s rule in our lives, Called TO BE LIKE Christ—to surrender to Christ’ righteousness in our heart attitudes, and Called TO EXERCISE DOMINION FOR CHRIST—to seek, in every sphere of our lives, to bring about kingdom righteousness and kingdom flourishing. Our mission is a little bigger than overcoming our personal sin.

Christopher Wright, in his book, God’s Mission: The Key to Unlocking the Bible’s Grand Narrative, summarizes the four-chapter understanding of our mission: "Our committed participation as God’s people, at God’s invitation and command, in God’s own mission within the history of God’s world for the redemption of God’s creation…This is THE STORY that tells us where we have come from, how we got to be here, who we are, why the world is in the mess it is, how it can be (and has been) changed, and where we are ultimately going.”

The resurrection of Christ’s physical body calls us not just to a private, spiritual relationship with Christ, but to do our part in Christ’s cosmic mission to fix everything in creation broken by sin.

For Further Prayerful Thought:

Celebrate the fact that your calling from Christ is to part of the biggest enterprise in the history of the world—Christ’s overthrow of Satan, sin, and death and establishment of his kingdom of righteousness over nook and cranny of earth.
The Council of Nicaea countered the heresy that Christ’s resurrection was just spiritual, by insisting that Orthodox Christianity believes in the resurrection of the body. It also decreed that all towns with cathedrals also build hospitals. How are these two decisions related to one another?
How does the two-chapter gospel deny what Jesus said was his reason for coming to earth when he quoted Isaiah 61, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor”?

Resources Used

All Things New by Hugh Whelchel
Ministries of Mercy The Call of the Jericho Road by Tim Keller
Discipling Men’s Hearts Through Kingdom Theology by Gary Yagel (doctoral dissertation)

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Palm Sunday Reveals Our Mission as Christ’s Disciples

On 13 April, 2025 By Gary Yagel

One of the most remarkable incidents in the life of King David led, a thousand years later, to the Triumphal entry of the Son of David, the promised Messiah through the gates of Jerusalem on the day we celebrate as Palm Sunday. You might even say, “the story of Palm Sunday began in the heart of David with his allegiance to his God.” 2 Samuel 7 tells us that after David took Jerusalem, built his palace on the high ground, and moved the Ark of the Covenant (God’s throne) there, he said to himself, “It’s not right that Yahweh should have a tent (the tabernacle) while I live in a cedar palace.” David wanted to build a house for Yahweh. But God’s answer was, “No, David, I don’t want YOU to build MY HOUSE. I am going to build YOUR HOUSE.” God says,

When your days are fulfilled and you lie down with your fathers, I will raise up your offspring after you, who shall come from your body, and I will establish his kingdom… I will establish the throne of his kingdom forever…. And your house and your kingdom shall be made sure forever before me. Your throne shall be established forever (vs 12-13, 16).

Though we associate Jesus’ arrival on a donkey with children and palm branches, those actually with Jesus who shouted, “Hosanna to the Son of David! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord” saw his arrival as the coming of the promised Messianic King who would fully and finally overthrow their enemies. This episode is devoted to better understanding the nature of Christ’s kingship and kingdom, which was not only misunderstood by the crowd and his disciples but is misunderstood by many Christians today.

David and his kingdom are a physical type pointing to spiritual realities just as Hebrews tells us the earthly tabernacle and earthly priesthood “serve as a copy and shadow of the heavenly things” (Heb 8:5). The Palm Sunday crowd not only connected the Messiah to David as his descendant but connected his coming kingdom to David’s kingdom, as well. Those who went before and those who followed were shouting, “Hosanna! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord! Blessed is the coming kingdom of our father David! Hosanna in the highest!” (Mk 11:9-10). Let’s examine three themes from the establishment of David’s kingdom that parallel Christ’s Kingdom and can illuminate our understanding of it.

THEME #1—THE DEFEAT OF SATAN & HIS KINGDOM

A. David defeated Israel’s earthly enemies in the power of the Lord. David knew that according to God’s Covenant mediated by Moses, God would defeat their enemies if they obeyed God but allow their enemies to subjugate them if they violated the covenant sanctions. Here are some of the words from Scripture that he, no doubt, meditated upon while keeping his father’s sheep.

And if you faithfully obey the voice of the Lord your God, the Lord your God will set you high above all the nations of the earth. And all these blessings shall come upon you and overtake you ….The Lord will cause your enemies who rise against you to be defeated before you. They shall come out against you one way and flee before you seven ways…But if you will not obey the voice of the Lord your God or be careful to do all his commandments and his statutes that I command you today, then all these curses shall come upon you….The Lord will cause you to be defeated before your enemies. You shall go out one way against them and flee seven ways before them (Dt 28).

David knew and modeled two truths. 1) The battle is the Lord’s. Goliath came at him with sword and spear and javelin, but David said “I come to you in the name of the LORD of hosts, the God of the armies of Israel, whom you have defied…. For the battle is the Lord's, and he will give you into our hand.” 2) Israel’s failure was not a failure of MILITARY MIGHT but a failure of MORAL MIGHT. Remember David’s words in Psalm 1:

God gave David military success for Israel wherever he went but that went hand in hand with turning his nation back to covenant faithfulness to God. Israel’s true enemy was the kingdom of darkness.

B. Ezekiel’s remarkable prophecy of the “son of David” to be Israel’s Messiah, given 580 years before the birth of Jesus, reveals that the Messianic King would defeat the kingdom of evil. Ezekiel 37. They shall not defile themselves anymore with their idols and their detestable things, or with any of their transgressions….My servant David shall be king over them, and they shall all have one shepherd. They shall walk in my rules and be careful to obey my statutes. Right in the midst of Ezekiel’s remarkable prophecy was that the real subjugating power that needed to be overthrown for Israel was not Babylon or Rome but Satan presenting himself as a false god in the form of an idol.

C. Jesus’ Triumphal Entry. In Luke’s account we see that, perhaps unknowingly, the crowds proclaimed that this messiah would bing a cessation of hostilities in heaven. The whole multitude of his disciples began to rejoice and praise God with a loud voice for all the mighty works that they had seen, saying, "Blessed is the King who comes in the name of the Lord! PEACE IN HEAVEN and glory in the highest!” Heaven is often used in Scripture to describe the place surrounding God’s throne where there is no sin. But it is also used to describe the place where the battle between the Kingdom of Darkness and the Kingdom of Righteousness takes place. For example, we read in Revelation 12:7-8. Now war arose in heaven, Michael and his angels fighting against the dragon. And the dragon and his angels fought back, but he was defeated, and there was no longer any place for them in heaven.

The expression, peace in heaven, proclaimed by the crowds on Palm Sunday is only found one other place in the NT. That text, Colossians 1:20, also talks about Christ making peace in heaven. For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in HEAVEN, MAKING PEACE by the blood of his cross. Only Messiah Jesus can bring about peace in heaven, because only he can vanquish the Evil One and his angels. The Apostle, John, tells us that overthrowing Satan was central to Jesus’ mission, The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the works of the devil (1 John 3:8b). Paul’s version of the same truth is stated in Col 2:15) He (Christ) disarmed the rulers and authorities and put them to open shame, by triumphing over them at the cross (Col 2:15).

D. Our Mission. The Palm Sunday story reveals that Jesus’ mission is to destroy Satan’s work. As followers of Christ, we need to ask ourselves, “What are we doing to fight Satan?” Spiritual warfare is not just for church leaders and Charismatic Christians; it is fundamental to our calling as Christ-following men. The great Ephesians 6:10-20 passage on spiritual warfare can be summarized: BE STRONG IN THE LORD in 2 ways:

(vs 11-17) Defensively, we are to stand against Satan’s assault by putting on our armor.
(vs 18-19) Offensively, we are to fight through prayer for righteousness to prevail, in the hearts of our loved ones, and over the planet.

Here are practical ways to fight spiritually in prayer for those you care for:

Pray for them to resist specific temptations they might face. Pray then like this….lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil (Matt 9, 13).
Pray for them to be spiritually strengthened. May he grant you to be strengthened with power through his Spirit in your inner being (Eph 3:16).
Ask for specific spiritual fruit to be produced in them. “Lord, empower Jim with self-control today.” “Lord, please produce the fruit of joy in Sally’s heart today.” If you abide in me, and my words abide in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be done for you. By this my Father is glorified, that you bear much fruit and so prove to be my disciples (John 15:7-8).
Pray for believers to have the winsome boldness to share their faith if the opportunity arises. Paul wrote, Pray….also for me, that words may be given to me in opening my mouth boldly to proclaim the mystery of the gospel (Eph 6:19).

THEME #2—THE DEFEAT OF SIN THROUGH CHRIST’S ATONEMENT & ASCENSION

In order for sin to be ultimately defeated, it had to be atoned for, and the Second Adam had to retake Adam’s throne ascending to the right hand of God providing the spiritual authority and power by which Christians can make disciples of the nations. This defeat of evil, including atonement for sin, is pre-figured by David, alluded to in Ezekiel’s prophecy, and portrayed in Jesus’ triumphal entry riding on a donkey. John tells us in Revelation 1 that Christians are a kingdom of priests.

A. David brought the Ark of the Covenant to Jerusalem and built a rudimentary tabernacle for it, reinstituting the offering of sacrifices as atonement for sin.

And they brought in the ark of the Lord and set it in its place, inside the tent that David had pitched for it. And David offered burnt offerings and peace offerings before the Lord. And when David had finished offering the burnt offerings and the peace offerings, he blessed the people in the name of the Lord of hosts and distributed among all the people, the whole multitude of Israel, both men and women, a cake of bread, a portion of meat, and a cake of raisins to each one. Then all the people departed, each to his house (2 Sam 6:17).

B. Ezekiel’s prophecy is amazingly clear about Yahweh’s role in defeating sin both in making atonement for and giving them power to overcome their backslidings.

But I will save them from all the backslidings in which they have sinned, and will cleanse them; and they shall be my people, and I will be their God. They shall dwell in the land that I gave to my servant Jacob, where your fathers lived. They and their children and their children's children shall dwell there forever, and David my servant shall be their prince forever. I will make a covenant of peace with them.

Compare this with Romans 5:1, Therefore, since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.

C. Jesus’ Triumphal Entry. At the beginning of his final week, Jesus deliberately instructed his disciples to borrow a donkey colt for him to ride to fulfill Zechariah’s Messianic prophecy, which was widely known, Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion! Shout aloud, O daughter of Jerusalem! Behold, your king is coming to you; righteous and having salvation is he, humble and mounted on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey (Zechariah 9:9). The crowd had added the powerful miracles they’d seen Jesus perform to his decision to deliberately fulfill Zechariah’s prophecy and concluded that he was the promised king from David’s descent, the long-awaited Messiah who had finally come to overthrow Rome and establish his kingdom. They expected a military/political kingdom. Yet, in the details of the triumphal entry, were clues about the true nature of their enemy and his kingdom.

Some suggest that riding a donkey instead of a warhorse implies that the King’s arrival was bringing peace. The crowd’s shouts must have proclaimed “peace on earth” as well as in heaven because a few minutes later, Jesus wept over Jerusalem, saying “Would that you, even you, HAD KNOWN ON THIS DAY THE THINGS THAT MAKE FOR PEACE! The only true peace that can be achieved in the human race is through the eradication of sin. Scripture tells us, The works of the flesh are ….enmity, strife, jealousy, fits of anger, rivalries, dissensions, divisions, envy (Gal 5:20-21). Jesus wept for the citizens of Jerusalem, because they did not understand this truth. Their enemy was not Rome but their own sinful hearts that had blinded them to the truth of their sin and to who Jesus really was.

D. Our Mission. Harmony comes from aligning life with God’s design, given in his moral law. Harmony in human relationships is the fruit of Jesus overthrowing sin, ascending to heaven, and sending the Holy Spirit to indwell his people, to root out the works of the flesh and produce the fruit of the Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, meekness, and self-control. That is the formula for peace and flourishing--shalom! But such fruit is only produced by abiding in Christ. Jesus said to his followers, Abide in me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit by itself, unless it abides in the vine, neither can you, unless you abide in me.

THEME #3—EARTH IS RESTORED & PREPARED TO BE THE LOCATION OF YAHWEH’S ETERNAL THRONE

A. David defeated the Jebusites and made Jerusalem the capital city of Israel. The battle to take this ground appears to have had everlasting consequences. In John’s Revelation vision of the final return of Christ, he wrote,

And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God… And I saw no temple in the city, for its temple is the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb. (Rev 21:2-3,22).

B. Ezekiel 37 prophecy. Notice that this prophecy is linked to specific land (promised to Abraham) on which God would one day locate his throne, the same reality portrayed in Revelation 21. David my servant shall be their prince forever. I will make a covenant of peace with them. It shall be an everlasting covenant with them. And I will set them in their land and multiply them, and will set my sanctuary in their midst forevermore. My dwelling place shall be with them, and I will be their God, and they shall be my people (Chapter 37).

Too many Christians today think that when we die, we go to heaven to spend eternity there. This half-truth goes right along with the half-truth that Christians should separate from “this world” by withdrawing from contact with non-Christians. This is a flat denial of our call in Genesis 1 to shape the culture of planet earth FOR the high king and of Jesus' command to make disciples of the nations, not just Christians within the nations. The truth is that when we die our souls go immediately into God’s presence, but we will spend eternity on earth, which right now is being restored and prepared to be the location of Yahweh’s eternal throne. The gospel is not that WE go to HEAVEN for eternity: it is that HEAVEN comes to EARTH for eternity.

C. Jesus Triumphal Entry. The truth that the gospel is more than a ticket to eternal life is a fundamental part of the Palm Sunday story, but it is often missed. When the crowds started to chant, “Glory to God in the Highest,” some Pharisees told Jesus to rebuke his disciples. Jesus answered, “I tell you, IF THESE WERE SILENT, THE VERY STONES WOULD CRY OUT.” What did Jesus mean? The curse upon the ground because of Adams sin was about to be reversed at the cross and creation itself redeemed! Listen to Paul’s explanation. The creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of him who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now (Rom 8:19-22). The gospel is that Adam’s kingdom, earth, subjected to God’s curse because of Adam’s sin has been set free from the curse by the Second Adam who has ascended to take over earth’s kingdom and is fixing everything broken by sin.

D. Our Mission is to put on display the Kingdom of Christ as it invades, transforms, and fixes earth. Here are a few examples of fixing what has been broken by sin.

In South Central Los Angeles FCM Baptist Church began training volunteers to work in the neonatal intensive care unit of the overburdened and underfunded Martin Luther King Hospital. After completing their training, these “Rock n’ Hold” volunteers began to spend hours in the hospital nursery, holding the twitching, afflicted babies who had been born addicted to the crack that their mothers consumed. Rocking and holding the babies, some of whom were born with AIDS, they love them, sing them lullabies, and show the hospital staff Jesus.

Tenth Presbyterian Church located in a part of downtown Philadelphia with numerous gay bars and homosexual meeting areas began running a two-line advertisement in the Philadelphia Inquirer, “Homosexuals and Lesbians can change,” followed by a phone number to this outreach ministry arm, Harvest. Besides some crank calls, hundreds of people called Harvest, where they have received tender love, and real hope, some coming to faith in Christ.

Kingdom disciples display Christ’s kingdom, which overcomes the kingdom of evil and the brokenness that sin has brought. That is the message of Palm Sunday!

For Further Prayerful Thought:

What stood out to you from David’s foreshadowing, Ezekiel’s prophecy or Jesus’ triumphal entry that emphasized our calling to fight Satan?
What stood out to you from David’s foreshadowing, Ezekiel’s prophecy or Jesus’ triumphal entry that emphasized our calling to battle our sinful nature and strive for godly attitudes?
What stood out to you from David’s foreshadowing, Ezekiel’s prophecy or Jesus’ triumphal entry that emphasized our calling to join in Jesus restoration of everything on planet earth broken by sin?

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David Models Three Marks of Spiritual Maturity

On 02 April, 2025 By Gary Yagel

Christian author, Dave Murrow, writes, “Men want to succeed at everything then do. Competence is very important to them. They never stop to ask for directions because doing that would call their competence as a navigator into question. Men are also competitive. They want to win in every situation” (Why Men Hate Going to Church).

When it comes to following Jesus, Paul tells us what winning looks like. His goal in ministry is—that we may present everyone mature in Christ (Col 1:28). Our life target is spiritual maturity. Today’s episode from David’s life helps us all lock on to a concrete picture of just what spiritual maturity looks like in everyday life!

Let’s take another look at David’s walk with God. His humanness draws us to him as one moment he fails God spectacularly but the very next time we see him, David is raising the bar on making righteous choices out of faithfulness to God. Observe I Samuel 24:2-7.

Then Saul took three thousand chosen men out of all Israel and went to seek David and his men in front of the Wildgoats' Rocks. And he came to the sheepfolds by the way, where there was a cave, and Saul went in to relieve himself. Now David and his men were sitting in the innermost parts of the cave. And the men of David said to him, “Here is the day of which the Lord said to you, ‘Behold, I will give your enemy into your hand, and you shall do to him as it shall seem good to you.’” Then David arose and stealthily cut off a corner of Saul's robe. And afterward David's heart struck him, because he had cut off a corner of Saul's robe. He said to his men, “The Lord forbid that I should do this thing to my lord, the Lord's anointed, to put out my hand against him, seeing he is the Lord's anointed.” So David persuaded his men with these words and did not permit them to attack Saul. And Saul rose up and left the cave and went on his way.

Don’t you love how real the Bible is! This incident takes place in front of “Wildgoats’ Rocks.” King Saul slips into the cave to take a dump. Saul just goes far enough into the cave to be out of sight of his troops. But David and his guys, who are deeper in the cave, see his silhouette against the light. Let’s put ourselves in David’s shoes.

You have been a national hero. You’ve known the thrill of cheering crowds and women singing of your achievements in the street. Now, because of one man’s jealousy, you are a national fugitive, always on the run, always hiding, always fearing that one of your countrymen will betray you. Falsely accused of disloyalty to the king, you’ve been hiding in filthy caves and sleeping on hard ground. You are hungry, thirsty, and exhausted, always on the move, always fearing that one man who was trying to hunt you down like an animal. David can’t even remember a home-cooked meal, a soft bed, the arms of Mikal around him, or even a full night of sleep without the anxiety of being discovered.

This one man’s unjust pursuit of you has forced you to leave your dearest friends, your father’s household of brothers, sisters-in-law, nieces and nephews—and even forced you to leave your wife, Mikal. And you are lonely…so lonely. This one man, Saul, has made it his sole purpose to track you down and kill you. He is possessed by the single goal of putting you to death; he won’t stop until the day you die or he dies. All of this in spite of what God had promised you years ago—that you would replace this man as king. God promised that he will give this man’s kingdom into your hands.

Your heart skips a beat when you hear Saul’s troops outside the cave. Suddenly you see a dark figure at the mouth of the cave coming in. Your heart begins to pound. Perhaps he is an advance scout searching the cave making it certain you will be discovered. Being trapped, you and your troops would be slaughtered. Your eyes squint to make out who it is against the backlighting of the cave’s entrance. As the figure comes closer, you rub your eyes. You can’t believe what you see. It is THAT MAN, ALONE, UNGUARDED, and UNARMED. Joab, one of your men whispers, “Do you believe this? Yahweh is putting your enemy right in the palm of your hand?”

What a clearcut situation. Killing your enemy before he killed you was ingrained in the culture. God had told David that he was to be ruler in place of Saul. What better situation could Yahweh orchestrate to deliver his enemy, Saul, who was unjustly trying to murder David, into David’s hand? Even David’s men realized that God was handing David the chance to end Saul’s miserable life and insane pursuit of them all. Yet, when these compelling circumstances would have led almost any man to take Saul’s life, David would not do it. Why not? David was inner-directed by his conscience, not outer-directed by circumstances and the opinions of his men. Notice the reasoning process he rejected:

1. The end justifies the means. God had already anointed David to be king and Saul was getting in the way by trying to kill David. Here was the opportunity to get him out of the way so God’s will would be accomplished.

2. These circumstances are so perfectly designed, they have to be God saying to kill Saul before Saul kills him. While it is true that God is sovereign over circumstances, their perfect alignment can be deceptive. Sarai misread the circumstances of God’s long delay to cause her pregnancy. So she convinced Abram to obtain what God promised by following local customs and getting her handmaid, Hagar, pregnant. It is not overstating the case to say that the very Middle East conflict today between Hamas and Israel traces back to Ismael the father of Arabs being fathered by Abraham as well as Isaac the father of the Jews, and conflict between the two ever since.

Circumstances do play a role in discerning God’s leading. But that place is close to the bottom of things to consider. A better order is:

--after asking, “What is and is not my responsibility?”

--after asking, “Which biblical principles apply here, especially moral prohibitions?”

--after asking, what my wife’s thoughts are (after helping her see the whole picture.)

--after seeking counsel from others, not those who will just tell me what I want to hear, but give wise, biblical counsel.

--after using common sense to list the pros and cons.

3. He also rejected the peer pressure of his men. They urged him to do the obvious, take Saul’s life. But a godly man can never be a pragmatist, which is the philosophy that the end justifies the means.

Mark # 1 of Spiritual Maturity: Developing & Submitting to A Mature Conscience

David listened to his conscience. Clearly this is the reason David did not take Saul’s life. David arose and stealthily cut off a corner of Saul's robe. And afterward David’s heart struck him, because he had cut off a corner of Saul's robe. It appears that David’s conscience had already led him not to slay Saul but to prove to Saul that he could have done so—by cutting off a piece of Saul’s robe. But David’s conscience was so sensitive that he even felt guilty about cutting off a corner of Saul’s robe.

A. Understanding the function of our conscience as Christians. The human conscience is the nervous system that keeps us from damaging ourselves, spiritually, just as our physical nervous system keeps us from damaging our bodies. Touching a hot stove burns our finger; the nervous system produces pain that causes us to stop. Leprosy destroys the nerves, which means a leper could put his hand in a pot of boiling water, feel no pain, and destroy his hand. Our conscience functions similarly. When we start to do something wrong—our conscience bothers us. It hurts, telling us not to keep going down that path or it will further damage our lives. So, our conscience is a warning system that is our friend.

B. Four kinds of consciences mentioned in the New Testament.

A good conscience. Acts 23:1—Paul said, “Brothers, I have lived my life before God in all good conscience up to this day.” Paul is not saying that he never sinned or violated his conscience but that when his conscience spoke, he responded promptly and properly. (Besides warning us, the conscience also convicts us of sin so that we confess our sins and seek forgiveness. We will examine this role of conscience after David’s adultery with Bathsheba and murder of Uriah.) Notice also that Paul linked his conscience to living “before God,” not to living before men.

A seared conscience. 1 Tim 4:1-2 speaks of hypocritical liars who seared their own consciences. Skin that is burned at first hurts, but if the pain is ignored the nerves are destroyed and hardened scar tissue replaces it. This word, seared, points to a profound truth about the human conscience. It is crucial to listen to it because if we violate it repeatedly, it becomes more insensitive, like scar tissue. That is why psychologists tell us that, sometimes, hardened criminals who have murdered others, no longer experience the sensation of guilt. In Titus 1, Paul uses another word to describe the way the human conscience is corrupted by sin—defiled. Both their minds and their consciences are defiled. They profess to know God, but they deny him by their works. They are detestable, disobedient, unfit for any good work. Both a seared and defiled conscience no longer function clearly. This is another way of saying that sin causes us to suppress the truth in unrighteousness (Rom 1:18).

A weak conscience. In 1 Corinthians 8:9-12, Paul interestingly calls an overly active conscience a “weak” conscience, signifying his belief that our conscience has an important role of assuring us that it is clear, either because we have not sinned against another or because we have obtained forgiveness from them. Paul says it is a weak conscience that causes a person to feel guilty about eating bread, which was offered to idols. An overly sensitive conscience usually arises from legalism. It often results from making your application of Scripture equal to Scripture itself, e.g. since I home-school, anyone who puts their kids in public school is compromising.

Historically, legalism was part of fundamentalism, which unbiblically defined separation from evil as not drinking alcohol, not dancing, and not going to movies. The same level of legalism arose in the Corinthian church. So many members had come from backgrounds of sexual brokenness that even the married couples viewed sex as dirty. Paul knew that their weak conscience corrupted the truth that sex is God’s rich creation design to express the joining of hearts and lives by husband and wife, a pleasure that points to the eternal pleasure of us being united to our Bridegroom, Christ. Although Paul emphasized loving each other in the Body of Christ by respecting those with a weak conscience, his entire letter to the Galatians was written to show Christians the centrality of grace. Taking grace from our heads to our hearts is the only way to silence a faulty conscience, whose voice is amplified by Satan, the accuser of the brethren who keeps accusing those of us who are washed in Christ’s blood and clothed in his righteousness of guilt/

A clear conscience. Paul expresses numerous times that a clear conscience is foundational for our lives and work. In 1 Timothy 1, he writes, The aim of our charge is love that issues from a pure heart and a good conscience and a sincere faith. Later, in his charge to Timothy, he reminds him that he had been sent out to battle for the right armed only with your faith and a clear conscience. A clear conscience is maintained three ways: 1) by sharpening and correcting our conscience through the Word of God, 2) by getting an understanding of grace from our heads to our hearts, 3) by practicing what Jesus taught—to make peace with our brother before offering God our gift.

So, David provides us a powerful example of the maturity Jesus wants for us. He had developed a sharp and accurate conscience, which he listened to.

Mark # 2 of Spiritual Maturity: David Recognizes God’s Hatred of Rebellion.

The rock of biblical truth that anchored David so firmly that neither circumstances nor peers could push him away from it is articulated by David. “The Lord forbid that I should do this thing to my lord, the Lord's anointed, to put out my hand against him, seeing he is the Lord's anointed.” This same countercultural respect for those in positions of authority is required of all Christ-followers. (Rom 13:1-5)

Be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God. Therefore whoever resists the authorities resists what God has appointed, and those who resist will incur judgment. For rulers are not a terror to good conduct, but to bad. Would you have no fear of the one who is in authority? Then do what is good, and you will receive his approval, for he is God's servant for your good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for he does not bear the sword in vain. For he is the servant of God, an avenger who carries out God's wrath on the wrongdoer. Therefore one must be in subjection, not only to avoid God's wrath but also for the sake of conscience.

It is worth noting that Nero was ruling the Roman empire (54-86 AD) when Paul wrote this letter (57 AD). Nero’s persecution of Christians was horrific, lighting them on fire as human torches in his garden. Yet Paul was so aware of the evil of fallen man’s natural rebellion to authority that he makes this extraordinarily broad statement. There is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God. The evil of authority never justifies rebellion. I realize this text of Scripture was misapplied in Germany when some argued that the church must support Hitler and that over-support of government authority has led to some Christians accepting racism and a serious failure to oppose injustice that victimizes the poor and marginalized. Nevertheless, Paul said it for a reason.

One of the defining marks of an EVIL call for justice for the poor and marginalized is its support of LAWLESSNESS. The current ideology guiding the political left is Cultural Marxism. Christians today need to understand that there is a reason why Antifa and Black Lives Matter advocates burned down cities in 2020; it is the same reason that extremists are setting Tesla dealerships on fire. Cultural Marxism justifies violence against the evil class it has demonized because that’s what Marxism does. Mao’s Red Guard led in the slaughter of over 85 million farm and business owners, while the same Marxist evil led Pol Pot to slaughter nearly half of his population—those who held any kind of leadership position in Cambodia. In my view, Christians need to increase our compassion for immigrants, even for those who crossed the border illegally but are otherwise law-abiding. Nevertheless, Christians must not be associated with any anti-ICE actions. US Immigration and Customs Enforcement is exactly the kind of legitimate authority about which Paul wrote in Romans 13. To undermine it is evil and it needs to be identified as evil.

Mark # 3 of Spiritual Maturity: David Leaves Balancing the Scales of Justice to God. As David follows Saul out of the cave, we see him demonstrate two other parts of spiritual maturity—he leaves retribution to God, but he still pleads his case for justice. Back in 1 Samuel 24:8-12.

Afterward David also arose and went out of the cave, and called after Saul, “My lord the king!” And when Saul looked behind him, David bowed with his face to the earth and paid homage. And David said to Saul, “Why do you listen to the words of men who say, ‘Behold, David seeks your harm’? Behold, this day your eyes have seen how the Lord gave you today into my hand in the cave. And some told me to kill you, but I spared you. I said, ‘I will not put out my hand against my lord, for he is the Lord's anointed.’ See, my father, see the corner of your robe in my hand. For by the fact that I cut off the corner of your robe and did not kill you, you may know and see that there is no wrong or treason in my hands. I have not sinned against you, though you hunt my life to take it. May the Lord judge between me and you, may the Lord avenge me against you, but my hand shall not be against you.

All Christians must forgive others. Forgiveness never means talking ourselves into thinking the offense against us wasn’t real. Forgiveness is NOT making an excuse for another’s sin. Our sense of right and wrong won’t let us do that. We know it was wrong. We know it was unjust. Rather the key to forgiveness is knowing that since God forgave us for sins against him that are much worse than any person’s sins committed against us—must forgive others. Our sins against others force us to relinquish the right to demand perfection from another.

Another part of forgiveness is leaving it to God to balance the scales of justice—to leave retribution to God, as David so clearly did. Nevertheless, this trust in God to bring about justice does not mean passively accepting the status quo. David was being treated unjustly. He forgave Saul and trusted God to bring retribution instead of taking justice into his own hands. But he did make a passionate appeal to Saul. Can you hear his heart. See, my father, see the corner of your robe in my hand. For by the fact that I cut off the corner of your robe and did not kill you, you may know and see that there is no wrong or treason in my hands. I have not sinned against you, though you hunt my life to take it.

David challenges us to raise our bar of spiritual maturity. It is shaping our conscience by the Word of God and training ourselves to listen to it. It is grasping the inherent evil of the human heart, which gravitates towards rebellion against authority and choosing submission to God’s ordained structures of authority. It is recognizing that forgiveness does not mean saying that an evil committed against us was not evil. But it is leaving it to God to balance the scales of justice.

For Further Prayerful Thought:

How can you better follow David’s example of listening to a biblically trained conscience even in the face of overpowering circumstances and peer pressure?
If you think about it, Satan’s revolt and Adam and Eve’s sin were a defiance of God’s authority. How can Christians oppose injustice by those in authority but guard against movements that play upon sinful envy or rebellion against authority?
What do David’s words to Saul teach you about how to forgive one who is unjustly harming us?

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Helping Loved Ones Weather Their Fears

On 29 March, 2025 By Gary Yagel

God made men to be protectors. God put Adam in the Garden to keep it. This Hebrew word, SHAMAR is used of soldiers who watch over others to protect them. Every guy reading this blog would take a bullet for his family. But many of us haven’t thought much about protecting our families, not just physically but emotionally. Feelings of depression, worry, bitterness, worthlessness, and fear can devastate our loved ones. One of the most eye-opening questions a husband can ask his wife is, “Are their fears that sometimes grip your heart?”

This episode is designed to help us know how to cope with our own fears and know how to help our kids and wives deal with theirs. We will sit at the feet of David and see what he learned when terror filled his heart because he was captured and taken to the king of Gath—the ruler of the hometown of Goliath whose head David had cut off.

One of the most reassuring promises of Scripture is from 1 Corinthians 10:13. No trial has overtaken you that is not common to man. God is faithful, and he will not let you be tested beyond your ability, but with the trial he will also provide the way of escape, that you may be able to endure it. The word for trial, PEIRASMOS is often translated temptation. It is used for trials designed to lead to sin, i.e. temptations, but also for trials with a beneficial purpose and effect. The story we come to in I Samuel 21 is not only the story of David’s trial of being terrified by falling into the hands of his Philistine enemy wanting revenge for killing Goliath; it is also the story of God providing a path of escape. 1 Samuel 21:10-15.

And David rose and fled that day from Saul and went to Achish the king of Gath. And the servants of Achish said to him, “Is not this David the king of the land? Did they not sing to one another of him in dances, ‘Saul has struck down his thousands, and David his ten thousands’?” And David took these words to heart and was much afraid of Achish the king of Gath. So he changed his behavior before them and pretended to be insane in their hands and made marks on the doors of the gate and let his spittle run down his beard. Then Achish said to his servants, “Behold, you see the man is mad. Why then have you brought him to me? Do I lack madmen, that you have brought this fellow to behave as a madman in my presence? Shall this fellow come into my house?” David departed from there and escaped to the cave of Adullam.

DAVID IS TERRIFIED

The ESV study notes say: “David apparently had the idea of serving Achish as an anonymous mercenary.” But his high-risk plan, which presumably required him to disguise himself, backfired. He was discovered and seized by some of Achish’s men who pointed out that this was the famous killer of Goliath about whom the Israelite women sang. David was then terrified. The always wooden Hebrew puts it this way: David took these words to heart and was much afraid.

I’m sure I have never faced a situation that invoked such terror. David had humiliated the Philistines—as a teenage boy—by defeating their champion, Goliath and leading a route of their army. Now he was in the hands of Goliath’s hometown soldiers, who had to be salivating with plans to torture David in revenge. Our fears and those of our loved ones may not be as severe, but the lessons we can learn from David’s example are powerful.

DAVID TAKES HIS FEAR TO GOD

We are fortunate to have a first-hand account of how David dealt with the terror that seized him because he wrote Psalm 56, while in captivity, which shows us. The subscript of this Psalm reveals, “A Miktam (probably a musical term) of David, when the Philistines seized him in Gath.” David takes his situation to God. Psalm 56 provides a great pattern to follow when overwhelmed by negative emotions.

A. He seeks the mercy of God in sharp contrast to the treatment of him by his enemies. Psalm 56 begins, Be gracious to me, O God, for man tramples on me; all day long an attacker oppresses me; my enemies trample on me all day long, for many attack me proudly (vs 1-2).

B. David then directly takes his fear to God choosing to trust God for help. When I am afraid, I put my trust in you. In God, whose word I praise, in God I trust; I shall not be afraid. What can flesh do to me? (vs 3-4).

C. David next takes the injustice of his situation to God. All day long they injure my cause; all their thoughts are against me for evil. They stir up strife, they lurk; they watch my steps, as they have waited for my life. For their crime will they escape? In wrath cast down the peoples, O God! (vs 5-7).

D. David then finds enormous comfort knowing that his suffering matters to God. Don’t miss the wisdom of this step. You have taken account of the misery of my wanderings. Put my tears in Your bottle. Are they not in Your book? (vs-8).

E. David next reaffirms that God is worthy of his trust. This I know, that God is for me. In God, whose word I praise, in the Lord, whose word I praise, in God I trust; I shall not be afraid. What can man do to me? (vs 9-11). I wonder if this Psalm led to Paul writing in Romans 8, “If God is for us, who can be against us?”

Despite David’s numerous failures throughout his life, when fear, anxiety, or discouragement pressed hard on him, David knew to take that pressure to God. Hudson Taylor, the founder of China Inland Mission modeled the same pattern. He wrote: “It doesn’t matter really how great the pressure is; it only matters where the pressure lies. See that it never comes between you and the Lord. Then the greater the pressure, the more it presses you to His breast.”

GOD PROVIDES A WAY FOR DAVID TO ESCAPE

So he changed his behavior before them and pretended to be insane in their hands and made marks on the doors of the gate and let his spittle run down his beard. We have no idea why Achish did not put David to the sword for cutting off Goliath’s head. Perhaps in that culture it was considered cruel to execute an insane person. In any event, it appears that due to God’s intervention, the hostility of Achish was directed more at his servants than at David. Then Achish said to his servants, “Behold, you see the man is mad. Why then have you brought him to me? Do I lack madmen, that you have brought this fellow to behave as a madman in my presence?” God does what Paul will later promise the Corinthians he will do when he sends trials—provide a way of escape.

Perhaps, because believers face similar tough trials that easily overwhelm us, Scripture provides much detail in this story of David facing overpowering fear from his life being threatened. Not only does Psalm 56 reveal David's actual words of trust in God, Psalm 34, written after he had escaped to the cave of Addulam, records how this faith-testing trial had renewed and strengthened his faith.

PSALM 34: A PICTURE OF DAVID GROWING FROM THIS TRIAL

A. DAVID RENEWS HIS CONFIDENCE IN GOD’S FAITHFULNESS. In verses 1-3, he sings, I will bless the Lord at all times; his praise shall continually be in my mouth. My soul makes its boast in the Lord; let the humble hear and be glad. Oh, magnify the Lord with me, and let us exalt his name together! To “bless” means to speak well of. It is a foundational component of loyalty. Its opposite is to complain. David had every reason to complain of God’s treatment of him. He had been minding his own business when he got sent by his father to the front lines in the battle with the Philistines and took down Goliath. He wasn’t asking for fame, but God prospered him in battle to such an extent that the young women were singing, "Saul has slain his thousands, and David his ten thousands." He was completely innocent of the charge of trying in any way to usurp Saul’s throne. It was Saul’s evil envy, not anything David did, that was ruining David’s life. And yet, while hiding in a cave, David sings, “I will bless the Lord at all times.” What incredible loyalty to God.

Despite the severe terror of being captured by Achish, in these verses David returns to his calling, “his praise shall continually be in my mouth.” Praise is telling God which of his characteristics we think are awesome and why. Celebrating who God is not only gives God a gift, it also fills our own emotional tanks, generating more confidence in God’s nature as we face life’s challenges. The author to the Hebrews challenges Christ-followers, Through (Jesus) then let us continually offer up a sacrifice of praise to God, that is, the fruit of lips that acknowledge his name (13:15).

Seeing God faithfully deliver him from Achish seems to have returned David to the most foundational of all attributes required to walk with God—humility. My soul makes its boast in the Lord; let the humble hear and be glad. God resists the proud but gives grace to the humble. God is not our genie in a bottle to serve us; we were created for his glory. The WCF first catechism question reminds us, “The chief end of man is to glorify God and to enjoy him forever.” Jeremiah reveals to us exactly which human heart attitude delights God:

Thus says the Lord: “Let not the wise man boast in his wisdom, let not the mighty man boast in his might, let not the rich man boast in his riches, but let him who boasts boast in this, that he understands and knows me, that I am the Lord who practices steadfast love, justice, and righteousness in the earth. For in these things I delight, declares the Lord” (9:23-24).

As Psalm 34 continues, David reclaims the passion that should grip all who know God. Oh, magnify the Lord with me, and let us exalt his name together (vs 3)!

B. DAVID CELEBRATES THE EXAMPLE OF GOD’S FAITHFULNESS HE JUST WITNESSED. I sought the Lord, and he answered me and delivered me from all my fears. Those who look to him are radiant, and their faces shall never be ashamed. This poor man cried, and the Lord heard him and saved him out of all his troubles. The angel of the Lord encamps around those who fear him, and delivers them (vs 4-7). Notice that God not only delivered David from Achish; he delivered David from his fear. God can just as easily deliver us and our loved ones from ours:

Fear of failure to raise our kids correctly
Fear of failure on the job or losing our means to support our family
Fear of physical harm
Fear of losing a spouse or of never getting married
Fear of making a terrible mistake that harms others
Fear of pain.
Fear of death

Fear is not sinful unbelief. It is the God-given emotional response to what the mind sees as a threat that can harm us. But if we, or our loved ones, allow it to remain, its nature is to grow stronger until it controls us, just as jealousy, resentment, and anger can simmer, grow, and overpower us. But as we saw in Psalm 56, David took the situation that created terror in him to God. And David gives us the result. Those who look to him are radiant, and their faces shall never be ashamed. David testifies that when God empowered David to trust him, even his face radiated confidence because God will never shame one who trusts in him. God will never let you crawl out on a limb of trust in him and saw it off. Believe me, it can feel like it. David’s faith was put to the severest of tests when captured by enemies who by every measure would have been expected to run him through with a sword.

David finishes recounting his story of God’s faithfulness by contrasting his lack of resources to the powerful resources of God to protect him. This poor man cried, and the Lord heard him and saved him out of all his troubles. The angel of the Lord encamps around those who fear him, and delivers them. "How foolish, it would have been," argues David, "to trust myself when the angel of the Lord is on call to protect his beloved." That is a great reminder for us!

C. DAVID URGES OTHERS TO TRUST GOD’S FAITHFULNESS. Oh, taste and see that the Lord is good! Blessed is the man who takes refuge in him! Oh, fear the Lord, you his saints, for those who fear him have no lack! The young lions suffer want and hunger; but those who seek the Lord lack no good thing. It strikes me that this invitation to test the Lord’s goodness in your own experience may be the best of all approaches to evangelism. John the Baptizer and Jesus were God’s prophets. They began their ministries, “Repent for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” But so often Jesus did not start gospel conversations with his hearer’s sin. He started with the subtle invitation to taste and see that the Lord is good.

Jesus said to them, “I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me shall not hunger, and whoever believes in me shall never thirst (Jn 6:35).
Jesus said to her, “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks of the water that I will give him will never be thirsty again. The water that I will give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life” (Jn 4:13-14).
The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I came that they may have life and have it abundantly (Jn 10:10).

During twenty minutes of silence at a Young Life Camp named Hilltop, in response to Jesus’ words in John 10:10, I told Jesus I was all in with him. It is worth noting that when Peter issues the most direct command to share our faith, he essentially says, “Be ready to share with others how you have tasted and seen that the Lord is good.” I say this because Peter’s actual words are, “always being prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you.” The Greek word “hope” (ELPIS) means anticipation and expectation of what is certain. The Christian’s hope DOES include deliverance from punishment for our sins; but it means so much more. It is restoration to the rich life of fellowship with God and rich wholesome relationships with each other—to God’s original GOOD design. To come to Christ is to taste this future restoration that the cross has inaugurated and see that the Lord IS good. Christ-followers expderience of foretaste in this life of the full restoration of the life to come.

D. DAVID URGES OBEDIENCE BECAUSE OF GOD’S FAITHFULNESS. As Psalm 34 continues, David addresses the widespread loss of perspective that trials always bring—that God has designed life so that keeping his ways leads to prosperity but violating them leads to death. We see this often-repeated truth in Psalm 1.

Blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the wicked, nor stands in the way of sinners, nor sits in the seat of scoffers; but his delight is in the law of the Lord and on his law he meditates day and night. He is like a tree planted by streams of water that yields its fruit in its season, and its leaf does not wither. In all that he does, he prospers. The wicked are not so, but are like chaff that the wind drives away.

Knowing that what you spiritually sow you shall reap is the biblical concept called the fear of the Lord. It means knowing that God is such a heavyweight that you never get away with breaking his law. Notice some of the ways David emphasis this in Psalm 34: He pictures himself as a tutor, saying, Come, O children, listen to me; I will teach you the fear of the Lord. He then appeals to every person’s desire for a prosperous life. What man is there who desires life and loves many days, that he may see good? He then urges obedience to God’s commands and trusting God even though we must endure hard times.

Keep your tongue from evil and your lips from speaking deceit. Turn away from evil and do good; seek peace and pursue it. The eyes of the Lord are toward the righteous and his ears toward their cry. The face of the Lord is against those who do evil, to cut off the memory of them from the earth. When the righteous cry for help, the Lord hears and delivers them out of all their troubles. The Lord is near to the brokenhearted and saves the crushed in spirit (vs 13-18).

Don't let trials make you doubt that God's face is always towards those seeking to obey him and away from those in rebellion against him.

E. DAVID URGES: DON’T LET AFFLICTION MAKE YOU DOUBT GOD’S FAITHFULNESS/

David wants his experience to impact us. His deliverance from Achish proves God’s faithfulness to his people in this life. David knows that our trials can easily cause us to look at the lives of those who are not following Jesus, feel like they have it easy, and wonder if it is worthwhile. Through this Psalm and David’s deliverance from Achish, David is shouting that walking with God is the path to a rich, satisfying life in this temporal world. But this world isn't all that matters. David closes, with the same lesson that Asaph learned in Psalm 73. He reported “For I was envious of the arrogant when I saw the prosperity of the wicked… until I discerned their end.” Similarly, David closes Psalm 34:19-22. Many are the afflictions of the righteous, but the Lord delivers him out of them all. He keeps all his bones, not one of them is broken. Affliction will slay the wicked, and those who hate the righteous will be condemned. The Lord redeems the life of his servants; none of those who take refuge in him will be condemned.

It is about as counter cultural as it can be to think about eternity. But last time I checked it was a long time. Don’t ever forget Paul’s perspective. This life is full of trials and afflictions. But we do not lose heart. Though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day. For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison. (2 Cor 4:16-17).

For Further Prayerful Thought:

Although the pressure point you have faced may not be fear but another strong emotion, what can you learn from the first Psalm we studied, Psalm 56 about trusting God with the situation, the emotion in order to rest in God?
Notice that as David pens Psalm 34, which looks back on the terrifying experience of being captured by the Philistines, he voices intense determination in the very first verse, to bless the Lord at all times. How do you think his experience of being captured and rescued from Achish strengthened this determination?
What do you think of the idea that David’s invitation to everyone in Psalm 34, “taste and see that the Lord is good” is an excellent approach to evangelism. How might this idea shape our efforts to share Christ with those around us?

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David—Big Successes Bigger Failures

On 22 March, 2025 By Gary Yagel

Christian men want a faith that is real, that works where they live out their everyday existence—in the physical world. Life teaches them everyday not to believe salesmen’s hype, leaders’ overly rosy predictions, and coworkers’ excuses. They live in the bottom-line world, trusting only what they can measure and identify as corresponding to reality. Perhaps that is why men who get to know the Bible, love it so much. The Bible tells it like it is, with shoe-leather reality. It is the unvarnished story of the very flawed. Author Alan Redpath expresses what most of us feel about the Bible’s honest portrayal of its figures, “I find it tremendously comforting that the Bible never flatters its heroes. It tells the truth about them, no matter how unpleasant it may be, so that in considering what is taking place in the shaping of their character we have available all the facts clearly that we may study them” (The Making of a Man of God). Such a hero was David who had big successes but even bigger failures. In 1 Samuel chapters 19-23, we see David pass a big test of his faith with flying colors and then fall flat on his face, doing evil, which led to enormous suffering due to his unbelief.

As we pick up the story of David, in 1 Samuel 19, God has already anointed David to be the future king of Israel and launched him into national prominence through his defeat of mighty Goliath. Saul has appointed him top general in Israel, and chapter 18 ends with the words, The commanders of the Philistines came out to battle, and as often as they came out David had more success than all the servants of Saul, so that his name was highly esteemed. But as we saw last week, David’s success fills Saul with envy and Saul decides to murder him. The story continues,

Saul sent messengers to David’s house to watch him, that he might kill him in the morning. But Michal, David’s wife, told him, “If you do not escape with your life tonight, tomorrow you will be killed.” So Michal let David down through the window, and he fled away and escaped. Michal took an image and laid it on the bed and put a pillow of goats’ hair at its head and covered it with the clothes. And when Saul sent messengers to take David, she said, “He is sick.” Then Saul sent the messengers to see David, saying, “Bring him up to me in the bed, that I may kill him.” And when the messengers came in, behold, the image was in the bed, with the pillow of goats’ hair….Now David fled and escaped, and he came to Samuel at Ramah and told him all that Saul had done to him. (I Sam 19:11-18).

One of the most distinctive characteristics of God is that he relentlessly tests the faith of those he loves. Peter explained this reality, when he wrote to Christians who had also been displaced from their homes, You have been grieved by various trials, so that the tested genuineness of your faith—more precious than gold that perishes though it is tested by fire—may be found to result in praise and glory and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ. God is like a football coach who makes his players run wind sprints in August, not letting up until they drop from exhaustion. He knows that on game day, they will be glad they endured such painful trials. God is relentlessly committed to what will matter most to us on the day of Christ’s return—praise, glory, and honor going to him. The Day of Christ extends into eternity, which means our eternal joy will be linked to how we have honored Christ with our lives. God loves us too much to sacrifice that eternal joy to give us the ease, and comfort we crave now! Scripture tells us that David wrote Psalm 59 during the episode of his life that we just read about.

Psalm 59—David’s Model Response to His Faith Being Tested

As David realized he was surrounded by Saul’s troops who were waiting for daylight to execute him, he took his impossible situation to God. Someone has said, “We are all faced with a series of great opportunities for our faith to grow stronger, brilliantly disguised as impossible situations.” Maybe you are facing one right now. The challenge before you is just too big; you don’t have the resources to meet it. We know that David took the fact that he was trapped by his enemies seeing no way out to God that night because Scripture tells us so. Notice the flow of thought: 1) requesting God’s help, to 2) remembering God’s character, to 3) resolving to trust God in the future.

A. David REQUESTS God’s help. (Notice these second person direct appeals.)

Deliver me from my enemies, O my God (vs 1).
Protect me from those who rise up against me (vs 1).
Deliver me from those who work evil (2).
Save me from bloodthirsty men (2).
Awake, come to meet me, and see (4).

B. David REMEMBERS God’s character.

You, Lord God of hosts, are God of Israel. Rouse yourself to punish all the nations; spare none of those who treacherously plot evil (5).
There they are, bellowing with their mouths with swords in their lips—for “Who,” they think, “will hear us?” But you, O Lord, laugh at them; you hold all the nations in derision (7-8).

C. David RESOVES to trust God for the future.

O my Strength, I will watch for you; for you, O God, are my fortress (9).
My God in his steadfast love will meet me (10).
God will let me look in triumph on my enemies (10).
My enemies wander about for food and growl if they do not get their fill. But I will sing of your strength (16).
I will sing aloud your steadfast love in the morning. For you have been to me a fortress and a refuge in the day of my distress (16).
O my Strength, I will sing praises to you, for you, O God, are my fortress, the God who shows me steadfast love (17).

David’s Unbelief Leads to a Sin of Omission

The Bible teaches that sin is not only an act of commission, e.g. stepping across the moral line to harm another; it is also an act of omission, e.g. not caring that a poor man has no food. The next chapters of David’s life reveal a significant sin of omission. After he escaped from his home with his wife, Michal’s help, he never went back for her. We might say, “Wait a minute, David spent the next 10 years running around the countryside fleeing from Saul.” But that did not stop David from taking another woman as his wife, Ahinoam of Jezreel, during these years and then Abigail as a second wife. The binding nature of the marriage covenant has been true since God brought Eve to Adam! Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh. David abandoned his responsibility to provide for her, protect her, and pursue her. We might say, “But would not David having Michal at his side put her at risk of harm from her father’s wrath? Yes. But could not the God who protected David from the paw of the lion and bear, from Goliath’s sword, and 15 years of Saul’s attempts to kill him also have protected his wife, Michal?

In fact, David’s mistreatment of his wife Michal was even worse than abandoning her. After David failed to return for Michal, Saul had given his daughter, David's wife, to Palti the son of Laish, who was of Gallim. Fifteen years later, after Saul and Jonathan’s death, David demands that Saul’s son give Michal back to him as his wife. Then David sent messengers to Ish-bosheth, Saul's son, saying, “Give me my wife Michal, for whom I paid the bridal price of a hundred foreskins of the Philistines.” And Ish-bosheth sent and took her from her husband Paltiel the son of Laish. But her husband went with her, weeping after her all the way to Bahurim (2 Sam 3:14-16). It is very likely that David wanted Michal back as his wife for political reasons, supporting his claim to be the rightful heir to Saul’s throne. Whether this was his motivation or not, David violated the sanctity of his marriage bond to Michal. There is no denying such massive failure on the part of a husband.

David’s Unbelief Leads to a Sin of Commission

Human beings have been compared to sponges. Squeeze them and the pressure causes what is inside to come out. As we come to 1 Samuel 21, David has just confirmed that Saul is so intent upon murdering him that he exploded in fury against his own son, Jonathan for siding with David. The pressure is on. We read,

Then David came to Nob, to Ahimelech the priest. And Ahimelech came to meet David, trembling, and said to him, “Why are you alone, and no one with you? And David said to Ahimelech the priest, “The king has charged me with a matter and said to me, ‘Let no one know anything of the matter about which I send you, and with which I have charged you.’ I have made an appointment with the young men for such and such a place.

This is a boldfaced lie. The text continues.

Now then, what do you have on hand? Give me five loaves of bread, or whatever is here.” And the priest answered David, “I have no common bread on hand, but there is holy bread….So the priest gave him the holy bread, for there was no bread there but the bread of the Presence, which is removed from before the Lord, to be replaced by hot bread on the day it is taken away. Now a certain man of the servants of Saul was there that day, detained before the Lord. His name was Doeg the Edomite, the chief of Saul's herdsmen.

Common bread, which might be eaten by anyone, is distinguished from holy bread, eaten only by the priests in a holy place. So, Ahimelech was bending the rules. However, Jesus endorsed Ahimelech’s act of putting mercy before ceremonial law. David’s request for bread was not the problem; it was his brazen lie as to his purpose for traveling to Nob. As the ESV text notes point out, “Though David normally acted like an upright man, the Bible does not hesitate to record honestly his instances of wrongdoing.” David’s sin of deceit had horrific consequences.

Then the king sent to summon Ahimelech the priest, the son of Ahitub, and all his father's house, the priests who were at Nob, and all of them came to the king. And Saul said to him, “Why have you conspired against me, you and the son of Jesse, in that you have given him bread and a sword and have inquired of God for him, so that he has risen against me, to lie in wait, as at this day?” Then Ahimelech answered the king, “And who among all your servants is so faithful as David, who is the king's son-in-law, and captain over your bodyguard, and honored in your house? Is today the first time that I have inquired of God for him No! Let not the king impute anything to his servant or to all the house of my father, for your servant has known nothing of all this, much or little.” And the king said, “You shall surely die, Ahimelech, you and all your father's house.” Then the king said to Doeg, “You turn and strike the priests.” And Doeg the Edomite turned and struck down the priests, and he killed on that day eighty-five persons who wore the linen ephod. And Nob, the city of the priests, he put to the sword; both man and woman, child and infant, ox, donkey and sheep. (1 Sam 22:11-19).

Hard Lessons for David and Us

Lesson # 1: Our sins harm those we love. One member of the priestly family escaped the slaughter and fled to David to explain the genocide. David responded, “I have occasioned the death of all the persons of your father’s house.” David’s lie led to the slaughter of 85 priests, every one of their wives and children, and the death of everyone in the city of Nob. As you can see from their quick obedience to King Saul, Ahimelech’s courageous rebuke of Saul’s unjust persecution of David, and his innocence from wrongdoing, Ahimelech and the priests were some of the finest of God’s covenant people. Yet David’s lies got them all killed.

The wage of sin is death. Our sins have consequences for others. We men understand that the world in which we live operates on the basis of cause and effect. We reap what we sow. Our sinful choices harm those we love most. As leaders of our homes, we need to take Paul’s advice, Abhor evil, cling to what is good (Rom 12:9). and God’s advice to arguably the most successful man in the entire OT Joshua, This Book of the Law shall not depart from your mouth, but you shall meditate on it day and night, so that you may be careful to do according to all that is written in it. For then you will make your way prosperous, and then you will have good success (Josh 1:8). Leaders have influence. Bad choices harm.

Lesson # 2: Despite God’s sovereignty, in this world, the innocent suffer. Scripture does not hide the horrific murder of the entire priestly city of Nob Similarly, this podcast can’t avoid the hard question “How could God let this happen?” Here are three biblical perspectives that help us cope with this mystery.

1. We must approach this question with humility, recognizing that we may not have the mental horsepower to understand how suffering can be good. As Tim Keller argues, “If you have a God great and transcendent enough to be mad at because he hasn’t stopped evil and suffering in the world, then you have (at the same moment) a God great and transcendent enough to have good reasons for allowing it to continue that you can’t know. Indeed, you can’t have it both ways!”

2. Jesus’ love poured out on the cross matters. Again, Keller observes,

Christianity alone among the world’s religions claims that God became uniquely and fully human in Jesus Christ and therefore knows firsthand despair, rejection, loneliness, poverty, bereavement, torture, and imprisonment. On the cross, he went beyond even the worst human suffering and experienced cosmic rejection and pain that exceeds ours as infinitely as his knowledge and power exceeds ours. Why did he do it? The Bible says that Jesus came on a rescue mission for creation. He had to pay for our sins so that someday he can end evil and suffering without ending us… If we again ask the question, “Why does God allow evil and suffering to continue?” and we look at the cross of Jesus, we still do not know what the answer is. However, we now know what the answer isn’t. It can’t be that he doesn’t love us.

3. The goodness of suffering can only be seen from eternity. The biblical answer to suffering is resurrection—the renewal and restoration of everything broken by sin. In Matthew 19:28, Jesus spoke of his return to earth as the palingenesis, a Greek word that means “the renewal of all things.” Jesus insisted that his return will be with such power that the entire universe will be purged of all decay and brokenness. As Sam suspected in The Lord of the Rings, once he saw Gandolf alive again, everything sad is going to come untrue. C. S. Lewis writes, “They say of some temporal suffering, ‘No future bliss can make up for it,’ not knowing that Heaven, once attained will work backwards and turn even that agony into a glory (The Great Divorce). This is the ultimate defeat of evil and suffering. It will not only be ended, but so radically vanquished that the evil that has occurred will be reversed and bring about greater good. The suffering of a single woman who always wanted to be married will make her marriage to Jesus in eternity richer than it ever would have been if she had married and I believe the infants and children whose lives were cut short by Saul’s genocide at Nob will enjoy an even richer quality of adult life than they would have experienced had they not been slaughtered as infants.

Lesson # 3: Only grace can help us forgive ourselves when our failures have harmed others. I cannot fathom what it would be like to live each day knowing I had aborted my baby, killed another person through drunk driving, or caused another’s death through making a mistake at work. I do know what it is like, however, even though striving hard to be a faithful father to the five precious children entrusted to me, to have fatherhood regrets, as most men do. I know the truth that if God’s will for our kids depended upon us always getting it right as fathers, we would all be in deep weeds. Nevertheless, we are men. We know the laws of cause and effect. We can’t easily discard the thought, “If only I had done such and such, that negative outcome would not have taken place.” David, the young, passionate, heart-driven writer of the Psalms admitted to Ahimelech’s son that he was responsible for the death of his entire family and city. That fact must have crushed David. How could he forgive himself for what he had done?

We don’t know. But we do know that when David later committed adultery and murder, which cost his own child’s life, David went to the only one whose mercy was powerful enough to undo his guilty conscience. On that occasion his cry was, Have mercy on me, O God, according to your steadfast love; according to your abundant mercy blot out my transgressions. Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin! For I know my transgressions, and my sin is ever before me…. Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean; wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow (Psalm 51).

Hyssop was the branch dipped in the blood of the lamb of sacrifice. The blood of the High Priest’s sacrifice—ultimately the blood of Jesus—is the only force on earth capable of granting us forgiveness when our sins have deeply harmed others. By the authority of The Holy One of Israel, if you are in Christ, YOUR CONSCIENCE IS WHITE AS SNOW—even if your sin caused another’s death. Your sin also caused Jesus’ death and God has forgiven that.

For Further Prayerful Thought:

How is David typical of most Christian men?
Consider the three steps David took in Psalm 59. Why might these steps enable us all to pass the test of our faith when we face impossible situations?
David learned some hard lessons through his dishonesty which cost the lives of the priestly families at Nob. Which of these most stands out to you?
Has your sin hurt another so badly that you have trouble believing that Jesus’ blood can really wash it away. If so, ask Jesus to help you. Remember, every person sitting beside you in church is a murderer because it was our sin that sent Jesus to the cross

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How King Saul’s Envy Rotted His Soul

On 15 March, 2025 By Gary Yagel

Christian tradition records envy as one of the seven deadly sins, along with lust, greed, pride, gluttony, wrath, and laziness. God warns us, Envy makes the bones rot (Prov 14:30b). This episode examines how King Saul’s envy of David steadily eroded the health of his soul.

Some years ago, I observed one of the mom’s overseeing a home-school soccer game. She said to the kids, “Okay kids, it doesn’t really matter who wins, so we are not going to keep score.” I knew that she had just killed the interest in the game for my two sons, if not for all the boys. Males want to win at everything they do. But we must put a biblical lens over such competitiveness. Isn’t the desire to win driven by pride—wanting to triumph OVER another? Doesn’t Scripture exhort Christians to exalt one another above ourselves, not prevail over them by beating them?

Certainly, the desire to win can be motivated by, and produce sinful pride. But I don’t think men love competition because of their pride or that wanting to win is inherently selfish. Rather, I believe men love competition because they love challenges. Adam was designed to make an impact. He was put in the garden to make a difference—to change it, to accomplish a goal—bringing out its potential. Keeping score in games is just a way of measuring how we are doing in overcoming the challenge we have accepted—defeating whatever the opposition is.

Nevertheless, there is a place where that sense of competition does become sinful rivalry, jealousy, or envy. In fact, after the fall of Adam and Eve, the first sin recorded in human history was caused by envy—Cain’s murder of Abel. Envy is an insidious moral disease. In the words of Rosaria Butterfield, “If you do not deal with envy in the infantile stage, it will devour you. It will eat you from the inside out. Envy transforms a person into a monster” (Five Lies of Our Anti-Christian Age). Mao Zedong, like all Marxists, appealed to class envy to motivate young devotees of his “Cultural Revolution” to violently overthrow the land and factory owners so their stolen wealth could be redistributed to the laborers. Sixty-five million Chinese were slaughtered by this appeal to class envy of the wealthy in China.

God gives us a sober warning about envy in Proverbs 3:31. Let not your heart envy sinners but continue in the fear of the Lord all the day. Asaph, the author of Psalm 73, acknowledged his struggle to obey this admonition. For I was envious of the arrogant when I saw the prosperity of the wicked. As a product of our sinful nature, envy is associated directly in the NT with strife, hatred, dissention, and malice. In our study of the life of David we see sinful jealousy arise in the heart of King Saul after David’s defeat of Goliath, an internal envy that brought destruction in its wake, as envy always does. I Samuel 18:5-16).

David went out and was successful wherever Saul sent him, so that Saul set him over the men of war. And this was good in the sight of all the people and also in the sight of Saul's servants. As they were coming home, when David returned from striking down the Philistine, the women came out of all the cities of Israel, singing and dancing, to meet King Saul, with tambourines, with songs of joy, and with musical instruments. And the women sang to one another as they celebrated, “Saul has struck down his thousands, and David his ten thousands.” And Saul was very angry, and this saying displeased him. He said, “They have ascribed to David ten thousands, and to me they have ascribed thousands, and what more can he have but the kingdom?”

And Saul eyed David from that day on. The next day a harmful spirit from God rushed upon Saul, and he raved within his house while David was playing the lyre, as he did day by day. Saul had his spear in his hand. And Saul hurled the spear, for he thought, “I will pin David to the wall.” But David evaded him twice. Saul was afraid of David because the Lord was with him but had departed from Saul. So Saul removed him from his presence and made him a commander of a thousand. And he went out and came in before the people. And David had success in all his undertakings, for the Lord was with him. And when Saul saw that he had great success, he stood in fearful awe of him. But all Israel and Judah loved David, for he went out and came in before them.

We must begin this study, as we often must do, with some definitions. Jealousy can describe a virtue that is often used for God’s desire to hold first place in the affections of our heart. This is righteous hostility towards rivals. God is rightly jealous of other idols who would steal away our affections, as any husband would be hostile towards an illicit lover seeking to lure his wife away from faithfulness to him. But jealousy is also used in the sinful sense of hostility towards a rival who experiences some advantage you don’t have. This is unrighteous hostility towards rivals. It angered Saul that David received greater praise than he.

Envy is even more insidious than sinful jealousy. It is painful or resentful awareness of an advantage enjoyed by another, joined with a desire to enjoy the same advantage or at least have the advantage taken away from one’s rival. Jealousy says, “I want what my rival has.” Envy says, “I don’t have to have what my rival has; just don’t let him have it.” Envy is evil, ill will towards a rival. Years after the incident we are studying, the wisdom of Solomon was displayed through his recognition of envy in a woman’s heart. You remember the story:

One day two women came to King Solomon, and one of them said: Your Majesty, this woman and I live in the same house. Not long ago my baby was born at home, and three days later her baby was born. Nobody else was there with us. One night while we were all asleep, she rolled over on her baby, and he died. Then while I was still asleep, she got up and took my son out of my bed. She put him in her bed, then she put her dead baby next to me. In the morning when I got up to feed my son, I saw that he was dead. But when I looked at him in the light, I knew he wasn't my son. “No!” the other woman shouted. “He was your son. My baby is alive!” “The dead baby is yours,” the first woman yelled. “Mine is alive!” They argued back and forth in front of Solomon, until finally he said, “Both of you say this live baby is yours. Someone bring me a sword.” A sword was brought, and Solomon ordered, “Cut the baby in half! That way each of you can have part of him.” “Please don't kill my son,” the baby's mother screamed. “Your Majesty, I love him very much, but give him to her. Just don't kill him.” The other woman shouted, “Go ahead and cut him in half. Then neither of us will have the baby.” Solomon said, “Don't kill the baby.” Then he pointed to the first woman, “She is his real mother. Give the baby to her, (1 Kings 3:16-27).

Solomon saw that a heart filled with envy cannot be filled with love. Envy is self-focused; love is other-focused. Paul puts it bluntly, love does not envy. (I Cor 13:4). Let’s make five observations about Saul’s envy.

A. It is directed towards one within our circle of relationships. Saul had made David the commander of his army who was suddenly hanging out with Saul and the other warriors. Usually, it is with those close to us that we feel competitive. The envy that overpowered Cain was towards his brother, Abel. Joseph’s brothers were jealous of the fact that he was Jacob’s favorite son; so, they sold him into slavery. Sibling rivalry never seems to leave families—whose kids turn out the best, who is the most successful at work, who has the nicest house. At work, it is usually not those way up the management rung from us but peers with whom we may feel competitive. It is not seeing some guy in a commercial who leaves for golf in his Jaguar convertible that generates envy in me. It is my neighbor doing so, while I push my lawnmower and sweat, because I have not been as financially successful as he.

B. Envy surfaces when our rival is exalted over us. It was one thing for David to be popular. Up until verse 7 there is no mention of Saul being anything but pleased with David’s popularity. But as soon as David was exalted OVER Saul, jealousy sprang up in Saul’s heart. He said, “They have ascribed to David ten thousands, and to me they have ascribed thousands.” Until then, Saul had been the great warrior in Israel. He was the number one warrior in the people’s eyes, but now he was relegated to number two. In Genesis, to solve the problem of her barrenness when God had promised Abram that he would be the father of a great nation, it was Sarai who suggested to Abram that they follow the local custom of Abram getting her handmaiden Haggar pregnant on her behalf. But when Hagar flaunts her pregnancy with Abram’s child, rivalry kicks in and Sarai treats Hagar harshly.

C. Envy surfaces when others have something we want. Saul wouldn’t have been jealous of the fact that David was getting more attention than he was if Saul didn’t care about attention. But in reality, Saul craved attention. In 1 Samuel 15, as an act of judgement against the Amalekites who practiced infant sacrifice and were likely spreading venereal disease, Saul is explicitly commanded by God to put to death all humans and all sheep, and oxen. Saul didn’t do it. The excuse he gave God for his disobedience is revealing, “I was afraid of the people and gave in to them.” Saul became addicted to popularity. His jealousy was provoked when he saw David experiencing the immense popularity that he craved. In 1 Kings 21 we read the story of how envy consumed King Ahab who wanted the vineyard of Naboth. When Naboth refused to sell it, Ahab’s wife, Jezebell, plotted to murder Naboth so Ahab could have his vineyard. Eny often surfaces first as covetousness.

One of the greatest historical examples of envy is Karl Marx’ “conflict theory” of history. He saw history as the conflict between the wealthy bourgeoisie who controlled the means of production and business, and the proletariat workers who depended on the bourgeoisie for employment and survival. Marxism foments hostility towards the rich bourgeoisie through class envy. Assuming falsely that a society’s economic pie-size is fixed, Marxism enflames envious hostility toward any rich person because, by definition, he has stolen part of the poor person’s pie. Marxism is not only based on a thoroughly wrong understanding of economics, it stirs up the covetous envy of the poor towards the rich, which leads to violence.

Rosaria Butterfield, called to faith in Christ out of radical lesbianism, sees transgenderism as rooted in envy—wanting what the other gender has. "We see how the sin of envy pulses through the concept of transgenderism. People obsessed with having a gender and sex that is not rightly theirs, and people who are willing to mutilate themselves and manipulate others to get this are under the control of envy” (Five Lies of Our Anti-Christian Age). Eny surfaces when others have something we want.

D. Envy corrupts spiritual perception. One of the most sobering components of Saul’s envy was that it eroded his conscience, causing him to cling to a false narrative to justify his hostility to David. The false narrative is revealed, in I Samuel 18:8 They have ascribed to David ten thousands, and to me they have ascribed thousands, and WHAT MORE CAN HE HAVE BUT THE KINGDOM?” Saul rationalized his attempts to kill David and even tried to convince Jonathan to join him by seeing David as a threat to his throne. But, as the rest of 1 Samuel demonstrates in spades, that was false. David had several opportunities to take Saul’s life and was urged to do so, by his men. Yet David steadfastly refused to raise up his hand against God’s anointed; Saul could not have been more wrong.

Consider what envy did to Cain’s conscience. Cain was jealous of Abel because God had regards for Abel’s offering from his flock but not for his offering from the land. If ever envy started out in a good way, this was it. Cain wanted God to be pleased with his offering. Perhaps when God wasn’t, Cain might have pursued God to ask, “why not.” But what galled Cain was that God WAS pleased with Abel’s offering and that wasn’t fair because Cain’s vocation was farming and Abel's was keeping sheep. But what started out as a desire to please God was overtaken by the sin of envy, which dulled his conscience, and filled him with such angry hostility that he overrode that conscience to murder his own brother.

The sin of envy has had a huge impact shaping the most widespread anti-biblical worldview in our culture—critical theory—corrupting its adherent’s sense of right and wrong. Based on Marx’s “conflict theory,” critical theory (aka cultural Marxism) changes the goal of justice, which is receiving what your actions dictate that you deserve to the goal of equity, i.e. equal outcomes. This is a radical descent into evil and radical injustice. As legendary economist Thomas Sowell notes, “This conception of fairness requires that third parties must wield the power to control outcomes overriding rules, standards, or the preferences of other people” (Voddie Baucham, Fault Lines). Pursuing the cultural Marxist goal of equal outcomes destroys human freedom. It is an invitation to totalitarianism—which is exactly what this process of replacing the concept of just equality of opportunity with the concept of equity as equal outcomes has done, producing Mao, Lenin, Stalin and Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. Class envy in cultural Marxism devolves into the call to steal what rightly belongs to others and to violently overthrow all existing institutions.

Critical theory’s class envy, furthermore, mindlessly accuses every person who is non-poor, male, white, cisgender, American-born, and able-bodied to be an oppressor and labels all who are not, victims. Consider what this class envy has done to the consciences of some politicians who justified burning down cities in protest of racism, who want open borders because the US is the rich oppressor and all immigrants are the poor oppressed (including rapists, Mexican drug cartels, and terrorists), and who unjustly allow men to compete in women’s sports because transgender people are the oppressed and cisgender people are the oppressors. The deterioration of the conscience of those who cling to cultural Marxism’s class warfare envy is apparent, everywhere.

E. Envy leads to virulent hostility towards others. Envy opens Saul’s heart to an evil spirit. The next day a harmful spirit rushed upon Saul, and he raved within his house while David was playing the lyre, as he did day by day. Saul had his spear in his hand. And Saul hurled the spear, for he thought, “I will pin David to the wall” (1 Sam 18:10-12). The fruit of sowing envy is reaping hate-filled actions. Cain murdered Abel. Ahab murdered Naboth. Sarai sent Hagar away from her home once temporarily and once permanently. But perhaps the expression of envy that was the most wicked of all was the insistence of the chief priests and elders that Jesus be crucified. Mathew tells us that even the pagan ruler, Pilate “knew that it was out of envy that the chief priests had delivered him up” (Matt 27:17). Envy leads to horrific evil. In the 1990’s, scholars documented the total number of those murdered through the Marxist ideology that used class envy to incite the overthrow of government and slaughter of the wealthy. It was between 85-100 million people worldwide. Class envy produced virulent hatred for the rich and we are seeing the same class-warfare hostility today fomented by critical theory advocates.

Attacking Four Roots of Envy in Our Hearts

The night is far gone; the day is at hand. So then let us cast off the works of darkness and put on the armor of light (Rom 13:12).

Root #1: PRIDE. Life is about me.

Puff off: exalting ourselves, wanting attention, wanting to be recognized as the best, self-absorption, subtly wanting to impress.

Put on: exalt others, follow Jonathan’s example, focus on hero-making, embrace the upside-down kingdom truth that greatness is serving.

Root #2: LOW SELF-ASSURANCE. Relationships with others shaped by needing others' acceptance.

Put off: doubting God’s love. He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things (Rom 8:32).

Put on: trust in God’s unconditional love. The young lions suffer want and hunger; but those who seek the Lord shall not be in want of any good thing (Ps 34:10). Trust is a choice—to put off doubt and put on faith in God’s proven love. The righteous shall live by faith. (Rom 1:17)

Root #3: LOW SENSE OF WORTH. Somehow, we feel like we must prove our worth by being better than others.

Put off: doubts about our worth. Jealousy happens because we lack confidence in our own value compared to others. But Paul says, When they measure themselves by themselves and compare themselves with themselves, they are not wise (2 Cor10:12). It is folly to compare ourselves to others because we each run the unique race God has marked out for us.

Put on: confidence in our design. For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them (Eph 2:10). We are God’s artwork. Our worth is not based so much on what we look like as WHO painted us.

Root # 4: LOW LEVEL OF CONTENTMENT. Envy has difficulty invading a contented heart just as covetousness has.

Put off: complaining, discontentment, grumbling. Complaining is public disloyalty to God.

Put on: gratefulness. Grow in gratefulness through the discipline of continual thankfulness. In everything give thanks; for this is the will of God for you in Christ Jesus (I Thes 5:18).

Let’s ask God to search our hearts to put his spotlight on any seeds of envy and preempt it by putting off these attitudes of darkness and putting on the amor of light!

For Further Prayerful Thought:

What new observations about competition, jealousy, and envy stood out to you?
What stands out most to you about the way envy got control of Saul?
We observed four roots of envy: pride, which wants to be exalted, low self-assurance that you are loved, so you need peer acceptance too much, low self- esteem so you must prove yourself, and discontent, which makes you prone to wanting what others have. Which root concerns you most about your own life?

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David and Jonathan’s Extraordinary Bond of Brotherhood

On 09 March, 2025 By Gary Yagel

As I’ve mentioned often on this blog, it is for our wives and children that Christian men are to pour out sacrificial love. We are called to die for them. But this episode is about the masculine longing for someone to die with. As Stu Weber points out, “something inside us longs for someone to die with… someone to die beside…someone to lock step with. Another man with a heart like our own.” David had such a brother. Today, we examine what we can discover about building our own brotherhood bonds from the famous example of David and Jonathan.

The book of 2 Samuel opens with the death of Saul and his son Jonathan in battle. David laments:

Saul and Jonathan, beloved and lovely! In life and in death they were not divided; they were swifter than eagles; they were stronger than lions. You daughters of Israel, weep over Saul, who clothed you luxuriously in scarlet, who put ornaments of gold on your apparel. How the mighty have fallen in the midst of the battle! Jonathan lies slain on your high places. I am distressed for you, my brother Jonathan; very pleasant have you been to me; your love to me was extraordinary, surpassing the love of women. How the mighty have fallen, and the weapons of war perished (vs 23-27)!

Army Ranger Veteran, Stu Weber, ponders the moving words of this lament.

“YOUR LOVE TO ME was more wonderful than the love of a woman.” What words are these? Perverted words? Twisted words? The words of some pathetic sexual deviate? No. A war-hardened veteran penned these words after his best buddy fell in battle. They were written by a warrior, with the piercing grief only a soldier mourning for a comrade-in-arms could begin to understand. David wrote these words after the death of his friend Jonathan on the bloody slopes of Mount Gilboa. What the son of Jesse expressed without shame in that lament was something that has burned deep in the soul of every man in one way or another for generations beyond memory. A desire for friendship, man to man. A desire for friendship with nothing between. A yearning for friendship so real, so strong, so compelling, it is willing to share everything about itself and make deep and powerful promises. Down deep at the core, every man needs a friend. Down deep at the core, every man needs a brother to lock arms with” (Locking Arms).

As many of you know, I have written an entire book, Forging Bonds of Brotherhood, to make the case that God never intended for a man to fight his spiritual battles alone. The OT wisdom literature is clear: Two are better than one, because they have a good reward for their toil. For if they fall, one will lift up his fellow. But woe to him who is alone when he falls and has not another to lift him up! Again, if two lie together, they keep warm, but how can one keep warm alone? And though a man might prevail against one who is alone, two will withstand him—a threefold cord is not quickly broken (Eccl 4:9-12). The way the NT brotherhood functioned was equally clear: Let us consider how to stir up one another to love and good works, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day drawing near (Heb 10:24-25). God has been pleased to use our ministry to help thousands of men build the kind of brotherhood experienced by Jonathan and David. Let’s observe four characteristics of this attractive brotherhood connection:

A. Their Souls Were Knit Together. In 1 Samuel 18:1, after Jonathan witnessed David’s victory over Goliath, Scripture tells us that his soul was “knit together” with David’s. A look back at the fourteenth chapter explains why.

Jonathan said to the young man who carried his armor, “Come, let us go over to the garrison of these uncircumcised. It may be that the Lord will work for us, for nothing can hinder the Lord from saving by many or by few….And the men of the garrison hailed Jonathan and his armor-bearer and said, “Come up to us, and we will show you a thing.” And Jonathan said to his armor-bearer, “Come up after me, for the Lord has given them into the hand of Israel.” Then Jonathan climbed up on his hands and feet, and his armor-bearer after him. And they fell before Jonathan, and his armor-bearer killed them after him. And that first strike, which Jonathan and his armor-bearer made, killed about twenty men. And there was a panic in the camp, in the field, and among all the people. The garrison and even the raiders trembled, the earth quaked, and it became a very great panic.

Notice the similarities between this story of Jonathan’s victory and David’s defeat of Goliath. Like David, Jonathan could not stand the passivity of the Israelite army. Like David, he understood that the battle was the LORD’s, saying to his armor-bearer, “Come, let's go over to the outposts of those uncircumcised fellows. Perhaps the LORD will act in our behalf. Nothing can hinder the LORD from saving, whether by many or by few.” Like David, he courageously faced an overwhelming Philistine force. Like David, he prevailed against enormous odds, killing some twenty men with the help of just his armor-bearer. Like David, his victory caused the entire Philistine army to be routed.

In short, Jonathan and David were kindred spirits, warriors who were jealous for God’s honor, willing to take the battle to his enemies, depending upon his power for victory. They are an inspiring pair of comrades-in-arms, whose earthly battles are an Old Testament picture of the invisible, spiritual battles Christian men fight.

B. Jonathan Loved David as Himself. In Romans 12:10, Paul commands Christians, “Love one another with brotherly affection. Outdo one another in showing honor.” There is no clearer Biblical picture of such love than Prince Jonathan’s love for a shepherd boy named David. In 1 Samuel 18:1 we read that Jonathan loved David as himself. To love someone “as yourself” means to be as committed to meeting his needs as you are to your own. Practically speaking, that means when your brother has a need, you drop what you are doing and go.

Jim and Bill were best friends who enlisted together in World War I. During the long, muddy days of trench warfare, the battle became a stalemate. Every so often, the men would be ordered over the top to move up to the next trench; but in this new era of the machine gun, row upon row would be mowed down. On one particular occasion, Jim and Bill were ordered over the top to advance to the next trench. Enemy fire broke out and Jim fell mortally wounded. Bill worked his way back in retreat to the previous trench with his commanding officer. He could hear Jim out on the battlefield crying, and wanted to go rescue him. But his commanding officer said, “No, don’t risk your life. Didn’t you see where he was hit? He’s a gonner.” But when the C.O. turned away, Bill went out of the trench into the fire to be with his friend, Jim. A little bit later, he returned alone to the trench in a hail of bullets.

The C.O. snapped, “Why did you do that? I told you he wasn’t going to make it. He’s dead, isn’t he?”

Bill said, “Yeah, he is.”

The C.O. replied, “That was the stupidest thing you could have ever done.”

Bill mumbled, “But he was alive when I got there.”

“He was—well what did he say to you?”

Bill answered, “He said, ‘I knew you’d come…I knew you’d come.’”

Back in the text, Jonathan’s love for David went even beyond loving him as himself. Verse four of 1 Samuel 18:4 reads, “Jonathan took off the robe he was wearing and gave it to David, along with his tunic, and even his sword, his bow and his belt.” What a picture of fulfilling Paul’s later admonition, “In humility count others more significant than yourselves.” Jonathan was royalty; David was a peasant and as a shepherd, one of the lowliest at that. Furthermore, there was every reason for Prince Jonathan to see David as a rival and threat, just as his father, Saul, did. After all, Jonathan was not only the crown prince, but a great warrior like David in his own right.

But Jonathan overcame masculine rivalry, stripped himself of the royal robe he wore to put it on David, also giving David his royal sword and bow. The gift of his sword was especially striking, since the Philistines had removed nearly all the swords from Israel so that they could not be used in a revolt. Jonathan was willing to step aside and make way for his friend. Several chapters later, he even says to David, “You will be king over Israel, and I will be next to you” (I Sam. 23:17). Such a radical commitment to honoring the other is behind our ministry’s recommendation that brotherhood meetings over lunch begin with the question, “What encouragements or successes have you had this week?” Celebrating each other’s wins is a strategic way to keep men’s natural competitiveness from hindering brotherly love.

C. Jonathan Formed a Covenant with David. One night, while sleeping-out in the treehouse we had just finished building, my best friend and I took out our pocketknives, slit our fingers, and mingled the blood. We became intentionally committed to each other as blood brothers. Little is known about the nature of Jonathan’s covenant with David, except that David honored it by always welcoming Jonathan’s descendants to his table, when he became king. The one thing we do know, however, is that, as in my friendship with my best friend, Jonathan and David wanted to be intentional about their commitments to each other as friends. This same intentionality, in his commitment to form a closer bond with a few other men, was exhibited by Jesus, who intentionally singled out Peter, James, and John with whom to go deeper than he did with the rest of the disciples. Our ministry has been challenging men to follow the example of Jesus in forming brotherhood connections with a few other brothers.

The covenant with a blood brother or marriage partner, however, does more than single out others for a special, deeper relationship. A covenantal relationship has structure, promises and obligations, an example of which we hear in the vows that make a marriage covenant. A covenant is both organic (i.e. subjective—I choose you) and organizational, (i.e. structured.) With brotherhood connections, this principle means being intentional to go deeper with some men but also implementing the structure of regular meetings for breakfast, lunch, or a zoom call. Even those meetings have both an organic part--small talk to begin and adjustment of the agenda based on a brothers pressing need--and a default of structured questions that get men beneath the superficial into sharing their spiritual battles.

D. Jonathan Had David’s Back. When Saul told Jonathan of his intent to kill David, Jonathan went to David and warned him, “My father Saul is looking for a chance to kill you. Be on your guard tomorrow morning; go into hiding and stay there. I will go out and stand with my father in the field where you are. I’ll speak to him about you and will tell you what I find out.” (I Sam. 19:2-3) Later, he fervently interceded with his father, arguing vehemently on David’s behalf.

Jonathan, like any good soldier, understood the importance of watching his brother’s back. He saw David’s susceptibility to being attacked by his father and acted. In the military, “I’ve got your six” is all about protecting your brother’s back, which is his point of greatest vulnerability. But in spiritual warfare no one can see the attacker stalking a brother. The only way we can have his back is for the brother to have exposed those points of weakness to us, asked for our help in those battles and leaned on us for strength by asking us to hold him accountable.

Years ago, a pastor came to me who was a retired Marine Corps helicopter pilot. He said, “I inherited a church with strong couples’ small groups. But I know men. They do not open up in front of another guy’s wife. In fact, they don’t even open up in front of their own wives. I’ve got a bunch of guys working at the Pentagon. Could you write some questions for them to use over lunch that would get them connected below the surface. I returned with a series of six questions that we call Check 6. Printed on a wallet card, thousands of men have been using them.

Check #1: What encouragements or successes have you had this past week?
Check #2: What Biblical insight or verse from your quiet time has stood out to you recently?
Check #3: What has been the most difficult part of being the spiritual leader at home lately?
Check #4: Personal Accountability: Choose what you want your brother(s) to ask you about next time?
Check #5: Who are the non-believers you are building relationships with and how can I pray for your strategy to share Christ with them?
Check #6: What other spiritual battles can I help you fight through my prayer for you?

Tom Joyce, the men’s pastor at Immanuel Bible church expects every one of his men to meet with at least one other man for prayer, encouragement and accountability. Tom saw the power of accountability—even among unbelievers—while serving as a squadron commander in the US Navy, shortly after the Navy Tailhook scandal took place. This scandal refers to a series of incidents in which U.S. Navy and U. S. Marine Corps aviation officers were alleged to have sexually assaulted numerous female coworkers. Against that backdrop, Tom writes:

The predominant number of guys who got involved in the Tailhook scandal were from the West Coast F14 community. So, I was hand-selected to go to this squadron since the commanding officer and executive officer had both been relieved of their duties because of their involvement in things surrounding Tailhook. As soon as I had the opportunity, because we were going into our first port visit, I got all my guys together—thirty-six officers—in the Ready Room. I said, “I know what the background of this squadron has been. You’ve lost a CO and XO because of that. But things have changed. Here’s what I’m going to do. We’re heading into a port visit tomorrow, and if it comes to my attention that any one of you men has done anything immoral behind your wife, or girlfriend’s back, I’m going to send you home. I don’t care where we are on the deployment, I’m going to send you home and one, you will pay your own way home, and two, you can knock on the door and explain to your wife or girlfriends why you came home.” You could have heard a pin drop in that room. The meeting ended. A young lieutenant came up to me and asked, “Permission to speak frankly, Sir?”

I said, “Sure.”

He said, “You’re an idiot!” I wasn’t expecting that much frankness! He continued, “You can’t dictate your morals on us. You can’t tell us what we can and can’t do on our own free time in port.”

I told him, “Number one: adultery is a violation of the Uniform Military Code of Justice. It’s against the law. Number two: go ahead and push me. You’ll be the first to go.” For the next few weeks, it was difficult. But we got into a combat zone and operations spiked up. Everything got back to normal—just as a fighter squadron should be—a really, really, close-knit group of guys.

We came home six months later, on December 23rd. I led a ten-plane formation over the flight-line of Miramar Naval Air Station with thousands of family members and friends waiting for us to come in. As the CO, I landed first. So, as each pilot took his flight gear off, I went up, shook his hand, and said, “On behalf of a grateful nation, I welcome you back to the United States. Thanks so much for your great work and encouragement to me following my leadership. Now go see your family and Merry Christmas.” But before they walked away every one of these guys—they didn’t want to say it publicly—but nearly every one of these men would shake my hand, grab me close, and say, “Thanks for holding me accountable. Thanks for helping me do the right thing.” Not all of Tom’s flyers believed it at first. But as his officers had headed into port for some R & R, he still had their back. And when they got home to their girlfriends and families, they were glad he did.

In today’s world, every Christian man needs a band of brothers who will help him fight his spiritual battles and have his back. Jonathan was that kind of brother to David. Some have speculated that if Jonathan had not died in battle, David’s affair with Bathsheba would have never happened. Jonathan would have had his friend’s back. He would have been in David’s face about taking more than one wife in the first place and later about staying back at the palace while his troops were out in the field. With Jonathan’s kindred zeal for God’s glory, it is likely that their friendship would have strengthened David, making him less vulnerable to his lust. We’ll never know. But we do know that Jonathan had David’s back. As warriors battling Satan, the world's anti-biblical worldviews, and our sinful nature, we need someone watching our six, just as David did.

What an attractive picture--having a brother with whom you share a deep bond, your souls knit together by a common loyalty to the High King of Heaven, a common passion for his honor, and a common willingness to fight for his cause. I believe that kind of brotherhood is what Jesus modeled with the inner three. Do you have that kind of brotherhood connection?

If you would like help knowing how to better build a brotherhood connection with one or two brothers, you will find great help in my book, Got Your Back, which is available in paperback, Kindle, and Audible versions on Amazon. Also, the Check 6 wallet cards are available in our online bookstore.

For Further Prayerful Thought:

What stood out to you the most about Jonathan and David’s friendship?
What do you think of Stu Weber’s statement, “something inside us longs for someone to die with…someone to die beside…someone to lock step with. Another man with a heart like our own?” Have you ever had a friend like that?
What steps do you need to take to build or to maintain the kind of brotherhood connection David and Jonathan had and Jesus modeled?
What can you do to help the other men in the church get out of isolation and into brotherhood connections in the Body of Christ?

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In the Fight or On the Sidelines?

On 01 March, 2025 By Gary Yagel

A Union officer from Rhode Island named Sullivan Ballou wrote a love- letter to his wife on the eve of the Civil War Battle of Bull Run, a battle he sensed would be his last. He speaks tenderly to her of his undying love, of “the memories of blissful moments I have spent with you.” He grieves the thought that he must give up “the hope of future years, when, God willing, we might have lived and loved together, and seen our sons grown up to honorable manhood around us.” Yet despite his love for her, the battle calls and he cannot turn away from it. “Sarah, my love for you seems to bind me with mighty cables that nothing but Omnipotence could break,” and yet a greater cause “comes over me like a strong wind and bears me irresistibly on with all these chains to the battlefield.”

Sullivan Ballou was killed in battle the next day. God has shaped our masculine hearts to respond to a mission that both involves and transcends even home and family. I believe that John Eldredge is right when he says, “A man must have a cause to which he is devoted even unto death, for this is written into the fabric of his being (Wild at Heart). The adage is true, “If a man doesn’t have a cause to die for, he doesn’t have a cause to live for.” This episode is about the greatest cause in the history of the world—the kingdom of Jesus defeating the kingdom of evil and spreading righteousness over earth.

In Genesis 2:15, God reveals that he placed Adam in the garden to protect the garden and its inhabitants from harm. The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and KEEP it. The Hebrew word for “keep” is SHAMAR which means to protect from harm. As Genesis unfolds, we discover an enemy, Satan, who hates God and his image bearer. He is described by Jesus as a thief “who comes only to steal and kill and destroy.” As C.S. Lewis said, “enemy occupied territory, that is what the world is.” In Ephesians 6 Paul explains that most of our calling to protect our family and the garden (the world) requires us to fight spiritually. For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places (vs 12). This episode challenges us all to rethink whether we are standing on the sidelines or engaged in some spiritual fight against a Goliath that God wants us to fight to spread Christ’s righteous agenda. The subject of our study is David’s defeat of Goliath, which is physical picture that is loaded with truths about spiritual warfare. Let’s dig in. (1 Sam 17 summary.)

A champion named Goliath came out of the Philistine camp. His height was six cubits and a span. Goliath stood and shouted to the ranks of Israel, “Why do you come out and line up for battle? Choose a man and have him come down to me. If he is able to fight and kill me, we will become your subjects; but if I overcome him and kill him, you will become our subjects and serve us. On hearing the Philistine’s words, Saul and all the Israelites were dismayed and terrified.

Three of David's brothers are stationed there so David is sent to them by his father with food. David arrives. As he was talking with them, Goliath, the Philistine champion from Gath, stepped out from his lines and shouted his usual defiance, and David heard it. David asks, ‘Who is this uncircumcised Philistine that he should defy the armies of the living God?’ What David said was overheard and reported to Saul, and Saul sent for him. David said to Saul, ‘Let no one lose heart on account of this Philistine; your servant will go and fight him.’ Saul replied, ‘You are not able to go out against this Philistine and fight him; you are only a young man, and he has been a warrior from his youth.’ But David said to Saul, ‘Your servant has been keeping his father’s sheep. When a lion or a bear came and carried off a sheep from the flock, I went after it, struck it and rescued the sheep from its mouth. Your servant has killed both the lion and the bear; this uncircumcised Philistine will be like one of them, because he has defied the armies of the living God. The Lord who rescued me from the paw of the lion and the paw of the bear will rescue me from the hand of this Philistine.’ Saul said to David, ‘Go, and the Lord be with you.’

Then he took his staff in his hand, chose five smooth stones from the stream, put them in the pouch of his shepherd’s bag and, with his sling in his hand, approached the Philistine…who said to David, ‘Am I a dog, that you come at me with sticks?’ And the Philistine cursed David by his gods. ‘Come here,’ he said, ‘and I’ll give your flesh to the birds and the wild animals!’

David said to the Philistine, ‘You come against me with sword and spear and javelin, but I come against you in the name of the Lord Almighty, the God of the armies of Israel, whom you have defied. This day the Lord will deliver you into my hands, and I’ll strike you down and cut off your head. This very day I will give the carcasses of the Philistine army to the birds and the wild animals, and the whole world will know that there is a God in Israel. All those gathered here will know that it is not by sword or spear that the LORD saves; for the battle is the LORD’s, and he will give all of you into our hands.’ As the Philistine moved closer to attack him, David ran quickly toward the battle line to meet him. Reaching into his bag and taking out a stone, he slung it and struck the Philistine on the forehead. The stone sank into his forehead, and he fell facedown on the ground. Than David cut off his head.

GOLIATH AND WHAT HE REPRESENTS

Goliath’s armament was the best that the highly skilled Philistines could obtain either by manufacturing or by trade. The shield was a large standing shield that covered the whole body. Most of his armament was bronze except his spear’s head of iron—this was just the beginning of the Iron Age. It weighed about 15 lbs. His coat of mail weighed 125 lbs. Six cubits, and a span is about 9 feet 9 inches.

Goliath was:

An enemy against whose strength God’s people felt powerless.
An enemy who defied God’s people to conquer him.
An enemy whose very presence struck fear in the heart of God’s people.
An enemy whose daily defiance of God’s people paralyzed them for they knew their strength was no match for his.

In the battle between the Kingdom of Darkness and Christ’s Kingdom of Righteousness, Goliath represents sinful habits, desires, fears, and doubts that defy our efforts to bring them under the Lordship of Christ in both our own personal lives and in our culture. At the personal level, some years ago, after a men’s retreat that focused on the battle with porn, the weekend closed with the chance for men to share what they had gotten from the weekend. Rising to his feet, Bob spoke through his tears, “I want to confess to you brothers that I need help with my Internet porn problem. I’ve only been married two years. I thought marriage would fix the problem. But it hasn’t.” Slowly, Sam got to his feet and confessed the same struggle. Then Bill. Then Brian offered to lead a group to join together in battle with this Goliath. Your Goliath may be any idol that regularly defies your efforts to control it, not just lust, nicotine, sugar, alcohol or gambling but anger, bitterness, a sharp tongue, lack of discipline, or time-wasting pleasures.

But the Goliath God may want you to fight may not be personal but cultural. Some years ago, a friend of mine named Ellen, was challenged with the question from this text, “What is your Goliath?” Her’s was abortion. She had walked in on an abortion as a Candy Striper. Ellen determined to fight abortion in her area of Gaithersburg, MD. She located two other prolife friends to help her start a pregnancy center. They prayed, built their team, raised their money, and found an ideal location. Ellen had the time to put into this pursuit because she was a nurse who was recently married and had been praying for a daytime position so it would not take her away from her new husband. Plans went forward and Ellen decided to become the volunteer director of the center. But the weekend before Shady Grove Pregnancy Center was to open, a daytime nursing position became available right next to the office building where her husband worked. But she turned it down. Shady Grove Pregnancy Center was born and has been operating at that same location now for over forty years saving lives and leading fathers and mothers with unwanted pregnancies to faith in Jesus. Ellen refused to sit on the sidelines. She got into the fight. Is there a Goliath, personal or cultural that God might be using this episode to call you to fight?

DAVID’S STRATEGY FOR DEFEATING GOLIATH

A. Preparation for the Battle. The skill David used to defeat Goliath was developed through David’s faithfulness in fulfilling the lowly task he was assigned as the youngest brother—caring for the smelly sheep. Not only would that skill be developed by driving predators away from the flock, he developed the courage to go after the lion or bear who had stolen away one of his lambs. In his own words to Saul, When a lion or a bear came and carried off a sheep from the flock, I went after it, struck it and rescued the sheep from its mouth. When it turned on me, I seized it by its hair, struck it and killed it. The Lord who rescued me from the paw of the lion and the paw of the bear will rescue me from the hand of this Philistine. Faithfulness in the mundane tasks assigned to us is preparation for bigger things.

Not only that but David’s preparation for this battle took place when David began putting the Torah to music using his harp (which would later become the Psalms) while out in the fields keeping the sheep. No doubt, one of the lessons he saw in the Torah was the principle that the battle against Israel’s enemies had always been the Lords.

B. Passion for God’s Honor. I believe that what moved David to action is the same force that can propel us to leave the sidelines to take on a Goliath in our sphere—passion for God’s honor, zeal for God’s reputation, such overpowering allegiance to God that nothing matters as much as the name of our God being exalted. Listen to David’s incredulity at the way Israel’s soldiers were allowing their God to be shamed. David asked the men standing near him, “What will be done for the man who kills this Philistine and removes this disgrace from Israel? Who is this uncircumcised Philistine that he should defy the armies of the living God (vs 26)? David saw the powerlessness of Israel’s army to stand up to Goliath. Yet it was Israel who claimed to worship the true God. In those days, the true God was clearly the one who gave his followers victory. David saw that it was the reputation of God, himself, that was at stake in Goliath’s defiance of Israel.

When you love someone, you can’t tolerate his reputation being trashed. In fact, God explicitly teaches us this principle. The first four of the Ten Commandments explain how to love God (the second six, how to love our neighbor.) The third commandment is to respect God’s name. “You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain, for the Lord will not hold him guiltless who takes his name in vain (Ex 20:7). Wanting God’s name to be revered is at the core of loving him and at the core of David asking God to defeat Goliath. In fact, years after David had died, God tells us that he empowered Israel’s evil King Ahab to win a great military victory, for one reason: God’s reputation was at stake. And a man of God came near and said to the king of Israel, “Thus says the Lord, ‘Because the Syrians have said, “The Lord is a god of the hills but he is not a god of the valleys,” therefore I will give all this great multitude into your hand, and you shall know that I am the Lord (1 Kings 20:28).

Jesus appeals to this devotion to God’s honor as motivation to defeat evil and bear the fruit of righteousness when he says. By this is my father GLORIFIED, that you bear much fruit and so prove to be my disciples. Similarly, the very starting point for praying as Jesus taught us to pray is passion for the honor of God’s name. “Our father in heaven, may your name be hallowed, may your kingdom come and your (moral, preceptive) will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” The song of those captured by heart-driven allegiance to the King of Kings and Lord of Lords is Oh, magnify the Lord with me, and let us exalt his name together (Ps 34:3)!

C. Trust in God for the Power to Win. What is surprising in this story may not be David’s faith but Saul and his army’s lack of faith. From the beginning of Israel’s history and throughout, God had over and over and over again shown Israel that victory came not by the might of Israel’s army but from the Lord.

It was God who changed Pharoh’s heart so he would let them leave Egypt.
It was God who dried a path through the Red Sea, & drowned the Egyptian Army
It was God who made the walls of Jericho fall.
It was God who gave Deborah and Barak victory over Canaanite King Jabin.
It was God who gave Samson victory over the Philistines despite his major character flaws.
It was God who told Gideon to cut his army from 32,000 to 300 saying “The people with you are too many for me to give the Midianites into their hand lest Israel boast over me saying ‘My own hand has saved me’” (Judges 7:2). God then gave Gideon’s army of 300 victory over an army of 5000.

If there was anything that any Israelite should know about warfare—it was that the battle is the LORD’s. Yet, there stood Saul and his men on the sidelines, feeling powerless, afraid, disheartened before Goliath because all they thought about was their own strength. Are there any Goliaths in your world that God might want you to fight that are intimidating you?

D. Use of Intelligence to Fight. Faith does not mean jettisoning reason.

David detected that the one place Goliath was vulnerable was his face.
While others saw Goliath’s size as too big to defeat, David saw his massive face as too big to miss!
Goliath’s reach meant he had to be attacked from a distance.
Although he knew he had the skill to hit Goliath in the face, David knew he could miss and might need to fire again. So, he took five stones.
David knew that smooth stones would least alter the direction of his hurl.
He knew that wearing Saul’s armor would hinder his sprint towards Goliath to increase the velocity of the stone as he hurled it so it penetrated his head.

Attacking your Goliath takes every bit of cunning, wisdom and intelligence that you can muster. The horse is made ready for the day of battle, but the victory belongs to the Lord (Prv 21:31). The fight to defeat lust, for example, requires being smart.

Anticipate the outer conditions when lust is most likely to strike.

--You are alone with the opportunity to pursue illicit sexual pleasure.

--You are out of town with the opportunity to pursue illicit sexual pleasure.

--You can’t sleep.

--You are in a physical location associated with past sexual pleasure.

Anticipate internal conditions when lust strikes (boredom, loneliness, depression, discouragement, anger towards wife.)
Remember sin thrives in the dark. To defeat it requires accountability.

E. Marshalling the Courage to Act. David stepped onto the battlefield. In the greater Richmond area, a friend of mine, named Bob, met a Christian woman (I will call Cindy), whose Goliath was the filthy, explicit, sexual content in the children’s section of the regional library. Though Bob had many other things to do, he left the sidelines to get into the fight against this evil Goliath. An opportunity arose to gain control of the Board of Trustees, which by a 5-4 margin had supported such explicit content and the American Library Association promoting it. One of the five was up for a second term. Cindy asked Bob to run for that open seat. He met with every other board member and secured the endorsement of another high-ranking official, all the while Bob and Cindy bathing what they did in prayer. When the vote came, the board member who favored the explicit material lost what had always been a certain election by former board members to a second term. Bob was elected, instead. Since then, the library board majority members have endured public assaults on their character and a fight with the director who was promoting the filth, finally getting him to resign. The majority is currently not only putting controls on the explicit sexual content that is available to children but working to change the structure to ensure that the content decisions are not determined by the American Library Association but by the local parents. Goliath was defeated, but the battle to prevent the rise of another Goliath continues, which leads to the final strategy that David was forced to employ.

F. Celebrating the Win but Expecting Continued Fighting. David won one of the best-known battles in the entire world. It was a great victory for Israel and for the reputation of the LORD. It launched David into prominence, building support for God’s calling upon him to be Israel’s king. But the story is incomplete without mentioning another part. King Saul became insanely jealous of David because of his victory over Goliath. If David was fifteen when he killed Goliath, David spent the next fifteen years fleeing from his king who was trying to kill him. Perhaps the NFL has it right when it comes to “today’s victory.” They celebrate it tonight and maybe tomorrow but then get right back to preparing for the next gridiron battle.

The need to head back into the fight need not discourage us. Men are created to be warriors. That is our calling. But our disheartening defeats send us to the sidelines. One such man admitted to his friend. “I’d love to be William Wallace in Braveheart, leading the charge with a big sword in my hand. But I feel like the guy in the fourth row with a hoe.” Perhaps that describes you. But consider the friend’s response, (which is as biblical as it can get).

"That’s a lie of the Enemy—that your place is really insignificant, that you aren’t really armed for it anyway. In your life, you are William Wallace—who else could be? There is no other man who can replace you in your life, in the arena you’ve been called to. If you leave your place in the line, it will remain empty. No one else can be who you are meant to be. YOU are the hero in your story. Not a bit player, not an extra, but the main man."(Eldredge, Wild at Heart).

For Further Prayerful Thought:

Do you think ther are some sins in Christian men’s lives that they have been so overpowered by that they give up fighting? What might they be? How can this story of David and Goliath give them faith to step onto the battlefield?
Do you think there are cultural battles that many men believe reflect such spiritual power from the kingdom of darkness that they are reluctant to launch intentional fights against them?
Which of the six principles exhibited in David’s defeat of Goliath stood out most to you?

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Bad Ideas Make Our Kids Victims

On 23 February, 2025 By Gary Yagel

A mom and dad whose daughter was away at college received this letter from her:

“Dear Mom and Dad,

I just thought I’d drop you a note to clue you in on my plans. I’ve fallen in love with a guy named Jim. He quit high school after grade eleven to get married. About a year ago he got a divorce. We’ve been together for two months and plan to get married in the fall. Until then I’ve decided to move into his apartment, (I think I might be pregnant). At any rate, I dropped out of school last week although I’d like to finish college sometime in the future.”

On the next page she continued: “Mom and Dad, I just want you to know that everything I’ve written so far in this letter is false. NONE it is true. But Mom and Dad, it IS true that I got a C- in French and flunked Math….it is true that I am going to need some more money.”

Pretty smart girl. She knew that even bad news can sound like good news if it is seen from a certain vantage point. She could shape her parent’s attitude towards her minor failure by shaping their perspective; at least she didn’t screw up big time! One of the great truths of life is that one’s mental perspective is what determines one’s attitude. Eve believed the lie that God’s command not to eat the fruit was selfish and that God was keeping something to be desired—the knowledge of good and evil—from her. That perspective led to the attitude of rebellion which led to the action of sin. This episode seeks to better understand how wrong thinking leads to wrong attitudes, which is why we need to protect the rising generation from the destructive ideas invading their lives.

Let’s dwell a bit more on the life-reality that our attitudes are determined by our perspective. Suppose you are at a busy street corner in Manhattan. The “walk” light turns green, you step off the curb, and someone grabs you from behind yanking you back, causing you to lose your balance and fall to the sidewalk ripping the knee of your suit pants. You will be angry at the guy who grabbed you, but only until you notice a car that had run a red light fly right over the spot where you were standing. Then your anger will turn to extreme gratefulness. You have the same bruised knee and torn suit pants—but the opposite attitude. Perspective—the way we view life—has an enormous impact on the way we live. We observe this truth in Jesus’ portrait of kingdom living, the Sermon on the Mount. He begins with four kingdom attitudes. Notice how each one depends upon the right perspective.

RIGHT ATTITUDES RESULT FROM RIGHT PERSPECTIVES

A. Blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. The correct view of YOURSELF. I am utterly destitute when it comes to righteousness.

I cannot earn salvation. Attitude: gratefulness, indebtedness to God.
I cannot serve Jesus in my own strength—in weakness his power is shown the more completely. Attitude: humility, dependency.
My brokenness means I must be open to reproof. Attitude: teachability.
I cannot be unforgiving. I cannot demand that others never hurt me by their sin when I, myself am so sinful. Attitude: forgiveness, patience.

B. Blessed are those who mourn for they shall be comforted. The correct view of SIN.

Seeing our sin against God as a personal afront to him which demands profound repentance and sorrow. Attitude: grieving over sin.
Knowing the wage of sin is always death and destruction. Attitude: mercy, and grace towards others who sin.
Recognition that those who promote evil values and lifestyles in our culture are not the enemy but held captive by the enemy, sin. Attitude: love for ideological enemies.
Realizing that we do not so much break the law as the law breaks us. Attitude: compassion for those broken by their sin.
Knowing that God is not mocked, for whatever one sows, that will he also reap. Attitude: the fear of the Lord, hating sin.

C. Blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the earth. Correct view of YOUR RIGHTS.

Knowing we have been purchased by the precious blood of Jesus we do not belong to ourselves but Jesus. Attitude: trust in God’s character, loyalty
Having transferred ownership of ourselves to God and knowing he takes good care of what belongs to him. Attitude: Inner peace, generosity.
Knowing I was put on earth for God’s glory. Attitude: meekness, endurance.
Seeing time as an earthly trust from God, which invested wisely will produce eternal treasures. Attitude: faithfulness, stewardship.

D. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness for they shall be satisfied. Correct view of the relationship between THE MORAL LAW and LIFE.

Knowing that obedience is God's love language (If you love me keep my commandments) we hunger to obey what is right. Attitude: love for God, allegiance.
Knowing as followers of Jesus that the discipleship call to “be careful to do all that I have commanded you.” cause us to hunger and thirst to do what is right. Attitude: obedience, thoroughness.
Remembering that God gave us the Law as the path to life, we humger to know that path. Attitude: love for God’s Word.
Knowing that sin broke creation and Christ has come to restore it caues us to hungering for that restoration. Christians have a vital role in God’s creation to retard the decay of evil as salt and to reveal evil by shining the light of truth. Attitude: resisting apathy, engaging culture.

Ideas have consequences. Bad ideas have victims. That is why the third function of successful spiritual leadership in the home (which we’ve been studying)—EQUIP—requires us to teach our teens to identify the culture’s worldviews, analyze them through the lens of Scripture and winsomely oppose their influence. That is why in Romans 12:2, after Paul says that the right response to the gospel is to offer ourselves to God, the next command he gives is. Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind. Let’s consider three key words in this command, conformed, this world, and transformed.

DO NOT BE CONFORMED

A. This Greek word, SUSSCHEMATIZO, means to shape or fashion one thing according to another. It suggests being shaped from the outside in. Its focus is on the human inclination to want to fit in. Phillips translates this concept in Romans 12:2, “Don’t let the world around you squeeze you into its own mold.” Let’s consider how a teen girl named Grace was squeezed into the world’s mold.

As a 12-year-old, Grace began posting her artwork, along with her friends on the website called DeviantArt. She noticed the Gay is good message, which started to seep into her thinking. She heard the word, transgender for the first time and asked her mom what that was. Her mom did have a willingness to say, “We Christians don’t agree with that.” But she did not take time to explain the folly of the transgender worldview. Grace had the courage to post to her Facebook page, God created people male and female. But the response of her LGBTQ friends was not to shun or reject her but to put their arms around her and invite her to their GSA (Gender & Sexuality Alliance club). The key theme of this group of 12-13-year- old girls was feeling uncomfortable in their bodies as they started through puberty. Through the guidance of online “trans coaches” Grace decided one Saturday to send a text to her parents: “Mom and Dad, I’m not actually a girl. My pronouns are they and them. I am coming out today as transgender.”

Being conformed to the destructive idea that you decide your gender and not your anatomy has taken place among thousands of girls. And this is just one of the lies capturing the minds of children in our church and culture. Why does this kind of thing happen to Christian kids? Their parents are naïve about how anti-biblical worldviews are capturing the hearts of rising teenagers and they fail to grasp the truth that the spiritual battle that rages around them is the battle of IDEAS. For the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh but have divine power to destroy strongholds. We destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God, and take every thought captive to obey Christ (2 Cor 1-3-5).

(DON’T BE CONFORMED) TO THIS WORLD

The Greek word translated “world” is significant. It is not COSMOS meaning the physical earth but AION which means this age. It is Paul’s way of describing the current cultural values that are seeking to squeeze our loved ones into their mold. It is our job to stop this process both as our family’s protectors and because God assigns us the same task, which he assigned Abraham: that he may command his children and his household after him to keep the way of the Lord by doing righteousness and justice (Gen 18:19).

Most of the destructive anti-biblical world views of our culture can be identified by the word suffix ism. This suffix transforms a word into a worldview in which that word reveals the highest value. For example, the word, secular is a good word, which describes the non-spiritual sphere of life. Secularism is a worldview that makes ultimate the secular sphere of life over any spiritual part of life. These ism’s catch our attention because the very first commandment, You shall have no other God’s before me tells us that nothing is to have more ultimate significance than God himself. But since humans are created to be worshippers, when sinful man refuses to submit to God’s authority, he will fill that need for something to be ultimate with a person, statue, false religion, or false ideology.

BE TRANSFORMED BY THE RENEWAL OF YOUR MIND

Scripture makes clear that our race’s fall corrupted our thought process. There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way to death (Prov 14:12). Let's examine some current ideologies and put a Biblical lens over them.

Ideologies in Our Culture with Biblical Response

Humanism: The elevation of the welfare of humans and opinions of humans to the highest level of importance in disregard of God. The biblical view is that the value of a human is rooted in his identity as an image-bearer of God accountable to him.

Naturalism: The elevation of this physical world of nature and its study, science, to the ultimate place of arbiter of truth. Scripture highly values this material world as a mirror of his glory and because God commands us to develop its potential. Science, by definition, deals only with the material and not the supernatural. So it is unqualified to answer the question of the existence of the spiritual. But science is the discovery of the order of creation, which points to an orderer who is outside of creation and the behavioral sciences point to aspects of human experiences such as beauty and love, which can't be explained by the argument that the material order is all that exists.

Moral Relativism: The belief that truth, morality, and other values are relative to a person's perspective or culture, and thar absolute truth does not exist. An example is the argument that same-sex attraction and homosexual sex are not wrong but reflect cultures that misunderstood it. The biblical view is that truth is objective, that objective holiness exists in the nature of God, and that the objective law of God is written on the hearts of all men. However, humans suppress that truth because sin has polluted their entire being, including their sexuality.

Subjectivism: A philosophical view that holds that reality is shaped by our perceptions, beliefs, and feelings. If you believe Budha saves you, that is true for you. If you believe you are a boy in a girl’s body that is true for you. The biblical view is that truth is objective. True truth is rooted in the unchanging nature of God. The natural world is an objective expression of his unchanging attributes.

Pragmatism: What is of ultimate importance and highest value is getting results. Technically, truth is measured by results. “Pragmatic” is sometimes confused with practical application of truth, which Scripture highly affirms. But Scripture collides head on with pragmatism. How we get a result, whether righteously or unrighteously matters. The ends do NOT justify the means.

Egalitarianism: Equal treatment is elevated to the highest value in disregard of the biological differences between men and women, the importance of teaching obedience to children at home, and the need for structural accountability in society. The biblical view is that men and women, adults and children, leaders and followers have equal worth as those made in God’s image. The impulse to rebel against God’s structure of authority began in the heart of Lucifer the first egalitarian. He said, ‘I will ascend to heaven, above the stars of God. I will set my throne on high; I will sit on the mount of assembly… I will ascend above the heights of the clouds; I will make myself like the Most High’ (Is 14:13-14)

Cultural Marxism AKA Critical Theory: What It Teaches

Summary: Critical Theory is a way that some in our culture try to explain and confront power structures. To understand Critical Theory, we need to understand its two primary claims. 1) First, everyone can be divided into two groups—those who have power—and those who don’t. 2) Those who have power always OPPRESS those who don’t. How do we know who the oppressed and who the oppressors are? According to Critical Theory the categories of oppressed and oppressor are based on your group identity. Membership in categories of race, gender, religion, immigration status, income, sexual orientation, and gender identity determine whether we are oppressed or one of the oppressors.

Historical Roots: It traces back to Karl Marx’s view of history as class conflict and parallels his view of animosity between the oppressed proletariat (workers) and the oppressor bourgeoisie the (business owners). He defined capitalism as the exploitation of the masses and predicted that the workers in the industrialized nations would revolt and overthrow the capitalist establishment. Marx died in 1888. Though his ideology led eventually to the bloody Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 in Russia and execution of millions of landowners by Mao Zedong in the 1950’s, this revolution never took place in the industrialized west. Why not?

The answer was supplied later by one of Marx’s followers, Antonio Gramsci, cultural hegemony. The word hegemony is normally used of nations that exert dominance, authority, or influence over other nations. But Gramsci applied this term, hegemony, to the capitalist establishment who, he argued, unjustly gained cultural power and dominance, (not just economic dominance as Marx argued) and has victimized everyone else. Gramsci defined cultural hegemony from Marx’s class warfare perspective, as: Domination or rule maintained through ideological or cultural means. It is usually achieved through social institutions, which allow those in power to strongly influence the values, norms, ideas, expectations, worldview, and behavior of the rest of society (Voddie Bauchem, Lecture: Cultural Marxism). The oppressed worker that Marx predicted would revolt against capitalism didn’t, because that worker was also oppressed by cultural hegemony.

Have you ever wondered why women, who outnumber males in the world, are considered a minority? Because women are not seen as part of the cultural hegemony. The cultural hegemony in US culture is based on unjust patriarchy. So, the cultural hegemony in our society is white, male, heterosexual, cisgender, able-bodied, non-poor, and born in the USA. EVERYONE who IS that is part of the PRIVILEGED OPPRESSIVE CLASS and corresponds to Marx’s hated bourgeoisie. Everybody who IS NOT that (which corresponds to Marx’s proletariat) is a victim of the cultural hegemony (including, especially racism) established by THE PRIVILEGED CLASS, and ought to be at war with the privileged class.

Biblical Lens. Scripture DOES validate the INTENT of Christians who support CRT, though not CRT’s ideology. Here is why it is anti-biblical:

Critical Theory offers a wrong view of human personhood. It argues that our identity is rooted in categories like race, gender, income, economic status--all features that differ from one another and become the basis for hostility towards one another as oppressors or those who are victims of such oppressors. Scripture bases human identity upon all being made in God’s image. CT deliberately fuels class warfare and reverse racism. The Bible says, "love your neighbor as yourself."
Critical Theory teaches a wrong view of oppression. Oppression is not the result of being born into privilege. Nowhere does the Bible teach the Marxist class division and warfare making white, male, heterosexual, cisgender, non-poor, able-bodied, natively born, by definition, oppressors. Jesus was a white, male, heterosexual, cisgender, able-bodied Jew. I guess this makes Jesus an oppressor. Oppression is using whatever power you have to harm another. The Bible teaches that every race oppresses others. Oppression comes from human, sinful nature. Now the works of the flesh are evident: … enmity, strife, jealousy, fits of anger, rivalries, dissensions, divisions, envy (Gal 5:20-21).
Critical theory teaches a foolish view of truth. The degree to which you are oppressed gives you the moral authority to make truth claims. This is silly. No one lives this way. If you have a stomachache, you don’t find someone from the most oppressed group to find out what is wrong; you go to the doctor. Such folly is from the world of academia, which is disconnected from reality.
The CT definition of oppression turns the loving action of being truthful with someone on its head. Critical Theory advocates see practices like discipleship, leadership, correction, and reproof as sinful assertions of power if the speaker’s identity group is among the oppressors.

The impact of cultural Marxism upon the rising generation of Christians is enormous. Just this past week one of the national leaders of my denomination, the PCA, publicly repented of allowing lawlessness to have been encouraged on our website for ministry to immigrants. Why did this happen? Could it be the result of the influence of Cultural Marxism, which sees immigrants as the victims and ICE as the oppressors?

For Further Prayerful Thought:

What examples most stood out to you about the way our mental perspective determines our attitude?
Of the eight ideologies identified and evaluated through a biblical lens, which ones do you see most clearly in the culture? Which ones do you think are most deceiving teenagers?
What are the evil parallels between Marxism and cultural Marxism? Why do you think that otherwise mature Christians who are calling the church back to a concern for social justice are falling into some of its evil tenets?

Resources

A Practical Guide to Culture, Stonestreet and Kunkle
The Secular Creed, Rebecca McLaughlin
Five Lies of Our Anti Christian Age, Rosaria Butterfield
Mamma Bear Apologetics, Hillary Ferrer

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Developing Champions

On 16 February, 2025 By Gary Yagel

This episode addresses an aspect of stewardship that you may have never thought about, at least I didn’t until this week. Stewards are those entrusted with great resources. The parable of the Ten Talents teaches us that we are to cause a treasure entrusted to us to be developed and utilized for the kingdom. Scripture tells us that preachers are stewards of the mysteries of God, every Christian is a steward of the gifts of grace given him, and overseers are stewards of every lamb entrusted to their care. In a parallel sense, I believe that fathers are assigned the stewardship responsibility by God of developing the potential of our children. They are precious treasures entrusted to us. But like gold that needs to be refined, or rough diamonds that need to be cut and polished, they need us to develop the full potential that God built into them.

When we consider God’s call to the first man in Genesis 2:15, we recall that Adam was put into the garden to cultivate it, i.e. to develop the potential of the garden and its inhabitants. Developing that potential is a man’s calling as a husband, father, and in broader society, a worker in his vocation. This episode answers the question, “What do dads need to do to develop their child’s potential, i.e. to be faithful stewards of this treasure entrusted to us, not just because we love them, but because God has important contributions for them to make to his world.”

Being a “steward” of our children’s potential is another way of calling attention to the third function of spiritual leadership in the home, which we’ve been studying—EQUIP and EMPOWER. We’ve seen that the first leadership function is to stay focused on the goal of growing in Christ, so that we lead from our lives. We then examined the second function of leadership, which is building our relationship with our followers. Leaders gain the influence they need by winning the hearts of their followers through intentionally serving them and caring for their needs.

At present we are in a study of the third function of leadership, one that is often neglected by Christian fathers, equipping and empowering them with what they need to move down the path of spiritual maturity. Feb 2nd, we examined how to use the ultimate equipping tool—the Word of God. Today, we want to examine three additional practical ways to equip and empower our kids and grandkids to keep walking down the discipleship path following Jesus. When we consider this often-neglected function of fatherhood, it is mind-boggling to realize that we spend hundreds of thousands of dollars putting our kids through college to equip them to reach their potential vocationally but in most cases give little thought to how to equip and empower them spiritually.

THREE WAYS TO EMPOWER OUR KIDS FOR SPIRITUAL SUCCESS

A. Help them discover and celebrate their unique God-given design. After working with teens for over twenty years at his Christian sports camp for teens, Joe White came to a powerful conclusion—every tragic teen problem has a common root: low self-esteem. Research shows what they are up against:

Parents give 10 negative comments to every positive one
Schools give 18 negative statements to every positive one.
By the time kids graduate they’ve heard 15,000 negative statements
When kids enter 5th grade, 80% of them feel good about themselves but when they leave, just 10% feel good about themselves.

The answer is not, everybody gets a trophy or failing kids get a passing grade. The starting point is to help them know they have been shaped perfectly by God for their mission. The. Psalmist sang,

For you formed my inward parts; you knitted me together in my mother's womb. I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made…I was being made in secret, intricately woven in the depths of the earth. Your eyes saw my unformed substance; in your book were written, every one of them, the days that were formed for me, when as yet there was none of them (Ps 139:13-16).

Notice the connection between the weaving together of the child and the days that were written for him. He has been perfectly designed FOR what he will be doing each day. Paul captures this thought when he explains that although good works don’t earn our salvation, they are what we were saved FOR. He writes,

For by grace, you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast. For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them (Eph 2:8-10). Each of our children has been perfectly designed to accomplish the good works that God prepared beforehand that he should accomplish.

Shaping our child’s self-image by repeatedly reminding him of these truths is foundational, but it only goes so far. What is much more powerful is for our child to see his unique giftedness. Here are some practical ways to do this. First help him discover which of the seven spiritual gifts given in Romans 12:6-8 best match him. All Christians are commanded to discover and use their spiritual gifts.

Spiritual Gifts of Romans 12

1. PROPHET: (PROPHETES) which means “to speak forth openly.” He was the mouthpiece of God, prosecuting his covenant lawsuit against his people for their sin. The OT prophet often supernaturally predicted the future consequences of Israel’s sin. The NT prophet also warns of the consequences of sin but he uses God’s written Word. He is God’s oncologist, identifying evil and cutting through rationalizations to remove the cancer of sin, calling for repentance. Peter seems to have had this gift. Some sample characteristics are:

Quick to detect and point out sin.
Tendency to be blunt.
Set and demand a high standard of moral behavior by believers.
Very convictional and will not compromise when they believe they are right.

2. SERVER (DIAKONIA). This is the inward motivation to express Christ’s love by meeting practical needs. People with this gift love the touch of the physical—they like mowers, mops, wrenches, saws, drills, pots, pans, soundboards and computers. Some sample characteristics are:

Having radar that sees practical needs with a motivation to immediately meet them to assist others.
Finding joy in taking care of practical needs to free up those they love to do other things.
Very happy being in the background, which they prefer but do need to feel appreciated.

3. TEACHER (DIDASKALOS) Just as Microsoft Office’s Word has spell check, those with this gift are the doctrine check for the church. In fact, the root meaning of DIDASKALOS is doctrine. This person is not so much one who loves teaching (as perhaps a schoolteacher) as one who loves to do detailed research, like a PhD professor. The DIDASKALOS’ focus is always on the accuracy of what is being taught. Dr. Luke seems to have had this gift. He introduces his gospel with the words: Just as those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and ministers of the word have delivered them to us, it seemed good to me also, having followed all things closely for some time past, to write an orderly account for you…. THAT YOU MAY HAVE CERTAINTY concerning the things you have been taught. Some sample characteristics are:

Their teaching is often so detailed that it is boring.
They care about the details of the context of a verse and the related doctrines that are guardrails for the text’s correct interpretation.
Unlike exhorters, they are typically not good at applying Scripture

4. EXHORTATION (PARAKLESIS) from PARA along side + KALEW to call to the side. The exhorter is given by God to the church to help believers apply Scripture to everyday life. It is noteworthy that this spiritual gift is the same word used to describe the Holy Spirit (PARAKLETE) whose role in the plan of salvation (planned by the Father and carried out by the Son) is to apply the work of salvation. Some sample characteristics are:

Have an innate ability to apply Scripture to life.
Focused on helping others build Christ-like character.
Love the book of Proverbs, the Sermon on the Mount, and the book of James for their practical wisdom to make everyday life work as God intends.
Focused on helping the church get its members discipling one another.

5. GIVING (THE ONE WHO CONTRIBUTES) Those with this gift play a vital role in God’s plan to finance the work of ministry. That plan is: 1) Christians who tithe, 2) emergency, crisis-giving such as we see in Acts 2 to care for new converts who had come to faith on the Day of Pentecost, but were outstaying their money supply to hear the Apostle’s further teaching, 3) those in the Body of Christ with the gift of giving contributing financially as a primary spiritual motivation. Matthew may have had this spiritual gift. Those who have it are very conscious of the resources required to finance a call from God. Matthew was the only gospel writer who mentioned the treasures brought by the Magi, described Mary’s ointment as very precious, and Joseph’s tomb as new. Some sample characteristics are:

Usually, have the ability to earn above average income.
Personally frugal to free funds for kingdom work but generous to others.
Resist pressure appeals for funds. Give quietly to kingdom projects.
Often, very interested in overseas mission work.

6.LEADERSHIP (PROISTEMI) to stand before. This is the God-given ability to enlist a group of people to help accomplish a task that honors Christ. This is not the same as administration—it is the ability to influence others to come with you in your pursuit of kingdom objectives. Some sample characteristics are:

Goal focused.
Have the ability to win a following and build a motivated team captured by a vision that matters to them.
See clearly the talent and resources needed to reach the goal.
Accurately evaluate how their team members’ strengths do or do NOT match their personnel needs and are committed to getting the right people in place, and removing the wrong ones.

7. MERCY SHOWER (ELEO) to feel sympathy for the misery of others. It has been suggested that the mercy shower is mentioned after everyone else in the Body has done their ministry, because the mercy shower binds up the wounds of those hurt in the process. God gives his heart of mercy to some in the Body of Christ for the purpose of sensing those who are in emotional turmoil to gently, tenderly bind up their wounds. John, known as the Apostle of Love, and the disciple Jesus loved, appears to be a mercy shower. Some sample characteristics are:

Primary motivation is to care for others, not reach a program objective.
In his view, oneness, fellowship, and love ARE the objective.
Keeps calling the church to ministries of mercy to the poor, oppressed, suffering, and disenfranchised.
Thinks, relationally, about everything. Caring for each other trumps all.

Why not print out these seven gifts and read them to your children asking them which gift they think they match best?

Helping your children see how they match one or two of these descriptions is beneficial both for you to understand them and for them to understand themselves. Another lens through which we can help our children value their gifting is Gary Chapman’s book, The Five Love Languages. Chapman identifies five biblical ways of showing love to one another and speculates that each of us tends to lean towards one of those ways to both give love and feel the love of others. I remember sitting at breakfast with my kids and asking them, “Which of these do you think would make you feel most loved? Giving you: words of encouragement, a big hug, quality time together, help with something hard they had to do, or a nice gift?” My son Brian shot up his hand and asked, “How big is the gift?” I knew what he was thinking. “That new Nintendo 64 would make me feel very loved!” I wrote down all their responses and have used them over the years to understand and love them.

Two additional categories of tools can help equip our kids with confidence that they are perfectly, uniquely designed for their mission. First, surveys that help link their interests to specific vocational pursuits. We found the YES--Youth Exploration Survey very helpful for guiding our kids, vocationally. The second category is temperament surveys like DiSC and Myers Briggs. One year, on our family vacation, my son and daughter-in-law got us all to take the online Myers Briggs survey. It reminded us that this son and wife are INTROVERTS, which is why they wanted us all to take the online survey since introverts need time alone, disengaged from people to emotionally replenish. God made us all differently and the non-introverts in the family now realize their need to disengage from the family.

B. Invest in your one-on-one relationship with each child. In Paul’s first letter to the church at Thessalonica, he was defending himself against the charge that he did not care about them. His response was to remind them of his treatment of them when he had been with them. For you know how, like a father with his children, we exhorted each one of you and encouraged you and charged you to walk in a manner worthy of God, who calls you into his own kingdom and glory. (I Thes 2:11-12) What a great picture of the multifaceted benefit of investing in our personal relationship with each child. Notice three different ways that fathers use words to individually motivate their children.

I exhorted each of you. This Greek word is a combination of PARA which means beside and KALEO, which means to call. It refers to one-on-one support, another beside you to give direction, encouragement, and motivation. In fact, the root of the English word, “exhort” is incite, which means to move to action, to stir up, to spur on.
I encouraged each of you. This Greek word is a combination of PARA, beside or near, and MUTHIA speech. It is often translated console or comfort. It refers to more intimate words spoken with tenderness because the one hearing them is vulnerable or in pain. These are words like “I know it hurts; but you’ll get through this,” “If anybody can get through this it is you,” “I know its crushing; but God won’t let go of your hand as He walks with you through this.”
I charged you to walk in a manner worthy of God, who calls you into his own kingdom and glory. This is the same Greek word as bearing witness. It seems to mean appealing to the gravity of a situation. The English word "charge" means literally to put under a load. A verbal charge appeals to the weightiness of a situation, its solemnity and significance.

All three of these categories of fatherly words suggest a one-on-one conversation. We get one-one-one opportunities through intentionality, either putting them on the calendar or utilizing opportunities that are already there. Before my kids got busy with high school activities, I took a different one out to breakfast on my day off. There are millions of ways to get one-on-one time. One of my sons and I would ride our bikes up to the center of town for a coke. But along the way we would stop and rotate reading pages from a book in the My Magic Treehouse series. I wanted to equip him to read a little better, and knowing how active he was by nature this was my approach. So, the second way to equip our kids is to invest in one-on-one time.

C. Empower them for spiritual success by supplying them with spiritual power. As we know, their spiritual journey following King Jesus is opposed by three evil forces—their sinful nature that seeks to overpower them, the fallen world that seeks to entice their hearts away from Jesus, and Satan who lies to them.

When it comes to us empowering them for this journey, it is valuable to remember that even Jesus did not have enough personal influence to take his followers down the path to spiritual maturity—without praying for them. Jesus unveiled this truth, when he said, Simon, Simon, behold, Satan demanded to have you, that he might sift you like wheat, but I have prayed for you that your faith may not fail. And when you have turned again, strengthen your brothers. Our kids need not only to be equipped for their growth as disciples of Jesus but EMPOWERED, which is why Paul urged us to see what Jesus saw. We do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places. Therefore…..be praying at all times in the Spirit, with all prayer and supplication. To that end, keep alert with all perseverance, making supplication for all the saints.

James makes the same appeal pointing to one of the mightiest defeats of evil in the entire OT—Elijah’s obliteration of Baal worship. James says, The prayer of a righteous person has great power as it is working. Elijah was a man with a nature like ours, and he prayed fervently that it might not rain, and for three years and six months it did not rain on the earth. Then he prayed again, and heaven gave rain, and the earth bore its fruit. Do you ever feel helpless in steering your children or grandchildren down the path towards surrender to Jesus? We are not. Praise God we can pour out our love for each child, child’s spouse, and each grandchild by praying for them, which has great power. James uses two words to describe the might of prayer because one is not enough. The adjective is strong. This is strong power. The word for power is ENERGES, from which we get energy. Prayer gives to our loved ones the spiritual energy they need for their battles. But THEY will not receive it if WE don’t ask God to give it to them. You have not, because you ask not (James 4:2).

For Further Prayerful Thought:

As you read through the descriptions of the seven spiritual gifts in Romans 12, were there some people who seemed to match some of the gifts? How might understanding these gifts help Christians and family members better get along?
Do you agree that one-one-one time is indispensable for building a father/child or father/grandchild relationship? Which category of words do you need to use more—words that incite action, tenderly console, or give a sober challenge?
When God makes such staggering promises about the power of prayer, why don’t we practice if more to give our loved ones more spiritual energy to follow Jesus? If you are wondering what to pray for, here are some of Paul’s prayers (Ephesians 3:14-19, Philippians 1:9-11, Colossians 1:9-11).

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A Valentine’s Day Tool to Enrich Marriage Intimacy

On 08 February, 2025 By Gary Yagel

This week in preparation for Valentine’s Day coming up this Friday, I decided to interrupt our series on Effective Spiritual Leadership at Home to post a special Pre-Valentine's Day episode that we produced in 2021 to examine a huge cause of marriage failure that sneaks up on many men, even Christian men, who never see it coming.

A careful examination of what divorcees say was missing in their marriages reveals time and again that what was lost was the closeness that we call intimacy. Of course, there are many factors that contribute to the loss of closeness, but here is a primary one. During the dating and engagement phases of a relationship, sharing hearts and lives is easy. Feeling close is effortless. So, we enter marriage expecting intimacy to just happen, especially with the additional benefit of living together and having regular sex. But it doesn’t just happen. The intimacy required for successful marriage happens because a couple devotes themselves to pursuing that intimacy in their relationship. This episode looks into Scripture for the wisdom to know how to do that.

Our topic today is God’s design of marriage. I know that this topic does not leave the single guys out because I, myself did not marry until I was 31—but in my single years I wanted to learn as much about successful marriage as I could, BEFORE I made the plunge. If you are married, this episode might be also be one that you want to share with your wife.

GOD’S DESIGN OF MARRAIGE

A. A fundamental purpose of the male-female love union in marriage is to reflect the image of God. Man cannot fully bear God’s image in isolation. God exists as the Trinity, the union of three persons who love one another, which is why we are told, God is love (1 John 4:8). So, we read in Genesis, Then God said, ‘Let us make man in our image, in our likeness...’ So God created man in his own imagine, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. (1:26-27).

B. A second purpose of marriage is to give us a foretaste of the joy we will experience when we are forever united in love to Christ our bridegroom. We, the church, are betrothed to Christ as his bride. The final return of Christ to receive us to himself is portrayed as the wedding of the lamb. The richest pleasures of sexual union are a type, a foreshadow of the intense joy that will be ours when we are united to Christ. This astonishing truth is spelled out by Paul, For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife and the two will become one flesh. This is a profound mystery, but I am talking about Christ and the church (Eph. 5:31-32).

C. A third purpose for marriage is revealed in the creation account, where marriage is designed by God to overcome the aloneness of Adam. Each part of the creation narrative closes with God’s statement: “And it was GOOD,” until the creation of man. After Adam is created, God says. “It is NOT GOOD that man should be alone. In naming the animals Adam realizes that none can be a true partner to him. They cannot overcome his loneliness. So, God creates woman to be his partner, soul mate, and lover. The LORD God said, ‘It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him. (Gen 2:18).

These three purposes come together in a single, clear, focus: God’s goal for marriage is a LOVING INTIMACY between husband and wife! Eve is created with a spirit, heart, and body which correspond to Adam’s. She is bone of his bone, flesh of his flesh. Marriage is the joining together of two lives (mind, will, and emotions) and the joining of bodies: Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh (Gen 2:24). Marriage is given as the one safe arena where husband and wife are naked, body, soul, and spirit--laid bare and vulnerable to each other.

Adam and Eve’s like natures, combined with their covenant pledge of unconditional love, make safe the experience of baring their hearts and bodies to one another. It enables them to experience LOVING INTIMACY, i.e. oneness of spirit, oneness of heart, oneness of body. The goal of marriage, then is to be able to be naked, body and soul, and be so loved and accepted that you never feel ashamed. The man and his wife were both naked, and they felt no shame. Gen. 2:25. An old-fashioned way to express God’s goal for our marriages is the word intercourse. Intercourse means, literally, connection between persons. It is both conversational interaction that connects two SOULS, and sexual interaction, which connects two BODIES. God wants Christian couples to proactively pursue his goal for their marriage—INTIMACY—both the union of soul and union of body. Let’s dig a little deeper.

1. Loving each other in a God-honoring marriage means pursuing CONVERSATION, which leads to oneness of SOUL. Sharing our experiences, feelings, ideas, plans, hopes and dreams is the path to the oneness of soul God wants married couples to enjoy. It requires making time regularly to talk in a relaxed way that allows mates to open their hearts to one another and active listening, seeking to understand our mate’s feelings and ideas. It means overlooking our mate’s weaknesses and deficiencies, so they are not afraid to be known as they really are but instead feel safe, accepted, and valued. It is to know the joy of sharing with another the deepest secrets of each other’s hearts and feeling understood. It is to never feel alone because you are walking through life hand in hand with your soul mate. Barbara Rosberg, in her book jointly written with her husband, gives us a crisp picture of the target:

The word, “intimacy” comes from a Latin word that means “innermost.” What this translates into for those of us in the marriage relationship is a vulnerable sharing of our inner thoughts, feelings, spirit, and true self. Both men and women need to feel secure in this sharing and confident of their spouse’s support. This support is achieved through listening, empathy, prayer, or reassurance. (The 5 Love Needs of Men and Women).

2. Loving each other in a God-honoring marriage will also mean pursuing LOVE-MAKING, which leads to oneness of BODY. Numerous studies show a strong correlation between a couples’ satisfaction with the marriage and their satisfaction with their sex life. In Song of Songs, God enters and the bridal chamber, where the newlyweds lay entwined in each other’s arms and urges, ‘Eat friends: drink and imbibe deeply, O lovers (5:1). Sexual union is the outward, physical expression of the inner emotional and spiritual reality of ONENESS. It is similar, in this sense, to communion. The wine and bread are OUTWARD PHYSICAL signs and seals, which point to an INNER SPIRITUAL reality—feeding on Christ for spiritual nourishment. Sexual union is an OUTWARD PHYSICAL joining of two bodies which express the INNER SPIRITUAL union of two hearts—giving each other the nourishment of love. Just as celebrating communion strengthens our love relationship with Christ, so sexual union strengthens our love relationship with our spouse. Pastor’s wife, Anne Ortland points out:

Lovemaking is the most practical, binding, and enriching experience of all married love. There is one person who knows you and wants to know you more, better than anyone but God. And that’s why God gave you sex, to interact at the deepest possible human levels. Your sex life as a married couple will make your self-esteem go up or down. (Sex in a Growing Marriage audio).

The Biblical design for loving intimacy in marriage exalts BOTH oneness of soul and oneness of body. Biblically, the human body is not considered inferior to the soul, nor the soul inferior to the body. Joining bodies in sex apart from joining lives in marriage is condemned as wrong (1 Thes 4:3). Joining lives in marriage without joining bodies in sex is also condemned as wrong (1 Cor 7:5). Biblically, body and soul belong together. Unlike pagan philosophies like Gnosticism, Christianity has always upheld a high view of the physical body and therefore of sexual union. There is no biblical reason to think God takes any less pleasure in a married couple’s sexual union than in their spiritual union. God designed them for both.

THE INTIMACY MISCONNECT

Christian counselor Gary Rosberg observes this reality in the counseling room. He writes, “No matter how many times I hear couples lament their differences in the counseling room, or at conferences, it is the same story. Men spell intimacy S-E-X, and women spell it T-A-L-K. (The Five Love Needs of Men and Women).

A. Normally a WIFE’s deepest yearning is for intimacy of HEART and SOUL. A wife longs for spiritual oneness and emotional closeness. She yearns to share at the level of the heart. Barbara Rosberg, in the same book, reveals, After, ‘unconditional love,’ women indicated that emotional intimacy was their second most important need. For a wife, spiritual/emotional oneness precedes sexual desire. She needs to feel in love, in order to want to make love. Sex is a celebration of the closeness she already feels, which enables her to open up her body to him. Rosberg tries to explain this feminine hardwiring to husbands,

Men, your sex drive is connected to your eyes; You become aroused visually. Your wife’s sex drive is connected to her heart; she is aroused only after she feels emotional closeness and harmony…You feel less masculine if your wife resists your sexual advances. Your wife feels like a machine if she doesn’t experience sexual intimacy flowing from emotional intimacy (Ibid).

B. In God's design a HUSBAND’s strongest INTIMACY yearning is usually for oneness of BODY—sex. What makes him feel intimately connected to his wife is sex. Her eagerness to make love to him makes him feel loved and wanted. The yearning for oneness that God put into him is felt by him primarily as a yearning for sexual union. For him, sexual union brings back his feelings of closeness to his wife and feelings of love for her. He needs to make love in order to feel in love. Sexual arousal stirs his feelings for his wife. Her receptivity assures him that he is wanted. Sexual release makes him feel one with his wife inclining him to open up to her about other things he is feeling. God built husbands with hormones that drive most men to desire sexual release frequently. Writers, Linda Dillow and Lorraine Pintus try to explain the male sex drive to wives:

A man has 17 sexual glands. Like millions of Energizer Bunnies these glands work day and night, producing semen, which is stored in an inner sack in the testes. When the sack fills up, his testes tell his brain, “Do something quick before I explode.” A man’s need for sex is not all in his mind; his sexual command center demands release from the accumulated buildup (Intimate Issues).

In a perfect world, making love refills the husband’s emotional tank. He feels his love for his woman, which helps him think of her, make time to listen to her heart, etc. which makes her feel close to him. Her feelings of oneness with her husband awaken her desire to make love, so she eagerly welcomes his advances, etc. Ideally, this wonderful cycle fills their hearts with love for each other.

REAL MARRIAGE

A. Emotional intimacy gets harder to maintain. When the “honeymoon phase” is over, our differences and the self-centeredness of our fallen nature begin to make themselves felt. Busy schedules and long to-do lists replace the delightful hours of sharing during courtship. Intimacy of HEART and SOUL begins to fade. It gets harder and harder to find time to talk. Conversation begins to center around the decisions and needs of the family—not the deep feelings of the heart. Disagreements on some subjects place them off limits for discussion, which further contributes to isolation. Career responsibilities increase, demanding greater time and energy. Couples drift more and more into their own worlds. In one study, 83% percent of women felt that their husbands don’t even know the basic needs of a woman for emotional intimacy (Arterburn & Stoeker, Every Woman’s Desire.) Unintentionally, husbands rob their wives of the companionship and closeness they need in marriage. In view of how our wives are hardwired, here are two vital commitments we, husbands need to make to Christ, if we are to love them well:

1. Commit to the time and energy required to hear and understand what is going on in her heart and to share what is going on in yours. The first achievement for the condition of understanding is the will to understand, writes Paul Tournier, the second condition is expressing oneself…In order to express oneself, there must be a feeling of warm and kind receptivity and of attentive listening (To Understand Each Other). What husbands don’t realize is that just as their wife’s eagerness to make love to him makes him feel loved, HIS EAGERNESS TO LISTEN TO HOW HER DAY WENT makes her feel loved. And just as her lack of interest in sex makes him feel rejected, HIS LACK OF INTEREST IN HEARING WHAT IS GOING ON IN HER HEART makes her feel rejected.

2. Don’t allow yourself to become too emotionally close to a woman who is not your wife. The fact that emotional closeness precedes the awakening of a woman’s sexual desires is a sobering warning to us. So is the fact that so many married women are not having their emotional intimacy needs met by their husbands. Other than perhaps a drunken one-night stand on a business trip—affairs almost never start with sex but with getting too close as friends. Men, we have to have emotional boundaries, and help our wives set emotional boundaries that protect our hearts. Here are a few:

Don’t get into an ongoing discussion with a woman about her marriage or yours.
Be known as a warm, caring, listening guy—but don’t treat any one woman at work specially. Being made to feel special IS romance to a woman.
Be especially guarded with either a woman you work with closely in your job or ministry, or one you know happens to be especially attractive to you.
Don’t talk to a woman other than your wife about sexual things.

B. In real marriage before long, SEXUAL intimacy also becomes less frequent and passion begins to cool. Busy schedules and tired bodies leave less energy for sex. Lovemaking can become infrequent, predictable and boring. Often, lovemaking slips to low priority. A wife’s sexual desires get buried under the weight of the responsibility she feels for the kids, her home, her career, church, etc. Husbands often express affection only when they want sex rather than regularly filling their wives’ emotional tank with non-sexual affection. Wives can feel used and start to lose interest in sex. Husbands can get resentful, feeling that their wife takes care of everyone else’s needs, but that their sexual needs (which, righteously ONLY SHE can satisfy) are low priority. A reluctant wife causes even Christian men to think “It’s just easier not to bother my wife. I’ll find sexual release through porn and masturbation." Here are two commitments to help our marriages to stay sexually vibrant.

1. Get into an accountability relationship with a brother who asks, “Have you looked this week at sexually explicit material?” Our sex drive is a precious gift to be shared only with our wife or future wife. Love her too much to let Satan get away with corrupting your sexual desires. (But don’t ever let such accountability be shame-based but built upon a grace-driven understanding that Christ’s shed blood and love are more powerful than the ugliest of my sexual sins.)

2. Commit to helping your wife understand that the biblical goal of marriage is intimacy from pursuing both conversational interaction, which connects two hearts, and sexual interaction, which connects two bodies. Specifically, help her understand the biblical teaching that for married Christians in the battle for sexual purity, the best defense is a great offense. In Proverbs 5, God says to married men fighting for sexual purity, Rejoice in the wife of your youth, a lovely deer, a graceful doe. Let her breasts fill you at all times with delight; be intoxicated always in her love. Why should you be intoxicated, my son, with a forbidden woman (vs 17-19)? Help her understand God’s design of your sex drive. Very few women realize that although they need to FEEL in love to want to MAKE love, their husbands need to MAKE love to FEEL in love. The masculine sex drive is not just an itch that men want scratched; it is God’s physiological design to drive them back into the arms of their wives where, surrounded by thir welcoming warmth, acceptance and care, they realize again how precious their woman is to them and renew their desire to love her with all their heart.

I want to close our time by letting you know about some tools to help you and your wife pursue emotional and sexual intimacy together. One is the short, 75- page booklet, Intimacy: God’s Design for Marriage: Three Conversational Dates to Rediscover Intimacy in Your Marriage, written by my wife Sandy and me after we pushed through a major intimacy misconnect in our marriage. It is written so it can be read and used in the form of three dates together. It is available only on my website forgingbonds.org where you can read just a few of the many stories of marriages impacted by this book. A second, FREE resource is a series of questions for you to go through together, perhaps on Valentine’s Day that will help you get on the same page in the pursuit of emotional and sexual intimacy. These questions are below.

For Further Prayerful Thought:

What stood out to you about the purposes for which God’s design for marriage?
What is the significance to you of remembering that marriage is both the joining of two lives (mind, will, and emotions) exhibited by leaving home, and the joining of two bodies in sex?
When it comes to emotional intimacy, do you have more trouble opening up to your wife about what is going on inside or in helping her open up about what is going on inside her?
If you are married, is there another woman in your spheres of life with whom you need to be more vigilant—not to allow yourselves to get too emotionally close?

VALENTINE’S DAY QUESTIONS FOR COUPLES

FUN

1. What’s the most embarrassing thing that ever happened to you?

2. If you could be any cartoon character for a day, who would you be and why?

3. What’s the funniest movie you’ve ever seen?

4. If you could have an unlimited supply of one thing for the rest of your life, what would it be?

5. If you could have any animal as a pet, no matter how wild, what would you choose?

WARM UP

1. What do you remember most about your first date?

2. Share two things you most appreciate about your mate.

EMOTIONAL INTIMACY

Husband to Wife

1. What regular tasks in taking care of the family do you dislike the most or find most difficult?

2. How can I help you shoulder your load at home?

3. How can I better help you share your heart with me?

4. What family problems do you feel need to be addressed?

5. What are the worries and concerns that are weighing heavily on your heart?

6. How can I best help you feel cherished by me?

7. How can I support your use of your gifts that go beyond the home?

Wife to Husband

1. How best can I help you when your emotional tank is on empty?

2. What gets you down most at work? When there is something weighing heavily on you at work how can I best help you share it?

3. How can I support your spiritual leadership in our home.

4. Do I tell you often enough what I admire and respect about you?

SEXUAL INTIMACY

1. How do you feel about discussing sexual intimacy on this date?

2. Why do you think God invented sex?

3. What is one thing you appreciate about the other as your lover?

4. What sexual activities do you find most exciting?

5. Is there anything else about our love-making that you want to tell me?

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A Treasure That Causes Our Kids to Flourish

On 01 February, 2025 By Gary Yagel

If God said to you as a dad, “There is one investment you can make in your child’s future that I guarantee is more precious than gold, that will bring him a lifetime of enjoyment, a lifetime of protection from harm and a lifetime in which he is richly rewarded,” would you pay attention? The fact is that God has made such a promise—the question is whether or not we will take him up on it!

In our study of spiritual leadership at home, we have used a right triangle to depict the three parts and processes of successful leadership. We observed that it begins with an arrow between the leader and the mission across the X axis, the first function of leadership being to FOCUS/MODEL. Then, the past two weeks, we studied the arrow between the leader and his followers up the vertical Y axis, the second function of leadership being to BUILD HIS RELATIONSHIP with his wife and children. Today, we begin to examine the third arrow across the hypotenuse between the followers and the mission, being to EQUIP/ASSIST his followers to reach their full potential in Christ. Even if a leader is good at the first two functions, staying focused on his mission and building relationships with his followers, he will still fail if he does not equip them with what they need to reach spiritual maturity. The most neglected step of leadership at home may be equipping our followers to become all they can be in Christ. While the church and our wives are tasked to assist fathers, WE are the ones charged by God with the responsibility to equip children for life by teaching them the ways of the Lord.

Today’s episode focuses on the one most foundational equipping tool for spiritual growth, the Word of God. It is described by Paul in 2 Timothy 3:16, All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the servant of God may be THOROUGHLY EQUIPPED for every good work. How do we get the Word of God into our kid’s lives?

HELP THEM SEE GOD’S WORD AS A TREASURE CHEST OF RICHES

In Psalm 19 God’s people celebrate his revelation of himself in creation (called general revelation) and his revelation of himself in his Word (called special revelation), notably what pleases him revealed in his Law. Verses 7-11 reveal the way God’s moral law is like a precious jewel refracting light into every facet of human life.

The Law of the Lord is perfect, restoring the soul; the testimony of the Lord is sure, making wise the simple. The precepts of the Lord are right, rejoicing the heart; the commandment of the Lord is pure, enlightening the eyes. The fear of the Lord is clean, enduring forever; the judgments of the Lord are true; they are righteous altogether. They are more desirable than gold, yes, than much pure gold; sweeter also than honey and drippings of the honeycomb. Moreover, your servant is warned by them; in keeping them there is great reward.

A. The Law of the Lord is perfect restoring the soul. The term, Law of the Lord refers here to the general life principles taught throughout Scripture. Perfect refers to completeness. It contains all we need. The purpose of the overall Law of the Lord is to restore the soul. Remember that one of the most foundational biblical doctrines is that sin causes us to suppress the truth in unrighteousness (Rom 1:18), that our fallen hearts are darkened in their understanding (Eph 4:18), that there is a way which seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death (Prov 14:12). This darkened understanding includes not just our thinking but impacts our attitudes and feelings as well. There is only one way for a broken soul—mind will, and emotions—to be restored to what God created it to be—through the Word of God. Here are some examples of how this works:

We think: The path to wealth is to hold on to what we have and add to it. God says, “Give, and it will be given to you. Good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over, it will be poured into your lap. For with the measure you use it will be measured back to you” (Lk 6:38).
We think: The path to sexual satisfaction is surrendering to urges. God says: The path to satisfaction is always choosing the righteous path to satisfy desires. “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness for they shall be satisfied” (Matt 5:6).
We think: God won’t prosper my efforts because I am too weak and sinful. God says: “In your weakness my power is shown the more completely: (2 Cor 12:9).
We think: When we’re hurt by another’s criticism we need to withdraw and shut another out so he or she will treat us with more grace in the future. God says: “Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy” (Matt 5:7).
We think: The path to respect is achieving. God says: The path to respect is helping others achieve. “Whoever would be great among you must become the servant of all” (Matt 20:26).

Because our child inherits our sinful nature, her soul has a broken understanding of life. We need to use the Law of the Lord to restore her soul to wholeness.

B. The testimony of the Lord is sure, making wise the simple. Testimony refers to true life accounts in Scripture. Those stories make Gods Word sure, cementing into our mind the principles of Scripture. For example, when we see what happened to David and his family resulting from his adultery with Bathsheba, we more fully realize that the wage sin pays is always destruction. Testimonies make wise the simple. The simple are the naïve and gullible regarding how life actually works. But God's testimonies causes them to see life as it really is, from God’s point of view.

C. The precepts of the Lord are right, rejoicing the heart. Precepts are rules—the specific application of biblical principles. I believe God has revealed a specific order for teaching God’s Word here. 1) It should start with the Law of the Lord—the general, big-picture principle behind a rule. 2) Then, it is best to illustrate that truth with the testimony of the Lord, a true story from Scripture. If we do that first, we will find that 3) sharing the precept of the Lord brings rejoicing. But if we skip directly to the precept, presenting it without steps 1 and 2, the naked rule often causes rebellion. For example, we can just say to teens, “Sex before marriage is wrong,” which goes straight to the rule. That won’t cause rejoicing but rejecting. After all, today no one waits until marriage to have sex. To their minds, Victorian prudishness, like old technology, has been replaced by the enlightened realization that sex is wonderful. To overcome such thinking requires a fuller picture to accompany the prohibition.

In God’s design, He intends for the union of bodies to be the ecstatic celebration of the permanent uniting of lives and hearts in marriage.
Everyone knows that rape is so destructive that a woman may never heal internally from this trauma, which demonstrates the Bible’s view of sex. It is more than recreation; it is sharing extremely vulnerable parts of ourselves.
We also sense this vulnerability in our own uneasiness about being naked in front of another, which is God’s gracious way of sending us the message, “Even in romance nakedness is not safe until each partner has vowed to unconditionally love the other in front of family, church, state, and friends.”
Sex is designed to glue husband and wife together throughout the tough process of merging lives. But after casual sex, since your partner moves on, it is like ripping apart pieces of paper that were glued together; it tears the soul.
Statistics universally show that cohabiting before marriage increases the likelihood of both divorce and dissatisfaction with sex later in the marriage.
Premarital sex, called fornication, is so destructive for society that in Israel, God made it a capital offense. He wouldn’t do that were it not very harmful.
Christ-followers offer their bodies to God as a living sacrifice. No matter what others do with their bodies, saving sex for marriage is about honoring Jesus with our bodies. (BTW the battle still honors Jesus even if there are a few failures.)

D. The commandments of the Lord is pure, enlightening the eyes. Commandments are direct commands from the mouth of God. They are not gray, fuzzy or cloudy; they are pure moral perfection. Their black and whiteness enables us to have moral clarity. They enlighten our eyes. The Ten Commandments are pillars on which all the moral law stands. The first four commandments explain the first great commandment—love God. Loving God is accomplished by 1) remembering to keep God first in our affections, 2) celebrating who he really is and not a figment of our imagination, 3) treating his name with respect, 4) setting apart the first part of our week to delight in him. The second great commandment, loving our neighbor is accomplished by 5) respecting those in positions of authority, 6) not harming others, 7) channeling sexual desire only toward one’s spouse, 8) not stealing, 9) telling the truth, 10) replacing envy with gladness that others prosper.

E. The fear of the Lord is clean, enduring forever. The fear of the Lord is knowing that you never get away with sin. It is realizing we don’t so much break God’s law as God’s law breaks us when we violate it. It leads to a clean life because it recognizes that even little things matter eternally. Every single choice we make to please Jesus will endure forever, i.e. cause additional joy for us in eternity. God is not mocked, writes Paul, whatever one sows, that will he also reap. For the one who sows to his own flesh will from the flesh reap corruption, but the one who sows to the Spirit will from the Spirit reap eternal life. And let us not grow weary of doing good, for in due season we will reap, if we do not give up (Gal 6:7-9).

F. The judgments of the Lord are true; they are righteous altogether. This Hebrew word means just decrees. God’s Word reveals justice that is true; it is unbiased and based upon facts. It is always fully righteous. God is never unjust. In fact, the very sense of justice we have originated with God himself because we bear his image. If he seems unjust in allowing some to be born into poverty and others into wealth, or places some into free countries and others under tyranny or assigns men the role of leading in marriage and women the role of submitting to their leadership, the problem is not an unjust God but our fallen misunderstanding of justice.

G. They are more desirable than gold, yes, than much pure gold; sweeter also than honey and drippings of the honeycomb. Moreover, your servant is warned by them; in keeping them there is great reward. There is nothing more valuable that we can give our children than God’s Word. We need to lavish it upon them, help them see it as the great treasure that it is, and fall in love with it.

EQUIPPING OUR CHILDREN WITH THE WORD IS THE RESPONSIBILITY OF FATHERS

A. God established this principle with Abraham, the father of the Covenant. I have chosen him, (Abraham) that he may command his children and his household after him to keep the way of the Lord by doing righteousness and justice, so that the Lord may bring to Abraham what he has promised him (Genesis 18:18). Later, it appears that Joshua did fulfill this responsibility. He had been challenged by God, This Book of the Law shall not depart from your mouth, but you shall meditate on it day and night, so that you may be careful to do according to all that is written in it. For then you will make your way prosperous, and then you will have good success (Joshua 1:8). We have no direct examples of Joshua teaching his children and grandchildren the way they should go—but the indirect evidence seems overpowering that he did just that. Joshua lived to be 110 years old, which meant he would have had great, great, great grandchildren. In Judges 2:7-8, we read, And the people served the Lord all the days of Joshua, and all the days of the elders who outlived Joshua, who had seen all the great work that the Lord had done for Israel.

B. But this pattern of “commanding his children and household after him to keep the way of the Lord,” did not continue. Judges 2 continues, And there arose another generation after them who did not know the Lord or the work that he had done for Israel. And the people of Israel did what was evil in the sight of the Lord and served the Baals. The failure of the covenant fathers of Israel to turn their hearts towards their children and grandchildren in order to turn the next generation’s heart towards keeping God’s law was nearly universal—especially being highlighted in the book of Judges. Although King David and his son Solomon were notable exceptions, this massive failure of the OT fathers to pass on their spiritual heritage is exhibited all through its history. In fact, the OT ends by observing this fact in the final two verses. But the Messiah will come, overthrow Satan, sin, and death, and empower fathers with the Holy Spirit poured out in greater measure. Hebrews 8 tells us that Jeremiah’s prophecy is fulfilled in the coming of Christ. For this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, declares the Lord: I will put my laws into their minds, and write them on their hearts, and I will be their God, and they shall be my people.

C.The dawning of this new age will be marked by the coming of a second Elijah (whom Jesus said was John the Baptist). The OT ends with this hope, Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the great and awesome day of the Lord comes. And he will turn the hearts of fathers to their children and the hearts of children to their fathers (Mal 4:5-6). Under the New Covenant, with the power of the risen Christ poured out upon us through the indwelling Holy Spirit—men will be helped to win the hearts of their children and turn their hearts to love the Law of the Lord. So, in the NT era we now have the help of the Holy Spirit. Praise God!

FOUR PRINCIPLES FROM DEUTERONOMY 6 FOR TEACHING GOD’S WORD

A.You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might (vs 5). Teaching Scripture to our kids begins in OUR hearts with wanting to obey his Word because we love him and want to please the one who redeemed us, NOT because we think God is a rules-obsessed tyrant or that we need to earn his love. The Ten Commandments were given to Israel after it had been freed from slavery to Egypt to show us how to respond to his redemptive love already poured out upon us. Out of delight and confidence in his goodness proved at the cross, we trust that his law is for our benefit. Counselors, Cloud and Townsend point out, “When we finally understand that God isn’t mad at us anymore, we become free to concentrate on love and growth instead of trying to appease him” (How People Grow).

B. Deuteronomy 6 continues: And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart (vs 6). There is a natural flow from loving God with all our being to having his Word on our hearts, so that we can obey it. In this text, God is saying what Jesus would later repeat, In John 14:6, If you love me, you will keep my commandments. Psalm 119:11 says, I have stored up your word in my heart, that I might not sin against you. Devotion to obeying Scripture is not legalism; it is the proper expression of love for the God who first loved us. Jesus taught that the mark of kingdom people is hungering and thirsting for righteousness (Matt 5:6).

D. Deuteronomy 6 continues: And shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise. The reason for having the Law on our hearts is so that we can meditate on it during the day applying it to everyday life. As leaders we just include our kids in the process. Arguably the most successful believer of the OT era was counseled by God, This Book of the Law shall not depart from your mouth, but you shall meditate on it day and night, so that you may be careful to do according to all that is written in it. For then you will make your way prosperous, and then you will have good success. Joshua defeated the most enemies in Israel’s history and his family leadership influence caused four generations to walk with God.

DEVELPING A GAME PLAN FOR IMPARTING THE WORD

1.Seek God’s wisdom for developing a life-long lifestyle of radical commitment to time in God’s Word, yourself.

2.Pray specifically for each child to:

See Scripture as the great treasure it is—more precious than gold
Fall in love with it as David did—Oh how I love your law! It is my meditation all the day (Ps 119:97).
Become devoted to building his or her life upon it—as Jesus taught, like a wise man who built his house on the rock

3. Break Scripture into subsets to be mastered.

New City Catechism
Ten Commandments
Psalm 1
Key verses of Proverbs' wisdom
Beatitudes

In closing, I return to the issue of my child’s future. Of all the things I want my child to learn to prepare for life, what is most important? Here again is God’s answer:

Blessed is the one who finds wisdom, and the one who gets understanding, for the gain from her is better than gain from silver and her profit better than gold. She is more precious than jewels, and nothing you desire can compare with her. Long life is in her right hand; in her leftt hand are riches and honor. Her ways are ways of pleasantness, and all her paths are peace. She is a tree of life to those who lay hold of her; those who hold her fast are called blessed (Prov 3:13-18).

For Further Prayerful Thought

In the study of the six facets of the jewel of God’s Word—his law, testimony, precepts, commandments, fear, and judgements, which ones stood out most to you?
Since God’s plan to bless the nations was to call Abraham and his family to faith and then the fathers command their children and households to keep the way of the Lord by doing righteousness and justice, why have Christian men been slow to focus on this responsibility?
Why is it important, in teaching our kids, for us to follow the Deuteronomy 6 pattern to starting with our motive for loving the Law of God being to please him because he first loved us.
Why do you think God tells parents in Deuteronomy 6 to talk about applying the Word of God throughout the day?

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Winning the Hearts of Our Kids

On 26 January, 2025 By Gary Yagel

As we’ve seen in this series, Successful Spiritual Leadership at Home, our assignment from God to lead our homes is much less about a position, than it is about action, movement, and direction. Spiritual leadership begins with us, ourselves, answering Christ’s call 1) to himself to enjoy a love relationship with him, 2) to be like him in our heart attitudes, 3) to implement his agenda of righteousness in every sphere of our lives with wholehearted allegiance to him. But leadership goes beyond our own commitment to becoming mature disciples. It is all about bringing our followers with us in this whole-hearted commitment to the Master. Leadership is influence, so this episode answers the question, “How do we win the hearts of our followers?” How do we maximize our influence?

History provides a striking contrast of the influence of two different men revealed through their descendants. In 1874 a prison official named Richard Dugdale was doing research for the New York Prison Commission when he was surprised to find criminals in six different prisons that were all descended from the same family. This led Dugdale to conduct an exhaustive study of 1200 people whose lineages all traced back to one man, who lived in the 1750s, to whom Dugdale assigned the fictitious name, “Max Jukes.” His research revealed these facts about Juke’s descendants:

310 of the 1,200 were professional paupers—more than one in four.
300 of the 1,200—one in four—died in infancy from lack of good care.
50 of the women were publicly known for lives of debauchery.
7 were murderers.
60 were habitual thieves who spent, on average, twelve years in prison.
130 were criminals who were convicted of crimes.

A generation later a researcher named A. W. Winship compiled records of the descendants of another man who lived during the same time period (1750s) as Max Jukes, but whose influence was the opposite. In his line of descent were:

1 U.S. Vice-President
3 U.S. Senators
3 governors
3 mayors
13 college presidents
30 judges
65 professors
100 lawyers
100 missionaries, pastors and theologians.

This second man’s name was Jonathan Edwards. Despite his extremely busy life as an author, pastor, theologian, and president of Princeton Seminary, Edwards stands as a striking example of one committed to being the spiritual leader of his home—the fruit of which we can see looking back at his descendants. Edwards daily lived out the three functions of leadership we have described in the leadership triangle.

1) He stayed focused on his mission to pursue Christ whole-heartedly--orange arrow across X axis. 2) He invested his time and energy in equipping his eleven kids--brown arrow across hypotenuse. Every evening before dinner, he gave them his full attention for one hour. 3) He invested in his personal relationship with each of his eleven kids--green vertical arrow up y axis. This investment in building his relationship with each child was exemplified by his practice of taking a different child with him when he traveled. The rest of this episode examines how fathers can build their relationship with their children and thus increase their influence. But before that we must see how fathers can also tear down their relationship with their child, marring their positive influence.

FOUR RELATIONSHIP BUSTERS

A. Reluctance to admit that we are wrong. Intuitively men realize they need respect from their followers in order to succeed in leading them. But we default to the wrong understanding of how to gain respect, hiding our failures, being defensive about our mistakes, and being slow to admit that we are wrong. But Scripture tells us that covering our failures is the exact wrong way to win respect from followers. Proverbs 29:23 says A person’s pride will bring him low, but a humble spirit will obtain honor. God repeatedly tells us that honor always comes after humility. Consider Prov 15:33: The fear of the Lord is the instruction for wisdom, And before HONOR comes HUMILITY or Prov 18:12: Before destruction a man's heart is haughty, but HUMILITY comes before HONOR. Our successes can sometimes build walls with our children who think to themselves, “I could never do that.” But sharing failures builds bridges into another’s life. The example they need isn’t as much to see Jesus in us as it is to see one who needs Jesus in us.

B. A critical spirit. Paul commands, Let no unwholesome word proceed from your mouth, but only such a word as is good for edification according to the need of the moment, so that it will give grace to those who hear. We men easily explode in anger and send verbal shrapnel tearing into the tender flesh of our wife, or child’s self-esteem. And when we do wound those under our care, we too often ignore what Jesus said to do about it—which leads to the next relationship buster

C. Refusal to seek forgiveness when we wrong another. In Jesus’ portrait of kingdom living he explains what to do when we wound another through words that are angry, cause another to feel stupid, or attack his character (by saying things like “You always” or “You never”). Matthew 5:22-24: I say to you that everyone who is angry with his brother will be liable to judgment; whoever insults his brother will be liable to the council; and whoever says, ‘You fool!’ will be liable to the hell of fire. So if you are offering your gift at the altar and there remember that your brother has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar and go. First be reconciled to your brother, and then come and offer your gift.

I am grateful that someone taught me that when I screw up I need to man-up and take responsibility for the harm it caused and seek to restore the relationship through asking for forgiveness. On one occasion, while traveling to my oldest daughter’s graduation from Covenant College, my wife got a call from Kim. She said, “I was just in a car accident and smashed the car into a mailbox.” It had been a tough year for us financially with four of our kids in college. Not realizing that my wife’s phone was NOT muted, I unthinkingly muttered to myself, “What do I have to do to get my kids to slow down in the rain?” Her younger brother had rear-ended someone in the rain a few months earlier. Kim heard my words and hung up.

We stopped at a motel part way to Covenant College and I knew what I had to do. Stepping onto the porch, I called Kim. To her credit she answered. I said, “Kim I don’t know if you can do this yet because I have really hurt you, but I am calling to ask you to forgive me. First of all, who cares about the car. What matters is that you are safe! Second, it is not fair to get mad at you when one of the other kids was driving too fast to stop in the rain. You have a great driving record and that is just not fair. So again, I’m not sure if you are ready to do this yet, because I hurt you so badly, but I’m calling to ask, “Will you forgive me?” She answered, “Of course dad.”

Three weeks later, on Memorial Day weekend, I found myself sitting on the dock of our summer cottage beside Kim, both of us kicking and splashing our feet in the water. For over thirty minutes, we had the greatest heart-to heart father daughter conversation ever—all about her dreams for getting a job in the field of teaching and how excited she was to implement so many things she had learned. I do not believe that conversation would have happened if someone had not taught me, “Gary, when you screw up and wound someone you need to man up, take responsibility for it and fix it.”

D. Selfishness. The fastest way for a leader to cause rebellion among his followers is to use his authority selfishly. Satan knows this characteristic of humans, which is why his strategy in tempting Eve was to deceive her into believing God is selfish. Listen again to Satan’s Words. “Did God actually say, ‘You shall not eat of ANY tree in the garden’?” Do you hear the insinuation? I know God is just the kind of selfish god who would create all this lovely, delicious fruit and then tell you that you can’t eat any of it—but did he actually do that? Later, Satan directly accuses God of selfishness. The serpent said to the woman, “You will not surely die. For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” God lied to you Eve; you won’t die if you eat that fruit. God just wants to selfishly keep “the knowledge of good and evil” to himself. So, Eve rebelled. When it dawned on me that selfishness drives followers away, I became convicted—why did I play sports with my kids that I like, throwing the football and playing ping pong, when they like throwing the frisbee and playing video games. How often did I choose restaurants with food I like, always watch football games when the kids liked soccer matches, and keep the TV remote in my hand? It is worth taking an inventory of our default choices. It might reveal surprising selfishness.

FIVE WAYS TO BUILD OUR RELATIONSHIP WITH OUR FOLLOWERS

A. Through UNDERSTANDING. Here are two practical ways to build understanding:

Go into our kids’ world just as Jesus came into our world. Jesus won our hearts by coming into our world. He is our Great High Priest who has won the right to be heard by suffering everything we have suffered. This incarnational principle of ministry is precious to me because it changed my life. When I was 16, I was a Christian, but not really following Christ. My world was my high school. I noticed a guy hanging out at our high school games with a bunch of my high school student government friends. I later found out that he was John Hartsock, a Young Life leader. Because he was so interested in MY WORLD he won my heart. I wanted to go to Young Life meetings, HIS WORLD. Trying to follow this example as a dad, I always tried to get into my kid’s world, on one occasion arranging a tour of an industrial lawn mower manufacturing company plant because my son was working there on the floor.
Build the habit of listening well. Lyndon Johnson, had a sign on his office wall that read, “You ain’t learnin nothin when you’re doin all the talkin.” Here are five reasons why dads need to be good listeners

Listening shows respect
Listening builds relationships
Listening increases knowledge
Listening builds loyalty
Listening helps you know how to help others and yourself (John Maxwell, Becoming a Person of Influence).

B. Through AFFIRMATION. During the launch of his ministry, God the Son heard the audible voice of God the Father who said the two things that every son and daughter most want to hear from their dads, I love you and I am proud of you. Matthew 3:17 a voice from heaven said, “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased.” This father/child paradigm from heaven itself, exhibiting the words children desperately need to hear from their fathers, was a truth that the apostle Paul knew well. He wrote to the church at Thessalonica, For you know how, like a father with his children, we exhorted each one of you and encouraged you and charged you to walk in a manner worthy of God, who calls you into his own kingdom and glory (1 Thes 2:10-11). Few things help a person the way verbal affirmation does. It is oxygen for the soul. When a person feels encouraged, he can face the impossible and overcome incredible adversity. Secular research reveals the power of encouragement. An experiment was conducted years ago to measure people’s capacity to endure pain. Psychologists measured how long a barefooted person could stand in a bucket of ice water. They found when another person was present, giving support and encouragement, the sufferers were able to endure the pain twice as long as their unencouraged counterparts (Maxwell, Becoming a Person of Influence).

C. Through COMPANIONSHIP. Jesus built his relationship with his followers through COMPANIONSHIP. In Mark 3:14, Jesus reveals to us another vital key to leadership influence. We read, He appointed twelve (whom he also named apostles) so that they might be with him and he might send them out to preach. When we realize that leadership is not an authority position but influence, it becomes obvious that there is no substitute for the time required to build a relationship of love and trust with our followers. There are two requirements for providing the companionship with our kids that they require to flourish.

1. Realize our kids spell love T-I-M-E. Here is, A Perspective On Time for Fathers

A child cherishes a father’s presence above all else.
You have a very short time in which to be the major influence in your children’s lives.
Little time = little influence.
You can’t buy back lost time.
The world, deadlines, contracts and so forth will always be there—your children won’t. Typically they will be with you 2/7ths of your life.
You can almost never spend too much time with your family.
The thief in American homes today is too much screen time.
Whatever intimacy parents and teens enjoy is almost always cultivated before the age of twelve—rarely after it.
Out of quantity time come the quality moments.
If you make time with children when they are young, there will be opportunities and even requests from them for time with you, when they are older.

2. Be intentional: schedule time together on your calendar. Nothing has more power to build our relationship with our kids than “dad dates.” Until my tribe reached high school, I met with a different one of my kids every Monday morning. Often it was for breakfast. Other times, it was to do something together like roller skate, learn tennis, or go to the ice-skating rink. “Grandpa dates” may be even more powerful. A friend of mine takes each of his grandchildren out for some kind of fun activity, usually on Saturdays. One of his most recent grandpa dates was hiking the trails at Carderock, overlooking the Potomac River at Great Falls.

D. Through COMPASSION. The hearts of Jesus’ followers were drawn to the compassion Jesus had for the broken and hurting. As Mark recounts the following story, the wording reveals that the source of this eyewitness account, almost certainly Peter, was not just struck by Jesus’ healing but by the depth of Jesus’ compassion. And a leper came to Jesus, beseeching Him and falling on his knees before Him, and saying, “If You are willing, You can make me clean.” Moved with compassion, Jesus stretched out His hand and touched him, and said to him, “I am willing; be cleansed.” Immediately the leprosy left him and he was cleansed (Mark 1: 40-42). All believers are called to tenderhearted compassion, but it is essential if you want to influence others. Paul writes to the Colossians, Put on then, as God's chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassionate hearts (Col 3:12).

Simply stated, all followers want to know that their leader cares about them. Such care is revealed by noticing their pain, being inwardly moved by it, and doing something to remove it if they can. Compassionate adults enter into another’s pain, but that does not mean helping them languish in it. When our child falls off the swing, it is equally important to say, “that hurts” and help them brush it off and get back up on the swing.

E. Through ATTENTIVENESS TO THEIR PRACTICAL NEEDS. There is a strong connection in Scripture between serving by meeting practical needs and love. Paul commanded the Galatians, “Be servants to one another in love.” But it is perhaps the Apostle John who saw this connection most clearly. He wrote: Having loved his own who were in the world, Jesus loved them to the end…. so he got up from the meal, took off his outer clothing, and wrapped a towel around his waist. After that, he poured water into a basin and began to wash his disciples’ feet, drying them with the towel that was wrapped around him. One of the best ways to win another’s heart is to notice one’s practical needs and assist with meeting them. It is sacrificing for the sake of another. Jesus said, the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.” Wise Dads look for ways to assist their wives and kids with their tasks. Proactive dads say, “I love you” when they stuff a twenty in their college kid’s hands, wash her car before she heads back to college, stay up past midnight to help with a school project he didn’t budget his time well to accomplish. Paying attention to another’s practical needs and giving assistance to meet them is the universal language of love.

Our influence upon our children is very largely the result of the quality of our love relationship with them. That is the testimony of Dan Huff who looked back upon his parents’ influence. He recalls:

When I got to the point one time of saying, ‘I’m going to rebel, I’m out of here, I can’t deal with my folks! They don’t know what they’re talking about!’ I remember thinking very specifically, ‘I can’t rebel against them—they love me too much!” And I hated them for that! Now this may sound odd, but at that point I couldn’t rebel. I wasn’t an angel, but I couldn’t turn my back on that kind of love. I wanted to, and that’s what made me angry. If there had been any flaws in the ways they loved me or any hypocrisy on their part, any dishonesty or patronizing from them, then I think I would have found my hole and escaped through it. But I couldn’t find that hole…Let me close with one statement that says it all. My dad was the best man in his three sons’ weddings.

For Further Prayerful Thought

In what ways did Jonathan Edwards demonstrate what it takes to be a successful spiritual leader at home?
What relationship busters are you most concerned about committing?
Which of the following relationship builders do you think is most important for you to focus upon in your spiritual leadership at home: understanding, affirmation, companionship, compassion, attentiveness to practical needs?

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What Our Wives Need to Flourish

On 18 January, 2025 By Gary Yagel

No man who walks down his wedding aisle intends to fail in his marriage; but many do, including Christians. This episode looks at one of the most critical investments the spiritual leader of his home makes—into the heart of his wife, because their bond is the very foundation of their home.

A wise mentor taught me that in God’s design of the dance of male and female, the man initiates, the woman responds. A man looks for a woman to love, the woman looks for a man who loves her. Jesus set his unconditional love upon his bride and drew her to himself with the cords of love. Husbands provide what their wives need to flourish. That is what the word “husband” means. It has agricultural roots and means “to cultivate,” as a farmer tenderly cares for his cattle from the time they are calves and his crops from the time they are seedlings. When a wife receives from her husband the various ingredients of love she requires to thrive, she flourishes as the woman she was created to be, richly nourishing others around her.

7 REASONS FOR INVESTING IN WHAT HER HEART NEEDS

It is Scripture’s fundamental call to husbands. “Husbands, love your wives as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her.” The word used for love is AGAPE, which means to sacrifice whatever is necessary to provide what another needs. All Christian men would take a bullet for their wives; men are great at the heroic. But it is the mundane, little, everyday decisions to die to ourselves to meet her needs, that is the challenge—especially since we don’t know what her heart needs to thrive. Let’s just admit it! The female heart is a mystery to us! But figuring out what she needs and providing it is our assignment to love her.
Her partnership is our greatest asset. It is simple logic that our top priority as leader must be our leadership team. Her physical, emotional, and spiritual wellbeing is our highest priority because her assistance is our greatest asset.
Building a strong marriage is the best investment we can make in our children. Statistics show that children who grow up in homes with both moms and dads do better physically, economically, emotionally, spiritually and socially.
The calling of manhood is to PROVIDE. Adam was put in the Garden of Eden to cultivate it (AVAD), which means providing whatever is required for garden residents to reach their full potential. Pouring heart nutrients like confidence, encouragement and affirmation into our wife’s heart enables her to flourish.
The calling of manhood is to PROTECT. Adam was placed in the Garden of Eden to keep it (SHAMAR), which means to protect it from physical, emotional, and spiritual harm. We need to watch over our wives’ hearts so that destructive emotions like fear, worry, despondency, and depression don’t harm them.
She is hardwired to respond when you pour love into her. John says, “We love because He first loved us.” The origin of a husband’s love is not his wife’s lovability but his commitment to love her, just as Jesus’ love for us is rooted not in our behavior but in his decision to love us. But when a woman’s heart is fully nourished, she instinctively loves those around her, especially her family.
The most distinctive part of married love—sexual union—is designed to work best when wives thrive emotionally. A wife needs to feel romantically connected to her husband to want to make love to him. Knowing how to romance her so their sexual relationship thrives is not selfish but biblical (Prov 5:19) and in fact strategic, according to Paul, for avoiding sexual immorality.

7 INGREDIENTS OF LOVE TO CAUSE OUR WIVES TO FLOURISH

A. The need to feel understood. In college, I read a statement by Christian Counselor Paul Tournier, which profoundly changed my understanding of relationships: “No one can develop freely in this world and find a full life without feeling understood by at least one person. Misunderstood, he loses his self-confidence, he loses his faith in life or even in God. He is blocked and he regresses” (To Understand One Another). The nakedness of marriage makes it the primary place where God intends for your wife (and you) to feel understood. So, not surprisingly, in 1 Peter 3:7, Peter commands, Husbands, live with your wives in an UNDERSTANDING way. “Your wife’s first need” says Peter, “is for you to understand her, which means discovering what is going on in her heart. Literally this text says, dwell-together according to knowledge. The Greek word used here for knowledge, GINOSKO, indicates a relationship between the knower and what is known, which progresses into deeper understanding. Peter says, “Husbands, as you dwell together with your woman, she needs you to UNDERSTAND her, which means finding out what is going on inside her.” There is only one way to meet this profound need of every wife’s heart: Listen well to help her reveal her soul.

5 Skills for Effective Listening

1. Pay attention. Our wives can sense whether we are listening to them or not. Starting to open up but then observing that you don’t care enough about what she’s sharing to listen sends the message, “You aren’t important to me.”

2. Practice “shutupping.” Good husbanding does start with asking questions about her day. But once she starts to answer, we shouldn’t divert the conversation away from what she is saying by interjecting more questions. Rather we must shut up.

3. Use body language that shows you are engaged with what she is sharing. If she starts to well-up always move physically towards her and perhaps show the kind of touch, hand on shoulder, or hug that fits the moment. Lock your eyes to hers.

4. Listen for the deeper meaning behind the words, especially her FEELINGS. Tournier continues. “Through speech men tend to express ideas and communicate information. Women speak to express feelings, emotions.” I discovered this truth as a pastor, when I called a mom in our congregation who had four kids. I casually asked, “Kathy, how are you doing?” She answered, “Well I’ve got four nooses up on our porch. I’m about to hang all four of my kids.” After I got off the phone, I asked my wife, “Do I need to worry about what Kathy said?” Sandy laughed and said, “Honey, Kathy was just telling you how she FEELS. That’s what women do!”

5. Occasionally, mirror back to her what you think she just said. The goal is to cause your bride to feel like you are trying to understand what she is feeling because you cherish her. Here are a few phrases you can use: “so, from your point of view…,” “it sounds like your feeling…,” “it seems like….” In my opinion a wife’s greatest need is to feel understood. That happens through her husband’s skillful listening, which helps her reveal what is going on in her heart.

B. The need to feel honored in her role as wife and mom. After calling husbands to provide understanding for their wives, Peter continues, showing honor to the woman as the weaker vessel…so that your prayers may not be hindered. (1 Pet. 3:7). Modern readers are offended by Peter calling the woman a weaker vessel. But NT scholars point out that Peter is drawing a contrast to the pagan culture, which demeaned women for several reasons. Rome valued brute strength by which Roman legions had conquered the world. And it valued cold logic above feelings; reason was to rule their passions. By these false measures, women were devalued and abused in Roman culture.

In direct opposition to the culture, instead of denigrating his wife because she is a woman, a Christ-following man is to bestow honor on his wife because she is a woman. This so-called “weaker” vessel just happens to have the exact abilities and strengths that the male gender desperately needs. Instead of demeaning wives for being like fine crystal instead of clay mugs, or being intuitive, when we are logical, or being shaped by feelings instead of linear reasoning, godly men cry out “Viva La Difference.” At the very point at which abusive men call her weak, godly men protect and cherish her.

“Furthermore,” warns Peter, “if you don’t honor your wife despite her weaknesses God won’t answer your prayers.” The clue to this cause/effect connection comes later where Peter says that God won’t answer the prayers of the proud. “God resists the proud but gives grace to the humble” (5:5). Peter explains “If YOU don’t treat HER ‘weaknesses’ with grace, GOD will not treat YOUR weaknesses with grace—he will not answer your prayers for help.” “Husband, your need for grace is so massive that you cannot criticize anyone else’s need for it. If you don’t get that, you’re in such proud denial that I will resist any request for my help.”

C. The need to feel like she and her husband are full partners at home. Peter continues his admonition to husbands, reminding them that their wives are joint heirs with them of the grace of life. The emphasis is on equally working out God’s grace in our everyday family life. Husbands can fail to be full partners by being too independent, not recognizing how much we need our wives’ perspective on decisions or being too passive, letting the weight of decisions about the family fall on her. After all, she is more spiritual and intuitive about the kids than we are!

Because of the way she is designed, a wife naturally defaults to concern for her home, even if she spends much of her time away in the work world. Because of her hard wiring she can’t let go of her concerns. If her husband doesn’t step in and help shoulder the responsibility, leading in the physical, emotional, and spiritual care of the kids, she will do it alone and exhaust herself. She needs to feel that she and her husband are both carrying the responsibilities for their marriage, and home. After all, marriage to her means having a companion beside her as she travels through life meeting their responsibilities, together.

D. The need to feel valuable. Dr. James Dobson once wrote, “If I could write a prescription for the women of the world, I would provide each of them with a healthy dose of self-esteem and personal worth (taken three times a day until the symptoms disappear). I have no doubt this is their greatest need” (What Wives Wish Their Husbands Knew About Women.) God knew about this need way before Dobson figured it out! Did you know that the final command in the entire book of Proverbs is to give a godly woman the praise she deserves! (Prv 32:28-31).

Her children rise up and call her blessed; her husband also, and he praises her: ‘Many women have done excellently, but you surpass them all.’ Charm is deceitful, and beauty is vain, but a woman who fears the Lord is to be praised. Give her of the fruit of her hands, and let her works praise her in the gates.

Notice the imperative God gives: SHE IS TO BE PRAISED! Husbands and children are to GIVE HER verbal affirmation. Period. Full stop. In Dr. Dobson’s study of depression among women mentioned earlier, more than fifty percent listed low self-esteem as the top cause of depression in their lives, leading him to write, “This finding is perfectly consistent with my own observations and expectations…. revealed within the first five minutes of a counseling session are: feelings of inadequacy, lack of confidence, certainty of worthlessness” (Ibid). Of course, wives need to find their worth and identity in Christ. But God’s design for wives is for them to constantly be reassured of that truth through words of verbal praise, especially from her husband. You are called to meet her human need to feel valuable in a way that no other person can. You are the one who knows her best—body, soul, and spirit; so, your praise carries enormous weight. Since you are a part of her everyday life, you see the blows to her self-image that come and are in a position to continually counter those negative hits with affirmation. Not only that but she was created to complete YOU, as Eve was created to complete Adam. So, her God-designed identity is being YOUR suitable helper. Because she was created to complete YOU, she needs to know that YOU value her many feminine virtues. If her role is to help you, your assurance that she is the perfect mate for you meets a profound need in her heart. It is the regular PAYCHECK she needs. Are you paying her what she is worth in words of praise?

E. The need to feel in harmony with you. Colossians 3:14: And above all these put on love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony. Our wives do not function well when there is tension in our relationship. Neither do we. But I think most men compartmentalize better than their wives. Someone has said, “Men are like waffles, wives like spaghetti.” Their everyday functioning in life is intertangled with us and their sense that all is well in our relationship. Obviously, couples go through spats, hurts, anger, and misunderstandings for at least two reasons. We’re fallen, and we’re different. (If two always agree on everything one of them is not necessary.) Every couple goes through periods of tension when life just hasn’t allowed them to work things out. Nevertheless, as the spiritual leader in your marriage, you need to know that unresolved conflict may be a lot harder on your wife than you realize. One tool to help with harmony may be an anger contract, which Dave and Claudia Arp propose in their book, Ten Dates for Mates containing the following elements:

We agree to tell each other when we are getting angry.
We agree NOT to vent our anger at each other.
We will ask for the others’ help in solving whatever is causing pain behind the anger.

F. The need to feel romantic attraction to her husband. In the Song of Solomon, God enters the bridal chamber, where the newlyweds lay entwined in each other’s arms. He raises his hand over them and blesses them. He urges them to feast on the joy of their sexual union. “Eat friends: drink and imbibe deeply, O lovers” (SOS 5:1) God commands husbands and wives to drink deeply and frequently of the refreshing waters of their partner’s sexuality. The same command to be sexually drunk with our mate occurs in Proverbs 5:19. Husbands must realize that a flourishing love-life with our wives is not selfish; it is a requirement for the spiritual, emotional, and physical health of husband and wife. Shannon Ethridge points out to wives the soul-nurturing component of sex in Every Woman’s Battle:

“We women look for satisfaction through emotional connection, but this will not fulfill us unless it is celebrated through physical intimacy with our spouse. Even the deepest emotional connection is no substitute for genuine intimacy. Genuine sexual intimacy involves all components of our sexuality—the physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual. When these four are combined, the result is an elixir that stirs the soul, heals the heart, boggles the mind, and genuinely satisfies”

The gateway to wanting sex with their husbands for women is romance. What is being romanced, according to women? Here are their answers.

Romancing her means treating her like a princess. Pamper her. Treat her like royalty! One female said, “As long as he shows me that I'm special--no matter where we are or what we're doing—that’s romance.” (Sana and Miller, How to Romance the Woman You Love).
Romancing her means cherishing her. Once, while speaking to a Mothers of Preschoolers group, I asked the wives, “What makes you feel most loved by your husband?” They answered, “feeling cherished.” That means causing her to feel treasured, highly prized, deeply appreciated, precious.
Romancing her means making her feel beautiful with words. “I love your smile.” “I love the way you laugh.” “You look beautiful tonight.” “I love the smell of your hair.” “I love the touch of your smooth skin,” “You have the most beautiful eyes,” “You still have what it takes to light my fire.”
Romancing her means lifting the weight of her responsibilities from her shoulders. Only when she stops feeling that weight will she be able to feel her sexual desire for you. That is why romantic weekends are so needful. That is why on date night YOU take care of the details. YOU feed the kids. YOU line up the baby-sitter and if sex is planned for the night you say, “Honey, I’ll put the kids down. Why don’t you relax in a warm bubble bath?”
Romancing her means making her feel cared for. Linda Dillow and Lorraine Pintus put it bluntly, “When she offers to help you organize your tool bench, it counts as an interruption. When you offer to vacuum the house, it counts as foreplay” (Simply Romantic Nights).

G. The need to feel unconditionally loved. Dr. Barbara Rosberg writes:

“Every wife shares this same need for unconditional love and acceptance. That became clear to us when a majority of our female survey respondents said that the need for unconditional love and acceptance was their number one love need. That’s not surprising when you think about it. We all need love, but we need it most when we deserve it least—when we have sinned against someone, when we have made poor choices, when we have failed. In these situations, ordinary love must become extraordinary love” (The Five Love Needs of Men & Women).

The truth is that every one of us is married to a wife who will, at times, continue to hurt us, be inattentive to our needs, and selfishly pursue her own way until the day we die. And her wounds, at times, reach deep inside to our very self-esteem itself. How do we overcome our inclination to shut down, withdraw, and wallow in self- pity, when her flaws repeatedly hurt us? The only source of such self-emptying love is Jesus. He must produce it in us, or we won’t have it to give to our wives!

If this review of the needs of your wife’s heart is so daunting that you don’t know where to start, join the club. It’s called “Christian husbands.” But it is Christian husbands who daily depend upon Christ to produce AGAPE love in us and who quote God’s promise back to him: “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Let’s believe that promise, ask for God’s power, and get to work!

For Further Prayerful Thought.

What are the strongest arguments for a Christ-following husband to continually invest the nutrients into his wife’s hear that she needs to flourish?
Take a moment to review the first three needs mentioned in the podcast/blog. Which of these needs do you feel best about meeting in your wife? Which do you most want to remember to focus upon in the coming days?
Take a moment to review the last four heart needs mentioned. Which of these needs seems most important to you? Which one do you most want to remember to try to better meet in the coming days?
How can you do a better job of being intentional about meeting these needs in your wife’s heart?

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The Key to CONSISTENCY in Leadership

On 11 January, 2025 By Gary Yagel

On one occasion, the prolific inventor, Thomas Edison, was asked by a reporter how he became so successful. Edison answered, “The ability to apply my physical and mental energies to one problem incessantly, without growing weary is my secret to success.” When a reporter suggested that Edison imposed a rather severe schedule on himself and was very smart, the inventor laughed, looked at the reporter, and said, “You do something all day long don’t you? Everyone does. If you get up at 7 AM and go to bed at 11, you have 16 good hours, and it is certain that most people have been doing something all that time. The only difference is—they do it about a great many things. I do it about one.” Edison overcame distractions to consistently stay focused.

We all know intuitively that success at most everything, be it discovering a filament for a light bulb, hitting a baseball, or leading our homes well requires us to keep our eye on the ball, staying focused on our mission. But in the real world it is so easy to lose focus, take our eye off the ball and lead inconsistently. We’re not real good at following through on our good intentions. Did you know that this past Friday, January 10th, the second Friday of January, has been dubbed “Quitters Day,” signifying that by then many who have made new year’s resolutions have already thrown in the towel? Staying focused is tough. This episode examines step # 1 in staying focused on our mission as spiritual leaders at home—formulating a clear picture of where we are going—what that mission is and then step # 2, shaping our lives to stay focused on that mission.

Last week, we saw that successful leadership at home requires 3 questions to be answered. Where am I going? How can I inspire my followers to come with me? How are we going to get there? The answers to these questions define the three functions of leadership. These we visualized in the graphic below.

Let's review the three functions of leadership:

Function # 1: (Orange arrow across X axis from Leader to Goal: Spiritual Maturity). The leader has a clear understanding of and stays focused on the goal: The leader is called the leader because he is out in front of his followers going hard after the goal. Paul said, One thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus… Brothers, join in imitating me. (Phil 3:13ff). So, we must be striving hard after Christ, getting back up quickly when sin knocks us down.

Function # 2: (Green vertical arrow up Y axis from Leader to Followers). The leader motivates his followers to come with him by building his relationship with them. There are two vital components of leadership influence.

Structural or positional influence. Bosses motivate their employees by paying them, giving them raises, or threatening to fire them. Fathers exercise structural influence by firmly disciplining their children. Whoever spares the rod hates his son, but he who loves him is diligent to discipline him (Prov 13:24). Structure with consequences for behavior teach a child self-mastery.
The second component of leadership influence is relational. As children get older and parents transfer to teens responsibility for their lives, the strength and quality of our relationship with our kids dramatically impacts our influence. Researcher Virginia Hearn interviewed 37 Christian adults raised by Christian parents, asking the adults, “What did your parents do right to steer them towards Christ?” Here are a few responses: “My father was my counselor, pastor, teacher, and friend…My parent’s authority was not something that was beaten into me; they won my respect and loyalty with their actions…My father’s devotion to Christ was transparent. I think I grew to love the Lord because I loved my father, and you just couldn’t separate the two” (What They Did Right).

The next two episodes will focus on the green vertical leadership function of BUILDING A RELATIONSHIP with followers with the questions, How do I make sure I am strengthening my bond with my wife by meeting the needs of her heart, What does it mean to lead with a limp, i.e. win influence with my kids?

Function # 3: (Brown arrow across hypotenuse from Leaders to Goal Spiritual Maturity). The leader equips his followers to reach the goal. This may be the most neglected part of spiritual leadership at home. The leader EQUIPS and ASSISTS his followers to keep taking steps towards spiritual maturity, being shaped by the Word of God. Weeks 5-6 of will focus on the brown hypotenuse leadership function TO EQUIP/ASSIST followers with the questions, What basic truths of Scripture need to be built into my child’s heart, What are the worldview issues in our culture that I must equip them to overcome?

The rest of this episode zooms in on the first function of leadership—clearly defining and then staying focused upon our goal, spiritual maturity.

OUR GOAL: WHAT DOES A MATURE DISCIPLE LOOK LIKE?

When it comes to being effective spiritual leaders of our homes, we must begin by asking, “what is our destination?” Leaders take their followers somewhere. There is a goal to achieve, a destination to reach. Many men fail to lead well because their destination is fuzzy and ill-defined so they can’t formulate steps towards it. As the Cheshire Cat said to Alice, “If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will get you there.” The goal of our spiritual leadership at home is mature disciples. This target is like a diamond with many facets; so, it is described slightly differently in many biblical texts. But it is the same diamond. Paul calls the goal, “growing up into Christ the Head” (Eph 4:16), “Christ in you, the hope of glory” (Col 1:27), “being conformed to the image of his Son” (Rom 8:29). Jesus described the same goal by saying “seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness” (Matt 6:33) and in his command to “make disciples” (Matt 28:19). Let’s examine what the word “disciple” meant to Jesus’ hearers.

Jesus' Command: “Make Disciples”

When Jesus gave us this Great Commission, “Go and make disciples,” those hearing it had a clear understanding of the word, disciple. Bands of disciples with their masters were common in Jesus’ day. The noun “disciple” (MATHETES) means “learner.” It is the word from which we get mathematics. But it described a particular kind of learner—one who followed a master. Jesus’ hearers knew three things about disciples:

1) The disciple had the deepest kind of PERSONAL FRIENDSHIP with the master because they did life together. So, a disciple is called TO Christ—to enjoy a love relationship with him. Christ’s primary role as HIGH PRIEST is to enable us to achieve this foundational part of our mission, experiencing a personal relationship with God through Christ. For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin. Let us then with confidence draw near to the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need (Heb 4:16-17).

2) The disciple PATTERNED HIS WHOLE LIFE on the teaching and example of his master. The disciple’s greatest goal was to be like his master. So, as Christ-followers, WE are called to BE LIKE Christ—to holy, Christ-like attitudes. Christ’s primary role as PROPHET helps us achieve this part of our mission. The Word proclaimed calls us to repentance and we are sanctified, i.e. made holy, through the truth (see John 17: 17).

3) The disciple, as a “follower” joined in HIS MASTER’S CAUSE. Jesus came into the world to overthrow the kingdom of darkness and establish his kingdom of righteousness over earth. Joining in that mission means we are called to EXERCISE DOMINION FOR Christ—to implement Christ’s righteous agenda in our role as husband, father, employee/employer, neighbor, church member, steward, and ambassador of the kingdom.) Christ’s primary role as KING is to overthrow evil and establish his kingdom of righteousness over the earth. He sends us out to further his mission.

Years ago, as I started my family and wanted to stay focused on Christ’s mission for me, I did a personal study of the Biblical statements describing our mission. I soon saw three themes constantly recurring. We are called TO Christ to enjoy a love relationship with Christ, called to BECOME LIKE CHRIST to Christ-like character, called to EXERCISE DOMINION FOR CHRIST, to implement Christ’s agenda in every sphere of life including, most importantly, our homes. In 45 years, I have never been able to improve upon this summary’s accuracy. The call to maturity as Christ’s disciple is living out of this three-fold calling.

HOW JESUS STAYED FOCUSED ON HIS MISSION

On the night before he died, Jesus made an astonishing claim. He said to his Father, "I have brought you glory on earth by completing the work you gave me to do.” We wonder how Jesus could have talked about a completed work. His three-year ministry seemed all too short. For every prostitute whose heart he touched, hundreds remained untouched. For every blind man enabled to see, hundreds were still blind. Yet on that last night, with many urgent human needs unmet and tasks undone, the Lord said he had completed the work God had given him. How did he do that? How did he stay focused on his mission? Let’s look. Mark 1:32-39.

That evening at sundown they brought to him all who were sick or oppressed by demons. And the whole city was gathered together at the door. And he healed many who were sick with various diseases, and cast out many demons. And he would not permit the demons to speak, because they knew him.

As busy as life is in the 21st century with ten-thousand opportunities available to us screaming for our time, I’m not sure any of our lives were as hectic as Jesus’ life was. Talk about opportunities, Jesus had the power to heal everyone everywhere and remove so much pain, not to mention the power to change hearts by the preaching of His Word. So, what does Jesus do? He takes time to get alone with his Commander-In-Chief, the Father, to talk about his mission.

And rising very early in the morning, while it was still dark, he departed and went out to a desolate place, and there he prayed. And Simon and those who were with him searched for him, and they found him and said to him, “Everyone is looking for you.” And he said to them, “Let us go on to the next towns, that I may PREACH there also, for that is why I came out.” And he went throughout all Galilee, PREACHING in their synagogues and casting out demons.

We are not told what Jesus talked to the Father about, but it had to be about his mission. The whole town wanted healing. Overnight the word about Jesus’ miraculous healing power would have gotten out to the surrounding countryside. No doubt many precious human beings with broken bodies had traveled in the wee morning hours to Capernaum to be healed. Yet, Jesus’ decision about his mission is to leave Capernaum and the opportunities to HEAL and go to other towns primarily to PREACH. I believe Jesus was meditating on his mission statement: The mission of the Messiah is revealed in Isaiah 61, which Jesus had quoted in the synagogue at Nazareth at the beginning of his ministry.

This passage foresees the ministry of the Messiah. It pictures his DEED ministry, binding up the broken hearted by healing horrible diseases and bringing liberty to the captives—setting free those overpowered by disease and Satanic influence. It also pictures his ministry of the WORD, “proclaiming good news, proclaiming liberty to those held captive by sin, proclaiming the year of the Lord’s favor.” I believe Jesus was talking with his CO, The Father, about how to balance his WORD and DEED ministries. Late into the evening before, Jesus had devoted himself to his DEED ministry of healing and casting out demons. But he tweaked his direction to leave Capernoum and focus on his WORD ministry—preaching. Jesus stayed focused on his mission by carving out time to talk over his mission with his CO.

This story from Mark 1 was not an isolated incident. Other texts of Scripture show this as Jesus’ way of life. For example, when Jesus had to decide which followers to call as apostles he withdrew and prayed all night (Lk 6:12). The classic withdrawal of Jesus to wrestle with his CO about his mission was in the Garden of Gethsemane. Luke saw a pattern, Great crowds gathered to hear him and to be healed of their infirmities. But he would withdraw to desolate places and pray (5:15-16). The result of constant connection with his CO about his mission was a clear sense of direction. A few months before his death we read that Jesus set his face towards Jerusalem (Lk 9:53). When messengers told Jesus that his friend Lazarus had died, Jesus said, “We must remain here two days” (Jn 11:6).

Following Jesus: Consistent Leadership by Staying Focused on Our Mission

There are just two requirements to stay focused, as Jesus did, on our mission.

1. The first is having—a clear picture of what our mission is from which we shape a game plan for how we will accomplish it. That is what Jesus did. In this episode, we’ve summarized our mission which will become the basis of our game plan in coming weeks. Our mission is responding to Jesus' 3-fold call. We are:

Called to CHRIST, to enjoy a love relationship with him
Called TO BE LIKE Christ, to Christ-like character
Called to EXERCISE Dominion for Christ, implementing Christ’s agenda in every sphere of our lives, especially in our homes. The upcoming episodes in this series will help formulate game plans for each part of this mission

Jesus did not spend the minutes of his life carelessly or haphazardly. He was moving in a direction--to fulfill his mission. The familiar warning, “if you fail to plan, plan to fail is as true of completing Christ’s mission for us as it is of any other part of life. Few men I know would try to run a business without a business plan. Even if it is not written down, they still have in mind the steps they will take to succeed. Few of us, however, have a LIFE plan. But, which is more important, our business or our life? When God has ordained a world in which success in every other area of live requires a plan, why would we think accomplishing Christ’s mission for us would be different?

2. The second requirement for staying focused on our mission is a regular time built into our schedule to get away with our Commander-in-chief to talk about our mission. Certainly, this includes the daily habit of being in God’s Word. In Proverbs 8:34-35, God’s wisdom says, Blessed is the one who listens to me watching daily at my gates. For whoever finds me finds life and obtains favor from the Lord. But what Jesus modeled was much closer to sabbath rest. He worked on the Sabbath teaching in the synagogue—but he regularly shut out the world for a chunk of time to spend with his Commander In Chief focusing upon his mission. Can you find 1 hour out of 168 perhaps sometime on Sunday (which I believe is designed for this weekly reflection) to discuss with him your mission?

If we are to be consistent in our leadership, we need to live, not out of drivenness but out of our calling from Jesus which is what empowers our consistency. Os Guinness writes, Answering the call of our Creator is “the ultimate why” for living, the highest source of purpose in human existence…Calling is the truth that God calls us to Himself so decisively that everything we are, everything we do, and everything we have is invested with a special devotion, dynamism, and direction lived out as a response to His summons and service” (The Call).

For Further Prayerful Thought

Why does it make sense that spiritual leadership at home which seeks to lead our families to be fully devoted mature followers of Jesus, requires us to stay focused on this mission ourselves?
What are the differences you can think of between having a clear picture of mature discipleship versus a fuzzy picture of mature discipleship?
What does Jesus’ routine withdrawal into his private world with the Father to discuss his mission imply for his followers? Why don’t more Christians follow this pattern?

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God’s Strong Views About Family Leadership

On 05 January, 2025 By Gary Yagel

Today we begin a new series, entitled, "Successful Spiritual Leaders at Home” with a quiz for you. True or false? When Adam sinned by eating from the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, God judged him for failing to be the spiritual leader of his home. We might be tempted to say, “False. He was judged for eating the forbidden fruit.” But listen to God’s exact words to Adam. “Because you have listened to the voice of your wife and have eaten of the tree of which I commanded you, ‘You shall not eat of it,’ cursed is the ground because of you…”

(Gen 3:17). The first words out of God’s mouth, in judgement for Adam’s sin of eating the fruit, call attention to Adam’s reversal of God’s order of creation. Adam was to lead Eve and they together were to rule over the reptile kingdom. But in the midst of the fall is flagrant rebellion against that order: Adam listens to Eve and Eve listened to the serpent. That reversal of God’s order is so important to him that God starts with that reversal, before mentioning the actual transgression—eating the forbidden fruit. In a culture that is steeped in egalitarianism, we might say, “What’s the big deal? They both disobeyed God by eating the fruit.” But God wants to let us know that he is offended by this rebellion against his gender-role design, as well as the transgression of eating the fruit. This episode explores the significance of Adam’s gender-designed role to be the spiritual leader and seeks to provide a clear portrait of what that leadership looks like.

Most Bible-believing scholars point out that the role-reversal in the fall is also indicated by Adam’s passive failure to protect Eve from the serpent’s lies. In the prior chapter, God assigned to Adam the responsibility to protect (SHAMAR) the garden sanctuary and those in it from harm or evil. Adam should have manned up and stepped between Eve and the serpent, especially since he was the one to whom God had given the command not to eat the fruit. But, he remained passive instead of manning up. Here is what he might have said:

“Now, wait just one minute here! Honey, this snake is up to no good. I can see right through his devilish cunning. He’s deceiving you into thinking you have more to gain from disobeying God than by remaining faithful to him. That’s a lie! Let me tell you exactly what God said to me before he made you. And look around us. This is Paradise. God made it and gave it all to us. We have no reason to doubt his goodness.” And then, turning away from Eve: “Snake this conversation is over. TAKE OFF. (Larry Crabb, The Silence of Adam).

So, we begin our biblical study of spiritual leadership at home by noting two sobering truths: 1) God takes a man’s failure to lead his home very, very seriously and 2) the sinful nature we inherit from Adam inclines us to neglect this vital responsibility assigned to us by God. On top of that, we swim upstream in a culture which loathes no one more than a male who sounds like he is promoting oppressive patriarchy. Social media has a label for the worldview of anyone who resists its demand to eliminate gender roles: toxic masculinity. The result, I fear, is that many Christian men are so afraid of authoritarianism—the abuse of others using their authority—that they passively fail to take hold of the authority assigned them to lead their families. Nevertheless, what the Bible actually teaches about leadership at home has tremendous power to motivate us as we see its glory! So, let’s examine the biblical view of men’s responsibility to lead their homes.

GOD SAYS MALE AND FEMALE ARE EQUAL BUT HAVE DIFFERENT ROLES

Our view of family leadership must begin with Genesis 1 where we are told unequivocally that femininity is required to fully image God, that both genders share equally in the dignity of bearing that image, and that women are equally called to exercise dominion in the development of culture through their vocation. When God begins teaching us about man and woman in Genesis 1, the first thing he stresses is the full equality and dignity of woman. The Puritan writer, Matthew Henry gives us the proper view of the equality and value of woman. “The woman was made of a rib out of the side of Adam; not made out of his head to rule over him, nor out of his feet to be trampled upon by him, but out of his side to be equal with him, under his arm to be protected by him, and near his heart to be loved by him” (Commentary on Genesis).

But God then writes Genesis 2 to show us how different male and female are by design—so that they can complete what is lacking in the other, designing the marriage union to image the unity of the Trinity. Christians must resist the feminist threads in our culture that undermine the significant differences in the sexes. The Genesis description of Adam and Eve’s creation reveals a 5-fold parallel structure that intentionally highlights their differences.

Adam was needed to work the ground (2:5); Eve was needed because of the aloneness of the man.
Adam was created from the ground; Eve was created from the man.
Adam’s name means the ground; Eve’s name is Ishah meaning she was taken out of Ish—the man.
God brings Adam to the ground (garden) to work it and keep it: God brings Eve to the man to be his necessary ally, i.e. a helper suitable for the man.
God curses Adams’s relationship to the ground when he sins; God curses Eve’s relationship to the man when she sins.

This parallel structure of the creation of Adam and Eve reveals the importance that God places on our different roles. Although many discipleship responsibilities given in the NT are generic, Paul reinforces God’s gender design by assigning different discipleship responsibilities to women than to men.

THE WORD LEADERSHIP: WHAT IT IS AND IS NOT

1.To lead means you are not static or passive; you are moving. Being the spiritual leader of your home is not merely a position description on an organizational chart. It is an active process of moving your followers towards Jesus

2. To lead means you are moving towards a goal. Leading is not merely to aimlessly move around but to move together towards a goal. Leaders provide goals to enable growth for the team members individually and as a team

3. To lead means more than to exercise authority i.e. being the one with the final say. It is intentionally moving your family members. Authority is a God-ordained structure that we must teach children to respect. But effective leadership (especially with adults and teens) must go beyond authority. Harry Selfridge, the owner of a London department store chain, shows his managers the difference between seeing themselves as bosses or leaders.

The boss drives people, the leader coaches them.
The boss depends upon authority, the leader depends upon good will.
The boss says, “I”; the leader says, “We.”
The boss fixes the blame for the breakdown; the leader fixes the breakdown.
The boss knows how it is done; the leader shows how it is done.
The boss says, “Go!”; the leader says, “Let’s go!”

4. To lead means you are bringing others with you. He who thinks he is leading when no one is following is only taking a walk. Leadership is getting your team to choose to come along with you to achieve shared goals. Leadership is influence, not coercion. Spiritual leadership in the home is the ability to get your wife and children to follow you in your love for Jesus. Successful spiritual leadership at home is creating a desire in your wife and in your children to WANT to follow you as you follow Christ.

VISUALIZING LEADERSHIP

Three COMPONENTS of Leadership

1.The Leader. This is us, not because we deserve it but because it is assigned to us by God. A wife who has better leadership gifts or greater spiritual maturity than we have is awesome to assist us; but she doesn’t replace us. Being a leader is also not synonymous with being an upfront person. Any church dynamics expert will tell you the real leader in the church may not hold office, but is the key influencer.

2.The Followers. These are our wives, kids, grandkids, or anyone we’re influencing towards Christ.

3. The Target: Our objective for our wife and children is for each to reach his or her full potential—fully developing their gifts and fully reaching spiritual maturity.

Three FUNCTIONS of Leadership

1.The orange arrow across the bottom axis connecting the leader to the target of spiritual maturity portrays the first function of leadership: FOCUS upon and MODEL your own growth to spiritual maturity. Leaders must lead from their lives (MODEL). However, here is a key point for men: What you model is direction not perfection. The gospel is that we all get knocked down by our own sin. Our kids know we fail. It does NOT help them to see us try to hide our failure; what they need is to see us fail and then get up, get back into the race, and follow after Christ even harder.

2. The green arrow up the Y axis connecting the Leader to Followers portrays the second function of leadership: BUILD your RELATIONSHIP with your followers. A leader’s influence is completely dependent upon the quality of his relationship with his followers. Jesus, affirmed, served, motivated, rebuked, challenged, felt compassion for, and loved his followers, winning their hearts.

3. The hypotenuse brown arrow from Followers to the Target Spiritual Maturity portrays the leader’s task: EQUIP and ASSIST your followers to keep taking steps towards the goal, spiritual maturity. The best leader is not a hero; he is a hero-maker (Hero Maker by Dave Ferguson.) Good leaders 1) help their followers see their own potential, 2) encourage them to discover their own, God-given gifts and passions, 3) equip them with training needed to succeed, 4) give them honest feedback, praising their successes, and pointing out their blind-spots. Many dads understand this part of fathering in the sports arena. We do everything we can to help our kids discover their athletic gifts, develop their skills at throwing, catching, kicking the soccer ball, take them to countless practices, try to get them the best coaching we can, and root obnoxiously for them during the games. Bob Hamrin of Great Dads asks Dad, Do you put as much energy into helping prepare your child to succeed spiritually as you do athletically?

This diagram might be considered the skeleton for effective spiritual leadership at home. Now, we look to some specific texts of Scripturte to fill out the picture.

SPIRITUAL LEADERSHIP AT HOME JOB DESCRIPTION

A. Cause your family members to flourish. In Genesis 2:15 we are told that Adam is placed in the garden to work it (ESV). The Hebrew word for “work it” is AVAD, which is also translated cultivate (NASB). It means to make fruitful, to cause to flourish, to produce, to build, and to shape. Adam is to make the garden (which includes its inhabitants) fruitful—to provide what the garden needs to thrive, to help it and its inhabitants reach their fullest potential. This core concept of masculinity is that we spend our lives (energy and time) devoted to helping those under our care develop to their fullest potential. We sacrifice our greatest assets, time and energy, so that the garden (or civilization) as well as our wives and children (also in the garden) prosper, physically, emotionally, and spiritually.

B. Protect your family members from harm. Genesis 2:15 continues, The LORD God put him in the garden of Eden to….keep it. The Hebrew word that is translated “keep it” is SHAMAR, which also means to guard, watch-over, and protect. The word is used of soldiers, shepherds, priests, custodians, and government officials. Rick Phillips writes, “This calling to keep rounds out the Masculine Mandate of the Bible. A man is not only to wield the plow but also to bear the sword. Being God’s deputy lord in the garden, Adam was not only to make it fruitful but to keep it safe. (The Masculine Mandate). The call to be the head of our homes requires us to protect those under our care, physically, emotionally, and spiritually.

C. Take the initiative to figure out and meet the needs of your wife, and kids. Moses, the author of Genesis, reveals the universal principle that when it comes to the dance of man with woman, the man is the initiator. He is the one who leaves his father and mother to find and pursue her to give her his love. He asks her to dance. Therefore, a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh. CS Lewis said, “God is so masculine that all of creation is feminine in comparison.” What he meant was that when God speaks (initiates action), creation responds. We also know that masculinity initiates by the pattern of Jesus our bridegroom who leaves his place in heaven and comes into the world, taking on the form of a servant who sacrifices himself for his bride at the cross, and then draws her to himself with the cords of love. Because Jesus initiated, we responded. We are his because he pursued us. When husband and wife are in an emotional stalemate or fight, he is the one called to initiate a path out of conflict and move towards her with open arms and unconditional love.

D. Build a foundation of obedience to God’s Word into your followers’ lives. In Genesis 18:19 God reveals with striking clarity what the responsibilities are of the head of the covenant family, beginning with Abraham the father of the Christian faith. God says, “For I have chosen Abraham that he may command his children and his household after him to keep the way of the Lord by doing righteousness and justice, so that the Lord may bring to Abraham what he has promised him.” God did not assign this task to Sara, nor did Paul assign the spiritual nurture of the children primarily to moms. His words in Ephesians 6:4: Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord. Certainly, our wives partner with us in every way but God places the primary responsibility for training children in the way they should go upon dads.

E. Recover God’s unfallen design of masculinity in Adam. When we remember that the Apostle Paul rooted nearly all his teaching in the OT, his command to Ephesian husbands makes great sense. Adam is placed in the garden to spend his energy doing all he can to cause the garden and those in the garden—Eve and the children—to thrive. That is the purest definition of masculinity that I know of. Men die to themselves so that those under their leadership reach their full potential and flourish. So, Paul commands Ephesian husbands: Love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, so that he might present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish. Spiritual leadership at home means we pay whatever price is required to cause our wives to become radiant in godly character, i.e. reach their fullest potential. We are assigned authority to serve. Jesus said, “You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great ones exercise authority over them. It shall not be so among you. But whoever would be great among you must be your servant, and whoever would be first among you must be your slave, even as the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.” He who was rich became poor so that through his poverty, we might become rich (2 Cor 8:9) That is Jesus; but it is also redeemed masculinity.

Christ-following men die to themselves, paying whatever price is required for our wives and children to flourish, not because we are heroes but because we understand the definition of spiritual leadership at home: being hero makers.

When it comes to understanding the call to spiritual leadership at home, Christian men have something far better to offer our children and culture than misguided accusations of oppressive patriarchy, egalitarianism, feminism or transgenderism. We view our calling to lead not as a power play or a chance to take advantage of others, but as an opportunity to serve. We see the complementary roles we have the privilege of filling not as a sentence to misery but a summons to the joy of seeing our loved ones flourish.

For Further Prayerful Thought

Why do you think God told Adam he was being punished for his role reversal as well as eating the forbidden fruit?
What stood out to you in this episode about what leadership is not?
How would you explain the three functions of leadership? (arrows in the diagram)
What stood out to you about the job description of men being the spiritual leaders at home?

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Pride in Your Son But a Sword for Your Soul

On 29 December, 2024 By Gary Yagel

This is Gary Yagel interrupting the normal beginning of this week’s blog tell you how excited I am about our new podcast series that begins next week, "Successful Spiritual Leaders at Home." I’m convinced that no Christian man wants to fail an assignment given to him by Jesus, much less fail to provide what our wives and kids need through our leadership at home. But what does that look like? This new series goes to Scripture to answer that question. Specifically, we will examine biblical answers to these questions:

What is the biblical understanding of my job as spiritual leader of my home?
How can this understanding be transformed into a workable plan to focus upon?
How do I make sure I am strengthening my bond with my wife by meeting the needs of her heart?
What basic truths of Scripture need to be built into my child's heart as his or her spiritual foundation?
What does it look like to lead with a limp, i.e. to win influence with my kids because I am vulnerable about my own struggles to obey Jesus?
What are the worldview issues in our culture that I must prepare them to overcome with a Biblical worldview?
How do I tap into the motivation to do what I know I need to, as the spiritual leader of my home?

As your brother in Christ, may I make this request of you? Would you please take action to let the other Christian men in your church and sphere of influence know about this upcoming blog/podcast series, “Successful Spiritual Leaders at Home.” Please let the men of your church know about this new series. You can print a PDF to give to others, download the PDF onto your computer and email it as an attachment, or just send an email with this link to the PDF, which explains what the series will cover. Here is the link.

Today we examine a little-known part of the Christmas story that not too many Christmas carols sing about. When Mary and Joseph brought Jesus to the temple to be circumcised the eighth day, they bumped into on old man named Simeon who had been promised by the Holy Spirit that he would see the Messiah before he died. Luke recounts the story of Simeon’s words (Luke 2:28-36): He took him up in his arms and blessed God and said, “Lord, now you are letting your servant depart in peace, according to your word; for my eyes have seen your salvation that you have prepared in the presence of all peoples, a light for revelation to the Gentiles, and for glory to your people Israel.” And his father and his mother marveled at what was said about him. And Simeon blessed them and said to Mary his mother, “Behold, this child is appointed for the fall and rising of many in Israel, and for a sign that is opposed and a sword will pierce through your own soul also, so that thoughts from many hearts may be revealed.

Mary, one of the godliest women who ever lived, agreed to bear God’s child and what does she receive? A sword to her soul. Few song writers I know have put Simeon’s promise that a sword would pierce Mary’s soul to music. It isn’t sung about by children’s choirs in Christmas pageants. But Luke’s account of the true Christmas story ends on the ominous note of suffering caused by the opposition of the kingdom of darkness to Jesus’ kingship claim, just as Matthew’s Christmas story ends with the weeping of Bethlehem for the children slain by Herod’s fear of Jesus’ rule—reflecting this same opposition of the kingdom of darkness to Jesus’ kingship. This episode reminds us of the kingdom of darkness’s fierce opposition to the rule of the Prince of Peace and what to do about it.

Although it is certainly a fact that Jesus is the Prince of Peace, his ascension to the Father does not mean harmony on earth. “Peace,” when used in the NT, usually refers back to the Hebrew concept of shalom, which means flourishing the way things were designed to flourish before sin’s corruption. Shalom is therefore on a warpath with evil, because sin fractures the wellbeing and harmony of planet earth. The Second Adam overthrew sin’s rule and has ascended earth’s throne, where he is now fixing everything broken by sin. However, the retaking of Adam’s throne does not at all mean that peace reigns in this fallen world. Jesus made this fact quite clear in Matthew 10:34, Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. Simeon spoke of this conflict.

JESUS CAUSES CONFLICTS AMONG PEOPLE

Simeon says Jesus will be a light for revelation to the Gentiles and cause the fall and rising of many in Israel… a sign that is opposed. In other words, people will be polarized. Jesus explained this polarization to Nicodemus:

This is the judgment: the light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light because their works were evil. For everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his works should be exposed. But whoever does what is true comes to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that his works have been carried out in God” (John 3:19-21).

Jesus came into the world to overthrow the kingdom of darkness and replace broken human thinking “corrupted by evil desires” (Eph 4:22) with the truth of God’s kingdom of light. Christians have joined this cause, which Jesus explained in the words “You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hidden. Nor do people light a lamp and put it under a basket, but on a stand, and it gives light to all in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before others.” Though defeated, the kingdom of darkness still fights to take captive every human mind to cause it to believe Satan’s lies. As we enter 2025, here is a sample of the lies being promoted by the kingdom of darkness in our current culture:

A. Lie: Fulfillment comes from being your own master and doing whatever you want to do. Truth: Fulfillment comes in fulfilling your creator’s design for you. Ephesians 2:10 tells us that we were designed before the creation of the world for specific good works. Whenever this goal of personal autonomy is falsely presented as the path to happiness, it is an opportunity to say, “I don’t actually believe that total autonomy is the path to happiness. As a Christian, I believe fulfillment comes in discovering and following the Creator’s design and purpose for me, which includes caring for others and contributing to community, not just my personal, selfish freedom.” Who knows where that conversation may go?

B. Lie: You build a child’s self-esteem by NEVER criticizing him, lest you harm his self-image. Truth: Welcoming correction is the path to maturity. Whoever ignores instruction despises himself, but he who listens to reproof gains intelligence (Prov 15:32), The truth is that the job of parents is not to protect children from negative feelings, but to teach them how the world works. Failure to use consequences to reinforce wrong choices is called hatred by God. Whoever spares the rod hates his son, but he who loves him is diligent to discipline him (Prov 13:24).

C. Lie: Our job as parents is to protect kids from negative emotions because they harm him. Truth: Experiencing negative emotions is vital for growing to maturity. Foolishness is bound up in the heart of a child; the rod of discipline will remove it far from him. (Prov 22:15). Pity the child whose feelings have always been pandered to. He does not know the joy of overcoming obstacles. He is denied the deepest kind of self-esteem, which comes from having the self-mastery to overcome our feelings and do what needs to be done. Whoever is slow to anger is better than the mighty, and he who rules his spirit than he who takes a city (Prov 16:32). The child who is not taught to say “no” to his feelings becomes a slave to whatever breaches the walls of his heart, A man without self-control is like a city broken into and left without walls (Prov 25:28).

D. Lie. Homosexual relationships are normal; they result from different sexual orientations. Truth: Every culture has recognized that some sexual compulsions are morally wrong and cannot be excused by arguing, “that’s just the way I am.” Like all the major religions of the world, the Bible teaches that sexual desire for my neighbor’s wife, my sister-in-law, a child, or one of the same sex is wrong. Even for the irreligious, there is strong evidence that homosexuality is not “normal.”

Nature tells everyone that homosexual sex is a perversion. The female vagina was made to receive the male penis. Heterosexual lovemaking causes the home where children are conceived to be a place where both mom and dad are present and in love. Homosexual sex places the penis other places.
Monogamy is almost non-existent in gay relationships with 4.5 % of men being faithful compared to 75% of men in heterosexual relationships. 75- 90 % of lesbians report sexual activity with men as well as with women.

E. Lie: Stating your belief that homosexual practice is wrong is hate speech. Truth: Love does not rejoice at wrongdoing but rejoices with the truth (I Cor 13:6). The truth is that homosexual practice is very destructive physically and emotionally, not to mention spiritually. Pointing someone away from such destruction is love!

Gay and bisexual men make up 2% of the population but 55% of HIV infections. Monkeypox, like AIDS, is spread by gay men having multiple partners.
The emotional consequences of such sexual brokenness are enormous. One CDC study found that, whereas 14.8% of heterosexual students contemplated suicide, that number skyrocketed to 42.8% of LGBTQ+ students. Regarding actual suicide attempts, the heterosexual student rate was 6.4% compared to a staggering 29.4% of LGBTQ+ students. This lifestyle is emotionally destructive.

F. Lie: Legislative actions against minors receiving cross gender hormones and surgery violate transgender rights. Truth: In America no minor has the right to pursue potentially self-destructive behavior, e.g. to get a driver’s license, drink alcohol, or get a permit to carry a firearm. States passing laws against cross gender hormones and surgery are protecting children from radical ideologues victimizing children who are struggling with their experience of going through puberty.

G. Lie: The goal of government and education policy should be EQUITY—not equal opportunity for all but equal outcomes for all. Truth: Justice means equal opportunity. Scripture forbids partiality even towards the poor. You might have heard, “In America, the richest 1% have 40% of all the wealth.” The implication is that wealth gap is fundamentally unjust, which makes God unjust because he placed one child in the home of a single mom crack addict, and another in the home of a Saudi Prince. The biblical call to justice for the poor does not mean unjustly confiscating the wealth of a father who worked his butt off to leave behind an inheritance to his children. That is Marxism. Justice for the poor means being sure the wealthy do not oppress them; it does NOT mean using politics to steal the money of the wealthy and redistributing it to the poor.

H. Lie: Women’s equality means denying the distinctions between the genders.

Truth: Believing men and women are created differently is not sexist but wise. To be sure, we must avoid overemphasizing gender differences or unfairly limit full opportunities for women. But the folly of attempts to erase gender differences by allowing males to claim transgender identity is so obvious that The American College of Sports Medicine released this statement, “Adult males are stronger, more powerful, and faster than females of similar age and training status. The difference in athletic performance where endurance or muscular power is required is roughly 10-30% depending on the event.” Christians need to stop being people pleasers and stop being apologetic about God’s intentional design of male and female differently to complete one another.

JESUS CAUSES CONFLICTS WITHIN PEOPLE

Simeon does not simply prophecy conflict among humans but within humans, when he said to Mary, “Your own soul will be pierced too.” One writer observes, “Mary stands before us as a representative of everybody who loves Jesus. If you love Jesus and have him in your life, a sword will pass through your heart as well. There will be inner conflict, confusion, sometimes great pain. You may fight with him. And you may fight with yourself” (Tim Keller, Hidden Christmas). The same spiritual conflict between the kingdom of darkness and the kingdom of light takes place in our own soul as it does out in the world. There we must fight a three-front battle: with Satan who knows the tactics of spiritual warfare, a sinful nature that wants its own way, and a world that wants to entice our hearts away from our first love. As 2024 ends and a fresh spiritual battle in 2025 is about to begin I think of Paul’s words urging Christ-followers to use their armor and weapons. Be strong in the Lord and in the strength of his might. Put on the whole armor of God, that you may be able to stand against the schemes of the devil (Eph 6:10-20). Let’s examine our equipment.

A. The belt of truth. This piece of armor is needed to fix our wrong thought patterns. Putting on the belt of truth means immersing ourselves in Scripture. We must re-program our minds because they have been corrupted by the lies of the evil one and of the fallen culture. Tony Evans in his book, Victory in Spiritual Warfare, writes, When you align your mind, will, and emotions underneath God’s view on a matter—his truth—He will then empower you to fight your spiritual battles…. By knowing and functioning according to the truth of God, you will be on your way to experiencing victory over anything or anyone seeking to over-come or defeat you. We must take control of our schedules in 2025 to make sure we immerse ourselves in Scripture so that we see life from God’s point of view.

B. The breastplate of righteousness. The word righteousness, DIKAIOSUNE, contains no hint of self-righteousness. Think of righteousness as “rightness”—the way things were originally designed to be before the fall. It is that which conforms to the moral will of God. Here are three ways that putting on the breastplate of righteousness protects us:

The imputed righteousness of Christ protects us from Satan, the Accuser, who wants to bury us with shame over our sin and drive us into isolation.
Righteous character protects us from harm. Righteousness guards the one whose way is blameless, but wickedness subverts the sinner. (Prov 13:6).
Putting on the breastplate of righteousness protects us from distractions. Most humans get up in the morning and dress for work. For Christians that work is seeking to spread rightness over earth. Isaiah says the Messiah’s mission is to form a people that may be called OAKS OF RIGHTEOUSNESS (Is 61:3). We put on the breastplate of righteousness because working for righteousness in the world around us is our mission, and that mission begins with ourselves.

C. As shoes for your feet the readiness given by the gospel of peace. The emphasis here is on readiness. This is the same Greek word that Peter uses when he commands, Be ready to give a reason for the hope that is within you. Clearly, both biblical authors want us to be ready to seize the opportunity to share our faith when it arises. Here are two ways to do that:

Think through and be ready to share the benefits to being a Christian in your own life. One man illustrates. “I talk about my experience of being a Christian—of how I now sense a purpose and meaning to life, of how I never feel alone, and how—because I feel accepted by God—I more willingly accept other people. I told how being a Christian makes my marriage better, gives me a clear conscience, and fills me with a sense of optimism and hope” (Randy Newman, Questioning Evangelism).
Pray intentionally for opportunities to share your faith. When we have been asking God for opportunities to share Jesus, our mind is much more alert to the opportunities that cross our path. One of my favorite accountability questions is, Who are the non-believers you are building relationships with and how can I pray for your strategy to share Christ with them?

D. The shield of faith, with which you can extinguish all the flaming darts of the evil one. Raising the shield of faith means to hide beneath promises about God and his nature. Here are a few:

He who trusts the Lord will not be in want of any good thing (Ps 34:8)
My God shall supply all of your needs according to his riches (Phil 4:19)
He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things (Rom 8:32)?
Though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor, so that you by his poverty might become rich (2 Cor 8:9).
He disciplines us for our good, that we may share his holiness. For the moment all discipline seems painful rather than pleasant, but later it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it. (Heb 12:10-11).

E. The helmet of salvation. The purpose of a helmet is to protect the brain. The helmet of salvation is the protective truth surrounding our thinking about salvation, namely that salvation is FROM CHRIST and not FROM US. Remembering that salvation comes from Christ alone: 1) overcomes moralism—the pressure to perform so that God likes me, 2) causes us to constantly stop and ask for Christ’s help to be obedient, 3) eliminates self-righteousness and judgementalism, since we ourselves are desperate for grace, 4) enables us to get back up quickly when sin has humbled us claiming God’s promise, “God gives grace to the humble.”

F. The sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God. The Greek word Paul uses here for sword, MACHAIRA does not describe the swash buckling sword used by Zoro, but a short blade, more like a dagger, used by the Romans in close hand-to-hand combat. This weapon is for personal attacks. That specific attacks are in view is evidenced by the Greek word Paul chooses for “word” in his phrase word of God. It is not LOGOS but RHEMA. Vine writes, “Here the reference is not to the whole Bible as such, but to the individual Scripture passages, which the Spirit brings to our remembrance for use in time of need, a prerequisite being the regular storing of the mind with Scripture.” In the past few months, I have had to rememorize specific verses (RHEMA) of James 1 because I have had such a lousy attitude towards trials and difficulties that come my way. Why not steal one hour from your remaining Christmas holidays to think through your spiritual battles, memorize a verse or two, and follow Jesus’ pattern for defeating Satan?

G. Prayer. God, Himself, identifies PRAYER as the way Christ’s kingdom advances. Just as a military invasion begins with cruise missiles and bombing runs, our efforts to advance the kingdom on earth must begin with prayer, the only weapon capable of dislodging the enemy from its strongholds. Prayer is such a potent offensive weapon for advancing the kingdom of Christ over earth, that in Psalm 2 we hear God the Father identify prayer as the way Christ’s kingdom spreads. He promises Christ, “ASK of me, and I will make the nations your heritage, and the ends of the earth your possession.” As Christ-followers join Christ in ASKING that his kingdom advance, the Father promises to act. As 2025 begins, perhaps we all need to rethink our stewardship of the 168 hours/week God gives us.

Ironically, as Simeon’s prophecy to Mary made clear, the arrival of the Prince of Shalom does not mean ease and passivity but joining his fight against evil. May we put on all the armor and use all the weapons he has given us for this battle.

For Further Prayerful Thought

What are the implications of these two facts: men love darkness because their deeds are evil, and we are called to be light to the world?
Which two cultural lies do you hear most often? How best could you raise a question about whether that assumption is really true?
How can you do a better job of defeating sin in your own life by using the spiritual armor and weapons Jesus has given us?

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Has the Manger’s Familiarity Deadened Its Wonder?

On 21 December, 2024 By Gary Yagel

Author Max Lucado describes the power of what he calls “the agent of familiarity” (God Came Near) to deaden our hearts even to experiences that are astonishing. This agent’s commission from the black throne room is clear, and fatal, “You don’t need to steal the rich blessings poured out upon Christians—you just need to cause them to forget how precious and spectacular they are.” Lucado ID’s this agent:

“He’s an expert at robbing the sparkle and replacing it with the drab. He invented the yawn and put the hum in humdrum. And his strategy is deceptive. He won’t steal your home from you, he’ll do something far worse. He’ll paint it with a familiar coat of drabness. He’ll replace romance with routine and scatter the dust of yesterday over the wedding pictures in the hallway until they become pictures of another couple in another time. He won’t take your children from you he’ll just make you too busy to notice them. Before you know it that little face that brought tears in the delivery room has become—perish the thought—common.”

The agent of familiarity can cause you to pass a garden every day and never look at the splendor of a flower or witness a hundred sunsets without being moved by the grandeur of one. This agent of familiarity is hard at work this Christmas season, spreading layers of the poisonous dust of the ordinary over the manger in Bethlehem to deaden our senses to the staggering reality of what actually took place there. This episode seeks to blow off that dust to reveal with fresh clarity five ways the incarnation can evoke radical devotion to Jesus. May a fresh look at the incarnation fill us with fresh energy and passion to follow our Master well.

THE INCARNATION HELPS ME SEE HOW COSTLY EVIL REALLY IS

Because God is the holy judge of all the earth who will uphold justice on earth, no sin can go unpunished. God’s moral decree is clear, without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sins (Heb 9:22). Remarkably, God, out of love for us is able to be both just and merciful to us because of the principle of substitution. In the OT, he portrayed a combination of mercy and justice in the slaying of a perfect lamb whose death substituted for sinful Israelites. But that animal blood only pointed to the true lamb of God who would take away the sin of the world; the death of a lamb could never justly satisfy the demands of God’s holy justice. The wage of sin is and must always be death to human sinners in a universe created by a holy God. Sin is way too evil to be atoned for by a slaughtered lamb. Justice demands that every human die for his treason. But in mercy, God the just judge, has allowed for one human’s death to substitute as payment for another human’s sin—a substitutionary atonement.

The Messiah who would have to come to deliver God’s covenant people from the penalty for their sin could not be one who had sinned, himself. No sinful human could atone for another’s sin because his death would just be atoning for his own sin. But the history of the OT reveals no such holy saint—not Moses, nor Abraham, nor Joseph, nor David. So, the Messiah would have to be God himself. Only God, himself, was holy enough to live as a human being perfectly so that his death could atone for others’ sin. The judge himself, the divine judge of the universe, has declared his verdict upon all men—they must die for their high treason. But then the judge stepped down from his celestial bench, took off his judicial robes, put on his prison garb, and was executed on our behalf.

At its core, the incarnation proves the severity, the hideousness, the atrocity, the evil, that sin is. It is so opposite to the God whom we are to love with all our hearts that no sinful man can see the face of God and live. God’s holiness would destroy him. Going into 2025, Christians must hate evil and courageously speak out against it. Jesus devoted 2 of the eight beatitudes to challenging his followers about this component of kingdom living, the 4th—blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, and the 8th—blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake. This commitment to stand for righteousness is relevant every day. Yet its importance has recently been underscored after United Health Care CEO Brian Thompson was gunned down on a New York City Street by left-wing elitist Luigi Mangion. Emerson College conducted a poll about Mangione’s premeditated murder of Thompson. 41% of those aged 18-29 said that this cold-blooded murder was either partly or completely acceptable.

This poll reveals the wide-spread worldview corruption in this age group, by critical theory, aka cultural Marxism. One of the central tenets of this view is that the oppressed have the right to violent actions against their oppressors. This horrific ideology tried to justify the burning down of American cities by Black Lives Matter and excuse the actions of Hamas in their horrific rape, beheading of children and eventual murder of 1300 Jews on October 7th, attempting to label Israel the oppressors. Christan’s must confront the false, evil cultural Marxism that has spread by social media, college campuses, and left-wing politicians. The burning down of property is wrong. The attack of Hamas was wrong. Luigi Mangione’s murder of Brian Thompson was wrong. Full stop. Period. Any other comment is an attempt to justify evil. Christians must stand for what is right. On another relevant topic, sex before marriage is wrong. Full stop. Period. If either the teen girls or teen guys in our cities were raised to believe that truth, the number one cause of inner-city problems—teen pregnancies resulting in the raising of children without dads—would go away. The incarnation reminds us that evil cannot be rationalized, denied, or excused. The wage of sin is always death.

THE INCARNATION GUARANTEES THAT JESUS UNDERSTANDS ME

It helps to grasp Jesus’ humanity by remembering that he grew up with a real mom and dad. Max Lucado transports us back to the days of Mary by imagining some of the questions we might have wanted to ask her:

Did you ever feel awkward teaching him how he made the world?
Did you ever see him with a distant look on his face as if he were listening to someone you couldn’t hear?
Did the thought ever occur to you that the God to whom you were praying was asleep under your own roof?
Did you ever try to count the stars with him…and succeed?
Did he have any friends by the name of Judas?
When he saw a lamb being led to the slaughter, did he act differently?
Did you ever accidently call him Father?
Did you ever think, That’s God eating my soup (Ibid)?

The most astounding words ever written were from John’s gospel The Word became flesh and he dwelt among us. The Greek word John uses for dwelt meant literally to pitch your tent—a clear allusion to the tabernacle, Israel’s portable tent where God’s throne, the Ark of the Covenant, was kept. God’s presence was understood to dwell most fully in the tabernacle. In the years prior to the construction of the temple in Jerusalem, the tabernacle was a portable tent to communicate the idea that God was present among his people, no matter where they went. John picks up on the OT imagery and says, “God again has come to dwell among his people.” But this time he doesn’t inhabit an animal skin tent—but a human skin tent. Human flesh is Christ’s tabernacle. God came among his people in the most total manner possible—by getting inside their own skin.

The tongue that called forth the dead was a human one
The hand that touched the leper had dirt under its nails
The feet on which the woman wept were calloused and dirty
And his tears came from a heart as broken as yours or mine has ever been

Even if others don’t understand what you are going through, Jesus does. The author to the Hebrews writes: For we do NOT have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, (which being translated means JESUS LIVED IN OUR SKIN) yet without sin. Let us then with confidence draw near to the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need. Jesus, our Great High Priest, is a great listener. He wants us to pour our hearts out to him. And he is better able to understand EVERYTHING than any other person surrounding our lives. I’m reminded of a cartoon I saw in New Yorker magazine. It shows a forklift operator moving boxes with a quizzical look on his face. Instead of the writing on the box saying “FRAGILE: HANDLE WITH CARE,” it says, “CONTENTS UNKNOWN: HANDLE WITH NONCHALANCE.” The contents of human beings are not unknown to Jesus. He therefore does NOT handle us with nonchalance. He handles us with CARE greater than the care we have ever known from our loved ones. We never wear out his desire to hear us pour out our struggles, frustrations, and need for grace.

THE INCARNATION INSPIRES LOYALTY TO JESUS MY CO

There is something about Christ’s decision to humble himself that stokes the fire of my desire to follow him as my leader and I think the same is true for you. Humility is always inspiring but especially humility in someone great. It wasn’t just that Jesus understands me that attracts me; it’s the way he chose to enter his world.

The omnipotent made himself breakable. He who had been spirit became pierceable. He who was larger than the universe became an embryo…the creator of life being created. God was given eyebrows, elbows, two kidneys and a spleen. He stretched against the walls and floated in the amniotic fluids of his mother. God had come near. He came not as a flash of light or as an unapproachable conqueror, but as one whose first cries were heard by a peasant girl and a sleepy carpenter. The hands that first held him were unmanicured, calloused, and dirty. No silk. No ivory…For thirty-three years he would feel everything you and I have ever felt. He felt weak. He grew weary. He feared failure. He was susceptible to wooing women. He got colds, burped, and had body odor. His feelings got hurt. His feet got tired. And his head ached. To think of Jesus in such light is—well, it seems almost irreverent, doesn’t it (Ibid)?

Christ did not shelter himself from any of the harsh realities of human life. He could have. He could have been born into a family of aristocrats. Wouldn’t that have been more fitting for the King of Kings and Lord of Lords? Yet he did not choose ease and luxury—and that captures my respect and admiration.

His first breath of air would have in it the odor of animal urine.
The first noises would be grunts of animals.
His first bed would not be on royal satin sheets as his royalty demanded, but a feeding trough in a stable because his parents were poor.
He knew what it was like to be a refugee in Egypt.
He endured the verbal abuse in a shame-based culture of being a bastard—i.e. a child born out of wedlock.
As the oldest child he knew what it was like to bear the financial burdens of a single mom with seven children after Joseph had died.
As a tradesman, he got real splinters in his fingers and real bruises from dropping stones on his feet.
As one convicted of a crime he didn’t commit, his wrists and ankles were crushed by Roman spikes and the thrust of a spear poured out his real blood.

Proverbs 18:12 says humility goes before honor and my heart senses that reality. The way Christ came to earth captures my respect and allegiance.

THE INCARNATION IS LOVE—HE BECAME POOR SO WE COULD BECOME RICH

Paul wrote to the Christians at Corinth. For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor, so that you by his poverty might become rich. (2 Corinth 8:9). Is there a simpler, truer definition of genuine love? That is the epitome of unselfishness—I will become poor so that you can become rich. The eternal God imprisoned himself forever in a 6-foot body. He who was larger than the universe became a human embryo. God abandoned the splendor of the universe’s throne, surrounded by myriads of angels worshipping him every second, for a smelly sheep pen. The supreme emperor of the universe arrived in his world wearing diapers. For God the Son, the eternal cost of becoming forever a human being is unfathomable. The more we understand what it cost him to empty himself for OUR SAKE, the more our heart is awakened to his love for us. Dorothy Sayers writes:

The incarnation means that for whatever reason God chose to let us fall…to suffer, to be subject to sorrows and death—he none the less had the honesty and the courage to take his own medicine….He can exact nothing from man that he has not exacted from himself. He himself has gone through the whole of human experience—from the trivial irritations of family life and the cramping restrictions of hard work and lack of money to the worst horrors of pain and humiliation, defeat, despair, and death….He was born in poverty and …suffered infinite pain—all for us—and thought it well worth his while (The Greatest Drama Ever Staged).

And yet Satan and my sinful nature have the audacity to plant doubts in my mind about God’s love. But the eternal truth stands: HE WHO WAS RICH BECAME POOR SO THAT I MIGHT BECOME RICH. That forever settles the issue of his love for me.

THE INCARNATION IS OUR PATTERN TO FOLLOW—DESCEND INTO GREATNESS

Paul commands the Philippian followers of Jesus, Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. (2:5-8).

The Christ-like attitude we are to emulate is described carefully by Paul as not hanging on to his rights and glory as God but emptying himself of those rights and privileges. JB Phillips translates this attitude as laying aside his prerogatives as God’s equal. The NIV translates emptied himself as made himself nothing. How mind boggling are those words! The one who is everything, made himself nothing. The source of life—the one in whom we live and move and have our being—the one of infinite worth and supreme dignity—how could he make himself nothing? How can this be? So great was the humiliation of our savior when he laid aside his glory to become a human being that the only way the language can accommodate it is to say that he made himself nothing.

This Christ-like attitude is the total opposite of human nature. At the very core of our sinful human heart is the desire to be the center of attention, to have everyone else accommodate our wishes and lifestyle, to do better than everyone else and so be exalted above them, to be preoccupied with making sure others think highly of us. Every person born into the human race is born with a congenital vision problem: OUR EYES ARE FOCUSED ON OURSELVES. This defect comes out as pride, self-centeredness, rivalry, insecurity, selfishness, jealousy, anger, and self-pity. God’s lifelong goal for you and me is to make us like Christ—to take our eyes off ourselves—to make ourselves NOTHING—and then fix them on others’ needs. And by the way, such a mission is as masculine as it gets. God put Adam in the garden to cultivate it—to cause it to achieve its potential. We die to our love of ease, sweating every day to cause others to prosper at work and our families to flourish at home. We are called to descend into constant servanthood.

The great irony is that as we follow Jesus’ example of descending from our instinctive self-preoccupation, making ourselves nothing to serve others, we actually ascend into greatness. Jesus never criticized his disciples for wanting to be great. That is part of our male DNA—We want to achieve. We want to matter. We want to win. We want to be the best us we can be. Instead of criticizing their desire for greatness, Jesus told them how to achieve it. And you know his words, Whoever would be great among you must be your servant, and whoever would be first among you must be slave of all (Mk 10:44). When we shake the dust off the manger scene of Christmas, we see magnified the great model of Jesus who laid aside his wealth, and glory, and divine privilege descending as a slave to serve us, making us rich through his poverty. That is our call—made achievable through the power of the Holy Spirit.

And yet the manger scene of the incarnation does not end with Jesus’ humiliation. There seems to be a law in God’s universe. Peter knew it: Humble yourselves, therefore, under the mighty hand of God so that at the proper time he may exalt you (I Pet 5:6). Jesus descended into greatness in a manger--Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.

For Further Prayerful Thought

How do we balance the truth that sin is so heinous and God so just that only he could pay for our sin—the truth that we must take sin seriously—with the truth of God’s grace towards us and call to treat others with grace?
How can you better apply the truth that Jesus is your Great High Prist and Advocate, who fully understands every form of pain and injustice you experience?
How does Jesus’ choice to be born into a manger instead of a palace impact your heart?
In what way is the decision to become poor so that another becomes rich a definition of agape love? How can we better remember what it cost our Lord to redeem us?
How can we better draw upon the power of the Holy Spirit to change our default, subtle focus from ourselves to others and how I can serve them?

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How Can Christ Be the Redeemer and the World So UNREDEEMED?

On 14 December, 2024 By Gary Yagel

Pete had been a Christian nearly all his life. But since his teen years he had been losing the battle with pornography. Desperately he fought his lust, but every new solution was temporary. Praying harder didn’t work. Feeling worse afterwards didn’t work. Getting married didn’t work. Feeling alone and ashamed, Pete struggled for ten years; but his bondage only increased. One day, he heard about a seminar on sexual purity and attended with his friend. On the way home Pete was even more overwhelmed with feelings of condemnation, and hypocrisy. He knew he had to bring his sin into the light to get help; but the thought of his wife and kids finding out about his secret life was too humiliating to consider. Pete’s friend listened compassionately. But it was the last conversation he would have with Pete. The next weekend, Pete committed suicide.

Countless committed Christian men wrestling with masturbation have asked a legitimate question. If Christ has redeemed me from slavery to sin, why am I still regularly giving in to lust and masturbation? Didn’t Paul say the Christian’s old self was crucified with Him, in order that our body of sin might be done away with, so that we would no longer be slaves to sin; for the one who has died is freed from sin (Rom 6:6-7) and then repeat in verse 18 that Christians have been set free from sin? How can this be true when we default to lust, selfishness, resentment too easily and know that our heart attitudes are miles away from being like those of Jesus? This episode addresses the question, If Christ defeated sin at the cross, setting Adam’s kingdom free from its destructive slavery, why isn’t earth’s culture more sanctified and why am I, myself, not more sanctified?

As Christmas draws near, we hear “Joy to the world! The Lord is come. Let earth receive her King.” But if we are honest, we must admit that most of the earth has not received her king. The words continue, “Joy to the Earth! The Savior reigns.” However, news reports don’t sound much like Jesus is reigning but more like evil, hatred, secularism, and cultural Marxism are reigning. The lyrics continue, “No more let sins and sorrow grow, nor thorns infest the ground. He comes to make His blessings flow far as the curse is found,” rightly grasping that the Messiah has come to overthrow sin’s curse upon the earth. But thorns still grow, and the blessing of God’s design of sexuality, for example, doesn’t seem to be flowing into our culture; instead, the culture is attacking it. The final verse says, "He rules the world with truth and grace and makes the nations prove the glories of His righteousness," but we see no international summit of world leaders to acknowledge Christ’s kingship. In short, is the coming of the Messiah no more relevant to the world right now than a fairytale, giving people a picture of a happy ending to the story when everybody lives happily ever after? If Christ defeated sin at the cross—why does sin have so much power to corrupt culture and overpower our hearts? Does our Redeemer’s work have any impact upon this life?

YES. THE TRUE TYRANTS KICKED OFF ADAMS THRONE WERE SATAN SIN & DEATH

From Genesis to Malachi, the pages of the Old Testament promise that one day the Anointed One (Messiah) would come to liberate God’s oppressed people. The oppressive tyrants to be overthrown always were the triumvirate of evil—Satan, sin, and death, which is made clear in the Genesis 3:15 promise that the seed of the woman would crush the serpent’s head. Since Israel was constantly subjugated by foreign political powers, as it was by Rome in Jesus’ Day, its people almost always thought of the Messiah as one to overthrow their political oppression. But nations like Assyria, Babylon, and Rome were just pawns in God’s hands. The root cause of Israel’s oppression was its disobedience, as texts like this make clear:

But if you will not be careful to do all his commandments and his statutes that I command you today, then all these curses shall come upon you…. The Lord will cause you to be defeated before your enemies. You shall go out one way against them and flee seven ways before them…. And you shall be oppressed and robbed continually. You shall betroth a wife, but another man shall ravish her. Your sons and your daughters shall be given to another people, while your eyes look on and fail with longing for them all day long, but you shall be helpless. and you shall be only oppressed and crushed continually…. (Dt 28:15ff).

It could not be clearer that the oppressor, from which Israel needed to be set free, was not Egypt, Assyria, or Rome, but the sin that reigned after Adam aligned his kingdom with Satan’s rebellion, which cased Israel’s failure to keep its covenant obligations. Though many Israelites missed it, the Messianic prophecies were clear that the real oppressor was SIN. Listen to these familiar words of Isaiah

For to us a child is born, to us a son is given; and the government shall be upon his shoulder, and his name shall be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. Of the increase of his government and of peace there will be no end, on the throne of David and over his kingdom, to establish it and to uphold it with justice and with righteousness from this time forth and forevermore (v

Notice that the Second Adam takes back the governing of earth from SATAN, the Prince of the Power of the Air—the government shall be upon his shoulder.
Note that SIN and its corruption of relationships will be overthrown. As the Prince of Peace, shalom will be restored; both justice and righteousness reign—to establish it and to uphold it with justice and with righteousness.
Note, that DEATH, the third ally in this triumvirate, will be vanquished since this kingdom of righteousness will be from this time forth and forevermore.

Not only did Messianic prophecies point to the defeat of this triumvirate of oppressors, not a political foe, but Jesus also deliberately prefigured the overthrow of these three specific tyrants in his ministry. Concerning SIN, consider how thoroughly Jesus proclaimed what the righteousness of the Second Great Commandment required, in his Sermon on the Mount. It went way beyond the outward keeping of the law.

You have heard that it was said, “You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.” But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you…For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? And if you greet only your brothers, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same? You therefore must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect (Mt 5:43-48).

Concerning DEATH, Jesus prefigured overcoming the curse upon the material earth placed there because of Adam’s sin by making the deaf hear, blind see, lame walk, and those afflicted with disease well. Decay and death were further overcome by raising Jairus' daughter and Jesus’ friend Lazarus from the dead. Concerning SATAN, Jesus not only routinely cast out demons but in Matthew 12:26-29 interprets his own messianic mission to be the invasion of Satan’s kingdom. Jesus answers the accusation that the source of his supernatural power is the demonic world with the words, “Every kingdom divided against itself is laid waste, and a divided household falls. And if Satan also is divided against himself, how will his kingdom stand?... But if it is by the finger of God that I cast out demons, then the kingdom of God has come upon you” (Lk 11:17-20).

UNDERSTANDING OUR CURRENT CHAPTER IN REDEMPTIVE HISTORY

One of the reasons it has been so difficult for Christians to understand and apply what Jesus taught about the kingdom of God is that Jesus was emphatic that his kingdom has already come but also spoke of it as having not yet come fully. The messianic prophecies have been fulfilled. Jesus, the second Adam, has come. He has defeated Satan, sin, and death. The victory is already accomplished. He has proven that victory by rising from the grave. He has taken back Kingdom Earth’s rule by ascending to the right hand of the Father. However, Jesus has not yet removed Satan, sin, and death from Adam’s kingdom. Christians are still tempted by Satan, they still sin, and they still die. How are we to understand this already-not yet aspect of the kingdom? Many scholars have suggested a parallel to the Allied defeat of Germany in WWII. Once they succeeded in the D-Day invasion, their victory was sure; it was only a matter of time until VE Day. The decisive battle in a war may already have occurred in a relatively early stage of the war, and yet the war on the ground rages on. Satan has been defeated, but not destroyed. In Colossians 2:15, Paul says, Christ has disarmed the rulers and authorities and put them to open shame, by triumphing over them in him. But he does not say the powers of darkness have fled the battlefield. Satan, and sin still wage war, but we can defeat them if we fight with the spiritual weapons explained in Ephesians 6.

THE ADVANCE OF CHRIST’S KINGDOM OF RIGHTEOUSNESS IN 2000 YEARS

The value of human life. In the ancient world, child sacrifice was common. Excavating in Samaria during King Ahab’s time, Archaeologist Ashtoreth Halley stated, “Just a few steps from the temple was a cemetery, where many jars were found containing remains of infants who had been sacrificed in the temple” (D. James Kennedy, What if Jesus Hadn’t Been Born). Before Christianity, it was common for infirm babies or unwanted little ones to be taken into the countryside and abandoned to be eaten by wild animals. George Grant sums up, “Before the explosive and penetrating growth of medieval Christian influence, the primordial evils of abortion, infanticide, abandonment, and exposure were a normal part of everyday life in Europe” (Ibid).
The value of women. Plato taught that if a man lived a cowardly life, he would be reincarnated as a woman. Little girls have been far more vulnerable to abortion and infanticide than boys. For example, Adam Smith writing in 1776, said: “In all the great towns of China, several female babies are every night exposed in the street or drowned liked puppies in the water.” In India, prior to the influence of Christ’s kingdom of righteousness, widows were voluntarily or involuntarily burned on their husband’s funeral pyres—a grisly practice known as suttee. Africa had a similar practice. The wives and concubines of the chieftain were killed at his death so they could not have sex with anyone else. Such tribal customs were stopped only after Christianity began to penetrate the continent.
Help for the Poor and Needy. Before King Jesus ascended Adam’s throne, and Christianity began to impact the Roman world, charity was nearly non-existent. The Greek and Roman cultures exalted self-reliance, despising mercy, helplessness, and weakness. One Roman wrote, “in Rome no one ever gives away anything to anyone if he can help it.” Into this self-centered culture stormed the kingdom of righteousness, stressing the support of Christianity’s widows, orphans, sick, and disabled, and of those who, because of their faith, were thrown out of employment or were imprisoned.” One historian, wrote, “It was the church’s care for its own poor and for outsiders that so impressed the pagan Emperor Julian. Julian wrote: ‘For it is disgraceful that, when no Jew ever has to beg and the impious Galileans (Christians) support both their own poor and ours as well, all men see that our people lack aid from us’” (Ibid).
Universal Education. Many of the world’s languages were first set to writing by Christian missionaries so that people could read the Bible for themselves. In the latest Wycliff Bible Translators Report, 1,548 languages have a complete NT, with portions translated into another 1,138 languages. This codification of oral language into writing was often the first step towards educating rural, tribal groups. But Christianity’s commitment to education goes much deeper. For example, William McGuffey, a Presbyterian minister, authored McGuffey’s Reader, which sold 120 million copies, for many years providing the backbone of grammar school education for Colonial America. Every collegiate institution (like Harvard, Princeton, Yale) founded before 1775 in the colonies—except the University of Pennsylvania—was established by some branch of the Christian Church
Founding of Hospitals. In the pre-Christian era hospitals existed only for soldiers, gladiators, and slaves whose masters could pay for their care. Manual laborers and other poor individuals had no place of refuge. Because humans feared contracting disease the ill were often driven out of their homes and left to their fate. But In 325, the Christian church’s Council of Nicaea, made a world-changing decree. The bishops of the church were instructed to go into every cathedral city in Christendom and start a hospital. Even today, many hospitals reflect their origin in their name, e.g. Holy Cross, Adventist, St. Joseph’s.
The Discovery of Science. It is well known that many of the most famous scientists were devout Christians, e.g. Blaise Paschal, Johannes Kepler, and Sir Isaac Newton. Less well known is that Christians urged the exploration of science through organizations like The Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge founded in 1660. Seven of the ten founders were Puritans.
Explosion of Conversions to the Christian Faith. Though overall church attendance in America is down, the losses are nominal Christinas from Liberal churches whose Christianity is inherited in contrast to religion that is chosen as it is among Evangelicals. Tim Keller in his book, Making Sense of God points out “Only evangelical protestants, among all religious bodies in the Untied States are converting more people than they are losing. In the non-Western world the growth of Christianity is stunning.” In the last 50 years, the number of Christians in East Asia (China, Korea, Japan) has grown from 11.4 million to 171.1 million. In 1910, only 12 million people in Africa were Christians. Today, there are 630 million Christians, a growth from 10% to almost 50% of the population. Today, there are Christians and organized Christian churches in every inhabited country on earth. Christ is spreading his kingdom of righteousness over the earth!

5 REASONS WHY CHRISTIANS AREN’T MORE SANCTIFIED (HOLY) TODAY

A. Because we lose sight of the greatness of God’s mercy to us. After devoting eleven chapters to putting the glorious gospel of grace on display to the Romans, Paul writes, With eyes wide open to the mercies of God, I beg you, my brothers, as an act of intelligent worship, to give him your bodies, as a living sacrifice, consecrated to him and acceptable by him. There is only one intelligent response to God’s mercy—in gratefulness put myself on the altar. Jesus gave two examples of sinners who had not lost sight of God’s mercy—the tax collector in the corner of the temple who would not even lift up his eyes to heaven, but beat his breast, saying, ‘God, be merciful to me, a sinner!'--and the prostitute standing behind him, weeping, shamelessly letting down her hair to wipe Jesus’ feet with her tears, of whom He said, “She who is forgiven much loves much.” Until I realize that my sin is worse than hers—because to whom much is given much is required—I won’t find the power to keep putting myself on the altar, grateful for God’s mercy to me.

B. Because spiritual change is more a consequence of what our hearts love than of what our hands do. Ultimately, sanctification is the result of loving Jesus more than I love sin. Godliness is not behavior modification, but heart transformation. I cannot take three steps to overcome lust forever next Thursday at 3 PM and be forever, sexually pure. The problem is my heart desires, which are not easily changed. Channeling and protecting the desires of my heart is the foundation of growing in holiness, which is why God says, Watch over your heart with all diligence for from it flow the springs of life (Prov 4:23). John Piper recognizes that holiness is a consequence of changing our heart loves in saying: “One reason lust reigns in so many is that Christ has so little appeal. You were created to treasure Christ with all your heart—more than you treasure sex or sugar. If you have little taste for Jesus, competing pleasures will triumph. Plead with God for the satisfaction you don’t have. Quote Psalm 90:14, ‘Satisfy us in the morning with your steadfast love that we might rejoice and be glad all our days’” (Desiring God).

C. Because abiding in Christ, the only path to spiritual fruitfulness, takes great intentionality. Jesus was clear about how the fruit of the Spirit are produced. He said, Abide in me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit by itself, unless it abides in the vine, neither can you, unless you abide in me. I am the vine; you are the branches. Whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing. One of the most counter-intuitive parts of Jesus’ personality was how he handled his life getting busier and his opportunities exploding. Luke observes, But now even more the report about him went abroad, and great crowds gathered to hear him and to be healed of their infirmities. But he would withdraw to desolate places and pray (Lk 5:15-16). The greatest temptation to men of our cell-phone-world of the 21st century may not be the constant accessibility of porn. It may be the theft of private time to shut out the world of sound and sight and touch to commune with our savior and Lord.

D. Because few of us have mastered fighting sin with the spiritual weapons given to us to use in this battle. Christians are not commanded to be courageous in spiritual battle in our own strength but to be strong in the Lord and in the strength of his might. Paul then equates fighting in the Lord with putting on Christ’s spiritual armor and picking up Christ’s spiritual weapons. We are to put on the belt of truth, breastplate of righteousness, readiness to share the gospel, and helmet of salvation, raise up the shield of faith, and fight with the sword of the spirit and with prayer in Jesus’ name. But very few Christians know what employing each piece of equipment in battle actually looks like. The result is far too many victories for agents of the kingdom of darkness who all seem to know how to fight!

E. Because most Christian men fight their battles in a manner that guarantees failure—ALONE. When it comes to obeying God’s command, “Be holy because I am holy,” men ignore the age-old text of Scripture that says, Two are better than one, because they have a good reward for their toil. For if they fall, one will lift up his fellow. But woe to him who is alone when he falls and has not another to lift him up! Again, if two lie together, they keep warm but how can one keep warm alone? And though a man might prevail against one who is alone, two will withstand him—a threefold cord is not quickly broken (Ecc 4:9-12). Furthermore, Jesus sets all Christian men an example. On the night of his most intense spiritual battle, in the Garden of Gethsemane when he wrestled with saying yes or no to the cross—he intentionally invited only his three closest buddies, Peter, James and John to be near him, coming back to them over and over as he fought his battle. Jesus did not fight this battle alone.

For Further Prayerful Thought

What evidence would you point to from Scripture that proves that the oppressors the promised Messiah would overthrow always were Satan, sin, and death and not the political oppressors of Israel?
How does the Already/Not Yet description of this period of redemptive history clarify things and muddy things?
The Second Adam’s overthrow of the triumvirate, Satan, sin, and death and ascension to God’s right hand has positioned Him to spread his kingdom of righteousness and restoration over earth for 2000 years. Of the 6 ways that I mentioned its impact on culture which ones stood out most to you?
Which reason for Christians’ lack of sanctification stood out most to you?

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God DELEGATED More to Us Than We Realize

On 07 December, 2024 By Gary Yagel

As we pursue a clear mission target, which is the goal of this podcast, Christians today can inadvertently be shaped by a “lifeboat” view of our mission in this fallen world. We can subtly act as if the created world and its culture were the Titanic, and now that we’ve hit the iceberg of sin, there is nothing left for us to do but get ourselves and others into lifeboats. The ship is sinking rapidly, God has given up on it and is concerned only with saving those who will respond to the gospel and get in the lifeboat. Any effort we make to improve life in this world through vocation—building a bridge, producing a movie, designing cell phones, teaching secular kids in public schools—has no real meaning. It is just “rearranging the deck chairs” on the sinking ship of our fallen culture on its way down to ruin.

But such a view of Christianity is very flawed. This world is not sinking down to ultimate destruction like the Titanic; to the contrary, it has been boarded by the builder and designer of the ship who at great personal cost is patching the giant hole caused by sin, restoring everything damaged by the toxic sea water, and sailing that renewed ship right into the golden waters of a perfect, eternal world. The lifeboat understanding of Christianity ignores two fundamental biblical facts. The first is the goodness of God’s creation, a mirror of God’s glory, upon which God Himself will one day dwell in its renewed form with his people forever. The second is the reality of God’s nature as a delegator. In the first chapter of the Bible, God is revealed not only to be the great creator and ruler over his good earth, but also to be the great delegator—having fashioned Adam and Eve in his own image to continue the creating and ruling process that He began. His delegating words were, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.” This episode examines how God delegated to humans the process he started, i.e. creating and ruling the material order and why such an understanding gives everyday life great meaning.

Today we continue our series, Life Is Knowing God, by examining God’s role as delegator. The chief way God chooses to rule his creation is by delegating that rule to humanity, and the chief way Christ brings renewal to his fallen creation is, likewise, by delegating his rule to the new humanity commanding us to seek first the spread of Christ’s kingdom rule into every sphere of our lives and ever corner of the planet. The word, delegate, means “to entrust to another,” “to appoint to act on your behalf." God’s plan to delegate his task of creating and ruling the material world to mankind seems to have shaped how God recounts his creation of the planet, providing a pattern for humans to continue. Two aspects of this process stand out.

A. In the creation narrative, God first makes the stuff of creation. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters. Then the creation narrative reveals God following a distinct pattern for Adam and Eve to later follow, separate and rearrange: Vs 4 And God separated the light from the darkness. Vs 7 And God made the expanse and separated the waters that were under the expanse from the waters that were above the expanse. Vs 9 And God said, “Let the waters under the heavens be gathered together into one place, and let the dry land appear.” God, the Master Craftsman, recounts his actions in creating the cosmos not as simply speaking every sparrow, giraffe, and oak tree directly into existence. This would be a pattern no human can follow! Rather, he describes his creative work as separating and rearranging the stuff of creation because that is a pattern that he wants his delegates, human beings to follow, as they continue his creative work of developing the material world he entrusts to them. They are to separate the sound waves into notes and rearrange them into music, separate the light waves into colors and rearrange them into art, separate iron ore from the ground and rearrange it into bridges, separate rubber from trees and rearrange it into balls.

B. The second pattern in God’s creative process that leaps off the page is creating four kingdoms first, the heavens, the air, the water, and dry land (days 1-3.5) and then the rulers of those four kingdoms (days 4-6): 1) The ruler of the heavens: And God made the two great lights—the greater light to rule the day and the lesser light to rule the night. 2) The ruler of the waters: God created the great sea creatures and every living creature that moves, with which the waters swarm. 3) The ruler of the air: and every winged bird. 4) The ruler of dry land: And God said, “Let the earth bring forth living creatures according to their kinds—livestock and creeping things and beasts of the earth.” The connection of created beings to the kingdoms (realms) they rule sets the stage for the creation of man.

Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.” So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. Notice how closely being God’s image bearers is linked to exercising dominion. That is what the High King of Heaven does. He rules. That is what he designed his image-bearers to do—rule. God delegates his rule over Kingdom Earth to humankind.

After linking the likeness of humans to himself as the ultimate ruler, God then issues the First Commission to the first man and woman. “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.” Jordan Raynor, in his book, The Sacredness of Secular Work rightly observes that a correct understanding of our mission as Christ-followers begins by realizing that God’s work of creating was never completed by God. He argues, “God never intended creation to be a product we passively consume. He intended it to be a project we actively participate in.” The sixth day of creation has been mistakenly viewed as the end of creation, when it is actually just the beginning of the next chapter about humans creating:

“You might think that our story is ending, but in fact it is just the beginning. God made you to look like Him—to act and work and create with Him. Because while in six days God created a lot, there are so many things that He simply did not—like bridges and baseballs, sandcastles and s’mores. God asked us to create and fill the planet with more” (The Creator in You).

God delegated to us, his image bearers, the responsibility to continue his work of creating with the stuff of the material world and continue his work of ruling over, i.e. shaping the growing interaction of image bearers with each other and with the material world as they develop its potential. This interaction is called “culture.” Before the Great Commission was given by the Second Adam, God gave the First Commission to the First Adam and Eve. Let’s dig into a deeper understanding of it.

1. Be fruitful and multiply. The creation of human beings is not finished. However, God no longer makes males from the dust of the ground and females from the ribs of males. God delegates to the first husband and wife, the responsibility of creating humans through sperm joining egg. This very delegation of the further creation of humans through the pattern of one man and one woman conceiving a child by making love to one another speaks volumes about God’s creation of the human family as the first human institution. How perfect for a child to be conceived in a home in which his mom and dad are in love with each other and thus provide the stability of both father and mother for the child.

We are raising children and grandchildren who hear many voices that undermine God’s design of the family. Marriage is no longer defined as the joining of one man and one woman. God’s design of children to need the feminine touch of a mom and masculine involvement of a dad is being denied. In fact, the value of children, themselves, has been substantially lost in America, which now has a birth rate that is insufficient to replenish our population. Nevertheless, God’s created institutions will prevail against this assault. In contrast to the message sent through social media that the recipe for personal happiness is making money, living for yourself, and staying single or childless without the constraints of marriage or children, UVA researcher Brad Wilcox has proved that the opposite is actually the case. Here are just four of the facts uncovered by his research for his 2024 book, Get Married:

Both men and women who get and stay married accumulate much greater wealth than people who don’t marry.
Married men and women with families report more meaningful lives, compared with their single and childless peers.
Couples who take a “we-before-me” approach to married life—by for instance sharing joint checking accounts—are happier and less divorce-prone than couples who do not.
Couples who form “family-first” marriages—characterized by frequent date nights, family fun time and chores done with the kids—enjoy the happiest marriages.

It should not surprise us that those in marriages between one man and one woman who choose to have children flourish by every measure of evaluation. They are following God’s creation design. Every ounce of energy spent loving our wives, serving our children, and building our homes is fulfilling The First Commission!

2. Fill the earth. Jordan Raynor explains the meaning of the Hebrew word fill: “Scholars agree that this isn’t God reiterating the call for us to fill the maternity ward. While the command to ‘increase in number’ is a call to procreation, the command to ‘fill the earth’ is a call to civilization and cultural creation. It is God’s call to take this largely blank canvas he handed us on the sixth day and fill it with art and architecture, schools and services, tree forts and telescopes.” Nancy Pearcey notes that fulfilling this command given in our God’s First Commission to humans is fundamental to every human’s sense of fulfillment.

“The lesson of the Cultural Mandate is that our sense of fulfillment depends on engaging in creative, constructive work. The ideal human existence is not eternal leisure or an endless vacation—or even a monastic retreat into prayer and meditation—but creative effort expended for the glory of God and the benefit of others. Our calling is not just ‘to go to heaven’ but also to cultivate the earth, not just to ‘save souls’ but also to serve God through our work. For God himself is engaged not only in the work of salvation but also in the work pf preserving and developing his creation. When we obey the cultural mandate, we participate in the work of God himself." (Total Truth).

3. Subdue the earth. The ESV Study Bible notes:

“The term ‘subdue’ (Heb KABASH) elsewhere means to bring a people or land into subjection so that it will yield service to the one subduing it. Here the idea is that the man and woman are to make the earth’s resources beneficial for themselves, which implies that they would investigate and develop the earth’s resources to make them useful for human beings generally. This command provides a foundation for wise scientific and technological development.”

“Subdue the earth,” means to harness the natural world: plant crops, build bridges, operate businesses, write fiction, design I phones, and compose music. God has delegated to us, his image bearers, the responsibility for building civilization on the planet that is a mirror of his glory. I don’t know whether or not the cofounder of Nike, Phil Knight, is a Christian. But Knight captured the essence of this concept when he wrote:

“When you make something, when you improve something, when you deliver something, when you add some new thing or service to the lives of strangers, making them happier, or healthier, or safer, or better and when you do it all crisply and efficiently, smartly the way everything should be done but seldom is—you’re participating more fully in the whole grand human drama” (Shoe Dog).

4. Rule over all of creation. The ESV renders rule, exercise dominion over the rest of creation. The High King delegates to us the shaping of life on Kingdom Earth as the population grows and diversifies, developing the earth’s resources. But we are to rule our portion of the kingdom FOR him, in alignment with the moral law of God written on every heart (Rom 2:15). Human life is to be regulated by the righteousness of the High King, summarized in the two Great Commandments, “Love the LORD with all your heart” and “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Righteousness was to prevail on earth, just as righteousness prevails in heaven.

After Adam and Eve rebelled against God’s rule, Satan, sin, and death took over earth’s throne causing life on the planet to descend into such wickedness that God destroyed nearly all of it in the flood. Interestingly, as the flood waters recede and created life begins anew, God repeats The First Commission to Noah in words nearly identical to those said to Adam and Eve, with one huge exception. Be fruitful and multiply, increase greatly on the earth and multiply in it. But notice that the command to rule over creation is missing. This omission seems to reflect the truth that at that time, Satan, sin, and death were ruling Adam’s throne, not Adam. Adam’s race needed a Second Adam to overthrow the kingdom of darkness and win back Adam’s throne. And, as we are now celebrating in Advent, our Redeemer did come to take back Adam’s kingdom, and give it back to us, paying the penalty that our sins justly demand so that as Jesus destroys sin, he doesn’t have to destroy us. The Second Adam now re-delegates to us the responsibility to spread his kingdom of righteousness over all the earth making disciples of every nation.

FIVE TAKE-AWAYS

This entire episode about God the delegator is background for grasping more fully that God has delegated to us the responsibility for ruling earth in The First Commission and then again in the Great Commission, assigning us responsibility for taking his redemptive kingdom of righteousness into every sphere of earthly life where we have influence and into every corner of the globe. We are to exercise dominion, to rule, to implement righteousness there. Here are a few practical take-aways from what we’ve seen:

A. Every ounce of energy you spend to care for your wife, kids, grandkids and extended family is fulfilling our First Commission. The family is God’s primary institution for the benefit of planet earth, beginning even before the church. The importance of this sphere of life is so foundational that we all need a game plan. Here is a quick way to design a simple game plan for loving your wife well this week. Read through these components of love asking, “which need more attention from me?”

Love is slow to lose patience—it looks for a way of being constructive. It is not possessive: it is neither anxious to impress nor does it cherish inflated ideas of its own importance. Love has good manners and does not pursue selfish advantage. It is not touchy. It does not keep account of evil or gloat over the wickedness of other people. On the contrary, it is glad with all good men when truth prevails. Love knows no limit to its endurance, no end to its trust, no fading of its hope.

B. Since vocation is how God tasked humans to develop Earths’ resources to benefit mankind, every effort to accomplish your work well, matters to God. It fulfills our First Commission. Richard Pratt describes this assignment: “The Great King has summoned each of us into the throne room. ‘Take this portion of my kingdom,’ he says, ‘I am making you my steward over your office, your workbench, your kitchen stove. Put your heart into mastering this part of my world. Get it in order. Unearth its treasures, do all you can with it.’” (Designed for Dignity)

C. Your vocation, the place where you spend most of the day, is your primary sphere for spreading the kingdom of righteousness. You might want to make some time to think and pray through how you can better cause your work sphere to conform to the values of the kingdom of God. Kingdom values include humility, servanthood, justice, integrity, treating all with dignity as God’s image-bearers, forgiveness, grace, mercy, compassion, fruitfulness, generosity, etc.

D. Because God has delegated to humans the development and shaping of every sphere of life on planet earth to exhibit his righteousness, you might make time to think about and write out Christ’s agenda for each major sphere of your life—in your role as husband, father/grandfather, employee/employer, neighbor, church member, citizen, steward of resources, ambassador of the kingdom. The common adage if you fail to plan, plan to fail rings especially true in fulfilling this responsibility assigned to you by God, himself. We need intentionality and a plan.

E. Your fruitfulness in every sphere depends upon your commitment to prayer for that sphere. Cornelius Plantinga, in his book, Engaging God’s World, writes,

“A Christian who goes to work for the kingdom (i.e. every Christian) simultaneously goes to war. What’s needed on God’s side are well-educated warriors (warriors who know what is going on). We are now fallen creatures in a fallen world. The Christian gospel tells us that all hell has broken loose in this sad world and that, in Christ, all heaven has come to do battle. Christ has come to defeat the powers and principalities, to move the world over onto a new foundation, and to equip a people—informed, devout, determined people—to lead the way in righting what is wrong, transforming what is corrupted, in doing things that make for peace.”

For Further Prayerful Thought

How would you explain to someone the Genesis 1 teaching that God has delegated his royal rule over Kingdom Earth to mankind?
In what sense would you say God has finished creation and in what sense would you say he has not finished his work of creating?
When considering the Genesis 1:28 four-fold First Commission God gave to Adam and Eve, what is the significance of God starting out with the love-making process of husband and wife the first part of that commission? How can we uphold the value of the first human institution—the family—without demeaning those who are single, divorced, or childless?
If the goal of both The First Commission and the Great Commission is to spread the righteous rule of Christ over every sphere of human life (beginning with surrender to King Jesus in the human heart) why do we Christians spend so little effort being intentional abut thinking through how to impact those spheres of human life where we have influence?

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The Huge Implications of God’s Goodness

On 29 November, 2024 By Gary Yagel

In December 2004, a massive tsunami in the Indian Ocean killed more than 250,000 people. Over the following weeks, the news media were filled with articles asking, “Where is God?” One reporter wrote: “If God is God, he’s not good. If God is good, he’s not God. You can’t have it both ways, especially after the Indian Ocean catastrophe” Suffering nearly always creates doubts in the human mind about God’s goodness. And if God is not good, then his moral law is just his selfish restriction upon human pleasure, which was the reasoning Satan used to lure Eve into rebellion. This episode examines the massive implications of God’s perfect goodness, not just in resisting temptation, but in enduring suffering, and in shaping the way we interact with the fallen world.

A famous attack upon the goodness of God was made by Rabbi Harold Kushner, in his book When Bad Things Happen to Good People, published following the death of his son, Aaron, from the horrible premature aging disease progeria. Kushner argued, “If God is all-powerful, he could prevent evil. If God is all-good, he would prevent evil. Evil exists. Therefore, either God is not all-powerful, or he is not all-good.” Kushner opted for God being good but not all-powerful. Since Kushner’s book exploded on the scene in 1981, careful thinkers have exposed the logical flaws of his argument. Hidden away within Kushner’s argument are two fatal assumptions.

The first is that the evil and suffering that exist can have no good purpose. Kushner views evil as inherently pointless. This reasoning is of course, fallacious. Just because you can’t see or imagine a good reason why God might allow something to happen doesn’t mean there can’t be one. It is a bit arrogant for humans to say that if we can’t plumb the depths of the universe for good answers to suffering, there can’t be any. This argument against God’s existence doesn’t hold up, not only to logic, but to our human experience. Athletes understand a basic truth of life—no pain, no gain. Many people admit that most of what they really needed for success in life came through their prior most difficult and painful experiences. So even at our human level, we get a taste of the possibility that God might allow evil and suffering for a greater good.

The second hidden assumption that fatally undermines Kushner’s logic is that if God were an all-powerful, all-loving God, he would have destroyed evil and suffering ALREADY. Ironically, Kushner’s assumption that a good God would destroy evil is exactly what the gospel of Jesus Christ points to—but not yet! The gospel is that God himself in the Second Person of the Trinity came on a rescue mission for creation. He had to pay for our sins so that someday he could end evil and suffering without ending us!

Besides refuting Kushner’s false logic, the Bible, additionally points to God’s compassion and identification with the human suffering caused by our own evil as proof of God’s goodness and love for those who suffer. As Keller observes:

“Christianity alone among the world religions claims that God became uniquely and fully human in Jesus Christ and therefore knows firsthand, despair, rejection, loneliness, poverty, bereavement, torture, and imprisonment. On the cross he went beyond even the worst human suffering and experienced cosmic rejection and pain that exceeds ours as infinitely as his knowledge and power exceeds ours. In his death, God suffers in love identifying with the abandoned and godforsaken” (Ibid).

When we ask, “Why does God allow suffering and pain to continue?” and we look at the cross of Jesus, we still can’t fully conceive what the answer is. But we now know what the answer is NOT. It can’t be that God doesn’t love us. As Paul wrote, Neither death nor life, neither messenger of Heaven nor monarch of earth, neither what happens today nor what may happen tomorrow, neither a power from on high nor a power from below, nor anything else in God’s whole world has any power to separate us from the love of God in Jesus Christ our Lord!

BIBLICAL TEACHING THAT GOD IS GOOD

Oh, taste and see that the Lord is good! Blessed is the man who takes refuge in him (Ps 34:8)!
Enter his gates with thanksgiving, and his courts with praise! Give thanks to him; bless his name! For the Lord is good (Ps 100:4-5).
Oh give thanks to the Lord, for he is good, for his steadfast love endures forever!...For he satisfies the longing soul, and the hungry soul he fills with good things (Ps 107:1, 9).
The Lord is good to all, and his mercy is over all that he has made…. You open your hand; you satisfy the desire of every living thing (Ps 145:9, 16).

God’s goodness is his morally pure self-giving character by which he acts to benefit his creation. A. W. Tozer, in his book, The Knowledge of the Holy, describes God’s attribute of goodness. “The goodness of God is that which disposes Him to be kind, cordial, benevolent, and full of good will towards men. He is tenderhearted and of quick sympathy, and his unfailing attitude towards all human beings is open, frank, and friendly. By his nature, he is inclined to bestow blessedness, and he takes holy pleasure in the happiness of his people.” J. I. Packer adds to this explanation that goodness is generosity, which “means a disposition to give to others in a way which has no mercenary motive and is not limited by what recipients deserve, but consistently goes beyond it. Generosity expresses the simple wish that others should have what makes them happy.” (Knowing God).

GOD’S GOODNESS IS TESTED IN TRIALS

James, the earthly brother of Jesus, seems to have understood that when trials come our way it is easy for us to doubt the goodness of God. Notice three ways that James highlights God’s goodness for us to remember in the midst of our trials.

A. God is a GOOD coach. A good coach focuses on game day. He knows he must get his team running hills and wind sprints to build their endurance so that in the fourth quarter they can overpower their opponent and win. As a superb coach, God’s focus is the Day when Jesus Christ is revealed—a day that will continue into eternity. To be fully ready for that day, we need to build character through endurance. So, James writes, When all kinds of trials and temptations crowd into your lives my brothers, don’t resent them as intruders, but welcome them as friends! Realize that they come to test your faith and to produce in you the quality of endurance. But let the process go on until that endurance is fully developed, and you will find you have become men of mature character with the right sort of independence (1:2-4). We cannot become like Christ in our character without enduring pain. Pain is the fire that refines our inner attitudes. But we hate pain because our focus is right now instead of game day. However, God loves us too much to take his eyes off game day. He does NOT wrap us up in a protective bubble to be “safe.” It is precisely because he loves us that he is not safe, in the sense of protecting us from all pain. I think of Lucy’s question to Mr. Beaver in The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe about whether Aslan was a safe lion. Mr. Beaver answered, “Who said anything about safe. ‘Course he isn’t safe. But he is good.'"

B. God’s goodness causes him to promise us wisdom to endure hard times. God has not endowed humans with the mental horsepower to always understand suffering. He is weaving our lives into his perfect tapestry, which includes dark hews of suffering, difficulty, and pain. We view the tapestry from underneath, where the dark threads seem like a bunch of ugly knots. But from the perspective of eternity, we will see how the dark threads were necessary to accomplish God's perfect design of our lives. However, though we are limited in our ability to grasp God’s purpose for suffering, God promises enough wisdom to get us through the trial. James continues into verse 5: And if, in the process, any of you does not know how to meet any particular problem he has only to ask God—who gives generously to all men without making them feel foolish or guilty—and he may be quite sure that the necessary wisdom will be given him. In goodness, God is happy to grant to us all the wisdom we need to get through a trial, without shaming us if we ask for it.

C. The goodness of God, which lies behind every good gift, never changes. As James addresses Christians who were suffering, he reminds them that the God who is behind every good gift they have every enjoyed is the same good God who is taking them through this trial. Do not be deceived, my beloved brothers. Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change (1:17). James wants to insulate his readers against Satan’s fiery arrows, which make us doubt God’s goodness when he takes us through hard times. The God who could remover this difficulty from your life but has not done so is the same one who sent his beloved Son to the cross proving once and for all that he loves you and desires what is best for you. “He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things?” (Rom 8:32)

THE DOCTRINE OF COMMON GRACE

James’ teaching that every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights is the foundation for what has been called common grace. John Calvin recognized this capacity for goodness in non-Christians as a gift of God’s grace. He made the distinction between God’s saving grace towards believers, and God’s common grace towards all men. This James text means that no matter who performs it, every act of goodness, wisdom, justice and beauty is empowered by God. God gives out good gifts of artistic talent, intellectual power, athletic ability, musical skill, wisdom, physical strength, etc. graciously, for the development of his beloved creation earth. He casts them across all humanity regardless of race, gender, religious conviction, or moral character. This doctrine of common grace transforms our entire attitude towards the fallen world.

The Goodness of Creation Reaffirmed

A. We are to VALUE God’s creation. God’s action of pouring out good gifts upon his image bearers to develop his creation points to the goodness of the material world, which is a mirror of God’s glory. It is a great tragedy that the church has often fallen into the dualism of Greek Gnosticism, which viewed the material world as inferior to the spiritual world. In fact, Roman Catholicism located evil in physical matter. Thus, marriage, along with sexual intercourse that went with it, were lawful but not nearly as virtuous as avoiding sex altogether and becoming a celibate priest. In sharp contrast to such heresy, Paul commanded married Christians at Corinth: The wife does not have authority over her own body, but the husband does; and likewise the husband also does not have authority over his own body, but the wife does. Stop depriving one another so that Satan will not tempt you because of your lack of self-control. (1 Cor 7:4-5). In Proverbs 5, God shamelessly explains to married men struggling with lust the same Biblical principle for defeating it that Paul taught: the best defense is a great offense. Drink water from your own cistern. Should your springs be scattered abroad, streams of water in the streets? Rejoice in the wife of your youth. Let her breasts fill you at all times with delight; be intoxicated always in her love. Notice that God does not say to take a cold shower, suck it up, pray and read your Bible more! Scripture teaches men that part of leadership is to be sure he and his wife both understand that pursuing sexual oneness is as important to God as pursuing spiritual oneness.

Any demeaning of the physical realm, whether it is the sexual relationship in marriage, the arts, physical recreation, secular work, feeding the hungry, or clothing the poor is heresy. John’s command, “Love not the world neither the things of the world” was never intended by God to deny the goodness of his material world and its culture. That text goes on to say that it is the values that guide secular culture not governed by the moral law of God that is to be avoided. For all that is in the world—the desires of the flesh and the desires of the eyes and pride of life—is not from the Father but is from the world. To separate from the world is to deny our fundamental calling in the very first chapter of the very first book of the Bible to shape culture. Furthermore, the author who said, “Love not the world” also told us that God so loved the world that he gave us his only Son to die to redeem it and that the spiritual fruit of love can’t ignore the realm of the physical: But if anyone has the world's goods and sees his brother in need, yet closes his heart against him, how does God's love abide in him? (I Jn 3:17).

B. We are to DEVELOP THE POTENTIAL of Creation. The observation in James 1 that every good gift among humankind has been poured out by God upon all his image bearers to enjoy and develop his creation underscores the importance of our calling not just to go to heaven but to cultivate the earth. Chuck Colson says:

God cares not only about redeeming souls but also about restoring his creation. He calls us to be agents not only of his saving grace but also of his common grace. Our job is not only to build up the church but also to build a society to the glory of God. As agents of common grace, we are called to help sustain and renew his creation, to uphold the created institutions of family and society, to pursue science and scholarship, to create works of art and beauty and to heal and help those suffering from the fall (How Now Shall We Live).

Richard Pratt points out, “God ordained humanity to be the primary instrument by which his kingship will be realized on earth” (Designed for Dignity). This original calling of King Adam who was given Kingdom Earth to develop and rule was recovered from Satan, sin, and death by the Second Adam who now extends his rule over earth by reissuing the cultural mandate to his followers to accomplish, now, in his resurrection power to overthrow sin. Richard Pratt explains further:

The Great King has summoned each of us into his throne room. “Take this portion of my kingdom,” he says, “I’m making you my steward over your office, your workbench, your kitchen stove. Put your heart into mastering this part of my world. Get it in order; unearth its treasures; do all you can with it. Then everybody will see what a glorious King I am." That’s why we get up every morning and go to work. We don’t labor only to survive; insects do that. Our work is an honor, a privileged commission from our great God. God has given each of us a portion of his kingdom to explore and to develop to its fullest (Ibid).

The Goodness of Lost Humans Reaffirmed

The Biblical teaching of total depravity does not mean that mankind is as evil as it can be. Rather, it means that evil has reached every aspect of the human heart. In a world full of false God’s like money, power, pleasure, prestige, and comfort, Paul commands the Romans, “Make no provision for the flesh to gratify its desires,” which can easily lead to a very mistaken withdrawal from evil fallen culture and evil fallen non-Christians. But such a separation violates what Scripture teaches. The image of God in humans is not destroyed by sin but only marred. The good gifts poured out upon all means that all humans experience common grace. Common grace keeps our total depravity from becoming absolute; it keeps the world from falling into anarchy. In my view, the greatest impact of understanding the Bible’s teaching of common grace is changing our attitude towards unbelievers who are part of the fallen culture from a negative to positive one. Keeping in mind that our assigned mission is to shape the culture for good, common grace transforms our attitude towards the lost from the unbiblical, default view of adversary to one of potential ally. Reformed theologian John Murray explains that God not only restrains evil in unredeemed men, but he also endows them with:

“Gifts, talents, and aptitudes; he stimulates them with interest and purpose to the practice of virtues, the pursuance of worthy tasks, and the cultivation of arts and science that occupy the time, activity, and energy of men that make for the benefit of civilization and of the human race. He ordains institutions for the protection and promotion of right, the preservation of liberty, and the improvement of physical and moral conditions” (Writings).

Dutch theologian Abraham Kuyper held the same view of common grace, saying, “God is glorified in the total development towards which human life and power over nature gradually march on under the guardianship of “common grace.” It is His created order, His works that unfold here. It was He who seeded the field of humanity with all these powers” (A Centennial Reader). What the truth of common grace means is that the unredeemed around us are often allies in our calling from God to develop the potential of the earth and shape its culture towards good. A generation ago, the great American theologian and philosopher Francis Shaeffer, spoke of the importance of joining forces as co-belligerents. Hugh Whelchel explains the importance of this concept in the twenty-first century:

We often meet people who are not Christians but who agree with a Christian stance on a certain cultural issue, and therefore they are willing to work together with Christians towards resolution. We should be open to working with them towards a common goal. Francis Shaeffer popularized the use of the term co-belligerence to express that the enemy of my enemy is my friend. He explained, “A co-belligerent is a person with whom I do not agree on all sorts of vital issues, but who for whatever reasons of their own is on the same side in a fight for some specific issue of social justice” (How Then Should We Work).

May God’s goodness empower trust in his good intentions in all his dealings with us and may understanding the common grace that flows from that goodness cause us to always value what every image bearer contributes to God’s good world.

For Further Prayerful Thought

How would you refute the argument: If God is all-powerful, he could end suffering and evil. If he were all-good, he would end evil and suffering. Evil and suffering exist. Therefore, either God is not all-powerful or not all-good. The Christian god does not exist?
Summarize the three “goodness of God” truths that James tells his readers to cling to when facing trials. Which seems most helpful to you?
How does the common grace doctrine that God has given gifts to the unredeemed to enable his world to be developed and enjoyed, impact the way believers should view unbelievers and secular culture?

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Delighting in God’s Holiness and Wrath

On 23 November, 2024 By Gary Yagel

In the second book of C. S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia, young Lucy returns to Narnia a year after her first adventure. Narnia has changed so that she feels lost. But then she catches a glimpse of Aslan. We read

Oh joy! For He was there: the huge Lion, shining white in the moonlight, with his huge black shadow underneath him…She rushed to him. She felt her heart would burst if she lost a moment. And the next thing she knew was that she was kissing him and putting her arms as far around his neck as she could and burying her face in the beautiful silkiness of his mane. The great beast rolled over on his side so that Lucy fell, half sitting and half lying between his front paws. He bent forward and just touched her nose with his tongue. His warm breath came all around her. She gazed into the large wise face.

“Welcome, child,” he said.

“Aslan,” said Lucy, “You’re bigger.”

“That is because you are older little one,” he answered.

“Not because you are?”

“I am not. But every year you grow you will find me bigger.”

This blog/podcast series, Jesus Said LIFE is KNOWING God, is intended to cause our view of God to get bigger as we grow towards spiritual maturity. My hope is that by the end of today’s episode we will all be able to delight in two of God’s attributes that don’t usually excite us very much—God’s holiness and his wrath.

As we try to stay focused on Christ’s mission for us, we remember that growing in the knowledge of God was often mentioned by Paul as big part of that mission. For example, Colossians 1:9 commands, “walk in a manner worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing to him: bearing fruit in every good work and INCREASING IN THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD.” Today we consider the temple vision of Isaiah, who in Isaiah 6 discovered, as Lucy did on her return trip to Narnia, that his earlier vision of God had been way too small.

In the year that King Uzziah died I saw the Lord sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up; and the train of his robe filled the temple. Above him stood the seraphim. Each had six wings: with two he covered his face, and with two he covered his feet, and with two he flew. And one called to another and said: “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory!” And the foundations of the thresholds shook at the voice of him who called, and the house was filled with smoke. And I said: “Woe is me! For I am lost; for I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips; for my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts!” Then one of the seraphim flew to me, having in his hand a burning coal that he had taken with tongs from the altar. And he touched my mouth and said: “Behold, this has touched your lips; your guilt is taken away, and your sin atoned for.” And I heard the voice of the Lord saying, “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?” Then I said, “Here I am! Send me.” (vs 1-8).

ISAIAH’S VISION OF GOD

A. Seeing God’s MAJESTY. Isaiah, the prophet, is in Jerusalem. He goes into the temple probably grieving the loss of King Uzziah, anxiously praying because a stable time of Uzziah’s 52-year reign has just ended, probably wondering what his role will be in the future. And he is shocked to encounter a vision of the Lord Himself. Try to put yourself in his place. You’re in the temple courtyard—not in the Holy place—because you are not a priest. You look up and see the Lord, ADONAI. Adonai is the title for the king of all kings. He is seated on his royal throne in the sky, high and exalted—as high as your eye can see—in his majesty. You see the magnificent train of his royal robe winding down from the heights. It covers the holy of holies, and the entire holy place. So exalted and supreme is the sovereign one that the train of his royal robe fills the entire courtyard so there is not even a place to sit. Such was Isaiah’s vision of God’s infinite majesty. Isaiah wasn’t even at the level of God’s feet with layers and layers of royal robe between Isaiah and the bottom of the throne. When you see who God really is, you see that God is so awesome, so great, so absent from limitation, that you become very small. You realize you can’t trifle with him, argue with him, complain to him, criticize him, beat him, avoid him or ignore him. The recognition of God’s weightiness is called the fear of the Lord. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom (Prov 9:10).

B. Seeing God’s GLORY. Isaiah notices strange angelic beings called seraphim with three pairs of wings: one pair with which to fly, one pair covering their feet in humble respect as ANE culture would have dictated. But why two wings covering its face? Because the presence of God brings the blinding radiance of his glory. In 1 Timothy 6:15-16, Paul describes God as one who dwells in unapproachable light, whom no one has ever seen or can see. The brightest, most blinding light possible is what is associated with God’s glory. Mark 9 describes Jesus, Peter, James and John ascending a mountain where Jesus is transfigured, before them. The veil that hid the glory of Christ, the Second Person of the Trinity was temporarily removed. Mark’s words were “his clothes became radiant, intensely white, as no cloth-refiner on earth could bleach them.” The glory of God clothes God in unapproachable light. When considering the glory that accompanies God, it is worth remembering what happened when Moses asked to see God’s glory.

Moses said, “Please show me your glory.” And he said, “I will make all my goodness pass before you and will proclaim before you my name ‘The Lord.’ And I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious, and will show mercy on whom I will show mercy. But,” he said, “you cannot see my face, for man shall not see me and live.” And the Lord said, “Behold, there is a place by me where you shall stand on the rock, and while my glory passes by I will put you in a cleft of the rock, and I will cover you with my hand until I have passed by. Then I will take away my hand, and you shall see my back, but my face shall not be seen” (Exodus 33: 19-23)/

After this took place and Moses descended the mountain, the brilliant radiance of God’s glory so remained upon Moses that the people begged Moses to cover his face—and Moses had only seen the BACK of Yahweh! No one can look upon the face of the LORD of Hosts unveiled and live. So, the seraphim covered their faces with their wings.

C. Seeing God’s HOLINESS. Next, Isaiah hears the voices of these Seraphim calling to one another, ““Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory!” The Hebrew word, “holy” comes from QUADASH, which means to cut, or to separate. God is “set apart” from his creatures. He is utterly distinct from his creatures. He is so exalted above them in infinite majesty, absolute unapproachability, and perfect moral purity that there is a chasm between the most virtuous human and God. Notice that the seraphim ascribe holiness to God not once, not twice, but three times. Grammatically, what occurs here in Hebrew was a totally new phenomenon in the Hebrew language. In Hebrew, repetition was used for emphasis; there were no exclamation points and no ability to “bold” what you were saying. That is why in Aramaic, Jesus would preface some of his teaching with, “Truly, truly, I say to you.” But never, ever was a word said three times, according to the Hebrew laws of grammar—only two. But so totally holy is Yahweh, the Lord of Hosts, our God, that the language Isaiah spoke and heard could not accommodate the concept—the magnitude and depth of his holiness. They had to defy the laws of grammar, crying out, “holy, holy, holy is the Lord.”

Take Away #1: God’s holiness means that his moral attributes are infinitely superior to human virtues.

Though parents do their best to discipline and train their children properly, God always disciplines and trains us perfectly.
Though human dependability is frail—people back out of commitments and forget their promises—God never fails to keep his word.
Though human kindness can carefully consider another’s feelings, such human care often gives way to selfish treatment of others. But God never ceases to treat our emotions carefully with divine kindness.
On the days when we most need love, the humans we count upon may be preoccupied with themselves or don’t understand our needs. But God never fails to love us, delight in us, and provide what our hearts and bodies need.
Though humans can sometimes have the patience that all humans desperately need because of our maddening shortcomings, eventually they reach the end of their fuse. But there is no length to God’s fuse. He knows our frame. He knows that we are dust. And he NEVER shames us.
Though humans can discover vital wisdom through investigation of God’s world (general revelation), the wisdom of God revealed in Scripture is perfect and eternal. It never needs to be culturally updated or abandoned because new technology or scientific discovery makes it obsolete.
Though humans have the capacity to forgive us many times, their ability to endure our wounds has limits. But God’s forgiveness is inexhaustible; he never tires of forgiving us. Jesus’ blood to cover our sins never runs dry.

Take Away #2: Because God is holy, holiness is a requirement for the health of the universe. A W. Tozer, in his classic, the Knowledge of the Holy writes:

God is holy and has made holiness the moral condition necessary to health in His universe. Sin’s temporary residence in this universe only accents this. Whatever is holy is healthy; evil is moral sickness that must end ultimately in death. The formation of the language itself suggests this, the English word holy deriving from the Anglo-Saxon halig, hal, meaning “well, whole.” Since God’s first concern for his universe is its moral health, that is its holiness, whatever is contrary to this is necessarily under his eternal displeasure. To preserve his creation, he must destroy whatever would destroy it.

One of the most irrational sins that a Christian can commit is to envy the wicked. My sinful nature says it would be nice to have three hundred concubines (as Solomon had) so I could have sex anytime I wanted to or be nice to have so much money I didn’t know what to do with it because I had made money my God. Such a loss of perspective, however, forgets that sin is a moral cancer that always destroys from the inside out. God is holy—you can’t get away from the destructive consequence of sin in his universe because he made it. When we see someone who seems to be getting away with violating God’s moral law, we should be wise enough to know he or she is not. We ought to weep for those enslaved by sin and hate this evil taskmaster that destroys lives. Imagine for a moment that you are a pediatric oncologist. Every day you help children do battle with cancer; but so many of those days end with the precious child succumbing to cancer’s power to destroy them. Would your heart not develop a hatred for cancer? Would you not abhor everything about this hideous disease?

So it is, with the cancer of sin. God hates it because it destroys his good creation. Yes, he has sovereignly ordained the sin that he hates. Satan and Adam’s rebellion are part of his good plan. Nevertheless, holiness abhors evil. Did you know that God commands us to hate? Romans 12:9, Abhor what is evil; hold fast to what is good. The Greek word APOSTUGEO means to hate something so much that you shudder. Do you hate your own sin that much? One of the current controversies in today’s church is over those who experience same-sex attraction. One such celibate group identify themselves as “gay Christians.” Such identification seems benign. Yet my denomination has argued that anyone who experiences same-sex attraction and is truly repentant will abhor that same-sex attraction, not celebrate it by calling themselves Gay Christians.

ISAIAH’S VISION OF HIMSELF

Back in Isaiah 6, we see something profound about his encounter with the Holy One of Israel. When Isaiah saw who GOD was, he discovered who HE was. Vs 5 And the foundations of the thresholds shook at the voice of him who called, and the house was filled with smoke. And I said: “Woe is me! For I am lost; for I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips; for my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts!”

These angelic beings weren’t exactly singing a lullaby. They thundered, “HOLY, HOLY, HOLY IS THE LORD GOD ALMIGHTY. THE WHOLE EARTH IS FULL OF HIS GLORY” so loudly that the doorposts and thresholds shook. Even inanimate objects moved in response to the holiness of God. And Isaiah was terrified.

A. Isaiah declares an Oracle of Woe upon himself. Isaiah stood in the presence of God’s brilliant light totally exposed—every thought, every motive, every word ever spoken. As the author of Hebrews says, “no creature is hidden from his sight, but all are naked and exposed to the eyes of him to whom we must give account (4:13). Isaiah’s role as prophet is to be the mouthpiece of Yahweh, to announce oracles of benediction upon obedience and oracles of woe as a consequence of evil. In fact, in the fifth chapter of Isaiah, he had pronounced numerous woes upon the workers of evil in Judea. Woe to those who are wise in their own eyes, and shrewd in their own sight! Woe to those who are heroes at drinking wine, and valiant men in mixing strong drink, who acquit the guilty for a bribe, and deprive the innocent of his right (5:21-23). But in the presence of the holiness of God, Isaiah does what no other prophet had ever done, He says, “Woe to ME.” He announces an oracle of doom upon himself. Because of his uncleanness, his response was “I’m finished.” “I am ruined.” The Hebrew word which the ESV lightly translates lost is translated ruined by the NASB and NIV. It is translated undone by the KJV and NKJV. It could be translated, “I am coming apart at the seams.” We need to soberly understand that every person not clothed in the righteousness of Christ will one day go through this terrifying experience.

B. Isaiah’s woe upon himself reflects the wrath of God upon all who sin. The theme of God’s wrath against evil-doers is a subject about which the Biblical writers feel no inhibitions whatever. There are more references to God’s wrath in Scripture than to God’s love. The wrath of God is not a very popular concept outside the church or within. Perhaps it is because we subtly believe that wrath is unworthy of God. Wrath suggests an extreme, out-of-control, angry fist of God hitting back those who have refused to honor him. Shouldn’t God be above such capricious emotional reactions to those who do things displeasing to him? Yes, he should and is. This human view of God’s wrath is totally wrong. J.I. Packer corrects:

“God’s wrath in the Bible is never the capricious, self-indulgent, irritable, morally ignoble thing that human anger so often is. It is, instead, a right and necessary reaction to objective moral evil. God is only angry when anger is called for. Even among men there is such a thing as righteous indignation, though it is perhaps rarely found. But all God’s indignation is righteous. Would a God who took as much pleasure in evil as He did in good be a good God? Would a God who did not react adversely to evil in His world be morally perfect. Surely not” (Knowing God).

God’s wrath is always judicial—that is, it is the wrath of the Judge administering perfect justice. It is God’s just punishment upon the sinner. Isaiah confessed that at the very core of his calling as a prophet, he was unclean. “I am a man of unclean lips.” As God’s prosecuting attorney, he knew that no one could see God and live. He deserved wrath, which is why he pronounced God’s curse (woe) upon himself.

ISAIAH’S VISION OF THE CROSS

Then one of the seraphim flew to me, having in his hand a burning coal that he had taken with tongs from the altar. And he touched my mouth and said: “Behold, this has touched your lips; your guilt is taken away, and your sin atoned for.” There are no richer words in the English language than these. Your guilt is taken away and your sin atoned for. Notice that the coal was taken from the altar in the temple on which the paschal lamb was sacrificed for the sins of the people. On that altar for hundreds of years, God had been teaching his people one basic truth: Without the shedding of blood there is no remission of sin. On the heavenly altar in the heavenly temple 800 years later, God’s ultimate sacrifice, the lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world, Jesus Christ, was slain. Notice that it was Isaiah’s lips that he had confessed were unclean and it was his lips that were touched by the coal—his guilt was burned away.

ISAIAH’S ALL-IN RESPONSE TO GOD’S GRACE

And I heard the voice of the Lord saying, “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?” Then I said, “Here I am! Send me.” What a picture. Isaiah was traumatized by seeing the holiness of God, because it exposed the heinousness of his sin. In those moments of awful exposure, he knew his need for the atoning action of the Seraphim as he had never felt that need before. In those moments, gratefulness for God’s atonement for his sin so flooded his soul that he could not help himself. In love, he had to offer himself back to his savior—Here I am. Send me.

Unless we are wounded by the holiness of God exposing the true us, we can never be healed by the grace of God and our hearts will remain lukewarm. 800 years after Isaiah’s vision, in the presence of holiness, a prostitute quietly wept, wetting Jesus’ feet with her tears. She wiped them with her hair, which she had scandalously let down, and kissed his feet, anointing them with the ointment she’d brought. Throughout all of eternity, she will be remembered as the embodiment of this great truth from Scripture: Whoever is forgiven much loves much. May God give us eyes to see God’s holy hatred of every germ of evil. May God give us eyes to see how great our sin really is. And may our increasing need for a BIG savior generate a BIG LOVE for God—a love which says, “Here I am Lord, send me.”

For Further Prayerful Thought

What stood out most to you about Isaiah’s vision of the LORD in Isaiah 6?
How would you explain God’s holiness to a child?
What is most attractive to you about God’s holiness?
What does it look like to abhor evil?
How does a BIG view of God’s holiness take us through a process that leads to a BIG devotion to put our lives on the altar to Him?

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Counter-Cultural Belief in One True God

On 16 November, 2024 By Gary Yagel

While sitting in his freshman English class in college, a new Christian named R. C. Sproul was asked by a hostile professor in front of the entire class, “Mr. Sproul, do you believe that Jesus Christ is the only way to God?” Sproul gulped and muttered quietly, “Yes I do.” The teacher responded with unmitigated fury. In front of the class with a voice as loud as a rocket launcher, she yelled at Sproul, “That is the most narrow-minded, bigoted, and arrogant statement I have ever heard in my life! You must be a supreme egotist to believe that your way of religion is the only way” (D. James Kennedy, Sceptics Answered).

In today’s culture, where tolerance is seen as the highest of moral values, the exclusivity of Christianity provokes great hostility. Jesus, however, was crystal clear in his claim, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” He repeated this same truth in his intimate prayer to the Father, And this is eternal life, that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent (Jn 17:3). This episode examines this exclusivity, how we can teach our loved ones to winsomely respond to this accusation, and what are the implications of Jesus’ description of the Father as the only true God.

The late Tim Keller spent thirty years asking New Yorkers, “What is your biggest problem with Christianity? What troubles you most about its beliefs or the way it is practiced.” One of the most frequent answers he heard was, “its exclusivity.” To insist that one faith has a better grasp of the truth than others is seen as “intolerant.” Keller also heard the frequent refrain, “We will never come to know peace on earth if religious leaders keep making such exclusive truth claims.” Followers of every religion believe their religion right and other religions wrong. So, by its very nature religion causes divisiveness. Keller points out that civic and cultural leaders around the world have taken three approaches to solving this problem: outlawing religion, condemning religion, and privatizing religion.

Outlawing Religion. There have been several massive efforts to do this in the 20th century. Soviet Russia, Communist China, the Khmer Rouge were all determined to tightly control religious practice in an effort to destroy it, lest it divide society and erode the power of the state. The result, however, was not more peace and harmony but more oppression. As Alister McGrath points out. “The 20th century gave rise to one of the greatest and most distressing paradoxes of human history: that the greatest intolerance and violence of that century were practiced by those who believed religion caused intolerance and violence (The Twilight of Atheism).

Condemn Religion. This approach creates a cultural environment in which it is considered unenlightened and outrageous to make exclusive truth claims. Denigrating religion is accomplished by stating and restating certain axioms that eventually become common-sense assumptions. Here is a sample of those axioms:

All major religions are equally valid and teach essentially the same thing.
Each religion sees part of the truth, but none can see the whole truth.
Religious belief is too culturally and historically conditioned to be truth.
It is arrogant to insist your religion is right and to convert others to it. (Tim Keller, The Reason for God.)

Keep Religion Private. Another common approach to overcoming the divisiveness of religion is to allow people to privately believe their faith, and even evangelize for it—but demanding that religious values be kept out of the public sphere. This ideology is called secularism—dividing life into various slices of a pie but keeping religion in its own slice. It is telling you to keep your religion in your closet. The above two approaches to overcoming the potential divisiveness of religion are shaping the worldview of the culture into which we are launching our children.

RESPONDING TO THE ARGUMENT CHRISTIANITY IS TOO NARROW TO BE TRUE

When we address this claim, we find three possibilities. Christianity is not narrow. Christianity is narrow but not true. Christianity is narrow but is true. Let’s evaluate.

A. Christianity is not narrow. There is perhaps no more mistaken view about religion in America than the often-repeated idea that all religions teach the same thing; so, Christianity is just like all religions. From the idea of tolerance has sprung the notion that to be tolerant we must agree that all truth claims are equally valid. So, it is ignorantly assumed that all religions teach fundamentally the same thing. Years after college, a mature R. C. Sproul was in a public forum with a Bahai priest. Bahais believe in just about everyone. Jesus Christ is placed as a peer with all the rest—Budha, Lao-tzu, Confucius, Mohamed, Zoroaster, etc. Sproul asks the priest,

“How can you believe that all religions are essentially the same when so many religions contradict each other? For example, Christianity says that Christ came so people could have life, have it more abundantly, and have it eternally. Buddhism and Hinduism, on the other hand, teach that life is a great evil. What we should seek after is the ending of all personal life in nirvana, where the individual, like an individual drop of water as an individual life, falls back into the ocean and all conscious life ceases…Islam vigorously teaches that there is one god. Hinduism, on the other hand, teaches that there at least 300 million gods. Confucianism recognizes no god.”

The Bahai priest’s response to Sproul was astonishing, “I don’t know anything about Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, or Confucianism. I just believe all religions are the same.” Anyone who says Christianity is like all religions is sadly, ignorant.

B. Christianity is narrow but can’t be true. The reasons for this rejection can be summarized in three objections.

Objection #1: There are millions of sincere worshippers who are not Christian believers. While Christians must admit that this reality poses significant challenges to understanding why God creates so many who never hear the faith, we cannot solve them by denying Jesus’ claim to being the only way to God. The assumption of this argument is that because these worshippers are sincere, they can’t be wrong. Sincerity or lack of it, however, has nothing to do with the accuracy of what is believed. We can be sincere and right or sincere and wrong. A nurse in a large hospital changed an oxygen tank in an oxygen tent for one of her patients. On the next set of rounds she found her patient dead. The tank she had affixed to the tent was filled with nitrogen, not oxygen. It had been labeled improperly at the warehouse. The nurse sincerely thought she was attaching oxygen to the tent. But her belief was not true, i.e. it did not correspond to reality.

Objection #2: Even though it may be right for us it might not be right for everyone. This assumes that truth is determined by your belief or unbelief, not by external reality. But we all realize that whether something is objectively true or not is a separate issue from whether or not a person believes it. One unfortunate driver sincerely believed that trains don’t run on Sundays and ignored the warning that a train was coming around the curve and crossing the highway. He was killed instantly. Christ’s claims are either objectively true or false.

Objection #3: A religion as narrow as Christianity can’t be true. The assumption behind this objection is not valid. A position can be narrow and wrong or narrow and right. Just being narrow doesn’t mean it is right or wrong. At one time in history, believing that the world was not flat was narrowly held by few. In many areas of life, we have learned to be tolerant. Different strokes for different folks. Tolerance is a biblical virtue in personal relationships. Someone once said, “Tolerance in personal relationships is a virtue, but tolerance in truth is a travesty.” Truth is always intolerant of error. The fact that one plus one equals two is very narrow, but it is also reality.

C. Christianity is narrow but true. Christianity is undeniably narrow. As we know:

Jesus claimed to have power to forgive sins
Jesus claimed to be sinless
Jesus claimed to be the fulfillment of OT prophecies of the coming Messiah
Jesus claimed to be Yahweh, the god of Israel
Jesus claimed that he would rise from the dead
The historic evidence for the fact of resurrection is overpowering

As C. S. Lewis pointed out, Jesus’ claims leave no possibility of calling him just a great religious teacher. Someone making these claims to be God was either self-deceived, in which case he was a deranged lunatic, a deceiver of others, in which case he was a liar, or he was who he claimed to be, Lord. Jesus left no other option open to us for understanding his identity. As Lewis says, “He did not intend to.”

WHY ARE THERE SO MANY OTHER RELIGIONS? A BIBLICAL RESPONSE

A. God created humans in his image to be worshippers. Archeologists, along with sociologists inform us that religion is a universal human phenomenon. Wherever man lives, he is found giving some recognition to a power or powers beyond himself. Joseph Gaer in his book, What the Great Religions Believe, points out,

“As far as we can determine, religion has existed in every society, from the most primitive to the most culturally advanced. The more keys modern science finds with which to open the locked doors of the past, and the more we learn about the early days of man on earth, the more evidence there is that all these societies in the past had one thing in common—some form of religion.

Religion is not only universal among human societies; it is also one of the features separating humans, as God’s image bearers, from the rest of creation. British historian Richard Cavendish observes, “Religion is one of the things that distinguishes man from animals. Apes and dolphins (the two creatures most like humans), as far as we know have no religions. But no group of human beings has ever been discovered which did not have religious beliefs” (The Great Religions).

B. Adam’s rebellion corrupted the human heart, causing all humans to refuse to be submissive and thankful to their creator, the true God. But because we’re created to be worshippers, we must worship someone or something. So, fallen man invents his own false God to worship in place of the true God. Paul explains,

For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth. For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse. For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things. Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves, because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator (Rom 1:18-25).

C. Because God created humans to be worshipping creatures the first two commandments focus on worshipping the only true God and no one or nothing else. Jesus’ words to the Father, in John 17:3, This is eternal life, that they know you, the only true God, were no doubt a reflection of these two commandments, You shall worship ONLY me and You shall worship THE TRUE me. Let’s drill down to review what these commands mean for our everyday lives.

Commandment #1: You shall have no other gods before me (Ex 20:3). This prohibition, of course, refers not only to the traditional idol worship of physical statues but to the idolatry of the heart. The corruption of the human heart at the fall causes the human heart to take good things like a successful career, love, material possessions, being liked, and even family and turns them into ultimate things. Our hearts can deify these things, as the center of our lives because we believe we must have them for fulfillment, significance, security and safety.

Commandment #2: You shall not make for yourself a carved image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or serve them, for I the Lord your God am a jealous God visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and the fourth generation of those who hate me. Historically, at the time the Ten Commandments were given, the gods of the neighboring peoples were visually represented by huge statues overlaid with gold, decorated lavishly with precious jewels. And they were housed in enormous temples that would hold thousands of people. It certainly could be argued that since we live in a concrete, material world, such physical tangible objects could be aids to worship. Contrast that now with the only true God who commands us not only to worship no one and nothing else but forbids his worshippers from crafting an object that will in any way serve to represent him. The natural question that arises is why not? What is so important that God makes this prohibition the second commandment. The answer is that God takes great pleasure in being loved for who he truly is. Perhaps an illustration may help. When pursuing their wives to make love, more than one husband has heard, “You don’t really want ME; you just want SEX,” which points to the need to persuade our wives that it is who she is—every part of her—that draws us irresistibly towards her. God wants us to be drawn irresistibly in love to him for who he actually is, not to a figment of our imagination. His desire is for us to come to know and love him, the only true God, for the being he is. This desire explains the prohibitions that arise from the 2nd commandment.

1. God in his wisdom, knew that no image crafted by human hands could ever accurately represent the totality of who he is. No carving or statue could capture even a fraction of who our infinite, transcendent god is. Any man-made image would reduce God’s greatness. Any physical image of God is a grossly inadequate image of who he is. To understand this principle, imagine visiting the Swiss Alps, standing at the foot of them being dwarfed by grandeur that takes your breath away. Imagine returning home, trying to explain this experience and a friend saying, “Help the rest of us out. Here is a stick of gum. Chew it for a while, then make it into a replica of the Swiss Alps.” Your response would be, “a chewing gum replica of the Alps would be worse than no replica at all.”

2. Fashioning a physical statue to represent God starts with the craftsman’s formation of his own mental image. In the Roman world the statue for Artemis, the goddess of love, looked very different from statue of Mars, the god of war. Any idol maker must begin with his own mental picture before he turns his stone into a statue. So, the Second Commandment prohibits replacing the true God with our own mental image of God. The reason there are so many false religions in the world is that man was created to be a worshipping creature and having refused to submit to his creator or be thankful to him, has replaced the true God with one that man has fashioned himself. Our rising children and grandchildren need to know that all false cults and religions are the result of violating this second commandment and shaping our mental image of God ourselves the way WE want him to be. For example, the very idea that undergirds almost all other religions of the world—that we can earn our way to heaven by our good works--deinies the most foundational characteristics of God’s nature. He is holy and just. My hope is that this commandment and this episode will fire a passion within us to get to know, love, and celebrate the being who God actually is. That most honors him.

3. It is the jealous nature of God that is beneath both the first and second commandments. But doesn’t saying God is jealous sound offensive? Jealousy is usually thought of as a vice. Are we to think that God is a selfish, insecure deity, so full of spite that he gets back at those who spurn him for another lover? No, because there is a side to jealousy that is entirely right, and proper and virtuous—and that is the zeal to protect a covenantal love relationship. As J. I. Packer has written, “Married persons who felt no jealousy at the intrusion of a lover or an adulterer into their home would surely be lacking in moral perception; for the exclusiveness of marriage is the essence of marriage” (Knowing God). Scripture consistently views God’s jealousy as this kind of zealous commitment to guard the exclusivity of his covenantal love relationship with his people. God will tolerate no rivals. His people shall have no other gods before him. God will not even tolerate inaccurate images of himself used in worship. Those who center their affections, priorities, experiences, or desires on any thing or one other than God himself are consistently called adulterers in Scripture.

Just as lovers want, enjoy, adore, delight in, and come to intimately know each other, God wants to be the first being we want, enjoy, adore, delight in, and come to intimately know. May God be honored by our passion to come to know him, the only true God.

For Further Prayerful Thought

What is the difference between tolerance in relationships and tolerance regarding what is true? How do you see Scripture requiring us to tolerant of other people but intolerant of false ideas masquerading as truth?
How would you answer a Christian you were discipling who asked, “Why are there so many religions?”
What do you think of the statement, “God has too much dignity to accept adoration from worshippers who are not celebrating his true nature?” How does the second commandment relate to Jesus’ statement to the woman at the well in Samaria, “The Father desires worshippers to worship him in spirit and in truth?”

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A Supernatural God Must Exist

On 08 November, 2024 By Gary Yagel

Praise God that Americans, by a thin majority in the election, rejected cultural Marxism. But the war of ideas will continue to rage on social media and college campuses. The rising generation will continue to encounter the argument that intelligent people reject the Bible in deconversion stories like that of S. A. Joyce, which he entitled, “One Night I Prayed to Know the Truth. The Next Morning I Discovered that I Was an Atheist.” Here are his words:

In the years after leaving the military, I went back to college… I pieced together, bit by bit, a humanistic set of values which turned out to be far more self-consistent and pertinent to the modern world than a petrified Decalogue of biblical taboo. It was becoming clear to me that the universe behaved pretty much as might be expected if God didn’t exist, or at least didn’t care. It gradually dawned upon me that in the grand scheme of things there was in fact no grand scheme…God performed no observable function and had no valid purpose. The question entered my mind, “What is a God without purpose and for which there is no evidence?” “Non-existent,” came the obvious answer (Keller, Making Sense of God)

This episode equips men to guide their families and friends to see that science and logic do NOT undermine belief in God. To the contrary, the evidence for the existence of God is so compelling that it is unreasonable not to believe in God.

As we continue our series on knowing God, we come to his supernatural attributes, i.e. characteristics of the infinite God. But before digging into them, it is important to realize how necessary these characteristics are to explain human life, even though fallen man wants to suppress this truth. Today, best-selling books written by Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris promote the idea that science in general, and evolutionary science in particular, have made belief in God obsolete. In The God Delusion, Dawkins argues that you can’t be an intelligent scientific thinker and still hold religious beliefs. It is one or the other. What less enlightened humans couldn’t understand and therefore attributed to some kind of god, we now can explain by science. The Bible’s miracles exhibit the same mythology that all religions have used to explain things they couldn’t understand. But scientists know better.

Though popular, this argument is not based on sound reasoning. Science is, by definition, the study of the material world; it is only equipped to test for causes within the closed system of the physical, natural order. Dawkins assumes but does not prove that all events that take place in the natural order can be explained entirely by other events inside that closed, material system. He is like a mechanic who is trying to fix a car that won’t start. He studies every aspect of the system—the car—for an explanation. But suppose that car was in northern Canada, and it was -40 degrees. The assumption that the internal system of the car explains the car not starting is false. Something outside the system, namely the temperature, explains reality. Science is the investigation of the closed, material universe; it is unable to perceive what is outside the material universe. Dawkin’s hidden premise is that because science can’t see a spiritual cause outside the material world there can’t be one. That is like a Canadian mechanic saying, “there has to be something wrong with the car, itself,” disregarding a cause outside the car’s system. So, science does not at all prove that God doesn’t exist; it just assumes it.

But the biblical response to Dawkins goes much further than pointing out his faulty reasoning in assuming his conclusion. Scientific observation yields weighty evidence that there must be a supernatural being who exists outside of the material order.

THE FAILURE OF SECULAR MATERIALISM TO EXPLAIN LIFE

A. Intelligent design. Here is an experiment to conduct with your child, or grandchild. While sitting in the living room, point to any object in the room and ask him, “Do you think this was MADE by someone or RANDOMLY CAME INTO EXISTENCE BY CHANCE?” In my living room, it would be, “Do you think this piano just happened because it evolved on its own or that someone designed and built it?” Do you think this lamp just accidentally came together because a lightbulb and brass pole just happened to get blown together in a junk yard with some electrical wire, or that someone designed and created this lamp?” We need to help them see that everything about human experience tells us that if we see order anywhere in the world around us, there was an orderer. If they are walking in the woods and see a treehouse, they know that someone built it. If they pick up your cell phone, they know they are looking at something that was intelligently designed. If they walk into the classroom at school and the warm-up activity for that class is written on the board, they know someone wrote those words on the board. The most logical scientific truth of all is that if we see order in this physical world, it is because there is an orderer. NOTHING in life indicates that order results from disorder or random chance. The order of the universe points to a designer.

B. The Big Bang. There is strong scientific evidence that the universe is expanding, which has led most scientists to reason backwards towards a starting point. One Scientist writes, “We have a very solid conclusion that the universe has an origin, the Big Bang. Fifteen billion years ago, the universe began with an unimaginably bright flash of energy from an infinitesimally small point. That implies that before that, there was nothing” (Francis Collins, The Language of God). The concept of self-creation is a logical impossibility. To create you must exist. Self-creation means you existed before you existed, which is a nonsense statement. So, the very fact that the universe had a beginning implies that someone outside of the universe was able to begin it. Science therefore points to a creator.

C. Cosmic Welcome Mat. Science tells us that for organic life to exist, the constants of physics—the speed of light, the gravitational constant, the strength of the weak and strong nuclear forces—must all have values that together fall into an extremely narrow range. The probability of this perfect calibration happening is mathematically zero. Collins observes,

“When you look from the perspective of a scientist at the universe, it looks as if it knew we were coming. There are 15 constants—the gravitational constant, various constants about the strong and weak nuclear force, etc. that have precise values. If any one of those constants was off by one part in a million million, the universe could not have come to the point where we see it. Matter would not have been able to coalesce, there would have been no galaxy, stars, planets, or people” (Ibid).

D. The Clue of Love, Beauty, and Meaning. Naturalism says that the physical world of matter and energy is all that exists. But every human who thinks about it realizes that we all sense a spiritual reality behind the material world. There is a reality behind the words, beauty, love, heroism. Those qualities exist beyond mere chemical reactions in our brains. Padgett & Sunshine point out,

Naturalism runs counter to our experience of life. Love, hate, self-consciousness, self-awareness, all of these are just chemical reactions. Good and evil and right and wrong do not exist since they are neither matter nor energy. You can’t even call them cultural preferences since a preference is neither matter not energy….You are nothing more than a robot carrying out the necessary and inevitable results of biology, chemistry, physics, and math. While some people claim they believe this is true, it is extremely doubtful that they really believe it deep down, and it is certain that they do not and cannot live as if it were true (The Image Restored).

E. Moral Obligation. If you were jogging on a path beside a river and someone who was drowning cried for help, what would you do? Almost every human being would immediately try to help. The materialist understanding of life can’t explain why. In fact, Darwin’s survival of the fittest would demand that a human NOT risk drowning to help another. One pastor responding to a couple’s unbelief asked “Is there anything you think is absolutely wrong?" The wife answered, “Male abuse of women.” The pastor responded, “I fully agree because I am a Christian. The Bible says God made all human beings in his image. But why do you see harming women as wrong?” She responded, “Women are human beings and human beings have rights. It’s wrong to trample on someone’s rights.” The pastor asked, "How do you know that?" She smiled realizing she was in a corner. Scientific naturalism has no explanation for why male blobs of protoplasm should not rape female blobs of protoplasm. It can’t account for our moral feelings, let alone the fact that we all believe there are external moral standards by which moral feelings are evaluated.

The above 5 scientific observations about the world we inhabit don’t prove the existence of God. They only prove that it is much more reasonable to believe in a supreme being than not to. Alvin Plantinga illustrates that absolute proof isn’t necessary for humans to act. He imagines a man dealing himself 20 straight hands of 4 aces in poker. As his companions reach for their six-shooters the poker player says, “I know if looks suspicious! But what if there is an infinite succession of universes with an infinite possible distribution of poker hands and there is one universe in which the dealer deals himself 20 straight aces without cheating.” This argument will have no effect on the other players. They couldn’t technically prove he had cheated, but it would be unreasonable to conclude that he hadn’t.

ALL HUMANS SUPPRESS THE TRUTH ABOUT GOD

As we lead someone to faith in Christ or launch our child into the world, it is imperative that he understand that logic supports belief in God but that human nature suppresses that belief. For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, WHO BY THEIR UNRIGHTEOUSNESS SUPPRESS THE TRUTH. For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. The picture behind the word, suppress is that of holding down a spring. Nature unremittingly leaps out to all humans with arrows pointing to its creator, one who is eternal, i.e. outside the created order, and one who is divine, i.e. one who is God. All are given this knowledge of God. But because our autonomous sinful nature refuses to honor God by surrendering to him as the one to whom we owe obedience, and because we refuse to give thanks to God as the one on whom we depend to sustain life every second—our foolish hearts suppress the truth that he is our creator.

We see this human tendency in the research of Charles Darwin. In 1831, on a voyage to the Galapagos Islands, Darwin observed that the beak shapes of finches varied. His research substantiated that the beaks of an ancestral species had adapted over time to equip the finches to acquire different food sources. He found no scientific evidence to support the idea that finches became crabs—that species morphed into other species, admitting that there was no fossil evidence to support one species evolving into another. Nevertheless, with zero evidence, Darwin extrapolated from his legitimate research on adaptation within a species to the worldview of evolution that denies the creature’s accountability to God. Millions still cling to this theory even though it has been debunked by science.

GOD’S EXISTENCE OUTSIDE OF CREATION—INCOMMUNICABLE ATTRIBUTES

A. Self-existence. When a child asks, “Who made God?” the answer may not be as hard as we think. It is, “God did not need to be made because he has always existed.” The theological word for this self-existence of God is aseity. This characteristic of God is identified by Paul in Acts 17 when he challenged the Athenian Christians: to seek God, saying that he is actually not far from each one of us, for ‘In him we live and move and have our being’ (vs 27-28). R. C. Sproul in his book, The Character of God, elucidates this attribute:

"To say that God is self-existent simply means that there is no time when God started to exist. He has always been. He is eternal. He has no beginning and no end. Nothing caused God to come into existence. God did not make Himself. He made us. In a word, God is not a creature. He is not dependent. He is not derived. He is not fragile. Rather, God is the Creator. He is independent, self-sufficient, and secure. God, and God alone, has the power of being within Himself. He is who He is. “I AM WHO I AM.” That God is self-existent means that He is unique. He alone is the source of all being. He alone has the power of being. He alone is eternal. He alone is supreme."

This characteristic that he is outside of creation and self-existent is foundational for our security. He is dependent upon no one and no thing. No force exists that can change him. At the same time, his aseity is the source of our humility. If God died, we would instantly perish. We are utterly dependent upon him every second.

B. Omnipresence. One of the Christian’s boldest assertions is that there is a reality that far exceeds the visibility of the physical world. “God is spirit,” said Jesus, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth (Jn 4:24). Because God is an infinite spirit, he can be omnipresent. In fact, the universe is replete with his presence. This biblical teaching is far from pantheism, which is disallowed in the first verse of the Bible, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” The boundary between God and the material universe is a boundary of being. The being of the created world is a lower order of being than the being of God because God’s power of self-existence is lacking in creaturely beings who must be sustained in their existence by God. Scripture affirms “that there exists a higher plane of reality than the plane upon which we live our everyday lives. This other reality is the spiritual realm” (Ibid). God’s omnipresence reminds us that there is much more to life than what we can see with our eyes. One morning when Elishah’s servant stepped outside, he realized he and Elisha were surrounded by an army intent on killing them. Then Elisha prayed and said, “O Lord, please open his eyes that he may see.” So the Lord opened the eyes of the young man, and he saw, and behold, the mountain was full of horses and chariots of fire all around Elisha (2 Kings 6:15-17). Those of us who are Star Wars fans may miss the truth that spirit is much more than force. God is a creative, personal, loving, moral being. The spiritual world deals not only with spiritual beings but with the hidden world of the heart. The outworking of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, meekness, and self-control.

C. Omnipotence. In Genesis 17:1 God refers to himself as God ALMIGHTY. When Abram was ninety-nine years old the Lord appeared to Abram and said to him, “I am God Almighty; walk before me, and be blameless. Later in this conversation, God tells Abraham that he will bear a son through his ninety-year-old wife, Sarah. As the eternal, infinite God, his power over creation is total. There is no limit to God’s power except himself, when he choses to limit his use of that power. He could have prevented Satan from rebelling as well as the disobedience of Adam and Eve. We do not live in a dualistic universe, caught between two equal warriors, God and Satan who are battling it out for supremacy. Satan is on God’s leash. Humans don’t have the mental horsepower to understand why God allows evil. We are not only told that God is so good that evil cannot exist in his immediate presence but that he is so good that he turns evil into a tool for good. For those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose (Rom 8:28).

One of the most important principles in understanding God’s omnipotence is that he limits the use of his power because of his decision to involve man, his image bearers, in ordering and shaping earth. He has limited his creative power, not delivering an iPhone 16-Pro to Adam in the garden, nor an adult son named Isaac to Sarah. The process of us exercising dominion is God’s ordained way to exercise his creative power and his recreative power. Paul finds it especially important to remind the Ephesian Christians of that process when they pray. He points to the power of the one to whom we pray: who is able to do far more abundantly than all that we ask or think, according to the power at work within us (Eph 3:20).

D. Omniscience. Proverbs 15:3 warns, The eyes of the Lord are in every place, keeping watch on the evil and the good. The truth that God is all-knowing is a terror to those who do not belong to Jesus. But here are 3 reasons why this attribute is a comfort to those who do.

God is the God of all knowledge. There is no conflict between Christianity and science. The old faith vs reason division is false. We never need to fear the academic world or of scientific facts. God invented knowledge. It is the accumulation of facts about his creation!
God knows the future. He is outside of time. He views the timeline of history, past, present, and future. There is nothing in the future that can take him by surprise. When I seek his guidance, he gives it in light of the future. Nothing unforeseen can ruin his perfect plan for my life.
God knows everything in my closet of shame but still loves me. God has searched and known us, our sitting down, our rising up, and everything in our locked diaries of shame. Yet he is the God of all grace who loves me.

E. Immutability. In Malachi 3:6, God says, I, Yahweh, do not change. There is an inner consistency to God. He undergoes no mutations. He is very different from Allah in Islam who can change his mind upon any whim. But God is internally consistent. Is there anything that God can’t do? Yes. He can’t act against his immutable nature. The same God who has not stepped in to prevent the loss of a loved one, allowing my heart to be crushed, is the one who loved me so much that he gave his only son to die for me. The author of the NT book of James was the half-brother of Jesus. In the first chapter of his letter, James addresses how to handle our everyday trials. I’m sure that he knew exactly how his brother, Jesus, handled trials. James tells us that one of those key principles is to be confident of the immutability of God—his unchanging character. The same God taking his readers through trials was the giver of every good gift they enjoyed. Do not be deceived, my beloved brothers. Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change.

God is an unchanging, supernatural, fabulous being.

For Further Prayerful Thought

What evidence would you martial to support an argument that it is much more reasonable to believe in the existence of God than not to?
Why do you think it might be important to help our rising young adults understand the biblical teaching that human sinful nature leads man to suppress the truth that creation proves there is a God?
Look back to God’s supernatural attributes. Which ones most stood out to you? How can knowing these attributes help you delight in the Lord?

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Let Him Who Boasts Boast in This

On 31 October, 2024 By Gary Yagel

In Jeremiah 9, God has some words for his people about boasting, and they re not, “Don’t brag.” Rather he says to his covenant people, Let not the wise man boast in his wisdom, let not the mighty man boast in his might, let not the rich man boast in his riches, but let him who boasts boast in this, THAT HE UNDERSTANDS AND KNOWS ME, that I am the LORD who practices steadfast love, justice, and righteousness in the earth. For in these things, I delight (Jer 9:23-25). What is it about knowing God that causes him to tell us that knowing him is of greater worth than wisdom, might, and riches? What does the rest of Scripture say about the benefits to us of knowing God? These are the questions we seek to answer in this episode.

As you know, this podcast/blog focuses on our mission as men. In Genesis 2:15 we see that God placed Adam in the Garden of Eden to work it. Men are designed to have impact, to rearrange the “stuff "of creation, to get the project done. No wonder every third commercial when watching the NFL is for a pickup truck, the perfect tool for getting most jobs done. Because God created men to be doers, we have an intuitive sense that getting a job done requires some assets—three in particular, which happen to be the same three mentioned in Jeremiah 9. The first is expertise. Every team member doesn’t need an MBA or PhD; but getting the job done requires wisdom, good old-fashioned know-how. Second, success requires the strength to overcome the obstacles we encounter to completing our mission. No goal worth pursuing comes easily, so the might to persevere is required. The third asset required is money. Obtaining the material resources and labor we need requires wealth.

In our Home Depot world where doers get more done, successful men understand the value of these three assets, wisdom, might, and riches to accomplish almost any project we undertake in our vocation or at home. So, as men called to be doers, it should get our attention that the primary assets that preoccupy our thinking to accomplish any mission i.e. wisdom, might, and riches are NOT the keys to our success. They are not what we should depend upon nor boast about. “Rather,” says God, “your boast should be that you understand and know me.” But, practically speaking, what is God saying? Let’s dig into the meaning of the word boast for some clues.

A. Boasting, according to Webster, is rooted in “an awareness of one’s excellence.” In one sense, being aware of our own excellence is a good thing. Acknowledging our own strengths is not pride; boasting about them is. However, an awareness of one’s excellence can apply to someone else. Knowing God leads to an awareness of God’s excellence. God is saying through Jeremiah—I want you aware of MY EXCELLENCE and boasting about that.

B. Boasting means to display proudly. My shirts and jerseys display proudly that I am a Penn State, Baltimore Ravens, and now, repentant Washington Commanders fan. It is amazing how profoundly humans identify with their college or professional sports team, as if we are exalted somehow by their success. It is also surprising how common it is to name drop—i.e. mention some kind of connection we have to a famous player or celebrity as if who we know will enhance our worth in others’ eyes. In Jeremiah 9, God is saying, “If you want to name drop, boast about knowing ME.” God just happens to be the most fantastic being in the universe and knowing him (because he changed my darkened heart) is the greatest privilege in the entire world.

C. “Boasting” in context in Jeremiah 9 probably refers primarily to where one’s confidence lies. This is the meaning in Jeremiah’s other two uses of the word boast. (48:30 and 49:4). Though our masculine call (AVAD) is to be a doer, to transform the world including through our prayer and influence even the hearts of our loved ones, God reminds us that our greatest asset is not our wisdom, our powerful determination, or our riches. It is understanding and knowing God.

D. Boasting in this text is linked not only to understanding and knowing God but specifically to knowing what God delights in. God goes on to tell us what that is, i.e. the practices of steadfast love, justice, and righteousness in the earth. The strong implication of God is that the more we know him, the more we will pursue the things in which he delights. There seems to be a link between the moral energy that comes from knowing God and pursing what pleases him. That gets my attention because we are all looking for more motivation. Last week I was talking with a believer who is doing an exceptional job of raising his son and daughter. But he lamented, “Gary, the problem is not that I don’t know what I should be doing as a spiritual leader—it’s that I just don’t do it.” We all need more motivation.

E. Boasting about knowing God will be easier, says Jeremiah, under the New Covenant. One of the major themes of Jeremiah is the failure of God’s people under the Old Covenant to live up to their covenant obligations while giving hope to Israel about a New Covenant to come. The following words from Jeremiah 31 are directly quoted in Hebrews 8:8-12 as being fulfilled in Christ through the outpouring of the Holy Spirit on the Day of Pentecost. Notice the emphasis on better knowing God.

Behold, the days are coming, declares the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah, not like the covenant that I made with their fathers on the day when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt, my covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, declares the Lord. For this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, declares the Lord: I will PUT MY LAW WITHIN THEM, and I WILL WRITE IT ON THEIR HEARTS. And I will be their God, and they shall be my people. And no longer shall each one teach his neighbor and each his brother, saying, ‘Know the Lord,’ FOR THEY SHALL ALL KNOW ME, from the least of them to the greatest, declares the Lord. For I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more.

Under the New Covenant, the Holy Spirit is poured out 1) to indwell us, giving us the reality of Christ’s presence with us every moment and 2) to apply the Word of God to our hearts (See John 14:25-26). At the core of the New Covenant is boasting that we can now know the Lord personally through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit and through the Word of God personally applied to our hearts.

Seven Further Benefits of Growing in The Knowledge of God

A. Those who know God have great energy for God. In one of the prophetic chapters of Daniel, we read, the people who know their God will be strong and take action (11:32). J. I. Packer writes, "In this context, the statement is introduced by ‘but’ and set in contrast to the vile person who corrupts by flattering talk those whose loyalty to God’s covenant has failed. This shows us that the action taken by those who know God is their reaction to the anti-God trends which they see operating around them. While their God is being defiled or disregarded; they cannot rest; they feel they must do something; the dishonor done to God’s name goads them into action" (Knowing God p 23).

B. Those who know God understand how life works. We find this theme all through the book of Proverbs, for example, The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, And the KNOWLEDGE of the Holy One is understanding. For by me your days will be multiplied and years of life will be added to you (9:10-11). Again, J. I. Packer says it well:

"Knowing God is crucially important for the living of our lives. As it would be cruel to an Amazonian tribesman to fly him to London, put him down without explanation in Trafalgar Square, as one who knew nothing of English or England to fend for himself, so we are cruel to ourselves if we try to live in this world without knowing about the God whose world it is and who runs it. The world becomes a strange, mad, painful place, and life in it a disappointing and unpleasant business, for those who do not know about God. Disregard the study of God, and you sentence yourself to stumble and blunder through life blindfold, as it were, with no sense of direction and no understanding of what surrounds you" (Ibid p 14).

C. Those who know God have confidence in his character. Life is full of trials; in a fallen world there is no escape from pain. Scripture does not cover up that pain. Rather, it says, My son, do not regard lightly the discipline of the Lord, nor be weary when reproved by him. For the Lord disciplines the one he loves, and chastises every son whom he receives (Heb 12:5-6). Yet, the prophet Hosea points to a growing knowledge of God as the salve for heart-wrenching pain. Come, let us return to the Lord; for he has torn us, that he may heal us; he has struck us down, and he will bind us up. After two days he will revive us; on the third day he will raise us up, that we may live before him. Let us know; let us press on to know the Lord; his going out is sure as the dawn; he will come to us as the showers, as the spring rains that water the earth (Hos 6:1-3). Hosea urges his countrymen going through tough times NOT to let those trials hinder their growth in the knowledge of God. Such knowledge is their hope—in the consistency of the God they have come to know: his going out is as sure as the dawn; he will come to us as the showers, as the spring rains that water the earth.

D. Those who know God’s perfections can better delight in him, which satisfies our hearts. Desiring heart satisfaction is a good, not an evil thing. As C. S. Lewis preached many years ago:

"If there lurks in most modern minds the notion that to desire our own good and earnestly to hope for the enjoyment of it is a bad thing, I submit that this notion has crept in from Kant and the Stoics, and is no part of Christian faith. Indeed, if we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased" (Sermon, “The Weight of Glory”).

We were made for God, and he is the answer to our deepest longings. Delighting in him and basking in his delight in us is the core foundation to a Christian’s very life. Abide in my love, even as I abide in the Father’s love, said Jesus. Just as in marriage knowing my wife more deeply enables me to love her more fully, our delight in the Lord is a direct result of seeing his perfections. David wrote, One thing have I asked of the Lord, that will I seek after: that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to gaze upon the beauty of the Lord and to inquire in his temple (Ps 27:4). Moses recognized the same truth—that our deepest heart hunger needs to be satisfied through intimacy with God when he wrote, Satisfy us in the morning with your steadfast love, that we may rejoice and be glad all our days (Ps 90:14).

E. Those who know God are better able to fulfill God’s purpose for our lives. In Ephesians 1, Paul summarizes that purpose, Be imitators of God (Eph 5:1). There is a category of God’s perfections called “incommunicable attributes,” his omnipotence, omniscience, eternality, etc. the characteristics of which finite humans do not share. But, as we saw last week, Adam and Eve were created to exhibit God’s moral attributes, and believers are recreated in Christ to recover that calling and are empowered through the work of the Holy Spirit “to be conformed into Christ’s image” (Rom 8:29) which God tells us is the purpose for our trials (Rom 8:28). The more clearly that we perceive God’s moral perfections, the more powerfully they can move us to reverent adoration of them, and impel us with the spiritual energy through the Spirit to imitate them.

F. Those who are growing in the knowledge of God exhibit the fruit of being true disciples. Paul summarizes the life of a true Christ follower in Colossians 1:9-10 when he says, I pray that you may be filled with the knowledge of his will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding, so as to walk in a manner worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing to him: bearing fruit in every good work and increasing in the knowledge of god. Notice how growing to know God is implicit in three parts of this text.

First, note the phrase worthy of God. Worthy describes an equation. It is balancing the degree to which my life is surrendered to God against his worthiness of that surrender. The more I grow to know God, the more I will see that he deserves the best I can offer him, fullest surrender. It all begins with knowing God’s worthiness—seeing who he really is.
Next, note the expression fully pleasing him. When you love someone, that love compels you to find out what pleases your loved one. So it is with the greatest commandment. If I am to love God supremely, I must get to know him well enough to find out what pleases him.
Finally, Paul says explicitly that a disciple is one who is increasing in the knowledge of God. A true love relationship deepens over time as the lovers intentionally seek to know and delight in one another.

G. Knowing God IS life. Jesus prayed to the Father, This is eternal life, that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent (Jn 17:3). As my Young Life leader used to say, “eternal life doesn’t wait until you die to begin! It’s about the quality of life right now—living life to its fullest—and that quality continuing into eternity.” Notice that the path to such life is knowing God. There are two Greek words for knowing. OIDA, which comes from the word seeing, suggests objective perception of the facts. But the other word, GINOSKO, which signifies a process of taking in knowledge is the one used in John 17. W. E. Vine tells us “In the NT, GINOSKO frequently indicates a relation between the person knowing and the object known; in this respect, what is known is of value or importance to the one who knows, and hence the establishment of a relationship.”

The blessing of knowing God is so enormous that the only way the biblical writers can describe it is to call it life. What is your picture of vitality? Maybe it is the rippled muscles of a man or woman completing a triathlon. Maybe it is a 100% healthy newborn baby. Maybe economic vitality is seeing South Korea lit up from outer space while North Korea is completely dark. Maybe vitality to you is a lush green garden full of vibrant flowers and luscious fruit. Maybe it is the sound of a rushing waterfall or bubbling brook. Whatever that picture is for you—the path to it is knowing God. The benefits of knowing God seem boundless!

The Greatness of God

In the coming weeks we will be studying the specific perfections of God and what difference they make in our lives. But perhaps the best way to wrap up this introductory episode is to remember the greatness of this being who has invited us, indeed urged us, to know him. May we bow in humble adoration, as we consider the wht is probably the most complete descriptive paragraph ever written about our God outside of Scripture. From the WCF:

There is but one only, living, and true God, who is infinite in being and perfection, a most pure spirit, invisible, without body, parts, or passions; immutable, immense, eternal, incomprehensible, almighty, most wise, most holy, most free, most absolute; working all things according to the counsel of his own immutable and most righteous will for his own glory; most loving, gracious, merciful, long-suffering, abundant in goodness and truth, forgiving iniquity, transgression, and sin; the rewarder of them that diligently seek him; and withal, most just, and terrible in his judgments, hating all sin, and who will by no means clear the guilty.

What a privilege to be invited into the presence of this being—to know him. As we head into the week of the 2024 election, what comfort to know that this is the God who sits on the throne of the universe. As Steve Green sang a decade ago, he is the only being fit to sit on that throne:

God, and God alone created all these things we call our own. From the mighty to the small, the glory in them all, is God’s and God’s alone.

God and God alone reveals the truth of all we call unknown. And all the best and worst of man won’t change the master’s plan—it’s God’s and God’s alone.

God and God alone is fit to take the universes’ throne. Let everything that lives, reserve its truest praise, for God and God alone.

God, and God alone, will be the joy of our eternal home. He will be our one desire; our hearts will never tire, of God and God alone.

God and God alone is fit to take the universes’ throne. Let everything that lives, reserve its truest praise, for God and God alone.

For Further Prayerful Thought

What is your take-away from God’s command to the wise man not to boast in his wisdom, the mighty man not to boast in his might, the rich man not to boast in his riches but instead to boast of understanding and knowing him? What are your ideas about what this looks like?
Which benefits of growing in the knowledge of God most stood out to you?
How would you defend the idea that God and God alone is fit to take the universe’s throne? Which components of God’s character give you the most peace and confidence as you head into the future?

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What If I Don’t Like Either Candidate?

On 26 October, 2024 By Gary Yagel

In a new study conducted by George Barna, in which he interviewed 2000 church-going self-identified Christians, his results were shocking. 49% said they were unlikely to vote. Here are their reasons:

68% said they are not interested in politics
57% said they disliked the major candidates
55% said they felt like none of the candidates reflect their most important views
52% believed their vote will not have an impact
50% said the election has become too controversial

This episode addresses these reasons for NOT voting.

Thinking biblically about our participation in an election, in which we 1) dislike both candidates, 2) are sickened by the politicization of everything, 3) are disgusted by the harsh rhetoric of both sides, and 4) are questioning whether our single vote really matters takes us back over 4000 years to God’s words to the first two humans he created, explaining his reason for creating them. God said he created us to be images of himself. God’s inherent royalty, i.e. his kingship, his creativity, his love within the three persons of the Godhead, his holiness, and many other of his attributes would be revealed in this creature called man whose purpose would be putting God, himself, on display before all the angels by bearing God’s image. So, God created man—the union of male and female--to exhibit: 1) God’s kingship by giving them the kingdom earth to rule, 2) his creativity by calling them to explore and maximize the potential of that kingdom, 3) God's love by creating other humans to be loved, 4) his holiness by writing his moral law upon their hearts. God’s familiar words were:

“Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And LET THEM HAVE DOMINION over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.” So, God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and SUBDUE IT (Gen 1:26-28).

As the first humans were fruitful and productive, the resources and population grew, requiring Adam and Eve to exercise dominion over the CULTURE that emerged as they fulfilled their calling to CULTIVATE their kingdom. Worshipful love for their creator and love for his image bearers—other humans—was to shape the culture that evolved as the population grew, labor diversified, and ownership of the resources in the garden became more complex. Exercising dominion over this emerging, complex set of relationships—a person’s relationship to God, to the earth’s resources and to one another—was the calling of King Adam and Queen Eve. They were to exercise dominion FOR God, in obedience to his moral law, which, as the Apostle Paul told us, is written on every image bearer’s heart.

But instead, Adam and Eve joined the rebellion against God, aligning their kingdom with Satan, sin, and because of sin, death. These three ruled, until God himself came as the Second Adam. Jesus overthrew these three usurpers of Adam’s kingdom, triumphing over them at the cross, proving in his resurrection that sin and death’s hold on Adam’s race and kingdom were broken. Then, Jesus ascended as the Second Adam to do what the first Adam was originally called to do—exercise righteous rule over Adam’s kingdom, earth. In Christ, Christians recover Adam’s calling to shape the culture over the earth. Jesus commanded, All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations. Notice that Jesus did NOT say make disciples in every nation or from every nation but OF every nation, meaning that not just individuals but entire nations are to be discipled, i.e. we are to shape the culture of all nations. All Christians are now restored to Adam’s original calling, the NT expression of which is stated, “seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness.”

Returning to the topic of this election, having the opportunity to choose government leaders through the process of voting for representative government, as we experience in this nation, is a privilege and responsibility that most Christians in the world never dreamed of having. It is a direct way to fulfill Jesus’ great commission, of using our God-given political influence to “disciple” our nation, i.e. align its values with Christ’s kingdom of righteousness. With this fundamental calling to use our influence to shape the culture of our nation in mind, let’s respond to some arguments Christians make NOT to vote.

A REVULSION TO POLITICS

It could simply be that a Christian has never been that interested in politics or that the hostility of the two sides to each other is repulsive to him or her. Besides, the church should focus on seeking first the kingdom of God, not the kingdom of man gained by a political party or candidate, especially since almost every politician claims God is on his side. Furthermore, it is argued, as the spiritual wasteland of Europe proves, the fastest way to kill Christianity is aligning it with politics and creating a state church. Separation of church and state, though misstated by the political left to marginalize Christians and keep religious values out of the public square, is nevertheless a legitimate Biblical principle of keeping the power of the sword to coerce given to the state distinct from the power of the Word to persuade given to the church.

I understand this distinction, but I see no way that the refusal to take advantage of an opportunity to shape the culture by using my vote to support the policies that most align with Christ’s kingdom righteousness is NOT disobedience to God’s cultural mandate. Using our political rights may be unpleasant but since when is unpleasantness an excuse for disobedience. We were CREATED in God’s image to shape culture (Genesis 1). We were RECREATED in Christ’s image to shape culture (Matt 6:33). Failure to vote because politics is unpleasant is disobedience.

WITH OVER 100 MILLION VOTES CAST—MINE DOESN’T MATTER

160 million people voted in the 2020 election. One vote, out of 160 million, doesn’t seem likely to make a difference. So, why should I bother voting? Here are three reasons:

A. One vote matters a lot in local elections. When most people think about elections, they tend to focus on the presidential race. But state and local elections, which are decided by far fewer votes, can have a significant impact on our lives. In most elections, there are ballot measures that will determine local and state laws... everything from rules about utilities or transportation to restrictions on abortion and law enforcement.

In 2017, a Virginia House of Delegates race ended in a tie after more than 23,000 ballots were cast. According to the rules, the winner was decided by pulling a name out of a bowl.
In 2016, a New Mexico State House seat was decided by just two votes out of 14,000 that were cast.
School board elections, which happen in every town in America, determine what students will be taught at school. Many of these races are decided by just hundreds of total votes.

B. If lots of people decide their vote doesn’t matter, it makes a big difference. In 2020, approximately 240 million Americans were eligible to vote. However, only 168 million were registered to vote, and only 158 million actually voted for president. That means 82 million people who could have voted for a presidential candidate chose not to. In the end, Joe Biden, who was elected president, received 81 million votes, which was only 34% of eligible voters.

C. Voting is an act of stewardship. Romans 13 tells us that government was created by God to punish evil and reward good. If any of us had been born into a royal family and were destined to be king or queen, we would be responsible to use the power God gave us to punish evil and reward good. In America, all citizens have been granted authority to determine who should be in government offices. The church has a vital role—defining what good and evil are for the state. Part of the way that voice is heard in a democracy is through our vote. Though the ultimate outcome may be beyond our control, our stewardship of the authority God has given us is part of our responsibility. (see What Would You Say, Colson Center).

I DON’T LIKE EITHER CANDIDATE

Many of us had hoped for a different candidate to represent the Republican Party. But we must put a biblical lens over the attitude, “I don’t like either candidate and I’m not sure that in good conscience I can vote for either.” Here is a response:

A. The vote for president isn’t about liking a candidate; it is not a vote for “Mr. or Ms. Congeniality.” Choosing the Commander-in-Chief of America is a responsibility that is very different than voting for high school class superlatives like, most popular, best personality, or most friendly. Most of the best leaders of the world would fail to win “most likeable” contests.

B. The vote for president is a hiring decision. It is filling the top job vacancy in the US government with the candidate who is most likely to do a good job. The benefit of a CEO to his shareholders and employees is the effectiveness of his leadership and policies he will implement—not whether he is a nice guy who would be your first choice with whom to have a beer.

C. It is a choice between candidates both of whose characters are flawed. There is no candidate without character flaws. Here are some thoughts to consider in evaluating character flaws in this election.

We live in an age when both sides use the ad hominem argument, which attacks the character of your opponent. Trump childishly belittles his opponents relentlessly, which all Christians should find extremely repulsive. Jesus was severe in his words about character assassination, Anyone who says to a brother or sister, ‘Raca, is answerable to the court. And anyone who says, ‘You fool!’ will be in danger of the fire of hell. The Democrats employ ad hominem arguments incessantly, labeling anyone who disagrees with their cultural Marxist ideology racist, homophobic, or transphobic and demonizing Donald Trump as Hitler incarnate. Here are the words from a news conference called earlier this week by Kamala Harris to attack Trump’s character: "Donald Trump is someone who certainly falls into the general definition of fascists, who in fact vowed to be a dictator on day one and vowed to use the military as his personal militia to carry out his political vendettas. Donald Trump is increasingly unhinged and unstable." Perhaps such demonization should not surprise us since Democrats called George Bush, Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon “Hitler” also.
As the Colson Center for Christian Worldview points out, “A vote doesn’t always mean, ‘I think they’re great.’ It may just mean I think they’re better.’ On social media we ‘like’ posts as a way of affirming someone. In some ways, a ‘vote’ feels the same, so we hesitate to vote because it feels like we’re affirming the person or showing our complete approval of everything they say and do. But voting to fill government offices is not the same as ‘liking’ an Instagram post. It’s more like interviewing someone for a job. You may not be excited about any of the job applicants, but you still must hire someone to fill the position” (Ibid).
A grace perspective that recognizes that character flaws are the flip side of character strengths can make living with flawed candidates more tolerable.

For example, Kamala Harris’ dishonesty is striking. She consistently lied that she saw nothing about Joe Biden’s cognitive decline and even after the debate, she denied this reality saying, “it was just a bad debate.” She is advertising in front of a border wall, which Donald Trump built saying she will fix the border problem, when her administration caused the problem. Harris criticized the border wall over fifty times, calling it stupid, useless and Trump’s medieval vanity project. She called for defunding ICE and shutting down of the ICE detention centers. Every time she had a chance in the Senate to vote for funding the border wall she voted against it. As a senator, she tried to take $220 million out of ICE’s Enforcement Division.

But I believe that Kamala Harris, though lying about her border view, sincerely believes open borders help to right the wrong of financial inequity around the world. Kamala Harris believes cultural Marxism if not economic Marxism. Her father was a Marxist economics professor. This ideology sincerely believes that poverty is the fault of the rich business and landowners. When asked about her economic approach to high grocery prices, Harris revealed her Marxist, blame-the-rich mindset referring to price gouging, indicating that she would use price controls. Then she pointed to her actions in California, also revealing her Marxist, blame-the-rich mindset when she took action against the "evil" banks that foreclosed on those who defaulted on their home loans. Marxism believes the state should force economic equity, taking wealth from the evil rich and distributing it to the victimized poor. Such ideologues sincerely believe that Americans unfairly have too much wealth and that every poor immigrant looking for a better life has a right to come to America and enjoy our prosperity, whether coming illegally or not. From a character perspective she is a liar concerning closing the border and Joe Biden's memtal health. But I believe she is rationalizing such dishonesty because the elites know best how to help the poor. There is good evidence that she cares about the poor, the disenfranchised, and destitute. So, I don’t think open borders just mean more votes in the future to her. From her youth she appears to have been raised to believe that Marxist policies help the poor.

Donald Trump’s self-confident arrogance is an off-putting character flaw. This flaw can’t be covered up. But. I have asked myself, “Could anyone without a very strong ego actually succeed at taking on cultural Marxism's vice grip on this culture?" Think of what Trump has endured: 1) three years of media lies and Department of Justice corruption accusing him of Russian collusion from a story proven to be from Hilary Clinton’s campaign, 2) the unprecedented dishonesty of the corrupt social media which suppressed facts about his successes and US enemies' bribes to Hunter Biden, 3) relentless frivolous lawsuits and criminal charges brough by corrupt Democrat attorneys and prosecutors, 4) the invasion of his and his family’s privacy in a legally baseless FBI raid of his and Milania'a bedroom and the rest of Mar-a-Lago, 5) hatred from the media that is so vicious and inexplicable that conservatives have labeled it Trump Derangement Syndrome, 6) two assassination attempts, 7) a Democrat Party that does not care whether calling Trump a dangerous fascist incites a mentally unstable gunman to make another assassination attempt. What Trump has endured is no justification for arrogance. I’m just saying that character flaws are often the flip side of strengths. Trump is arrogant. But the strength he brings to the table as a fighter for what he believes in is an asset that can’t be ignored, especially in facing down America’s enemies.

D. If you don’t like either candidate, remember that you cast your vote for the leaders WHOSE POLICIES most correspond to the righteousness of Christ’s kingdom. Character always matters, but if the options don’t include a person we can enthusiastically support, maybe they represent policies that we can enthusiastically support. Is one candidate working on behalf of the abortion industry, while the other works to defend life? Does one candidate defend conscience rights while the other supports suing nuns and churches that live out their faith? Does one candidate want parents involved in their child’s education and health care decisions while the other wants the state to interfere with parental rights? Every voter must work out which issues matter most, but in a situation where all the candidates are flawed, we can gain clarity about who to vote for based on the policies they endorse” (Ibid).

E. If you don’t like either individual candidate, vote for the best team. No politician works alone. Most candidates are part of a political party, and all candidates have donors and supporters. Executive offices, like mayors, governors, and presidents also appoint cabinet members, judges, ambassadors, and thousands of other positions that affect how government operates. In choosing one candidate over another, it’s important to think about the team that each brings along with them. If neither coach is ideal, which direction is the team going? Voting isn’t always easy. As in all of life, we’re often presented with imperfect choices, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t vote (Ibid).

When this final episode of this series, Election 2024 and Biblical Worldview is published, the election will be just 9 days away. May each of us do what God told us he created us to do over four thousand years ago: Use our influence with other voters and our own vote to, as best we can, elect leaders whose policies most align with Jesus’ kingdom of righteousness.

Just one final thought as we close. No matter who wins the Nov 5th election Christians will have to continue to battle the same anti-biblical views identified in this podcast series over the past seven weeks, especially cultural Marxism. These culture-shaping views aren’t going away, anytime soon, unless the Lord returns.

For Further Prayerful Thought

How would you explain the connection between God’s reason for creating human beings (to bear his image) and the Christian responsibility as redeemed human beings to vote?
What are the logical flaws in a Christian’s argument that with over 100 million votes cast his doesn’t matter?
How would you respond to someone who said, “I don’t like either candidate and I’m not sure that, in good conscience, I can vote for either”?

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Policies That Harm Girls and Women

On 19 October, 2024 By Gary Yagel

God assigned men the responsibility of protecting women. Not only is that clear in God’s special revelation; Genesis 2:15 tells us that Adam was placed in the garden to protect the garden and its inhabitants. It is equally clear in God’s general revelation (i.e. from observing creation); men have stood between their women and harm in every known culture of the world. This episode is about protecting women—our wives, our daughters, and our sisters.

History reveals that Christians have been known throughout the world for protecting women. Following the example of their master, who protected a woman caught in adultery who was set up by male Pharisees, from being stoned by them, and who even protected Mary who was sitting at Jesus’ feet as a full disciple from her sister Martha’s female stereotypes, first century Christians lived out the truth that every female is as precious as any male by rescuing the predominantly females babies left by chauvinistic Roman fathers in the wilderness to die. So effective was the Christians' protection of female babies that when male Roman children grew to adulthood finding a shortage of Roman women for marriage, they turned to the Christian adopted daughters who became their wives and led many to faith in Christ! At the cost of being labeled partisan, this episode reveals the truth about how harm to our girls and women is resulting from Biden/Harris policies of 1) an open border, 2) promoting gender affirming medical care, and 3) rewriting Title IX to allow biological males to compete against females and share their locker room.

OPEN BORDERS CAUSE SEXUAL ASSAULT OF IMMIGRANT WOMEN & CHILDREN

The refusal of the Biden/Harris administration to enforce immigration law, which would allow women and children to be protected as they migrate to the USA, has led to countless parents sending their daughters on a journey to the southern American border. But most of the young women are captured by Mexican drug cartels and turned into sex slaves. According to one congressional report, immigrants, especially immigrant women, make up the largest portion of trafficking victims. Let’s stop and consider what this little word trafficked means? It means raping girls, boys, and women repeatedly and selling them into a life of being raped endlessly. Have you ever talked to someone who has been raped? Women say it rips apart their soul. It is a trauma so severe that it takes a lifetime of therapy to overcome it. And that is if it happens ONCE.

This refusal to enforce immigration law, however, harms more than the millions of precious girls and women setting out for a new life in America. 15,811 convicted sex offenders and another 4,250 charged with sexual assault have been apprehended at our borders by ICE but released into our country to victimize Americans instead of being sent home as immigration law requires. 22-year-old Georgia nursing student, Laken Riley, 37-year-old Baltimore mother of five, Rachel Martin, and 12-year-old Texas child, Jocelyn Nungary, are just some of many raped and murdered by illegal immigrant convicts caught and then released.

Further proof of what is happening through Democrat open border policy are the facts about the Mexican drug cartel’s income. In 2018, during the Trump administration, the cartels were earning roughly $500 million per year. Under the Biden/Harris open border policy the cartels' revenues have skyrocketed, 2000%. Last year, they made approximately $13 billion--26 times their income in 2018. Christians need to stop closing their eyes to the suffering of women who are being raped because of Democrat refusal to implement US Immigration law.

“GENDER AFFIRMING CARE” PREYS ON PUBESCIENT GIRLS

On Joe Biden’s inauguration day, the very first day in office, the Biden/Harris administration made clear its radical gender ideology by executing the “Executive Order on Preventing and Combating Discrimination on the Basis of Gender Identity or Sexual Orientation” mandating the implementation of the transgender agenda throughout the US government. The words: “Children should be able to learn without worrying about whether they will be denied access to the restroom, the locker room, or school sports….People should be able to access health care and secure a roof over their heads without being subjected to sex discrimination.” Here’s what it means: Boys who identify as girls must be allowed to compete in the girls’ athletic competitions, men who identify as women must be allowed in women-only spaces, healthcare plans must pay for gender-transition procedures, and doctors and hospitals must perform them. The Biden/Harris Justice Department then sent a letter to all state attorneys general warning that they could be violating civil rights laws if they keep minors from receiving “gender-affirming care.” Biden’s Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Population Affairs explains that gender affirming care requires:

Supporting social affirmation: Adopting gender-affirming hairstyles, clothing, name, gender pronouns restrooms and other facilities.
Supporting puberty blockers: Pause pubertal development using hormones.
Supporting hormone therapy: Testosterone hormones for those assigned female at birth; Estrogen hormones for those who were assigned male at birth.
Supporting gender-affirming Surgeries: “Top” surgery—to create male-typical chest shape or enhance breasts. “Bottom” surgery—surgery on genitals or reproductive organs. Facial feminization or other procedures.

Seven states and the American College of Pediatricians are suing the Biden administration for requiring physicians and healthcare personnel to provide affirming care to patients, including minors. In their brief they argue, “Doctors should not be compelled to harm children. But a new final rule from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services requires physicians to perform, refer for, or affirm harmful gender-transition procedures and forces States to pay for these dangerous procedures in state health plans.”

Gender-affirming health care denies 4000 years of history and all of science, specifically anatomy (which shows obvious differences in reproductive systems), embryology (which shows that testosterone in male babies shapes brain development), endocrinology (which shows enormous male and female differences based on the presence of testosterone and estrogen), and genetics (which shows that every one of the thirty trillion cells in the normal female body is marked XX and in the male body XY). Gender affirming care is based upon the enormous power of the LGBTQ+ lobby, which intimidates politicians, educators, and government bureaucrats into support for it. Its victims are primarily pubescent girls, whose anxieties and emotional turmoil over their bodies growing into womanhood are exploited by radical gender ideologues to cause the girls to believe a delusion—that THEY, not their biology, determines their gender. Here are some characteristics of the girls who are most vulnerable to believing the destructive delusion that they are actually boys in the wrong (female) body. They: 1) already have high comorbidities (emotional/social disorders like autism), 2) don’t “fit in,” 3) are often fleeing womanhood more than pursuing maleness, 4) may fear their body becoming sexualized, 5) may be confused about their identity because of stumbling onto lesbian porn and being aroused by it, 6) don’t fit their or their parent’s stereotype of femininity, 7) are starving for affirmation, since being cis is uncool but being trans brings immediate notoriety, 8) are lonely but feel understood by a transgender media coach. This socially outcast subgroup would be one that Jesus would fiercely protect. So must we!

The Harm to Children Done by Gender Affirming Care

Although there has been an explosion of gender dysphoria among teen girls in the last 15 years, research shows that if left alone 82% will outgrow it. But the LGBTQ+ lobby wants government to mandate a shove of such troubled girls down the path of gender transition, sterilization, and body mutation.
The most frequently used puberty blocker, Lupron, which is used to chemically castrate sex offenders has never been approved by the FDA for halting puberty. We don’t even know what it is doing to kids.
Statistically, 100% of those who begin puberty blockers go on to cross-gender hormones, which always cause permanent sterility.
The gender affirming care claim that we must put gender dysphoric children on puberty blockers and support their desire to change genders or they will commit suicide is utterly false. The illegitimacy of the main organization making this fraudulent claim, World Professional Association for Transgender Health, was exposed via internal WPATH documents released March 4, 2024, by whistle blowers. Long term studies of transgender adults in fact show a very troubling increase in the suicide rate of trans adults after ten years.
Increasingly, de-transitioners, i.e. those shoved down the path of gender affirming care who now regret it, are making their voices heard. Such victims are proving what science is increasingly showing about the adolescent brain; it does not finish developing until age 25. Until then the young adult’s ability to understand the long-term consequences of immediate decisions is impaired, which partially explains suicide, risky drug experimentation, fast driving, and decisions to mutilate their bodies and become sterile because of a teen fad.

BIDEN/HARRIS ADMINISTRATION CHANGES TITLE IX OF CIVIL RIGHTS LAW

August 1, 2024. WASHINGTON—The Biden/Harris administration’s radical rewrite of Title IX, the longstanding federal law created to protect girls and women from sex discrimination in education, takes effect today in public and many private schools in 24 states across the country. Title IX of the Civil Rights Act says that schools cannot discriminate against individuals based on sex, which gave women better access to higher education and athletics through women’s scholarships and requirements to fund women’s athletics. It led to a revolution in the sports world enabling women athletes to compete in their own sports leagues. But the current administration has swapped “sex” for “gender,” which allows biological males access to females’ bathrooms, locker rooms, sports competitions, etc. This change treats women unjustly, puts them at risk of physical injury, and sexually abuses them.

The Biden/Harris Title IX Change is UNJUST for Girls & Women

On September 29, 2023, The American College of Sports Medicine, in an article entitled ACSM Releases Expert Consensus Statement: The Biological Basis of Sex Differences in Athletic Performance, says, “Biological sex is a determinant of athletic performance: adult males are faster, stronger, more powerful than females because of fundamental sex differences in anatomy and physiology dictated by sex chromosomes.

Significant differences emerge at puberty due to anabolic effects of testosterone in males. Testosterone levels rise 20-30-fold in males during puberty and are 15 times higher in males than females by age 18.
Direct and indirect effects of testosterone during male puberty include increase skeletal muscle mass; lower percentage body fat; higher hemoglobin concentration and mass; larger ventricular mass (heart) and cardiac volumes; larger airways and lungs; greater body height; and longer limbs.
Adult males are stronger, more powerful, and faster than females of similar age and training status. The difference in athletic performance where endurance or muscular power is required is roughly 10-30% depending on the event.

Rilley Gaines is a 12-time All American University of Kentucky swimmer who, during her senior year, had to compete against a biological man claiming to be transgender, Leah Thomas, a member of Penn’s women’s swim team in the NCAA Women’s Swimming championships. She tells her story:

Beginning when I was six, I trained six hours every single day. By college, you swim fifteen thousand yards, which is about ten miles every single day. Three of those hours are before eight am. It's brutal. At the highest levels, you train all year just to knock off tenths of a second from your time. My senior year, I had a goal of winning a national title, which meant becoming the fastest woman in the country. I’m right on pace to achieve that when the NCAA allows a man, Leah Thomas, a mediocre swimmer at that, to compete in women’s athletics. He and I raced in the two hundred freestyle. We tied, which is really rare.

After we tied, we go behind the awards podium where the NCAA official looked at Thomas and me and said, “Great job but you tied, and we only have one trophy, and we're going to give that trophy to Leah because we've been advised as an organization that when photos are being taken it's crucial that the trophy is in Leah's hands.” There was no conversation with my coach or my AD or anyone that was representing me. The national championship trophy and my record setting time for women collegiate swimming were taken from me.

Later, my school warned me not to make trouble saying that if I objected to this unfair treatment, I would never get a job. No employer would ever hire me because they would look me up and see that I'm a transphobe. Their threatening warning continued,

“You know, Riley, you want to go to dental school. No dental school will ever accept you or even look at your application if you speak up about this. And remember when you signed that scholarship, you gave away your rights to speak in your own personal capacity. Remember whose name is across your chest, because it's not yours, it's ours. Understand, we have already taken your stance for you. If you speak out and any harm were to go Thomas's way, whether in the form of physical harm, emotional harm, self-inflicted for that matter—understand that could result in a potential death, and that would make you a murderer” (Interview with Riley Gaines on Verdict with Ted Cruz Podcast, October 4, 2024, The Assault by Men Playing In Women’s Sports.)

The Biden/Harris Title IX Change is PHYSICALLY HARMFUL to Girls & Women

Peyton McNabb, a high school senior, was in North Carolina competing in women’s volleyball. A man claiming to be trans on the opposing team spiked the ball, hit her in the face, knocking her unconscious. That was September 2022. Still to this day, she's partially paralyzed on her right side. Her vision is impaired, her memory is impaired. She was supposed to play softball in college, but because of this brain injury, she will never play college sports.
At a Massachusetts high school, a male claiming trans identity was allowed to play field hockey in women’s athletics. He slapped a shot that hit a woman in her face, knocking out all her teeth and requiring facial reconstruction surgery. This male is till harming women playing women's field hockey at the collegiate level.
At the summer Olympics we saw the IOC allow two men claiming trans identity, to compete in women's boxing. Naturally, both men won gold medals in their respective weight divisions. One of the female boxers who fought against one of the male boxers, said she had never been punched that forcefully in her entire life, and that “this was nothing like a punch a woman could throw.”

The Biden/Harris Title IX Change SEXUALLY ABUSES Girls & Women

Sexually abusing a woman is forcing non-consensual nakedness or sexual acts upon her. Listen again to Riley Gaine’s description of what happened in the women’s locker room at the NCAA finals where male swimmer Leah Thomas appeared.

“The NCAA gave no warning to the women competing in the NCAA finals that a man was going to be standing naked right next to us in our locker room. When I discovered this, I said to an official, ‘I understand the guidelines that allowed a man into the pool with us. But what guidelines allowed a man into our locker room?’ This official responded, ‘We actually got around this by making the locker rooms unisex.’ I remember, thinking, ‘Okay, you realize by admitting you had to change the rules, you're admitting that Thomas isn't a woman.’ But secondly, unisex, means any man, any coach, any official, any parent, any pervert who wanted to, could come down there and share this changing space with us.”

“A swimming locker room is a giant, completely open square with no stalls or even aisles. And the suits that you're putting on—it takes twenty minutes to poke and prod yourself into them and that's twenty minutes in which you're fully exposed. When I had my back turned and I heard a man's voice in our intimate changing space, I really cannot put into words the feelings. Of course it's awkward. It's embarrassing, it's uncomfortable, it's humiliating. It's feelings of utter violation and feelings of betrayal. It’s traumatizing, really, and not even necessarily traumatizing because of what we were forced to see or how we were forcibly and non-consensually exploited, which used to correctly be called sexual abuse or sexual harassment. It was traumatizing for me to know just how easy it was for them to throw our rights to privacy as women entirely out of the window” (Ibid).

As this blog comes out, San Jose State is allowing a man claiming to be trans to play on its women’s volleyball team. Not only did he take a scholarship away from a woman, he has taken a roster and starting spot away from a woman, and is endangering the safety and privacy rights of his team’s women, especially when they travel. But finally, someone is having the guts to stand up to the LGBTQ+ movement. The presidents of four other Mountain West Conference schools, Southern Utah, Boise State, University of Wyoming, and Utah State have chosen to protect their women by refusing to compete against men claiming to be women. Instead, they forfeited their match, thereby taking a loss on their record.

In the past, God has sometimes used secular forces to shame Christians into doing what they should be doing. Maybe Gof is doing that here—giving a picture of what men should be doing—protecting women. May we oppose every ideology that harms these precious feminine creatures!

For Further Prayerful Thought

Why do you think many Christians and Christian leaders turn a blind eye to the hundreds of thousands of girls and women being raped and turned into sex slaves by Mexican Drug cartels because of America’s open border?
What facts about gender affirming care do you most want to remember so you can point out its harm to parents of gender-confused kids?
What aspects of Riley Gaine’s story are most infuriating to you? Why do you think so many people cave to LGBTQ pressure when radical gender ideology totally contradicts science and common sense?

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Pursuing Truth in This Election

On 13 October, 2024 By Gary Yagel

Here is a Question for you. In the last two weeks, have you heard anything about the following news story from your news source?

The head of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) reported that there are now over 13,000 known convicted murderers who were caught by ICE at the southern border but instead of being sent home as immigration law dictates were released into America because of the Democrat party’s catch and release policy? And those are just the convicted felons. The ICE director reported there are also another 1900 illegal immigrants who’ve been charged with homicide in another country, caught by ICE, but released into America.
In the past two weeks did you hear any horrified female newscaster mention the 15,811 illegal immigrants who are convicted sex offenders who were caught by ICE at the border but released into the US by the Democrat Party’s refusal to enforce immigration law. Has any newscaster you know called attention to the additional 4,250 illegal immigrants charged with sexual assault now on the streets of America because of catch and release?

These shocking revelations came on September 30 in a letter from ICE Director Patrick Lechleitner to Congressman Tony Gonzales. Lechleitner revealed that under the Biden/Harris catch and release violation of immigration law, over 600,000 illegal immigrants with criminal records or pending criminal charges against them have been released onto our streets instead of returned home as US immigration law requires. Think of it. Over 13,000 convicted murderers and over 15,000 convicted rapists released into our land by the Biden/Harris administration and the corrupt mainstream media makes virtually no mention of it!

This episode examines the responsibility of Christians to be light to our culture—to expose what sin wants to cover up and, in particular, to expose the unprecedented suppression of the truth by the corporate media and Democrat Party of what is actually happening at our southern borders. Jesus said, “I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life” (Jn 8:12). What does this claim mean for our mission? A disciple, by definition, pursues both BEING LIKE his master, and the master’s CAUSE. So, not surprisingly, Jesus said to his followers, You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hidden. Nor do people light a lamp and put it under a basket, but on a stand, and it gives light to all in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before others (Mt 5:14-16). Let's fill out the biblical picture of this mission.

OUR MISSION TO BE LIGHT TO THE WORLD

We are called out of darkness: But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you OUT OF DARKNESS INTO HIS MARVELOUS LIGHT (I Pet 2:9).
Sin causes humans to suppress the truth and hide from the light. And this is the judgment: the light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light because their works were evil. For everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his works should be exposed (Jn 3:19-20).
Deceit is at the heart of evil. The devil was a murderer from the beginning, and does not stand in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks out of his own character, for he is a liar and the father of lies (Jn 8:44).
God is unalterably opposed to dishonesty. A lying tongue is an abomination to the LORD (Prov 16:17).
Jesus exposed hidden evil. “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you clean the outside of the cup and the plate, but inside they are full of greed and self-indulgence. You blind Pharisee! First clean the inside of the cup and the plate, that the outside also may be clean. Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs, which outwardly appear beautiful, but within are full of dead people's bones and all uncleanness” (Mt 23:25-27).
We follow a master who IS truth. I am the way the truth and the life (Jn 14:6).
A commitment to truth belongs at our core in the battle for the kingdom of light to prevail. Stand therefore, having fastened on the belt of truth (Eph 6:14).
Notice that in Psalm forty-five’s description of Jesus’ messianic rule, he spreads truth. Gird your sword on your thigh, O mighty one, in your splendor and majesty! In your majesty ride out victoriously for the cause of truth and meekness and righteousness (Ps 45:3-4).
Helping another see truth is an act of love. Love does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth (1 Cor 13:6).
Our calling in the culture is to expose lies. You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hidden. Nor do people light a lamp and put it under a basket, but on a stand, and it gives light to all in the house.

EVIDENCE OF THE CORPORATE MEDIA’S SUPPRESSION OF TRUTH

A. Trump Russian Collusion Hoax. Although I’ve known that over 90% of those in the media industry are Democrats, I did not see the extent of the mainstream media corruption until 2019 when Special Counsel Robert Mueller exonerated President Trump’s campaign from the mythical allegation of Russian collusion to influence the 2016 election. The world saw that this allegation was actually fabricated by Hillary Clinton’s campaign. For three years, the mainstream media had repeated the lie of Russian collusion. During that time, I repeatedly heard Greg Jarrett of Fox news give updates on these allegations. Mueller’s report confirmed that every single thing Greg Jarrett said true, while the wool was pulled over the eyes of everyday Americans for three years by a dishonest media seeking to undermine everything Trump tried to do. This experience opened my eyes to the sad truth. CNN, MSNBC, CBS, NBC, ABC, Sixty Minutes are no longer interested in real journalism. They are led by progressive ideologues, the same ideology that has overtaken what was for some a beloved Democrat Party. I have had many conversations with distraught friends who have spiritually mature Christian adult kids who seem to be blind to the takeover of the Democrat Party by Cultural Marxism. I think I understand why. If they get their news from the above sources, they don’t have a clue what is happening in America. Instead, they hear progressive spin at every turn. Sadly, some very intelligent Christians would be called naïve using biblical categories. Scripture says, The naïve believe everything but the prudent man considers his steps (Prov 14:15). Perhaps some of us need to say to friends and relatives, “The Bible says, The one who states his case first seems right, until the other comes and examines him. If your main news source is the mainstream media, what conservative news source are you listening to so that you get both sides?” (Conservative sources would be Fox News Channel, Newsmax, The Heritage Foundation, some talk radio broadcasts, and podcasts like the World and Everything in It, Breakpoint, Verdict with Ted Cruz.) So, it would be folly to ignore what the 3-year promotion of a hoax invented by the Clinton campaign tells us about the corporate media. They can’t be trusted. Period.

B. Cover Up of Hunter Biden’s Crimes Before the 2020 Election. Black Conservative thinker Kay Coles James asks, “While there’s little doubt that left-leaning bias is rampant throughout much of the political media, is that bias powerful enough to swing a presidential election? According to a survey of those who voted for Joe Biden in November of 2020, it made a big enough difference to hand six swing states to the former vice president.

Brent Bozell, president of the watchdog Media Research Center, surveyed swing-state Biden voters and found that the media’s refusal to cover certain stories may have cost President Donald Trump the election. The Media Research Center asked voters about eight news stories, including the unfolding scandal involving Hunter Biden’s foreign business dealings that may have included Joe Biden himself, a former staffer’s sexual assault allegation against Joe Biden, and positive stories about Trump’s successes, including 33% economic growth during the pandemic, an upcoming coronavirus vaccine rollout, and Middle East peace deals. The Media Research Center found that 17% of Biden voters wouldn’t have voted for him had they known about one or more of the stories. Bozell’s calculations show that was enough to move six swing states into Trump’s column, giving him 311 Electoral College votes—enough to retain the presidency. For example, 39% of Biden voters said they didn’t know about the record 11 million jobs created from June to October in the snapback from the pandemic. If they had, 5.4% would have changed their vote. (Heritage.org “How Conservatives Must Counter the Media’s Left-Wing Election Advocacy”).

C. In April of 2023 Elon Musk bought Twitter for 44 billion dollars. In a TED interview, Musk said he aimed to make Twitter a "platform for free speech around the globe", hailing free speech as a "societal imperative for a functioning democracy" and insisting that he had not made the offer to increase his wealth. Musk himself had been the victim of twitter’s incredibly biased shutdown of voices with whom its leaders disagreed.

On July 13th Elon Musk endorsed Donald Trump. Musk is no political conservative, but he saw the way progressive ideology suppresses the truth. All forms of Marxism, including Cultural Marxism, which reigns in the Democrat Party, are totalitarian in nature. The elite must control and manipulate what the masses think. Six days ago, Musk repeated his reasons for supporting Trump in these words: “I think this election is the most important election of our lifetime. This is not an ordinary election. The other side wants to take away your freedom of speech.… Free speech is the bedrock of democracy. If people don’t know what’s going on—if people don’t know the truth, how can you make an informed vote.”

D. Facebook admits suppressing the truth. This past summer, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerburg made a stunning revelation about Facebook being pressured at times by the Biden/Harris administration and that it had deliberately buried stories about the Biden family receiving bribes by “demoting it.” Demoting a story means making it and references to it all but impossible to find anywhere on Facebook. Zuckerburg’s words: “In 2021, senior officials from the Biden Administration, including the White House, repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain Covid-19 content. In a separate situation in the lead up to the 2020 election, when we saw a New York Post story reporting on corruption allegations involving then-Democrat presidential nominee Joe Biden’s Family, we… demoted it…In retrospect we shouldn’t have demoted the story.”

E. The Son of Robert F Kennedy leaves the Democrat Party and endorses Trump. On August 24th in one of the most stunning political reversals in US history, the reigning patriarch of the bluest of all Democrat blueblood families, RFK Jr. endorsed Donald Trump. His words are a stunning confirmation that cultural Marxism has taken over the Democrat Party and will do anything to force its ideology on voters, in utter disregard of the principles of democracy. His words:

"Sixteen months ago, I launched my campaign to be president of the United States. I began this journey as a Democrat, the party of my father and uncles, the party which I pledged my allegiance to long before I was old enough to vote. Back then the Democrats were the champions of the Constitution, of civil rights. The Democrats stood against authoritarianism, against censorship and were the party of government transparency. Our party was the bulwark against big money interests and corporate power. As you know, I left that party in October because it had departed so dramatically from the core values that I grew up with. It had become the party of censorship, corruption, big tech, big pharma, and big money."

"I’m sorry to say that while democracy still survives at the grass roots, it has become little more than a slogan for the media, and the Democratic Party. In the name of saving democracy, the Democrat Party set itself to dismantling it. Lacking confidence that its candidate could win in a fair election at the voting booth, the Democrat National Committee waged continual legal warfare against both President Trump and myself. Each time our volunteers turned in those towering boxes of signatures needed to get on the ballot, the DNC dragged us into court, state after state, attempting to erase their work and subvert the will of the voters who had signed those petitions. It deployed DNC-aligned judges to throw me and other candidates off the ballot and to throw President Trump in jail."

"In a campaign of over a year, when at times my poll numbers were in the high twenties, the DNC-aligned mainstream media networks maintained a near perfect embargo on interviews with me. By comparison, during his 10-month presidential campaign in 1992, independent candidate Ross Perrot gave 34 interviews on mainstream networks. In contrast, in the 16 months since I declared, ABC, NBC, CBS, MSNBC CNN combined had 2 live interviews with me. In my heart I no longer believe that I have a realistic path to victory in the face of this relentless censorship and media control. The causes for throwing my support to President Trump are free speech, the war in Ukraine, and the war against children."

F. Sixty Minutes was caught red-handed “fixing” Kamala’s answers. In an interview with Bill Whitacker broadcast last week, Kamala Harris answered Whitaker’s question about Hamas in a very unpresidential, windy, uncertain manner. Her words were: “Well, Bill, the work that we have done has resulted in a number of movements in that region by Israel that were very much prompted by, or a result of, many things, including our advocacy for what needs to happen in the region,” But in the broadcast that aired, Harris’ response was crisp and confident, having been edited to this. “The work that we do diplomatically with the leadership of Israel is an ongoing pursuit around making clear our principles,” This is just one more example of the dishonest mainstream media in action.

MEDIA & DEMOCRAT SUPPRESSION OF BORDER FACTS

In 2020, the Trump Administration achieved the lowest rate of illegal immigration in 45 years. But all Democrats want open borders. The first week in office the Biden/Harris administration made three intentional decisions to open the border to illegal immigrants. 1). They halted construction of the border wall. 2) They reinstated the disastrous policy of catch and release. 3) They pulled out of the incredibly successful Remain in Mexico policy. The truth is that the Democrats have deliberately caused the border crisis. The executive branch refuses to enforce immigration law. Here are some examples of the deceptions.

In recent interviews Kamal Harris lied in blaming the border crisis on Congress for not passing a necessary law. Tim Walz also lied in saying more funding is needed. There is no new law or funding needed. The only issue is the refusal of the Biden/Harris administration to enforce current immigration law. Why is it that members of the mainstream media did not challenge Harris or Walz with the dishonesty of their answers, since the 11 million illegal immigrant explosion is caused by catch and release, which defies immigration law.
The Republican majority of the House of Representatives voted to impeach Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas for dereliction of duty in not enforcing immigration law. When the case went to the Democrat-controlled Senate to be tried, every Democrat voted in favor of a bogus procedural motion to dismiss the charges. They would not allow the Democrat non-enforcement of immigration law to even be discussed on the floor of the Senate lest voters know what is happening at the border.
Here is a story from this week that has been all but ignored by mainstream media as are hundreds of vicious attacks committed by convicted felons released into the US by the Biden/Harris administration. A woman in her fifties returned to her Briarwood neighborhood of Dallas and had just pulled into her garage when four men approached her, forced her inside at gunpoint, tied her up, pistol-whipped her, threatened to cut off her fingers, ransacked her home, stole money and jewelry. Police matched a fingerprint to one of the suspects, Manuel Hernandez who named the others involved. All four are from Venezuela. Ice would only give the immigration history of Manuel Hernandez, who in March illegally entered the US from El Paso and has been arrested at least twice before and released. Just months after illegally coming into the US, he pled guilty to a DWI. Despite the conviction, he was released right back into the US. By the way, this Dallas woman was fortunate she wasn’t raped or murdered like 22-year-old Gorgia nursing student Laken Riley and so many others by convicted felons released into our country through the Democrat catch and release.
The Biden/Harris administration has admitted that it illegally flew 320,000 illegal immigrants secretly into the US. This would be a major news headline if the mainstream media were not committed to suppressing what the Biden/Harris is doing to bring illegal immigrants into America. The Biden administration was forced to admit these facts because it was sued under the Freedom of Information Act by the Center for Immigration Studies. I response to that lawsuit, they released documents that showed that the Biden/Harris administration paid for paid for secret flights of 320,000 illegal immigrants and unloaded them at 43 different American airports. They refused to admit which ones because that would be “a security risk."

In closing, I want to say that like most Christian leaders, I hate the very idea of bringing partisan politics into a discussion about Christian discipleship. Trump and the rest of the Republican Party are nowhere close to perfect. And EVERY politician spins the truth. But I cannot flee from my responsibility to shed light on the evil being covered up by the corporate media and Democrat party, especially with regard to our southern border.

For Further Prayerful Thought:

What do you think is the biblical case for Christians to advance the kingdom of light by exposing destructive actions that those in the culture are attempting to hide?
What two or three facts seem like the strongest evidence of the corporate media’s suppression of the truth? Why do you think Christians allow the mainstream media to blind them so much to what is really happening in our culture?
What facts about illegal immigration and the open southern border stood out most to you? In view of these facts, what wise question might you ask a believer who naively thinks Christians should support the Democrat’s open border catch and release defiance of immigration law?

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Putting a Lens Over the Israel vs Hamas/Hezbollah War

On 05 October, 2024 By Gary Yagel

In the Genesis 12 account of Abram’s calling, God says, Go from your country and your kindred and your father's house to the land that I will show you. And I will make of you a great nation, and… I will bless those who bless you, and him who dishonors you I will curse (vs 1-2). That nation, Israel is now at war with Hamas and Hezbollah. Does God’s promise of blessings and curses mean that Christians should blindly support candidates from the Republican party who are staunchly pro-Israel? What about Palestinian Christians who were killed while taking refuge in a church, which was bombed by Israeli jets in what many Christians consider reckless overkill? This episode seeks to set forth some facts about Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Christian theory of just war, giving you a lens to evaluate the stands of the two parties, yourself.

Tomorrow marks the one-year anniversary of the October 7 massacre by the terrorist group Hamas of some 1200 Israeli babies, children, women and men, many after torturing them. It was the worst day of slaughter of Jews since the holocaust. Hamas didn’t just commit atrocities: they filmed, celebrated, and broadcast them. As we try to get our minds around how to think biblically about Israel’s response to this attack. we need quite a few facts. Let’s begin with some history.

HISTORY OF THE MIDDLE EAST CONFLICT UP TO 2005

Jews were dispersed across the world after 70 AD when Jerusalem was pillaged.
In 1917, Palestine was part of the Ottoman Empire with less than 10% of the population Jewish.
During WWI, Britain passed the Balfour Declaration, in 1917, to establish a "national home for the Jewish people in Palestine.”
The declaration called for “safeguarding the civil and religious rights for the Palestinian Arabs” who composed the vast majority of the population.
After Britain’s army drove the Ottoman Turks out of the Middle East (WW1) the Britts set up a political entity called Mandatory Palestine under its rule.
Meanwhile, in Europe the Jewish Zionist movement called for Jews to migrate to Palestine to repatriate Israel.
Arab nationalists naturally opposed this effort, asserting Arab rights over the former Ottoman territories and seeking to prevent Jewish migration.
After World War II, in 1945, the United States took up the Zionist cause.
Britain, unable to find a practical solution for the rule of Palestine referred the problem to the United Nations, which in 1947 approved a plan for 1) an independent Arab State, 2) an independent Jewish State, and 3) the city of Jerusalem to be under an international trusteeship system.
The UN’s vote caused joy among Jews and anger in the Arab community. The next day Arab League members, Egypt, Transjordan, Syria, Lebanon and Iraq marched their forces into what had, until the previous day, been the British Mandate for Palestine, to attack the Jewish state.
After an initial loss of territory by the Jewish state, the tide turned in the Israelis' favor and they pushed the Arab armies back beyond the borders of the proposed Arab state.
The departure of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Arabs from Israel during the war left the country with a substantial Jewish majority.
Hostility towards Israel among the Arabs smoldered for twenty years leading the Arab league in 1967 to plan another attack. Israeli intelligence learned of it and the Israeli air force launched pre-emptive strikes destroying the Egyptian, Jordanian, and Syrian air forces on the same day.
It then defeated Egypt, Jordan and Syria in this Six-Day War. Israel captured the Old City of Jerusalem, the Sinai Peninsula, the Gaza Strip, the West Bank and the Golan Heights.
In 1979 Israel signed a peace treaty with Egypt based on the Camp David Accords.
In 1993, Israel signed the Oslo I Accord I with the Palestine Liberation Organization, followed by the signing of the Israel–Jordan peace treaty.
In 2005, Israel gave up its occupation of the Gaza Strip. All Jewish settlers were evacuated from Gaza and it set up free elections there.

The Rise of Hamas

Hamas won the free 2006 Palestinian election with 75% of the vote.
Hamas then staged a bloody coup against the Palestinian Authority which had won the other 25%, seized control of Gaza, and turned it into a base for attacking Israel with rockets, tunnel infiltrations, and incendiary balloons.
After Hamas's takeover of the Gaza Strip from other elected Palestinians, Israel significantly intensified existing movement restrictions and imposed a complete blockade of the Gaza Strip.
Hamas’ organizing documents state its intent to annihilate Israel and impose Islam on Palestine. Consider the actual words of this document.

The Covenant of the Islamic Resistance Movement 18 August 1988

In The Name of The Most Merciful Allah

There is no solution for the Palestinian question except through Jihad (holy war). Initiatives, proposals and international conferences are all a waste of time.
Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it.
The Jihad for the Liberation of Palestine is an individual duty. The day that enemies usurp part of Muslim land, Jihad becomes the individual duty of every Muslim. In face of the Jews' usurpation of Palestine, it is compulsory that the banner of Jihad be raised.
The slogan of Hamas: The Prophet is its model, the Koran its constitution: Jihad is its path and death for the sake of Allah is the loftiest of its wishes.
Under the wing of Islam, it is possible for the followers of the three religions--Islam, Christianity and Judaism--to coexist in peace with each other. Peace and quiet would not be possible except under the wing of Islam. It is the duty of the followers of other religions to stop disputing the sovereignty of Islam.

Identity of Hezbollah

Hezbollah is a Lebanese Shia Islamist militant group founded by Lebanese clerics primarily to fight Israel in 1982. It was created with the support of 1,500 Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps instructors from Iran. The group's stated goals: the expulsion of Western influences, the establishment of allegiance to Iran's supreme leader, and the establishment of an Iran-influenced Islamist government.

Hamas and Hezbollah Will Always Reject Peace with Israel

The founding documents of Hamas, Hezbollah (Iran’s proxy) and Iran, itself, demonstrate that their clear purpose is to annihilate Israel.
Since the 2005, Hamas terrorists have fired more than 18,000 rockets and mortars at Israel’s civilian population.
To date, Hezbollah, from Lebanon, has launched over 5,000 attacks against civilian and military targets in Israel.
Ali Laijani, head of the Iranian Parliament stated, "We [Iran] explicitly support Hamas and Hezbollah and the oppressed and Muslim people of Palestine, and we do not hide this support … Israel is a cancerous tumor in the region, and we are helping the people of Palestine, and we even send them weapons.”
As recently as 2020, Hamas rejected the Trump middle east peace plan that was embraced by the Arab states, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain, Oman, Qatar, and Morocco. The plan provided for Israeli security needs, and cleared the way for U.S. recognition of Israeli sovereignty over many settlements and Jewish holy sites in the territory of the West Bank. It also included important benefits for Palestinians, who were offered the opportunity to build a state of their own, supported by a $50 billion regional development plan for the Palestinian territories and nearby Arab states.
Despite the economic benefits and the diplomatic pathway to a Palestinian state the Islamic extremists, Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran rejected the plan.

ATTEMPTING TO LOOK THROUGH A BIBLICAL LENS

A. Muslim dissatisfaction over Britain’s division of Palestine into an Arab State and Jewish State does NOT justify seeking the annihilation of Israel. Civilized people work out disputes over land, which have happened all through history. An important parallel to the British and UN’s decision to partition Palestine is India. After WW II, Britain sought to return the rule of British India to its inhabitants. In 1947, the UK Parliament passed The Indian Independence Act that partitioned British India into the two new independent countries of India and Pakistan. Since most of the Muslim population was in the northwest portion of British India, these majority Muslim districts were awarded to Pakistan and the majority non-Muslim districts to India.

The plan to partition British-owned India, was a two-state solution as was the plan to divide British-owned Palestine. Although, there is certainly hostility between India and Pakistan today, the Pakistani military is not firing thousands of rockets at Indian civilians, demanding that India has no right to exist. Only evil, radical, hate-filled ideologues (like Radical Islamists and Nazis) insist on settling land disputes by the extermination of their opponents. When I visited Israel I saw how normal Palestinians, be they Christian, Arab or secular, don’t want Israeli eradication. They favor a kind of two-state solution not unlike that proposed by the Trump administration. However, Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran and other adherents to radical Islam WILL NEVER COMPROMISE. Israel must be annihilated, “from the river to the sea” so that radical Islam can impose the Caliphate, forcing Islam on all Palestinians. Muhamad was a warrior who spread Islam through the might of his sword. Islam’s method of spreading its faith is jihad, holy war. Once an enemy was militarily defeated, Islam was forced on the population through Sharia law, from the top down. The spread of Islam is done by slaughtering its opponents, especially Jews and Christians. That is why, when it comes to the persecution of Christians across the world you see statistics like these:

In Pakistan the number of Christians persecuted by Islamic oppression is 4,194,000 (The Gospel Coalition).
In Nigeria, the estimated number of Christians persecuted by Islamic oppression is 1,420,000 (Ibid)
Since the year 2000, 70,000 black Christians have been murdered in Africa by Muslim extremists. (Dennis Prager).

Contrast this to Christianity whose founder gave his life for others, prayed from his cross for the forgiveness of his enemies, and is building a kingdom whose core value is loving and serving others. The conflict in the middle east is not caused by a land dispute; it is caused by Islam.

B. There is NO moral equivalency between the actions of Hamas and the actions of the Israeli Defense Forces. None. In the 13th century, theologian Thomas Aquinas synthesized biblical teachings on peace and war, proposing what was called Just War Theory. His thinking had a lasting impact on later generations and became the basis for the humane treatment of civilians and prisoners required by the Geneva Conventions. Here is a summary of Hamas’ violations of the Geneva Conventions.

Specifically, those captured must be “treated humanely, without any adverse distinction founded on race, color, religion or faith, sex.”
The killing of all civilians is prohibited.
Beating, rape, cruel treatment of any soldier or civilian is prohibited.
Mutilation, torture, outrages upon dignity…humiliating and degrading treatment are forbidden.
Taking civilian hostages of any kind is forbidden.

Hamas gets an A+ for committing viscious war crimes. It could not be waging a more immoral war. It breaks all international laws by hiding among civilians and firing its weapons next to hospitals, schools and mosques. While Israel tries to avoid civilian casualties, Hamas fires thousands of indiscriminate missiles in order to maximize Israeli civilian casualties. Hamas has made it clear that its goal is the destruction of Israel and the extermination of its seven million Jewish inhabitants.

This contrasts in the greatest possible way with the Israeli Defense Force actions. The IDF has hamstrung themselves because of Israel’s adherence to the Geneva Conventions. In response to Hamas atrocities against its children, Israel did what every country in the world would justly do; it took military action to secure its territory and entered Gaza to rescue its hostages and eliminate the threat on its border. Israel’s attempt to destroy Hamas can be compared to the Allied invasion to end WW II. The Allies drove all the way to Berlin to destroy the Nazi party. As Israel seeks to destroy Hamas, it, like America is morally committed to keeping the Geneva Conventions. The former Supreme Commander of British forces in Afghanistan, Richard Kemp, has testified that, in Israel's battle against Hamas in Gaza, “The Israel Defense Forces did more to safeguard the rights of civilians in a combat zone than any other army in the history of warfare.”

This is not to say that abuse of Muslims is not taking place by the IDF forces. It certainly is. In fact, some IDF whistle blowers called attention to prisoners held at an Israeli detention camp in the Negev desert that were being subjected to widespread physical and mental abuses. This parallels the whistle blowers of the American military who called attention to American abuse of Muslim detainees in the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq during the Iraq war. But contrast Israeli whistle blowers with Hamas who videotaped and celebrated its horrific war crimes on October 7. There is zero moral equivalency here.

C. Hatred of the Jews is a worldwide phenomenon that is best understood as Satan’s hatred of God’s chosen people. Romans 9-11 make clear that God’s covenant made with Abraham continues through Abraham’s line of descent, but that line of descent was the faithful remnant of Israel who trusted God’s provision for their sin, foreseen in the temple sacrifices, but ultimately accomplished by Christ. “For the promise to Abraham and his offspring that he would be heir of the world,” writes Paul, “did not come through the law but through the righteousness of faith (Rom 4:13). God’s covenant, by which He promised to save Abraham, always belonged to the descendants of Abraham who had faith, the faithful remnant within ethnic Israel. That remnant and covenant promises come into the NT era as the church. Abraham is the father of the Christian faith.

But what about God’s commitment to ethnic Israel? The re-formation of Israel in 1948, after Jews were dispersed over all the earth for 2000 years is without precedent in history. So is the antisemitism that accompanied them everywhere, which I can’t help but see as Satan’s hatred of the ethnic group God chose. Admittedly the rebirth of Israel has led to wild eschatological views with which I strongly disagree Nevertheless, I believe that this historic fact—the reconstitution of Israel in Palestine with its capital in Jerusalem—is consistent with what Paul teaches. In Romans 11, Paul uses the analogy of the olive tree to say that God has grafted the Gentiles into God’s covenant community. Then he writes, “a partial hardening has come upon Israel, UNTIL the fullness of the Gentiles has come in. And in this way ALL ISRAEL WILL BE SAVED, as it is written, ‘The Deliverer will come from Zion, he will banish ungodliness from Jacob; and this will be my covenant with them when I take away their sins (vs25-27). I agree with the ESV Study Bible footnotes that argue that the best interpretation of Paul’s phrase “all of Israel will be saved” in context is that after the ingrafting of the Gentiles, before Christ returns there will be a great outpouring of the Spirit in the nation of Israel, leading to millions of Jews coming to faith in Christ. God's covenant people were clearly the remnant; but God's call to Abram and Romans 9-11 seem to suggest a commitment God has also made to ethnic Israel. That is not the only reason, but a good reason to elect those who are pro-Israel.

DEMOCRATE AND REPUBLICAN SUPPORT FOR ISRAEL

Is there a difference between Republican and Democrat support for the nation of Israel? Trump's support while in office was notorious. On December 6, 2017, he officially recognized Jerusalem as the capital city of Israel and announced his plan to move the American embassy to this city. It is unfair and untrue to say that all Democrats are anti-Israel. But the facts are that pro-Hamas politicians in the Democrat Party have caused a historic weakening in its support for Israel. Here are some of those facts.

One month after taken office, the Biden-Harris Administration rescinded Trump’s restoration of U.N. sanctions on Iran concerning its sale of oil. The enforcement of these sanctions led to a reduction in Iran's oil procuction from 1 million barrels/day to 300,000. The refusal of the Harris/Biden administration to enforce these sanctions has caused Iranian oil production to skyrocket to 2 million barrels/day flooding over one hundred billion dollars into Iran’s coffers since Boden and Harris took office. That money funds HAMAS and HEZBOLLAH rockets.
On March 14, 2024, Senate Democrat Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu should be replaced because of Netanyahu’s determination to root out and destroy Hamas. Such public criticism of an ally’s leader during wartime is an unprecedented violation of diplomatic protocol.
In May 2024, the Biden-Harris Administration decided to hold up certain arms sales to Israel without consulting Congress. The administration threatened Israel on network television suggesting that it is more concerned with satisfying the anti-Israel left-wing part of their party than supporting our close ally who neded the weapons immediately.
Vice President Kamala Harris has recklessly called for an immediate cease-fire in Gaza, when contrary to all international law Hamas is still holding hostages.
May 7th 2024 U.S. Senator Tim Scott submitted to the US Senate a resolution to condemn the explosion of antisemitism on U.S. college campuses. In an effort to call out university presidents who have enabled and refused to take action against this antisemitism, Senator Scott filed a motion to pass the resolution via Unanimous Consent, which was blocked by Democrat Senator Bernie Sanders.

Christians must continue to call Israel to follow the Geneva Conventions. But it is also necessary in 2024 to explore which candidates actually are pro-Israel, because God has said, I will bless those who bless Abraham’s descendants and curse those who curse his descendants.

For Further Prayerful Thought:

What are some thoughts that might come to your mind now if you heard someone say, “The middle east conflict is because Jews took Arab land.”
How would you respond to someone attempting to equate the IDF’s military response as just as morally reprehensible as Hamas’ October 7th attack?
How would you respond to one who said, “the Democrats say that Israel has a right to defend itself. They are just as supportive of Israel as Republicans."

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Does Loving Immigrants Mean Supporting Open Borders?

On 28 September, 2024 By Gary Yagel

When faced with the sight of millions of men, women, and children from war-torn lands seeking to escape tyranny to have better life, most Christians will voice their approval for open door policies of inclusion, hospitality, diversity and welcome. Some Christians have even argued that failure to have such open-hearted attitudes towards these immigrants is sinfully, selfishly, letting “the gods of fear and security dictate how we respond” (Mark Galli, Christianity Today). Does the Biblical call to care for the sojourner and resident alien, imply that those with true Christ-like love for non-Americans requires us to throw open our boarders to all who want to enter? Jesus, did teach that true believers will hear from Jesus, “I was a STRANGER and you WELCOMED me.” Doesn’t this settle the issue—All Christians must be welcoming to immigrants who want to come into our country? Your children and grandchildren are hearing that argument. This episode seeks to help us all think biblically about the hot topic today of illegal, undocumented, immigrants coming across our southern border.

Scripture describes a subset of King David’s “Mighty Men” from the tribe of Issachar as men who had understanding of the times, to know what Israel ought to do (1 Chron 12:32). That is a description of the band of brothers this podcast is seeking to build—men who understand their times because they view culture through a biblical lens—and who therefore know what their families, churches, and nation should do. As we continue our series, "Election 2024 and Biblical Worldview," we dig into what the Bible says about the Christians’ responsibility to care well for immigrants, who are called sojourners or resident aliens in Scripture.

GOD’S PEOPLE ARE TO GIVE SPECIAL CARE TO SOJOURNERS

In recent years among Bible-believing Christians there has come a welcome challenge to shun Western materialism, become much more committed to the poor and marginalized, and return to the simple vision of godliness given in Micah 6:8: What does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God? At the core of Christian ethics is the recognition that every human being has dignity as God’s image-bearer, which requires us to care for every human, no matter what his or her social status. Scripture particularly identifies those holding the lowest status for intentional care—widows, orphans, the poor, and immigrants.

The OT is filled with laws and narratives about immigrants. Israelites were commanded to provide for them through an agrarian welfare system, in which foreigners could glean from an Israelite’s field (Dt 24:19-22) and were required to be pay immigrants in a timely manner for their work (Dt 24:15). The Israelites were repeatedly warned not to oppress the widow, the orphan, or sojourner, in words like these in Deuteronomy 24: You shall not pervert the justice due to the sojourner or to the fatherless, or take a widow's garment in pledge, but you shall remember that you were a slave in Egypt and the Lord your God redeemed you from there; therefore I command you to do this (Vs 17-18). The prophets frequently called down fire on anyone who claimed to be a follower of Yahweh and mistreated a foreigner. Do justice and righteousness, and deliver from the hand of the oppressor him who has been robbed. And do no wrong or violence to the resident alien, the fatherless, and the widow, nor shed innocent blood in this place. (Jer 22:3). Indeed, Malachi puts mistreatment of immigrants on a level with sorcery and adultery: Then I will draw near to you for judgment. I will be a swift witness against the sorcerers, against the adulterers…against those who oppress widow and the fatherless, against those who thrust aside the sojourner (Mal 3:5).

The NT concern for immigrants is perhaps even more clear. Jesus was a refugee, fleeing with his family from Herod. He confronted his hometown elders over their racist attitudes towards gentile outsiders. He attacked the bigoted Jewish hatred for the Samaritans. Peter tells Christians that we, ourselves are sojourners in a foreign land. Such status as foreigners should give us a new heart for others who find themselves in similar situations. Moreover, Jesus taught that on judgement day, he will look at true Christians and say, “I was a stranger and you WELCOMED me” and look at those damned to hell and say, “I was a stranger and you did NOT WELCOME me” (Matt 25:35-43).

Taken at face value, there is an undeniable case that Christians must open their hearts to the plight of poor immigrants seeking a better life in America. But this non-negotiable heart attitude does NOT for one second support the policy of open, uncontrolled borders any more than opening our hearts to the poor in our neighborhood means leaving the doors of our homes wide open when we go to bed at night! Godly compassion for the poor immigrant wanting to come into our land cannot mean supporting open borders for these reasons:

FOUR REASONS OPENING OUR HEARTS TO IMMIGRANTS DOES NOT MEAN SUPPORTING OPEN BORDERS

A. American borders are NOT immoral, selfish attempts to keep others out and hoard our wealth any more than the doors to our homes are selfish. This accusation comes from cultural Marxism’s radical attempt to force “equality” on all and demonize wealthy nations. Scripture says it is God who has established national boundaries. When the Most High gave to the nations their inheritance, when he divided mankind, he fixed the borders of the peoples (Dt 32:8). In Acts 17:26, we see the same truth: God himself established boundaries, making distinctions between different groups of people. And he made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place.

Although authors, like Dan Carroll, in his book, Christians at the Boarder, and Preston Sprinkle in his blog, “A Christian Response to Undocumented Immigrants” attempt to justify the un-enforcement of immigration laws protecting our boarder as civil disobedience, they have no Biblical case for doing so, since there is zero biblical teaching that makes open boarders a moral imperative. Scripture permits civil disobedience only when a believer is compelled by the government to violate the clear command of Scripture. There is no verse of Scripture that gives a person the moral right to live in whatever land he or she chooses. It is an unbiblical stretch to turn the calling of all Christians to love their immigrant neighbors into a moral principle that gives every human a right to live in any country he wants to. That idea comes from cultural Marxism not Christianity.

B. Welcoming sojourners Is already happening through LEGAL immigration. Here are some facts taken from the State Department website. To move to the United States, a foreigner must obtain an immigrant visa and then get a Green Card (residence permit). U. S. immigration law is based on these principles: 1) the reunification of families, 2) admitting immigrants with skills that are valuable to the U.S. economy, 3) humanitarian protections, and 4) promoting diversity.

The law governing U.S. immigration policy is called the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA). The INA allows the United States to grant up to 675,000 permanent immigrant visas each year across various visa categories granting them the right to be lprs—lawful permanent residents. On top of those 675,000 visas, the INA sets no limit on the annual admission of U.S. citizens’ spouses, parents, and children under the age of 21. In addition, each year the president is required to consult with Congress and set an annual number of refugees to be admitted to the United States through the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program. Finally, humanitarian protections such as asylum, Temporary Protected Status, and other programs, which may permit someone to reside in the United States legally do not have numerical caps but do have other restrictions.

Once a person is granted an immigrant visa or receives certain other eligible protections, such as asylum or refugee status, they can apply to become a lawful permanent resident. Individuals arriving on immigrant visas become LPRs when they arrive in the United States.

Compare and contrast the following:

Legal immigration of children protects them by requiring the legal parent (US citizen or lpr) to sponsor them. Illegal immigration incentivizes parents to send their kids to the border, but on the way, most are captured my Mexican drug cartels, raped, and turned into drug mules or sex slaves.
Legal immigration requires a background check enabling hardened criminals to be denied admission. Illegal immigration allows nations like Venezuela to empty its prisons and mental institutions sending these folks into US society. Progressives try to downplay the crime caused by illegal immigrants, saying that non-immigrants commit crimes too. But this misses the point. Legal immigration strains out hardened criminals. Illegal immigration DOES NOT.
Legal immigration requires an immediate US citizen, legal permanent resident, or employer to sponsor the immigrant and thus care for his or her material and health care needs. Illegal immigration results in numerous immigrants arriving at America’s doorstep with no one to care for them, which causes an enormous, unjust burden on those who live near borders.
Legal immigration requires a background check so that very few terrorists come into the nation. Illegal immigration welcomes terrorists.

The argument that many deserving people can’t get into our country legally because they don’t have the money to bribe officials has no merit. Bribery is common throughout the world. This problem of human sin is not solved by an irresponsible U.S. border policy that has no control over who enters our country. The argument that it is unfair to prevent anyone from coming to América, who wants to, is rooted in cultural Marxism. It’s not fair for Americans to be so rich—so we must force equality on Americans by making them share their wealth.

C. The Bible requires governments to enforce a secure border. As we’ve seen the past two weeks, in Paul’s command to submit to government authorities he gives us great insight about God’s purpose that lies behind giving the power of the sword to the state. For rulers are not a terror to good conduct, but to bad. Would you have no fear of the one who is in authority? Then do what is good, and you will receive his approval, for he is God's servant for your good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for he does not bear the sword in vain. Notice the principle behind the civil magistrate, for he is God's servant FOR YOUR GOOD. The purpose of civil government is your good. God has instituted government to protect citizens from harm. The word good is closely linked to the word beneficial in biblical thought just as Paul’s negative words, wrong and bad are linked to causing harm. Government is instituted by God to prevent harm to citizens. Classically, the right to self-defense and to defend your nation against a military invasion is rooted in Paul’s teaching here. So, God’s ordained purpose for government is to protect from harm. For this reason, border security is indisputably required by God because it is a necessary part of protecting citizens.

D. Unenforced borders cause enormous harm. A biblical worldview begins by discovering the facts. Proverbs 13:6 says, Every prudent man acts with knowledge. Proverbs 14:15 gives good advice to those whose only news source is social media. The simple believes everything, but the prudent gives thought to his steps. If you do not know about the present human suffering caused by the refusal of the Biden administration and Democrat-controlled Senate to enforce immigration law at the borders, you need to find a news source that will tell you the truth. Less than a week after taking office, the Biden administration reversed 94 executive policies that the previous administration had implemented to enforce immigration law. For nearly four years Democrats have refused to enforce immigration law, which has led to immeasurable suffering. Let’s take statistics from just one day. March 21, 2024, from just one location, El Passo—its migrant dashboard showed, 743 immigrants who had tried to cross the border illegally were released from custody INTO THE UNITED STATES, instead of returned to their home country as immigration law stipulates. Let’s consider this policy’s cost.

Unenforced immigration law PROMOTES human trafficking. “In the U.S., immigrants, especially immigrant women, make up the largest portion of trafficking victims. The Department of State estimates than in 2016, 57,700 victims had been trafficked into the U.S. annually. Studies done by the Latin American branch of the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women estimates that 60% of Latin American children who set out to cross the border alone or with smugglers have been caught by the cartels and are being abused in child pornography or drug trafficking.” (Congress.Gov, “How Porous Borders Fuel Human Trafficking in the United States”). This horrific depravity alone is cause enough for all Americans, especially Christians, to recognize the evil of refusing to enforce immigration laws at the southern border, a refusal endorsed by 100% of Democrats.
Unenforced immigration laws EMPOWER drug cartels to kill Americans. The 2000-mile southern side of the American/Mexico border is now 100% controlled by Mexican drug cartels, who own 25,000 drones used to spot border patrols and drop illegal drugs over the border. Not only has unenforced immigration law caused inconceivable quantities of illegal drugs to spread all through American cities, now we are seeing prescription drugs laced with fentanyl, killing our college students. This is not a political statemen, but a personal one. Last year I wept with a father whose heart was crushed by the death of his 21-year-old son, a student at MIT because he took a prescription drug laced with fentanyl. According to the DEA, for Americans ages 18-45, the leading cause of death is an overdose of fentanyl, nearly all of which the refusal to enforce immigration laws allows into our country.
Unenforced immigration laws ENABLE known terrorists to cross the border. On October 31, 2023, a member of the Senate Homeland Security Appropriations Subcommittee, reported that 169 individuals had been apprehended at the southern border in 2023 who were on the U.S. terror watch list. And those were the ones caught; she did not speculate on the “got aways.” She said the number of individuals on the U.S. terror watchlist who tried to cross the border so far in 2023 constituted a “tenfold increase” from the fiscal year 2021 numbers. (capito.senate.gov). Six months ago, a member of the terrorist group, Hezbollah, Basel Bassel Ebbadi, 22, was caught by the US Border Patrol near El Paso, Texas. While in custody, he was asked what he was doing in the US, to which he replied, “I’m going to try to make a bomb.” Ebbadi told Border Patrol he had seven years of training with Hezbollah. Again, a reminder. God assigns civil government the responsibility of protecting its citizens from harm.
Unenforced immigration laws WELCOME hardened murderers and rapists. On February 22, 2024, Laken Riley, a 22-year-old American nursing student at Augusta University, was abducted and killed while she was jogging at the University of Georgia (UGA) in Athens, Georgia by José Antonio Ibarra, a 26-year-old Venezuelan who had entered the United States illegally. ICE confirmed that the suspect was caught crossing the border but was released into the United States because of the Democrat catch and release policy. ICE also confirmed that the New York City Police Department arrested Ibarra back in September and charged him with acting in a manner to injure a child under 17. But since NYC is a Democrat-governed sanctuary city, he was released. Open border advocates argue that many people are murdered; Laken’s death is just being used politically. But it remains a stubborn fact that will not go away. Laken Riley lost her life because the Biden administration and the NY City Democrat-controlled government did NOT do what God says governments are ordained by him to do: protect its citizens from harm.

I don’t doubt that the vast majority of displaced persons are simply looking for peace and a new chance at life. If you want to help more such immigrants then tell your Congressman and work politically to increase legal immigration. But there is zero biblical case for open US borders. Zero.

HOW SHOULD WE TREAT ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS ALREADY HERE?

A. Expel known terrorists and hardened criminals. Those caught by law enforcement who are known to be on the terror watch list or are convicted felons from other countries would never have been allowed to enter the US under legal immigration. Sending them back is part of the government’s biblical responsibility to protect its own citizens.

B. Provide care for immigrant whose only crime was crossing the border illegally.

As many churches do, Christians must reach out to poor immigrant communities in Jesus’ name with love, compassion, and material assistance.
In my opinion, mercy for the sojourner means supporting an earned legalization process. Many undocumented immigrants have chosen to come to the U.S. illegally under very difficult circumstances, fleeing serious economic hardship or persecution. But amnesty for them communicates that the law doesn’t matter. An earned legalization process would include the payment of a monetary fine as restitution for adults who willfully violated U.S. immigration laws. One prominent group of Evangelicals points out:

A welcoming heart towards poor immigrants who want to come to America for a better life is non-negotiable for all who would be Christ-like.

That might mean seeking larger legal immigration quotas.
It does mean caring well for our immigrant neighbors.
It does NOT mean subverting the government's God-given responsibility to protect its citizens through enforcing border, immigration laws.

For Further Prayerful Thought:

Why do you think so many Americans are unaware of what is happening at the southern boarder? Of the categories of harm that un-enforcement of immigration policies brings—human trafficking, spread of drugs including fentanyl, terrorism, and attacks from hardened criminals, which concern you the most?
How would you respond, biblically to the fallacy that for Christians to properly care for immigrants we must we welcoming to all who want to come to our nation, including those crossing the border illegally?
What biblical principles do you think apply to our treatment of illegal immigrants who are already in our country?

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Ideas Have Consequences—Cultural Marxism Has Victims

On 18 September, 2024 By Gary Yagel

The spiritual battle in which Christian men are called to engage is largely a battle of ideas. After Paul devotes eleven chapters of Romans to the glory of the gospel, and challenges Christians that the only proper response is to offer ourselves back to God as a living sacrifice, the very next command is a reference to this battle over ideas: Do not be conformed to this world but be transformed by the renewal of your mind. In Ephesians 6 the list of equipment for warfare begins with the belt of truth and ends with the sword of the Spirit, the word of God, indispensable tools for this battle of ideas.

This reality presents Christian men with an enormous challenge. We are created to be warriors (Gen 2:15). But few of us are philosophy majors. The world of ideas that we know best matches our vocation and avocation. Yet, as warriors in the spiritual battle of ideas and as protectors of our families, WE are the ones God expects to lead the way to destroy arguments, and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God and take every thought captive to obey Christ (2 Cor 10:5). How can we possibly do this? The missing ingredient is EQUIPPING. The church must find ways to equip the saints (Eph 4:12). This podcast series, “Election 2024 and Biblical Worldview” is intended to equip men to understand the worldview issues that lie beneath the upcoming election.

As an economics major at Penn State, I got to take an economics class from an expert on Mao Zedong’s take over of China by his Red Guard in 1949, just twenty years earlier. I discovered with horror the Red Guard’s slaughter of millions of Chinese landowners to collectivize farming, and how this experiment led to the economic ruin of China and the starvation of twenty million people. I studied how Mao implemented his unique brand of Marxism and how he deceived the naïve into ceding more and more power to his regime. In his Little Red Book, I read his argument that class and class struggle justify violent revolution making it necessary for peasants and the Chinese people to murder business owners and seize their assets . I saw how Mao played on class envy, enflaming violent hatred in Chinese peasants towards the wealthy, justifying the brutal annihilation of factory owners. I saw how he brainwashed the young and naïve to accomplish his slaughter of farmers through the slogan, “From each according to his ability. To each according to his need.” History reveals that eventually 65 million Chinese lost their lives through Mao’s evil Marxist policies. 65 million! So, perhaps, I am more alarmed than most at the spread of a very similar ideology throughout the institutions of America over the last twenty years. It is called cultural Marxism and is also known as critical theory, a subset of which is critical race theory.

Origin and Growth of Critical Theory

Critical theory is a comprehensive way of viewing society that is rooted in Karl Marx’s dichotomy of society into the oppressed proletariat laboring class and the oppressor bourgeoisie land and business owner class. Italian Marxist Antonia Gramsci extended this oppressor/oppressed lens into every aspect of culture. Thus, not only are laborers oppressed by business owners, but the poor are oppressed by the rich, blacks are oppressed by whites, women are oppressed by men, homosexuals and transgendered oppressed by cisgendered people. Poor nations are oppressed by wealthy nations, immigrants wanting to cross our borders are oppressed by Americans citizens who want closed borders. Palestinian Muslims are oppressed by Israel. Gramsci called the force that enables these oppressors to oppress “unjust, cultural hegemony.” You may remember this term from history class, which usually refers to the influence of stronger nations over weaker ones. Hegemony means the social, cultural, ideological, or economic influence exerted by a dominant group.

After the Marxist revolution failed to topple capitalism in the early twentieth century, Marxists, who had gone back to the drawing board, picked up Gramsci’s hegemony concept. One such group, the Frankfurt School, following Gramsci’s lead, expanded Marx’s oppressor/oppressed economic lens to every sphere of social injustice. All inequities are caused by the cultural power of the OPPRESSORS, which these OPPRESSORS cling to through their religious, political, social, and cultural structures. These structures, such as Christianity, the US Constitution, the free market, accurate history, and the structure of the family must be torn down to accomplish social justice. One’s membership in oppressed groups is called his intersectionality rating and determines the legitimacy of one’s truth claim. Thus, a black, female, gay immigrant has more credibility than just a black man. During the last 25 years among Christians in the West there has come a welcome return to a concern for social justice and especially opposition to racism. But tragically, many Christians who lack an awareness of the tenets of cultural Marxism are being seduced into its anti-biblical thinking, including their thinking about politics.

FOUR CHARACTERISTICS OF CULTURAL MARXISM

1. Cultural Marxism is based on a corrupt, anti-Biblical view of justice.

Amplification: This view argues, “all inequalities are unjust.” Privilege is evil and the cause of oppression. Equal opportunity is replaced by the call for equity. Whereas equality means that each individual or group is given the same opportunity or resources, equity recognizes that each person has different circumstances and, therefore allocates the exact resources needed to reach an equal outcome among all. This is pure Marxism—the redistribution of wealth, i.e. the state stealing from the rich and giving those funds to the poor. After all, why should some have so much and others so little? It is not fair! Mao fomented revolution through his slogan “from each according to his ability and to each according to his need.” This utopian ideal to force “equality” upon others led ultimately to the slaughter of 65 million Chinese by Mao, and 20 million in the USSR by Lenin and Stalin (cited from Money Greed and God, by Jay Richardson). That this Marxist view of justice is seen in critical theory is obvious. For example, Ibram Kendi, the author of How to Be an Antiracist, and leading spokesman for CRT writes, “As an anti-racist, when I see racial DISPARITIES, I see racism” (Cited by Ted Cruz, Unwoke). Think of it, ANY inequity PROVES racism.

Thinking biblically:

Inequality is not unjust. It is God who has ordained the exact circumstances of every creature. In Romans 9 Paul gives God’s response to the accusation of being unjust in treating humans differently, Is there injustice on God's part? By no means! For he says to Moses, “I will have mercy on whom I have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I have compassion” (vs 14).
There is zero biblical case for the state redistributing wealth. The eighth commandment, which prohibits theft, underscores the ownership of private property while the tenth commandment warns against the covetousness that is at the core of critical theory’s oppressor/oppressed social binary.
The chief obstacle to defining justice as equal outcomes is the Bible. It overwhelmingly teaches that outcomes are a result of numerous factors, including the blessing of God upon righteousness as well as potentially being unjustly oppressed.
The Biblical law requiring landowners to harvest only once leaving the leftovers for the poor needs to be recognized; but to act justly is not just defending the marginalized. It is being impartial, i.e. not favoring the rich or POOR. “You shall do no injustice in court. You shall not be partial to the POOR or defer to the great, but in righteousness shall you judge your neighbor” (Lev 19:15).

Cultural Marxism and Government Policy. Progressive ideology, which I’m using synonymously with cultural Marxism has very largely taken over the Democrat party in the past 20 years. The cultural Marxist view of equity is behind many of the Biden Administration Executive Orders (e.g.13985) behind his nominations for positions in the executive branch and courts, behind his administrations’ promotion of radical gender ideology and his administrations promotion of Diversity Equity and Inclusion policies. While these three terms seem benign, “diversity” is interpreted diversity of opinion, which takes precedence over whether such ideas are true, while “inclusion” ideology targets Christians for hate speech if they do not go along with one’s chosen gender identity. The most extreme form of this Progressive equal-outcome-ideology is the idea that rich America must open its border to all poor people who want to come to America. New York city taxpayers are paying to house illegal immigrants in the hotels of New York City. After all, it is not fair that America has so much wealth compared to everyone else. Next week, we’ll look further at the border issue.

2. Cultural Marxism’s oppressor/oppressed social binary is false and evil.

Amplification: Of course, those with power oppress those with less. That is an obvious conclusion from biblical teaching about how the fall corrupted human nature. But the radical fall of Adam’s race transmitted his sinful nature to all humans, not just the rich. Using the oppressor/oppressed lens of Marx to interpret all of history and explain the most basic human motivations is nowhere close to accurate. For example, according to critical race theory’s intersectionality teaching one of the greatest racists who every lived was Abraham Lincoln. After all he was a white, male, cisgender, protestant, able-bodied, non-immigrant according to intersectionality. Never mind that he gave his life to end slavery. So, critical theory, written by academics disconnected from reality, does not conform to reality at all. Nor can it be reconciled with Scripture.

Thinking biblically. The reason this oppressor/oppressed binary narrative is so evil is that it is substituted for Biblical one. Notice God’s true biblical binary of Psalm 1.

Blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the wicked, nor stands in the way of sinners, nor sits in the seat of scoffers; but his delight is in the law of the Lord, and on his law he meditates day and night. He is like a tree planted by streams of water that yields its fruit in its season, and its leaf does not wither.
In all that he does, he prospers. The wicked are not so, but are like chaff that the wind drives away. Therefore, the wicked will not stand in the judgment, nor sinners in the congregation of the righteous; for the Lord knows the way of the RIGHTEOUS, but the way of the WICKED will perish.

All through Scripture God challenges his creatures to choose the path of his wisdom and righteousness. And in common grace, he appoints the state to reinforce that choice. Peter argues the same way we saw Paul argue last week in Romans 13. Be subject for the Lord's sake to every human institution, whether it be to the emperor as supreme, or to governors as sent by him to PUNISH THOSE WHO DO EVIL and to praise THOSE WHO DO GOOD (I Pet 2:13-14).

Cultural Marxism and Government Policy. During the riots in American cities in 2020, I remember being shocked that so many Democrat Party leaders, the party that regularly gets over 90% of the black vote, were coming out in favor of defunding the police. Not one of my black pastor friends did so. They saw clearly that the anti-police rhetoric hurts no one more than Black folks who live in our major cities. What caused the “defund the police” movement? The influence of the cultural Marxist oppressor/oppressed narrative. Police officers in our cities, (ironically many of whom are black) are deemed the oppressors, while black teen males are the oppressed. But common sense and Scripture teach that punishment for lawbreaking is required to motivate humans towards righteousness. Folly is bound up in the heart of a child, but the rod of discipline drives it far from him (Prv 22:15). Outside the home, government must administer punishment for evil or evil will triumph. But Cultural Marxism’s oppressor/oppressed lens sees lawbreakers as victims, while District Attorneys and the police are oppressors. Cities like San Francisco, and Chicago have been overrun by crime and the homeless because city officials refuse to enforce laws. This victim mentality towards those who refuse to obey the law could not be more anti-biblical or more unloving. Whoever spares the rod hates his son, but he who loves him is diligent to discipline him (Prov 13:24).

3. Cultural Marxism builds on class envy, enflames class hatred, and justifies evil.

Amplification: Cultural Marxism violates the most basic of moral principles learned by most of us before kindergarten: two wrongs don’t make a right. Doing wrong is never justified by a so-called “righteous” cause! Just as economic Marxism rationalized the slaughter of 85 million people in the name of “justice,” cultural Marxism foments evil on the part of the oppressed but excuses it because it is against oppressors.

Thinking biblically. Satan tempted Eve to do evil, eat the forbidden fruit, so that good might come—she might be wise, knowing good and evil. Satan, no doubt tempted Jesus to do evil so that good might come when he showed Jesus all the kingdoms of the world, and said he would give them all to Jesus (to rule benevolently) if Jesus just hit the knee once in worship to Satan. We are never commanded to do evil so that good may come.

Cultural Marxism and Government Policy. Some classic examples of progressive policies embraced today that foment evil and injustice.

The refusal of Democrat city mayors to enforce laws against destroying property during the summer riots of 2020.
The constant refrain of Democrat politicians blaming the rich, for example, Kamala Harris blaming gas station owners for high gas prices.
The catch and release approach to those crossing the southern border illegally, which is supported by 100% of the Democrat party.
Enabling the rape of women, subjugation of children as sex slaves, the death of over 100,000 American children per year by drug overdoses, especially fentanyl which crosses the border through refusing to enforce border laws.
Excusing the brutal war crimes of Hamas because Palestinians are deemed the oppressed and Israel is the oppressors. Never mind Hamas’ horrific war crimes and long-term abuse of the Palestinian civilians by hiding their weapons beneath hospitals and day care centers.
Supporting transgender policies that unjustly allow males to compete in women’s sports leagues and take away the rights of women to privacy and safety in their own locker rooms.

4. Cultural Marxism destroys flourishing by minimizing human responsibility.

Amplification: The cultural Marxist oppressor/oppressed worldview lens teaches victimhood instead of personal responsibility. Arguably the most important principle you can teach a child is that the child is responsible for himself. Cloud and Townsend point out, “Truly responsible people take responsibility for their feelings, attitudes, behaviors, choices, limits, talents, thoughts, desires, values, and loves. To take ownership of these is to be a truly responsible person—the kind of person with whom everyone wants to have a relationship” (Boundaries for Kids). The most unhappy human in the world is the one who is always blaming someone else for his problems. One of the greatest spiritual poisons that exists is bitterness towards those who have wronged you. Blaming others promotes victimhood.

Thinking biblically. The first thing that Adam did when confronted with his sin in eating the fruit was blame Eve. The first thing Eve did was blame the serpent. Human flourishing comes from assuming our responsibility to exercise dominion over our lives, shaping them and the world around us according to righteousness. This moral law is summed up, “love God with all your heart and your neighbor as yourself.” It is taking responsibility for my actions. Psalm 119:1-3 is one of hundreds of biblical texts that point to the path of human flourishing: Blessed are those whose way is blameless, who walk in the law of the Lord! Blessed are those who keep his testimonies, who seek him with their whole heart, who also do no wrong, but walk in his ways!

Cultural Marxism and Government Policy. Voddie Baucham, a black pastor who was raised in the inner city of LA by a single mom, argues that Critical Race Theory blames the pathologies in the black communities of our cities on systemic racism instead of correctly putting the focus on the destructive behavior choices of black teens. He looks back to the 2014 shooting of Michael Brown, in Ferguson, MO, as an example, lamenting the way CRT advocates, including white Evangelical pastors leapt onto the bandwagon of accusations against Police Officer Darren Wilson. He was accused of shooting a black teenager who held his hands up and said, “don’t shoot.” His death caused widespread looting and destruction in American cities as the oppressor/oppressed narrative was promoted relentlessly….except that the FBI Report eventually said Michael Brown never raised his hands and never said, “Don’t shoot.” To Voddie, the oppressor/oppressed narrative prevented young black men from hearing, “We can’t live like this, stealing things we want from stores and roughing up store clerks, walking down the middle of the street, refusing to listen to police officers, and provoking a confrontation with them.”

But perhaps the most tragic result of CRT imposing its false narrative over the Michael Brown shooting is what has been called “the Ferguson effect.” This is an increase in violent crime rates in a community caused by reduced proactive policing due to the community's distrust and hostility towards police. Fueled by the defund the police movement led by Progressive Democrats, The Ferguson effect was an increased murder rate in U.S. cities following the Ferguson unrest.

“Cultural Marxism” isn’t just a nasty name conservative made up to describe the beliefs of their leftwing opponents. It is a real, evil ideology that brings destruction wherever it travels, just as economic Marxism has. Christians must oppose it.

For Further Prayerful Thought

What did you learn about Marxism that you did not know before?
How does the concept of hegemony (the cultural power to which oppressors cling to protect their dominance) explain why the political left wants to destroy the social institutions of Christianity, the US Constitution, a market economy, traditional male/female roles, traditional moral values, and the family?
How would you explain to a friend why cultural Marxism’s oppressor/oppressed is either substantiated by reality not Scripture?
Which illustrations of cultural Marxism shaping progressive policies most stood out to you?

Recommended Resources

Critical Dilema, Neil Shenvil and Pat Sawyer.
Fault Lines, Voddie Baucham.
Money Greed and God , Jay Richards.
Unwoke, Ted Cruz.

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Christian Men’s Mission in the 2024 Election

On 15 September, 2024 By Gary Yagel

The purpose of this podcast has always been to help Christian men define and stay focused upon their mission as followers of Christ. So, what is our mission over the next 50 days in view of the upcoming American election? Some Bible-believing Christians answer, “Your mission is to save America as a Christian nation by voting for Donald Trump and getting others to.” Other Bible—believing Christians are appalled by such Christian nationalism and would say, “The kingdom of God is not America. The mission of the church is to preach the gospel and stay out of political discussions.” Which is it? This episode analyzes the strengths and flaws of these two arguments, then suggests an alternative that avoids the potholes of both.

The term “Christian Nationalism” has rather suddenly intruded into American political conversation. For some, the term recognizes the historical reality of Christian influence that shaped this nation and made it great. The term calls Christians not to be passive while evil ideologies are being promoted by progressive Democrats that replace the Christian worldview that shaped America with destructive, godless ideologies. For others, the term Christian nationalism suggests January 6th violent, white supremacy. It is a dangerous term that denies the critical importance of separating church and state while seducing the church from its call to preach the pure unadulterated gospel into partisan politics. Between warring camps are Christian parents and grandparents who want to avoid the error of both sides, and just understand Jesus’ mission for them in this election. Is that possible? I think so.

THE CASE FOR CHRISTIAN NATIONALISM: Christians should be politically involved supporting the Republican Party to save America as a Christian nation

Two years ago, Eric Metaxas, a specialist in the study of Deitrich Bonhoeffer and the German culture surrounding Hitler’s rise to power, challenged American Christian leaders to avoid the mistakes of the German church, which remained silent while Hitler incrementally rose to power in the 1930’s. Here are some excerpts from the first chapter of his book, Letter to the American Church:

Critical Race Theory—which is atheistic and Marxist—and radical transgender and pro-abortion ideologies are all inescapably anti-God and anti-human. So, they are dedicatedly at war with the ideas of family and marriage, and with the idea of America as a force for good—as a force for spreading the Gospel and Gospel values throughout the world.

One of the principal ways that they (CRT, transgenderism, pro-abortion ideology) have gained strength is in persuading so many in the American Church that to fight them is to abandon the “Gospel” for culture warring or for politics. This is not just nonsense, but it is a supremely deceptive and satanic lie, designed only to silence those who would genuinely speak for truth...Those who call the church to be “apolitical” are like (the 1930s German church leaders) singing more and more loudly to drown out the cries of Jews in boxcars heading to their gruesome deaths.

Just as the German Church had a painfully important task and did not rise to that occasion to perform it, so we have a painfully important task…If anyone would feel that believing God has chosen the American Church for such a vital role somehow smacks of an egotistical nationalism, they have already bought into the Marxist and globalist lie that America is nothing special.

Let’s consider the arguments made in support of this view:

A. Scripture does distinguish between the power of the church, exercised via church discipline, and the power of the state, exercised through the use of the sword. But notice that the secular state is required to punish moral evil and reward moral good. From Romans 13: For rulers are not a terror to good conduct, but to bad. Would you have no fear of the one who is in authority? Then do what is good, and you will receive his approval, for he is God's servant for your good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for he does not bear the sword in vain. For he is the servant of God, an avenger who carries out God's wrath on the wrongdoer (vs 3-4). The secular state is incapable of doing its job by itself; it needs the church to define the good, which it is to reward and the evil it is to punish.

History records that just nine weeks after taking office, Adolf Hitler signed the “Restoration Act” to “restore the purity of the Arian race,” which made it illegal for anyone with Jewish blood to hold government positions. Dietrich Bonhoeffer immediately responded writing his essay, “The Church and the Jewish Question” that same month. Bonhoeffer argued three central points:

The church was the conscience of the state and must call it to account. It must loudly object if the state was doing wrong. It must not remain silent when injustices and wrongs are being promoted and enacted.
The church was obligated to help the victims of the state’s evil policies.
If the state refused to change course, Christians were obligated to act against it.

Bonhoeffer rightly understood the Romans 13 responsibility of the church to be the conscience in its political sphere.

B. Present-day progressive ideology and in particular, critical theory, (aka cultural Marxism) are as evil as were Hitler’s racism, America’s chattel slavery, and India’s practice of widow immolation. If William Wilberforce and Harriet Beecher Stowe believed Christians were to be “apolitical,” slavery might still exist in America and Great Britain. If Martin Luther King, Jr. believed Christians should be “apolitical” Blacks might still be forced to sit in the back of the bus. If Christian missionaries to India had been “apolitical,” some widows might still be burned on their husband’s funeral pyre. In today’s world, children are being raped because of open border policy, mutilated by gender ideologues shoving them down the path of irreversible hormone treatments and surgery that permanently disfigures their bodies, and slaughtered by policies that advocate the murder of unborn children not only up to the moment of birth but in some cases, after birth if the child survives a botched abortion. Ideas have consequences. Evil ideas have VICTIMS. If Christians don’t speak against the evils of progressivism,

C. Historically, America has been seen by many as a “Christian nation” from its inception. Here are two classic examples from the thousands that could be cited.

The French sociologist, Alexis de Tocqueville in 1835 when he reported on his visit to America to understand the roots

I sought for the greatness and genius of America in her commodious harbors and her ample rivers—and it was not there…in her fertile fields and boundless forests—and it was not there…in her rich mines and her vast world commerce—and it was not there…in her democratic Congress and matchless constitution—and it was not there. Not until I went into the churches of America and heard her pulpits flame with righteousness did I understand the secret of her genius and power. America is great because she is good, and if America ever ceases to be good, she will cease to be great. (Democracy in America).

As recently as 1954, Earl Warren, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, said to attendees of a prayer breakfast at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, D.C.

“I believe no one can read the history of our country without realizing that the Good Book and the spirit of the Savior have from the beginning been our guiding geniuses. Whether we look to the first Charter of Virginia, or to the Charter of New England, or to the Charter of Massachusetts Bay, or to the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut, the same objective is present: a Christian land governed by Christian principles. I believe the entire Bill of Rights came into being because of the knowledge our forefathers had of the Bible and their belief in it: freedom of belief, of expression, of assembly, of petition, the dignity of the individual, the sanctity of the home, equal justice under law, and the reservation of powers to the people. I like to believe we are living today in the spirit of the Christian religion. I like also to believe that as long as we do so, no great harm can come to our country.”

D. Some intellectuals like Rusty Reno, editor at First Things, use the term Christian nationalism juxtaposed to globalism. There is a strong case for resisting the open society globalism that is being promoted by globalist progressives, which would require the US to give up the tremendous influence that Christianity has had and is having on American society. As Rusty says, “I’d rather live in a society whose main influence is Christianity than in a society mainly influenced by secularism.”

E. Christian nationalists argue that Christians who attempt to deny that America is a Christian nation are playing right into the hands of godless progressivism, especially since the January 6th riots. Progressives have successfully used the dishonest tactic of guilt by association to brand Donald Trump a right-wing, white, racist, supremacist, extremist. No Christian leader wants to be associated with this label. So instead of speaking out against the evil policies of the Democrat party’s progressive ideology—they seek to justify being “apolitical.”

THE CASE AGAINST CHRISTIAN NATIONALISM

A. The fusion of Christain identity and national identity is both wrong and racist.

Although it could be argued that God has blessed us as no other nation and that no other nation has been used for good the way God has used America, we are no more special to God than North Korea, Venezuela, or South Africa. Blessed—yes. Special—no. The only time God’s church took on a political identity was in the OT, when the nation of Israel was a theocracy. The suffix ism, by definition, describes what is most valued. Human ism most values humans. Nationalism elevates loyalty to one’s nation to the highest value. It makes your country an idol. History is littered with the debris of human suffering that has accompanied nationalism of any kind. Christian nationalism is NOT the same as patriotism. CS Lewis in his book, the Four Loves defines the Greek word, STORGE as affection for an object like one’s pet or his homeland. There is no evil in love of country, but Christians are bound by a higher allegiance to brothers and sisters in Christ and to King Jesus!

B. Conflating Christian identity and the church’s identity is dangerous. One of the most horrible sights I have ever seen took place on January 6, 2021--a wooden cross propped up outside the US Capitol, surrounded by a mob of people hoisting up American flags, not far from a faux hangman’s platform and noose apparently intended for the vice president. I agree with the lat Tim Keller's assessment: “It will be many years before the sights and sounds of evangelical religious symbols and language in the Capitol riot will fade from national consciousness. We have all been stained with it (Gospel Coalition). Christians are naïve if they fail to realize that just about every politician who has ever lived has sought to persuade the populace that God was on his side. Let’s consider the other argument:

ARGUMENT: Christians should be “apolitical” and stay focused on just preaching the Gospel.

SUPPORT FOR THIS VIEW

A. Keeping the church and state separate is profoundly important. Arguably the location where the church of Jesus Christ is weakest is Europe, because of its historical union of state and church. It is ironic that Eric Metaxas, (with whom I mostly agree) has pointed to the moral weakness of the German church during the rise of Naziism, challenging us to NOT be like them. But why was the church of Luther’s Germany so weak? One cannot read Detrick Bonhoeffer’s biography without realizing that the moral weakness of the Lutheran church was caused by its centuries-long history of being a state church. During the Reformation, Lutheranism became the state religion of numerous states of northern Europe, especially in northern Germany, and Scandinavia. Lutheran clergy became civil servants, and the Lutheran churches became part of the state. No wonder most Lutheran pastors automatically went along with Nazi government declarations.

B. Part of the reason Isreal did not recognize the Messiah was that its people didn’t separate church and state. They expected a political ruler to overthrow Rome. But God sent Jesus to overthrow a far more sinister triumvirate—Satan, sin, and death. Progressive Democrats are not the enemy, they are being held captive by the enemy. The political entity we want to prevail is not the Republican party; it is the kingdom of righteousness spreading over all the earth.

C. Politics in a democratic system is extremely complicated. Political leaders must build coalitions to accomplish anything. Such messy compromises are difficult to evaluate. Should Christians rebel against the Republican party and refuse to vote for their candidates because they are no longer prolife? Hardly, since the alternate candidate belongs to a party that supports the death of the unborn child until the moment of birth, if not longer. The complexity of the democratic process makes it arrogant for a Christian leader to identify one party, or sometimes even one party’s position on a given issue as “the Christian one.” Furthermore, the complexity of many issues means that telling a congregant how to vote risks “binding their conscience.” The Protestant, Reformed tradition strongly upholds the freedom of conscience in political matters.

THE CASE AGAINST BEING “APOCITICAL” AND JUST PREACHING THE GOSPEL

A. There is NO gospel in the New Testament but the GOSPEL OF THE KINGDOM. The gospel Jesus proclaimed was never just the gospel of personal, private salvation. The gospel has always been the gospel of the kingdom. That is the only way the Gospel writers understood it. Matthew records, “And he went throughout all Galilee, teaching in their synagogues and proclaiming the gospel of the kingdom and healing every disease and every affliction among the people” (4:23). Luke recounts “Soon afterward he went on through cities and villages, proclaiming and bringing the good news of the kingdom of God” (8:1). Jesus’ own words show that his gospel was the Gospel of the Kingdom, “I must preach the good news OF THE KINGDOM OF GOD to the other towns as well; for I was sent for this purpose” (Lk 4:43). Until Jesus returns his followers are to proclaim the good news OF THE KINGDOM: “And this gospel of the kingdom will be proclaimed throughout the whole world as a testimony to all nations” (Mt 24:14).

The true gospel, the Gospel of the Kingdom does not merely consist of two chapters, i.e. 1) man’s fall, 2) salvation through Christ, which gives us a ticket to heaven to escape this fallen world. Such a gospel teaches separation from the world, including the world of politics. But the gospel of the kingdom—the one Jesus taught—begins with kingdom and ends with kingdom. 1) Adam is created and given a kingdom to rule—earth. He is placed in the garden paradise to develop and shape it FOR God (God’s moral law written on his heart.) 2) Adam and Eve chose rebellion, causing their kingdom, earth, to be given to the power of Satan, sin, and death. 3) A Second Adam comes to defeat those powers at the cross, redeeming Adam and his kingdom from slavery to Satan, sin, and death and he is now seated on Adam’s once-lost throne. 4) Adam’s original call to bring glory to God by ruling Kingdom Earth in a way that pleases him is now being accomplished by the Second Adam. In his authority and power, we are to seek the spread of Christ’s kingdom of righteousness over every square inch of planet earth. Biblically, the true gospel IS the spread of Christ’s agenda of righteousness into every sphere of life on earth, beginning with the human heart. And the mark of every true Christ-follower is spreading that agenda as best he can EVERYWHERE. Politics and government policy are NOT excluded!

B. Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, which defines kingdom life as disciples, begins with the the development of heart attitudes which must take root in the heart of every true believer. Notice how directly three of these eight call Christians to oppose evil and promote righteousness over earth.

Blessed are those who mourn—we are to grieve, to weep over the way sin is destroying ourselves and those around us (Matt 5:4).
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness—we are to hunger for righteousness to be restored everywhere. (Matt 5:6)
Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness' sake—we are expected to stand against evil and for what is right (Matt 5:10-11). It is doing that which Paul implies in Romans 13, Christians must do because the naked secular state can’t, call out what is evil and what is right.

The mark of Christ at work in our heart attitudes is an increasing hatred of evil and deepening refusal to be silent in the face of it.

C. God’s plan in this age is not for Church isolation from culture—but for Christ’s kingdom of light and righteousness to exist side by side with Kingdom Earth, Christians influencing our culture like yeast spreading throughout the loaf. Salt and light INFLUENCE their surroundings: “You are the salt of the earth, but if salt has lost its taste, how shall its saltiness be restored? It is no longer good for anything except to be thrown out and trampled under people's feet. You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hidden. Nor do people light a lamp and put it under a basket, but on a stand, and it gives light to all in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven (Matt 5:13-14).

There is zero case for the faithful church to be “apolitical.” The gospel transforms culture and uses thoughtful Christ-followers to do that. But we can get the HOW of political influence very, very, wrong. The rest of this series on Election 2024 and Biblical Worldview will attempt to help us not through calling for blind allegiance to a particular party but by understanding the worldview ideas at stake during this election.

For Further Prayerful Thought

How can understanding the strengths of both sides of the Christian nationalism movement help Christians be less judgmental towards those holding the other view.
How would you challenge a friend who claims that America is more special to God than other countries like China and Iran?
How would you challenge a friend who said, “The kingdom of God is not America and Christians should just focus on the gospel and not discuss anything political?”
How would you summarize the argument that Christ’s highest calling, “seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness won’t” requires Christians to be engaged in working for righteousness through utilizing their political rights?

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Prayer Releases Spiritual Power

On 07 September, 2024 By Gary Yagel

Author Dave Murrow observes what anthropology has confirmed: "Warfare is still imprinted on the male psyche. Men love to watch war movies and read war novels. They play war games on computers. Polls show men always support military action more than women" (Why Men Hate Going to Church). Science just confirms the truth we are given in Genesis 2:15—that Adam is designed to shape and protect the garden. Since Adam and Eve’s sin brought Satan, sin, and destruction into the garden, all our efforts to shape our lives and culture in righteousness are opposed by this triumvirate. We must fight, in the power of Christ, for every inch of ground. Today we examine a powerful WEAPON for this fight: prayer. But viewing prayer as a weapon for fighting is probably NOT what most men think of prayer as being for. They see prayer as praise to God, confession to God, thankfulness to God, requesting God’s help for those grieving or having surgery. But rarely do we see prayer used the way Paul tells us in Eph 6”18 it is to be used: as an act of war. And when men understand this dimension of prayer, prayer moves from being a guilt-producing obligation to becoming a life-changing thrill! Could that happen in your prayer life? Yes, and that is our goal in this episode.

Behind the world and the flesh is an even deadlier enemy, one we rarely speak of and are much less ready to resist, the kingdom of darkness, which is to blame for most of the casualties around us and assaults against us. Paul said it this way, We do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places. Paul reveals two vital implications of this reality 1) we must put on our spiritual armor—the belt of truth, etc. but secondly 2) we must PRAY. Eph 6 continues, praying at all times in the Spirit, with all prayer and supplication. To that end, keep alert with all perseverance, making supplication for all the saints (vs 18). Paul uses one of the words for prayer four times. Why is prayer such a vital part of combatting the spiritual forces of evil?

Our Prayer Power Is Only Grasped by Understanding Redemptive History

A. Because humans are made to bear God’s image, God created humans to rule over a world using their mental capacity and creativity to develop the potential of the earth and all those living on it—causing everything to flourish. God left things “undeveloped” so man could exhibit God’s image in developing earth’s potential. The law of God was written on Adam and Eve’s hearts, to guide them to shape the world righteously in a way that pleased God. For them that moral law was summed up, “You may not eat of the fruit that is in the midst of the garden.”

B. When Adam and Eve ignored their conscience and rebelled against the High King by eating the fruit, Adam’s race lost the moral ability to shape the earth in a way that was consistent with God’s righteousness. SATAN, and SIN (along with sin’s consequence DEATH) began to rule Adam and Eve’s kingdom.

C. Adam and Eve’s descendants inherited that corrupt nature. Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned (Rom 5:12). There is nothing that any human can do to free the human race from sin’s enslavement of human nature.

D. God himself would have to come, invade human nature, and become a second Adam. So, God The Son, came into the world as Jesus the Messiah to “redeem” the new humanity and new earth from the destruction, power, and presence of sin.

And you, who were dead in your trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made alive together with him, having forgiven us all our trespasses, by canceling the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands. This he set aside, nailing it to the cross. He disarmed the rulers and authorities and put them to open shame, by triumphing over them in him (Col 2:13-15).

E. At the cross, Jesus, the second Adam overthrew the usurpers of Adam’s kingdom--Satan, sin, and death, restoring the throne of Adam’s kingdom to the new head of Adam’s race, namely King Jesus to spread the kingdom of God over earth from his position at the right hand of the Father. George Ladd explains,

The Kingdom of God is the redemptive reign of God dynamically active to establish his rule among men, and this Kingdom, which will appear as an apocalyptic act at the end of the age, has already come into human history in the person and mission of Jesus to overcome evil, to deliver men from its power, and to bring them into the blessings of God’s reign. The Kingdom of God involves two great moments: fulfillment within history, and consummation at the end of history. (The Presence of the Future).

F. We live between these two moments in history; Jesus has already ultimately defeated Satan, sin, and death, and yet they have not yet been destroyed. During this present age, Jesus wants us to spread his righteous rule over earth (Matt 6:33) THROUGH HIS POWER. The fact that this can only be done through his power was stressed by Jesus in the words that preceded his great commission: All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me, therefore—go and make disciples of the nations. Only IN CHRIST is there power to overcome the kingdom of darkness. Ladd continues,

The kingdom in this age is not merely the abstract concept of God’s universal rule to which men must submit; it is rather a dynamic power at work among men…. Before the apocalyptic coming of God’s Kingdom and the final manifestation of his rule to bring in the new age, God has manifested his rule, his Kingdom to bring men in advance of the eschatological era the blessings of his redemptive reign.

G. Jesus’ defeat of Satan, sin and death at the cross, his resurrection, and then ascension bring about the outpouring of the Holy Spirit in a fuller way. On the day of Pentecost, Peter tells the crowds they are witnessing the fulfillment of Joel’s prophecy, And in the last days it shall be, God declares that I will pour out my Spirit (Acts 2:17). The primary work of the Holy Spirit reinforces the truth that Christ is establishing his kingdom of righteousness RIGHT NOW. Paul describes the role of the Holy Spirit in our lives:

Walk by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh…. Now the works of the flesh are evident: sexual immorality, impurity, sensuality, idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, fits of anger, rivalries, dissensions, division, envy, drunkenness, orgies, and things like these. But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control (Gal 5:16-23).

Linking These Facts of Salvation History to PRAYER

Just as God left the earth undeveloped because he wants Adam to exercise dominion over the earth to develop its potential, much of Christ’s redemptive power for the new creation is waiting for us to access. Because he made us to be his image bearers, he wants US to engage the weapons of spiritual warfare to advance the kingdom of righteousness over earth. Just as God did not create the world with iphones already invented, God’s new creation does NOT begin with Christ-followers and their world already perfected. During our current period of church history, he has given us spiritual resources to spread the rule of Christ over every sphere of life on planet earth. God does NOT need us to do anything for Christ’s kingdom to advance. But he has chosen to grant Christ-followers, a role in advancing the kingdom of righteousness. Prayer is the primary weapon for advancing Christ's kingdom of righteousness in this world during this age. Why? Here are three reasons:

1. Because only Jesus has exhibited the power required to defeated Satan, sin, and death. Paul prays fervently that the Christ-followers in Ephesus would grasp the greatness of this spiritual power. Paul asks God to give them the eyes to see:

What is the immeasurable greatness of his power toward us who believe, according to the working of his great might that he worked in Christ when he raised him from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly places, far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and above every name that is named, not only in this age but also in the one to come. And he put all things under his feet and gave him as head over all things to the church, which is his body, the fullness of him who fills all in all (1:19-23).

The resurrection of Christ brings the future power of God—that will one day heal and renew the entire world—into our lives now, accessed by prayer in his name.

2.) God, Himself, identifies PRAYER as the way Christ kingdom advances. Just as a military invasion begins with cruise missiles and bombing runs, our efforts to advance the kingdom on earth must begin with prayer, the only weapon capable of dislodging the enemy from its strongholds. Prayer is such a potent offensive weapon for advancing the kingdom of Christ over earth, that in Psalm 2 we hear God The Father identify prayer as the way Christ’s kingdom spreads. The Father promises the Anointed One, “ASK of me, and I will make the nations your heritage, and the ends of the earth your possession.” As Christ-followers join Christ in ASKING that his kingdom would advance, The Father promises to act.

3) The third reason why prayer is the primary weapon for advancing Christ’s kingdom in the world is that Jesus specifically taught that the Father will give the Holy Spirit’s help to those who ASK for it. Luke 9:11, Jesus says, What father among you, if his son asks for a fish, will instead of a fish give him a serpent; or if he asks for an egg, will give him a scorpion? If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him! In context Jesus is not talking about a one-time filling of the Holy Spirit but continuing to ask God to work through the Holy Spirit. Indeed, we may even ask for the Holy Spirit’s help for others, not just ourselves. Paul tells the Ephesians that he prays to the Father “That he may grant you to be strengthened with power through his Spirit in your inner being” (3:16).

All of this background is to say that you and I have a vital role in the defeat of evil in our world. In many cases, God will not act to defeat evil if you and I do not pray. There are many things God can do but doesn’t do if we don’t ask. That is especially true in combating evil. Perhaps the power of Christ to defeat sin could be compared to an antibiotic against the bacteria of moral evil that has spread to every aspect of human life. Prayer in Christ’s name for that person or battle does cause God’s Spirit to inject antibiotics into that bacteria. God promises, “The prayer of a righteous person has great power as it is working.” (Ja 5:16). But we may not see the result of the injection for two reasons: 1) we can’t see inside people and 2) the disease of sin is so strong that multiple injections are needed. We may not see the result of our prayers, but they bring others one step closer to defeating evil.

Lessons from Ephesians 6:18

Praying at all times in the Spirit, with all prayer and supplication. To that end, keep alert with all perseverance, making supplication for all the saints,

1. Note that the context of this admonition to pray is battling the spiritual forces of evil. It is prayer for some aspect of the kingdom of righteousness to prevail over the kingdom of evil.

2. The Greek word for “supplication” is DEOMAI which means: “ask fervently for help.” The root comes from the word, “desire.” So, it means asking intensely for something you really want.

3. Every member of the Body of Christ is to be engaged in prayer warfare for other Christians. The expectation of Paul is that the intense spiritual battle he has just described must be won by making supplication for ALL the Saints.

4. Paul stresses perseverance in prayer. He must have known by experience how hard it is to keep going in prayer support for other’s spiritual battles. He would also be familiar with Jesus’ emphasis on persevering in prayer, as in Luke 11.

And he said to them, “Which of you who has a friend will go to him at midnight and say to him, ‘Friend, lend me three loaves, for a friend of mine has arrived on a journey, and I have nothing to set before him’; and he will answer from within, ‘Do not bother me; the door is now shut, and my children are with me in bed. I cannot get up and give you anything’? I tell you, though he will not get up and give him anything because he is his friend, yet because of his impudence he will rise and give him whatever he needs. And I tell you, ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. (vs 11:5-9).

I have wrestled with this text and fervent prayers of mine that have gone unanswered for a long time. To get at what I think this parable means, I need to go back to my high school days. Back then, we used the term cheap girl, for a girl who would easily give sex to a guy who wanted it, instead of requiring a life-long commitment to love her in marriage. She was lacking dignity. She was a people pleaser. God is not a cheap God. He does not let us USE him. He does NOT spring into action the moment we make a request, saying to us, “Your wish is my command.” He has way too much dignity to jump into action because one of his kids, once in a while, thinks to make a request that he has forgotten about the next day. Yes, God will respond to this request; that is his promise. But he is not our personal genie. He is the ultimate heavy weight, full of glory. The neighbor within the house is not such a people pleaser that he will wake up his whole household, including his kids, some of whom probably will not get back to sleep, keeping him and his wife awake half the night, just because a friend asks for some bread. God does not answer prayers because he is a people pleaser. “He has too much dignity,” says Jesus, “for you to EVER think he is a puppet on strings.”

But when the man within the house realizes, “my neighbor asking for bread is never going to stop knocking. He is so impudent, that he refuses to take ‘no’ for an answer,” he will give what is requested to his neighbor. The precious treasures we request of God—a son or daughter returning to Christ, a relative coming to salvation, victory over an enslaving sin—don’t happen because on a whim we asked God to work. They only happen for those who in a humble sense, refuse to take “no” for an answer. They keep asking and asking and asking. The ground conquered by Christ’s kingdom of righteousness is not cheap nor easily obtained; it belongs only to those who persevere in prayer.

What To Pray For

Prayer releases spiritual power when its focus is spiritual battles and the work of the Holy Spirit producing Christ-like attitudes. We see this in Paul’s prayers.

Phil 1:9-11: And it is my prayer that your LOVE may abound more and more, with KNOWLEDGE and all DISCERNMENT, so that you may APPROVE WHAT IS EXCELLENT, and so be PURE and BLAMELESS for the day of Christ, filled with the fruit of RIGHTEOUSNESS that comes through Jesus Christ, to the glory and praise of God.

Col 1:9-11. We have not ceased to pray for you, asking that you may be filled with the KNOWLEDGE OF HIS WILL in all spiritual WISDOM and UNDERSTANDING, so as to walk in a manner worthy of the Lord, fully PLEASING TO HIM: BEARING FRUIT IN EVERY GOOD WORK and INCREASING IN THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD; being STRENGTHENED with all power, according to his glorious might.

Gal 5:22. The fruit of the Spirit IS LOVE, JOY, PEACE, PATIENCE, KINDNESS, GOODNESS, FAITHFULNESS, GENTLENESS, SELF-CONTROL.

Eph 3:17-19. I pray that you, firmly fixed in love yourselves, MAY BE ABLE TO GRASP (with all Christians) HOW WIDE AND DEEP AND LONG AND HIGH IS THE LOVE OF CHRIST—and to KNOW FOR YOURSELVES that love so far beyond our comprehension. May you be FILLED THOUGH ALL YOUR BEING WITH GOD HIMSELF!

You might want to write down the names of your loved ones and others you know God has called you to pray for and choose from the verses above a request that seems most suited to his or her needs.

Men, our mission is to FIGHT THROUGH PRAYER for the kingdom of righteousness to prevail in our own heart attitudes, in the hearts of our wives, children and grandchildren, church, neighborhood and nation. During this stage of church history, prevailing prayer is God’s ordained means of extending his kingdom, for defeating Satan and his empire of darkness, and bringing to earth a taste of the way things will someday be. If we do not fight this battle, the kingdom of darkness will prevail in the hearts and lives of those we love. No one else can take our place in this fight!

For Further Prayerful Thought:

1. Why do think Christians don’t see prayer more as a weapon?

2. What is wrong with saying that after the resurrection, Jesus left this world to go back to heaven and be with God?

3. What does Jesus want Christians to during this stage of salvation history, between his ascension to God’s right hand and his final return?

4. Why is it important, that Jesus prefaced his command to make disciples of all nations with, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me, Therefore…”?

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Using the Sword of the Spirit in the Power of Christ

On 30 August, 2024 By Gary Yagel

Author, David Jeremiah abserves,

The biblical context for viewing all of life’s events is called spiritual warfare—the age-old conflict between the kingdom of darkness and the kingdom of light…. Biblically and practically speaking, we are in a spiritual war. The Christian’s spiritual enemy is not in uniform, and he doesn’t meet us on an identifiable battlefield. He uses ruthless and unconventional tactics such as deceit, deflection, and disguise…. The church of Jesus Christ needs to know its enemies and his strategies. Above all, Christians need to know how to gain victory over this enemy. (The Spiritual Warfare Answer Book).

In this episode, we take a practical look at HOW YO USE the sword of the Spirit to resist thoughts and temptations that seek to entice us off of the path of life and onto the road of destruction. As we continue the series, Winning Spiritual Battles Because We Use Our Spiritual Weapons, we come today to Paul’s admonition to take up… the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God (Eph 6:17). One of the best things about this weapon is that unlike the others, we actually get to see Jesus using it in Scripture. We’ll dig into a study of Jesus’ combat with Satan, in a moment but lets first get to know a bit about this weapon.

This weapon is the Word of God, which is so powerful for transforming human minds and hearts that it is called “living.” For the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and of spirit, of joints and of marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart. (Heb 4:12-13). As we will see, even Jesus did not battle Satan with his own thoughts but only by quoting Scripture.

The Greek word for sword, MACHAIRA does not describe the swash buckling kind of sword used by Zoro. Rather, it was quite short, more like a dagger. It was used by the Romans in close hand-to-hand combat. This weapon is for personal attacks. This truth is underscored by the Greek word Paul chooses for Word (of God). It is not LOGOS, which connotes broad, general principles. Rather, Paul chooses RHEMA, which refers to specific “utterings.” NT scholar W. E. Vine writes,

The significance of RHEMA as distinct from LOGOS is exemplified in the injunction to “take the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God” Here the reference is not to the whole Bible as such, but to the individual Scripture passages, which the Spirit brings to our remembrance for use in time of need, a prerequisite being the regular storing of the mind with Scripture (An Expository dictionary of NT Words).

Identifying the word of God as the sword of the Spirit is consistent with what we know about the work of the Holy Spirit. Not only does He indwell Christ-followers so they have the presence of Christ with them at all times (abiding in Christ), the Holy Spirit’s work is to help us overcome our sinful nature and transform our hearts into Christ-like attitudes—love, Joy, peace, patience…etc. So, the Holy Spirit is right inside us to help us when thoughts come into our minds, designed by Satan to lead us away from Christ and his righteous path. He is there to help us recall the right truth in Scripture to combat Satan’s lies. But of course, we can’t recall, what we have never read or committed to memory. Let’s zoom in to the wilderness of Judea and watch Jesus wield the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God.

First Temptation: Use your power to command these stones to be bread

Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. And after fasting forty days and forty nights, he was hungry. And the tempter came and said to him, “If you are the Son of God, command these stones to become loaves of bread.” But he answered, “It is written, ‘Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.’ (Matt 4:1-4).

Satan begins the temptation by appealing to Jesus’ power, If you are the son of God use that power to turn stones into bread. What many don’t realize is that Jesus’ hunger after a long fast meant that he was close to death. Those who have practiced long fasts point out that after 6 or 7 days, hunger pains go away. If they have water, a human can fast about 40 days, but when his hunger pangs return, he must eat soon, or he will die. Jesus was being tempted not to have to depend upon his heavenly father, but to use his spiritual power to take care of his own needs. The passage he cites is Deut 8:3. The verse before it provides important context.

And you shall remember the whole way that the Lord your God has led you these forty years in the wilderness, that he might humble you, testing you to know what was in your heart, whether you would keep his commandments or not. And he humbled you and let you hunger and fed you with manna, which you did not know, nor did your fathers know, that he might make you know that man does not live by bread alone, but man lives by every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord (Deut 8:2-3).

Dependency upon God for your daily bread reflects the humility that is vital for depending upon God’s moral law every day. Jesus refused the temptation to stop depending in humility upon his heavenly father. The first Adam refused to depend upon God to satisfy his hunger for food, failing to trust God’s instruction not to eat of the tree in the middle of the garden. Instead, he allowed the delicious fruit to entice him into rebellion against God. He violated God’s restriction and ate. The first Adam put his physical appetite ahead of obedience to God. The Second Adam, though at the point of dying because of his need for food—refused to take matters into his own hands. He humbled himself depending on God. In quoting Deut 8:3, man does not live by bread alone, but man lives by every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord, Jesus is saying real life comes not just through physical sustenance but also by obedience to God. That is the lesson God wanted to teach the Israelites in the wilderness.

Second Temptation: Putting God to the Test

Then the devil took him to the holy city and set him on the pinnacle of the temple and said to him, “If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down, for it is written, ‘He will command his angels concerning you,’ and ‘On their hands they will bear you up lest you strike your foot against a stone.’” Jesus said to him, “Again it is written, ‘You shall not put the Lord your God to the test’” (Matt 4:5-7).

In the second temptation Satan again appeals to Jesus’ power, If you are the Son of God…..The temptation is to throw himself off the pinnacle of the temple in Jerusalem proving that he was the messiah, and thus winning a following. In response, Jesus quotes Deuteronomy 6:16, You shall not put the Lord your God to the test, as you tested him at Massah. Here is what Israel did at Massah:

(Israel) camped at Rephidim, but there was no water for the people to drink. Therefore the people quarreled with Moses and said, “Give us water to drink.” And Moses said to them, “Why do you quarrel with me? Why do you test the Lord? But the people thirsted there for water, and the people grumbled against Moses and said, “Why did you bring us up out of Egypt, to kill us and our children and our livestock with thirst?” So Moses cried to the Lord, “What shall I do with this people? They are almost ready to stone me” (Exodus 17:1b-4).

God provides water from a rock that Moses strikes. Then Moses sums up what happened in the words, they tested the Lord by saying, “Is the Lord among us or not?” The sin of the Israelites was demanding that God prove himself IN THE WAY THEY DECIDE HE MUST DO SO. Had Jesus thrown himself off the pinnacle of the temple in Jerusalem, it is likely that the Jewish people, recognizing by this supernatural feat that Jesus was the Messiah, would have immediately risen up in rebellion against the Roman occupation. A bloodbath would have ensued, and the people would have coronated him the king of a political Israel. Instead, Jesus must defeat the more deadly triumvirate, Satan, sin, and death by going to the cross, inaugurating the spiritual kingdom of Israel—Christ’s Kingdom of Righteousness.

What is the difference between having faith that God will work supernaturally to answer our prayer (thus pleasing God), and sinful presumption, which puts God to the test? Genuine faith always includes humility. Consider the faith of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego in Daniel. When told by Nebuchadnezzar that they must fall down and worship his statue or be cast into the fiery furnace, they answered,

“O Nebuchadnezzar, we have no need to answer you in this matter. If this be so, our God whom we serve is able to deliver us from the burning fiery furnace, and he will deliver us out of your hand, O king. But if not, be it known to you, O king, that we will not serve your gods or worship the golden image that you have set up.” (3:14-18).

In contrast, the arrogant Israelites in the wilderness, demanded that God give them water when and where they wanted it. Their arrogance is revealed in demanding that God prove himself to them THEIR WAY instead of God’s way. Jumping off the temple pinnacle would have demanded that God prove Jesus was the Messiah and win a following JESUS’ way rather than God’s way.

Third Temptation: Achieving a great goal but making one small compromise

Again, the devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their glory. And he said to him, “All these I will give you, if you will fall down and worship me.” Then Jesus said to him, “Be gone, Satan! For it is written, ‘You shall worship the Lord your God and him only shall you serve.’” Then the devil left him, and behold, angels came and were ministering to him (Ma

In this temptation, Satan offers to give Jesus rulership over every kingdom of the world if he would just hit his knees and worship Satan once. At this point in Jesus’ sinless life, his heart was full of perfect love for humans. Jesus must have thought back over all the centuries of human suffering caused by Satan’s rule of the earth, since Adam’s rebellion. Imagine all the suffering Jesus could relieve, all the healing he could perform, all the good he could do, if he were in charge of Adam’s kingdom, instead of Satan. It would just take one small compromise. Just genuflect once—and he could avoid the horrible agony of the cross and rule Adam’s kingdom for good. But thanks be to God, Jesus resisted Satan’s enticing offer. Satan tempted the first Adam and Eve to become LIKE GOD, knowing good and evil. They chose rebellion rather than submission. Satan tempts the Second Adam to be LIKE THE GOD of this world—ruling all the kingdoms of earth—and Jesus fought off the temptation with God’s word, Deut 6:13, “Be gone, Satan! For it is written, ‘You shall worship the Lord your God and him only

Jesus parries every blow Satan attempts, by citing a relevant specific passage of Scripture. Jesus grew up in an oral culture where practicing Jew’s like Joseph and Mary had their children memorize much of the Torah. Certainly, this is strong motivation to stay devoted to reading and study Scripture ourselves—a vital weapon in our arsenal. Is there some way in our culture to train ourselves to wield the sword of the Spirit, when temptation strikes? David Jeremiah, founder of Turning Point, answers that question from his own life. He writes,

Years ago, my friend Swen Nater and I got together at a restaurant. We talked about the areas where we thought the enemy would come after us, and we took a concordance and researched the Scriptures. We came up with about forty “swords” (i.e. specific verses for specific temptations) for each of us, which we stored in the armories of our minds. I suggest you do the same. Think of the areas in which you know Satan will tempt you, find some Bible verses relating to those areas, write them out on little cards, and put them where you will see them often. Memorize them. Internalize them. Learn them by heart--and be ready to use them when the enemy attacks.

Even Jesus, did not try to fight Satan’s temptations without quoting Scripture!

A List of Temptations and Correlating Combat Truths from Scripture

1. When I doubt that following Christ is worthwhile:

Ps 34:10 Even) the young lions suffer want and hunger; but Those who seek the Lord shall not be in want of any good thing.

2. When inwardly bored, the temptation to indulge in lustful pleasure strikes:

Matt 5:6: Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness for THEY shall be SATISFIED.

3. When God wants me to give more generously than I want to:

Luke 6:38: Give, and it will be given to you. Good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over, will be put into your lap. For with the measure you use it will be measured back to you.”

4. When I am angry because of my wife’s critical words:

Prov 12:1 Whoever hates correction is stupid.

5. When I am repelled by my wife’s selfishness feeling like I work at meeting her needs way more than she works at meeting mine.

Eph 5:25: Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her.

6. When anger seeks to control my decisions.

James 1:20: The anger of man does not produce the righteousness of God.

7. When I have more month left than money, and am tempted to worry.

Phil 4:19: My God will supply every need of yours according to his riches in glory in Christ Jesus.

8. The temptation to get a better deal by bending the truth a little.

Prov 10:2 Ill-gotten gains do not profit, but righteousness rescues from death.

9. When I am envious of a friend’s new house, car, or other possession.

Matt 6:19-21: Don’t pile up treasures on earth, where moth and rust can spoil them and thieves can break in and steal. But keep your treasure in Heaven where there is neither moth nor rust to spoil it and nobody can break in and steal. For wherever your treasure is, you may be certain that your heart will be there too!”

10. When everything is going wrong, and I want to murmur against the Lord.

Romans 8:28: For those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose.

11. When my pain and suffering send the message that God doesn’t love me.

Heb 12:6: For the Lord disciplines the one he loves, and chastises every son whom he receives.

12. When I want more sugar and don’t feel like working out.

1 Cor 6:19-21: Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, …. Therefore, honor God with your bodies.

13. The temptation to spin the truth so I am in seen a more favorable light.

Prov 12:19: Truthful lips will endure forever, but a lying tongue is only for a moment.

The result of yielding to Satan’s temptation is always destruction. But wielding the Sword of the Spirit fends off the thoughts and impulses that The Enemy plants in our minds to lead us into death. The Word of God brings LIFE. This truth led King David to write Psalm 19 and sing:

The Law of the Lord is perfect, restoring the soul; The testimony of the Lord is sure, making wise the simple. The precepts of the Lord are right, rejoicing the heart; The commandment of the Lord is pure, enlightening the eyes. THEY ARE MORE DESIRABLE THAN GOLD, YES, THAN MUCH PURE GOLD; SWEETER ALSO THAN HONEY AND DRIPPINGS OF THE HONEYCOMB. (Ps 19:7-8,10).

For Further Prayerful Thought:

Do you think this is a fair statement? If a man is not winning his own spiritual battles, he won’t be very effective helping his wife and children win theirs.
Describe in your own words the power of the Word of God.
What did you learn from our examination of the way Jesus wielded the sword of the Spirit?
Of the 13 temptations, listed, which 2 or 3 do you most need to be able to parry, by quoting Scripture?

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How Can the Helmet of Salvation Protect Us?

On 24 August, 2024 By Gary Yagel

Today, we continue our series Winning Spiritual Battles Because We Use Our Spiritual Weapons. As we seek to run well the race marked out for us, this calling means advancing the righteous reign of King Jesus in our own hearts, attitudes, and behavior, not to mention shaping each sphere of life with Christ’s agenda. But it is very easy to think, “Who am I to spread righteousness anywhere? Whoever thinks that’s my job in life, doesn’t understand the corruption of MY heart and weakness of MY flesh.” But it is Christ who told his followers to seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness. Jesus calls us to this primary life focus, knowing the weakness of our sinful nature because his plan has never been for us to seek righteousness in our own strength but in his. He tell us.

Be strong in the Lord and in the strength of his might. Put on the whole armor of God, that you may be able to stand against the schemes of the devil. For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places. Therefore take up the whole armor of God (Eph 6:10-13).

This episode tries to define in practical terms how to put on the helmet of salvation and how that protects us in the fight to do the right thing.

A few years ago, I was sitting in the stands watching some of the finest moments in my son’s collegiate football career. Playing the Rover position (sort of combination safety/linebacker, he had stopped the opposing ball carrier for no gain. On the next play he chased down the tailback on a sweep for a loss. A few plays later, he met the fullback right in the hole at the line of scrimmage for no gain. But my son didn’t get up. The running back had ducked his head just as Josh hit him in a helmet-to-helmet collision. Josh had a concussion that kept him in a dark, quiet dorm room for three days and out of football for weeks.

The main purpose of helmets, whether in sports, in battle, or in work situations like construction sites, is to protect the brain from injury. The brain must be fiercely protected, because once the brain is damaged, body functions also get damaged. That is why the NFL is investing millions in helmet design, most recently studying God’s design of woodpeckers. This medical reality is also the reason behind the helmets worn by the Roman legions. They did not want their soldiers concussed and therefore controlled by fuzzy vision and confused thinking. Paul tells Christians that our salvation is like a helmet protecting us from fuzzy, confused thinking. But how does the helmet of salvation do that? And what does it mean to take up the helmet of salvation over and over—we don’t have keep asking Christ to come into our lives over and over again!

Some commentators envision the helmet’s protection of the brain to be protecting our thinking—the process by which God’s Word renews our minds. Indeed, spiritual warfare is very much about the thoughts that capture our mind. In 2 Corinthians 10 we are told that we have divine power to destroy…. arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God, and take every thought captive to obey Christ (vs 5). But in the text we’re studying, the next piece of armor Paul will mention is the Sword of the Spirit, which is the Word of God, by which Jesus took every thought captive when he fought Satan. When Paul says, “Take the helmet of salvation” he is NOT talking about the need to renew our mind in this verse; he is talking about how understanding SALVATION in particular protects our minds.

An important clue in understanding Paul’s teaching on the armor of God is realizing that Paul is as influenced by Isaiah’s writing about the armor of God as by the Roman soldiers guarding him, if not more. Here are the verses that impacted Paul concerning the helmet of salvation (describing God’s decision to HIMSELF bring salvation):

Man’s Evil: Truth is lacking, and he who departs from evil makes himself a prey. The Lord saw it, and it displeased him that there was no justice.

Man Can’t Save Himself: He saw that there was no man, and wondered that there was no one to intercede;

The Solution: then his own arm brought him salvation, and his righteousness upheld him. He put on righteousness as a breastplate, and a HELMET OF SALVATION on his head. (59:15-17b).

This text uses the same expression Paul used, helmet of salvation. The whole point to the Isaiah 59 text is that salvation for Adam’s race can not come from another human; God, himself must provide salvation from sin and its consequences. God himself will be the Messiah who wears the helmet of salvation and breastplate of righteousness. So, taking up the helmet of salvation is a reference to the reality that salvation from sin comes by grace alone, through Christ alone. Think of what Paul has already said in this same letter about salvation. By grace you have been SAVED through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast (2:8-9).

Remember, the purpose of a helmet is to protect the brain. So what Paul is saying is that in some way the reality that salvation from sin comes by grace alone through Christ alone PROTECTS our thinking as Christians. I believe this is the truest understanding of taking the helmet of salvation. Let me try to say this another way. The one to whom he helmet of salvation belongs in Scripture is only Christ (Is 59:17) But we get to wear that helmet because of grace, that we are “IN Christ,” dependent upon him for every aspect of salvation. So, the helmet of salvation to which Paul refers is the protective truth surrounding our thinking that SALVATION IS FROM CHRIST AND NOT FROM US. To see how this truth can protect our thinking, let’s consider three component parts to our salvation.

Salvation Means We Are Saved from The PENALTY Of Sin

The Greek word for salvation, SOTERIA includes deliverance from God’s just wrath upon all lawbreakers separating them from his holy presence and consigning them justly to destruction in hell. Jesus said, Truly, truly, I say to you, whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life. He does not come into judgment, but has passed from death to life (John 5:24). The salvation story is the reality that we ourselves are destitute sinners whose only hope is God’s mercy. God, himself must save us. How does surrounding our daily thinking with the helmet of salvation protect us?

1. It protects us from thinking WE ARE TOO DIRTY FOR GOD TO WANT A RELATIONSHIP WITH. In Luke 5, after spending a whole night finding no fish, Peter sees Jesus miraculously fill his nets. Luke reports, But when Simon Peter saw it, he fell down at Jesus' knees, saying, “Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord.” I have found that many men struggling with lust, feel the same way. “Lord I know you love me, and forgive me because Christ died for my sins. But you are holy. My lust is so repulsive it makes me disgusting to you. Depart from me. I’ll be back to see you after I’ve proved that I really am sorry for my sin by getting a few wins under my belt.”

But putting the helmet of salvation on means, knowing that only Christ can make us holy. We are declared righteous. Christ’s righteousness is imputed to us. And Christ’s righteousness is not so incomplete that we have to add a little of our own! The truth about our salvation is that we are far more flawed than our lust proves while at the same time we are far more loved and accepted than we imagined. Henry Cloud and John Townsend, write, When we finally understand that God isn’t mad at us any more, we become free to concentrate on love and growth instead of trying to appease him (How People Grow).

A mother named Maria understood the principle that feeling dirty might drive someone away from those who love her. Her 15-year-old daughter, Christiana, had run away from home to the big city. Maria knew Christiana would turn to prostitution to support herself. She also knew that when Christiana did so, she would feel too dirty and disgusting to think her mom and family would ever want a relationship with her, again. So, Maria threw some clothes in a bag, gathered all her money, and bought a bus ticket for Rio de Janeiro. She stopped by the drugstore to take as many pictures of herself as she could afford. Maria visited every hotel, nightclub, or bar where prostitutes hung out. At each place she left her picture—taped on a bathroom mirror or tacked to a hotel bulletin board. On the back of each photo, she wrote a note. But before long, Maria was out of photos and money. So, broken-hearted, she returned home.

A few weeks later, young Christiana descended the hotel stairs. Her young face was tired. Her big brown eyes no longer danced with the laughter of youth but spoke of pain and fear. She longed to trade these countless beds for the secure pallet of her bedroom at home. As she reached the bottom of the stairs, her eyes noticed a familiar face. There on the lobby mirror was a small picture of her mother. Christiana’s eyes blurred with tears as she crossed the room and removed the small photo. Written on the back was this compelling invitation: “Whatever you have done, whatever you have become, it doesn’t matter. Please come home.” Christiana did. (No Wonder They Call Him Savior, by Max Lucado).

Putting on the helmet of salvation means remembering that God’s arms are always open to us like the arms of the father who runs to throw his arms around the prodigal son.

2. The helmet of salvation protects us from JUDGING OTHERS. Jesus taught,

Why do you see the speck that is in your brother's eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye? Or how can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when there is the log in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother's eye (Matt 7:3-5).

Taking up the helmet of salvation means remembering the rock from under which I was dug--that my salvation is all about God’s incredible mercy for me. I have a whole forest of timber in my eyes, compared to another’s speck. When the flaws and sinfulness of others wound me or make my life more difficult, my own desperate need for God’s mercy surrounds and protects my mind from impatience, anger, retaliation, and bitterness.

3. The helmet of salvation protects me from APATHY TOWARDS THE POOR, THE OUTCASTS, THE HURTING. Let’s think for a moment of the Good Samaritan.

A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and he fell among robbers, who stripped him and beat him and departed, leaving him half dead. Now by chance a priest was going down that road, and when he saw him he passed by on the other side. So likewise a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. But a Samaritan, as he journeyed, came to where he was, and when he saw him, he had compassion. He went to him and bound up his wounds, pouring on oil and wine. Then he set him on his own animal and brought him to an inn and took care of him. And the next day he took out two denarii and gave them to the innkeeper, saying, ‘Take care of him, and whatever more you spend, I will repay you when I come back (Lk 10:30-35).

How does this relate to putting on the helmet of salvation? WE are the wounded man. We lay helpless and bankrupt, dying in the road. Christ who is our natural enemy because he is God who hates evil, who owes us nothing, nevertheless shows great mercy for us. He stops and gives us of his riches and saves us. When we realize we are the one in need of mercy, we better understand the gospel of grace. Christians who RECEIVE mercy must be drawn to those who NEED mercy.

There are two powerful effects that the gospel of grace has on a person who has been touched by it writes Tim Keller. First, the person who knows that he has received mercy while an undeserving enemy of God will have a heart of love for even (and especially) the most difficult and ungrateful persons. When a Christian sees prostitutes, alcoholics, prisoners, drug addicts, unwed mothers, the homeless, the refugee, he knows that he is looking in a mirror….The second major effect that the gospel of grace has on a person is that it creates spontaneous generosity (Ministries of Mercy)

My salvation story is that he who was rich emptied himself so that I who am poor might be rich. This truth that is foundational to the salvation story is a helmet that protects me from apathy for those broken by sin. Everyone to whom much was given, of him much will be required, said our master (Lk 12:48).

Salvation Means We Are Saved from the POWER of Sin

4. Putting on the helmet of salvation protects us from PASSIVITY AND LAZINESS. The salvation story was never just that those who put their faith in Christ are saved from the penalty of their sin and go to heaven when they die. Such a mistaken understanding leads to a neglect of Christ’s call to discipleship—the call to enjoy a personal relationship with him right now, the call to become like him in this life, the call to spread the kingdom of righteousness over our sphere of earth.

The word salvation refers to the truth that believers are being saved from the power of sin in this life. Justification is a one-time act that saves us from sin’s punishment. Sanctification is the ongoing process of saving us from sin’s power. Paul writes: For this is the will of God, your sanctification (1 Thes 4:3). I am called to pursue God’s goal for my life: holiness of character. Salvation is not spiritual retirement. It is pressing on towards our upward call in Christ Jesus.

5. Putting on the helmet of salvation protects us from NEGLECTING OUR RELATIONSHIP WITH GOD. The helmet of salvation is the reality that Jesus is the only one with the power to save me from sin’s destructive power. WE MUST DEPEND UPON HIM EVERYDAY. Jesus precedes his marching orders to the church to make disciples with a very important historic fact about our power for discipleship. All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples (Matt 28:18). It is only in the power of Christ that I can surrender to Christ’s kingly rule over my heart loyalties, heart attitudes, and the other spheres of my life. After Christ ascended, he poured out the Holy Spirit who empowers us to be holy. But the only way the spiritual fruit of godliness is produced is by abiding in Christ, because he is the vine, and we are the branches.

Salvation Means We Are Saved from the PRESENCE of sin

6. Putting on the helmet of salvation protects us from DESPAIR, when evil wins.

The third aspect of the word, salvation, refers to our future hope. The biblical word for hope does not imply uncertainty as the English word does. Our hope is certain, but it is future. Before penning the verses we are studying in Ephesians, Paul had written to the Thessalonians, Let us be sober, having put on...for a helmet the hope of salvation. Here, Paul had referred to this third part of salvation—the final return of Christ when all of creation will be set free from its bondage to sin and restored. (Rom 8:18-21). We are given a glimpse in Rev 21.

John’s vision of the new heaven and the new earth is breathtaking. God’s people are adorned as a bride for his son, clothed in righteousness. God, whose presence dwelt in the tabernacle and temple of old, will be present with them to satisfy their hearts with the ecstasy of his immediate presence; they will see him face-to-face. Sorrows will be turned to joy, mourning and pain wiped from memory. Thirst will be quenched without cost.

During this church age evil will triumph at times, then be driven back, and then triumph, back and forth. But taking up the helmet of salvation is remembering that sin’s utter defeat will take place one day. The proof of that, argued Paul, was Christ’s resurrection. That is why he closed his chapter on the resurrection (I Corinthians 15) with the words, Therefore, my beloved brothers, be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that in the Lord your labor is not in vain (vs 58).

For Further Prayerful Thought:

1. Why does taking up the helmet of salvation mean something different from just thinking biblically about stuff.

2. How does putting on the helmet of salvation protect us from thinking we are too dirty for God to love?

3. Why does being saved by grace alone cause a true Christian to be drawn to those who need mercy?

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How to Protect Ourselves from Satan’s Fiery Darts

On 17 August, 2024 By Gary Yagel

Men don’t always admit it, but deep inside, we all want to be heroes. We want to come through when it matters for our loved ones. In our own way we would love to be like Joshua or David or William Wallace leading the charge with a sword in our hand in the spiritual battle. Yet, instead of identifying with such great warriors on the front line, most of us feel like we are just the factory worker back home in the war effort, putting in our 8 plus hours a day, sharing home responsibilities with our wives, checking our social media, maybe grabbing an hour on Disney+ and starting the whole routine over again the next day. But thinking that your role in spiritual battle is insignificant is a lie from the Enemy. Christ has called you and me to follow him in his cause of defeating evil and establishing his righteous kingdom over every square inch of human hearts and lives. There is no other man who can replace you in your life, in the arenas you have been called to. If you leave your place in line, it will remain empty. You must be the hero in your own story. There is no extra or stunt man to fill in for you. Winning your spiritual battles matters. You will celebrate for eternity the ones you win tomorrow and the next day and the day after that because each victory has honored Christ. This episode examines how we protect ourselves from Satan’s fiery arrows by lifting up our shield of faith.

The evil day is the day that all hell breaks loose in your life—when you are under attack. It’s when the finances are so low that you don’t know how you are going to make it through the end of the week. It’s when you’ve lost your job. And there is no new job in sights. It’s when you are breaking down emotionally and have lost your passion for life. It’s when your marriage seems hopeless, your kids have turned away, your health deteriorates, your future looks bleak. It’s wen your friend has betrayed you, you’re overcome by an addiction or impulse, or life seems to deliver any other piercing stab.

Six Reasons for Trusting God

(Components of a Shield of Faith Laminated Together)

6. Trust God because he has already proved he is FOR US. In pop culture, taking something by faith is contrasted with having proof. Faith is believing in something even when there is no evidence for it. That is not the Biblical meaning of FAITH. In the famous verse, Romans 8:28, it is true that Christians are to believe that all things work together for good for them. But he goes on to give us the evidence upon which this faith rests: because God is FOR us. If God is for us, who can be against us/ (vs 31). In fact, in this eighth chapter Paul specifically tells us all three persons of the Trinity are FOR us. In verse 26, the Spirit himself intercedes FOR us with groanings too deep for words. In verse 32, he tells us that God the Father is FOR us, He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up FOR us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things? In verse 34, Paul tells us God the Son is FOR us. Who is to condemn? Christ Jesus is the one who died—more than that, who was raised—who is at the right hand of God, who indeed is interceding FOR us. The reason our shield of faith protects us from Satan’s flaming arrows of doubt is that we are trusting a truth about God’s character, PROVEN by the facts: GOD IS FOR US

For Further Prayerful Thought:

1. For you, what is the hardest part of remembering that winning your spiritual battles matters?

2. What circumstances tend to be the occasion for you to doubt God’s goodness and whether following Christ is worth it?

3. Of the six aspect of our Faith Shield mentioned, which “Trust God because…” statement do you most want to remember?

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Being Contagious Christians

On 09 August, 2024 By Gary Yagel

A. The first way to be BE READY to move a conversation towards discussing Christ comes from understanding the OT background behind Paul’s command in Ephesians to shod our feet with the readiness of the gospel. As Paul writes he is influenced both by the armor of the Roman soldiers guarding him, and the words of Isaiah concerning the coming of the Messiah. Paul knew Isaiah 52:7, How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him who brings good news, who publishes peace, who brings good news of happiness, who publishes salvation, who says to Zion, “Your God reigns.” The good news is that the promised Messiah, God, himself, would rescue Adam’s kingdom from the devastation of its slavery to sin and establish his righteous rule over earth. The good news is the gospel of the kingdom.

1. Maslow says mankind’s most foundational need is PHYSIOLOGICAL--for oxygen, water, food, clothing, shelter, and health. But the curse of Adam’s sin upon the ground has caused humans to lack what they need physiologically to flourish. The coming of Christ’s kingdom means that creation itself will be set free from this bondage to decay. Since Jesus’ kingdom brings the renewal of the physical earth, Jesus taught his followers to prefigure the coming physical wholeness of the world by feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, housing strangers. We are to care for those harmed by the physical brokenness of earth. The agape love shown by believers in meeting these physical needs is the best way to turn their hearts to Christ.

I am blessed to have been an Evangelism Explosion Trainer, and I have my own set of Christianity Explored videos, which I have used. These are great tools. But those in today’s world who are under seventy don’t find the EE question, “Have you come to the place in your life, where you know for certain that if you were to doe tonight you would go to heaven?” relevant. Christianity Explored is excellent—but most of the lost folks God has surrounded us with aren’t interested in exploring Christianity. But they are experiencing the brokenness of life on planet earth. Jesus pattern in reaching the lost is to identify that brokenness and tailor the good news to how they can be whole. The gospel is about Christ’s ability to start to fix brokenness RIGHT NOW. Most of the time, sweetness and persuasiveness of speech is showing others how Christ is relevant to them NOW. Think about Maslow’s categories of need or your own categories and ask—how can the good news that Jesus came to fix everything broken by sin be good news to the one I am thinking about?

Randy Newman, in his book, Questioning Evangelism summarizes this approach to linking our faith to others’ felt needs. Calling this his “so what” story, Newman stopped starting with “You’re a sinner in need of forgiveness.” Instead, he says, I talked about my experience of being a Christian—of how I now sense a purpose and meaning to life, of how I never feel alone, and how—because I feel accepted by God—I more willingly accept other people. I told how being a Christian makes my marriage better, gives me a clear conscience, and fills me with a sense of optimism and hope.

B. The second way to BE READY when we have a chance to talk about spiritual things is intentional prayer. Part of the sinfulness of Gary Yagel’s heart is that I just don’t care about the lost, the way Jesus did. If I did, I would be relentlessly dedicated to praying for my lost relatives, lost neighbors, and lost friends. But I like being the keeper of the aquarium a lot more than being a fisher of men. This week, in exasperation over my own uncaring heart, I opened my Evernote APP to my prayer list and put, “Pray for the heart of Jesus for the lost” at the top. I will tell you, in a few months if it worked. Maybe you need to do the same.

After renewing our prayer for each other’s outreach efforts, after the very next match in my racquetball league, my opponent sat down with me for thirty minutes to discuss philosophy and Christianity.
On another occasion, after renewing this prayer commitment, the next week my double-oven went out. I didn’t want to pay an installation fee. So, I asked my next-door neighbor to help me move it in and, afterwards we relaxed for a half-hour and he opened up about his life and spiritual pilgrimage.
Another friend and I renewed our commitment to such prayer and he soon had a discussion about spiritual things with the restaurant owner where he often ate lunch at work.
One year as I set goals for the new year, I felt convicted about not sharing Christ enough and my accountability partner and started praying again for outreach opportunities. A few years earlier, I had led a Bible-study in at a pregnancy center for the fathers of the unborn babies. He had married the mother of his baby, but he was now asking me for help in his marriage. My wife and I met with them. His wife had made of profession of faith, but I explained how Christ can help with spiritual strength to love well. I gave him a copy of Mere Christianity, which he read and surrendered his life to Christ.

C. The third way to be READY to move the discussion towards spiritual things is to be seeking the right opportunities. This opportunity is NOT the chance to slip the gospel into the discussion but the chance to listen and ask questions. The third way to BE READY to move towards discussing the gospel is to BE AN INTERESTED LISTENER. We often think that effective evangelism requires looking for someone to share the gospel with. But a wiser approach, especially in the 21st century, is NOT looking for people to talk to but looking for people to listen to. Listening to them well will open a window to their soul. John Leonard, author of Get Real: Sharing Your Everyday Faith Everyday writes:

For Further Prayerful Thought:

2. Which 2 or 3 of those in your circle of lost associates and friends has God put on your hearts. What might be missing in their lives compared to what you have in Christ?

3. Is God prompting you to be more intentional about praying for and reaching the lost? What might additional intentionality look like for you.

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How Misunderstanding Evangelism Makes Us Fear It

On 01 August, 2024 By Gary Yagel

Today we continue our study of the armor of God and come to Eph 6:15, where we’re told to put on, as our shoes, the readiness of the gospel of peace. I think most Christian men want to see God use us in others’ lives to bring the gospel to them. Yet, nearly all would say we fail more in this part of our mission than in any other part. Could it be that it is harder to share our faith than it should be because we have some mistaken ideas of what Scripture says sharing the gospel looks like? That is the question we investigate in this episode.

For many Christians, this is what sharing the gospel looks like: It is having the courage to overcome every piece of emotional intelligence we’ve learned about relationships, and intruding into the life of a co-worker, neighbor, or stranger to tell someone, who doesn’t want to hear it, the gospel message that they are a sinner in need of a savior, and then being willing to suffer rejection if we are accused of being preachy. This “traditional"view has major flaws. It misunderstands the word, evangelism, it misunderstands the gospel, and it misunderstands peace.

The Word Evangelism (EUANGELIZO)

Traditional evangelism only takes place when we drive home our point over and over again—when we do all the talking. We have gotten the impression that on every page of the New Testament we are commanded to preach the gospel. We know what preaching looks like because we see it in church. The model for traditional evangelism looks a lot like what preachers do on Sunday mornings….

Faithfulness to our call to share our faith is not primarily seeking an opening to push the content of the gospel into another’s life! Nor does faithfulness to the call to share your faith require you to violate everything you’ve learned about relationships. Jesus wrote the book on emotional intelligence. It is true that at times Jesus spoke harshly to the scribes and Pharisees! But that is because Christ, the Anointed One, filled the office of Prophet—God’s prosecuting attorney to convict his people of their sin. That is not the way Jesus interacted with others in his every day, private relationships. Instead, he modeled the pattern for communication given in verses like Prov 16: 21, The wise of heart is called discerning, and sweetness of speech increases persuasiveness, and Prov 16:23, The heart of the wise makes his speech judicious and adds persuasiveness to his lips. Jesus wants us to wisely impact our non-Christians friends for him. Evangelism, EUANGELIZO, is winsomely sharing good news.

The GOSPEL We Share

In the traditional view of sharing the gospel that I started with, the hearer must admit he is a sinner who can’t save himself and trust the work of Jesus on the cross as the atoning sacrifice for his sin. Such faith is his admission ticket to heaven. While this is true, it is only two chapters of a four-chapter story—1) the fall, 2) redemption. Failure to see the whole gospel story will cause our gospel message to focus just on another’s sin and Jesus’ death on the cross so he can avoid eternal separation from God in hell. While these two chapters are essential to anyone’s salvation, that is NOT what Jesus referred to as the good news. A thoughtful examination of the word, gospel, in Scripture shows that the gospel Jesus spoke of was the gospel of the kingdom. Jesus had begun his ministry by calling attention to the cataclysmic intrusion of the kingdom of God into time. “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand” (Mk 1:15). The good news that Jesus preached was not just a message of personal private salvation, but the gospel of the kingdom. “And he went throughout all Galilee, teaching in their synagogues and proclaiming the gospel of the kingdom and healing every disease and every affliction among the people” (Mt 4:23). The good news of the kingdom was that the second Adam, Christ, had come to overthrow Satan, sin, and death, the usurpers of Adam’s kingdom and begun to establish his righteousness kingdom over earth, restoring everything broken by sin. The truncated, two-chapter gospel, man has sinned and needs to trust Jesus as his savior completely misses what Jesus said about his “kingdom.” It is only in recovering the entire, four-chapter Gospel, 1) creation, 2) fall, 3) redemption, 4) restoration that Christ’s vital role as the anointed king, (besides being anointed priest, and prophet) makes sense. When we start the gospel story with creation, we quickly learn that the kingdom is Adam’s kingdom, earth. And the fourth chapter (restoration) reminds us that believers aren’t chosen to escape from this world, but to renew this world. Tim Keller writes,

The Gospel of PEACE

Harmonious relationship with God, depending upon his love as our lifeline.
Harmonious relationship with self, finding our dignity and worth as God’s image bearers.
Harmonious relationship with others, made to connect to others by loving them as we do ourselves.
Harmonious relationship with the creation, assigned the job of discovering and developing earth’s potential.

For Further Prayerful Thought:

1. Why is it misleading to understand the Greek word for evangelism (EUANGELIZO) to mean preaching the gospel to others?

2. How does understanding the four-chapter gospel help us realize that Christ’s kingdom power is for more than just an eternal life insurance policy?

3. Can you think of biblical examples not mentioned in this episode of Jesus tailoring the good news of the kingdom to the point of brokenness being felt by his listener?

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Put On the Breastplate of Righteousness

On 23 July, 2024 By Gary Yagel

Sir Winston Churchill famously said, "Those who fail to learn from history are condemned to repeat it. In the 1181-chapter world history book, the Bible, already by just the third chapter, human beings encounter a spiritual enemy who hates us and constantly seeks to lead us down a path to destruction—i.e. rebellion against God. In the Bible’s meta narrative, Satan and the kingdom of darkness enter in chapter 3 and aren’t destroyed until 1176 chapters later, 3 chapters from the end of the Biblical story in Revelation 20. Since that third chapter of Genesis where Adam and Eve allied their kingdom with the powers of darkness, every page of human history is written against the backdrop of the clash between these alien powers and God’s plan to send Christ to free Adam’s kingdom from sin and its devastation.

Paul gives us his perspective of what is really happening on the stage of world history. He writes, For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places. Do we really think we can stand up against THOSE POWERS without figuring out how to be strong in the Lord by putting on the spiritual armor he’s provided? Is there any reason why THOSE ENEMIES will not tear us to pieces if we do not resist them with spiritual weapons? Could we ever hope to chieve our mission establishing Christ's agenda over every sphere of life without taking on the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places who claim this world as their own?

THE APPROPRIATE GARB THAT FITS OUR WORK OF SEEKING RIGHTEOUSNESS

3. The fourth beatitude, Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness for they will be satisfied shows us kingdom living and the character of Jesus. John Macarthur writes,

TAKING UP THE BREASTPLATE OF RIGTEOUSNESS IS ASKING FOR CHRIST’S HELP

THE BREASTPLATE OF RIGHTEOUSNESS IS PROTECTION

2. Righteous character protects us from harm.

Righteousness guards the one whose way is blameless, but wickedness subverts the sinner. (Prov 13:6).
In the path of righteousness is life, and in its pathway there is no death (Prov 12:28).

3. Righteous character protects us from misunderstanding the Lord's leading.

The integrity of the upright guides them, but the crookedness of the treacherous destroys them (Prov 11:3).
The righteousness of the blameless keeps his way straight, but the wicked falls by his own wickedness (Prov 11:5).

4. Righteous character protects us from being trapped or snared by sin. An evil man is ensnared in his transgression, but a righteous man sings and rejoices (Prov 29:6).

For Further Prayerful Thought:

What is the motivation for hungering and thirsting for righteousness for one who is confident of God’s unconditional love? How does that contrast with the moralist’s view of the moral law?
What is the difference between seeking righteousness and being legalistic?
How would you summarize Paul’s command to put on the breastplate of righteousness? What stood out to you about HOW to do this?
How is the fourth beatitude (Matt 5:6) a prerequisite for putting on the breastplate of righteousness?

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How NOT to Promote Truth

On 21 July, 2024 By Gary Yagel

Eight days ago, as we all know, an attempt was made on the life of former president Donald Trump. A split-second after shots rang out, Corey Comperatore shoved his wife, Helen and daughter Allyson to the ground and dove on top of them taking the fatal bullet that would end his life to protect them. My hope is that the memory of this committed Christian head of his family will serve as a lasting inspiration to all Christian men to lay down their lives for our families.

This series is not about laying down our lives to protect our families, physically from destructive bullets penetrating their bodies, but protecting them, spiritually from destructive lies penetrating their minds. For the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh but have divine power to destroy strongholds. We destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God, and take every thought captive to obey Christ (2 Cor 10:4-5). But such protection takes no less determination to die to ourselves. This summer series on understanding our spiritual weapons is a repeat of a series produced 3.5 years ago. Yet, as you will see, it could not be more relevant to our fight for Christ’s kingdom of truth in 2024.

How do we as Christians impact our culture with biblical truth? As we process what happened in the last election and the storming of the Capitol since, Christians are divided. Eschewing passivity, many believers feel impelled to speak up on the social media to fight a movement rooted in ungodliness, which they see shaping our culture. They are appalled that younger Christian leaders either don’t seem to see this happening or seem to lack the courage to speak up about it. Other believers are horrified at the views they hear expressed by Christians on social media, which exhibit a kind of “Christian Nationalism” and exhibit Christians to be combative towards those with whom they disagree, violating Christ’s clear command, love your neighbor, not to mention, love your enemy. This episode continues our series Winning Spiritual Battles Because We Use Our Spiritual Weapons by examining how to encircle ourselves with the belt of God’s truth, which must be the starting point for sharing that truth in the culture. Then we consider how to be persuasive as salt and light in the culture, and in particular the dangers of being right, but sharing truth in a HARMFUL, rather than a COMPELLING way.

What do you think is the answer to the question, “Is our mission today, as Christians living in America, to recover America as a Christian nation?” In my view, the correct answer can only come from understanding what Jesus meant when he told his followers, “Seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness.”

Begins in the human heart with trusting Jesus’ death alone as the atoning sacrifice for our sins and in gratefulness turning our hearts to love the High King, our Redeemer with all of that heart. That is why seeking first the kingdom begins with leading others to faith.
But it doesn’t end there. Jesus’ summary of kingdom life in Matt 5-7 reflects an astonishing transformation of human attitudes and values, accomplished by the indwelling of the Holy Spirit given to believers as down-payment on the final work of redemption, which will make us unable to sin when Christ returns. This transformation of our character to be like Jesus IS KINGDOM WORK. I get absorbed in the cultural battle for righteousness. But I suspect that Jesus would say, “I’m pleased with your longing to see righteousness prevail over all the earth, but don’t forget to start with your own heart attitudes. You becoming like me because you love me is my greatest pleasure.”
We are called to seek justice and wholeness over every part of earth by influencing each part of the world around us to be aligned with righteousness (which is synonymous for God’s original design before the fall.) This transformation spreads to the whole earth, not just our nation. There is no biblical case for American Christ-followers to view the USA as a special nation that has received a special blessing from God. Our nation is exceptional. No nation of the world has a record that compares to ours for bringing good to other nations of the world. It isn’t even close. It is undeniable that we have been enormously blessed by God’s grace through our founding fathers aligning our constitution with many biblical principles, especially human freedom from tyranny. But we are no more special to God than any other nation. Like Christians of every nation, we seek through prayer and responsible citizenship to influence our culture towards righteousness. From our founding many of those have been answered. That is a core part of our mission. Yet history records that despite prayer and efforts of Christians of every nation to influence their culture and political system as fervently as any American has done, tyranny, suffering, corruption and severe persecution often prevail in their nation.

So, the correct view of the culture war is not that God blessed us so much because Americans were more righteous than other nations; but now the evil progressives are ruining our glorious past, corrupting our nation and causing us to lose God’s favor—so our only hope is the political power to get them out of office. Nor is it to give up on American culture, and separate, because God has given up on America and everything is going to go downhill until Christ’s return. Such a view of withdrawal from culture is disobedience to God’s command to Adam and his race to shape culture for his glory. Nowhere does the Bible say God has given up on this world or this culture. We must not isolate ourselves from opportunities to influence the world around us. Our fundamental calling is TO SHAPE CULTURE. But this current all-time high in the heat of political warfare may be a great time to reconsider HOW Jesus taught us to go about influencing those around us with biblical truth.

Four Ways to Put on the Belt of Truth and Why We Need to Do It

C. Putting on the belt of truth means wanting others to help us see truth we don’t see. It begins with a humility that recognizes that we only see part of the picture. For husbands, it means listening carefully to your wife’s opinion about decisions. For majority culture Christians, it means exposing ourselves to brothers and sister in minority subcultures. As we are able, it means knowing how Christians in other countries of the world live out their obedience to seek first the kingdom of God. In our individual lives, it means seeking wise counsel, having a teachable spirit, and being open to rebuke. Everyday Christian men fail morally, relationally, spiritually, and financially—not because they set out to fail, not because they don’t work very hard, but because of their blind spots. The reality is that our mind has been so corrupted by the fall, and we are so easily self-deceived that we need regular soul contact with a brother in Christ. Speaking the truth in love, writes Paul, we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ (Eph 4:15). Poor is the man who has no brother to deliver him from his self-deception by speaking truth into his life.

The Danger of Being UNDISCERNING in Sharing Biblical Truth

So, the first danger of knowing biblical truth is that, in wanting to stand for righteousness, we may think we are supposed to indiscriminately post God’s truth.

The Danger of Being Right but UNPERSUASIVE in Sharing Truth.

Here are 5 mistakes Christians make in seeking to advance the Biblical worldview:

Expecting to win people to embrace biblical truth through logical argument. When it comes to influencing culture, I naturally default to thinking this means winning arguments with those espousing an ungodly worldview. But how effective can we expect a logical argument on social media to be when God tells us, The natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned 1 Cor 2:14).
Thinking that our goal is reaching their head when it is actually to reach their heart. Since our objective must be reaching their hearts, might our time be better spent weeping for the lost, pouring out our tears and prayer for them because they cannot see the destructive nature of their lifestyle—than spent shaping an argument to prove their lifestyle is wrong (which they already know because the moral law of God is written on every heart.) Such prayer will make our hearts tender towards them, and God just might answer those prayers. After all, we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places (Eph 6:12). Moreover, it might just be because our goal is winning the hearts of the lost, that, when Jesus tells us to be salt and light, he doesn’t tell us to use words at all. He says, “Let them see your good works and give glory to your father who is in heaven” (Matt 5:16).
Being selective about the sins we confront. Steve Brown says, Christians have to speak truth about what is and what is not sin. However, people will stop listening (and rightly so) when they see how selective their list is (Ibid). Smoking dope, sex outside of marriage, homosexuality make the list, but somehow racial injustice, materialism, self-righteousness, gluttony, and pride tend to get a pass. Such selectivity nearly guarantees that Christians will not reach anyone but church people as they try to influence their culture.
The failure to value the common grace God has poured out on our culture. The Doctrine of Common Grace means God prevents Adam’s fallen race from being as evil as we could be. He grants power to all humans to in some measure overcome the race’s total corruption by sin and, being made in God’s image, to impact Adam’s kingdom (earth) in a positive way—helping it reach its full and morally good potential—making good products, passing just laws, rewarding good behavior, caring for the needy, punishing some evil behavior. When Christians never affirm the good accomplished by non-Christians, or the secular culture, but always attack them, it is like saying to a musician friend, “I hate music,” or a football player, “I think football is dumb and teaches violence.” Christians seem to always be putting down non-Christians and their world. How effective is that for winning friends and influencing people?
The failure to say “Me Too.” My default thinking is, “To draw people to Christ, I need to grow to be more holy like Jesus. Then they will see him in me.” But in reality, what seemed to draw people to Jesus was not his moral perfection but that he identified with them. The Word became flesh. Jesus sympathizes with weaknesses because “in every respect he has been tempted as we are” (Heb 4:15). What will draw non-believers to us is not our “righteous” life. Many non-Christians think Christianity is for good people and not them. Identification with others builds bridges. If we want our biblical truth to “land” we need to:

Identify with being a sinner; be astounded that God loves you anyway
Identify with weakness; resist sending the message I have it together.
Identify with doubt; I doubt that God is good and the Bible is true, a lot.
Identify with being normal; don’t send the message, Christians are weird.
Identify with worry; I worry about how my kids are going to turn out a lot.
Identify with failure; I mess up so often as a husband it’s a miracle my wife hasn’t left me.

By God’s grace, I may be RIGHT about God’s truth in our culture. But that doesn’t mean anybody is going to listen to me.

For Further Prayerful Thought:

1. Which aspect of fastening the belt of truth around ourselves stood out to you?

2. Why is it important in today’s word to surround our loved ones with truth?

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Prayer That Has Power to Defeat Evil

On 12 July, 2024 By Gary Yagel

As we seek to follow Jesus’ mission for our individual lives, advancing the righteous reign of King Jesus over our heart loyalties and attitudes, as well as implementing his agenda in our role as husband, father, employee/employer, neighbor, church member, steward of resources, and ambassador of the kingdom, we must displace the kingdom of darkness. Just as a military invasion begins with cruise missiles and bombing runs, our efforts to advance the kingdom on the ground must begin with prayer, the only weapon capable of dislodging the enemy from its strongholds. Prayer is such a potent offensive weapon for advancing the kingdom of Christ over earth, that in Psalm 2 we hear God the Father identify prayer as the way Christ’s kingdom spreads. The Father promises the Anointed One, “ASK of me, and I will make the nations your heritage, and the ends of the earth your possession.” As Christ-followers join Christ in ASKING that his kingdom would advance, the Father promises to act.

Jesus teaches the same six principles of prayer in Matthew 6:9-13 and in Luke 11:2-4. The only difference is that in Matthew, Jesus gives an explanation of three of the principles. He explains, may your kingdom come, (Matt 6:10a & Luke 11:2) when he continues may your will be done on earth as it is in heaven (Matt 6:10b). He explains lead us not into temptation (Matt 6:13a, Luke 11:4) when he continues, but deliver us from evil (Matt 6:13b). Jesus amplifies forgive us our debts as we have forgiven our debtors (Matt 6:12 & Luke 11:4) two verses later in Matthew 6:14-15 when he says, For if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you, but if you do not forgive others their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.

1. The principle of ADOPTION: Matt 6:9 Our Father in heaven, which gives us the ENVIRONEMNT for prayer. His help, and spiritual power don’t have to be pried out of his tight-fisted hands. Through Christ we are God’s adopted children and, as it happens, our particular father LOVES TO GIVE GOOD GIFTS TO HIS CHILDREN, especially spiritual power through the Holy Spirit. Jesus says, What father among you, if his son asks for a fish, will instead of a fish give him a serpent; or if he asks for an egg, will give him a scorpion? If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him (Lk 11:11-13)! It is noteworthy that Jesus had used nearly identical words in his Sermon on the Mount (Matt 7:9-11), but in the Luke account, Jesus substitutes Holy Spirit for good gifts. Both are true. God loves to give good gifts to his children. But the best gift is the power of the Holy Spirit at work in our lives.

I believe that Jesus viewed prayer much more as reporting to our forward battle station and launching a prayer assault against the kingdom of darkness for the advance of Christ’s kingdom of righteousness than he does, than emailing headquarters with a list of our needed provisions. It IS emailing that list, which we will get to in a moment. But prayer, as God designed it, is relentlessly fighting the enemy who wants to destroy you and your family and besmirch the reputation of God. It is being the man, the protector, that God designed Adam to be. “Your sonship,” says Jesus, “means being indwelt by the Holy Spirit, who is the producer of spiritual fruit in our lives." The first prayer principle to remember, is ADOPTION, the environment of prayer. We come to God as his beloved child, calling him Father, a father who loves to give good gifts and especially the power of the Holy Spirt to those who ask.

2. The second prayer principle is ADORATION: vs 9 continues, Hallowed be your name. Here is the MOTIVATION for prayer. May your name be honored. May you be glorified. May your name be held in high esteem by the whole world. Jesus modeled this aspect of praying at the beginning of his prayer in John 17, When Jesus had spoken these words, he lifted up his eyes to heaven, and said, Father, the hour has come; glorify your Son THAT THE SON MAY GLORIFY YOU.” A few verses later, Jesus reveals that this desire for The Father to be glorified was the focus of his life, I glorified you on earth, having accomplished the work that you gave me to do. (Jn 17:4). At the heart of the request, “May your name be hallowed” is “a burning desire that the whole world may bow before God in adoration, in reverence, in praise, in worship, in honor, and in thanksgiving” (The Sermon on the Mount). The more our prayers are rooted in ADORATION—our desire to see the name and reputation of God honored, the more power they possess.

3. The third prayer principle and one which very often is neglected in our prayers is ADVANCING the kingdom: vs 10 May your kingdom come. Here we see the PURPOSE of prayer. “The focus of your praying,” says Jesus, “should be the advance of my kingdom of righteousness over earth.” Praying “May your kingdom come (i.e. may your will be done on earth as it is in heaven)” is the primary purpose of PRAYER because seeking Christ's kingdom of righteousness is the primary purpose of Christians’ LIVES. We are to seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness in human hearts and in the culture all over the earth, every square inch of which, King Jesus claims as his own.

The first three prayer principles express a focus upwards towards the Lord—experiencing his presence, motivated to see his name honored, and seeking to advance Christ’s kingdom in specific ways through our lives. The final three principles focus on our own needs, physically, relationally, and spiritually.

4. The fourth principle of prayer is identified by the word ALL. Pray for ALL I need. Give us this day our daily bread. We’ve seen the environment of prayer, the motive of prayer, the purpose of prayer. Now we see the DEPENDENCY of prayer. What a marvelous thought—that the god who created the entire universe, who is the god of all space, time, and eternity, who is infinitely holy and totally self-sufficient, should care about supplying our daily bread. This petition is an invitation to bring every need—physical, mental, emotional, relational, and spiritual to him. Whatever I need TODAY to get me through, is my request to God, my Father, who is also named, Jehovah Jireh, The Lord will Provide. Jesus knew our human propensity to worry and he gives us his prescription for it. Name the things you are worried about. Specifically ask me to provide whatever you need, and you will know the joy of seeing me provide. Paul writes, Don’t worry over anything whatever; TELL GOD EVERY DETAIL OF YOUR NEEDS in earnest and thankful prayer, and the peace of God which transcends human understanding, will keep constant guard over your hearts and minds as they rest in Christ Jesus. (Phil 4:6-7).

After graduating from Penn State, I worked two years for the government and saved the money to go to seminary. But as I returned my third year, I was $1500.00 short. When I got back to school, I contracted with a church to pay me $700 for the work study program. Still needing $800, I stopped by the student union to check on mail that might have come in over the summer. In my box was a scholarship check for $800.00.
A few years ago as we sent out a letter to our financial partners for year-end giving, we faced a daunting challenge. We normally raise about 30% of our budget through yearend giving. Because Covid 19 hurt our donors and stripped away my speaking opportunities, we brought a $15,000 deficit into December causing our year end target to b over $29,000. What was worse, those we could count on to give large year-end gifts were not in a position to give anything. But on December 31, I opened the mail to a notice that a friend of our ministry had donated $15,000 of stock. Others stepped in with the other half and we raised the full amount. God loves to supply our needs. I think I understand that a little bit because as a father, nothing pleases me more than providing what my children need to flourish.

5. The fifth prayer principle is ADMISION of sin. Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors. This principle focusses on the HONESTY of prayer. Jesus identifies the two most foundational of all poisons to human relationships—a guilty conscience and an unforgiving spirit. This fifth principle of prayer reveals that Jesus’ concern about how past wounds can impact our hearts is so great that he made this matter one of the top six concerns in prayer. “Prayer,” says Jesus, “is listening to your conscience. Have you offended another human?” Jesus has commanded earlier in this sermon, If you are offering your gift at the altar and there remember that your brother has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar and go. First be reconciled to your brother, and then come and offer your gift. It is also vital to confess our sins against God regularly to him because we cannot walk with God, who is Light, and continue to walk in darkness. We need to confess our sins to God to maintain open fellowship with him and because the more we seek God’s forgiveness for OUR sins against HIM, the more we are empowered with grace to forgive OTHERS who sin against US. Jesus knows that resentment towards those who have wronged us is a poison that will destroy us from within. Moreover, being forgiving towards others is to Jesus, a distinctive mark of being his follower. Those who are forgiven, must be quick to be those who are forgiving.

Jesus, knowing that both guilt and bitterness destroy relationships teaches us as a regular part of prayer to confess our sins and search our hearts to be sure we have forgiven others.

I believe that in the Lord’s Prayer, a pattern for daily prayer is given for us to follow. Jesus is saying, Think about the day ahead. Where might you be tempted? Where might God’s providence lead you that you might be tempted and prepare ahead of time to be alert and resist. I’ve been walking with Christ for over fifty years, and the only time I can remember doing this was when an X girlfriend visited my wife and me and I asked my accountability brother, Rick, to ask me about every second she stayed with us. Other than on that occasion, I don’t think I’ve ever thought to do this. Yet, Jesus was very concerned that we do this. Twice, he urged Peter, James and John, “Watch and pray that you may not enter into temptation.” Could it be that many Christian men are losing spiritual battles because we don’t realize that this is how Jesus taught us to pray—to start the day with a few seconds of thought about where the temptation to sin might strike?

For Further Prayerful Thought:

What would you say to a believer who said he thought that reciting the Lord’s prayer at the end of his daily bible reading is what Jesus taught?
What struck you about Jesus teaching us to tell our heavenly father what our practical needs are? Have you ever thought about keeping a prayer journal?
Why does it make sense that one of the six prayer concerns we should have is looking at past events to see if there is unconfessed guilt or resentment towards another?
How can you be more watchful of temptation coming into your life?

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Using the Weapon Satan Fears Most

On 26 June, 2024 By Gary Yagel

Hi Men,

This is Gary Yagel, producer of the Mission Focused Men for Christ Podcast/Blog. I want to thank you for helping us pass the 150,000 episodes downloaded milestone and over 65,000 blog messages downloaded through Constant Contact. We are grateful to God that you are finding the podcast helpful. But there are so many more Christian men to be reached with a tool to equip, encourage, energize, and empower them to stay focused on honoring Jesus with their lives—a tool that doesn’t take their valuable time away from their wives and families but fits into their workout or commute time. So please spread the word about the podcast and blog.

In July and August, we will continue to release a new blog every Sunday evening as usual in this summer’s series on spiritual warfare entitled, Winning Our Spiritual Battles Because We Know How to Use Our Weapons. However, the episodes are former biblical worldview episodes that we think are still vitally important in 2024. Let me take a moment to explain why these messages and biblical worldview understanding are so vital for us to pass on to this rising generation in 2024.

Genesis 2 tells is that men are created to be warriors. Adam was put in the garden to guard it. The Hebrew word SHAMAR is the word for warrior. Every man hearing or reading this episode would stand at the door of his home and take a bullet if necessary to protect his wife and children. The problem is that the greatest threat to the welfare of your family in 21st century America is not a person coming through the doors and windows of our homes, but the false ideas coming into our homes through our families’ exposure to social media. The technology is different, but the battle is the same one Paul was fighting when he wrote 2000 years ago, Put on the whole armor of God, that you may be able to stand against the schemes of the devil. For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places. Evil is penetrating the hearts and minds of our loved ones in 2024; we have no choice but to learn exactly how we use the whole armor and weapons God has given us so we can win this battle for our hearts and those of our loved ones

As we seek to run well the race marked out for us in 2024, i.e. advance the righteous reign of King Jesus in our own lives, the lives of those we love and throughout our world, we must overcome the kingdom of darkness. In his wisdom, God has ordained one, primary offensive weapon that overthrows the kingdom of darkness: prayer. Jesus said to Peter, “Satan has demanded to sift you as wheat, but I have prayed for you “(Luke 22:31-32). One veteran missionary writes, There is nothing on earth that Satan so fears as prayer. He cannot triumph over prevailing prayer. Satan is more afraid of your praying than of your pure life or zealous witness. One’s life may be a beautiful witness that cannot be silenced, but prayer is a militant force that has the potential of defeating Satan, destroying his works, and driving him out of places and lives he claims as his own. (Wesley Duewel, Mighty Prevailing Prayer.) Could it be that we and are loved ones are losing spiritual battles because we’re not really fighting those battles through prayer, as Jesus wants us to? The next two episodes study what Jesus specifically told us are the six basic parts of prayer.

There was one characteristic of Jesus’ earthly life that seems to have been most striking to his disciples—those who knew him best, for Scripture records just one thing the disciples asked Jesus to teach them about. It wasn’t how to heal, cast out demons, or still the seas. It wasn’t how to counsel more effectively or how to forgive. The one thing they asked Jesus to teach them about was how to pray. Getting alone to pray was something that John the Baptizer was known for too. In Luke 11:1, we read, Now Jesus was praying in a certain place, and when he finished, one of his disciples said to him, “Lord, teach us to pray, as John taught his disciples.” The background for this request is enlightening. Jesus had already taught them how to pray in the Sermon on the Mount, two years earlier in his ministry. Since then, they had been sent out by Jesus with instructions Proclaim as you go, saying, ‘The kingdom of heaven is at hand.’ Heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the leper cast out demons (Matt 10:7-8.) They had returned from one of their missions saying, “Lord even the demons are subject to us in your name.” Yet, afterwards, on a separated occasion, the disciples had been unable to cast out a demon. They must have been intrigued by Jesus explanation: This kind cannot be driven out by anything but prayer. (Mark 10:29). Jesus clearly teaches that Satan cannot stand against PRAYER.

In response to his disciples’ request, “teach us to pray,” in Luke 11, Jesus gave six principles for effective prayer. They are the same 6 principles given in Matt 6:9-13 in the Sermon on the Mount, popularly known as The Lord’s Prayer. This teaching is not intended as a rote prayer to be recited in church liturgies; rather it is a prayer pattern that covers the six most foundational truths about prayer, a kind of skeleton that needs to be clothed with specifics of our situation. We know that Jesus did not intend this “How to” model primarily to be recited, because in the two verses immediately before the Lord’s Prayer Jesus said, When you pray, do not heap up empty phrases as the Gentiles do, for they think that they will be heard for their many words. Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him. False religions commonly employ the mindless repetition of rote, “sacred” prayer phrases, substituting a kind of self-hypnotism for prayer. The prayer methodology Jesus teaches could not be more different. Let’s dig into these 6 prayer principles from the pattern of Matt 6:9-13.

1. ADOPTION: vs 9 Our Father in heaven. The ENVIRONEMNT for Prayer. Prayer, as Jesus taught it, begins by remembering that those who belong to Christ don’t need a Rosary, a prayer wheel, prayer beads or pre-written words to be recited to draw near to God; prayer is coming to our heavenly Father, who loves us more than we can know. We are able to draw near because of our justification, i.e. Christ’s righteousness is imputed to us, turning away the just wrath of God the Judge. Instead, he declares us righteous. But salvation doesn’t end there; it is followed by adoption. As J.I. Packer observes,

Because of our adoption, we pray to our heavenly FATHER:

Who runs to us, like the prodigal’s father with arms wide open whenever we turn towards him,
Who desires to bless us even more than we desire to be blessed,
Whose ambition for us transcends our imagination,
Who delights in his children, finding great pleasure when we spend time with him in prayer.

“The first prayer principle to remember,” says Jesus, “is ADOPTION, the environment of prayer—you come to God as his beloved child, calling him Father.

2. ADORATION: vs 9 continues, Hallowed be your name. The MOTIVATION for Prayer. Notice that it is also the first request in the pattern Jesus gave us. May your name be honored. May you be glorified. May your name be held in high esteem by the whole world. This desire for God to be glorified was the focus of Jesus’ entire life (John 17:4). No wonder he taught his followers to begin their prayer, “May your name be glorified.” We were created to glorify God. The chief end of man, says the Westminster Shorter Catechism, is to glorify God and enjoy him forever. On the surface this may seem selfish of God; but I believe that whatever most glorifies God will ultimately most benefit us.

Take a moment early in your prayer to express words of adoration to the Lord. This petition reminds us that our life purpose is to honor God, so why not honor him at the beginning of your prayer by choosing an attribute of his that his been especially meaningful lately, and praising him for it.
Appeal to God’s honor and reputation in your requests, following Abraham’s and Moses’ example. In Genesis 18, Abraham secured the safety of Lot by reaffirming that God would not slay the righteous with the wicked. Moses, in Deut 9:28, urges God not to destroy the wicked Israelites appealing to God’s reputation—lest the land from which you brought us say, “Because Yahweh was not able to bring them into the land that he promised them.”

The more our prayers are rooted in ADORATION—our desire to see the name and reputation of God honored, the more power they possess.

3. ADVANCING the kingdom: vs 10 May your kingdom come. The PURPOSE of prayer. “The focus of our praying,” says Jesus, “is the advance of his kingdom of righteousness over earth.” Even in Jesus’ day, there was confusion over the term kingdom of God. Jesus was NOT saying that one of the six pillars of daily prayer is asking Jesus every day to come back to earth soon! Rather, Jesus explains what “May your kingdom come” means in the next phrase. Verse 10 continues, May your will to be done ON EARTH AS IT IS IN HEAVEN.” In heaven, there is no sin; righteousness reigns. The kingdom coming refers to the advance of Christ’s kingdom of righteousness over earth. The more that happens, THE MORE THE KINGDOM OF EARTH WILL BE LIKE THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN. That is what it means to pray for God’s kingdom to come—that God’s righteousness from heaven will spread over the earth. As we saw last week, this is what Jesus is talking about a few verses later, when in verse 33 he commands, “Seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness,” It is to SEEK the rule of King Jesus and his righteousness over our heart loyalties and our heart attitudes. It is recovering Adam’s call to develop the potential of the earth while seeking the restoration of rightness—fixing everything broken by sin in every sphere of our lives.

Praying “May your kingdom come (i.e. may your will be done on earth as it is in heaven)” is the primary purpose of prayer because it is the primary purpose of Christian’s lives. We are to seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness in human hearts and in the culture all over the earth, every square inch of which, King Jesus claims as his own. As we saw last week, to seek requires an intentional focus, a step- by-step plan. What Jesus is teaching us this week is, “Saturate that plan in prayer. Accompany your PLAN and EFFORT to seek Christ’s righteous rule in a particular sphere of your life with PRAYER that Christ’s righteous rule (KINGDOM) will prevail. Although modern warfare has changed dramatically, the Iraq war provides a useful analogy for spiritual warfare. It began with a full day of bombing, before ground troops invaded. God has ordained prayer as the foundational means of dislodging Satan’s hold on various spheres of life. Here is a great example of kingdom prayer at work:

For Further Prayerful Thought:

1. Why is it important to you to remember that your prayers are directed to one who has adopted you into his family at great cost?

2. Why is the name of God worthy of supreme honor. How can you increase the passion for your life to bring the Lord honor?

3. What would you say to gently correct someone who thought that praying, “Thy kingdom come” means to ask Jesus to return to earth soon?

4. What was the most exciting part of the story of the Kingdom of Christ prevailing on a piece of ground in Fort Collins, CO?

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Teaching Kids the Glory of God’s Work/Rest Rhythm

On 26 June, 2024 By Gary Yagel

One of the words used to describe the worldview of the culture in which we all swim is secularism, or sometimes called naturalism, which describes a lifestyle of preoccupation with the visible, material world to the neglect of the world of the spiritual. The result of swimming in this polluted water has been, in my view, a largescale disregard of the fourth commandment by Christians and consequent loss of its benefits. The lost benefits are understanding the eternal value of work and understanding the need to regularly shut out the secular world to be renewed and reconnected to the Spiritual Being who created us. This episode seeks to recover what is often lost by the neglect of the fourth commandment.

One of the complexities of faithfulness to Jesus through obedience to his moral law is understanding how to apply the fourth commandment in today’s world. As I mentioned in the first episode of this series, there are three categories of law. There is ceremonial law, religious rituals practiced in the OT, which are no longer binding, having been fulfilled in Christ. There is civil law. It provides universal principles of just treatment in our horizontal relationships in society. But those laws were for the theocracy of Israel, which no longer exists. The third category is moral law, which does continue into the NT. As Jesus explicitly taught,

Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. For truly, I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the Law until all is accomplished. Therefore whoever relaxes one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do the same will be called least in the kingdom of heaven, but whoever does them and teaches them will be called great in the kingdom of heaven (Mt 5:17-19).

In fact, in this same sermon, Jesus taught that the scribes and Pharisee’s understanding of the Law was not strict enough. The prohibition against murder covered not just the physical act but hostility towards another that injured his soul by treating him with anger, attacking his character, or making him feel stupid. The prohibition against adultery covered not just the outward act by the inner heart lust for another man’s wife. The OT moral law was not delegitimized by Jesus; to the contrary, Jesus sets a moral standard that goes way beyond the external way if was often interpreted. Moreover, these commandments are the path to LIFE, the path to loving God and others, which we were created to do and be most fulfilled by following. So, the fourth commandment cannot be thrown away as given only to Israel. It is part of the moral law.

Yet, its application is complex because it has a ceremonial component—setting aside one day a week for worship, and a civil component—requiring the whole country to stop conducting business on the Sabbath. Adding to the complexity is the fact that the early Christians changed the day of worship from the Saturday Sabbath of Judaism to Sunday, the Lord’s Day, because Jesus was raised from the dead on the first day of the week. Paul went to the synagogue to preach on Saturday and met with the Christians to worship and celebrate communion on Sunday. The early Christians did not stay home from work to worship on the first day of the workweek, Sunday. This was not the cultural practice in any area of the world. It was like our Monday, the first day of the workweek. For the most part the early Christians who were spread across the Roman Empire were slaves and those with low status. They had no power to get their culture to give them off on the first day of the week to worship Jesus. So they met for worship after work, which explains why Paul was preaching until midnight in Acts 20. Sunday, the first day of the week has been celebrated by Christians as the DAY OF WORSHIP since Christ’s resurrection. But Sunday was not a DAY OF REST FROM WORK until three hundred years later, when Constantine made Sunday a day of rest for the Roman Empire. Refraining from work on Sunday cannot be a moral absolute. If it were, we would have seen widespread rebellion by Christian slaves in the Roman world by refusing to work on Sundays.

I believe the core principle in the fourth commandment is to “set apart” one day per week to commune with God our lover, to restore our soul, and recover God’s perspective on creation. I also believe that the fourth commandment gives us a creation ordinance concerning work—that there is a built-in pattern that God designed into creation that follows his pattern—six days of work and one day of rest. We’ll look at these components in a moment. But let’s not overlook the way this commandment begins—with the significance God places on our work.

Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days you shall labor, and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God. On it you shall not do any work, you, or your son, or your daughter, your male servant, or your female servant, or your livestock, or the sojourner who is within your gates. For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy (Exodus 20:8-11).

THE BIBLICAL WORLDVIEW OF WORK

Six days you shall labor

A. In the beginning there was work. The Bible begins to talk about work as soon as it begins to talk about anything. The Bible refers to God’s actions to create the universe as work. In fact, he depicts the magnificent project of cosmos invention with language that refers to the regular workweek. Genesis repeatedly shows God “at work” using the Hebrew word, mlkh, the word for ordinary human work. Tim Keller observes, In the beginning, then, God worked. Work was not a necessary evil that came into the picture later, or something human beings were created to do but that was beneath the great God himself. No, God worked for the sheer joy of it. Work could not have a more exalted inauguration (Every Good Endeavor).

B. Our calling to work, is fundamental to bearing God’s image. The opening chapters of Genesis leave us with a striking truth—work was part of paradise. It is part of God’s perfect design for human life, because we are made in God’s image and part of HIS glory and happiness is that HE WORKS. “My Father is always at his work to this very day,” said Jesus, and I too am working.” (John 5:17). The fact that God put work in paradise reminds us that it was not a result of the fall, as is often thought. Work was part of the blessedness of the garden BEFORE the fall. Work is as much a basic human need as food, beauty, rest, friendship, prayer, and sex… Without meaningful work we sense significant inner loss and emptiness. People who are cut off from work because of physical or other reasons quickly discover how much they need work to thrive emotionally, physically, and spiritually (Ibid).

C. The job description of our work is to fill the earth and subdue it and exercise dominion over it. The word, “subdue” indicates that, though all God made was good, it was still to a great degree undeveloped. Al Wolters writes:

The earth had been completely unformed and empty; then in the six-day process of development God had formed it and filled it—but not completely. People must now carry on the work of development: by being fruitful they fill it even more; by subduing it they must form it even more…as God’s representatives, (we) carry on where God left off. But this is now to be a human development of the earth. The human race will FILL the earth WITH its own kind, and it will FORM the earth FOR its own kind. (Creation Regained).

D. The material world matters. Developing the potential of creation is our primary calling because God’s creation matters greatly to him. In fact, the story of salvation is the story of CREATION. Dutch theologian, Herman Bavinck, argues, “The essence of the Christian religion consists in the reality that the CREATION of the Father, ruined by sin, is restored in the death of the Son of God and RECREATED by the grace of the Holy Spirit into a kingdom of God.” For Christians, all work has dignity, no matter how menial, because it reflects God’s image in us, but also because the material universe we are called to care for matters to God. The biblical doctrine of creation harmonizes with the doctrine of the incarnation in which God takes on himself a physical body. It harmonizes with the Biblical view of marriage, which commands the joining of bodies in sex to accompany the joining of hearts in marriage. It harmonizes with the calling of the Messiah in Isaiah 61 to both proclaim the Word and restore physical flourishing. It harmonizes with resurrection doctrine, in which God redeems not just the soul but the body. It harmonizes with Romans 8:21 where we are told that creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption. God’s purpose for the earth is that it should become his dwelling place; it is not simply made to house his creatures… The concept of the earth as a divine sanctuary, runs throughout the whole Bible, coming to a climax in the future reality that the apostle John sees in his vision of a ‘new heaven and a new earth.’” Revelation 21:4 reads, “Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God. This earth matters to God. He is going to spend eternity dwelling here.

TWO ASPECTS OF THE COMMAND TO REST

The fourth commandment requirement to rest is both a creation ordinance and a moral calling for God’s Covenant People. I believe that these two components are made clear by the two different reasons given to keep the fourth commandment. When Moses repeats the Ten Commandments given in Exodus 20 forty years later, in Deuteronomy 5, his words are almost identical with one major exception: the reasons for keeping the fourth commandment. In Exodus 20, the reason was the CREATION PATTERN. For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day. When Moses repeats the fourth commandment in Deuteronomy 5, the reason for keeping the Sabbath was GOD’S SALVATION OF HIS COVENANT PEOPLE. You shall remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and the Lord your God brought you out from there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm. Therefore the Lord your God commanded you to keep the Sabbath day (vs 15). Let’s examine both aspects.

A. The Sabbath as CREATION ORDINANCE--Resting One Day in Seven. During the French Revolution, an attempt was made to have a ten-day workweek. But the machinery started breaking down. The factory workers concluded there may be a ratio of exertion to rest bult into the physical world. They returned to one-day-in-seven to shut the factory down. Here are some practical thoughts on applying the creation ordinance to rest one day in seven--three aspects of rest.

REST is NOT DOING the type of work required for your vocation. My father was an electronics engineer, sitting at his desk all week. He renewed by puttering around his cottage. C.S. Lewis, a writer, renewed by tending to his rose garden.
REST is DOING SOMETHING ELSE YOU ENJOY. As a busy pastor with five kids and caring for a father with Alzheimer’s, I experienced burn out. I later gave careful thought to what fills my emotional tank. I realized it was making love with to wife, playing sports with my kids, getting out into nature, and reading novels. I believe that what renews us emotionally is doing what we enjoy. It is different for each of us.
REST is BEEING FREE from things YOU HAVE TO DO. I try for 24 hours to get a break from chores I don’t feel like doing. I realize this could be a formula for selfishness. But most of us work five days giving us a sixth for the honey-do list. Being the best ME to go hard six days requires that I take seriously the creation principle of rest. (As a husband of five kids at home I also tried to give my wife a weekly break from caring for the kids.) In our life rhythm, God says we need to build in rest.

B. The Sabbath As a MORAL CALLING for God’s People—Renewal. In the application above the focus was on resting from work. This second part of the application of the fourth commandment focuses on the phrase Remember the Sabbath to keep it HOLY. I believe the Bible teaches us to set apart the Lord’s Day in some way for the Lord, meaning time with him. The whole concept of sabbath—a day for rest, reflection, renewal and recalibration was designed by God to be a great blessing to us. Some Christians have turned it into a legalistic rule about whether you can eat out at a restaurant or watch football games on Sunday afternoons. (Believe me, I know. I was one of them!) But the fourth commandment, as all God’s commandments are, IS GIVEN TO US BY GOD AS A GREAT BLESSING, which is why Jesus said, the Sabbath was made for man not man for the Sabbath (Mark 2:27). In fact, I believe that giving God the firstfruits of our time is very much like giving God the firstfruits of our earning power. Honor the Lord with your wealth and with the firstfruits of all your produce; then your barns will be filled with plenty, and your vats will be bursting with wine (Prov 3:9-10). I believe this principle of money management applies to our management of other resources, like time. Someone has defined time as: a limited resource extended only by giving the first part back to God.

When Genesis 2 says that God rested from his work of creation, resting had to mean more than just taking a break from the exertion of working. God doesn’t get tired! Resting must imply at the very least reflecting upon and delighting in what he had made. Could a rest day be for renewal of our perspective, our spiritual energies, and our love relationship with Jesus? Gordon MacDonald, in his book, Ordering Your Private World, identifies three principles of genuine rest:

1. Looking back: Closing the loop. “When God rested, He looked upon His work, enjoyed its completed appearance, and then reflected upon its meaning. 'And God saw that it was good' (Gen 1:10)… So, you could say that on the seventh day, God closed the loop on His primary creation activity. He closed it by resting and looking back upon it to survey what had been accomplished.” After the first time I spoke at a men’s breakfast with my son who coaches high school football, when we grabbed a coke afterwards—the first thing he wanted to do was evaluate everything we did. I was shocked. But in the world of football and in many other secular fields, the planning of the next event begins with an evaluation of the game film of the past event. Why wouldn’t our review of last week be a natural starting point for meeting weekly with our CO?

2. Present recalibration: Returning to the Eternal Truths. MacDonald continues, “We are daily the objects of a bombardment of messages competing for our loyalties and labors. We are pushed and pulled in a thousand different directions, asked to make decisions and value judgements, to invest our resources and our time. By what standard of truth do we make these decisions?...Thus rest is not only looking back at the meaning of my work and the path I have so recently walked in my life but it is also a finetuning of my inner navigational instruments so that I can make my way through the world for another week” (Ibid).

Might the Lord’s Day be the opportunity to read that Christian book, read a longer passage of Scripture in one sitting, go to the Colson Center's What Would Your Say website to sharpen your skills at promoting the biblical worldview, or pick up a dictionary to do a word study on the Fruit of the Spirit? Our Mormon friend, Stephen Covey, calls this renewal process the sharpening of our saw.

3. Future strategizing. Defining our mission. MacDonald continues, “When we rest in the biblical sense we affirm our intentions to pursue a Christ-centered tomorrow. We ponder where we are headed in the coming week, month, or year. We define our intentions and make our dedications. General George Patton demanded that his men know and be able to articulate exactly what the current mission was. ‘What is your mission?’ he would frequently ask. The definition of the mission was the most important thing a soldier could carry into combat. Based on that knowledge, he could make his decisions and implement the plan. That is exactly what happens when I pursue biblical rest. I take a hard look at my mission” (Ibid).

So, the biblical concept of setting apart time with God to renew our mission focus seems to be at the core of this fourth commandment. But the renewal of our mission focus isn’t all that requires time set apart to renew. Such weekly “set apart time” is also needed to renew our love relationship with Jesus. Remember that the fourth commandment is the last of the first four commandments that comprise the first table of the law, which explain how God wants to be loved. (Commandment 5-10 comprising the second table, how to love man). God engineered humans to only function properly when our loves are ordered properly. We must first satisfy our hearts by enjoying a love-relationship with our Lord or our hearts will crave other pleasures too much. But, as every marriage counselor knows, ALL LOVE RELATIONSHIPS require time apart alone with each other. Just as couples need regular intimate time together to gaze into the face of each other, we need regular intimate time to enjoy the pleasure of being loved unconditionally by our God, and the pleasure of loving him—delighting in him and praising his magnificence. This is what we do corporately in worship, but there is another, more personal renewal that we need. David, for all his faults, was a model of intimacy with God. Here is a glimpse into his personal love-relationship with his CO.

O God, you are my God, and I long for you. My whole being desires you; like a dry, worn-out, and waterless land, my soul is thirsty for you. Let me see you in the sanctuary; let me see how mighty and glorious you are. Your constant love is better than life itself, and so I will praise you. I will give you thanks as long as I live; I will raise my hands to you in prayer. My soul will feast and be satisfied, and I will sing glad songs of praise to you. As I lie in bed, I remember you; all night long I think of you, because you have always been my help. In the shadow of your wings I sing for joy. I cling to you, and your hand keeps me safe (Psalm 63 GNV).

Could it be that in accordance with God’s design, your life and that of all who depend upon you would be enriched, not only by worshipping with the Body of Christ Sunday morning, but by finding an hour Sunday afternoon or evening that YOU set apart for intimate conversation with your king?

For Further Prayerful Thought:

What most stood out to you in this episode about the fourth commandment?
How would you respond to someone who said, “Keeping the Sabbath is being legalistic, and the church is not Israel?”
What components of a biblical view of work seem most important to you?
It’s been said that the more important your work is, the more important it is to regularly step away from it and renew. How might this principle apply to serving Christ?

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Teaching Kids Why Respecting God’s Name Matters

On 22 June, 2024 By Gary Yagel

Fatherhood champion, Anthony Bradley, in his Fathers’ Day blog last week argued fathers are the most important men in any community, anywhere, everywhere, ever. He then supported his claim with data proving the profound difference fathers make in a child’s healthy development.

Emotional Support: Children with engaged fathers exhibit better emotional regulation and are less likely to experience depression and anxiety.
Academic Success: Fathers who are actively involved in their children's education see their children achieve higher grades, performing better in school.
Behavioral Impact: The presence of a father or father figure significantly reduces the likelihood of children engaging in delinquent behavior or substance abuse.
Social Development: When fathers are engaged with their children, the children develop stronger social skills, which are crucial for forming healthy relationships in the future.
Spiritual Formation: The greatest predictor of faith persistence from childhood into adulthood is the nature of a child's relationship with his father.

Such research validates God’s creation design for fatherhood, which is our topic of study as we celebrate National Fatherhood Month, with the 5-week series Fathers Giving the Moral Foundation to Their Children That the Culture Won’t. We’ve been looking at the summary of God’s moral law inscribed by his very finger, called the Ten Commandments. In this episode, we examine the third commandment: You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain, for the Lord will not hold him guiltless who takes his name in vain (Ex 20:7). I must confess, as a kid there was much that I didn’t understand about the Ten Commandments, like what adult--ery was. I knew adults were grownups but the ery? I also wondered why, of all the bad things you could do, God made number three, “don’t cuss,” before murdering or stealing. My hope is that by the end of this episode we will see that the third commandment teaches a bit more than “don’t cuss;” it links our love for God to a deeply held passion to see his name honored, a truth that can make a huge difference in our child’s heart.

As we have considered the vital responsibility of building God’s moral foundation into the hearts of our kids and grandkids, we noted that in this endeavor as in almost every endeavor of life, we won’t succeed without a plan. An over-all plan identifies the objectives—the steps we need to take—to build this strong moral foundation. In the first episode of this series (#22 on June 2), I proposed such a plan: Master Plan Objectives for Instilling Biblical Moral Values. Let’s take a few moments to review.

1. Get a biblical overview of this process. (We looked at overview training principles from Ephesians 6:4 and Deuteronomy 6:4-8.)

2. Answer worldview questions.

ME Questions: Why do I matter? Where did I come from? Where should I be going to fulfill my purpose? What is the origin of my sense of right/wrong?
WORLD Questions: What's wrong with the world? How did it get this way? What's the solution? (We saw many answered in New City Catechism).

3. Teach Jesus’ summary of biblical commandments—love God and love neighbor.

4. Teach God’s moral law: The Ten Commandments (covered in New City Catechism).

5. Practice biblical principles for the proper discipline of a child to teach self-mastery for obedience to the moral law.

6. Teach and inspire godly attitudes. We noted that character is a consistent attitude. (Past podcasts covered the beatitudes and golden virtues of 2 Peter 1.)

7. Help them celebrate God’s glorious design of manhood and womanhood differently to complete one another. (See numerous previous podcasts.)

8. Build the life-long discipline of intercessory prayer for your wife, kids, and grandkids (Ex 17, Eph 6).

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9. Teach God’s glorious design of sex. (See YouTube video Biblical Worldview of Sexuality)

10. Help build a strong self-image, knowing they are perfectly designed for their mission. For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them (Eph 2:10).

11. Teach them how to cope with peer pressure and to choose friends wisely.

12. Inspire them to pursue wisdom. When I was a son with my father, he taught me and said to me, the beginning of wisdom is this: Get wisdom, and get insight. Prize her highly, and she will exalt you (Prov 4:3ff)

13 Expose them to portraits of Jesus in the gospels to show that he is a leader worthy of their whole-hearted allegiance. Preteens look for heroes to follow.

---------------------------------------------Teen Years----------------------------------------------

(My research revealed a strong correlation between kids who leave home and renounce their faith or join the false religion Progressive Christianity, and a failure of parents to prepare them for the anti-biblical messages that flood social media.)

14. Ground them in sound logic, learning to recognize logical fallacies.

15. Thoroughly teach them the reasons for our faith (I Pet 3:15 apologia). Faith and reason are NOT opposites; the Christian faith is built upon sound reason. My heart cannot embrace what my mind rejects.

16. Equip them to understand the case for the culture’s most current anti-biblical worldviews, refusing to build a straw man. Then refute it with Scripture.

This plan may feel overwhelming—but it is an 18-year plan! Every faithful father needs a target on the wall—a curriculum he wants to impart to his child before she leaves home. This month our focus has been on objectives 1-4, which are to ground our children in an understanding of God’s moral law. Most Christian’s are familiar with Jesus’ summary of the moral law in the two love commandments. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets (Mt 22:36-40).

Sometimes we think Jesus is teaching something radically new in these words. But this summary of the law is not new. The first table of the law—the first 4 commandments have always been about LOVING GOD. #1) You are to keep me first in your affections, #2) You are to worship me for who I truly am as revealed in Scripture not as a figment of your imagination, #3) You are to love me so much that you passionately want my name to never be disrespected but honored, #4) You are to set apart time in your weekly schedule for communing with me. The second table of the law, verses 5-10, have always been about LOVIMG OUR NEIGHBOR—our horizontal obligations to each other: honor your father and mother, don’t murder, don’t commit adultery, don’t steal, don’t lie, don’t covet what your neighbor has. This month we’re only covering the first table of the law. So, we come to the third commandment, understanding that it is given to us as the proper way to express our love for God—respect God’s name. Exodus 20:7: You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain, for the Lord will not hold him guiltless who takes his name in vain.

Names matter. Parents give a lot of thought to the name they choose for their newborn. Our own name has the power to inspire us or demoralize us. The latter was the case for a boy named Clayton who overheard his uncle say to his father about him, “Clay is dirt and that is what your son is, worthless dirt; he’ll never amount to anything.” This crushing view of him became Clayton’s self-image and sabotaged nearly every positive achievement of his life. Names matter. And they especially matter to God. He changed Abram’s name to Abraham, Sarai to Sarah, Jacob to Israel, Simon to Peter, and Saul to Paul. God is precise in telling Joseph, the husband of Mary, to name her son Jesus, YASHUA, which means “salvation is from Yahweh,” because in the angel’s words, “He will save his people from their sins.” The name of a person is so closely linked to the person bearing it that to dishonor the name is to dishonor the person and to honor the name is to honor the person. We read of Christ, God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father (Phil 2:9-11). To treat one’s name with respect is to treat the person with respect. In this commandment, God says, “If you love me, show it in the way you treat my name.”

Four Ways God Says Loving Him Should Change How We Treat His Name

(The Third Commandment Applied)

A. Don’t disrespect God’s name by using it as profanity. Have you ever asked yourself, “why would anyone use God’s name as a curse word?” Most sins are understandable to some degree. You steal to get something you don’t have but want. You commit adultery because the thrill of romance has left your marriage. But what possible benefit is there to using God’s name as a curse word? As one author put it, “Using God’s name to curse extends no man’s reputation. It increases no man’s fortune. It satisfies no man’s passion.” Perhaps such profanity is thoughtless learned behavior. Yet this author discerns, “When a man continues to profane God’s name, what he is saying is: “God doesn’t scare me. I don’t care about him or his laws or his threats.” It is an expression of intentional disrespect. And such disrespect does not go unnoticed by God, for the Lord will not hold him guiltless who takes his name in vain.

The New City Catechism, as we have seen, is a valuable teaching aid for building a moral foundation into our children. Question 9 covers the first three commandments. What does God require in the first, second, and third commandments? First, that we know God as the only true God. Second, that we avoid all idolatry. Third, that we treat God’s name with fear and reverence. Here is another example of how the curriculum sold with it can help your teaching.

Activity: Print out each word of the first three commandments on individual sheets and put each word in an envelope. Hide the envelope for the children to find. Instruct the children to search for the envelope, encourage them to open it, and then begin to work together to put the words of each commandment in the correct order. This could be easier for younger children by printing each commandment on a specific color of paper. Read them aloud to refresh their memories. The first three commandments all address the relationship between God and his people. (New City Catechism Curriculum Vol 1 Leaders Guide.)

B. The second way God says we are to treat his name is this: Don’t make a vow using God’s name and fail to keep it. The ESV text notes say that take the name refers to “taking an oath,” i.e. making a promise and attaching God’s name to it. “In vain” refers to then failing to keep the promise. It showed a profound lack of respect for God to vow to do something in his name and not do it. It might be worth thinking back to some of the words in vows many of us have made to God:

In your marriage—do you pledge your faithfulness to her in all love and honor, in all duty and service, in all faith and tenderness, to live with her and cherish her…
In church membership—do you pledge to support the church in its worship and work to the best of your ability?
In the baptism or dedication of your child—do you pledge that you will endeavor to set before (him) a godly example. That you will pray with him and for him, that you will teach him the doctrines of our holy religion, and that you will strive to bring (him) up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord…

The third commandment is not the only place where we are told that God takes vows to him seriously. In Ecclesiastes 5:4-5 we read, When you vow a vow to God, do not delay paying it, for he has no pleasure in fools. Pay what you vow. It is better that you should not vow than that you should vow and not pay.

Jesus goes beyond the demand that any vows invoking God’s name must be paid. As he did with the other commandments in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus expounds one of the principles behind this commandment.

Again, you have heard that it was said to those of old, ‘You shall not swear falsely, but shall perform to the Lord what you have sworn.’ But I say to you, ‘Do not take an oath at all, either by heaven, for it is the throne of God, or by the earth, for it is his footstool, or by Jerusalem, for it is the city of the great King. And do not take an oath by your head, for you cannot make one hair white or black. Let what you say be simply ‘Yes’ or ‘No” (Mt 5:33-37).

On the surface, Jesus seems to forbid the taking of any vows. But in Jesus’ day, the scribes and Pharisees, in their typical legalistic way, had twisted the third commandment’s teaching around. The twisted logic went this way. If a vow made in God’s name must be paid, then a vow NOT made in God’s name does NOT have to be paid. So, they invented a perverse category of things to swear by that indicated the probability that you would keep your word:

If a person swears in God’s name—you know he’ll keep his promise.
If he swears by heaven, he’ll probably keep his word.
If he swears by earth, it’s not too likely he will keep his promise
If a person swears by Jerusalem, it’s pretty likely he’ll keep his promise
If one swears by his own head, there’s not much chance he’ll keep his promise.

And Jesus says, let your “Yes” be yes and your “No” be no. Keep your promises!

One group that needs to hear this admonition is fathers. A leader of men’s ministry was doing some research. He gathered a group of thirty teenagers and asked, “How many of you can remember specific promises your dad made to you but didn’t keep?” Every hand in the room shot up.

C. A third way that loving God should change the way we treat his name is this: Make asking for God’s name to be honored central to your prayer life. When Jesus was asked to share his prayer life with his disciples, they found out that one of the consuming passions of Jesus’ life was to see the name of the Father honored. In fact, it was for God’s name to be honored that was the very first thing Jesus taught his disciples to pray. “Our father in heaven, may your name be hallowed. The word hallowed is rarely used today but brings to my mind Abraham Lincoln’s famous words to dedicate the national cemetery in Gettysburg.

We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. But in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.

The word translated hallowed is HAGIASTHETW--from HAGIOS, holy, so it means to make holy, consecrate, to set apart. Jesus teaches us to begin our daily prayer, “Heavenly Father, may your name be set apart, honored, greatly respected, venerated, esteemed as no other.” Sometimes, names are associated with greatness. Mayo Clinic. Lenox china. Mercedes Benz. The first petition of the Lord’s prayer is asking that God’s name would be associated with moral greatness, that it be highly respected, revered. So, our daily prayer should begin by asking, “how can I honor you today at work, by my attitudes all through the day, by the way I love my wife and kids, by the way I love my neighbor, by the way I use my free time?” When you love someone, you want his name to be esteemed. Christians are not only commanded to not misuse the name of God but to yearn and pray for God’s name to be hallowed, honored, and exalted.

D. There is a fourth way that loving God affects the way you treat his name: You never get over the unspeakable honor it is to have Christ’s name entrusted to us. For if you are a follower of Christ, you are called a Christian, i.e. a Christ-one. Our Lord has entrusted his name, his reputation, the honor due his name, to you and me. We are his ambassadors. Christ’s name can either be lifted up and exalted by the way Christians live or dragged through the mud. One day a Christian woman was having her quiet time and read from Matthew 5, “If your brother has something against you—go, make peace with your brother. Then come and offer your gift.” She asked God to search her heart to see if anyone fit this category and she thought of her harsh, angry words, spoken in a conflict with her neighbor a few months earlier. The problem was, her neighbor had moved, and she had no way to reach the neighbor. But just a few days later she happened to run into that neighbor at the grocery store. She confessed her wrong and asked for the neighbor’s forgiveness. The neighbor began to cry. She said, “I found out just a few weeks ago that I have very advanced terminal cancer. I have only a few weeks left. You were my last hope that Christianity was real. After you hurt me so badly, I gave up on Christianity. Now, I see it is real. Can you show me how to become a Christian?” Christ has entrusted his name—his reputation to us. What an awesome PRIVILEGE and RESPONSIBILITY it is to represent him to the world.

But even as we grasp that the extreme honor of bearing Christ’s name requires setting a high bar, we must remember something else about his name; even when we drag it through the mud, he never takes his name back from us. I’m reminded of the story of a young, cowardly soldier who had fled from battle who was brought before his general, Alexander the Great. This mighty commander of men was tender with the young soldier until he asked the soldier his name. The soldier answered, “Alexander.” At that point, the great general became filled with anger and shouted to the soldier, “Young man, either go into battle with courage or CHANGE YOUR NAME.” How merciful of Jesus that no matter how many times we fail him, he never demands to change our name. We remain his: Christ-ones. No matter how many times we drag his reputation through the mud, when we fail to revere and respect his name as he deserves—there is still forgiveness in him. For, there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved (Acts 4:12). May our passion to see that name honored burn brightly!

For Further Prayerful Thought:

It seems like having a plan for building a strong moral foundation into our children with the help of the Holy Spirit is OBVIOUS. Why do you think so many Christian fathers don’t have one? How can you help that change?
What thoughts stood out to you about teaching children to not misuse God’s name?
What thoughts stood out to you about beginning our prayer by asking that God’s name would be hallowed? Why might Jesus say to start this way?
How can the thought that Christ has given us his name, fire a hotter passion to please him?

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Teaching Kids Why Some Worship False Gods

On 08 June, 2024 By Gary Yagel

On October 7, 2023, more than 3000 members of the radical Muslin extremist group Hamas surged across the Israeli border crying “Allahu Akbar” “God is good” raping women, beheading children, torturing, mutilating and murdering more than a thousand people, most of them civilians conducting the greatest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. How would you respond to the trembling words of a seven-year-old who said, “Daddy, these bad men said God told them to do those awful things. How can this be?” This episode seeks to answer this question by understanding what the second commandment teaches.

Among the religious beliefs of those Islamic terrorists was faith in Jihad—holy war, that it is Allah’s will to slaughter all who get in the way of establishing the ultimate Caliphate where all are forced to follow Islamic Law. Muslim doctrine proclaims that men who die waging Jihad against the enemies of Islam will be rewarded by Allah in heaven as martyrs and receive seventy-two virgins to enjoy in blissful ecstasy. While the atrocities committed by Hamas’ Jihadists are not to be in any way excused, Christians must admit that one pope, (just one, I might add) Pope Urban the Second, promised Christian warriors of the Crusades that if they died seeking to take back the holy land from the Muslims, they would go to heaven.

So, Muslim clerics say, God will reward you for killing Jews and Christians. Pope Urban’s message was, God will reward you for killing Muslims. No wonder kids are confused. Is the Muslim God the true one or is Pope Urban’ God the true one? Or are both gods fashioned by degenerate minds? That brings us to the importance of understanding and teaching the next generation the second commandment. As we’ve seen, the first commandment answers the question, “Who should we worship.” The answer is the true God alone—no one or thing promising to do what only God can do. The second commandment warns us against worshiping our own faulty image for the true God.

Understanding the Second Commandment

You shall not make for yourself a carved image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or serve them, for I the Lord your God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and the fourth generation of those who hate me, but showing steadfast love to thousands of those who love me and keep my commandments (Ex 20:4-6).

The second commandment is not merely a prohibition against worshipping a false God; that is covered in the first commandment. It is a prohibition against using a statue—a carved, man-made image as a representation of the true God in worship. In Exodus 32, Scripture gives us a classic example of his people fashioning an image to represent him, the golden calf. The name of the golden calf was significant; it was Yahweh. They forged an image of the true God, Yahweh, and were severely punished for it.

When it comes to obedience to this commandment, if you are like me, you might be thinking, “I’m not sure I did all that well with the first commandment. I have to fight a lot of counterfeit gods whose voices promise to satisfy my heart, which I am listening to way too much! But on the second commandment, give me an A+. I’ve never even taken a ceramics class, much less crafted a statue for God. I couldn’t carve the bark off a stick to make a totem pole without endangering my hands, and if I could carve it, I sure as heck wouldn’t bow down to it!”

Well, you may deserve an A+; but let’s talk about the real meaning behind this commandment. Something more than “don’t run an idol-making business” is being said. What is wrong with a visual image or symbol, a graven image to represent God. After all, it is difficult to worship and love an invisible being. When I close my eyes and think about how much I love my wife Sandy, I picture her in my mind, or how much I love one of my daughters, my mind pulls up her picture. But what do you picture when you close your eyes to think about loving God? He is an invisible God. He is spirit.

Historically, at the time the Ten Commandments were given, the god’s of the neighboring peoples around Israel were visually represented by huge statues, overlaid with gold, decorated lavishly with precious jewels. And they were housed in enormous, spectacular temples that would hold thousands of people. Because the worshippers had visual tangible representations for their gods, their religious experience could feel more real. Contrast that to our God—the God of Scripture—who commands us not only to worship no one and nothing else but forbids his worshippers from ever creating an object that will in any way serve to represent him. “Don’t ever make anything of wood or stone, or anything else go serve as your focal point for your worship of me.” The natural question that arises is: Why not? What is the big deal? What dangers lie behind this commandment?

A. Danger #1: No image crafted by human hands could ever accurately represent the totality of who God is. In other words, any concrete depiction of God reduces God’s inherent greatness. No carving or statue could ever capture even a fraction of who our infinite, transcendent God is. God is saying, “Any physical image of me is so grossly inadequate that it is worse than no image at all.” Let’s try to illustrate this principle. Suppose a friend of yours was able to visit the Swiss Alps and find a place to stand at the foot of them and gaze up. He is so dwarfed by the grandeur of them that it takes his breath away. Suppose when he got home you said to your friend, “Help the rest of us understand what that was like. Here is a stick of chewing gum. Chew it up and make it into a replica so we can get a sense of the splendor of the Alps. After laughing at you, along with anyone else who has been to the Alps, he would say, “It’s impossible to convey the majesty of the Alps with chewing gum. I’d be better able to describe them with words. A chewing gum representation of the Alps would be worse than no representation at all.” And, I would have to say, “a chewing gum image to represent Yahweh is also worse than no image at all.” The glory and majesty and splendor and greatness of God are so magnificent that you can never begin to capture them with a concrete image. Many of his attributes are what we call incommunicable, meaning humans can’t fully comprehend them because they are outside of human experience. These are attributes like immutability, omniscience, his omni-presence. So, we must refuse to reduce God by using a concrete image to represent him.

B. Danger #2: Whatever image you fashion to REPRESENT God, you will soon worship. Another danger of making physical images, relics, and objects to represent God is that although they start out as symbols pointing to God, there is a human tendency to begin to worship the objects themselves. During the Exodus, the Israelites suffered deadly snake bites as a punishment for their disobedience. But if they trusted Yahweh to heal them by looking at a bronze serpent, which God told Moses to make, they would be healed. Nothing more is said of the bronze serpent for hundreds of years until the kingship of Hezekiah when we find out that the Israelites had begun to worship the bronze serpent, burning incense to it.

There is a human tendency to treat relics, objects, and images as sacred. To some degree, I understand that. Physical space or objects associated with meaningful people or experience carry a sense of the sacred. We see the sites along the highway where loved ones died in car wrecks, marked by a cross or flowers. A beautiful cathedral communicates a sense of sacred awe. This past June 6th was the 80th commemoration of D-day—the storming of the beaches at Normandy in WWII. To Americans, those beaches are sacred and the thousands of crosses spreading over the fields at the Normandy American Cemetery are as well. Over six thousand Americans lost their lives taking those beaches on just the first day. When I visited Capernaum on a tour of Galilee, I stood a few feet from the foundation of the synagogue where Jesus taught. I looked down on the flat stone exit knowing it was quite likely Jesus had stepped on it. I did not want to step there; it felt too sacred. I stepped back and just looked. But there is a serious danger in treating any human objects, images, or even spaces as too sacred because doing so has often been the first step towards idolatry. It is hard for 21st century Protestants to comprehend this picture; but listen to this historian’s description of the Roman Catholic church in the sixteenth century.

The country lay under the dark pall of superstition and ignorance. Everywhere friars travelled with their holy relics which, for a fee, could be viewed and kissed. In Germany, in the city of Martin Luther, at Wittenberg in Saxony, the Castle Church contained over seventeen thousand relics including, supposedly, part of the rock on which Jesus stood when he wept over Jerusalem, the gown of the virgin Mary and some milk from her breasts, a piece from the burning bush of Moses, thirty-five portions of the cross, hay and straw from the manager at Bethlehem, some hair from Christ. (K. S. Latourette, A History of Christianity).

The accumulation of these holy relics, along with the superstition they engendered contributed to the widespread sale of indulgences—the promise of years off purgatory for viewing these relics. For example, one historian wrote “The Elector of Saxony was proud of the collection in his Indulgence Church. The pilgrim could earn one hundred and twenty-seven thousand seven hundred and nine years—and one hundred sixteen days off purgatory by viewing them all” (Ibid). We saw the same tendency to worship sacred objects a few years ago in the hoopla over the shroud of Jesus supposedly having been discovered. I personally believe that one of the reasons that God has not supernaturally preserved any of the original documents that have been collected into Scripture is because, based upon what the second commandment teaches us, had God supernaturally preserved any of them, we would worship them.

A further problem with viewing religious objects as holy is that we can easily begin to think they are necessary for worship. We need to be cautious about religious symbols, icons, basins, candelabras, altars and other religious objects lest they convey the subtle message that they are necessary for worship. But God’s clear promise is, “Draw near to me through Christ and I will draw near to you—and we don’t need any religious equipment to get acquainted” (Js 4:8) As Jesus told the Samaritan woman—it is not a matter of sacred space, being in Jerusalem or Mt Gerazim or being surrounded by worship equipment. You can come to God wherever you are, without beads, or basins, or crosses or altars so long as you come in spirit and in truth—which leads to the final danger of fashioning idols.

C. Danger #3 God wants you to worship him in truth—for who he IS not give your worship to the false god you imagine him to be. If you think about it, every craftsman who sculpts an image must have a mental image that he starts with. Statues of fertility goddesses have noticeable breasts. War gods look like warriors. The second commandment prohibits much more than making physical images. It prohibits creating our own mental image of God instead of letting the Word of God do that. I want to say that again. What the second commandment is most concerned about is the temptation to create our own mental image of God, instead of letting the Word of God frame that image. Our worship of God becomes corrupt when we worship our faulty image of God, instead of worshipping God as he truly is. It is okay to have a favorite attribute of God. I think for most of us that has to be his mercy. Yet, if we adore God only for the attributes that are our favorites, his mercy but not his wrath against evil, his grace but not his holy hatred of sin, or in some cultures loving his justice—but not his mercy, then our worship of God is corrupt; we worship a figment of our imagination. The only worship God wants is worship for who he truly is. But one of the most destructive results of the fall is human’s fashioning their own mental image of God. Notice that in Romans 1, sinful man’s suppression of the truth leads him to exchange the glorious truth about God’s, immortal, unchanging nature for a false image of God.

For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and EXCHANGED THE GLORY OF THE IMMORTAL GOD FOR IMAGES RESEMBLING MORTAL MAN AND BIRDS AND ANIMALS AND CREEPING THINGS (Rom 1:21-23).

Psychologists have for years dubbed “Homo Sapiens” the worshipping creature. Human beings alone, in the entire animal kingdom, have been worshippers in every society and culture that has existed. Indeed, Scripture tells us that only humans are created in God’s image with the capacity to worship built into us. As we saw last week, we are designed with a God-shaped worship vacuum. Life only works when he is our first love. But our sinful nature causes humans to try to fill that worship need with counterfeit gods that promise to satisfy our hearts. In my view it is extremely important in this world of multiculturalism, to help our kids understand that sin causes humans to suppress the truth about the true God and what he says in his Word because the true God demands obedience from us. But because every human is created to worship—humans make up other religions so they can still worship but ignore God’s demands upon them that they don’t like. For example, Islam allows chauvinistic Muslim men to abuse women and to slaughter those they hate. Similarly, so called Progressive Christianity, which is not Christianity at all, denies that premarital sex, adultery, and homosexuality are wrong, and that God created male and female for different roles in the home and church. But it, like today’s social media, loves to talk about injustice.

The Exodus text we’re studying explains that we are not to fashion our own religion or our own representation of God because God is a jealous god. He demands excusive worship, adored for who he is. There is an evil jealousy that says I want what you’ve got, and I hate you because I haven’t got it. But there is virtuous jealousy. J.I. Packer points out, “Married persons who felt no jealousy at the intrusion of another lover or adulterer into their home would surely be lacking in moral perception; for the exclusiveness of marriage is the essence of marriage.” We are designed for worshipping the true God exclusively. God’s jealousy inclines him to be hostile to false lovers deceiving us into giving them his rightful place and to false images of him based upon disrespecting his Word.

Twenty-First Century Application of Second Commandment

A. Don’t let the cultural myth that all religions worship the same God go unchallenged. Here is one example: Many argue that the Muslim God, Allah, is the same God as the Jews and Christians worship, Yahweh. But here are the facts:

Allah does not exist in three persons. The Trinity is denied by Islam.
Allah reveals his will but never himself. But Jesus said, “He who has seen me has seen the Father.”
Allah creates evil and leads men into sin. Yahweh is holy and cannot be tempted by evil.
Allah is not righteous, just, or morally consistent. He does whatever he wants. Yahweh’s nature never changes; he is holy and just in all he does.
Allah can change whenever he desires. Therefore, he is not bound by his promises. Yahweh is a god whose word can always be trusted. He always keeps his promises because he is unchanging.
Allah has no love relationship with his followers. He is unknowable and references to his love are almost non-existent in the Quran. Yahweh IS love, giving his Son to restore us to an intimate love relationship with him.
Allah is a false God fashioned by Muhamad’s degenerate mind just as Pope Urban’s God was a false God shaped by his degenerate mind.

B. Look to Jesus to correct your false image of God. Our views of God are all imperfect, having been shaped by subjective factors like our relationship with our earthly father, religious experiences growing up, and suffering that God did NOT step in to stop. But Jesus is the revelation of the true nature of God.

Col 1:15, 19. He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell.
Heb 1:3 He is the radiance of the glory of God, the exact imprint of his nature.

New City Catechism Help with Commandment #2

Question 9: What does God require in the first, second, and third commandments?

First, that we know God is the only true God. Second, that we avoid all idolatry.

Teaching Outline: God very clearly says he doesn’t want people worshipping images (pictures) or statues of him. Tell the children that God wants to be known through his Word alone. That is how he has chosen to reveal himself, and that is where he can come to be known. When people make an image of God, they are using their imagination to show God the way they want him to be. The problem is that they will leave things out that they don’t like or add things that aren’t true.

Discussion and Question Time: Is jealousy a good emotion? Explain to the children that when God expresses an emotion, it is always pure and not affected by sin. It is not like our own jealousy. Just as it is appropriate for a husband not to want his wife to love anyone else, it is appropriate for God to want us to not worship anyone or anything else.

Perhaps the best way to close this episode is with Jesus’ words that remind us of how important our adoration and worship are to God; but our gift of worship to him must be based upon who he truly is. The hour is coming, said Jesus, and is now here, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father is seeking such people to worship him.

For Further Prayerful Thought:

How would you answer a new believer who said to you, “I believe Jesus is the Son of God, the risen Lamb slain to take away my sin, but why are there so many other religions in the world?”
Why can’t a chewing gum replica of the Alps convey their glory? Do you agree that a chewing gum replica of the Alps might be worse than no physical image? Why?
Although man was created in God’s image, our fall into sin means that we suppress the truth of who God is, especially our accountability to him, and remake God as OUR IMAGE—the way we want him to be, because we are created to worship. (Atheists usually build their life around a false ideology, which functions like a God.) How do you see this biblical truth making sense in what you observe about the world?

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Teaching Kids Why God Has to Be First

On 07 June, 2024 By Gary Yagel

As we celebrate National Fatherhood Month, we are in the midst of a 5-week series entitled, Fathers Giving the Moral Foundation to Their Children That the Culture Won’t. Unlike adherents to multi-culturalism, Christians realize that God chose to reveal his moral law to one nation, Israel, in a rather spectacular manner. God descended to Mt Sinai. We read this physical description.

Now Mount Sinai was wrapped in smoke because the Lord had descended on it in fire. The smoke of it went up like the smoke of a kiln, and the whole mountain trembled greatly. And as the sound of the trumpet grew louder and louder, Moses spoke, and God answered him in thunder. The Lord came down on Mount Sinai, to the top of the mountain. And the Lord called Moses to the top of the mountain, and Moses went up (Exodus 19:17-20).

And there, God himself wrote his summary of his moral law on two stone tablets using his own finger (Dt 5:22). There is no other text of the Bible written directly by the finger of God. The two tablets were called the Ten Words, the decalogue, and kept in the Ark of the Covenant. Foty years later, In Deuteronomy 5, Moses repeated The Ten Commandments for the next generation. This episode examines how to apply the first commandment as the leaders of our homes and provides some thoughts about teaching it to our kids, using the New City Catechism.

Thousands of Americans have been asked the question, “If you were to die tonight and God were to say to you, ‘Why should I let you into my heaven,’ what would you say?” Let’s consider several answers: The majority have responded with a variation of, “Well, I try to be good and obey the Ten Commandments—I mean I’m not a murdered or a thief, or adulterer.” But the NT writers make clear that no one is saved by keeping the moral law. A second frequent answer, this from true Christians is, “Well, in the Old Testament, God’s covenant people were under the law. They were saved by keeping the law, but in the NT, we are not under law but saved by grace alone through faith.” It might surprise you to know that this response is also incorrect. The law was never given to Israel so its members could keep it to gain their salvation. This widespread misunderstanding is the result of confusion over the different categories of God’s law; some categories are no longer binding but some categories are.

Besides the moral law, there are two other categories of Biblical law, civil and ceremonial. The civil law regulated the functioning of civil society, e.g. property laws, marriage laws, laws prohibiting theft, murder, rape and manslaughter. This part of Scripture is the source of much of America’s civil and criminal legal system. But Israel was also a theocracy in which the church and state were united such that sorcery, the worship of false God’s, and adultery were capital offenses. Christ’s arrival ends a theocracy for God’s people. Spiritual authority is given to the church leaders, exercised through church discipline. The power of the sword is given to the state to punish society’s evils which directly harm others like, murder, rape, theft, and fraud.

The ceremonial law is revealed most fully in Leviticus. It covers required offerings, feasts, and ceremonial cleanness. The book of Hebrews is written to show us that the ceremonial law is no longer binding because it was fulfilled in Christ. But what is confusing is that in Paul’s day keeping the moral law and ceremonial law had become a matter of pride among the Jews, especially the religious leaders, leading them to trust their own good works—as their ticket to heaven. This is the group Paul criticizes in Galatians where he contrasts “being under the law” with trusting Christ. Paul does not in any way abrogate the moral law; the NT presents the Ten Commandments as thoroughly binding.

Ten Commandments Overview Observations

A. Observation #1. The Ten Commandments are given after Israel is set free from slavery in Egypt. Exodus 20:1-2 And God spoke all these words, saying, “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. Yahweh addresses his people as their REDEEMER—the one who has already set them free from bondage in Egypt. Earlier, in chapter 19, he had said, ‘You yourselves have seen what I did to the Egyptians, and how I bore you on eagles' wings and brought you to myself. In the Bible, Israel’s slavery in Egypt is typology, signifying human bondage to sin. God did not give the moral law to Israel while they were in Egypt so they could earn his favor by keeping it. He gave it AFTER he had shown them his mercy, grace, and unconditional love by delivering them from bondage in Egypt. Thinking that Israel was saved by keeping the law was a perversion of OT teaching embraced by the proud scribes and Pharisees. Paul goes to great lengths in Galatians and Romans to explain that Abraham and all the OT saints were saved by grace through faith. The historic fact that the moral law was given to Israel after he had already provided their salvation has huge implications for how we view the Ten Commandments:

Obeying them is not to try to GET God to love us; it’s because he already DOES love us.
Obeying them is not an attempt to APPEASE an ANGRY God; it is an attempt to PLEASE a MERCIFUL God who loves us unconditionally.

This is a watershed difference that we need to experience and help our loved ones to grasp. Christian Counselors, Henry Cloud and John Townsend note, “When we finally understand that God isn’t mad at us anymore, we become free to concentrate on love and growth instead of trying to appease him” (How People Grow). Steve Brown observes the same truth, “Only those who know God will still love them even if they don’t get better will ever get any better” (DMin class).

B. Observation #2: God’s moral law is the pathway to life. Nearly every time God mentions a moral requirement in Scripture, God tells us that keeping it is the path to life. Consider just one text: Consider just a few verses from Deut 28:1-8.

And if you faithfully obey the voice of the Lord your God, being careful to do all his commandments… Blessed shall you be in the city, and blessed shall you be in the field. Blessed shall be the fruit of your womb and the fruit of your ground and the fruit of your cattle, the increase of your herds and the young of your flock. Blessed shall be your basket and your kneading bowl. Blessed shall you be when you come in, and blessed shall you be when you go out. The Lord will cause your enemies who rise against you to be defeated before you. They shall come out against you one way and flee before you seven ways. The Lord will command the blessing on you in your barns and in all that you undertake.

In every conceivable way, God says, you will be blessed if you keep these commandments. They are life. We need to help our children see that Satan lied to Eve, saying God’s command forbidding them to eat of the tree was denying them happiness, and that Satan has been repeating that lie to every human ever since. But the fact was that LIFE was in obedience to God. Most scholars believe that had Adam and Eve resisted the temptation over a probationary period of time—they would have been confirmed in righteousness, a condition where there would be no tears, or death, or suffering, or pain. Obedience is always the path to life. The wage that sin pays is always death.

C. Observation #3: Far from being minimized in the NT as some mistakenly think when they hear the Christians are “not under law but grace,” God’s moral law portrays the way human beings were designed to live. In Matthew 6:33, Jesus says our top priority is to spread Jesus’ kingdom of righteousness over earth—the restoration of everything broken by sin. In Tim Keller’s words, “the kingdom is the renewal of the whole world through the entrance of supernatural forces. As things are brought back under Christ’s rule and authority, they are restored to health, beauty, and freedom” (Ministries of Mercy). The first four core heart attitudes for kingdom living are about overcoming sinful hearts to pursue righteousness: 1) poor in spirit--repenting over our sinful desire for independence, 2) those who mourn—grieving over the harm and all sin brings about, 3) the meek—surrendering in full allegiance to King Jesus, 4) those who hunger and thirst for righteousness. Hungering to obey God’s moral law is not legalism; it is seeking first the kingdom of God and fulfilling the 4th beatitude.

The First Commandment: You shall have no other gods before me (Exodus 20:3)

The first and most foundational commandment, says God, is, keep me first in your life. This commandment recognizes the tendency of the sinful human heart to find or manufacture false Gods to serve. Calvin called the human heart an idol factory. When most people think of “idols” they think of literal statues or perhaps Ryan Seacrest anointing the next popstar on American Idol. Yet, while traditional idol worship still occurs in some places of the world, internal idol worship within the heart is universal. Tim Keller in his book, writes:

What is an idol? It is:

Anything more important to you than God
Anything that absorbs your heart and imagination more than God
Anything you seek to give you what only God can give.

So, in this command, God is saying, “Don’t worship the sun, moon, or stars. Don’t worship Baal or Molech. Don’t worship Allah, or Budha, or Marx or Mao.” He is also saying, “Don’t worship YOURSELF,” the biggest idol of today’s culture. “Don’t worship material goods, pleasure, success, fame, or money. Don’t worship fashion, position, ease, or men’s applause. Biblically speaking, a false god is whatever you subtly trust in, instead of God, to get you what your heart secretly craves.

Through tears a young husband said to me, “I don’t know why my porn craving has so much control over me.” I said, “Let’s talk about that. Growing in sexual purity is more the result of changing what your heart loves than changing what your hands do.” Real, lasting change, which is what you said you are wanting is heart transformation, not just temporary behavior modification. The reason the struggle takes so long is that heart change is much tougher than behavioral change.”

“Your heart was created to find its greatest pleasure in an intimate love relationship with God, in which your heart feasts on the pleasure of knowing his delight in you and derives great pleasure in pleasing him. But another god has found its way into your heart—the God of Sexual Pleasure, who regularly usurps your heart’s throne from God. When you are feeling down on yourself, alone, bored, angry, lack of affection from your wife, or distant to God, the God of Sexual Pleasure whispers, “Want to feel better? You know I can make you feel really good.” You are letting the false God of Pleasure control you. Steve Childers, one of my RTS professors pointed out that Paul says in Ephesians 5:5 that idolatry is behind sexual impurity as well as behind covetousness. His words:

“To Paul, mankind’s root problem is not merely an external, behavior problem—it is the internal problem of the heart. Paul believed that one of the primary reasons human hearts aren’t more transformed is because the affections of people’s hearts have been captured by idols that grip them and steal their heart’s affection away from God (Lecture Notes).

New City Catechism Help with Commandment #1

Question 9: What does God require in the first, second, and third commandments?

First, that we know God is the only true God. In today’s pluralistic culture, where multiculturalism’s ideology has great power, it is important that from an early age, we teach this catechism question. The Leader’s Notes explain why:

Leaders Notes: “Children will likely be aware of the relativistic and pluralistic air of the twenty-first century. They will be conscious that there are people of different religions—and no religion—in their schools, towns, and cities. The media will particularly be training them to be skeptical about absolute truth. As a result, they may be reluctant to acknowledge that there is only one true God.”

Activity: Give each child a big picture of a heart with a smaller heart (the inner most heart) inside. “The children should write God in the center heart to remind them that God alone must be worshipped. Ask them to search the magazines and cut out pictures of things people might be tempted to love above God. Encourage them to paste in the outer heart things they’ve cut out that are good things (pictures of family, animals, food, toys.) It is right to love these good things God has created, but we should never put them in the center place of God.”

Three Reasons to Make God First in Our Lives

A. No other being or thing can satisfy the thirst of your soul. David wrote, As a deer pants for flowing streams, so pants my soul for you, O God. My soul thirsts for God, for the living God (Ps 42:1-2). The whole gospel story is that our sin has separated us from the God who made us for himself and who is the answer to our deepest longings. But Christ came to remove that barrier. God uses the two richest experiences of loving intimacy—that of a father with his son and that of a bridegroom with his bride to describe the intimacy he wants with us. In John 7 we read, On the last day of the feast Jesus stood up and cried out, “If anyone thirsts, let him come to me and drink. Then Jesus explains how that thirst is quenched. The Holy Spirit mediates Christ’s presence to us. Jesus continues, Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, ‘Out of his heart will flow rivers of living water.’” Now this he said about the Spirit, whom those who believed in him were to receive, for as yet the Spirit had not been given, because Jesus was not yet glorified. As Jesus would explain later in John 15, the Holy Spirit indwells our heart giving us a real and constant sense of Jesus’ presence with us. It is Christ’s presence with us that satisfies the deepest thirst of our hearts.

When Paul writes to the new Christians in Corinth, a city notorious for its sexual sin, Paul does not simply say, “Stop it!” Remarkably he pointed to the desires beneath their sexual temptation—the soul’s need for love, belonging, and pleasure, writing, “Don’t you realize that you were made for God and God is the answer to our deepest longings.” I never tire of John Piper’s analysis of sexual lust.

“One reason lust reigns in so many is that Christ has so little appeal. You were created to treasure Christ with all your heart—more than you treasure sex or sugar. If you have little taste for Jesus, competing pleasures will triumph. Plead with God for the satisfaction you don’t have. Quote Psalm 90:14, ‘Satisfy us in the morning with your steadfast love that we might rejoice and be glad all our days.’ Then look, look, LOOK at the most magnificent person in the universe until you see him as he really is” (Desiring God).

We need to keep God first because our deepest need is a love relationship with him and second, because:

B. No counterfeit God can be trusted to produce for you. Psalm 115 says,

Our God is in the heavens he does all that he pleases. But their idols are silver and gold, the work of human hands. They have mouths, but do not speak; eyes, but do not see. They have ears, but do not hear; noses, but do not smell. They have hands, but do not feel; feet, but do not walk; and they do not make a sound in their throat. Those who make them become like them; so do all who trust in them. O Israel, trust in the Lord! He is their help and their shield.

You and I need a god who can speak—words of encouragement, guidance, wisdom. We need a god who can see—who has the discernment to see things as they really are, who knows us. Do you want a blind god? We need a god who can hear—our cry for help. Every human will face life challenges too big for him or her. If you haven’t yet, you will. And when you face trouble, crisis, tragedy, if you call out to the wrong God, you will be in deep weeds. If you make money your god, it can be lost overnight. If you make success your God, a year after you’ve left your office, they will barely remember your name. If you make being liked your god, you’ll exhaust yourself trying to please everyone and fail those who most need you but don’t scream as loudly for your attention. In short, counterfeit gods are liars; they won’t come through for you in the long run.

C. The third reason to make God first in our affections is that no other being deserves our worship. First, because God is our redeemer. It is noteworthy that both versions of the ten commandments, Exodus 20 and Deuteronomy 5, begin

the same way, “I Am the Lord Your God, WHO BROUGHT YOU OUT OF THE LAND OF EGYPT, OUT OF THE HOUSE OF SLAVERY. You shall have no other gods before me. God is saying, “Before I lay down these laws for you, I want to remind you who I am. Just a short time ago, you were getting beat up in Egypt. You were oppressed slaves who cried out to me. Who sent you Moses? Who sent the ten plagues? Who parted the Red Sea? Who drowned the Egyptian army? Who sustained you in the desert for forty years? I DID THAT. WHY WOULDN’T YOU WANT TO WORSHIP ME? Molech didn’t free you from slavery. Baal didn’t save you from the Egyptians. You didn’t escape bondage by YOUR MIGHTY HAND but MINE.”

The second reason to give God our worship is that he alone is worthy of it. Our English word worship is derived from the word for “worthiness.” No one I know has captured this truth better than Steve Green in his song, “God Alone.”

“God and God alone created all these things we call our own. From the mighty to the small, the glory in them all is God’s and God’s alone.

God and God alone, reveals the truth of all we call unknown. All the best and worst of man can’t change the master’s plan. It’s God’s and God alone.

God and God alone, is fit to take the universe’s throne. Let everything that lives reserve its truest praise for God and God alone.

Gdd and God alone will be the joy of our eternal home. He will be our one desire; our hearts will never tire of God and God alone.”

For Further Prayerful Thought:

In the opening overview observations, which one stood out most to you?
Why do spiritual leaders have to fight a lifelong battle to keep reminding those under their care that God’s word is the path of life? Why is that so hard for us to remember, in moments of temptation?
What do you find most helpful in Tim Keller’s definition of an idol as: “anything more important to you than God, anything that absorbs your heart and imagination more than God, anything you seek to give you what only God can give.” Which potential idols do you need to be wary of?

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Is Social Media Catechizing Your Children and Grandchildren?

On 02 June, 2024 By Gary Yagel

The average teen in America in 2024 spends 7 hours 22 minutes on their phone per day (Cosmo, Feb 24, 2024, “Average Screen Time for Teenagers in 2024”) This totals over 50 hours a week compared to an hour in church and an hour in youth group for Christian teens. This 25-1 ratio caused the late Tim Keller, when asked to identify the must critical issues his church needed to address going into the future, to say, “Considering the sheer volume of hours our children consume the messages and values of social media, it is clear that our children are being catechized by social media not our churches. It is clear that we need to help our families take back this responsibility” (ByFaith Video June 2018). What do you think about his observation? How much do you think you can rely upon today’s culture to instill biblical moral values into your children and grandchildren?

Today, we begin our celebration of National Fatherhood Month with the June series, “Fathers Giving the Moral Foundation to Their Children That the Culture Won’t.” This episode examines the biblical practices we need to follow to construct a biblical/moral foundation in our children. We begin analyzing the process of instilling moral values into the hearts of our children by asking the question, “How do you get anything done in life that requires sustained effort over time” It was this question that motivated Charles Schwab, when he was president of Bethlehem Steel, to issue a challenge to management consultant, Ivy Lee, “Show me a way to get more things done. If it works, I’ll pay anything within reason.”

Lee handed Schwab a piece of paper and said, “Write down the things you need to do.” He was referring to Schwab’s job description. Schwab made the list. “Now number these items in the order of their real importance to your organization,” Schwab did that. “The first thing tomorrow morning,” Lee added, “start working on number one and stay with it until it is completed. Next, take number two and don’t go any further until it is completed. Then proceed to number three, and so on. If you can’t complete everything on schedule don’t worry. At least you will have taken care of the most important things before getting distracted by items of lesser consequence. In summary, “Evaluate the relative importance of the things you must get done…establish priorities…record your plan of action…and stick to it. Do this every working day. After you have convinced yourself of the value of this system, have your employees try it. Then send me a check for whatever you think the idea was worth.”

In a few weeks, Charles Schwab wrote a check to Lee Ivy for 25,000.00 (which would be the equivalent of over $100,000 today.) We observed Schwab following 3 common sense management steps 1) He had a clear understanding of his job description, from which he 2) formed a target of clear objectives he needed to reach to do his job well, 3) shaped and worked his plan to achieve his objectives. This June series is built around following these objectives—covering management steps 1 and 2 in this episode and starting down the 3rd management step.

MANAGEMENT STEP 1: OUR JOB DESCRIPTION AS FATHERS

The environment that God chose for growing a child to physical, emotional, and spiritual health is a family where the child is loved by both a father and a mother. Creation itself tells us that the nuclear family is not merely a social construct. The biological fact that conception takes place in the context of husband and wife making love speaks volumes about the best environment in which a child is nurtured to healthy adulthood—a home in which both his mom and dad are in love with each other.

When Paul explains the family responsibilities of Christians in Ephesians and Colossians, he addresses wives, then husbands, then children—commanding them to obey their parents. So, we might expect the next group Paul addresses to be parents; but it is not. How about mothers? No. Elsewhere, Paul does command older women to train the younger women to love their children (Titus 2:4). But it is striking that when Paul addresses the training of the children, he doesn’t mention mothers but gives commands to fathers. This pattern of responsibility began with Abraham, the father of the Christian Faith. Right after announcing to Abraham that his wife, Sarah, would have a son, the seed through whom all the earth would be blessed, God said he had chosen Abraham that he may command his children and his household after him to keep the way of the Lord by doing righteousness and justice, so that the Lord may bring to Abraham what he has promised him (Gen 18:19). Clearly, God assigns to covenant fathers the responsibility to build a biblical foundation into their children. God did not assign this responsibility to Eve, though obviously wives are a great help in the process.

MANAGEMENT STEP 2: FORMULATE A MASTER PLAN OF OBJECTIVES FOR INSTILLING BIBLICAL MORAL VALUES

Here is a humble attempt at master plan as a starting point for covenant fathers. It may also stimulate the thinking of grandfathers, since we always remain the covenant head of our tribe. This master plan is on our website; the show notes contain a link to it. We will be following it over the next four weeks:

Master Plan: Instilling Biblical/Moral Values

A. Get a biblical overview of this process.

Three Principles of Child Rearing (Ephesians 6:4)
Four Steps to Teaching Scripture (Deuteronomy 6:4-8)

B. Answer worldview questions (many answered in New City Catechism).

ME Questions: Why do I matter? Where did I come from? Where should I be going to fulfill my purpose? What is the origin of my sense of right and wrong?
WORLD Questions: What's wrong with the world? How did it get this way? What's the solution?

C. Teach Jesus' summary of the bibical commandmenst--loving God, first 4 commandments, loving neighbor, second 6 commandments.

D. Teach God’s Moral Law: The Ten Commandments (covered in NC Cat).

E. Practice biblical principles of discipline.

Train a child to obey his conscience.
Teach the law of sowing and reaping.
Teach a child self-control, i.e. to master his desires.

F. Teach and inspire godly attitudes: Character is a consistent attitude. (The fruit of the Spirit, the Beattitudes, Peter's golden chain of virtues)

G. Help them celebrate God’s glorious design of manhood and womanhood differently to complete one another.

Preteen-early teen years

H. Teach God’s glorious design of sex.

I. Help them know they are perfectly designed for their mission. For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them (Eph 2:10).

J. Teach them how to cope with peer pressure and to choose friends wisely.

K. Inspire them to pursue wisdom. When I was a son with my father, he taught me and said to me, the beginning of wisdom is this: Get wisdom, and get insight. Prize her highly, and she will exalt you (Prov 4:3ff)

L. Expose them to portraits of Jesus in the gospels to show that he is a leader worthy of their whole-hearted allegiance.

Teen years (Research from Before You Lose Your Faith, published by the Gospel Coalition from The Anatomy of Deconversion by John Marriott, and Another Gospel, by Alisa Childers strongly suggests these final three components of the equipping we must do with our kids before they leave home.

M. Ground them in sound logic, learning to recognize logical fallacies.

N. Thoroughly teach them the reasons for our the (I Pet 3:15 apologia).

O. Equip them to respond to current worldviews with a biblical perspective. Admit that Christians have at times failed to oppose unjust racism as they should have, and often failed to be as generous as Jesus commanded in helping the poor.

(There is strong evidence that children raised in Christian homes are at strong risk of abandoning their faith unless their parents and churches have followed through on these last three steps.)

This is just a starting point. But every faithful father needs a target on the wall—a curriculum he wants to impart to his child before she leaves home. The old adage is true; if you fail to aim, aim to fail. So, step 2 is “formulate you master plan.”

MANAGEMENT STEP 3: TURN YOUR OBJECTIVES INTO A PLAN & WORK IT

A. Get a Biblical Overview of the Process

1. Three Principles of Child Rearing (Eph 6:4). Paul writes, Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord (Eph. 6:4). We are not told why mothers are not specifically addressed, even though children are commanded to obey both parents. Perhaps giving this command to fathers is necessary because one of the primary results of the fall is that men inherit Adam’s passivity. Adam failed to step up, defend Eve against Satan’s temptation, and lead the way to flourishing, by being obedient to God’s command not to eat the fruit. He failed in his masculine calling to protect those in the garden and to cause them to flourish (Gen 2:25). A passive hesitation in training the children makes men’s discipline reactive instead of proactive. It ends up being haphazard, random, and inconsistent. Inconsistent discipline is one of the fastest ways to provoke anger in a child. One moment, he gets away with murder, the next time he barely steps across the line and is slammed with punishment. That will provoke hot anger. Notice that in Ephesians 6:4 Paul begins by saying this is NOT the way fathers are to raise their kids.

In contrast, fathers are to provide consistent discipline that trains a child to know what he is and is not responsible for. It is not a harsh, seat-of-the-pants, reactive discipline that only provokes anger. Instead, Paul says to fathers, bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord. Three important words in this phrase describe the biblical approach to rearing children. First, dads are NOT to watch their children grow up but to bring them up. Paul uses the Greek word EKTHREPHO from EK out of + THREPHO nurture. It is used for the care given by a nursery worker to a small, tender sapling, or the care given to infants and toddlers. This word is also used by Paul for the way we treat our own bodies, which speak to us about how they feel. The point seems to be that our training plan needs to be exercised carefully, relationally, with sensitivity to the one we are training. Leadership influence is built through caring relationships. Leaders build their relationship with their followers through empathy, affection, affirmation, truth-speaking, compassion and time together. Leaders win their followers’ hearts by serving them. Our parenting plan must be shaped in the context of a real relationship with each child and an understanding of each child’s uniqueness, progress, and needs.

The second word (ESV discipline) is PAIDEA, from which we get pediatric. It means the training of children’s behavior through appropriate discipline. i.e. giving consequences. A father’s authority is never to be used selfishly, or reflexively. Rather, it is to be part of a TRAINING plan. The third word, instruction, means literally “to put into the mind.” Every effective father must have in mind a specific set of content—a curriculum he will use for his moral instruction of his child. So, the first step in building a child’s moral foundation is understanding that doing so is a father’s responsibility. Certainly, his wife is perfectly gifted to assist in this task; but it is Dad’s job.

2. Four Steps to Teaching Scripture (Dt 6:5-8) 1) You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. 2) And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart. 3) You shall teach them diligently to your children, and 4) shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise.

Step 1: Love God with all your heart. The fundamental motivation for the entire Christian life is offering myself as a living sacrifice, returning love to God because he first loved me. The power of my influence in other’s lives always flows from my heart, especially with those closest to me, because they see my heart.

Step 2: These commands shall be on your heart. What is God’s love language? It is loving, knowing, and obeying his Word. There is no substitute for spending time in God’s word and committing it to heart. After 6 decades of ministry, I am still working at Scripture memory. Right now, I am trying to re-memorize the book of James. Why? I believe Proverbs 3:15 God’s wisdom is more precious than jewels, and nothing you desire can compare with her. If this verse is true—how can I not be radically committed to taking in God’s Word?

Step 3: You shall teach them diligently to your children. The Hebrew word for teach means to impress or to imprint the way the stylus imprints the ink on parchment. It refers to rote memorization. This is why the church has historically used catechisms along with Bible memorization. Failure to follow this discipline prevents us and our children from taking the next step.

Step 4: You shall talk of them all through the day. The two pairs of opposites, sit/walk, lie down/rise suggest any and every time, place, and activity. This teaching is by example as we lead from our lives, loving God, demonstrating the proof of that love by putting his Word into our hearts, intentionally structuring time to teach our kids, and model the application of Scripture in our own lifves.

The second objective in the Master Plan: Instilling Biblical/Moral Values” is:

B. Answer Worldview Questions

Although the New City Catechism is a modern version of historic catechisms, it is striking how relevant the questions are for today. Consider Tim Keller’s words about what worldviews a modern catechism must counter. He says, “One feature to counter would be the (culture’s view) of self, which comes down to this: You have to be true to yourself, and nobody can tell you who you are, and you have to look inside yourself and not base your understanding or identity on anything outside but on only what’s true to you.” Now, consider how relevant the very first question of the New City Catechism is. What is our only hope in life or death? The answer: That we are not our own but belong to God. Notice how this question refutes secularism's message that life is about me. It also gets to some foundational worldview ME questions-- Why do I matter? Where did I come from? Where should I be going to fulfill my purpose? This catechism comes with an awesome curriculum to use to teach the concepts behind each question. Here are some parts of that guide for this first question, “What is our only hope in life and death?” That we are not our own but belong to God.

Big idea: Certain hope is found only in a relationship with God through Jesus Christ

AIM: To help your children understand that children of God belong to him and should long to live for him.

Leader’s Notes: Children may not be inclined to regularly consider the purpose of their existence, but they will daily encounter messages that seek to teach them about the meaning of life. The media, school, friends, and family are all seeking to shape and focus children for the future. Some will say that the purpose of life is to be successful and earn money; others will teach that the purpose of life is simply to be happy. Children’s hearts are often nurtured to put their hope either in themselves or in created things rather than in the Creator. This lesson aims to help the children understand that they were made by God and for God.

Introduction: Ask the children if they can figure out which stories these sentences refer to: The prince’s only hope was to find the owner of the glass slipper Cinderella. The rabbit’s only hope was that Mr. MacGregor would not find him in the watering can. Peter Rabbit. The children’s only hope was Aslan. The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Then ask what they think the phrase their only hope means. Highlight for the children that hope often requires trusting somebody or something. Ask the children, “What kind of things do you hope for in the future?”

Activity: Lay out two pieces of large paper. On the top of one of the papers write, My Family. On the top of the other write, God’s Family. Ask the kids to identify the things that are great about belonging to their particular family. Write down their answers. Ask the children what would happen if another child were adopted into their family. Would he benefit from all of these great things as well? Then ask them to identify and list the great things about being part of God’s family. Explain that God brings people into his family and makes them his children through adoption. Remind the children that being adopted into God’s family means that we get all the great things that come with being a part of God’s family. He wonderfully blesses us in this life and will wonderfully bless us even after we die.

Let me close this episode by pleading “please find some time to construct your own master plan for building moral and biblical foundation into your child.” Charles Schwab knew he couldn’t fly by the seat of the pants and do a good job of leading Bethlehem Steel. Neither can you fly by the seat of your pants and disciple the children in your family well—And your children are much more important than a steel company.

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Paul’s Countercultural View of AUTHORITY

On 26 May, 2024 By Gary Yagel

If you are serving or have served our nation in the US military, thank you for your service. This past week, as I studied Paul’s words to Timothy about leadership and authority in the church, I was stunned in a fresh way by how opposite they are to the egalitarianism and critical theory, widely influencing the culture, which both see authority as fundamentally oppressive. Sadly, Neil Shenvi and Pat Sawyer in their book, Critical Dilemma, showed me that such corruption is creeping into those who started out in my own denomination. They observe:

“Michelle Higgins received an MDiv from the PCA’s seminary, Covenant and in 2015 spoke at InterVarsity’s Urbanna Missions Conference. She left the PCA and in 2020, she became the senior pastor of Saint John’s Church in Saint Loius, a pro-choice, LGBTQ+-loving denomination. On Pentecost Sunday, 2021, she preached “Let the Lord lead you to queer parenting. Let the Lord show you the queerness of the Trinity in ways that you had not felt welcome to before.” Dante Stewart was a student at Reformed Theological Seminary, a writer for Christianity Today, and “regular contributor” to the Gospel Coalition website. On February 13, 2022, he tweeted, “I’m convinced: we don’t need more white or evangelical theology. We need more womanist, black liberation, and queer theology to show us how to be better humans and embody a more loving and liberation faith. We can only get better if we expand the voices that lead us.”

This episode shows the sharp contrast between the Bible’s view of authority and the cultural voices of egalitarianism and critical theory, which are eroding the faith and corrupting the thought of many immature Christians. As we complete our May series, Portrait of Effective Spiritual Leadership, by examining Paul’s teaching in 1 Timothy 2 and 3, we discover the Bible’s stunningly high view of authority in his advice to Timothy. Before making specific observations from the text, let’s get a 30,000-foot biblical worldview of authority in general.

A. The essence of human sin is rebelling against God’s authority. Since we are creature and he is our maker, we owe him honor and obedience. Since he is our sustainer, we owe him thanksgiving. Paul traces sin back to these failures. They did not honor him as God or give thanks to him (Rom 1:21). The temptation to be like God means being accountable to no one. Instinctively fallen man brings resistance to any demand made upon him by authority; his fallen heart demands autonomy.

B. God has ordained the institutions of family, church, and government to restrain evil and reward good. Therefore, the default position of God’s redeemed people is obedience to parental, church, and governmental authority. At a time when Nero, Rome’s emperor, was using Christians as human torches to light his gardens, Paul instructed the Romans, Let every person be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God. Therefore whoever resists the authorities resists what God has appointed, and those who resist will incur judgment. Do you notice that this is the exact opposite of critical theory, also known as cultural Marxism, which says that the oppressed, like blacks in the city, have the right to burn down buildings and claims that members of Hamas are oppressed victims, they have the right to rape, slaughter, and “send back to the ovens of the Nazis” Jews because all Jews are “oppressors.”

C. Because of the fall, those who hold social or political power can be expected to abuse it, unjustly harming those with less power. Those who hold power over other humans must, therefore, be held accountable.

Husbands and fathers in Israel were accountable to the rule of law implemented by the elders at the gates of the city.
Husbands and fathers in the NT were accountable to the elders of the church and susceptible to church discipline if they misused their authority.
The biblical model of church government is a plurality of elders, with individual authority vested in no individual. Church leaders are to be accountable to other church leaders.
The United States Constitution provides a balance of powers that many trace back to presbyterian government and the Calvinist view of the fall of man. James Madison wrote in the Federalist Papers, “If men were angels, no government would be necessary….In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty is this: You must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place, oblige it to control itself.” This perspective led to a balance of powers.

D. Although Jesus clearly taught that his call was sovereign over the authority of families, and Peter obeyed Christ’s command to preach, when told not, it must be admitted that there have been times when the church has allowed the weak to be oppressed by those in authority, to our shame. For example:

Doing nothing to stop chattel slavery or Jim Crow laws in the south.
The slow response of German Christians to stand up to Hitler as the church was slowly taken over by the Third Reich.
The misapplication of “headship of husbands” biblical teaching, whic has caused women to mistakenly think God wants them to “accept” abuse rather than confront it.

With this recent history of the church, it should surprise no one that many of the rising generation of Christians want to distance themselves from any hint of oppression. So, they are drawn to critical theory’s oppressed/oppressor paradigm, like bees to honey. But the honey is laced with poisonous rebellion against God.

THE HIGH BIBLICAL WORLDVIEW OF AUTHORITY FROM I TIMONTHY 2 & 3

A. Positions of leadership are so important that those filling them are identified by Paul as requiring regular, intentional prayer support: I Tim 2:1 says, First of all, then, I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made for all people, for kings and all who are in high positions.

1.Regular prayer for those in authority over us both expresses and promotes loyalty to those in leadership positions. Regular prayer turns our hearts toward the ones for whom we pray because where you invest your treasure (time and energy) your heart will follow. A heart of loyalty towards those in authority over us is at the core of holiness. It begins with loyalty to God’s authority, which is described in the first four of The Ten Commandments. This submissive holiness then moves to loyalty to parental authority. Before forbidding murder, adultery, and theft, God’s moral law requires honoring the authority of those in God’s primary institution for shaping children, the home. “Honor your father and your mother.” This same loyalty to God’s authority structure is appealed to in a slightly different way by Peter in his words. Wives, be subject to your own husbands, so that even if some do not obey the word, they may be won without a word by the conduct of their wives, when they see your respectful and pure conduct (I Peter 3:1-2). Peter applies this same default requirement of loyalty to God’s authority structures in the realm of government. I Peter 2:13-15. Be subject for the Lord's sake to every human institution, whether it be to the emperor as supreme, or to governors as sent by him to punish those who do evil and to praise those who do good.

Historically, support for God’s designed institutions of authority, especially by praying for those filling those roles has been one of the great hallmarks of the church. Tertulian, one early church father wrote, “The Christian is the enemy of no man, least of all the emperor, for we know that since he has been appointed by God, it is necessary that we should love him, reverence him, honor him, and desire his safety (Commentary on I Timothy, William Barclay) Another early church father, Theophilus of Antioch wrote, “The honor that I will give the Emperor is all the greater, because I will not worship him, but I will pray for him. I will worship no one but the true God, for I know that the Emperor was appointed by him” (ibid).

2. Paul’s description of what we are to ask God to empower the government authority to do gives insight about God’s ordained role for government. Verse 2, for kings and all who are in high positions, that we may lead a peaceful and quiet life, godly and dignified in every way.

A peaceful life. The word used here is from the Greek word for peace, which means the cessation of hostilities. Peace comes about in society by overcoming anarchy through governments enforcing the rule of law.
A quiet life. This word means NOT causing a disturbance to others. We are to pray against persecution, so that through quiet living, we can sow the seed of the gospel without it causing a disturbance.
A godly life. In Romans 13, Paul explains that the role of government is to restrain evil and promote good. For rulers are not a terror to good conduct, but to bad. Would you have no fear of the one who is in authority? Then do what is good, and you will receive his approval for he is God's servant for your good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for he does not bear the sword in vain. For he is the servant of God, an avenger who carries out God's wrath on the wrongdoer (vs 3-4). Critical theory directly undermines the God-ordained plan for evil to be punished by governments that enforce the law. The rapid escalation of crime in cities like Chicago and New York City, along with drug abuse, disease, and human feces-covered sidewalks in our major cities, are the result of the critical theory ideology that excuses irresponsibility and criminal actions blaming such behavior on “the establishment oppressors.”
A life of giving respect to others. This unusual Greek word is translated by one commentator worthy conduct towards men, treating them with dignity. These words seem similar to Paul’s command in Romans 13:7 Pay to all what is owed to them…respect to whom respect is owed, honor to whom honor is owed. The government behavior that we are to pray for is the treatment of every human with dignity derived from being God’s image bearers. This moral requirement completely flies in the face of critical theory, which names entire classes of people privileged oppressors to be loathed by cultural Marxists, just as Marx, himself, fomented hatred of the bourgeoise. Black Lives Matter is nothing like the civil rights movement led by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. His focus was precisely the failure of the US government to promote laws that treated every human, including Negros, with God-endowed dignity. He based his appeal for just treatment of blacks upon the biblical view of the created dignity of all men—not the corrupt, misguided class warfare view of justice promoted by Karl Marx. King used measured civil disobedience to bring attention to this moral wrong. But such civil disobedience was nothing like the violent destructive lawlessness of Antifa, whose ideology justifies looting and vandalizing by the “oppressed victims” against their “oppressor property owners.” King, himself, was the one who suffered from civil disobedience—he went to jail. But he promoted non-violence, in sharp contrast to campus violence that calls for genocide of the Jews on campuses today by critical theory-driven Hamas supporters.

B. Authority rightly belongs to God. In the midst of Paul’s discussion of human authority, he insists on God’s absolute authority. I Tim 2:5-6: For there is one God, and there is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus, who gave himself as a ransom for all. We need to think clearly about the implications of this text for the multiculturalism being promoted today. There is healthy biblical focus today on celebrating diversity. We should celebrate the diversity of God’s creation, the diversity of good gifts poured out upon the individuals and various cultures of the world through God’s common grace, and the diversity of those in the kingdom of God from every tongue and tribe and nation. Christians must lead the way in avoiding tribalism, racism, or Christian nationalism.

However, at its very core, the Bible rejects true multiculturalism and the relativism that goes with it. God chose to reveal himself to one man, Abraham, from whom he created one nation, Israel, from whom one individual human would come, Jesus whose body would be invaded by God in the incarnation who was the Messiah, God’s Word incarnate. That revelation came through one people, God’s chosen nation, Israel. As the book of Hebrews recounts, Long ago, at many times and in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son. God did not choose to give his revelation to all cultures EQUALLY. The truth claims of every culture are NOT EQUAL IN VALIDITY as claimed by multiculturalism nor are the truth claims of the oppressed more valid as cultural Marxism seeks to argue.

C. Authority rightly belongs to Paul, Christ’s apostle. 1 Timothy 2 continues, For this I was appointed a preacher and an apostle (I am telling the truth, I am not lying), a teacher of the Gentiles in faith and truth. Scripture consistently teaches that a man’s morality dictates his theology, that is, that our conscience is designed so that it will rationalize away the truth of Scripture when we don’t want to follow it. Today’s church is losing some from the rising generation to what has been called Progressive Christianity, which is simply an attempt to remold Christianity by leaving out anything that current progressive culture finds repugnant—that pre-married sex, adultery and homosexuality are wrong, the atoning blood sacrifice of Christ on the cross is not required, that God is an egalitarian. All such views, twist the Bible’s teaching by saying that the author’s represented their own cultural biases in contrast to the words of Peter, No prophecy was ever produced by the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit (2 Pet 1:21) and Paul, All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness (2 Tim 3:16).

The historical evidence that what our current Bible says is what was originally written is unsurpassed in any other historical or religious book and the accuracy of these writers has been proved by the modern science of archeology again and again. The popular idea that the NT documents are just legends made up by a certain faction of his disciples is nonsense. The NT was written within one generation of the actual events and specifically points to eyewitness testimony from those often still alive to verify its events. No legend happens this way.

D. The authoritative teaching and leadership positions in the household of God are assigned to men. Speaking with the Apostolic authority he has just mentioned, Paul teaches something as countercultural as it gets. I do not permit a woman to teach or to exercise authority over a man; rather, she is to remain quiet. For Adam was formed first, then Eve; and Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and became a transgressor (2:12-14). What corresponds to the position of pastor in our day (giving the authoritative teaching on the Lord’s Day) and the position of ruling elder are assigned, just as the spiritual leadership at home is assigned, to men. Paul makes it impossible for anyone with integrity to deny this teaching about roles in the church: 1) He grounds his teaching in creation; so it can’t be misunderstood to be cultural, 2) Both Ephesians, which teaches that the husband is the head of the wife and this text were written after Paul wrote Galatians 3:28, There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. The Galatians text provides no evidence that Paul denied male leadership in the home and church. 3) This text continues to require that overseers be the husband of one wife. Paul did NOT say or the wife of one husband, even though the church was full of virtuous women like Mary the mother of Jesus. 4) Paul later states that the prerequisite for spiritual leadership in God’s household is a man using his home authority well. Some years ago, I watched a YouTube video of Tim Keller and John Piper defending their membership requirement of adherence to the complementarian view that men are to lead in the church and home for membership in the Gospel Coalition. Piper answered by extolling the virtues of the masculine creation calling, which I loved. Keller answered at an even more profound level. It was what you have to do to Scripture to come to an egalitarian view. Fundamentally you deny it.

E. The authority to lead is an honorable pursuit. I Timothy continues in 3:1, The saying is trustworthy: If anyone aspires to the office of overseer, he desires a noble task. The word overseer is the Greek word EPISKOPOS, literally from EPI upon + SKOPEO to look. As the ESV text notes point out this word is used in Scripture interchangeably with elder PRESBUTEROS, and shepherd POIMEN, which is also translated pastor. All three Greek terms describe the same office from different perspectives. The case for the high biblical worldview of authority is shown in Paul’s description of it as a noble task. No other way of serving is described this way!

F. Authority and its correct use is so important in the church that God has established a very high character bar for all who would serve in this role. Character is not perfection; but it is your characteristic attitude or behavior. May all of us who serve as spiritual leaders anywhere quietly ask the Spirit of God to search our hearts as we read this list of virtues: An overseer must be:

above reproach: one against whom no legitimate criticism can be made.
a one-woman man: one whose sexual desires are focused only on his wife.
sober-minded: one who sees the sobering cost of sin in the world.
sensible: one normally guided by careful thought, not careless emotions.
orderly: (from KOSMOS: the created order). One whose life is ordered.
hospitable: one who has an open heart and open home.
not a drunkard: one who does not drink too much.
not violent but gentle: one who is not abusive in angry words or deeds.
not quarrelsome: one who does not have to prove he is right.
not a lover of money: one who is content with his material blessings.
He must manage his own household well, with all dignity keeping his children submissive. One who has learned the loving combination of warm affection, firm discipline, and lavish affirmation.
He must be well thought of by outsiders. He must be respected by those he lives and works with outside the Christian community.

May we be inspired to more fully pursue these virtues as we grasp the significance that God places upon our position of authority in our homes and churches.

For Further Prayerful Thought:

What do you think are the most important elements of a 30,000-foot overview of the Bible’s view of authority?
Paul encouraged Timothy to pray that civil government leaders accomplish four things. Which ones stood out most to you?
How would you contrast the Bible’s high view of authority with the view of critical theory and egalitarianism’s views of authority?

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Paul’s Leadership Command—FIGHT

On 18 May, 2024 By Gary Yagel

A hundred years ago, Christian pastor and writer, J. C. Ryle wrote: "The saddest symptom about many so-called Christians is the utter absence of anything like conflict and fight in their Christianity. They eat, they drink, they dress, they work, they amuse themselves, they get money, they spend money, they go through a scanty round of formal religious services once or twice every week. But the great spiritual warfare—its watchings and strugglings, its agonies, its battles—of all this they appear to know nothing at all."

I suspect that this description of Christians rings as true in 2024 as in Ryle’s day—especially with the explosion of ubiquitous screens that demand nearly every waking moment of our attention. Yet, it’s hard to understand how any Christian can be so oblivious to spiritual warfare in view of texts like these:

I Peter 2:1: Beloved, I urge you as foreigners and strangers to abstain from fleshly lusts, which wage war against the soul.
2 Corinthians 10:4-5 For the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh, but divinely powerful for the destruction of fortresses. We are destroying arguments and all arrogance raised against the knowledge of God, and we are taking every thought captive to the obedience of Christ.
2 Timothy 2:4: No soldier in active service entangles himself in the affairs of everyday life, so that he may please the one who enlisted him.
Ephesians 6:12: For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.

In keeping with these texts, the words of Paul we’re considering are about fighting. This charge I entrust to you, Timothy, my child, in accordance with the prophecies previously made about you, that by them you may WAGE THE GOOD WARFARE, (I Tim 1:18). This episode examines what it looks like to wage the good warfare.

As we continue our May series, Portrait of Effective Spiritual Leadership, we discover in 1 Timothy 1:18 that spiritual leaders are expected to FIGHT. But our enemy doesn’t wear a uniform and doesn’t meet us on a visible battlefield. He uses ruthless tactics like deceit, irresistible heart enticements, rationalization, and relentless character assassination of God. Nevertheless, all Christians, especially men, are called to engage our enemy and FIGHT. To do so, we need to fully understand the battle.

ADAM IS CREATED KING OF KINGDOM EARTH TO RULE AND PROTECT

1. Being created in God’s image, means that Adam is created to share the moral attributes of God, in fact to demonstrate them to creation. Adam is to exhibit the holiness of God, having the moral law of God written on his heart.

2. Being created in the image of the One who reigns over all things, Adam is given the kingdom, earth, to rule as king. “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth. To “subdue” meant to develop its potential, and shaping the culture that emerged as the population and diversification of labor grew. Genesi 2:14 restates Adam’s call to exercise dominion as cultivating the garden.

3. Genesis 2:14 also restates Adam’s dominion calling to include protecting the garden as a soldier. Adam is designed to be a warrior. Any objective observer notices that girls and boys play differently on the playground. Testosterone matters. Author John Eldredge, in Wild at Heart observes,

“Capes and swords, camouflage, bandannas, and six-shooters—these are the uniforms of boyhood. Little boys yearn to know they are powerful, they are dangerous, they are someone to be reckoned with. How many parents have tried in vain to prevent little Timmy from playing with guns? Give it up. If you do not supply a boy with weapons, he will make them with whatever materials are at hand. My boys chew their graham crackers into the shape of handguns at the breakfast table. Every stick or fallen branch is a spear, or better, a bazooka. Despite what many modern educators would say, this is not a psychological disturbance brought on by violent television or chemical imbalance. Aggression is part of the male design; we are hardwired for it.”

Adam and his sons were created to be warriors.

4. A final observation about Adam’s kingdom is that its highest value was supreme allegiance to the High King. The first and greatest commandments were about worshipping, loving, and serving God first, above all else.

ADAM JOINS SATAN’S REBELLION: SATAN, SIN, AND DEATH USURP EARTH’S THRONE RULING EARTH

The perfect shalom of Adam’s kingdom of righteousness had brought harmony in all four relationships of life—Adam’s relationship to God, to himself, to other humans, and to the physical earth. But that harmony is shattered. In a symmetry of justice, as Adam rebelled against his king, God caused the earth to rebel against Adam’s rule. Adam’s KINGDOM OF RIGHTEOUSNESS, which had been perfectly aligned with the kingdom of heaven has now become the KINGDOM OF SELF. Supreme allegiance to God is replaced by supreme allegiance to self. In Augustine’s words, the City of God once ruled by love for GOD even to the point of contempt for SELF has become the City of Man, ruled by love for SELF even to the point of contempt for GOD. The kingdom of SELF is Satan’s kingdom of sin and darkness. Adam’s original kingdom of RIGHTEOUSNESS is the kingdom of light. As we will see in a moment, the Second Adam defeated the Kingdom of Darkness and now rules earth’s throne, from which he is restoring Kingdom Earth to righteousness, wholeness, which was Adam’s original call. So, “the good fight” is the battle over which kingdom will prevail over earth. For this reason, we need to know the consequences of the fall, to examine what broke when the kingdom of evil usurped Adam’s throne, because our battle is to undue that corruption through the power of the risen Christ. What broke?

1. Our desires are corrupted. Love for God, which is the only way to keep our desires aligned properly, is replaced by love of SELF. Sexual desire becomes selfish lust. The godly desire to please our creator becomes the selfish desire to please ourselves. Instead of worshipping God, we serve the idols that promise to meet our heart hungers for success, power, prestige, pleasure,and whatever else we are convinced will make us happy. The love of money prevails, as a root of all evil, because we think money lets us obtain whatever it is we want. If humans get in the way of what these idols promise will secure our happiness, we are filled with anger, envy, and hostility towards them. James asks rhetorically, What causes quarrels and what causes fights among you? Is it not this, that your passions are at war within you? You desire and do not have, so you murder. You covet and cannot obtain, so you fight and quarrel. Wrong desires are the enemies to be taken down in the good fight.

2. Our thinking is corrupted. Scripture says:

No longer walk as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their minds. They are darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them, due to their hardness of heart (Eph 4:18).
There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way to death (Prov 14:12).
For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth (Rom 1:18).

There is great emphasis in Scripture on correcting our thinking because ideas have consequences and bad ideas have victims. So, not only wrong desires but wrong ideas are the enemies to be taken down in the good fight.

3. Our behavior is corrupted. A darkened understanding combines with corrupt inner desires to produce sinful actions: we step across the moral line to sin.

In the Romans 1 text we just read, Paul tracks this process of suppressing the truth through desires being corrupted, thinking being corrupted, and behavior being corrupted. Sinful behavior is both wrong attitudes and sinful actions. And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a debased mind to do what ought not to be done. They were filled with all manner of unrighteousness, evil, covetousness, malice. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, maliciousness. They are gossips, slanderers, haters of God, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless. (vs28-31). So, wrong attitudes and actions are the enemies to defeat in the good fight.

4. Our call to exercise dominion over the earth is corrupted. The ground is cursed, making Adam’s task of cultivating the garden possible only by sweat. Sin mars the process of building culture at every level. As sin invades the 4 relationships of life it corrupts aspects of every culture. Cornelius Plantinga explains:

"We are born into a world in which for centuries, sin has damaged the great interactive network of shalom—snapping or twisting the thousands of bonds that give particular beings integrity and that tie them to others. Corruption is thus a dynamic motif in the Christian understanding of sin: it is not so much a particular sin as the multiplying power of all sin to spoil a good creation and to breach its defense against invaders. We might describe corruption as spiritual AIDS—a systemic and progressive devastation of our spiritual immune system that eventually breaks down and opens the way for hordes of opportunistic sins" (Engaging God’s World).

There is a term for this evil corrupting force in the culture; it is the world.

Romans 12:2: Do not be conformed to this world.
I John 2:15-16: Do not love the world or the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world—the desires of the flesh and the desires of the eyes and pride of life—is not from the Father but is from the world

It is extremely important to understand that this world and today’s culture are NOT used synonymously in Scripture. Every culture has aspects that reflect the righteousness of God because man is made in God’s image with the moral law written on his heart. The biblcial concept of the world, from which Christians are to flee, refers NOT to culture but to the ungodly elements of the culture. This world refers to the wrong cultural values of our age, which Paul says in 1 Corinthians 2:6-7 are doomed to pass away in contrast to the wisdom that God decreed before the ages. It is the combination of ungodly forces within the culture that Paul says in 2 Corinthians 4:4 result from the fact that the god of this word has blinded the minds of unbelievers. The term world, then, refers to any culture’s values, perspective, and thinking—contributed by the sinful nature of humans (who are darkened in their understanding Eph 4:18). The culture and the lost are not the enemy. Nor are Christians called to separate from culture but from the evil forces within that culture, which the biblical writers call the world.

So, the ungodly values, perspective, and thinking within the culture are the enemies that are to be taken down in the good fight. Our normal method of seeking cultural transformation is prayer warfare combined with winsome influence, not a combattive attitude. We are the salt and light for Kingdom Earth, retarding corruption and exposing evil. However, in democracy, where Christians are to be good stewards of their right to particiapate in governing, political opposition to ungodly ideas that shape the culture is appropriate; but we must remember that the cultures' greatest need is the gospel, not a political victory, and that those in the LGBTQ+ life, as well as political Progressives are NOT the enemy, but held captive by the enemy, Satan.

REDEMPTION DOESN’T JUST FREE-FROM-SIN INDIVIDUALS BUT KINGDOM EARTH

Messiah Jesus accomplishes our redemption—purchasing us out of slavery to Satan, sin, and death with his shed blood. He gives a foretaste of the work he would accomplish at the cross by temporarily overthrowing each of these powers. Demons are cast out, Jesus demonstrates human righteousness, calling his followers to a righteousness of character that far exceeds the superficial works of the scribes and Pharisee’s. His power to restore the broken physical world is shown by healing lepers, the blind, the paralyzed, by silencing a howling storm and by raising humans from the dead. Jesus’ resurrection proves that the curse has been reversed. But the story doesn’t end with Jesus handing his followers a ticket to escape to heaven, thereby escaping a culture dominated by religious leaders who were so evil that they condemned to death the holy Son of God. Instead, Jesus appointed them to go and FIGHT for the Kingdom of Righteousness to prevail over the Kingdom of Darkness. Perhaps the best summary of what it means to fight the good fight is to seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness (Matt 6:33). The gospel is not escape from the sinful world but transformation of this world.

THE GOOD FIGHT IS THE FIGHT TO RESTORE ADAM’S KINGDOM TO "RIGHTNESS"

The fourth chapter of the Gospel story is restoration. CS Lewis points to this truth in the Chronicles of Narnia. Aslan dies an excruciating death at the hands of the White Witch but comes alive. He explains to Lucy and Susan what it all meant:

It means, said Aslan, “that though the Witch knew the Deep Magic, there is a magic deeper still that she did not know. If she could have looked a little further back, into the stillness before Time dawned, she would have read there, a different incantation. She would have known that when a willing victim who had committed no treachery was killed in a traitor’s place, the Table would crack and death itself would start working backwards" (The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe.)

Restoration is about death working backwards throughout Adam’s fallen world to fix and restore everything broken by sin. Participating in this work of restoration is what we are saved FOR! Although our true homeland is the Kingdom of Christ and no earthly kingdom, Christians are not preoccupied with some kind of higher world. Christ came to restore Adam’s kingdom, Earth, which will be the dwelling place of God with his people for eternity. As we surrender to Christ’s lordship, our sanctification makes us more HUMAN (not otherworldly) Tom Howard reminds us,

“The Incarnation takes all that properly belongs to our humanity and delivers it back to us, redeemed. All of our inclinations and appetites and capabilities and yearnings and proclivities are purified and gathered up and glorified by Christ. He did not come to thin out human life; he came to set it free. All the dancing and feasting and processing and singing and building and sculpting and baking and merrymaking that belong to us, and that were stolen away into the service of false God’s are returned to us in the gospel.” (Evangelical is Not Enough).

BATTLEFIELDS OF THE GOOD FIGHT

1. Fight for the purity of our heart desires—to delight in God, and wrestle with selfish desires. Anger sometimes reveals our idols because it erupts over what keeps us from the idols we subtly think will make us happy. In contrast to trusting idols, God say's "trust me." Delight yourself in the Lord; And He will give you the desires of your heart (Ps 37:4)

2. Fight to transform our minds through the Word. God’s wisdom is more precious than jewels, and nothing you desire can compare with her (Prov 3:15).

3. Fight sin by resisting temptation. See James 1:13-15 and Proverbs 4:23, which give insight about protecting the heart.

4. Fight to implement Christ’s righteous agenda in your roles as husband, father, employee/employer, neighbor, church member, steward of resources, ambassador for the kingdom.

5. Fight for truth to prevail in our culture. Warren Cole Smith and John Stonestreet provide a useful lens for evaluating where to fight in our culture:

What is good in our culture that we can promote, protect, and celebrate?
What is missing in our culture that we can creatively contribute?
What is evil in our culture that we can stop?
What is broken in our culture that we can restore?

As believers have engaged culture, rather than retreating from it, here are some of their accomplishments (cited in their book, Restoring All Things).

Not all help is helpful, and the Christian church has learned much that it is teaching the world about helping the poor.
God is a worker, and we are created in His image. Therefore, our work, when rightly understood and engaged can bring good to the world.
Christians have led the way in rescuing women and girls from prostitution and human trafficking.
Throughout history, Christians have championed education.
While society struggles with how to handle those convicted of serious crimes, Christians are leading the way in restoring them to our communities.
Christians are once again offering the good gift of marriage as a healing institution to a sexually exhausted culture.
Christians have proclaimed the dignity of all life by taking seriously the exhortation in James to care for orphans.
God is a creator, and we are made to create too. For centuries, Christians led the way in the arts. Some modern Christians are leading the way again.

Let’s close by returning to Paul’s command to Timothy, which is literally, war the good war. The word war is STRATEUO from STRATUS—the word for an armed enemy camp. So, literally it means to make war on an encamped enemy. Satan has been defeated. He cannot stand against the risen Christ and our spiritual weapons. But he will remain encamped over the kingdom he once owned UNLESS WE MAKE WAR ON HIM. And so, Paul says to spiritual leaders everywhere FIGHT!

For Further Prayerful Thought:

When seeking to understand what fighting the good fight means, why might it be valuable to recognize that we are engaged in a war between two kingdoms?
How does understanding the extent of the damage done to Adam’s posterity and kingdom by sin and its consequences help us better understand how to implement our orders to FIGHT?
In the 1) fight against wrong desires, thinking, attitudes, behaviors, 2) the fight to implement Christ’s agenda in every sphere of our lives, and 3) the fight to be salt and light, influencing culture towards righteousness and truth—which do you feel you are most alert to? Which do you need to consider more carefully?

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Biblical Male Leadership’s Aim is Love

On 11 May, 2024 By Gary Yagel

When I hear the phrase biblical patriarchy today I can’t help but think of Mark Twain’s comment, “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.” Last night, from the Jesus Without Baggage website, I read an article entitled, “How Christian Patriarchy is a Misguided and Harmful Belief that Does Tremendous Damage.” It claimed:

"Christian Patriarchy oppresses and denigrates women and girls. They are expected to submit meekly to whatever the husband demands. This is wrong, oppressive. The idea is that men are directed by God and have the responsibility to direct their wives. But Women can follow the voice and direction of God just as easily as men can. Christian Patriarchy develops an environment for physical, emotional, and sexual abuse against women and misrepresents biblical passages. (The author then cites 5 biblical texts that teach that men are to lead their homes and churches.) These passages are used as if they are the very word of God—eternal propositional truth. But these opinions were written by people (not God) to address issues in particular congregations and based on the culture that existed at the time. They are not the eternal Word of God."

These words are but another example of the phenomenon we examined last week, i.e., the way critical theory’s oppressor/oppressed lens has corrupted so many people’s views of God’s perfect gender design. Also consistent with what we said last week, she is a woman, like way too many, who has been harmed by abusive men. I begin this way because this author and many, many egalitarians believe things about God’s design of gender roles that just ain’t so. The opening words of Paul’s letter to Timothy about spiritual leadership in the church and home directly refute the claim that God’s role assignments inherently harm women. To the contrary, the very aim of his leadership charge to Timothy, Paul states, “is LOVE.”

As we continue our May series, Portrait of Effective Spiritual Leadership, today we uncover three aspects of the spiritual leadership charge Paul begins to give Timothy in chapter 1.

Your charge is to teach others to avoid useless theological speculations but instead stay focused on ordering their lives to accomplish God’s mission.
The aim of your charge is love.
The love you need to fulfill your charge springs from a pure heart and a good conscience and a sincere faith.

TEACH OTHERS TO AVOID USELESS THEOLOGICAL SPECULATIONS: INSTEAD FOCUS ON ORDERING THEIR LIVES TO ACCOMPLISH GOD’S MISSION

Just as I urged that you would instruct certain people not to teach strange doctrines, nor to pay attention to myths and endless genealogies, which give rise to useless speculation rather than advance the plan of God, which is by faith, so I urge you now... (I Tim 1:3-4).

Paul comes down hard on theological mind games. The false teachers were not only deviating from the true gospel taught by Paul, they were adding things referred to as myths and endless genealogies. The Greeks loved argument for the sake of argument and intellectual centers in Rome were always looking for the latest teaching. These kinds of man-made theological games, says Paul are useless speculation, which is in sharp contrast to teaching that advances the plan of God, which is of faith. Paul uses a fascinating word for advance the plan, also translated stewardship, (OIKONOMOUS), from which we get economy. It is usually used for household management, a cognate from OIKOS—house + NEMO—to arrange. Useless speculation is the opposite of teaching that empowers stewardship, i.e. ordering our world to accomplish Christ kingdom agenda in every sphere.

Paul’s use of OIKONOMOUS points to his insistence that God’s true Word be applied in Christian’s everyday lives. Just as James calls believers to be doers of the Word and not hearers only, Paul expects us to manage our outward lives in such a way that we implement biblical teaching, i.e. shape our lives by it. Paul would have agreed with Gordon MacDonald, author of Ordering Your Private World, who astutely observed, “If my private world is in order, it will be because I am convinced that the inner world of the spiritual MUST GOVERN the outer world of activity.” So, our private, inner world requires ordering, so that it can shape the outer world of activity. “Good teaching,” says Paul, "must help Christians implement their faith plan for seeking first the kingdom in all their lives, living as transformed creatures."

THE AIM OF YOUR CHARGE IS LOVE (1 Timothy 1:5)

Think of how this stated AIM of spiritual leadership refutes the arguments of those who are brainwashed into thinking that biblical male leadership is oppressive. It just ain’t so. Anyone who looks into God’s gender design objectively, who casts off the dirty oppressor/oppressed lens of critical theory, will see that the consistent call throughout the Bible is for men to love those under their care by devoting themselves to whatever it takes for them to thrive, to die to themselves so those under their care flourish. Consider:

Adam is placed in the garden to cultivate it (AVAD) and to protect it (SHAMAR). His wife, Eve, and their children are in the garden. AVAD means to supply whatever his wife and children (and those he serves in business) need to flourish. He sweats. He dies to himself so that they may reach their full potential. Adam not only is to sacrifice his labor to care for them, his commission is to protect them spiritually, emotionally, and physically. If necessary, he dies to protect them. This vocation of Adam is the definition of AGAPE, self-giving LOVE. It is giving of yourself sacrificially to meet the needs of another.

Jesus, the Second Adam, models the manhood that Adam was to fulfill. He came to earth to free us from the tyranny of sin that was destroying us, giving his life in love so that we might be set free from the penalty, power, and presence of the spiritual cancer, sin. He pours out the Holy Spirit who sows in us the seed of godliness, who cultivates new life on the path of righteousness to which Jesus calls us. And Jesus fulfills the role of protecting us (SHAMAR). He defeated Satan at the cross, ascended to the Father and poured out the spiritual gifts and the weapons of warfare. Jesus interceded for us in John 17 to be kept from the evil one an, in fact, he and the Holy Spirit intercede for us every day. Jeus the head of his bride perfectly LOVES her.

Timothy, likewise, is called to be a leader, in his case of the church. Where does Paul start with his charge? The aim of our charge is love that issues from a pure heart and a good conscience and a sincere faith. The purpose of male leadership of the home and church given in the creation design and for his covenant people is crystal clear; The aim of our charge is love. Our spiritual leadership, like that of Adam and Jesus was given for the purpose of loving those under our care. And Christian men have been doing so for two thousand years. Nancy Pearcey, in her book, The Toxic War on Masculinity, reveals objective data that prove that the most loving, caring husbands of any subgroup in America today, are devout men who hold the biblical view that they should lead their homes. She writes,

“Many people assume that the most theologically conservative men are patriarchal and domineering. But sociological studies have refuted that negative stereotype. Compared to secular men, devout Christian family men who attend church regularly are more loving to their wives and more emotionally engaged with their children than any other group in America. They are the least likely to divorce and astonishingly they have the lowest level of domestic abuse and violence.”

THE LOVE YOU NEED TO GIVE ARISES FROM THREE WELLSPRINGS

The aim of our charge is love that issues from a pure heart and a good conscience and a sincere faith (I Tim 1:5). Every Christian man I know wants to love well his wife and kids. But we often don’t. How can we increase our capacity to love? Paul tells us that the very AGAPE, self-sacrificing love we need arises from 3 sources.

A. A pure heart. The word heart (KARDIA) refers metaphorically to the inner place where our motives, desires, and loves reside. These are the same two words used in Jesus’ 6th beatitude, Blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see God. Pure (KATHAROS) is also translated clean. It means free from impure admixture, unmixed. Sexual purity means directing my sexual appetite singly towards my wife, unmixed with fantasies involving other women. However, it is incorrect to understand the call to a pure heart as only, or primarily the call to sexual purity. Here are 2 observations about having a pure heart:

1. A pure heart is governed by pure MOTIVES--where concern for the loved one TAKES PRIORITY over love for oneself. Greater love has no one than this that he lay down his life for his friend. A pure heart is selflessness combined with an understanding of, and commitment to another’s needs. God so loved the world that he gave up what was most precious to him—his Son—to meet our great need for salvation. Self-love is normal and instinctive. We ought to be concerned about our own needs, take responsibility for meeting them ourselves, as adults should, and take those we can’t meet to God. But a pure heart prioritizes the other’s needs over our own. Tim Keller explains how this view of the heart shaped Augustine. In fact, he linked moral virtue to putting concern for another a priority over love for the self.

“Courage is loving your neighbor’s well-being more than your own safety. Honesty is loving your neighbor’s interests more than your own, even when the truth will put you at a disadvantage. Look at injustice. You may say that you believe in social equality and justice and think that you do, but if you make business decisions that exploit others, it is because at the heart level, you love your own prosperity more than your neighbor’s.” (Making Sense of God, Tim Keller).

A pure heart is unselfish to the core, always putting others ahead of ourselves. That is why it is so tough, why Jesus said that to follow him we must deny ourselves and take up our cross to follow him. Such denial, though temporarily painful, is very satisfying. We find pleasure in giving love. But only Christ can empower us to keep giving and giving, when we receive nothing or even pain in return.

2. A pure heart orders all of its loves correctly. Impure hearts are also those whose loves are not ordered properly. Keller continues to explain,

“Augustine also observed that the heart’s loves have an order to them, and that we often love less important things more and the more important things less. Therefore, the disorder and unhappiness of our lives is caused by the disorder of our loves. How does this work? There is nothing wrong with loving your work, but if you love it more than your family, your loves are out of order and you may ruin your family. Or if you love making money more than you love justice, then you will exploit your employees.”

Of course, the ultimate disordered love, and the ultimate source of our discontent is the failure to love first things first, a failure to love God supremely. Purity of heart begins with making God our first love, which is why the greatest commandment is to love the Lord with all of our heart, mind, soul, and strength. A pure heart is an undivided heart. Supreme allegiance is given to our first love. Augustine rightly believed that human beings are created for a degree of delight and fulfillment that nothing in creation can produce. His famous words to God from the beginning of his Confessions ring true, You stir man to take pleasure in praising you, because you have made us for yourself and our heart is restless until it finds it’s rest in you. Humans harm themselves when we love anything more than God.

“If you love your children more than you love God, you will essentially rest your need for significance and security in them. You will need too much for them to succeed, be happy, and love you. That will either drive them away or crush them under the weight of your expectations because they will be the ultimate source of your happiness, and no human being can measure up to that. If you love your spouse or romantic partner more than God, the same things occur. If you love your work and career more than God, you will necessarily also love them more than your family, your community and your own health, and so that will lead to physical and relational breakdown and often…to social injustice. If you love anything more than God, you harm the object of your love, you harm yourself, you harm the world around you, and you end up deeply dissatisfied and discontent” (Ibid).

So, the first wellspring from which AGAPE love flows is a pure, unselfish heart where our loves are properly ordered. The second wellspring is:

B. A good conscience. The Greek word for conscience (SUNEIDESIS) comes from the word knowing and with. Thus, we carry with us an all-seeing part of us called our conscience. Here are two reasons why a good, or clear conscience is a wellspring for genuine love:

1. True love never disregards the voice of conscience. Love does not rejoice at wrongdoing but rejoices with the truth. (1 Cor 13:6). Agreeing to have sex before marriage because your fiancée wants to is NOT genuine love. It is never worth violating your conscience to obtain a benefit for another. Satan tempted Jesus to hit his knee once, a one-second act of bowing to Satan and Satan would let Jesus spread his benevolent rule over the earth (or so he said). True love does not violate what our conscience tells us is untrue or morally wrong out of sympathy for another. Rosaria Butterfield, in her book, The Five Lies of Our Anti-Christian Age, points to the way that in our culture empathy has mistakenly been elevated to the highest form of love. She observes, “Empathy means standing in someone else’s shoes. In a world where kindness is the most important virtue, empathy is the highest manifestation of this love.” But empathizing is NOT the highest form of love. If you see a person drowning, you can empathize with the drowning victim all day; but love pulls the victim out of the water. Similarly, when your daughter comes home from college claiming that she is a male in a woman’s body, the LGBTQ+ propaganda says your highest moral virtue is empathy, trying to understand how she feels and not making her FEEL WORSE. But love recognizes the truth: something is terribly wrong with your daughter.

2. A good conscience is vital because a guilty conscience causes us to hide, as Adam and Eve did, when they sinned. Meaningful relationships require transparency. When my conscience tells me I have sinned against God, I need to seek his forgiveness, be restored, and continue to fill my soul with his unconditional love, the only source for the love I need to pour into others. But a good conscience is not only one that keeps short accounts with God (confessing my sins quickly and getting back in the fight) but keeps short accounts with humans we offend, also. If you are offering your gift at the altar, and there remember that your brother has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar and go. First be reconciled to your brother, and then come and offer your gift. (Matt 5:23-24).

C. A sincere faith. A hypocritical faith is one that feigns faith to enjoy the benefits of the faith community. In contrast, Paul says real faith is a wellspring from which AGAPE love flows. Real faith is trusting God. It is taking God at his Word, knowing his promises can be 100% trusted. Why are sincere faith and selfless love so closely interconnected? Because I will not be free to fully focus on devoting myself to another’s needs when I am concerned about my own. When I trust God’s promise, My God will supply every need of yours according to his riches in glory in Christ Jesus (Phil 4:19) I can give generously to alleviate a need or display my love for another. I can find freedom from needing to impress others when I am confident of 1 Pet 5:6. Humble yourselves, therefore, under the mighty hand of God so that at the proper time he may exalt you. When facing complex decisions that can preoccupy me, I can relax and focus on the needs of others when I am certain of James 1:5. If any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask God, who gives generously to all without reproach, and it will be given him. When I am consumed with anxiety, I can keep from overburdening my loved ones when I know God’s promise, You can throw the whole weight of your anxieties upon him, for you are his personal concern (I Pet 5:7). When my frailties and the tasks in front of me overwhelm me, I can find inner power to still reach out to others with love when I rely on God’s promise to Paul, He said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me (2 Cor 12:9). When I give in again to sin, am down on myself, feel disrespected at home, and unworthy of all I have been given, I recover strength in the promise that shaped Paul’s life, I have become absolutely convinced that neither death nor life, neither messenger of Heaven nor monarch of earth, neither what happens today nor what may happen tomorrow, neither a power from on high nor a power from below, nor anything else in God’s whole world has any power to separate us from the love of God in Jesus Christ our Lord! (Rom 8:38-39).

The calling of all Christiann men to lead our homes and churches is God’s good, perfect design; there is nothing about the prescribed leadership of men that even hints at oppression. To the contrary, it is a design rooted in the calling to love sacrificially and in the wisdom to know the three sources from which such self-giving love flows.

For Further Prayerful Thought:

In your own words why does sacrificial love issue from a pure heart?
In your own words why does sacrificial love issue from a clean conscience?
In your own words why does sacrificial love issue from a sincere faith?

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Captured by the Bible’s Countercultural View of Manhood

On 02 May, 2024 By Gary Yagel

As we begin a new May series, Portrait of Effective Spiritual Leadership, it might be asked, “With all that is going on right now in the world, the anti-Semitic demonstrations across America’s college campuses, a catch and release approach to the drug cartels on our southern border bringing sex trafficking, fentanyl, and crime to our nation, the new Title IX rules forcing public schools to allow trans-identifying males to compete in women’s sports and use women’s bathrooms—and you want to talk about Christian men leading their homes? Yes. And the reason I do is that the same false worldview corrupting our college campuses, current border policy, and Dept of Education’s radical gender ideology is corrupting many Christian men’s understanding of their biblical responsibility as godly men. Paul said, “Don’t let the world around you squeeze you into its own mold (Rom 12:2). This episode considers the impact that a worldview called critical theory is having in our culture, supplanting a biblical worldview at many, many points. My hope is by the end of the episode, all of us will be able to detect how the assumptions of critical theory have gotten in the way of grasping the glory of God’s perfect design of womanhood and manhood.

In Paul’s great theological treatise, his letter to the Romans, he devoted eleven chapters to explaining the glory of the gospel. Chapter 12:1 is then the hinge verse leading to Paul’s teaching on application. The first principle he mentions for everyday living is that it is the response to God’s mercy of offering ourselves every day to him as a living sacrifice. This episode is about the very next verse—the first step in offering ourselves to God: Do not be conformed to this world. To fully obey this command, we need to understand how the dominant, ungodly ideology of our day, critical theory is shaping our culture’s thinking in general, and specifically see how it undermines our calling to godly manhood. So, let’s get a quick overview of this ideology, see how it underlies almost every troublesome direction our culture is headed, and see how profoundly it interferes with our pursuit of godly manhood.

WHAT IS CRITICAL THEORY?

Critical theory is a way that some in our culture try to explain and confront power structures. To understand critical theory, we need to understand its two primary claims. 1) First, everyone can be divided into two groups—those who HAVE POWER and those who DON’T. 2) Those who HAVE POWER always OPPRESS those who DON’T. How do we know who the oppressed and who the oppressors are? According to critical theory the categories of oppressed and oppressor are based on your group identity. Membership in categories of race, gender, religion, immigration status, income, sexual orientation, and gender identity determine whether we are oppressed or one of the oppressors. Also, the more oppressed one is, the more his oppressed status excuses looting, vandalism, rape and murder.

Critical theory traces back to Karl Marx’s view of history as class conflict. It parallels his view of animosity between the oppressed proletariat (workers) and the oppressor bourgeoisie (business owners). Marx defined capitalism as the exploitation of the masses. His class warfare paradigm has been used repeatedly to justify the bloody, violent murder of the establishment by Marxists. Jay Richards, in his book, Money, Greed, and God, documents the way this supposedly moral justification for overthrowing “oppressors” led to the slaughter of over a 100 million farmers, business owners and their families in the 20th century, including 65 million Chinese by Mao Zedong, 20 million by Lenin and Stalin, 2 million by the Khmer rouge in Cambodia, and another million by Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam.

Though Karl Marx died in 1888, one of Marx’s followers, Antonio Gramsci, (writing in the 1920’s and 30’s) provided an explanation for why Marxism never spread to Western culture. His answer was the cultural power and dominance of the oppressor class, not just its economic dominance as Marx had argued. Gramsci called this cultural power of the established oppressors cultural hegemony. The word hegemony is normally used of nations that exert dominance, authority, or influence over other nations. But Gramsci applied this term, hegemony, to the capitalist establishment who, he argued, unjustly gained cultural power and dominance, and has victimized everyone else. Gramsci defined cultural hegemony from Marx’s class warfare perspective, as: domination maintained through cultural or ideological means, usually through social institutions, which allow those in power to strongly influence the rest of society (Voddie Bauchem, Lecture: Cultural Marxism). The cultural hegemony in our society is supposedly committed by all white, male, heterosexual, cisgender, able-bodied, born in the USA, non-poor. EVERYONE who IS that is part of the PRIVILEGED OPPRESSIVE CLASS and thus corresponds to Marx’s hated bourgeoisie. Everybody who IS NOT that (which corresponds to Marx’s proletariat) is a victim of the cultural hegemony established by THE PRIVILEGED CLASS, and ought to be at war with them.

Gramsci’s critical theory was furthered by a group of German philosophers in the 1930’s known as the Frankfurt School. In 1935, these cultural Marxists moved to Columbia University in New York City. Their goal has been to overturn the cultural hegemony, (which, by the way, includes the influence of Christianity). In my view, other than perhaps humanism, no worldview has done more to unmoor our culture from Biblical values than critical theory.

CRITICAL THEORY AND TODAY’S NEWS

Anti-Semitic Hatred: After the October 7th rape of girls, beheading of children, and slaughter of 1200 Jewish civilians—the greatest attempt at genocide of Jews since the holocaust—how could any sane person support Hamas? Yet, anti-Semitic demonstrations supporting Hamas’ call for genocide of the Jews are being encouraged by the same college administrations that warn students they will be expelled for merely speaking a word that questions transgenderism. Students mindlessly claim that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinians when the exact opposite is the case; the Palestinian population grew under the oversight of Israel’s government. Hamas hides weapons beneath nurseries in schools and hospitals, and uses their own people as human shields, a war crime. Yet members of Congress and protestors blame Israel? That is ludicrous. How can it happen? Because according to critical theory Jews are the oppressor class, Palestinians are the oppressed class—and there are no moral constraints on the oppressed class.

Catch and Release Policy at Our Southern Border. The horrific result of the administration’s refusal to enforce the Southern border is immeasurable suffering through sex trafficking, the invasion of our teen culture by fentanyl, which is the leading cause of death of those under thirty, and infiltration of rapists, thieves, and murders across our border every day. Open border advocates don’t usually try to justify what is happening: they try to hide it. How can this be happening? Because according to critical theory, America is the rich oppressor nation. Those coming across the border are all the oppressed class. If you favor border security you are labeled a selfish nationalist, part of the capitalist, oppressor establishment that wants to hoard our wealth instead of sharing it with oppressed immigrants.

State level prolife initiatives are failing. Since abortion law has been returned to the states, legislation to protect life which has been taken directly to the public for a vote has lost. Why? These laws threaten the reproductive and healthcare rights of women. What about the rights of the unborn child? They don’t matter. Why? Because according to critical theory babies are NOT the oppressed class, women are. And pro-lifers are the oppressor class. Since women are the oppressed class their taking of an innocent human life doesn’t matter.

Dept. of Ed Revised Title IX Guidelines. Title IX of the 1972 Education Amendments act stipulates that. No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance. It is hard to overstate the beneficial impact of this law on women’s athletics over the last fifty years, particularly at the collegiate level. But, the recent Title IX rules were amended to force public schools to allow trans-identifying males to compete in women’s sports and use women’s bathrooms. Science, medicine, and 4000 years of human history prove that transgenderism is a delusion. How could a whole culture ignore common sense—that there are two genders? Because critical theory makes transgender people the oppressed and cisgender people the oppressors.

GOD’S PERFECT DESIGN OF TWO GLORIOUS GENDERS

Have you ever wondered why women, who outnumber males in the world, are considered a minority? Because women are not seen as part of the cultural hegemony. The cultural hegemony in US culture is based on unjust patriarchy. I want to suggest that since the 1970’s rise of feminism, the cultural lens of nearly all Westerners towards God’s design of the genders has been corrupted. We now unconsciously view God’s glorious creation design with mud on our lenses—the mud of seeing oppression and oppressor when it is NOT THERE. I am certain that I, myself have been corrupted by critical theory, because I cringe at even reading Ephesians 5:22-23 in front of women. Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife even as Christ is the head of the church. Why should I feel apologetic about God’s glorious marriage design? Am I apologetic about a football team needing players and a coach? Is it unjust for some people to be just employees but others to be owners who have the final say? Should I apologize about a justice system that has some people in the role of judge, and others subject to his or her decisions? I can only conclude that the polluted oppressor/oppressed paradigm in the cultural water where I swim has gotten into my eyes making it hard to see. So, let’s try to clean the lens with a fresh view of biblical manhood. But before doing so we need an attitude check.

The rise of feminism in the seventies and the retreat from a biblical view of womanhood since then can certainly be attributed in part to bad male actors who have seriously and consistently harmed women. Toxic masculinity is real. And Christians have been slow to deal with the way “headship” has been twisted into an excuse for abuse. Our biblical worldview not only begins with the dignity of every woman; it is closely followed by the fall—the powerful will oppress the weaker. Women have been oppressed by males almost universally. Furthermore, we must recognize that many women are raw inside over this topic. Perhaps it is a raw subject because critical theory and feminism have enflamed it. Nevertheless, it is a tender subject that easily provokes an emotional reaction. We must wisely and graciously seek to guide those infected by critical theory into spiritual health.

GENESIS IS THE STARTING POINT

Adam is made for the ground. The creation of Adam begins with an explanation of why he was needed. When…there was no man to work the ground then the Lord God formed the man (Gen 2:5-6).
Adam is given a name that means ground (Gen 2:7). Here the word for the man is ADAM and the word for ground is ADAMAH.
Adam is made from the ground (Gen 2:7).
Adam’s creation calling is to work the ground (Gen 2:9-15).
When Adam sins, what is cursed is the ground (Gen 3:17).

In a perfect parallel structure, God explains Eve’s creation:

Eve is made for the man (Gen 2: 18,20). The creation of Eve begins with an explanation of why she was needed, Then the Lord God said, “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him.” The next verses summarize a search through creation for such a helper with ended with the words, But for Adam there was not found a helper fit for him.
Eve is given a name that means out of the man (Gen 2:23). The word for male is ISH the word for woman is ISHAH.
Eve is made from the man (Gen 2:21-22).
Eve’s creation calling is to assist the man (Gen 2:18, 20).
When Eve sins, what is cursed is her relationship with the man & his kids.

This portrayal of designed gender differences by a holy God has no stains of evil oppression written upon it. The truth that role distinctions do NOT INFER INEQUALITY is written into God’s eternal Triune nature. It is the stain of critical theory’s oppressor/oppressed paradigm that makes humans question this truth.

NT WORLDVIEW OF MANHOOD

A. The NT clearly reinforces and builds upon the creation role distinctions revealed in Genesis 1 and 2.

Peter points to Sarah’s respect for Abraham’s leadership role as the example for NT women to follow: For this is how the holy women who hoped in God used to adorn themselves, by submitting to their own husbands, as Sarah obeyed Abraham and called him lord. (1 Pt 3:5-6).
Paul expands upon the creation design of male and female to complete one another. Such union for married Christians, argues Paul, is a picture of Christ and the church. Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife even as Christ is the head of the church, his body, and is himself its Savior. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit in everything to their husbands. Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her (Eph 5:22-25).

B. Consistent with creation, and God’s design for marriage, the NT clearly teaches that the church’s leadership offices of elder and teacher were to be filled by men.

Speaking with Apostolic authority about ordering worship, Paul wrote, I do not permit a woman to teach or to exercise authority over a man; rather, she is to remain quiet (I Tim 2:12). The teaching here is the authoritative teaching done by pastors from the pulpit. Although in Gal 3:28 Paul insists that women are full members of the Body of Christ, he sees no contradiction in God assigning the leadership role in the church to qualified men.
An overseer must be above reproach, the husband of one wife (I Tim 3:2). Paul did not say or the wife of one husband, even though the church had a strong group of Christ-following women, including Mary the mother of Jesus.
The linguistic structure defining the requirements of those called to serve the church in the office of deacon is less clear. This legitimate uncertainty about female deaconesses is a good caution. Although Scripture clearly teaches that the authoritative office of teaching and leading is to be filled by men, the spiritual gifts of serving (DIKONINIAN), from which the word deacon comes, teaching (DIDASKALIA) in many situations, and leading (PROISTEMENOS) in Romans 12:7-8 don’t appear to be limited to men.

C. Next week we will take a deeper dive into Paul’s character requirements in 1 Timothy 3 for effective spiritual leadership; but let’s close with just one: An overseer must MANAGE HIS OWN HOUSEHOLD WELL, with all dignity keeping his children submissive, for if someone does not know how to manage his own household, how will he care for God's church? (I Tim 3:4-5). The Greek word translated manage is the word for lead (PROISTEMI), literally to stand (HISTEMI before (PROS). Here is the clearest NT call to be the spiritual leaders of our homes. Notice that it requires us to be out in front of our troops, our families (if God has blessed us with one). As leaders we are not required to be perfect; but we do need to be out in front of our families, modeling allegiance to our Commander in Chief.

In today’s world, leading our homes well requires heading into the fierce cultural headwinds of critical theory. It means teaching our loved ones to recognize it. It means learning to wisely speak to refute its influence. Above all, it means NOT doubting the goodness of God’s gender design that calls you to lead your home. There are many forces arrayed against us—our fallen culture, our own hearts, our wife’s heart on her bad days, even churches that have forsaken Scripture and are calling men taking leadership in their homes and churches oppressive patriarchy.

I know that I speak to an audience that wants application—we will cover that more next week. This week there is only on:. Take a stand against critical theory’s anti-God attack. Ultimately the decision to take a stand for Biblical truth is about loyalty to Jesus. I want to repeat what Martin Luther, a GIANT in standing against fierce cultural headwinds, said. “If I profess with the loudest voice and clearest exposition every portion of the truth of God except precisely that little point which the world and the devil are attacking at that moment, I am not being faithful to Christ…Where the battle rages, there the loyalty of the soldier is proved” (cited by Chuck Colson, Who Speaks for God).

For Further Prayerful Thought:

As you think of the cultural examples of critical theory’s oppressor/oppressed lens shaping cultural thinking, which examples stood out most to you? What other examples can you think of?
Although we don’t know why God’s Word tells the stories of Adam and Eve’s creation in a very structured intentionally parallel way but postulate some reasons God might have done that.
Summarize the evidence from Scripture that it is God who intends his household, the church to be led by men who are also assigned to lead their homes, not oppressive biblical patriarchy.

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Jesus’ Promise of Escape from the Driven Lifestyle

On 28 April, 2024 By Gary Yagel

As we have put Covid 19 in the rearview mirror, it seems that our society has returned to a pace of life and activity that creates constant stress. The costs of such stress are astronomical, disintegration of marriage relationships, the fracturing of families, and the increasingly documented breakdown of our health. Beneath this stress is often the unrelenting pressure of having to perform. Many of us, for numerous developmental, psychological, and even spiritual reasons, are living a life that feels more driven than called, more stressful than restful. Behind this toilsome existence may be the subtle need to achieve to feel worthwhile because we are gratified only by accomplishment. Gordon MacDonald observes,

"Somewhere in the process of maturation, a person discovers that the only way he can feel good about himself and his world is to accumulate accomplishments. This discovery may be the result of formative influences. I was standing at the entrance to the arena where my granddaughter plays indoor soccer. A small boy, no older than nine, came out the door and spied his father. 'I scored a goal, Dad,' he said with excitement. 'Yeah,' his father replied, 'but you missed the chance for two others.' A psychology of achievement sometimes captures the heart in circumstances like that" (Ordering Your Private World).

Jesus addressed this relentless internal pressure to have to achieve, and the resulting internal exhaustion we experience when he said, Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light (Mt 11:28-30). This episode examines Jesus’ only self-portrait in Scripture—that he is meek and lowly of heart, and why those qualities make taking on his yoke the pathway to REST.

WHO ARE THOSE WHO NEED THE REST JESUS OFFERS?

From the text we know that it is 1) those who labor: (KOPIAO). This Greek word has two connotations, growing weary, and toiling. In Luke 5:5, it is used for Peter and his fishing partners who were exhausted from toiling all night to catch fish but caught nothing. 2) It is those who are heavy laden: (PHORTION). This word means “something carried.” It indicates that at some time in the past a load, i.e. an external burden was placed on this person. These words and the context enable us to identify five categories of those who need Jesus’ rest.

A. Those needing rest from having to depend upon themselves. It is important to see the context of this invitation of Jesus to come to him. In verses 20-24, Jesus denounces the hard-heartedness of the cities, Chorazin, Bethsaida, and Capernaum where he had done most of his miracles. Jesus then says, “I thank you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that you have hidden these things from the wise and understanding and REVEALED THEM TO LITTLE CHILDREN.” Little children know they are utterly helpless; they cannot depend upon themselves. It is those who have a child-like need to trust in Jesus not the proud, resistant, self-reliant who will receive Jesus’ invitation to come to him. As the ESV Study Bible says, “All you who labor and are heavy laden refers, in the wider application to Jesus providing ‘rest for your souls’, meaning eternal rest for all who seek forgiveness of their sins and freedom from the crushing legalistic burden and guilt of trying to earn salvation by good works.”

The hard-hearted who refuse to repent and come to Jesus, refuse to be yoked with him. They refuse to give up their independence. The irony is that those who refuse to acknowledge their need for a savior, trusting themselves, instead, to merit eternity in heaven must carry a horrible psychological burden—not knowing if their good works are good enough! Their guilty conscience demands that they balance their guilt with righteousness, so the law becomes a taskmaster, driving them, pressuring them to perform, or in some cases hardening their hearts further as they suppress God’s truth. The only path to rest for the soul, is to acknowledge that we can never make ourselves holy enough to deserve to be in God’s holy presence, placing our trust in Christ’s atoning work on our behalf causing God to decare us justified in his sight. Only then, can the soul find escape from the tyranny of worrying, “Have I been good enough, to earn my way to heaven?” Only Christ’s sufficiency to atone for my sins WILL ALLOW MY SOUL TO FIND REST.

B. Those needing rest from having to perform to be loved. Could there be any pressure more horrible than believing that you must perform well, or you will not be loved? Is there any greater cause for insecurity than believing you must prove you are loveable to be loved? Conversely, is there any form of REST more foundational to human well-being than knowing that Jesus loves me unconditionally? Jesus’ call “Come to me all who labor and are heavy laden” reflects the same, wide-open arms of the prodigal son’s father. If you make performing well your God, that God will abandon you when you mess up. If success is your God that God will throw you away when you fail. If respect from others is your God, that God will turn its back on you the moment you do something shameful. The tyranny of having to perform to be loved haunts millions of people and drives them into isolation when they fail. One wise mother was aware of this aspect of human nature as she tracked down her teen daughter who had run away from home and, most likely, messed up big time.

"Maria knew exactly what her fifteen-year-old daughter, Christiana, would have to do for a living if she ever ran away from her village to the city. That is why her heart broke when she awoke one morning to find her daughter’s bed empty. Maria knew immediately where her daughter had gone and what she must do to find her. She threw some clothes in a bag, gathered all her money, and bought a bus ticket for Rio de Janeiro. She stopped by the drugstore to take as many pictures of herself as she could afford. Maria visited every hotel, nightclub, or bar where prostitutes hung out. At each place she left her picture—taped on a bathroom mirror, tacked to a hotel bulletin board, fastened to a corner phone booth. On the back of each photo she wrote a note. But before long, Maria was out of photos and money. So, broken-hearted, she returned home."

"A few weeks later, young Christiana descended the hotel stairs. Her young face was tired. Her big brown eyes no longer danced with the laughter of youth but spoke of pain and fear. Her dream had become a nightmare. She longed to trade these countless beds for the secure pallet of her bedroom at home. But the little village was in too many ways too far away. As she reached the bottom of the stairs, her eyes noticed a familiar face. She looked again and there on the lobby mirror was a small picture of her mother. Christiana’s eyes blurred with tears as she crossed the room and removed the small photo. Written on the back was this compelling invitation: “Whatever you have done, whatever you have become, it doesn’t matter. Please come home.” She did. (Max Lucado, No Wonder They Call Him Savior)

When we throw his yoke off yielding to sin, his invitation remains, "Come home." Always.

C. Those needing rest from having to perform to feel valuable. To every Jewish listener listening to Jesus’ invitation, the word, yoke meant one thing: the Law. The Mishnah says, He that takes upon himself the yoke of the law, from him shall be taken the yoke of worldly care. But he that throws off the yoke of the law, upon him shall be laid the yoke of worldly care (Michael Card, Matthew). Jesus is here contrasting the toilsome burden of being yoked to the law, with the freedom of being yoked to him. The scribes and Pharisees made keeping the law their idol, the God in whom they found their worth. In so doing they heaped 613 burdensome commands on the laity. From Matthew 23:

They tie up heavy burdens, hard to bear, and lay them on people's shoulders, but they themselves are not willing to move them with their finger. They do all their deeds to be seen by others. For they make their phylacteries broad and their fringes long, and they love the place of honor at feasts and the best seats in the synagogues and greetings in the marketplaces and being called rabbi by others. Whoever exalts himself will be humbled, and whoever humbles himself will be exalted (vs 4-7).

Jesus’ words reveal that the scribe and Pharisees sought to find their personal value in their commitment to the Law and their extensive applications of it. Theirs was the epitome of the driven, performance pressured life. What is worse, that performance was only outward, doing their deeds to be seen by others. They sought the seats and titles of honor, which they claimed for devoting themselves to the burden of keeping their man-made applications of God’s Law. In sharp contrast is being yoked to Jesus, the one who humbled himself. He will lead us into the confident path of true righteousness, not the insecure path of legalism driven by the need to prove we are better than others. It replaces performance pressure to prove our value with REST, because we already know how valuable we are: he redeemed us by the prescious blood of Christ shed for our sins.

D. Those needing rest from having to live up to other’s expectations. The word that Jesus uses for “heavy-laden” or “burdened” is PHORTION. The verb means that at some time in the past a load, an external burden, was placed on this person. We all live under the burden of others’ expectations for us. The field of men’s ministry is filled with the stories of men being driven all through life by the need to live up to their father’s expectations because they never felt that they did. Former NFL linebacker, Dave Simmons, explains how growing up under the tyranny of an impatient father with unreasonable expectations led to a driven life with enormous, unhealthy pressure to perform.

"To this day, I can’t capture the feeling of a job well done. I constantly focus on my mistakes and am negative toward all that I do. I set goals too high and fail. I sabotage things and fail. I resent and rebel against authority and I fail. I go to ridiculous lengths to reach perfection in order to get compliments and recognition for my work. But then I can’t accept appreciation and feel like a failure. Even though all the facts say I am successful, my emotions convince me that I am a failure."(Cited from Great Dads Seminar.)

The answer to the powerful voices that drive us to be people pleasers is the REST of Jesus. Abiding in his love keeps re-filling our tanks, not eliminating our need for human love but weakening its ability to drive our behavior, oppressing us with the need to perform a certain way to be liked.

E. Those needing rest from having to prove we can handle life on our own. Let’s be clear. We ought to be men who handle our life well, who exercise dominion over our heart loyalties, our hear attitudes and over every sphere of life where we have influence. God calls us to be strong men who take charge of our lives, not passive men who confuse being a servant with non-leadership. In fact, the biblical writers, David, Paul, and John appealed to men to be strong. But being strong men who step up and lead our homes, families, and churches does not require OUR strength but JESUS’ strength. Our personality may not make us a take-charge person. But regardless of personality, all men are assigned the calling to exercise dominion in our lives. The strength to do so, however, comes from Christ. The older I get, the more dumbfounded I am by Jesus’ unwavering refusal to shame me for my weakness, not matter what it is. Even when it comes to things that normal men can do on their own, but I can’t, I never sense a reluctance of Jesus to give me his strength. Perhaps that is the whole point to this text—being yoked together with Jesus whose strength, then, becomes mine.

CALL TO ACTION: TAKE MY YOKE UPON YOU, AND LEARN FROM ME

This is a call to obedient discipleship. The yoke on the animal enables its owner to direct it. Christianity without a call to seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness is not Christianity at all. The yoke was a wooden frame joining two animals, usually oxen. Being joined with Christ means joining him in the direction he is going. What is that direction? He is spreading his kingdom agenda of restoration of men’s broken relationship with God, broken relationships with each other, internal brokenness, and brokenness in our relationship with creation. Notice that with this call to take up his yoke, Jesus says “learn from me.” The word for learn is MANTHANO akin to the word MATHETES, disciple. As his disciples we are yoked with him, learning how to follow him, our master.

FOUR REASONS TO OBEY THIS CALL

A. He is gentle. The Greek word is PRAUS, meek. Meekness never means weakness. A weak ox would not be harnessed to do the farmer’s work! Meekness is used here as the opposite of being yoked to the brutal taskmaster, the Law—the harsh unrelenting demands of justice through punishment for our sin. Jesus would die to turn away God’s holy, just wrath, which required that all evil be punished. The technical term is propitiation. The truth is that all of God’s wrath for your sins, and all of his wrath for my sins has already been poured out. There is none left for us. It was fully spent on Jesus. Unlike being yoked to the accusing, disquieting voice of the law, we are yoked to the Great High Priest, who has already shed his blood for us. And now, We do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin. Let us then with confidence draw near to the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need. Counselors, Henry Cloud and John Townsend observe, “When we finally understand that God isn’t mad at us anymore, we become free to concentrate on love and growth instead of trying to appease him. (How People Grow).

B. He is lowly in heart. This word lowly isoften translated humble in the NT. Dane Ortland, in his book, Gentle and Lowly explains:

Paul uses this word when he tells us not to be haughty, but associate with the “lowly” (Rom 12:16), referring to the socially unimpressive, those who are not the life of the party but rather cause the host to cringe when they show up. The point in saying that Jesus is lowly is that he is accessible. For all his resplendent glory and dazzling holiness, his supreme uniqueness and otherness, no one in human history has ever been more approachable than Jesus Christ. No prerequisites. No hoops to jump through…. The minimum bar to be enfolded into the arms of Jesus is simply: open yourself up to him. It is all he needs.

C. His yoke is easy. This Greek word CHRESTOS is rendered pleasant by some translations. It is also the Greek word for kindness. Kindness is a virtue rooted in attentiveness to another’s situation, which leads to giving appropriate care. Easy could be translated, fit for use, the root word being CHRAOMAI to use. When used to describe a yoke, CHRESTOS meant, well fitting. In Palestine ox-yokes were made of wood; the ox was brought, and the measurements were taken. The yoke was then roughed out, and the ox was brought back to have the yoke tried on. The yoke was carefully adjusted so that it would fit well and not irritate the neck of the patient beast. Jesus’ yoke for us is tailor made. He knows us. He has good works he created us to accomplish from before creation. He will not allow us to be tempted or tested beyond our ability to endure.

D. His yoke is light. Being yoked with Jesus does still take us onto the tough, narrow path of self-denial so that right loyalties and attitudes prevail in our hearts, followed by right actions. But, unlike the unbeliever, whose conscience oppresses him to balance his sins by good enough deeds to justify him, or the moralistic Christian, who still believes he must “behave” or God will love him less, those yoked to Jesus experience REST. Our burden is light for at least three reasons. First, Jesus’ path is the very path of righteousness and life, the way he designed us to live. Instead of defying his law, running our feet against the grain of the universe that Jesus designed thereby getting feet full of splinters, we discover that Jesus’ path is the pleasant way of wisdom (Prove 3:17). Second, Jesus’ yoke is light because when he ascended to the Father's right hand, he poured out the Holy Spirit. He fulfilled the prophecy from Jeremiah 31:33 For this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, declares the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts. The Holy Spirit is at work in our hearts changing our “wants” so that we desire his holiness. Bryan Chapel writes, “Spiritual change is more a matter of what our hearts love than of what our hands do.” (Holiness by Grace). Third, Jesus’ yoke is light because being yoked to Jesus means being yoked to his power, especially when the pull is tough. Paul understood what it meant to be yoked together with such power, saying to the Philippians, I can do all things through him who strengthens me.

Taking Jesus’ yoke upon us is the path to REST—to escaping the relentless inner and outer pressure to perform. Yet, ironically, such REST actually result in higher productivity for the kingdom. Some years ago, at a midwestern county fair there was pulling contest among draft horses to see which animal could pull the heaviest sled. The champion animal pulled a sled weighted at 4500 pounds. The second-place animal dragged 4000 pounds. Then someone proposed harnessing the two big fellas together. Together they pulled 12,000 pounds, three times the pull of the second-place horse, alone. If just having another human partner could triple our kingdom output, how much greater glory can we bring to God’s name from being yoked together with Jesus!

For Further Prayerful Thought:

This episode explains Jesus’ offer of rest to those burdened by the inner compulsion to have to perform to reach heaven, be loved, feel valuable, be accepted, and to be strong enough for others to lean on. Which of these reasons for “needing to perform” is most powerful in your life?
If we are to REST in Jesus, why does it matter that he is meek, bearing no judicial wrath against you? Why does it matter that he is “lowly in heart?”
A yoke is a yoke; it puts the farmer in control. So, in what sense can Jesus’ yoke be easy? In what sense is it light? Since you are yoked to Jesus’ power, how can you shift more of the weight you are carrying onto Jesus?

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Jesus’ Unwavering Allegiance to the Father

On 20 April, 2024 By Gary Yagel

In a world that is becoming increasingly complex because of innumerable opportunities to which our cell phones connect us, it is refreshing to remind ourselves of what Jesus said was at the core of following him. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment (Mt 22:37-38.) The primacy of this first and greatest commandment resonates with me. If I could just love God more:

My heart would have less room to love sin.
The pleasure of pleasing him would overpower my selfish pleasures.
I would want the approval of God more than the approval of men.
I would love his Word more, meditating upon it, because obeying his commands is the way he wants me to express love for him.
I would shut out the world more often to be in his quiet presence.
I would be a better reflection of the new humanity, Christ’s kingdom. This is what Augustine called the city of God, the place where the evil impulse “the love of self to the contempt of God,” is replaced by the godly impulse, “the love of God to the contempt of self.”

Jesus, the perfect man who fulfilled all righteousness, obeyed the great commandment—loving the Father perfectly. This episode seeks to throw back the curtain of that devotion to the Father, so we may be inspired and challenged by it.

As some of you have heard me say before, when I hear the biblical commandment, Love the Lord your God with all your heart, my brain immediately jumps off the track and goes back to my memories of second grade on Valentine’s Day, when we gave our favorite female friend a silly card that said, “I love you with all my heart.” Of course, the biblical term used here for love does not mean romantic attraction. The Greek term for that is EROS. Nor is the term, PHILEO, the Greek word for friendship love used, nor STORGE, the word for family love. Rather, it is AGAPE, the word for undaunting allegiance. This Greek word describes not a feeling but a commitment, not a sentiment, but determined loyalty, not an emotion but a conviction to give supreme allegiance to another. Let’s observe five facets of Jesus’ AGAPE love for the Father, i.e. his allegiance to the Father.

A. HE EMPTIED HIMSELF OF HIS OWN WILL TO DO THE FATHER’S

Philippians 2:6-7 says, Christ Jesus… though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. Jesus was unalterably committed to do the Father’s will. He said, My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to accomplish his work (Jn 4:34) and, I have come down from heaven, not to do my own will but the will of him who sent me (Jn 6:38). Out of supreme loyalty and devotion to the Father, Jesus denied himself in order to yield to the Father’s will. Such emptying of himself to yield to the Father is also reflected in his Gethsemane prayer. We read, Going a little farther he fell on his face and prayed, saying, “My Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me; nevertheless, not as I will, but as you will (Mt 26:39).

Though God’s Son remained 100% God when he became 100% man, this emptying of himself seems also to point to his dependency upon the Father. Jesus said, Truly, truly I say to you, the Son can do nothing of his own accord (Jn 5:19). In John 6:65, he said, No one can come to me unless it is granted him by the Father. Emptying ourselves of self-reliance is foundational for walking closely with the Father. In the first beatitude Jesus taught that the riches of the kingdom belong only to those who admit they have no spiritual resources of their own. Blessed are the poor in spirit for the kingdom of heaven is theirs (Mt 5:3). Emptying ourselves, refusing to trust ourselves, even our own wills, precedes seeing the power of Christ poured out in us. God resists the proud but gives grace to the humble (Ja 4:6). Paul learned this dependency lesson through his thorn in the flesh: God said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore I will boast all the more gladly of my weakness so that the power of Christ may rest upon me (2 Cor 12:9). True dependence upon God requires yielding our will—not just doing what God wants but doing it his way. We see Jesus resisting the temptation to do things his way in combatting Satan’s temptation in the wilderness: He was tempted to accomplish his mission a selfish way, an easy way, and a painless way.

The selfish way. When Satan tempted Jesus to turn the stones into bread, Jesus was at the point of starvation. During a long fast, hunger pangs stop early on. When they return, it is a signal that you must eat, or you will die. Somehow Jesus knew that using his supernatural power selfishly, even to prevent his death, was not trusting God’s Word. He needed to wait upon God. The older I get, the more clearly, I realize how I default to concern for SELF. When someone hands me a group picture with me in it, where is the first place my eyes travel? To the picture of ME to see if it is a good picture! How profound is the challenge to empty ourselves!
The easy way. Satan took Jesus to the pinnacle of the temple, tempting him to leap off and gain an immediate following the easy way. God had promised that the angels would bear him up. But the easy way would have cut moral corners. Jesus realized this was the temptation to force God’s hand—to tempt God—to needlessly put God in a position where he “had to” come through instead of quietly trusting God to build his followers. I think of words from Pat Morley, about cutting moral corne.

Some men have spectacular failures where in a moment of passion they abruptly burst into flames, crash and burn. But the more common way men get into trouble evolves from hundreds of tiny decisions—decisions which go undetected—that slowly like water tapping on a rock wear down a man’s character. Not blatantly or precipitously, but subtly over time, we get caught in a web of cutting corners and compromise (The Man in the Mirror).

B. HE HUMBLED HIMSELF IN OBEDIENCE TO THE FATHER

Philippians 2 continues, And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross (Phil 2:8). Closely linked to emptying himself to yield to the Father’s will was humbling himself in obedience. To begin to grasp the meaning of these words we must remember that this being is the Second Person of the Trinity, transcendent over everything that exists—except the Father. Yet, he chose to embrace the humiliating role of a slave obeying his master in devotion to the will of his heavenly Father for him. Jesus told his followers, I have not spoken on my own authority, but the Father who sent me has himself given me a commandment—what to say and what to speak (Jn 12:49). Jesus explicitly tells us that he obeys the Father because he loves the Father. I do as the Father has commanded me, so that the world may know that I love the Father (Jn 14:31). And in return the Father loves Jesus for his obedience. For this reason the Father loves me, because I lay down my life that I may take it up again (Jn 10:17).

In short, obedience is personal to Jesus and to the Father. Obedience was an expression of his love—his unwavering allegiance to the Father. King David saw his choice to obey or disobey God in the same light. In Psalm 51 after his adultery with Bathsheba and murder of her husband, Uriah, David wept, Against you, you only, have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight…. Hide your face from my sins, and blot out all my iniquities. How could David say “Against YOU and YOU ONLY have I sinned?” What about Bathsheba and Uriah? Yet David’s sin was so personal to David, so massive on his mind’s screen that it pushed aside his other evil. It was a personal offense to the Father

Jesus’ personal devotion to obeying the Father is revealed in his response to Satan’s third temptation. After tempting Jesus to choose the selfish way, and the easy way, Satan tempts Jesus to choose the painless way, but it required just one compromise. Satan showed Jesus all the kingdoms of the world that had been surrendered to Satan’s control when Adam sinned allying his kingdom, earth, with evil. How Jesus must have been tempted to accept Satan’s offer to sit on kingdom earth’s throne as the benevolent king who could establish his rule of justice, compassion, and wholeness. He wouldn’t have to defeat Satan at the cross to recover earth’s kingdom; Satan promised to give it to him, without a fight. “But, there is one condition,” says Satan. “Just hit your knee once, Jesus, bowing to me. Just one second to momentary genuflect—and you can escape the pain of taking all that evil upon yourself, excruciatingly ripped from your unity with the father, not to mention escape the agony of the cross.” At this point in the conversation, I think we can detect Jesus’ anger rising from his supreme loyalty to the Father only. Be gone Satan. For it is written, “You shall worship the Lord your God and him only shall you serve” (Mt 4:10). How often we hear of ministries that continue to flourish—the kingdom seems to be expanding through the work—only to discover that behind the scenes the leader began compromising with evil. Jesus eschews the easy way out of his devotion to righteousness. When I think about it a big part of my complaining spirit when things go wrong is rooted in simple laziness. I want ease, I want pain-free followership of Jesus. If God loves me, why can’t he make things easier? It is a deadly temptation. But Jesus had emptied himself—he had no will of his own that would contend with the Father’s difficult for him.

C. HE KNEW THE FATHER’S CHARACTER

In John 10:15, Jesus says, the Father knows me and I know the Father. In John 6:45, he had already said, no one has seen the Father except he who is from God; he has seen the Father. In John 17, Jesus prays, “O righteous Father, even though the world does not know you, I know you.” Jesus knew the character of the Father. In his human nature there was something about other humans Jesus marveled at; it was unbelief. Mark 6:6 reports that in his hometown of Nazareth, He could do no mighty work there, except that he laid his hands on a few sick people and healed them. And he marveled because of their unbelief (Mk 6;5-6). I don’t know how an all-knowing being can marvel—but I believe that Jesus knew the character of the Father so well, that, somehow, he experienced the emotion of astonishment that anyone would not trust him. It was as if he knew the Father so well that he couldn’t comprehend ANYONE not trusting him.

A few years ago, my friend, Rick, told me this story about his trip to the nearby water park with his six-year-old son, Michael. They had climbed all the way to the top of the sliding board at the waterpark. But then Michael looked down the slide and stopped dead in his tracks. Rick said, “Michael, trust me, it will be okay. Its safe. You won’t get hurt.” But Michael wouldn’t budge. “Michael trust me; I’m your father. I wouldn’t let anything happen to you. Go down the slide; it is safe.” But Michale refused to go down—holding up everyone in line and infuriating my friend Rick. The two of them had to climb all the way back down the ladder. Rick later remarked, “I was angry that Michael refused to trust me, but then I realized I am the same way, refusing to trust God.

Doubting the Father’s character seems to be endemic to all of Adam’s fallen race. And Satan used doubts about the goodness of God to tempt Eve. He began with a question that insinuates that God is the kind of selfish being that just might have created a garden with ALL of this luscious fruit and then forbidden them to have ANY of it. His words, “Did God really say that you can’t eat from the fruit of ANY of the trees in the garden?” He then lies that God is keeping something good from them, “He knows that when you eat of it you will be like god knowing good and evil.” Jesus faced hardship and pain we will never know. Yet HE KNEW THAT THE FATHER WAS GOOD. He trusted the Father’s character. So can we!

D. HE KNEW THE FATHER LOVED HIM

In John 3:35, Jesus says The Father loves the Son and has given all things into his hand.” In 5:20, he repeats, the Father loves the Son. In John 17, Jesus prays, “Father, I desire that they also, whom you have given me, may be with me where I am, to see my glory that you have given me because you loved me before the foundation of the world.” Both at the inauguration of Jesus ministry in his baptism and on the Mt of Transfiguration, the audible voice of God the Father is heard saying the two things every son longs to hear, “I love you” and “I am proud of you.” In Matthew 3:17, we read, And behold, a voice from heaven said, “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased.”

How would our lives change if we ever grasped how much God loves us?

Jesus used logic to persuade us of it: Which one of you, if his son asks him for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a serpent? If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him! (Matt 7:9-10).
Paul prays for all Christians to grasp it: And I pray that you, firmly fixed in love yourselves, may be able to grasp (with all Christians) how wide and deep and long and high is the love of Christ—and to know for yourselves that love so far beyond our comprehension. May you be filled though all your being with God himself! (Eph 3:17-19).
Paul irrefutably argues to prove it. In face of all this, what is there left to say? If God is for us, who can be against us? He that did not hesitate to spare his own Son but gave him up for us all—can we not trust such a God to give us, with him, everything else that we can need...I have become absolutely convinced that neither death nor life, neither messenger of Heaven nor monarch of earth, neither what happens today nor what may happen tomorrow, neither a power from on high nor a power from below, nor anything else in God’s whole world has any power to separate us from the love of God in Jesus Christ our Lord!

They argued to PROVE it. It is for us to BELIEVE it.

E. JESUS DELIGHTED IN BRINGING HONOR TO THE FATHER

The motivation that lay beneath Jesus’ dogged determination to stay on the path to the cross is unmasked in John 12. Just a few days from the crucifixion, after his triumphal entry, Jesus reveals what is going on in his heart. “Now is my soul troubled. And what shall I say? ‘Father, save me from this hour’? But for this purpose I have come to this hour. Father, glorify your name.” (vs 27-28). Just days before his crucifixion, Jesus reveals the inner conflict of his soul; he does not WANT to go to the cross. But he overcomes these feelings with a more intense desire—for the Father’s name to be glorified. The greatest desire of Jesus’ heart was to bring honor to the Father. In Jesus’ great final prayer (on behalf of you and me) in John 17:4, Jesus says to the Father, “I glorified you on earth having completed the work that you gave me to do.” Jesus love for the Father infused him with passion for the honor of the Father—his name, his reputation, his glory.

We are given the privilege of being consumed by the same great passion. In John 15, Jesus explains that he is the vine, his followers the branches, and the Father is the owner of the vineyard. The quality of the fruit of the vine is to the owner’s glory, honor, reputation. Jesus’ words were, By this my Father is glorified, that you bear much fruit and so prove to be my disciples. My prayer is that we too may be consumed with a passion to bring glory to the Father by the quality of the spiritual fruit in our lives.

But the story can’t end here, with just Jesus’ passion to bring honor to the Father. You cannot honor God without him honoring you. It is impossible. You can’t OUT -HONOR GOD. The words of Philippians 2 describe the result of Jesus emptying himself, honoring the Father by his obedience to Him. Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father (vs 9-11).

The prayer of John 17 reveals the result of the Father and the Son loving each other; that love produces that passion to bring glory to the other. “Father, the hour has come; glorify your Son that the Son may glorify you…I glorified you on earth…And now, Father, glorify me in your own presence with the glory that I had with you before the world existed. When Jesus closes his prayer he returns to the theme of glory, “I do not ask for these only, but also for those who will believe in me through their word… The glory that you have given me I have given to them, Father, I desire that they also, whom you have given me, may be with me where I am, to see my glory that you have given me because you loved me before the foundation of the world.”

The incredible truth is that our longing to bring glory to God through the quality of spiritual fruit produced in us results in God bringing glory to us. Do you think God would ever allow someone to glorify him and not turn around and honor him. To love another is to desire his honor. May passion for the Father’s honor by bearing spiritual fruit consume us. May the kingdom values of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, meekness, and self-control prevail in our lives!

For Further Prayerful Thought:

How do “emptying myself” and “humbling myself” to obey God demonstrate my love for him?
Jesus was confident of the Father’s love for him. He and Paul wanted us to be confident of God’s love for us. Why might comprehending such love be foundational for our everyday walk with God?
Why does it make sense that when you love someone, you want to see that person honored? When you are battling a bad attitude in a given situation, how can it strengthen you to know that Christ-like attitudes in us bring glory to God?

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The COMPELLING Jesus

On 10 April, 2024 By Gary Yagel

As you know, one of the most popular TV series sweeping the nation in recent years has been The Chosen, produced by Dallas Jenkins. As someone has said, “If you’re aiming to make a TV show about the life of Jesus, you better cast the right person for the lead role." It appears that Jenkins did. Jesus is played by Jonathan Roumie and from my unscientific poll, most people find his portrayal of Jesus to be remarkably well done. I, myself, am in that category, which surprises me, having never liked the way Jesus was portrayed in the past.

There is something deep, personal, and even perhaps threatening to me in the way Jesus is portrayed by anyone. A wrong portrayal messes with my perception of my first love, the one I have devoted my life to, the one I most want to be like, the one who claims my supreme allegiance because of who he is. That is why this podcast series seeks to shake the dust off any mistaken Sunday-school-ideas we might have about Jesus. It seeks to replace them with the most accurate picture we can from Scripture. We begin with the compelling nature of Jesus’ presence.

A generation ago, Christian writer, Peter Marshall voiced his frustration at the wrong portrayal of Jesus, “We have had enough of the emaciated Christ, the pale, anemic, namby-pamby Jesus, the ‘gentle Jesus meek and mild.’ Perhaps we have had too much of it. Let us see the Christ of the gospels, striding up and down the dusty miles of Palestine, sun-tanned, bronzed, fearless” (A Man Called Peter). Let’s look beneath the religiosity and archaic King James English to see the man Jesus was.

COMMANDING IN HIS PRESENCE

The true portrait is compelling. It begins with noticing Jesus’ commanding presence in many situations. Consider the case of the soldiers sent by the chief priests to arrest Jesus. John describes the scene when they arrived.

Jesus stood up and cried out, “If anyone thirsts, let him come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, ‘Out of his heart will flow rivers of living water.’” Now this he said about the Spirit, whom those who believed in him were to receive…The officers then came to the chief priests and Pharisees, who said to them, “Why did you not bring him?” The officers answered, “No one ever spoke like this man!” (John 7:32 ff).

The temple guards were from tribe of Benjamin, known as the fiercest of all Israel’s warriors. A soldier is taught to obey orders no matter what. For a whole group of soldiers to disobey orders was unheard of. But soldiers are also used to recognizing powerful authority. To a man, Jesus was to them so commanding in his presence that they felt certain their bosses, the chief priests, were mistaken.

This same apparent commanding presence seems to manifest itself when temple guards showed up to arrest Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane. We read:

Jesus went out with his disciples across the brook Kidron, where there was a garden, which he and his disciples entered. Now Judas, who betrayed him, also knew the place, for Jesus often met there with his disciples. So Judas, having procured a band of soldiers and some officers from the chief priests and the Pharisees, went there with lanterns and torches and weapons. Then Jesus, knowing all that would happen to him, came forward and said to them, “Whom do you seek?” They answered him, “Jesus of Nazareth.” Jesus said to them, “I am he.” Judas, who betrayed him, was standing with them. When Jesus said, “I am he,” THEY DREW BACK AND FELL TO THE GROUND. So he asked them again, “Whom do you seek?” And they said, “Jesus of Nazareth.” Jesus answered, “I told you that I am he. So, if you seek me, let these men go” (Jn 18:1-8).

In the dead of night cowardly soldiers and religious officials came to take Jesus away. They were too afraid to do it in the daylight in the middle of Jerusalem. Jesus faces them head on. The sheer force of Jesus’ bold presence knocks the entire posse to the ground. Contrast Jesus' quiet strength to the guards. It is true that Jesus came into Jerusalem on a donkey and not a war horse, and that the upside-down virtues of his kingdom reflect humility, patience, grace, and special care for the weak and disenfranchised. Jesus was the suffering servant of Isaiah 53. But he was not weak. There was a strength that emanated from his very person. If that were not true, I doubt Peter could have followed him, and certainly hardened soldiers would not have cowered in his presence. That strength showed even more in his relentless confrontation of evil.

COURAGEOUS IN HIS CONFRONTATION

When my youngest son was eleven, he walked into my office, sat down on the corner chair, and said, “Jesus was a wimp,” I literally almost fell out of my chair. “What?” “Well didn’t he say we were supposed to turn the other cheek and back down from a fight, and all that?” To Josh, who started for his football team at middle linebacker and called the defensive signals, anyone who backed down from a challenge wasn’t tough enough to deserve his respect. “Josh, didn’t you ever read the story of Jesus making a whip and clearing out the temple?” “Jesus never did that,” Josh argued. Now, I had two problems: my son thought Jesus was a wimp and he had been skipping Sunday school!

The sad truth is that Josh’s mental picture of an effeminate Jesus is more the rule than the exception in today’s world. Most people think that being like Jesus is being a nice guy. David Murrow, the author of Why Men Hate Going to Church, asked hundreds of people, “Which set of values better characterizes Jesus Christ and his true followers?” On the left side was a list that included competence, power, results, achievement, and success. On the right side was a list that included love, relationships, support, communication, and loving cooperation. More than 95 percent chose the right set. Murrow then reveals that he took these two lists of virtues from the book, Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus, by John Gray. The right set is comprised of the feminine values of Venus, while the left set makes up Gray’s masculine values of Mars. In our culture Jesus is more identified with feminine virtues than masculine ones, to which Murrow responds, “Tell me, when did feminine gifts become synonymous with Christian goodness? Early Christians were known for risk taking, power, aggression, and heroic sacrifice. But somewhere in church history, somebody monkeyed with the definition of a Christian” (Why Men Hate Going to Church)! Let’s notice Jesus’ relentless willingness to confront evil.

A. Jesus confronted his hometown racism. One of the first places Jesus went, after his ministry was inaugurated through his baptism, was his hometown synagogue. It seems logical that he would launch his public ministry from his home village, a great place to start to build support—except that he would not take such support if it was mixed with racist superiority towards the Gentiles. We now know that Jesus had grown up just five miles away from a major Roman town called Sepphoris, which is known for its stonework. The Greek word translated carpenter (TEKNON) does not mean carpenter but tradesman. It is quite likely that Joseph and his firstborn son, Jesus, were stonemasons who would have found a great deal of work outside their tiny village of 200 people in nearby Sepphoris. Whether this was the case or not, it is certain that Jesus had lots of exposure to the gentile community near his hometown. The nationalistic prejudice of his own people against those made in God’s image must have galled him. We read:

And he came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up. And as was his custom, he went to the synagogue on the Sabbath day, and he stood up to read. And the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was given to him. He unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor.” And he rolled up the scroll and gave it back to the attendant and sat down. And the eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him. And he began to say to them, “Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” And all spoke well of him and marveled at the gracious words that were coming from his mouth (Lk 4:16-22).

Here is the perfect launch to Jesus’ ministry. He claims to be the very promised Messiah of Isaiah 61. The result: “And all spoke well of him and marveled at his gracious words.” If Jesus were running a political campaign, his campaign manager would have ushered him offstage at that point having achieved an awesome launch. But instead, Jesus picks a fight with his uncles and the fathers of the friends he grew up with in Nazareth, who were its elders.

And he said to them, “Doubtless you will quote to me this proverb, ‘“Physician, heal yourself.” What we have heard you did at Capernaum, do here in your hometown as well.’” And he said, “Truly, I say to you, no prophet is acceptable in his hometown. But in truth, I tell you, there were many widows in Israel in the days of Elijah, when the heavens were shut up three years and six months, and a great famine came over all the land, and Elijah was sent to none of them but only to Zarephath, in the land of Sidon, to a woman who was a widow. And there were many lepers in Israel in the time of the prophet Elisha, and none of them was cleansed, but only Naaman the Syrian.” When they heard these things, all in the synagogue were filled with wrath. And they rose up and drove him out of the town and brought him to the brow of the hill on which their town was built, so that they could throw him down the cliff. But passing through their midst, he went away (4:23-30).

At least at the present time, those cliffs are just beyond the "Sabbath Day’s Journey from the Synagogue” marker, which would have prevented them from taking further steps towards the cliff. But no matter what stopped them, Jesus did not run away. One commentator suggests that Jesus stood there, probably piercing them with his eyes. What we do know is that Jesus’ commanding presence caused the crowd to part like the Red Sea!

B. Jesus angrily confronted heartlessness. Have you ever heard a sermon, entitled, “Be Like Jesus, Get Mad?” Mark 3:1-6 would be a great text!

Again he entered the synagogue, and a man was there with a withered hand. And they watched Jesus, to see whether he would heal him on the Sabbath, so that they might accuse him. And he said to the man with the withered hand “Come here.” And he said to them, “Is it lawful on the Sabbath to do good or to do harm, to save life or to kill?” But they were silent. And he looked around at them with anger, grieved at their hardness of heart, and said to the man, “Stretch out your hand.” He stretched it out, and his hand was restored. The Pharisees went out and immediately held counsel with the Herodians against him, how to destroy him.

Jesus fearlessly confronted the Pharisees’ lack of compassion. It cost Jesus his life.

C. Jesus fiercely confronted the Pharisees hypocrisy. Listen to his harsh words.

Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you travel across sea and land to make a single proselyte, and when he becomes a proselyte, you make him twice as much a child of hell as yourselves…Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you clean the outside of the cup and the plate, but inside they are full of greed and self-indulgence. You blind Pharisee! First clean the inside of the cup and the plate, so that the outside also may be clean. Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs, which outwardly appear beautiful, but within are full of dead people's bones and all uncleanness. So you also outwardly appear righteous to others, but within you are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness….You snakes, you brood of vipers, how are you to escape being sentenced to hell? (Excerpts from Matthew 23).

Exactly how do these verses fit in with the notion of Jesus being meek and mild or thinking Jesus’ primary character attribute was being a nice guy? As Phillip Yancey asks, ““How would telling people to be nice to one another get a man crucified? What government would execute Mister Rogers or Captain Kangaroo?” What do you think would happen in a boy’s heart, if his Sunday school used this text in a study of Jesus’ fierce confrontation of evil, entitling it: “The Dangerous Jesus?” Wouldn’t you have loved to be with Jesus when he stood up to the hypocrisy of the scribes and Pharisees? Do you think you might have said, “Jesus you’ve got to lighten up. You’re making these guys mad.” They got their revenge. This is the group that would later execute Jesus.

Our leader stood fearlessly for truth and righteousness. He never backed down. What a privilege it must have been to know Jesus and to be invited to be his follower. It still is.

CONQUERING IN HIS MISSION

Not only was Jesus commanding in his presence and courageous in his confrontation, he was conquering in his mission. I was struck this past Palm Sunday by the truth that Jesus was orchestrating every aspect of the actions of his enemies. When he learned of his friend Lazarus’ death, it is true that he probably waited so that when he arrived it was certain that Lazarus was dead. But he was also extremely public in this miracle—and John’s description makes clear why. Let’s examine his account of Lazarus’ resurrection.

And Jesus lifted up his eyes and said, “Father, I thank you that you have heard me. I knew that you always hear me, but I said this on account of the people standing around, that they may believe that you sent me.” When he had said these things, he cried out with a loud voice, “Lazarus, come out.” The man who had died came out, his hands and feet bound with linen strips, and his face wrapped with a cloth. Jesus said to them, “Unbind him, and let him go.” Many of the Jews therefore, who had come with Mary and had seen what he did, believed in him, but some of them went to the Pharisees and told them what Jesus had done. So the chief priests and the Pharisees gathered the council and said, “What are we to do? For this man performs many signs. If we let him go on like this, everyone will believe in him, and the Romans will come and take away both our place and our nation…. So from that day on they made plans to put him to death (John 11:41 ff).

Although Jesus leaves to hide in Ephraim, he then intentionally returns to Bethany six days before Passover to celebrate a meal with Lazarus. John observes, When the large crowd of the Jews learned that Jesus was there (with Lazarus in Bethany), they came, not only on account of him but also to see Lazarus, whom he had raised from the dead. So the chief priests made plans to put Lazarus to death as well, because on account of him many of the Jews were going away and believing in Jesus (12:9-11). John tells us that the next day the ecstatic crowds walking with Jesus in his triumphal entry had been with him when he called Lazarus out of the tomb and raised him from the dead and they continued to bear witness. The reason why the crowd went to meet him was that they heard he had done this sign. So the Pharisees said to one another, “You see that you are gaining nothing. Look, the world has gone after him.”

Jesus knew that the curse for Adam’s sinful rebellion brought upon Adam’s race could only be overthrown by first being the sin offering for our atonement on the cross. Far from being the victim of the chief priests and Pharisees, he played them like a fiddle! They didn’t stand a chance against him.

Before Jesus set his face like flint for Jerusalem, while at Caesarea-Phillipi near the very location where the false God Pan’s gates to hell were claimed to be, Jesus asked Peter who he thought Jesus was. When Peter answered, You are the Christ, the Son of the living God, Jesus then said, You are Peter, and on this rock (his confession) I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it (Matt 16:18). As we know, for two thousand years Jesus has been building his church and the gates of evil have not been able to withstand the conquest. Matthew’s story of Jesus’ life had ended with his words, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.” One author writes:

“Amazing isn’t it, that we are still talking about Jesus? After two thousand years people meet in almost every conceivable spot on earth to worship Jesus Christ. Books dot our libraries; art adorns our galleries; and reams of music are all about Him. Like a majestic mountain-peak towering over a landscape, the unconquerable Christ stands today. Forces have been arrayed against Him. Foes have encountered Him. But He remains unvanquished, undefeated, unconquerable.” (H. S. Vigeveno, Jesus the Revolutionary).

He is a master worthy of our best.

For Further Prayerful Thought:

As you read about the reactions of the temple guards sent to arrest Jesus, on two different occasions, what words would you use to describe their response to him?
What difference does Jesus’ courageous willingness to confront evil make in your relationship with him?
What do you think of the statement: Our God is so morally pure that he can even turn his enemies’ evil into good.

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Gender Affirming Care UNMASKED

On 06 April, 2024 By Gary Yagel

Seeking first the spread of Christ’s kingdom of righteousness i.e. restoring creation to wholeness, thus protecting the most vulnerable has been the work of Christ-followers on planet earth throughout history. For instance, in the Roman Empire, it was common for unwanted little ones to be taken into the countryside and abandoned to be eaten by wild animals. But Christians started orphanages and began adopting the children. The early church was so known for helping the poor that Roman Emperor, Julian wrote: “It is disgraceful that when no Christian has to beg because they support both their own poor and ours as well, all men see that our people lack aid from us.” In 325 the Christian church’s Council of Nicaea, made a world-changing decree that the bishops of the church were to go into every city in Christendom big enough to have its own cathedral and start a hospital there. In India, Christians ended suttee, the grisly practice through which widows were voluntarily or involuntarily burned on their husband’s funeral pyres.

Today, in 2024 there is another vulnerable group being victimized that requires Christians to protect them. They are precious, confused, pubescent children, who, in the name of transgender rights, are being shoved down a path of permanent sterility and irreversible mutilation of their bodies, when they are too young to understand the consequences of the “affirming care” being pushed on them. However, last month, the deceit and dishonesty of gender affirming care was unmasked in a powerful way. Christians now have powerful, exposed facts that delegitimize gender affirming care. The question is, “Will we use these facts to end this horrific mutilation of children as Wilberforce fought to end slavery or will Christians do nothing?” This episode is dedicated to equipping you to speak confidently wherever you have influence to help stop this atrocity being imposed on little girls and boys struggling with puberty.

What some say is the biggest medical scandal of our times was exposed last month when whistle blowers released internal files from the self-appointed, “experts” on transgender health, the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) proving that WPATH’s “transgender medicine guidelines” had no basis in actual science and violated the most basic medical guidelines for patient care. The leaked documents make clear that WPATH suppressed universally accepted standards of medical care and ethics to push pubescent children experiencing gender dysphoria towards the most extreme possible hormonal and surgical interventions not for medical reasons but to promote their own radical gender ideology. These leaked internal memos rocked the medical world, since most US professional medical associations, including the US National Institute of Health, the American Medical Association, the American Psychiatric Association, and The American Academy of Pediatrics, based their recommendation for treating gender dysphoria upon these fraudulent scientific claims and what is now widely recognized as the actual medical malpractice of WPATH.

The dishonest impression that WPATH had presented to the world was a picture of real professionalism rooted in genuine care for “oppressed” transgender patients and grounded in the best available scientific evidence. It is none of these. To the contrary, experiments cited are not randomized, double-blind, or controlled, as any legitimate research must be. There is no scientific evidence to support radical interventions, i.e. halting puberty through puberty blockers (the most common of which is Lupron used to chemically castrate sex offenders). There are no long-term studies showing the benefit of taking cross gender hormones at the cost of a 99.7% rate of sterility. There are no follow up studies of their patients, which any legitimate medical association would perform. Their often-cited claim that a child who experiences gender dysphoria must receive gender affirming care or the child will commit suicide is a complete fabrication. Legitimate scientific studies have proven the opposite. What the leaked video and documents reveal is an organization driven by ideology at the expense of real science and real medical care for patients. Consider the evidence:

WPATH violates the fundamental ethical practice of INFORMED CONSENT. It is undeniable that these physicians knew they were not adequately meeting this universally recognized ethical requirement. A major topic of conversation in the leaked conversations was whether children could even give informed consent to these life-altering procedures when they (and often their parents) didn’t understand the full ramifications of their decisions, e.g., infertility. In a panel discussion, one doctor noted that some of these kids “haven’t even had biology in high school yet.” Another said, “It’s out of their developmental range sometimes to understand the extent to which some of these medical interventions are impacting them.” Do these concerns stop WPATH from pushing “transitions” on vulnerable children? No. Children are incapable of giving informed consent to such life-changing decisions—and WPATH knows it.
Leaked excerpts prove WPATH physicians know, but ignore, the reality that gender dysphoria is nearly always a symptom of other pre-existing psychological conditions that should be treated BEFORE radical hormonal and surgical interventions. These include depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder, borderline personality disorder, autism, dissociative identity disorder, etc. Such mental health issues often predate any distress about their sex. One nurse practitioner discussed struggling with whether to put a patient on hormones who also had PTSD, major depressive disorder, observed dissociations, and schizoid typical traits. Dr. Dan Karasic, the lead author of WPATH’s SOC8 chapter on mental health, responded, “I’m missing why you are perplexed… The mere presence of psychiatric illness should not block a person’s ability to start hormones…” The videos and tapes prove that these physicians knew that thinking they were in the wrong body was very likely caused by prior mental health issues, yet the clinicians’ ideology overruled sound, moral medical practice.
Knowing that gender dysphoric adolescents experience high levels of anxiety about going through puberty, WPATH gives them a false solution based on a delusion instead of proven medical science. The idea that a 12-year-old girl entering puberty is actually a boy is a complete delusion. The sciences of genetics, endocrinology, embryology, and anatomy prove otherwise. For selfish, ideological reasons, WPATH clinicians offer bodily mutilation as a solution to a delusion. It would be like a physician offering a ninety-pound, anorexic teen girl who is suffering from the delusion that she is too fat a prescription for diet pills. It is medical malpractice.
WPATH’s claim that gender dysphoric children must receive “affirming medical care” or they will commit suicide is a complete fraud. The leaked documents reveal no legitimate scientific studies to indicate that suicide ideation or attempts decrease if gender dysphoric children go down the path of radical intervention—starting on puberty blockers, moving to cross gender hormone treatments and gender altering surgery—which they call “affirming care.” NONE. The fact is that other, legitimate studies reveal a dramatic increase in actual suicides, ten years after gender-altering surgery. The most thorough follow-up of sex-reassigned people—extending over 30 years and conducted in Sweden, where the culture is strongly supportive of the transgendered—nevertheless, documents that ten to fifteen years after surgical reassignment surgery, the suicide rate of those who had undergone sex-reassignment surgery rose to 20 times that of comparable peers.
Leaked documents prove WPATH intentionally ignores the mounting evidence of “detransitioners”—those who consent to affirming care who later regret it and seek to return to their biological sex. Any credible surgeon wants his patient to understand all the risks of the potential surgery. Not these surgeons; they are idealogues first, physicians second. The leaked conversations prove that it is well known within WPATH membership that many people who are put through these life-altering procedures later come to regret it, especially given the long-term health consequences like infertility, loss of sexual function, and the lifelong medical treatments that must follow. A lengthy set of revealed chatroom entries discuss the best strategy to “reframe” patients’ serious regret, spinning it as simply “normal” exploration of gender over time. Dr. Marci Bowers, president of WPATH admits, “acknowledgement that de-transition exists even to a minor extent is considered off-limits for many” in the trans community. Ideology first. Patient care second.
WPATH is a SCIENTIFICALLY, ETHICALLY, MEDICALLY discredited organization. The issues listed above barely begin to cover the extent of the unethical and pseudoscientific work of WPATH. The organization’s recent standards of care are born of a precommitment to a radical gender ideology which is victimizing American pubescent children for their own selfish, political and financial gain. WPATH has discredited itself, and no medical organization or government can now legitimately use its “standards of care” as a basis for its decisions. Against all sound ethical practice, WPATH supports encouraging a very troubled child to think falsely that her problems are caused by the fantasy that she is trapped in a wrongly gendered body and needs to change her body to correspond to her delusion. These exposed WPATH documents are so alarming that you can be certain that any government agency or American medical association that continues to cite WPATH standards of transgender care or who recommends affirming care is doing so because of its radical gender ideology, not a concern for the health of its patients. If good medicine is the true motivation, American medical policymakers will learn from the example of the United Kingdom. Without a multimillion dollar/yr. drug and gender surgery industry to lobby its health officials, the U.K. has objectively followed treatment for gender dysphoria that puts patient care first.

LESSONS TO BE LEARNED FROM THE UNITED KINGDOM

The parallel of the exposure of what was really happening at the U.K.’s gender clinic, Tavistock, with this recent exposure of what is really happening at WPATH is hard to miss. A lawsuit by detransitioner, Keira Bell, exposed what was happening at Tavistock. As a result, on July 28, 2022, U.K. health officials shuttered Tavistock, and appointed a review led by Dr. Hilary Cass, the former president of the Royal College of Pediatrics and Child Health. Her subsequent report noted that gender clinic “staff have told us that they feel under pressure to adopt an unquestioning affirmative approach…” in which children’s claims about gender dysphoria are not carefully examined and underlying mental health issues are not properly addressed before prescribing puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones. The review also expressed concern about the gross over-representation of girls and children on the autism spectrum being recommended for puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones. They reasoned, that if the rise in prescribing these drugs were simply a matter of children feeling freer to express their true selves, rather than the result of social contagion and recruitment among vulnerable groups, then those treated would better reflect the broader population. But they did not. Instead, Dr. Cass’s report concluded, “It is increasingly clear that we are witnessing a dangerous craze among children with mental health challenges rather than the liberation of the sexually oppressed.”

Along with other European countries, the U.K. had started widespread use of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones for children identifying as transgender almost a decade before such clinics opened in the U.S. With that extra decade of experience, European health officials have accumulated more objective evidence of the long-term damage being done and have started to reverse course. As a result of the Cass Report, the U.K. permanently closed its sole “gender clinic, insisting that gender dysphoria be treated in a holistic manner by pediatricians not gender idealogues.

As the U.K. has continued to separate pediatric health care for those with gender dysphoria from radical ideologues, the objective realities of science and sound medical are prevailing. Just three weeks ago, the U.K.’s National Health Service banned the use of puberty blockers for all children under eighteen who were seeking treatment for gender dysphoria, citing too little research to be sure they are safe. The NHS's website said, "Puberty blockers are not available to children and young people for gender incongruence or gender dysphoria because there is not enough evidence of safety and clinical effectiveness.” The Times of London, was a bit more blunt, coming out in favor of a full ban on puberty blockers for children and calling gender affirming care “quack medicine.”

THE EXPOSURE OF WPATH MATTERS

All any believer needs to do is to read some of the stories of “detransitioners” to be captured by the horror of this abuse of American children. Though transitioning as an adult, herself, one detransitioner, who is passionately committed to protecting children from gender affirming care reports, “I am a forty-eight-year-old transgender man who transitioned at age forty-two, and I am a parent to three teenagers. Before my transition, I was known to the world as Kellie King, a dynamic, powerful business sales executive, consistently leading the sales charts while acquiring countless honors, awards, and accolades. At age 42, I made a decision that turned my world upside down. Everything that was once gold turned to coal, almost instantly. That decision was to transition from a lesbian to a trans man, to become Scott Newgent.” Her botched sex-change surgery eventually caused her to have six more surgeries, become so prone to bacterial infection that her life will likely be shortened because she is building up an immunity to every anti-biotic, and cost her and her insurance company $900,000. Such sex transition surgeries are legally deemed “experimental,” which makes it impossible to sue for malpractice because there is no established baseline of proper medical care.

Newgent believes that affirming medical care pushes kids who would otherwise have no psychological issue with embracing their biological sex to embrace an identity that is out of sync with their sex—a disconnect that everyone agrees comes with mental anguish, requiring our compassion. But transitioning is the wrong solution. She points out the power of peer contagion. “You know if we told middle-schoolers right now at a time they’re not fitting in, that you can absolutely fit in. All you have to do is cut your left leg off and you will fit in, the rest of your life. Do you know how many ambulances we would have at middle-schools.”

HOW CAN WE USE THIS UNMASKING OF AFFIRMING CARE TO PROTECT TEENS?

1.First, we must invest some time to be equipped. You don’t have to be a transgender expert. But unless you are confident that you have a bit more knowledge about what is happening to kids through gender affirming care than those around you, you won’t speak up about it. In the past I have mentioned two resources I have written, Anchoring Your Child to God’s Truth in a Gender Confused Culture and Our Daughters and the Transgender Craze. (Links in the show notes.) But now we have posted four free video tutorials at youtube.com/@gyagelspeaks. Of course, you can listen to these videos just like you would a podcast on your phone or watch them. Here is a description of each video:

Video # 1 Understanding Gender Theory

Opens parents’ eyes to the explosion of gender theory influence on kids.
Equips parents to recognize the tentacles of gender theory creeping into their kids’ thinking.
Prepares parents to show their kids that gender theory was disproved by science years ago.
Prepares parents to explain to their kids from Scripture why a scientifically disproved theory is nevertheless being widely promoted by social media.

Video # 2 Understanding Today’s Transgender Craze

Identifies the characteristics of teens, especially girls, who are most susceptible to being drawn into the transgender world.
Identifies the two primary paths that lead teen girls into the transgender life.
Gives a strategy to preempt our children from rejecting their gender design.
Explains why the LGBTQ+ movement’s highest values, authenticity and unconditional acceptance so powerfully draw pubescent teens into it—and what to do about it.

Video # 3 Countering Radical Gender Theory

Empowers parents to instill in their kids confidence that gender theory is no threat to their faith, since it contradicts the proven laws of science and logic.
Equips believers to winsomely refute the 7 most common claims of gender theory showing them to be based on flawed logic or disproved research.
Refutes an argument that is driving many of the rising generation to reject the faith—that the Bible teaches oppressive patriarchy.

Video # 4 (For Teens and Youth Leaders) Biblical Worldview of Sexuality

Helps teens see the way the LGBTQ+ view of gender and sexuality (promoted in the Gender Unicorn graphic) fractures personhood.
Helps teens see the glory of the Biblical view of gender as a unified, healthy, holistic view of sexual personhood that corresponds to reality.
Helps teens embrace the awesomeness of sex when it is kept in the context of married love.

2. The second step for seizin this opportunity to help put a stop to gender affirming medical care is to pray for and seize opportunities in your spheres of influence to let others know that gender affirming care, which originated with WPATH has been thoroughly debunked and exposed to be radical gender ideology masquerading as safe, medical care, WHICH IT IS NOT.

For Further Prayerful Thought:

As you think back over just six of the ways credibility of WPATH has been destroyed, which stand out the most to you?
What do you think is the strongest evidence that WPATH’s recommended transgender treatment policies are based on radical gender ideology at the cost of universally agreed upon standards for patient care?
When could you find time in your schedule to get better equipped by repeating this podcast or listening to the YouTube videos mentioned?
In what sphere of your life might you have the opportunity to raise questions about the legitimacy of gender affirming medical care?

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The Power of the Resurrection Worldview

On 30 March, 2024 By Gary Yagel

If you noticed the title of this week’s episode, you may be wondering, “What in the world is a resurrection worldview and why does it matter?” It turns out not only that a resurrection worldview is an essential biblical concept for Christians; it is the foundation for the three specific truths that Paul repeatedly asks for God to help the Ephesian Christians grasp. This episode examines these three life-changing PERSPECTIVES.

Before digging into the three resurrection truths that Paul yearned for the Ephesians to grasp, let’s consider why a person’s view, his perception of the truth, his mental perspective matter so much. Let’s start way back with happiness. Scripture teaches that happiness and life-satisfaction are not a result of circumstances but of the ATTITUDE you choose. For example, Proverbs 15:5 observes, All the days of the afflicted are evil, but the cheerful of heart has a continual feast. Jesus taught the same truth when he began his portrait of kingdom restoration with eight godly attitudes (known as the beatitudes) introducing each one with the term blessed (MAKARIOS), which is the Greek word for the entirely fulfilled. So, Jesus’ plan to transform our heart attitudes, restoring them to holiness, happens to be the pathway to fullest enjoyment of life.

If at the core of God’s salvation plan is transforming our sinful heart attitudes into Christ-like ones, no wonder Paul wants us to have a resurrection perspective. One of the great secrets of life taught in Scripture is this: Your PERSPECTIVE determines your ATTITUDE. If you doubt that, just consider how your attitude of thankfulness for getting an unexpected 10% raise from your boss would change if you found out everyone else got a 15% raise. Or consider how, after taking a step onto the street to cross it, your angry attitude towards a pedestrian whose arm flies out against your chest shoving you backwards into a mud puddle would be transformed to gratefulness if you then saw a bus fly across the surface of the road on which you were just standing! Our attitude is inseparably bound to our perspective. It should not surprise us that Paul, who knew that God’s goal is to transform our heart attitudes, wrote to the Romans, Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the RIGHT PERSPECTIVE—the renewal of your mind (12:2).

With this background, we can see why Paul’s prayer strategy for the Ephesian Christians began with prayer for them to have a correct RESURECTION PERSPECTIVE, i.e. to mentally grasp the way the resurrection impacts our everyday living in specific ways. As we now come to these three truths, notice in the text we’re studying, how Paul piles up words that have to do with PERSPECTIVE. Ephesians 1:16-23: I do not cease to give thanks for you, remembering you in my prayers, that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give you the Spirit of 1) wisdom and 2) revelation in the 3) knowledge of him, having the 4) eyes of your hearts enlightened, that you may 5) know…Five different ways he refers to the PERSPECTIVE he longs for them to have—a perspective about what difference the resurrection makes. That resurrection worldview is to know: 1) What is the hope to which he has called you, 2) what are the riches of his glorious inheritance in the saints, and 3) what is the immeasurable greatness of his power toward us who believe. If you are anything like me, these words go right over your head. What is Paul talking about? And why in the world does he single out these three aspects of the reality of the resurrection? I believe that as we dig into these truths, we will come away with a much richer understanding of how the resurrection of Jesus Christ on Easter Day—matters in our everyday lives.

TRUTH # 1: THE HOPE TO WHICH HE HAS CALLED YOU

A. Biblical HOPE is richer than most of us realize. We recognize that the historic miracle of God suspending the natural order to raise Jesus from the dead validates Jesus’ claims. But it points to so much more. Author, Tim Keller observes:

“The resurrection was indeed a marvelous display of God’s power, but we should not see it as a suspension of the natural order. Rather it was the beginning of the restoration of the natural order of the world, the world as God intended it to be. Since humanity turned away from God, both the human and natural worlds have been dominated by sin and evil, disorder and disease, suffering and death. But when Jesus rose from the dead, he inaugurated the first stage of the coming of God’s kingdom power into the world to restore and heal all things. The resurrection means not merely that Christians have hope for the future, but they have hope that comes from the future. The Bible’s startling message is that when Jesus rose, he brought the future kingdom of God into the present. It is not yet here fully but it is here substantially, and Christians live an impoverished life if they do not realize that it is available to them.” (Hope in Times of Fear).

If our view of what the resurrection accomplished is basically that when we die, we get to go to heaven, we’ve severely shrunk the biblical concept of hope, which is RESTORATION of CREATION PARADISE on EARTH—not ESCAPE from it.

“The world was created by God to be a place of perfect harmony under his rule. Everything was cohesively woven together with every other part of creation. There was no disharmony between the body and the soul, or between our feelings and our conscience. There was no conflict between individuals or the genders. The body never became disharmonious within itself—there was nothing like the disintegration of the body through disease, aging, and death. There was also perfect harmony between humanity and the animals and the environment. There was no broken relationship of any kind" (Ibid).

When we look behind the false worldviews we studied in this series, we realize that what is longed for is actually the restoration that Jesus is bringing. Behind broken sexuality is often a hunger for unconditional love. Behind the accusation that biblical patriarchy is toxic is often the feminist yearning for significance, and sense of worth. Beneath the pro-abortion position that embryos have no right to be in the way of women’s pursuit of happiness is the yearning for fulfillment. The day when open borders work is the day when sin and oppression are ultimately vanquished from earth. True resurrection hope is enormously attractive.

B. Biblical HOPE balances the ALREADY and NOT YET aspects of the kingdom. The kingdom of God and the Second Adam have already broken into Adam’s kingdom and overthrown the usurpers, Satan, sin, and death. As one theologian observes:

“We must not underestimate how present the kingdom of God is, but we must also must not underestimate how unrealized it is, how much it exists only in the future. Because the kingdom is present partially but not fully, we must expect substantial healing but not total healing in all areas of life...If we overstress the ‘already’ of the kingdom to the exclusion of the ‘not yet’ we will expect quick solutions to problems and we will be dismayed by suffering and tragedy. But we can likewise overstress the ‘not yet’ of the kingdom to the exclusion of the ‘already.’ We can be too pessimistic about personal change. We can withdraw from engaging the world, too afraid of being ‘polluted’ by it.” (Ibid).

C. Biblical HOPE energizes our CALLING. Christ-followers are those who have responded to our Master’s personal CALL to enlist in his cause—not just throwing a lifeline to people guilty of sinning—but the overthrow of the kingdom of darkness and establishment of his kingdom of righteousness over every square inch of life on planet earth. Resurrection hope fires our passion. God has already begun to fix everything in this world broken by sin. What a privilege to be called to the mission to spread surrender to Christ’s rule over our own heart loyalties, heart attitudes and every sphere life where we have influence. “The kingdom of God is the renewal of the whole world through the entrance of supernatural forces. As things are restored under Christ’s rule and authority, they are restored to health, beauty, and freedom” (Tim, Keller, Ministries of Mercy). Because of Christ’s resurrection and exaltation, to be a Jesus-follower is to have a part in the most significant mission in history—overthrowing the kingdom of darkness.

TRUTH # 2: THE RICHES OF HIS GLORIOUS INHERITANCE IN THE SAINTS

This truth, which Paul considers life-changing, is not about OUR inheritance; the grammatical structure won’t allow that. This staggering truth is that WE are GOD’S inheritance. Let’s try to unwind some of the rich threads of this text.

Being God’s inheritance, though a striking concept, is consistent with the nature of God’s covenant with his people, which has always been a covenant of belonging: Exodus 6:7 says, I will take you to be my people, and I will be your God. Revelation 21:3 reads, Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God. Scripture’s depiction of Israel as Yahweh’s lover and the church as Christ’s lover point to this incredible “belonging,” love relationship.
The term riches of his inheritance points to the immeasurable value that you have and I have to God. It is staggering. He is looking forward to enjoying ME forever. What a life-transforming statement of our personal value. Despite hearts that still wound God, personally, by our rebellion every time we sin, God not only tolerates us, but he ENJOYS us. WE are his treasured possession.
The cost of gaining US as his inheritance was infinite. You were ransomed from the futile ways inherited from your forefathers, not with perishable things such as silver or gold, but with the precious blood of Christ. (1Pet 1:18).
What is more—that brother in Christ we can’t stand or disagree with is God’s treasure as well! Every extra ounce of effort it takes to devote ourselves to loving that member of Christ’s family who is hard to love—matters to Jesus.
The adjective that Paul uses to describe the riches of the inheritance that we are to God is glorious. I can’t help but believe that Paul was very familiar with Jesus’ teaching that he is the vine, and his followers are the branches. “By this is my father glorified,” said Jesus, “By bearing much fruit and so proving to be my disciples.” The Father is glorified by the quality of the spiritual fruit—Christ-like attitudes produced through our union with Christ. Think of it—choosing a Christ-like attitude matters. Our Christlikeness is God’s eternal joy.

TRUTH # 3: THE IMMEASURABLE GREATNESS OF HIS POWER TOWARD US WHO BELIEVE

When Adam joined Satan’s rebellion, the cost was God’s curse on the ground bringing death and the enslavement of his kingdom to Satan and sin. As Paul explained, Sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned. Death, being the curse for sin, reigned over all mankind with sin. But the Second Adam paid for our sins and lived a perfectly righteous life so that all who are in him are doubly declared legally righteous. The atonement accomplished our salvation. The resurrection proves that the tyranny of Satan, sin, and death have been broken. Easter HOPE is the certainty that not only death, but SIN and SATAN’S KINGDOM OF DARKNESS have been overthrown. This is the third truth Paul yearns for the Ephesians to grasp.

When Paul gets to the sixth chapter, he is going to give instructions for battling four levels of demonic beings in the strength of Christ—the rulers, authorities, cosmic powers over this present darkness, and spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places. Notice that in this first chapter—as he argues it is imperative to understand that Christ’s exaltation is over the demonic host, he describes the same four categories, though slightly differently. As Paul elaborates on the immeasurable greatness of his power towards us who believe, he continues: according to the working of his great might that he worked in Christ when he raised him from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly places, far above all RULE and AUTHORITY and POWER and DOMINION, and above every name that is named, not only in this age but also in the one to come. And he put all things under his feet and gave him as head over all things to the church, which is his body, the fullness of him who fills all in all. What is the historic result of Christ’s resurrection and exaltation to the right hand of God? Here is just a brief summary of the CONQUEST OF THE KINGDOM OF GOD.

One of the most amazing facts of history, is that within five centuries of its birth, Christianity won the professed allegiance of the overwhelming majority of the population of the Roman empire. The church was expanding eastward as well. By 225 twenty Christian bishoprics were established in the Tigris-Euphrates Valley and on the borders of Persia. For several centuries the conquest of Christ kingdom seemed stalled. The explosive military growth of Islam in the seventh and later centuries meant territorial losses for Christianity in the Middle East and Northern Africa, were Sharia law was imposed. In Northern Europe invasions by the barbarians and Vikings created social upheavals in the dying Roman empire and the cultural attainments of Christianity were lower than they were in the 4th and 5th centuries. Another downside to Christianity was the withdrawal from culture into monasteries by Christ-followers because of the worldliness of the church. On the upside, monastic teams brought the gospel to Scotland, France, Germanic tribes, Poland and Russia as St Patrick brought the gospel to Ireland.

“One of the greatest examples of the transforming power of the gospel is the Vikings. In the ninth and tenth centuries the Vikings, who were marauding adventurers terrorized much of the coastline of Europe. The Vikings pillaged, raped, and killed men, women, and even children, systematically putting to the torching what was left of the villages. Their fighting men, berserkers, were so fierce in battle that our word, berserk, comes from them. What changed this horrible scourge of humanity? Jesus Christ. The gospel managed to penetrate even the Vikings—not without some resistance—and not even without some violence on the part of the new converts who didn’t know better! Nevertheless, over time, many of the Scandinavians became true Christians and so the Vikings stopped their terrible raids. In 1020 King Olav made “old practices illegal such as blood sacrifices, black magic, leaving infants to die, slavery, and polygamy.” (D James Kennedy, What If Jesus Had Never Been Born).

In the 14the century John Wycliffe emerged translating the Scriptures from the Vulgate into English for the ordinary people. Wycliffe had an effect that rippled across Europe. Jan Hus and others in Prague produced Scriptures in Hungarian and Bohemian. In the 1450’s Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press and in 1455 completed his Gutenberg Bible. About the same time, to the east, Constantinople fell, sending scholars westwards clutching their Greek and Hebrew texts to Paris, London and Rotterdam. Erasmus of Rotterdam produced an edition of the Greek text of the New Testament in 1516. In the 1530’s William Tyndale completed a translation into English using the Greek text compiled by Erasmus. Martin Luther, who posted his 95 Theses on the Whittenburg castle door in 1517 translated the Bible into German. As the gospel spread around the world, many of the world’s languages were first set to writing by Christian missionaries who wanted the people to study the Bible for themselves.

The age of European Colonialism brought a mixed bag for the church. Roman Catholicism brought Christianity to Asia and the Americas. But conquistadors imposed Spanish civilization and Catholicism by force in South America. By the 1740’s, Moravian missionaries had reached the Virgin Islands, Greenland, Surinam, the Gold Coast, North America and South America. The evangelical awakenings of the 18th century, by the labors of John and Charles Wesley, George Whitefield, and Jonathan Edwards, gave tremendous impetus to the development of the world missionary movement. The Baptist Missionary Society was founded by William Carey (who went to India in 1792). The London Missionary Society soon followed, in 1795. American Mission Societies began in 1787 and a student movement at Williams College and Andover Seminary led to the formation of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions in 1810.

The result was that the nineteen century was called by historian, Kenneth Scott Latourette, “the great century of Christian missions.” The period 1815-1914 witnessed the greatest numerical and geographical expansion of the missionary enterprise of any epoch until that time—including the penetration of the most populous nation of the world—China, by Hudson Taylor and the China Inland mission. In 1934, Cameron Townsend founded, Wycliffe, whose most recent report is that 698 languages now have the complete Bible, 1,548 languages have a completed New Testament, 1,138 have some translated portions of the Bible. Right now, translation or preparatory work is going on in 2,617 languages in 161 countries.

Has God suddenly stopped this expansion of Christ's kingdom over earth? NO. Jesus said, “I will build my church and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it” (Mt 16:18). In the non-Western world, the growth of Christianity is stunning:

Last Sunday there were more Christians attending church in China than there were in all of “Christian Europe.”
In the last 50 years, the number of Christians in East Asia (China, Korea, Japan) has grown from 11.4 million to 171.1 million (1.2% of pop. to 10.5%)
In 1910, only 12 million people in Africa were Christians (9% population). Today, there are 630 million Christians in Africa (almost 50% of populace)
Last Sunday, each of the nations of Nigeria, Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, and South Africa had more Anglicans in church than there were Anglicans and Episcopalians in all of Britain and the United States combined (Ibid)

Our heart attitudes are shaped by our perspective: Here is Paul’s perspective on how the 2000-year-old resurrection of Jesus can still impact us everyday.

It CALLS US to the greatest mission in this history of the world, overthrowing the kingdom of evil and spreading the wholeness of Christ’s kingdom.
It VALUES US as personal trophies of God, himself—his treasured inheritance purchased by the blood of his dear Son and called to become a redeemed community where love prevails, and the values of the kingdom are on display.
It EMPOWERS US with spiritual dynamite. That is the literal Greek word Paul uses, DUNAMIS--the power we need to get the job done.

For Further Prayerful Thought:

Why do the biblical writers care so much about our mind being transformed to having a biblical perspective?
How does Paul want our view of the resurrection’s significance to go way beyond God doing something supernatural to prove that Jesus came from God. How does resurrection restoration to the paradise we all long for enrich the attractiveness of the gospel?
How can knowing that you are God’s personal trophy of grace, his inheritance—one he plans to enjoy for eternity—ignite your passion to serve him?
How can the truth that we have the spiritual dynamite we need to dislodge evil in our hearts and spheres of influence renew our willingness to fight, spiritually?

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Falsehood—Loving Immigrants Means Supporting Open Boarders

On 23 March, 2024 By Gary Yagel

Scripture describes a subset of King David’s “Mighty Men” from the tribe of Issachar as men who had understanding of the times, to know what Israel ought to do (1 Chron 12:32). That is a description of the band of brothers this podcast is seeking to build—men who understand their times because they view culture through a biblical lens—and who therefore know what their families, churches, and nation should do. As we continue this month’s series on false worldviews that lead our loved ones astray, today, we dig into what the Bible says about the Christian’s responsibility to care well for immigrants, who are called sojourners or resident aliens in Scripture.

When faced with the sight of millions of men, women, and children from war-torn lands seeking to escape tyranny to have a better life, most Christians will voice their approval for open door policies of inclusion, hospitality, diversity and welcome. Some Christians have even argued that failure to have such open-hearted attitudes towards these immigrants is sinfully, selfishly, letting “the gods of fear and security dictate how we respond.” (Mark Galli, Christianity Today). Does the biblical call to care for the sojourner and resident alien, imply that those with true Christ-like love for non-Americans requires us to throw open our boarders to all who want to enter? Jesus, did teach that true believers will hear from Jesus, “I was a STRANGER and you WELCOMED me.” Doesn’t this settle the issue—All Christians must be welcoming to immigrants who want to come into our country. Your children and grandchildren are hearing that argument. Let's attempt to think biblically about the hot topic today of illegal, undocumented, immigrants coming across our southern border.

ALL CHRISTIANS ARE TO GIVE SPECIAL CARE TO SOJOURNERS

At the core of Christian ethics is the recognition that every human being has dignity as God’s image-bearer, which requires us to care for every human, no matter what his or her social status. Scripture particularly identifies those holding the lowest status for intentional care—widows, orphans, the poor, and immigrants. The OT is filled with laws and narratives about immigrants. Israelites were commanded to provide for them through an agrarian welfare system, where foreigners could glean from an Israelite’s field (Dt 24:19-22) and were required to pay immigrants in a timely manner for their work (Dt 24:15). The Israelites were repeatedly warned not to oppress the widow, the orphan, or sojourner, in words like these in Deuteronomy 24: You shall not pervert the justice due to the sojourner or to the fatherless, or take a widow's garment in pledge, but you shall remember that you were a slave in Egypt and the Lord your God redeemed you from there; therefore I command you to do this (vs 17-18). The prophets frequently called down fire on anyone who claimed to be a follower of Yahweh and mistreated a foreigner. Do justice and righteousness, and deliver from the hand of the oppressor him who has been robbed. And do no wrong or violence to the resident alien, the fatherless, and the widow, nor shed innocent blood in this place. (Jer 22:3). Indeed, Malachi puts mistreatment of immigrants on a level with sorcery and adultery: Then I will draw near to you for judgment. I will be a swift witness against the sorcerers, against the adulterers…against those who oppress widow and the fatherless, against those who thrust aside the sojourner (Mal 3:5).

The NT concern for immigrants is perhaps even more clear. Jesus was a refugee, fleeing with his family from Herod. He confronted his hometown elders over their racist attitudes towards gentile outsiders. He attacked the bigoted Jewish hatred for the Samaritans. Peter tells Christians that we, ourselves, are sojourners in a foreign land. Such status as foreigners should give us a new heart for others who find themselves in similar situations. Moreover, Jesus taught that on judgement day, he will look at true Christians and say, “I was a stranger and you WELCOMED me” and look at those damned to hell and say, “I was a stranger and you did NOT WELCOME me” (Matt 25:35-43). Here are some implications for a correct attitude towards immigrants:

Closing our hearts to the plight of the worldwide poor or oppressed immigrants seeking to flee to our nation is never appropriate.
Supporting a completely closed border, i.e. not having a legitimate way to admit any immigrants legally is, in my view, not a biblical option. As those whose citizenship is in heaven and who are called to a heart of compassion—shutting out the needy because they are not of OUR tribe is wrong.
I see no biblical basis for a merit-based system of legal immigration, which some Republican politicians have proposed. That seems the epitome of selfishness and American ethnocentrism. Though difficult to implement, opening our doors to those seeking asylum to escape oppression still seems most biblical to me.
Unquestionably, outreach to the immigrant population, whether here legally or illegally, must be as high a priority as reaching out to the poor, homeless, widows, and orphans.

THE FALACY of EQUATING OPEN HEARTS TO IMIGRANTS with OPEN BORDERS

The above argument to support justice and provide care for immigrants living in our land provides zero evidence for throwing open the borders of our nation.

The biblical commands require justice and care for immigrants already living in our land. This is an extension of the second great commandment, to love your neighbor as yourself. God is not addressing the issue of eliminating national borders, nor care for those of other nations.
To suggest that love for immigrants requires throwing open the doors of the nation would be like saying that love for our neighbor prevents every Hebrew or Christian family from closing the doors of their house to others at night.
God considers national boundaries important enough to say, When the Most High gave to the nations their inheritance, when he divided mankind, he fixed the borders of the peoples (Dt 32:8). In Acts 17:26, we see the same truth, that God himself established boundaries, making distinctions between different groups of people. And he made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place.
Although authors, like Dan Carroll, in his book, Christians at the Boarder, and Preston Sprinkle in his blog, “A Christian Response to Undocumented Immigrants” attempt to justify the un-enforcement of immigration laws protecting our boarder as civil disobedience, they have no Biblical case for doing so. Since there is zero biblical teaching that makes open boarders a moral imperative, disagreeing with your nation’s immigration policy is no biblical justification for civil disobedience. Scripture permits civil disobedience only when a believer is compelled by the government to violate the clear command of Scripture. There is no verse of Scripture that gives a person the moral right to live in whatever land he or she chooses. It is an unbiblical stretch to turn the calling of all Christians to love their immigrant neighbors into a moral principle that gives every human a right to live in any country he wants to.
The argument that many deserving people can’t get into our country legally because the ones who do get in legally have the money to bribe officials has no merit. Bribery is part of every government in the world. The problem of human sin is not solved by an irresponsible U.S. border policy that has no control over who enters our country.

THE BIBLE REQUIRES GOVERNMENTS TO ENFORCE A SECURE BORDER

In Paul’s command in Romans 13 to submit to government authorities he gives us great insight about God’s purpose that lies behind giving the power of the sword to the state.

For rulers are not a terror to good conduct, but to bad. Would you have no fear of the one who is in authority? Then do what is good, and you will receive his approval, for he is God's servant for your good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for he does not bear the sword in vain. Notice the principle behind the civil magistrate, for he is God's servant FOR YOUR GOOD. The purpose of civil government is your good. God has instituted government to protect citizens from harm. The word good is closely linked to the word beneficial in biblical thought just as Paul’s negative words, wrong and bad are linked to causing harm. Government is instituted by God to prevent harm to citizens. Classically, the right to self-defense and to defend your nation against a military invasion is rooted in Paul’s teaching here. So, God’s ordained purpose for government is to protect from harm. For this reason, border security is indisputably required by God because it is a necessary part of protecting citizens.

A. A biblical worldview begins by discovering the facts. Proverbs 13:6 says, Every prudent man acts with knowledge. Proverbs 14:15 gives good advice to those of us whose only news source is social media. The simple believes everything, but the prudent gives thought to his steps. If you do not know about the present human suffering caused by the refusal of the Biden administration to enforce immigration law at the borders, you need to find a news source that will tell you the truth. Less than a week after taking office, the Biden administration reversed 94 executive orders that the previous administration had implemented to enforce immigration law. For three and a half years this administration has refused to enforce immigration law, which has led to immeasurable suffering. As an update, just three days ago, El Passo’s Migrant Dashboard showed that last Thursday, March 21, 2024, on just one day, from just one location, 743 immigrants who had tried to cross the border illegally were released from custody into the United States, instead of returned to their home country as immigration law stipulates. Let’s consider this policy’s cost.

Unenforced immigration law PROMOTES human trafficking. “In the U.S., immigrants, especially immigrant women, make up the largest portion of trafficking victims. The State Department estimates that in 2016, 57,700 victims had been trafficked into the U.S. Studies done by the Latin American branch of the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women estimates that 60% of Latin American children who set out to cross the border alone or with smugglers have been caught by the cartels and are being sold as sex slaves, abused in child pornography, or forced to help get drugs across the border.” (Congress.Gov, “How Porous Borders Fuel Human Trafficking in the United States”). This horrific depravity alone is cause enough for all Americans, especially Christians, to recognize the evil of refusing to enforce immigration laws at the southern border.
Unenforced immigration laws EMPOWER drug cartels to kill Americans. The 2000-mile southern side of the American/Mexican border is now 100% controlled by Mexican drug cartels, who own 25,000 drones used to spot border patrols and drop illegal drugs over the border. Not only has unenforced immigration law caused inconceivable quantities of illegal drugs to spread all through American cities, now we are seeing prescription drugs laced with fentanyl killing our college students. This is not a political statement by me, but a personal one. Last year I wept with a father whose heart was crushed by the death of his 21-year-old son, a student at MIT because he took a prescription drug laced with fentanyl. According to the DEA, for Americans ages 18-45, the leading cause of death is an overdose of fentanyl, nearly all of which the refusal to enforce immigration laws allows to come in.
Unenforced immigration laws ENABLE known terrorists to cross the border. On October 31, 2023, a member of the Senate Homeland Security Appropriations Subcommittee, reported that 169 individuals had been apprehended at the southern border in 2023 who were on the U.S. terror watch list. And those were the ones caught; she did not speculate on the “got aways.” She said the number of individuals on the U.S. terror watchlist who tried to cross the border to that point in 2023 constituted a “tenfold increase” from the fiscal year 2021 numbers (capito.senate.gov). Just a few weeks ago, a member of the terrorist group, Hezbollah, Basel Bassel Ebbadi, 22, was caught by the U.S. Border Patrol near El Paso, Texas. While in custody, he was asked what he was doing in the U.S., to which he replied, “I’m going to try to make a bomb.” Ebbadi told Border Patrol he had seven years of training with Hezbollah. Again, a reminder. God assigns civil government the responsibility of protecting its citizens from harm.
Unenforced immigration laws WELCOME hardened murderers and rapists. On February 22, 2024, Laken Riley, a 22-year-old American nursing student at Augusta University, was abducted and killed while she was jogging at the University of Georgia (UGA) in Athens, Georgia by José Antonio Ibarra, a 26-year-old Venezuelan who had entered the United States illegally. ICE confirmed that the suspect was caught crossing the border but was released into the United States. ICE also confirmed that the New York City Police Department arrested Ibarra back in September and charged him with acting in a manner to injure a child under 17. But since NYC is a sanctuary city, he was released. Open border advocates argue that many people are murdered; so, Laken’s death is just being used politically. But it remains a stubborn fact that will not go away. Laken Riley lost her life because the Biden administration and the NY City Government did NOT do what God says governments are ordained by him to do: protect its citizens from harm.

B. There is zero biblical teaching to support a moral imperative to allow all immigrants indiscriminately into a nation. This idea is rooted in critical theory, which sees immigrants as the oppressed group and rich Americans as the oppressors. But the Bible says, there is a moral imperative to protect our border. Loving our neighbor as ourselves requires Christians to protect those around us from the evils that irrefutably accompany government leaders’ decisions not to enforce immigration laws. As Kevin DeYoung points out.

I don’t doubt that the vast majority of displaced persons are simply looking for peace and a new chance at life. But does anyone doubt there may also be a small number of extremists waiting in the same line? Is it unChristian to not want radical jihadists shooting people in our communities? That’s hardly a far-fetched scenario. Christian charity means loving the safety of the neighbor next door at least as much as loving the safe passage of the neighbor far away (thegospelcoaltion.org/blogs “Immigration Policy Must be Based on More than an Appeal to Compassion”).

GOD REQUIRES COMPASSION FOR ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS ALREADY HERE

The Facts: While most immigrants are in compliance with U.S. law, a significant minority—likely between 10.7 million and 12 million, based on nonpartisan and governmental estimates—are not present in the United States lawfully. Just over half of those individuals crossed a border illegally, while an estimated 4.5 million, including two-thirds of those who have arrived since 2014, entered lawfully on temporary visas but overstayed their visas. (evangelicalimmigrationtable.com)

Ministry to Existing Immigrant Population: I believe that the biblical data calling believers to care well for the sojourner in our land, though providing no evidence whatsoever for having an unprotected boarder does have great implications for how we treat existing immigrants, including those that are here illegally. Christians seeking to be faithful to the Scriptures want to show kindness and compassion to these individuals but are also bound to respect the law. It is true that many undocumented immigrants have chosen to come to the U.S. illegally under very difficult circumstances, fleeing serious economic hardship or even persecution. However, except for those brought as minors or trafficked to the U.S. against their will, they still did knowingly break U.S. law. This is why I believe amnesty is the wrong approach; it communicates that the law doesn’t matter. Even when laws don’t work well, they shouldn’t simply be ignored.

In my view and that of many Christians including John Piper, the best way forward in the treatment of illegal immigrants, which both respects the law and keeps families together is an earned legalization process. This would include the payment of a monetary fine as restitution for adults who willfully violated U.S. immigration laws. Of course, a criminal background check should also be a part of that process, and anyone convicted of a serious crime should be excluded and deported. The Christian call to compassion for all immigrants, including those who entered illegally DOES matter in my view. But it matters not because it leads to support for unenforced borders but because it leads to mercy and compassion towards illegal immigrants already here. One prominent group of Evangelical thinkers reasons this way:

“Most of the undocumented immigrants in U.S. churches are actually very eager to make things right, and they would be happy to pay a fine and meet other qualifications to eventually have the chance to be lawful permanent residents of the United States, a country most have come to love and see as their home. For many who have lived under both the fear and shame associated with their unlawful status for many years, the opportunity to earn legal status would feel akin to the biblical Year of Jubilee, a time of redemption, when debts were canceled (see Leviticus 25:8-17) If the law is truly to be respected, we should ensure the integrity of the U.S. immigration system going forward: That means doing everything possible to deter illegal immigration, including pursuing secure borders, but also facilitating legal immigration: not without limit, but in ways that meet the needs of the U.S. labor market, that keep families together, and that allow the country to continue to serve as a place of refuge for some of the most vulnerable persecuted people in the world, consistent with the best of the history and values of the United States of America” (Ibid).

For Further Prayerful Thought:

Why do you think so many Americans are unaware of what is happening at the southern boarder?
Of the categories of harm that un-enforcement of immigration policies brings—human trafficking, spread of drugs including fentanyl, terrorism, and attacks from hardened criminals, which concern you the most?
How would you respond, biblically to the fallacy that for Christians to properly care for immigrants we must we welcoming to all who want to come to our nation, including those crossing the border illegally?
What biblical principles do you think apply to our treatment of illegal immigrants who are already in our country?

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Falsehood—Abortion is a Woman’s Reproductive Right

On 16 March, 2024 By Gary Yagel

Most Christians born in the last 100 years in America would explain their salvation story like this: “I first had to discover that my real problem was my sin. Then I discovered that Christ died so I could be forgiven and go to heaven; so, I invited Christ into my life.” This is a biblical, accurate description of conversion; but it is an incomplete description of salvation. It describes just two parts of the actual, four-part biblical gospel. What the Bible actually teaches is not so much that WE are inviting Jesus into OUR stories, as that HE is inviting US into HIS STORY. He invites us into HIS GRAND STORY that begins with CREATION---stage 1, creating a kingdom over which his image-bearers are to exercise dominion for him. Stage 2, which we mentioned, is that creation is marred by human rebellion—SIN. Stage 3 is Christ’s REDEMPTION, requiring our response of repentance and faith, which lead to being indwelt by the Holy Spirit, changing OUR story. But SALVATION is SO MUCH BIGGER than just your individual story and mine—God’s bigger story extends to the COSMOS—stage 4 of the Gospel is—KINGDOM RESTORATION. Christ is making all things new. He is setting right everything that sin set WRONG. The true, whole, four-chapter gospel engages every Christian in Adam and Eve’s original calling to shape THE PUBLIC SQUARE for the HIGH KING—spreading the kingdom of righteousness over every square inch of earth.

Tragically, history reveals that Christians shaped by a mere two-chapter gospel withdraw from the public square, privatizing their Christian faith, and blaming “secular people” for corrupting their world. During the 20th century that is what most Bible-believing Christians did. But the loss of biblical values in the culture was not caused by secular forces overcoming kingdom forces; they don’t have the power to stand against the kingdom of Christ. It was caused by Christians withdrawing from the public square, giving up the fight. This podcast is devoted to leading the men of the church to recover the full, four-chapter gospel, which means intentionally fulfilling our calling to speak into the public square as salt and light. It is for those who would dare to winsomely lift high the light of Biblical truth in their world. This week, we consider how to do that on the subject of abortion.

In June of 2022, when the Supreme Court overruled the earlier Roe v. Wade decision, all of us who believe that Scripture requires us to protect human life in the womb rejoiced over a victory that took 50 years to achieve in the courts. It finally admitted that nine justices in the judicial branch did not have the right to impose their view of abortion but returned this decision to the legislative branch in each state. The good news is that pro-life advocates working through elected representatives are now positioned to legally protect unborn humans in ways that Roe did not allow. But there is sobering bad news. As Scott Klusendorf points out (The Case for Life),

“Since Roe was struck down, pro-lifers have lost every single time the abortion issue has been put directly to the public for a vote. Even in red states like Montana, voters rejected a modest pro-life ballot measure that did not ban abortion outright, but only protected children who survived abortion procedures and are born alive. A larger march for life won’t fix the problem at the ballot box. To win eventual political victory, the kind that results in legal protection for unborn humans, we must engage the public with a persuasive case for life.”

Our stand for God’s truth must be full of grace for women who have had abortions; but we must have the courage to stand for truth at this cultural moment.

THE PRO-LIFE ARGUMENT

Scott Klusendorf is the president of Life Training Institute, where he trains pro-life advocates to persuasively promote the pro-life view. As we will see throughout this episode, the most persuasive way to defend and win others to the pro-life view is to keep coming back to the logic of this syllogism:

Premise 1: It is wrong to intentionally kill an innocent human being.

Premise 2: Abortion intentionally kills an innocent human being.

Therefore,

Conclusion: Abortion is morally wrong.

THE SCIENTIFIC CASE FOR LIFE BEGINNING AT CONCEPTION

A. There is a clear beginning to this life as an individual.

“Human development begins at fertilization when a sperm fuses with an ooctyte to form a single cell, the zygote. This highly specialized cell, capable of giving rise to any cell type, marks the beginning of each of us as individuals” (Moore, The Developing Human: Clinically Oriented Embryology).
“Although life is a continuous process, fertilization is a critical landmark because, under ordinary circumstances, a new genetically distinct human organism is thereby formed” (O’Rahilly and Mueller, Human Embryology).

B. Human embryos are members of the species Homo sapiens. A Senate Judiciary committee wrote these words:

“Physicians, biologists, and other scientists agree that conception marks the beginning of the life of a human being—a being that is alive and is a member of the human species. There is overwhelming agreement on this point in countless medical, biological, and scientific writings” (97th Congress).
“Human embryos are not creatures different in kind from human beings (like potatoes, or alligators)…They are, rather, human beings—distinct living members of the species Homo sapiens—at the earliest stage of their natural development. They are different from human beings at later developmental stages not in virtue of the kind of entity they are, but rather the degree of development.” (Robert George, “Another Round,” National Review).

C. A zygote remains the same creature as it changes its form. Living things do not become entirely different creatures in the process of changing their form. Rather, they develop according to a certain physical pattern precisely because of the kind of being they already are.

The embryo is completely different from both parents; it has its own unique chromosomal structure.
It is clear that the embryo is human, since it comes from human parents
It is clear that the embryo is human because of its genetic constituents.

D. The fact that an embryo is not a fully mature human doesn’t change its continuity as a human. Various points along this process of development have been argued to be the point where life begins—after the fetus has brain waves, after the fetus can experience pain, after the fetus can live on its own outside the womb, after the fetus comes down the birth canal, etc. But every arbitrary point chosen where life is supposed to begin fails, logically, the same way. What is your basis for saying that up until that point the unborn is not a human being? Klusendorf points out, “They’re distinct, living, and whole members of the human species, regardless of their size or location. As is true of infants, toddlers, and teenagers embryos are human individuals at a particular stage of their development, and thus they don’t differ in kind from the mature adults they will one day become.”

E. The amazing embryo, from the start, directs its own internal development. Some argue that the fact that the embryo contains its own distinct genetic code doesn’t mean it is a life, since every cell contains all the genetic code. But other cells are not at all like the embryo. Those cells left alone will NOT develop themselves to the mature stages of human life. But the fertilized egg, the zygote, the embryo DOES develop itself into the future stages of human development.

This distinguishes the human embryo from being just a clump of cells. “Embryos are living creatures with all the properties that define an organism as distinct from a group of cells; embryos are capable of growing, maturing, maintaining a physiologic balance between various organ systems, adapting to change and repairing injury. Mere groups of human cells do nothing like this under any circumstance" (Ibid).
In fact, this self-organizing capability of the embryo that continues as it becomes a baby, toddler, teen, adult is so central to personhood that when this self-organizing principle ceases we call it death, even though individual cells continue living for a short while after humans die.

REFUTING THE MOST COMMON PRO-ABORTION ARGUMENTS

Thinking Clearly About What the Abortion Debate is NOT ABOUT

A. It’s not about REPRODUCTIVE RIGHTS. There is no absolute right of a woman to do with her body whatever she wishes. She may not put her fingers around the neck of her two-year-old, squeezing and strangling him. Every person’s right to his body is limited by the prohibition against harming another. So, the issue is: Does the embryo in the womb have rights that need to be protected? Some may say that embryo is not a life. Fine—but now you can debate the true issue.

B. It is not about LABELS. Don’t let another dismiss your pro-life views because you are religious, or a political conservative. Ask politely, “Are you pro-choice?” Of course, only a religious nut wouldn’t be? “May I ask a question?” Sure. “Why do you favor allowing an unborn child’s life to be taken? Because it’s not a life; it is a fetus. “What makes you say it is not a life?”

C. It’s not about MOTIVES or PERSPECTIVE. An office mate might say, Of course you don’t support reproductive freedom; you are a cisgender, right-wing, woman-hating male. Ask politely, “Do you think a woman has the right to end the life of her two-week-old baby because the father left her and she’s been up three straight nights with a fussing baby?” Of course not. “But you support the right of a mother to take that baby’s life three weeks earlier, while in utero?” Yes. “What is it about the baby OUTSIDE the womb that makes it more human than when it was INSIDE the womb?”

D. It’s not about THE HARM DONE TO WOMEN WHO HAVE ABORTIONS. This is okay to mention; but it is not a sound argument. Trying to persuade someone who is pro-abortion using this argument may backfire. It opens the door to the rejoinder, “I know MORE women who are glad they had abortions than those who regret them. Focus questions on the issue: Is the child in the womb a human?

E. It is not about MORAL NEUTRALITY. Suppose you hear, It’s the woman’s right to choose, not the government’s. It’s HER body. The abortion decision should be between a woman and her doctor. You might respond, “Suppose its 1860 and you and your doctor decide it would be to your benefit to force your slaves to do more labor for you? Should we be MORALLY NEUTRAL about that?” That’s different. “How so?” Slaves were human beings. A fetus is not. “What makes you think a human embryo is not a human?”

Recognize Arguments that ASSUME an Unborn Child is Not Human

The most common arguments for abortion violate sound reason through what is called “begging the question.” This argument never proves the premise but just assumes it. Here are examples from The Case for Life, with a possible response:

Anti-choicers don’t trust women to make their own personal choices: If parents want to abuse their toddlers in the privacy of their bedroom should society trust them to make their own personal choices?
Anti-choicers want to force poor women to bring another child into this world. When human beings get expensive, may we kill them? Can a parent with 10 kids kill the youngest one to help balance the checkbook?
Restricting abortion is unfair to poor women who, unlike rich women, can’t afford to travel to places where abortion is legal. Since when is equal opportunity to kill an innocent human being a good thing? The rich can afford to hire assassins; the poor can’t. Should we legalize hiring hit men?
Abortion is needed to prevent child abuse. Should we also kill two-year-old victims of abuse to prevent their getting abused again at age five?
Abortion prevents unwanted children. The homeless are unwanted; may we kill them?
Laws against abortion impose morality. Can’t we say the same thing about laws that prevent killing toddlers?

Many people who surround you and parrot anti-abortion arguments simply ASSUME that the unborn are not human beings. Don’t let them get away with that. Here is a secret from Klusendorf, “Whenever you hear an argument for abortion, stop and ask this question: Would this justification for killing the unborn work for killing a toddler? If not, your critic is assuming the unborn are not human.”

EAVESDROPPING ON A REAL DEBATE

Scott Klusendorf vs Nadine Strossen, former President ACLU at Malone University

“Abortion: Is the Legal Right a Moral Wrong”

“As she often does, Nadine opened with an appeal to reproductive freedom. To paraphrase her case, reproductive freedom means the ability to choose whether or not to have children according to one’s own personal religious beliefs. That freedom is necessary if all people are to live lives of self-determination, opportunity, and human dignity. She repeatedly stressed our need to work together to reduce the high number of abortions, by which she meant pro-lifers should support tax-funded birth control programs. Notice the question-begging nature of her claims. She simply assumes that the unborn are not human beings. Would she make this same claim for human freedom and self-determination if the debate were about killing toddlers instead of fetuses?" Klusendorf spoke:

"Men and women. I agree completely with everything Nadine just said. She is right that abortion is a personal, private matter that should not be restricted in any way. She’s right that we shouldn’t interfere with personal choices. She’s right that pro-lifers should stay out of this decision. Yes, I agree completely….if. If what? If the unborn are not human beings. And if Nadine can demonstrate that the unborn are not members of the human family, I will concede that you win, and so should everyone else who is pro-life."

"Contrary to what some may think, the issue that divides Nadine and me is not that she is pro-choice and I am anti-choice. Truth is that I am vigorously pro-choice when it comes to women choosing a number of moral goods. I support a woman’s right to choose her own health care provider, to choose her own school, to choose her own husband, to choose her own job, to choose her own religion, and to choose her own career, to name a few. These are among the many choices that I fully support for the women of our country."

"But some choices are wrong, like killing innocent human beings simply because they are in the way and cannot defend themselves. No, we shouldn’t be allowed to choose that. So, again the issue that separates Nadine and me is not that she is prochoice and I am anti-choice. The issue that divides us is just one question: What is the unborn? Let me be clear: if the unborn is a human being, killing him or her to benefit others is a serious moral wrong. It treats the distinct human being, with his or her own inherent moral worth as nothing more than a disposable instrument. Conversely, if the unborn are not human, killing them through elective abortion requires no more justification than having your tooth pulled" (Ibid).

Looking back, Klusendorf explains, "In short, I was willing to buy her argument for freedom and self-determination—but only if she could demonstrate that the unborn are not human beings. I then argued scientifically, that the unborn are distinct, living, and whole human beings. Framing the exchange around the status of the unborn set the tone for the entire evening, and it allowed me to ask good questions later in the debate. For example, during cross-examination, I asked Nadine why the high number of abortions troubled her. After all if abortion does not intentionally take the life of a defenseless human being, why worry about reducing it” (Ibid).

The assault by the demonic host upon human life, those who bear the image of God, is multifaceted and relentless. May the men of Christ’s church stand up and fight wisely for truth, letting our light shine on the portion of the world God has assigned us to influence. May we stay focused on the issue:

Premise 1: It is wrong to intentionally kill an innocent human being.

Premise 2: Abortion intentionally kills an innocent human being.

Therefore,

Conclusion: Abortion is morally wrong.

For Further Prayerful Thought:

How would you summarize the scientific evidence from Embryology that life begins at conception?
What do you think of the statement, “The most important support for life beginning with conception is that the human embryo is a distinct, living, unique, whole member of the human species, fully capable of directing its development into maturity, regardless of its size, stage of development or location.”
Which are the most common pro-abortion arguments that you hear. You might want to take a moment and think through how you can winsomely challenge that view just by asking a few questions—especially questions directing your friend to explain why the unborn are not human.

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Falsehood—Biblical Patriarchy Breeds Toxic Masculinity

On 09 March, 2024 By Gary Yagel

If you happen to believe that God created man and woman differently with different roles in the home and church to complete what is lacking in the other (called complementarianism) there is a chorus of voices blaming you for the toxic masculinity of our culture. Here are a few of these voices:

“At its core complementarian theology is one of inequality and hierarchy. And inequality breeds abuse” (Huffington Post).
“We can no longer deny a link between complementarianism and abuse” (The Making of Biblical Womanhood).
The theology of male headship “feeds the rape culture that we see permeating American Christianity today” (cofounder #ChurchToo).
“Because complementarian theology promotes a power differential between men and women, it fosters the sort of abuse of power that devolves into sexual abuse” (Huffington Post).
Complementarian theology “is a breeding ground for abusive marriages.” The problem is not the occasional “rotten apple” but a “rotten theological tree” giving rise to sexism and misogyny (Religion Dispatches).
Male headship theology makes abuse both more possible and more likely. Power differences between equals are emotionally, physically, sexually, and spiritually destructive (Christians for Biblical Equality). (Source: Nancy Pearcey, The Toxic War on Masculinity).

Sadly, these views are causing many in the rising generation of kids raised in the church to jettison their faith to embrace agnosticism or the heretical tenets of Progressive Christianity. This episode shows how the argument that biblical patriarchy breeds toxic masculinity is a complete fiction.

FALSE FOUNDATIONS BENEATH ACCUSATIONS THAT BIBLICAL PATRIARCHY IS TOXIC

Foundation #1: Egalitarianism

It is important not to confuse egalitarianism with believing in the equality of men and women. Complementarians believe in the equality of women. Egalitarianism specifically denies gender role distinctions; male and female are interchangeable.

1. Egalitarian teaching denies the authority of Scripture.

Genesis 2 tells us that Eve was created to be a helper fit for Adam; Adam is not created to be a helper fit for Eve. Their roles are NOT interchangeable.
Galatians 3:28, which says there is no male and female cannot be used as evidence that Christianity erases gender roles, since the one penning these words also commanded wives to submit to their husbands. This verse just stresses what God made clear in Genesis 1—that women are fully equal to men in worth as God’s image bearers, in our call to the cultural mandate, and in status as full members of the Body of Christ.
1 Timothy 2:12: I do not permit a woman to teach or to exercise authority over a man. Both the word used here for teach and the context imply that what is in view is the authoritative teaching of the Word of God, which corresponds to the preaching role today. So, Paul teaches that pastors and elders are to be male.
Even if this were not explicitly stated, it would be clear from Paul’s requirements for elder/overseers to be husbands of one wife (I Tim 3:2). Paul did not add “or the wife of one husband.”
It would also be clear from Paul’s description of the church as the household of faith (Gal 6:10). Under the Old Covenant and in the New Covenant, men were always assigned the role of leading their family household.
Egalitarianism flatly contradicts Paul’s words in Ephesians 5:22-23: Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife even as Christ is the head of the church. If husband and wife roles are interchangeable, egalitarianism requires changing this verse to read “Husbands submit to your own wives as the Lord submits to you. For the wife is the head of the husband even as the church is the head of Christ.

2. Egalitarian teaching is rooted in a false premise: subordination = inferiority.

Complementarian opponent, Jeremy Bouma writes: “Proponents of gender-based hierarchy don’t believe ontological equality of men and women leads to functional equality; equality of being does not lead to an equality of roles.” He assumes that equality in value means that there can be no differences in roles. Submission of a wife to her husband’s leadership, in his view must mean that, by definition, she is inferior. But, in fact, this assumption is completely false; it does not conform at all to reality. Does a citizen submitting to a police officer mean that he believes he is inferior to the police officer? Does an athlete submitting to her coach mean she is an inferior human being to the coach? Does anyone actually believe that a child submitting to his parent implies that the child is a human being without as much intrinsic worth and dignity as the parent? God, the Son is fully equal to God the Father in every single way. But for the purpose of salvation, he submitted to the Father’s will. The truth that submission does not mean inferiority was settled once and for all by Jesus Christ.

3. Egalitarian teaching is rooted in another false premise: authority is inherently oppressive. Jesus sacrificed his life for us and now rules over us as our lord. That is LOVE, not OPPRESSION. Adam, the first husband, is assigned to cause his family in the garden to flourish. The essence of masculine leadership is serving others—dying to ourselves—so that others prosper. The writer whose words I read earlier, who said, “male headship feeds the rape culture” must have never read Jesus’ words. You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great ones exercise authority over them. It shall not be so among you. But whoever would be great among you must be your servant (Mt 20:25-28).

Egalitarianism rests on the fatal logical flaw that the authority structure itself is the problem; but we know better. The cause of toxic masculinity is human sin. The Danvers Statement defining complementarianism says, The Fall introduced distortions into the relationships between men and women. In the home, the husband’s loving, humble headship tends to be replaced by domination or passivity; the wife’s intelligent, willing submission tends to be replaced by usurpation or servility. Notice how well this statement matches reality. Sin causes LEADERS to abuse their authority or refuse to take responsibility for leading. It causes FOLLOWERS to either rebel against authority or be mindlessly, submissive, which is not true loyalty to a leader.

Foundation # 2: Critical Theory

Critical Theory is a false worldview through which cultural Marxists explain and confront power structures. Shenvi and Sawyer in their 2023 book, Critical Dilemma, trace critical theory back to Neo-Marxist, Antonia Gramsci. They write,

“Like many early twentieth century Marxists, Gramsci wrestled with why decades had passed since Marx’s writings and yet, so few communist revolutions had taken place. He concluded that the key obstacle to communist revolution was the hegemony of the ruling class. Gramsci used hegemony to refer to the way the ruling classes' values, norms, and ideologies had fused with culture and were then used to justify the economic, political, and social dominance of the bourgeois.

Following Marx’s social binary of dividing society into the working class and evil business owners, critical theory divides society into two groups—those who have power and those who don’t. Just as Marx argued that business owners always ECONOMICALLY OPPRESS workers, Gramsci argued that those holding cultural power always CULTURALLY OPPRESS minorities. Membership in categories of race, gender, religion, immigration status, income, sexual orientation, and gender identity determine whether we are oppressed or one of the oppressors. Someone could be part of the oppressed group in one way, but one of the oppressors in another way, which is where intersectionality comes from. Intersectionality measures someone’s level of oppression, based on how many of these oppressed groups they identify with. Let’s examine four false premises of critical theory.

A. False Premise # 1: The best way to understand humanity is through the oppressor/oppressed lens. Let’s be clear, God condemns real injustice and recognizes that the marginalized—widows, orphans, aliens, the poor are most likely to be oppressed. God clearly condemns the sin of partiality (Jam 2:1-7). But we are warned specifically not to be partial towards the poor as critical theory is. You shall not be partial to the poor or defer to the great, but in righteousness shall you judge your neighbor (Lev 19:15). Notice here, that the biblical binary is not one’s socio-economic class, but whether one walks righteously or unrighteously. That is found all through Scripture. Here are a few examples.

From the beginning of time those who obeyed God’s Word not to eat of the fruit would experience life in contrast to those who disobeyed God’s Word, who would receive death.
Psalm 1 closes, summarizing mankind: “Therefore the wicked will not stand in the judgment, nor sinners in the congregation of the righteous; for the Lord knows the way of the righteous, but the way of the wicked will perish.”
Romans 13 explains the state dividing citizens into two categories: “For rulers are not a terror to good conduct, but to bad. Would you have no fear of the one who is in authority? Then do what is good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for he does not bear the sword in vain.”

Critical theory undermines the basic moral delineation of God in the universe between holiness and evil, righteousness and unrighteousness. Its division into oppressors and oppressed is also so absurd that its view of intersectionality would label Abraham Lincoln a vile racist. He was a white, cisgender, heterosexual, male, protestant. Never mind that he gave his life to stop racist slavery in the south.

B. False Premise # 2: Critical theory has a false view of the origin of truth. It says that the more categories of oppression someone identifies with, the more weight his or her truth claims should carry, whether or not such words correspond to reality.

As Carl Truman has pointed out, critical theory is rooted in the modern triumph of the self—the absurd notion that we can determine our own truth. Rosaria Butterfield heard this argument in a confrontation with a student who accused her of using hate speech because she said that her female friend’s “large hands” had covered hers. Butterfield answered, “Jill stands six foot two without heels. I’m five two. My hands barely cover an octave on the piano. Compared to mine, Jill’s hands are large.” The student quipped, “Trans women are hurt by such insensitive comparisons to bio women. It’s hateful.” Butterfield responded, “But the size of Jill’s hands is measurable, objective truth.” The student answered, “Who cares about your truth? Your truth isn’t my truth. Your truth hates my reality." (Five Lies of Our Anti-Christian Age).

Humans have an amazing ability to deny that absolute truth exists when it comes to our moral accountability to God. But in the rest of our lives we know that absolute, objective truth matters; ignoring it may cause us to end up dead. Probably everything else Butterfield’s student did that day depended on truth being absolute—driving through a green light that required confidence in an objective truth—that the drivers on her right and left were going to stop for their redlight, and taking her cough medicine because she believed the label, Robitussin was objectively true, and she was not drinking strychnine. Humans don't make truth; we discover it or suppress it.

C. False Premise # 3: True justice means eliminating inequality. VP Kamala Harris advocates this view:

“Theres a big difference between equity and equality. Equality suggests ‘O everybody should get the same amount’ The problem with that: not everybody’s starting out from the same place." The accompanying animation shows two men climbing a mountain. The White man starts at ground level in reach of a rope dangling from the mountain’s peak. But the Black man starts in a ditch from which he can’t reach a rope. Harris then contrasts equality with equity stating that equity “is about giving people the resources and support they need so that everyone can be on equal footing and then compete on equal footing” (Shenvi and Sawyer, Critical Dilema).

Critical theory does challenge Christians to greater empathy for those who are poor or marginalized and to remember that Scripture requires Christians to protect the disenfranchised from oppression by the powerful. But critical theory’s understanding of justice is not only FALSE, it is EVIL. Critical theory changes the concept of equal (equal opportunity) to equity (equal outcomes.) This is the same evil foundation beneath Karl Marx’s belief that income inequality is unjust. To say that justice gives the right to demand equal outcomes takes zero account of all the other factors that impact outcomes. The chief obstacle to Christians accepting this view of justice is the Bible. Unjust treatment is only one of many factors that Scripture says have negative life outcomes. There are many, many others! Consider, as an example, just these negative outcome causes from Proverbs:

Prov 1:10ff My son, if sinners entice you, do not consent. If they say, “Come with us, let us ambush the innocent without reason”…..these men lie in wait for their own blood; they set an ambush for their own lives. Such are the ways of everyone who is greedy for unjust gain.
Prov 10:8 The wise of heart will receive commandments, but a babbling fool will come to ruin.
Prov 13:3 Whoever guards his mouth preserves his life; he who opens wide his lips comes to ruin.
Prov 6:9-11 How long will you lie there, O sluggard? When will you arise from your sleep? A little slumber, a little folding of the hands to rest, and poverty will come upon you like a robber, and want like an armed man.
Prov 13:15 The way of the treacherous is their ruin.
Prov 19:3 When a man's folly brings his way to ruin, his heart rages against the Lord.
Prov 19:15 Slothfulness casts into a deep sleep, and an idle person will suffer hunger.
Prov 21:5 The plans of the diligent lead surely to abundance, but everyone who is hasty comes only to poverty.
Prov 24:21 My son, fear the Lord and the king, and do not join with those who do otherwise, for disaster will arise suddenly from them, and who knows the ruin that will come from them both?
Prov 28:19 Whoever works his land will have plenty of bread, but he who follows worthless pursuits will have plenty of poverty.
Prov 21:12 The Righteous One observes the house of the wicked; he throws the wicked down to ruin.

4. False Premise # 4 Critical theory provides an unjustifiable excuse for insurrection. This is dangerous. Its false divisions of citizens into the minority and oppressor classes, combined with its evil replacement of equality with equity provides the political right of the oppressed to violently overthrow the ruling class. We saw this aspect of critical theory on display in the burning of many properties in our cities in 2020. Insurrection has always accompanied Marxism. In the twentieth century, Marxist regimes, playing upon idealistic young adults' delusions, slaughtered nearly one hundred million land and business owners in Cuba, Venezuela, Cambodia, the Soviet Union, and China.

So, we have overwhelmingly refuted the false foundations upon which the accusation that biblical patriarchy breeds toxic masculinity rests—egalitarianism and critical theory. Now we refute this claim with the sheer facts:

THE FACTS ABOUT THE ANCIENT WORLD & TODAY

The word patriarchy is used positively by many Christians to describe the principle that God established the husband as the head of the family under the Old and New Covenants and that the legal right to property came through the male line. In recent years, the term patriarchy has come to be used in its literal sense, PATER = father, ARCHE = rule, and associated with the oppressive abuse of authority. There is ambiguity and confusion about the word; but there is no ambiguity about the historic practices. In Roman households the father and husband had "Patria potestas” absolute power to rule. When his child was born, if he gave a thumbs up, the child was kept. If the father’s response was thumbs down, the child was immediately taken out and drowned. That is oppressive patriarchy. That is literal FATHER RULE.

In contrast, OT Israel practiced the rule of law. Leviticus 19:18 summarized the law to which Israelite men were bound: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. We’re not sure how the moral law was enforced in Israel, but the most common structure was accountability to the town elders. In no case was a Hebrew father a law to himself and able to abuse his wife or child. The NT church never practiced Roman oppressive patriarch, by like the OT covenant community practiced the rule of law. Husbands were held to an even higher standard by the elders of the church, to love their wives as Christ loved the church and gave himself for her. This kind of loving treatment of their families by men who believed God wanted them to lead their homes has continued to this day. Nancy Pearcey, in her new book, The Toxic War on Masculinity, reveals objective data that show that the most loving, caring husbands of any subgroup in America today, are devout men who hold to biblical views, like the fact that they should lead their homes.

“Many people assume that the most theologically conservative men are patriarchal and domineering. But sociological studies have refuted that negative stereotype. Compared to secular men, devout Christian family men who attend church regularly are more loving to their wives and more emotionally engaged with their children than any other group in America. They are the least likely to divorce and they have the lowest level of domestic abuse and violence.”

For Further Prayerful Thought:

What would you say to another Christian who told you that you needed to understand that the NT does away with roles and says there is no longer any male or female?
How would you respond to a Christian who said that he thought the oppressor/oppressed lens of critical theory was a good lens through which to look at life and history?
Why can justice never be defined as identical outcomes? What are some of the biblical “outcome causes” that lead to poverty or ruin? How can we rightly define “justice” but still compassionately recognize that a child born in the city to a crack mom with no father starts at a different place than an upper middle-class kid whose parents are together and love him well?

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Falsehood—Homosexual Orientation is Normal for Some People

On 02 March, 2024 By Gary Yagel

At this cultural moment, the rising generation of Christian young adults is deconverting from biblical Christianity into atheism or Progressive Christianity at alarming rates. Researchers have discovered that those leaving the faith are not only doubting whether Christianity is TRUE but whether Christianity is GOOD. Professor Thaddeus Williams observes,

“If I were raised deep in the Amazon jungles, and suddenly dropped in the middle of Los Angeles and handed a smart phone and a Twitter account, I’d draw some clear conclusions about Christianity—namely Christians are bigots, phobics, and haters. This is a common caricature of Christianity (Before You Lose Your Faith).

In today’s world, the biblical view of homosexuality is assumed to be outdated, archaic, and oppressive of “sexual minorities” namely the members of the LGBTQ+ community. Many of those who claim to be Christians have abandoned confidence in Scripture’s teaching about gender roles and homosexuality, while still others, attempting to stand on biblical truth come across as intolerant and hateful. How do WE get this balance right? And how do we help OUR KIDS—the generation that will be shaping the future get it right? That is our goal in this episode.

I want to begin with the true story of a 15-year-old who came to the conclusion that he was gay. His story began with his friendship with his high school music teacher:

“Here was a man different from Dad or my brothers—he was gentle, soft-spoken, and warm towards me. He invited me into conversation. He told me of his world of teaching, ballet, music, and artist friends. I told him about my family, thoughts, hurts, and fears. He listened and encouraged me to confide in him. On a snowy evening, he escorted me to the Academy of Music to see Swan Lake. I was so excited. I had never been to the theater…After the ballet, my teacher called my parents and suggested that I stay with him for the night since the roads were unsafe. They agreed, not suspecting that he would unleash his lust on their son before dawn. He did. Sunrise witnessed my tear-stained face attempting to resume its self-protective mask of stoicism as my teacher cautioned me to keep our secret. He explained to me the “truth” that I was gay like him. He promised to help me but said I needed to keep our special relationship under cover. I didn’t believe I had a choice.” (David Longrace, But Such Were Some of You).

CHRISTIANS MUST BE WELCOMING

A. I begin with Rick’s story because in addressing homosexuality we must begin with mercy and compassion. Many homosexuals were raped as children. Even if they weren’t, our response to one whose sexuality is broken must be sorrow. Jesus’ compassion for sexual strugglers is modeled at the well of Samaria. Jesus, wearied as he was from his journey, was sitting beside the well. It was about the sixth hour. A woman from Samaria came to draw water. Jesus said to her, “Give me a drink.” The Samaritan woman said to him, “How is it that you, a Jew, ask for a drink from me, a woman of Samaria?” (John 4:5-9).

In just these few verses, Jesus models a welcoming paradigm for every Christian to follow who has a gay or transgender relative, friend, or work associate. It is an example our children need to see in us. Note what Jesus’ welcoming attitude did not do: immediately express his disapproval of her lifestyle. Some confused Christians seem to feel an urgency to express their disagreement with a gay friend or relative’s lifestyle, before he has gotten to know anything else about him. That was the opposite of Jesus’ approach. Instead, he first takes three steps to affirm the woman’s value. These steps open her heart to discuss spiritual things:

Jesus went out of his way to go into her world. When any reputable Jew traveled from Judea north to Galilee, he would go around the Samaritans who were considered unclean idolaters, just below dogs on the social status scale. But Jesus affirmed the worth of the Samaritan woman and her culture by walking among them. He didn’t stay in Jerusalem demanding that they clean up their act before he would speak to them. In fact, the incarnation of Christ is the very picture of holiness coming down to and bringing God’s love to the morally broken. Instead of treating homosexuals and the transgendered like lepers, we need to take the first step toward friendship with them.
Jesus took the initiative to speak to her. Instead of disrespecting her by ignoring her, Jesus’ asks, “Will you give me a drink?” To dignify her by speaking to her was radically countercultural. No self-respecting rabbi would ever speak to a woman in public, much less a Samaritan, and one living in sexual sin. Scorned by the other women, she came to the well in the heat of the day alone. But Jesus speaks to her. He doesn’t avert his eyes and look away. He doesn’t condemn her. Jesus overcomes social stereotypes and treats her with a level of dignity she probably had never experienced.
Jesus overwhelmed her with acceptance. More astonishing than the fact that Jesus spoke to her was what he said. He asked to drink from her cup. According to the tradition of the Jews, drinking from the cup of a Gentile would make Jesus ceremonially unclean. Jesus’ request sent her a message: she was clean enough for holiness itself to put his lips to her cup. Jesus did not push her away; he welcomed her into friendship with him. After Jesus opened her heart this way, he could address her sin.

B. Jesus refused to stigmatize her because she was sexually broken. Jesus did not put her into a special category called “sexual sinners” as if adulterers, fornicators, and homosexuals were bottom-rung sinners, lower than everyone else. When he confronted her sin and she repented, he welcomed her into the family of God. In fact, the rest of John 4 says that her conversion story led to a great gospel harvest.

In today’s church most same-sex-attracted teens know they will be stigmatized if they share this struggle in their youth group. Internally such teens are filled with questions like: Why do I feel attraction toward others of the same sex? How do I reconcile my same-sex attraction with my Christian faith? Why doesn’t God answer my prayers to take same-sex attraction away? If such a teen does not feel that he has a safe place in the Body of Christ to discuss such questions because homosexual sin is stigmatized, research shows that he will likely turn to the “I’m gay” identity script offered by the LGBTQ movement and feel like he belongs with those in the LGBTQ life instead of with Christians. The LGBTQ identity script reads:

Your attractions reside at the core of your identity, your sense of self.
If you are gay, it makes sense to follow through and act on what you feel. because you are expressing and enjoying who you are.
You are born gay—it’s just a matter of discovering this about yourself.
If you have same-sex attractions but don’t identify as gay, then you are in denial or not yet ready to be honest with yourself about who you are.

It is critical that Christians not stigmatize those whose sin nature produces same-sex desire. However, this refusal to stigmatize has led many too far the other way.

THE DANGER OF OVER-EMPATHIZING

While Christians are to try to understand what it is like to struggle with sinful same-sex desire, an over-emphasis on empathy harms the one we are seeking to understand. Rosaria Butterfield, in her book, The Five Lies of Our Anti-Christian Age, points to the way that in our culture empathy has mistakenly been elevated to the highest form of love. She observes, “Empathy means standing in someone else’s shoes. In a world where kindness is the most important virtue, empathy is the highest manifestation of this love.” But empathizing is NOT the highest form of love. If you see a person drowning, you can empathize with the drowning victim all day; but love pulls the victim out of the water. Similarly, when your daughter comes home from college claiming that she is a male in a woman’s body, the LGBTQ+ propaganda says your highest moral virtue is empathy, trying to understand how she feels and not making her FEEL WORSE. But love recognizes the truth: something is terribly wrong with your daughter.

Elevating empathy as the highest virtue, instead of love, which the Biblical worldview does, goes hand in hand with critical theory which divides humanity into oppressors and victims because we empathize with victims. Who wants to empathize with a murderer, thief, or rapist? The folly of over-emphasizing empathy is also seen in the parent who doesn’t want to hurt a child or make him feel bad by correcting him. But Proverbs 13:24 says, Whoever spares the rod hates his son, but he who loves him is diligent to discipline him. The TRUTH is that allowing a child’s wrong behavior go unpunished teaches him that he can violated God’s moral order and succeed—steering him down the path of destruction. Empathy without truth is never love. Scripture tells us, “Love does not rejoice at wrongdoing but rejoices in the truth” (1 Cor 13:6). I believe that over-empathizing with those in the LGBTQ+ community has led some to abandon the truth of Scripture about homosexuality. Rosaria Butterfield summarizes their beliefs:

THE FALSE TEACHING OF GAY CHRISTIANITY

“A movement began in 2002 that helped support the lie that homosexual orientation is a God-blessed category of humanity. That movement gave moral credence to homosexuality by making the claim that the Bible condones—indeed, even blesses—homosexual sin, either at the level of practice (dubbed “Side A” Gay Christianity), or at the level of identity (dubbed “Side B” Gay Christianity). The Gay Christian movement—Side A or Side B—presents a false religion, a different religion from biblical Christianity….Without the evangelical endorsement of Gay Christianity, we would not be in the confusing mess that we are in today.” (Ibid).

Side A Gay “Christianity” really began back in the 1970’s when Second Wave Feminism caused some evangelical leaders discomfort with Paul’s teaching that only men were to lead the church. They rationalized away Paul’s words, I do not permit a woman to teach or be in a position of authority over men, by saying Paul’s teaching on gender roles was cultural. Next, they became full egalitarians, rationalizing away God’s teaching, The husband is the head of the wife even as Christ is the head of the church. Now, Side A Gay Christians rationalize away Scripture’s clear teaching about homosexuality, saying that the Bible reflects uninformed cultural biases about sexuality. There is no limit to the human ability to suppress the truth of God in order to justify sin or to be loved by the world. Never mind the clarity of verses like Leviticus 20:13, If a man lies with a male as with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination; they shall surely be put to death.

Side B Gay Christianity is more troubling because it is held by those who claim to believe in the inerrancy of the Bible. It does correctly recognize that homosexual practice is sin; yet it embraces an unbiblical category of homosexual identity. This view is rooted in the unbiblical concept of sexual orientation, which produces an unbiblical view of the identity of Christians who experience same-sex desire.

A. The anti-biblical term sexual orientation is a man-made theory that WHO YOU ARE is determined by the object of your sexual desire. It is rooted in Darwin’s view of humans as merely biological organisms, and Freud’s understanding of sexuality to be at the core of human experience. John Money, who is considered the father of the transgender movement and was also proved to be a pedophile, intentionally changed the term sexual preference to sexual orientation, implying that one has no choice in the matter, one is simply directed a certain way from birth. What society and all other major religions, including Christianity, had taught was a moral choice—i.e. a decision to be sexually engaged with another, was now deemed an orientation, an organic drive over which you have no control. The impact of this change in language was massive: Consider how same-sex desire is now justified:

If it is an orientation, for God (or anyone) to say it is morally wrong is unfair.
If it is an orientation, which defines your very personhood, it is an assault upon your dignity for homosexual desire and behavior to be condemned.
If it is an orientation, your sexual minority status needs to be protected.

However, the TRUTH is that homosexual desire and practice are not a category of PERSONHOOD but a category of EVIL. Paul warns, Neither the sexually immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor men who practice homosexuality, nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God. And such were some of you. But you were washed, you were sanctified, sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus (1 Cor 6:9-11). Even if a person struggles with same-sex attraction from birth, the explanation is that we are born with a sin nature. Biblically, homosexual orientation is not a category of human personhood that needs to be valued but a sinful inclination that needs to be put to death. Put to death therefore what is earthly in you: sexual immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and covetousness (Col 3:5). Butterfield observes,

“You will not find the concept of sexual orientation in the Bible. Instead, the Bible mentions sexuality in the creation ordinance as a covenant between one man and one woman. Biblical sexuality is natural, God-blessed, and procreative. The goodness of heterosexuality is found in our unique and distinct biology as men and women and the procreative power God gives, while its holiness is found in the covenant of marriage. In contrast, homosexuality is unnatural, sinful, and barren.”

The anti-biblical categorization of same-sex sinful desire and practice as sexual orientation leads to further wrong thinking about one’s human identity.

B. Using the term gay Christian to describe the identify of Christians who struggle with the sin of same-sex attraction is wrong. Though Side B Gay Christians admit that gay sex is wrong, choosing to remain celibate, they heartily embrace homosexual orientation. They want to participate in gay culture (including gay PRIDE parades) and bring gay culture into the church. “Side B Gay Christianity redefines sin merely as sexual action and denies that sin acts with affections, feelings, attractions, and desires” (Ibid). Side B Gay Christians, like those involved in the Revoice movement, use this unbiblical categorization of personhood—one’s sexual orientation—to then over-empathize with humans who experience sinful same-sex attraction. But we are never called to empathize with sin; we are called to hate it. The true marks of repentance, sorrow for sin, grief over sin, abhorring sin, feeling shame over sin, don’t seem consistent with insisting that one’s identity is to be a gay Christian. What group of Christians who struggle with porn addition want their identity to be Porn-loving Christians?

The true identity of a same-sex attracted Christian is 1) being an image-bearer of God and 2) a forgiven child of God in the process of being made holy. It does not mean God will replace his homosexual desires with heterosexual desires, any more than God sets porn addicts completely free from sinful lust in this life. But it does mean learning to loathe his same-sex desire—not using it as a basis for one’s identify.

EXPLODING THE MYTH THAT HOMOSEXUAL RELATIONSHIPS ARE NORMAL

1. Sex has historically been seen as more than a bodily function; it is a MORAL CHOICE. Like most religions of the world, Christianity teaches that lust, adultery, polygamy, pedophilia, and homosexuality are wrong expressions of sexual desire. Same-sex attraction is like many wrong sexual attractions—to my neighbor’s wife, to my sister-in-law or to the idea of having multiple sex partners in an orgy.

2. Nature tells everyone that homosexual sex is a perversion. I hate to be crass, but sometimes the obvious needs to be stated. The female vagina was made to receive the male penis. Making love with your heterosexual partner makes the home where children are conceived a place where both mom and dad are present and in love. Homosexual sex places the penis in the part of the body intended to release excrement. This fact says everything.

3. Gay Marriage is Bad for Children. Sociologists have proven that both moms and dads are required for kids to flourish. From the way that they communicate, to how they play, to how they discipline, dad and mom offer distinct complementary benefits to children. Men don’t mother. Women don’t father. Kids need both.

4. The gay lifestyle is NOT just as normal and healthy as the heterosexual lifestyle. Monogamy is almost non-existent in gay relationships.

4.5 % of men currently in a homosexual relationship report being faithful. 75% of men in heterosexual relationships reported being faithful.
A study of the sexual profiles of 2,583 older homosexuals found that only 2.7 of those men reported having sex with only one partner.
Between 75 and 90 percent of lesbians report sexual activity with men as well as with women. Gay sex is NOT about MONOGAMY.
Homosexual practice is also loaded with disease. Gay and bisexual men make up about 2% of the population but account for 55% of HIV infections (A Practical Guide to Culture). Monkeypox, like AIDS, is spread by gay men having multiple partners.
In addition, the CDC found the following to be more prevalent among lesbian, gay, and bisexual students than heterosexual ones.

---Serious contemplation of suicide (42.8% compared to 14.8%).

---Suicide attempts (29.4% compared to 6.4%).

In view of the facts about homosexual practice, dissuading someone from pursuing the gay life is an act of love.

For Further Prayerful Thought:

What stood out to you about the way Jesus exhibited a welcoming attitude towards the woman at the well and refused to stigmatize her. How would you try to make the church a safe place for rising teens who experience same-sex attraction?
How would you explain to other Christians that the category sexual orientation is a false characterization of personhood? How does that perspective of the sin of homosexuality get in the way of one repenting over his or her same sex desires and practices?
If all Christians are sinners, which means some are guilty of the sin of same-sex desire, why is calling those who struggle with this particular sin, “Gay Christians,” wrong?
Which facts about the homosexual life stood out to you?

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Her Heart Needs Your Spiritual Leadership

On 22 February, 2024 By Gary Yagel

Let’s begin today’s episode by acknowledging that those whose loud voices shout that the Bible promotes oppressive patriarchy would be horrified to read its title: Her Heart Needs Your Spiritual Leadership. Tragically, feminist ideology and critical theory are rooted in the same evil rebellion against God’s perfect ordering of creation that was first found in the heart of Lucifer who said, I will ascend above the heights of the clouds, I will be like the Most High (Is 14:12-14). He tempted Eve with his own egalitarian poison: “Eat the fruit Eve, then you’ll decide for yourself what good and evil are. THEN YOU WILL BE LIKE GOD.”

In sharp contrast, Christians trust the goodness of God’s order for the home. The two leading NT apostles, writing with the very authority of God, both made a point of commanding Christian wives to honor God’s creation design of their husband’s leadership in the home. Paul commanded: Wives, submit to your own husband, as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife even as Christ is the head of the church, his body. (Eph 5:22-23). Peter commanded, Wives, be subject to your own husbands… for this is how the holy women who hoped in God used to adorn themselves, by submitting to their own husbands (1 Peter 3:1, 5). Though these verses should never be quoted by husbands demanding submission, men today need to have the guts to embrace this pattern of responsibility as the best possible design for their wives. To doubt God’s design is unbelief. To be apologetic for it is arrogance. Our wife is designed to need our leadership. But it must be the right kind of leadership. Steve Farrar, in his book, Point Man, describes this leadership:

"It means that you take the lead in your submission to Christ to such an extent that you become a model for your wife. A man’s willingness to serve his wife and meet her needs provides an environment and stimulus for her to respond in submission to his leadership. If she sees that kind of attitude in you, and sense that you are seeking to follow hard after Christ, it will be much easier for her to relax in your leadership in the home. I have yet to meet a woman whose husband provides this kind of leadership who has trouble with the idea of biblical submission."

Barbara Rosberg, coauthor of The Five Love Needs of Men and Women summarizes what a wife needs in a spiritual leader: "At the heart of spiritual intimacy lies trust. And from my own experience as well as the experience of countless women I’ve talked to, when it comes to spiritual matters, a woman needs to trust her husband in: his own walk with God, his support of her spiritual growth, his spiritual upbringing of the children, his decisions that affect the family, and his spiritual leadership in the home." She then shared her painful experience of life without her husband’s home leadership and how God got his attention about this failure:

“Gary was working and going to graduate school full time. He had very little time or energy left over for me or our two preschool daughters. I jumped in and provided the leadership—both emotional and spiritual—our family needed. But I sorely missed his presence in our lives. I longed for spiritual interaction with him, and I longed for him to be the spiritual leader in our home. One day, during the time that Gary was cramming for an exam, our five-year-old daughter, Sarah, burst into his study with a family portrait she had drawn. ‘Let me see your picture honey…ah that’s nice,’ he said absently. ‘I’ll hang it on the wall.’ Then he did a double-take. Sarah had drawn Mommy and Sarah and Missy and the dog, but there was no Daddy in the picture. ‘Honey, where’s your Daddy?’ Gary asked. ‘You’re at the library’ she replied nonchalantly. One picture drawn with green crayon was worth a thousand words I wanted to say to Gary about his absence. He finally found the courage to say, ‘Barb, is it too late for me to come home to take my place in this family?’ Gary finally recognized his self-absorbed focus.”

How easy it is for men to miss what our wives need as spiritual leaders who are engaged with them at home. Let’s look to Scripture for three components to the spiritual leadership that God has designed a wife’s heart to need.

A. SHE NEEDS YOUR WALK WITH JESUS TO FLOURISH

No man in his own strength can obey God’s primary command to husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her (Eph 5:25). The love with which a Christian husband is to love his wife is not just EROS—romantic love, nor PHILEO—friendship love. It is not even STORGE—the love of family. It is AGAPE—sacrificing what we want to instead meet the needs of our wife. Not only that, but Paul issues the mind-boggling challenge to love our brides the way Jesus loved his. If you are anything like I am, your response is, “What? Are you kidding? Doesn’t Paul realize that the sinful nature I fight every day wants to make my life about ME.” The biggest obstacle to giving our wives the regular agape love their hearts require is our radical self-centeredness. Notice how opposite self-absorption is to Paul’s classic description of agape love. Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful (1 Cor. 13:4-5). Any thoughtful marriage counselor will admit that at the root of marriage failure is self-centeredness. It may take the form of criticizing, selfishness, anger, resentment, verbal assault, insensitivity, withdrawal, or the simple failure to appreciate.

Masculine default selfishness is the reason my wife’s greatest need is for my relationship with Jesus to flourish. He is the vine. We are the branches. As the branch cannot bear fruit by itself, unless it abides in the vine, said Jesus, neither can you, unless you abide in me. Whoever abides in me and I in him bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing. (John 15:4-5). A close walk with Jesus (i.e. abiding in him) is the only way that our natural self-centeredness can be replaced by the fruit of the Spirit, love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, meekness (i.e. giving up our rights), and self-control. Let’s consider three requirements for the thriving relationship with Jesus our wives need us to have.

1. Abide in his love. Jesus said, As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Abide in my love. One of the most profound characteristics of masculinity is that we initiate love, and our bride responds. A woman seeks a man who will love her; a man seeks a woman to love. Jesus, our bridegroom left heaven to pursue us to draw us to himself with the cords of his love. Jesus loved us and gave himself for us when we were yet sinners; his love never depended upon what he got back from us. A careful look at Yahweh’s love for Israel reveals the same truth. It was not because you were more in number than any other people that the LORD SET HIS LOVE on you and chose you, for you were the fewest of all peoples, but it is BECAUSE THE LORD LOVES YOU (Dt 7:6-8). He loved you because …he loved you. In other words, God is the source of his love, not what his covenant people give back to him. Guys, masculine love is not dependent upon our wife’s response—how great our wives make us feel or how well they love us. It is not God’s design for ME to depend upon MY WIFE to fill my love tank. Masculine love initiates: it is a choice. It is a decision to give her love whether she deserves it or not. The source of the love I need in order to give it away is Christ. Abiding in Christ’s love fills my tank. We love, said John, because he first loved us (1 Jn 4:19). My ability to fill my bride’s tank with agape love depends upon first drinking huge gulps of Jesus’ unconditional love for me. The Prophet, Zephaniah, reminds us that God’s delight in us (despite our sin!) is like that of a bridegroom for his bride. He will rejoice over you with gladness; he will quiet you by his love; he will exult over you with loud singing (Zeph. 3:17). Dwelling on how much God not only loves me but enjoys me while also finding delight in him is the powerful process that renews our hearts. Our mission always begins with our call TO CHRIST to enjoy a love relationship with him. Nowhere in life is that principle truer than in loving our wives well.

2. Walk daily in the Spirit. Paul urges us, Walk by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh. For the desires of the flesh are against the Spirit, and the desires of the Spirit are against the flesh, for these are opposed to each other. Our sinful nature battles against the promptings of the Spirit, whose job it is to produce agape love. Walking in the Spirit requires time devoted to the Word of God. We all know we should read our Bibles, but this verse explains why. The tool, through which Jesus speaks to us by His Spirit, is the Word of God. That is one side of the communication that all vital, living relationships require. The other side is, of course, us speaking to Christ through prayer. If we would love our wives well, we are going to have to be intentional about 1) asking God, by his Spirit, to root out our self-centered nature and 2) asking for the help of the Holy Spirit to empower us to love her well. It is worth noting that Jesus singled out prayer for the help of the Holy Spirit as the kind of request the Father loves to answer. If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him! (Lk 11:13).

3. Be connected to brothers in the Body of Christ. The third path to a thriving relationship with Christ, which empowers godly manhood is identified by Stu Weber, who asks,

"How can a man learn to be a man, a husband, a father, a provider and protector—a full-orbed king, warrior, mentor, and friend? By walking with other men who are doing it. You learn to play ball by playing ball. And masculinity is a team sport. You and I, as men living in a tragically disoriented culture, need to experience the life-building of what Paul called a “brother, fellow-worker, and fellow-soldier.” It is time we heed the call of the High King to His High Communion. It is time God’s men come to his table in the round and, in the company of men, drink deeply of a fresh understanding of his kingdom and just what it takes to enjoy a man’s role in it." (Locking Arms).

A flourishing walk with Christ that keeps producing the agape love our wives need is only achieved, says Paul, by connection in the Body of Christ. Speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and held together by every joint with which it is equipped when each part is working properly, makes the body grow so that it builds itself up in love” (Eph. 4:15-16). So, abiding in Jesus’ love, walking in the Spirit, and brotherhood connection build a thriving, fruitful relationship with Christ.

B. SHE NEEDS YOUR FULL PARTNERSHIP ON THE HOME FRONT

Created to be her husband’s vital partner, a mother, and an awesome homemaker (as we saw last week) a wife naturally defaults to concern for the homefront, even if she spends much of her time away in the work world. She usually feels the weight of these responsibilities more than we do. Her radar detects things that need attention in her home and children that we miss entirely. To make matters worse, most men are good at their jobs (or they wouldn’t hold them for long), but don’t consider “husbanding” to be one of their strengths. The logical world of work makes sense to them. If you plug in A, you get the result, B. But their wives are far more complicated. Husbands plug in A because last time they got B. But this time the result is Q. It is exasperating trying to figure out how to love our wives well. Engaging WITH them on issues takes more work than just leaving a lot of decisions up to them. Since our wives are usually right in their assessment of homefront issues, husbands can delegate too much to their wives. We need to remember that God gave our wives to us as ASSISTANTS, not REPLACEMENTS.

A wife is not made to carry the heavy weight of concern for her family alone. When she carries too much responsibility, she begins to wear out. She becomes very, very, tired. Yet, she is wired so that she cannot ignore her home; she will suffer exhaustion and burn out before she will let the needs of her family go unmet. Barbara Rosberg explains what it was like when her husband Gary was AWOL from his spiritual leadership responsibility at home.

“To be honest, when Gary finally recognized his self-absorbed focus and began to make a change, it was difficult for me to change gears. I was exhausted, but I had been putting out fires for so long that I had a hard time thinking he was up to handling the job. Deep down, however, I knew our home was out of order, and I didn’t like it. I wanted my husband to be a vibrant leader in our family” (Ibid).

The apostle, Peter, seemed to know both that husbands can be so absorbed with their careers that they neglect the homefront and how much their wives suffer when they do. He wrote, Husbands, live with your wives in an understanding way, showing honor to the woman as the weaker vessel, since they are heirs with you of the grace of life (1 Pet. 3:7). As couples share life on the homefront, husbands are to shape this partnership in a way that reflects both the husband’s understanding of her weaknesses and respect for her strengths. Implied is that her husband is fully engaged with her at home so that he can pick up on home responsibilities for which he is better suited. Commentators agree that Peter’s description of the woman as the weaker vessel does not demean women. He recognizes that the vessel she dwells in, her outer physical body, doesn’t have the bulk physical strength that her husband’s body exhibits.

Peter observes that husbands and wives are heirs together of the grace of life. In other words, this is a full partnership. It is only as he is fully engaged as her partner at home that he can honor her by picking up on responsibilities that are harder for her than him. Being joint heirs of the grace of life also means stepping up and being the father that your kids need, involved with our kids. Being a full partner with her at home means being on the same page with your wife when it comes to disciplining the children, and not undermining her authority. It means demanding that your kids respect their mother.

The key to being fully engaged with your wife at home is the habit of asking questions like:

In what household tasks do you feel most alone?
What household projects would you most like me to complete?
In what other ways can I help you shoulder your load?
What family problems do you feel need to be addressed?
How are we doing in the discipline of the children? What needs to be improved?
What character training (discipleship) do you think needs to be our focus?

C. SHE NEEDS YOU TO GIVE HER SPIRITUAL STRENGTH

In Ephesians 5:25-27, God tells us that a husband has a vital role in and responsibility for his wife’s sanctification. Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, SO THAT he might present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish.

In order to understand this command to husbands, we need to realize that our Lord’s sacrifice of himself on the cross HAD A PURPOSE—to make us holy, without blemish, genuinely beautiful in the eyes of our holy God. Similarly, WE are to seek to help our wives grow more inwardly beautiful in the eyes of God—to become spiritually mature, more holy, more sanctified. The parallel does not apply to HOW our brides are sanctified. Jesus cleanses wives from their sins—not their husbands. But the parallel does apply with regards to THE GOAL, the end point. We are to be radically committed to our wives’ growth into spiritual beauty, i.e. holiness. As Peter tells wives, the only beauty that will last forever is the inner beauty of godly character. Let your adorning be the hidden person of the heart with the imperishable beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit, which in God's sight is very precious (1 Pet. 3:3). Every effort we make to help our wives overcome sin and become like Christ—i.e. grow in holiness—is an investment in her eternal beauty. What a staggering thought! Doing what we can to help our wives flourish spiritually matters eternally. We are investing in her eternal beauty!!

I believe that one day in eternity husbands will point to our wives, whose radiant inner beauty will overpower the stage with its magnificence, if we are faithful in making two spiritual investments in her inner beauty. Returning to Adam’s creation calling in Genesis 2, Adam is to sacrifice himself to help Eve reach her full spiritual potential of holiness (Hebrew: AVAD). And he is to protect her from spiritual harm (Hebrew: SHAMAR). Both of these are fulfilled on our knees.

On our prayer list should be the biblical characteristics of feminine beauty—asking God to produce this spiritual fruit through the power of the Holy Spirit. This is prayer for her to reach her full potential (AVAD). One such list is from Titus 2:3-5. Older women likewise are to be reverent in behavior, not slanderers or slaves to much wine. They are to teach what is good, and so train the young women to love their husbands and children, to be self-controlled, pure working at home, kind, and submissive to their own husbands.
The other category is spiritual protection for her (SHAMAR) by praying for her spiritual battles. Your faithful prayer will cause her to win battles she would otherwise lose. James 5:16 promises, The prayer of a righteous person is powerful and effective. Know and pray for her specific battles.

One of the most distinctive marks of loving spiritual leadership is fervent intercessory prayer for those we love. As Andrew Murray points out, “It is the very nature of love to give up and forget itself for the sake of others. It takes their needs and makes them its own. It finds real joy in living and dying for others as Christ did…true love will become in us the spirit of intercession…true love MUST pray” (Wesley Duewel, Mighty Prevailing Prayer).

For Further Prayerful Thought:

In one sentence how would you design the spiritual leadership a Christian wife’s heart yearns for?
How is the strength of your relationship with Christ related to the strength of your ability to love your wife and family well? What steps might you take to walk more closely with Jesus?
In what ways might you more fully share the weight of your wife’s concerns on the home front?
Is it overstating Paul’s teaching about your wife’s growth in holiness to say that in eternity a husband will celebrate how much he has enabled his wife to radiate eternal godly womanhood through his prayers for her character and for strength to resist her temptations?

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The Vital Calling to Protect Your Wife’s Self-Esteem

On 17 February, 2024 By Gary Yagel

On one occasion, a man accompanied his friend home for dinner and was impressed by the way his friend entered his house, asked his wife how her day went, and told her she looked pretty. After they ate, the husband complimented his wife on the meal and thanked her for it. When the two guys were alone, the visitor asked, “Why do you treat your wife so well?” “Because she deserves it and it makes our marriage happier,” replied the host. Impressed, the visitor decided to adopt the idea. Arriving home, he embraced his wife and exclaimed, “You look wonderful!” For good measure, he added, “Sweetheart, I’m the luckiest guy in the world.” His wife, amazed, burst into tears. Bewildered, he asked her, “What in the world is the matter?” She wept, “What a day! Billy fought at school. The refrigerator quit and spoiled the groceries. And now you come home drunk!”

We chuckle, yet sadly this joke represents a good many marriages. Instead of hearing refreshing words of praise and appreciation from their husbands, countless wives endure each day with parched souls and sad hearts. Being starved for words of affirmation, they feel worthless, unattractive, and unappreciated. This episode examines a biblical role of husbands that you may have thought little about—our job to protect our wife’s self-esteem. Life and self-doubt will eventually crush her sense of worth if we don’t keep binding up the wounds to her self-esteem, covering them with the salve of our reassuring words of affirmation.

Some years ago, Christian psychologist James Dobson noticed how common feelings of depression were in Christian wives and mothers. So, he conducted a survey asking them to identify which feminine problems cause them most frequently to feel depressed. On the list were loneliness, problems with the kids, lack of romantic love, sexual problems, financial difficulties, in-law conflict, and fatigue. But none of these topped the list. The leading cause of depression listed was low self-esteem. In fact, this topped the list of over fifty percent of the women interviewed. Dobson wrote:

“This finding is perfectly consistent with my own observations and expectations; even in seemingly healthy and happily married young women, personal inferiority and self-doubt cut the deepest and leave the most wicked scars. This same old nemesis is usually revealed within the first five minutes of a counseling session; feelings of inadequacy, lack of confidence, certainty of worthlessness have become a way of life, or too often a way of despair for millions of American women.” (What Wives Wish Their Husbands Knew About Women.)

Many wives find these feelings too personal to share even with their husbands. But Christian counselors, whose clientele is mostly wives, hear them often:

“It is wondering why you have no ‘real’ friends. It is longing for someone to talk to, soul to soul, but feeling that ‘they wouldn’t like me if they knew the real me.’ It is wondering why other people have so much more talent and ability than you do. It is feeling incredibly ugly and sexually unattractive. It is disliking everything about yourself and wishing you could be someone else. It is feeling unloved and unlovable and lonely and sad.” (Ibid).

Against this backdrop of feminine existence, we discover something that is startling in Scripture. God spells out that his design for a husband is to daily bind up the wounds to his wife’s tender self-esteem through covering her heart with the salve of praise. Proverbs 31 is not just about a virtuous woman but a godly man as well! Her husband rises up and calls her blessed. He praises her: Many women have done excellently, but you surpass them all (vs 28).

WHY THIS NEED OF IS SO CRITICAL FOR YOU TO MEET

A. You are the one who knows her the best—body and soul. The purpose of marriage is to enjoy such nakedness but still know that your mate loves you unconditionally, warts and all. Because you know all her flaws, you can communicate God’s great, merciful, lovingkindness better than anyone else. For you to regularly see her deficiencies and failures, but still cherish her is to pour Christ-like love into her heart, continually reassuring her through your words how precious and wanted she still is.

B. Life beats all of us down, including your wife. We all fail. We all feel inadequate at times. We all make mistakes. Since you are a part of her everyday life you see these blows to her self-image and are in a position to put the soothing salve of tender acceptance on their wounds when it is most needed. But it is even better to keep a constant flow of affirmation coming, which has an insulating effect in a world that is certain to bring blows to her self-image.

C. Your wife lives in a world that exalts youthful beauty and sexual attractiveness. Being beautiful and making her surroundings beautiful is at the core of God’s creation design of woman. She knows she is losing her beauty; age is stealing it. Wrinkles aren’t pretty. Sagging breasts don’t feel sexy. She may know you still love her. But she needs to feel attractive inwardly and outwardly. Feelings come and go, which is why she needs a steady diet of words valuing the inner beauty of her character that can never fade away.

D. She was created to complete YOU. Then the Lord God said, “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him.” Her God-designed identity is being YOUR suitable helper. She wants to look nice, smell nice and create a beautiful home FOR YOU. Because she was created to complete YOU, she needs to know that YOU value her many feminine virtues. If her role is to help you, your assurance that she is the perfect mate for you meets a profound need in her heart. Your words of appreciation may be the only paycheck she receives. How do you feel when you work for a boss who never verbalizes praise for your work?

HOW TO MEET A WIFE’S NEED FOR PRAISE

A. Understand that your most powerful set of muscles is not your quads—but those making up your tongue. Provers 18:21 says, Death and life are in the power of the tongue. James tells us that the tongue is so powerful, it can’t be tamed. For every kind of beast and bird, of reptile and sea creature, can be tamed and has been tamed by mankind, but no human being can tame the tongue. It is a restless evil, full of deadly poison. With it we bless our Lord and Father, and with it we curse people who are made in the likeness of God (3:7-9). It can powerfully tear down or powerfully build up.

B. Follow Scripture’s formula when you send verbal bullets tearing into your wife or child’s self-esteem. In a culture where the Pharisees were satisfied with their superficial righteousness, Jesus taught that kingdom restoration not only overthrows the practice of doing harm to another’s body but doing harm to another’s soul as well. “You have heard that it was said to those of old, ‘You shall not murder; and whoever murders will be liable to judgment.’ But I say to you that everyone who is angry with his brother will be liable to judgment; whoever insults his brother will be liable to the council; and whoever says, ‘You fool!’ will be liable to the hell of fire. So if you are offering your gift at the altar and there remember that your brother has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar and go. First be reconciled to your brother, and then come and offer your gift. Very simply, when our sharp, angry, or careless words wound her, we need to man up, grieve over the pain we have inflicted to a very raw and tender part of her self-esteem, and seek forgiveness. The pain of humbling ourselves, listening to God’s Spirit convict us to obey Matt 5:24 by asking, “Would you forgive me?” is the only pain I know that is severe enough to teach us to restrain our tongues in the future. (Even then they aren’t fully tamed).

C. Overcome your irritation with her shortcomings. Meeting your wife’s need to feel valuable won’t happen when you are feeling critical of her. Are there things about her that aren’t changing and really bother you? Do you wish she weren’t so critical of you? Are you bothered that she has put on weight that she won’t deal with? Do you tire of some of her annoying habits? Do you resent the fact that she is not more sexually inviting, finding yourself envious of husbands whose wives want and enjoy sex more than yours does? Do you feel like she is better at disrespecting you than respecting you as Scripture calls her to do?

Gary Smalley, in his book, If Only He Knew, provides invaluable help for husbands to transform their criticism of their wives by finding the positive side to their wife’s “negative” traits, (to which I’ve added a few of my own).

Negative Trait Positive Trait

1. Nosy She may be very alert or sociable.

2. Touchy She may be very sensitive.

3. Manipulating She may be resourceful with many creative ideas.

4. Stingy She may be very thrifty.

5. Talkative She may be very expressive and dramatic.

6. Flighty She may be naturally enthusiastic about new ideas.

7. Too serious She may be very sincere with strong convictions.

8. Insensitive She may be uncompromising in her convictions.

9. Rigid She may be a well-disciplined person with high standards.

10. Overbearing She may be a very confident person.

11. A dreamer She may be very creative and imaginative.

12. Too fussy She may be very organized and efficient.

13. Disorganized She may be easily distracted because she is a people-person.

14. Overspends She may love people wanting them to have the best.

15. Blunt She may be very discerning.

Before our heart is grateful enough to continually lavish our wives with praise, we may need to train ourselves to look for the strengths behind her weakness.

D. Practice gratefulness for her. Realize that meeting your wife’s need to feel valued begins in YOUR heart. Proverbs 18:22 says, He who finds a wife finds a good thing and obtains favor from the Lord. How grateful to God are you for your wife?

Here is the most accurate, scientific, objectively true assessment of your wife's value: She is far more precious than jewels. (Prov 31:10). Do you feel that way about her? You cannot meet her need for constant affirmation if you are not genuinely grateful to God for bringing her to you. She’s too smart. She will see right through an attempt to “be a good husband by saying nice words to her.” They must originate in your heart of gratefulness for her. Here is a practical way to train our hearts in gratefulness, based upon Psalm 100. Verse three says, “Enter his gates with thanksgiving.” I have applied this at times to praying for my family members, especially Sandy. As I enter into God’s courts, i.e. come into God’s presence to pray for her, I begin with thanking God for her, before interceding for her. It is amazing how this small habit can change us into more thankful people. I confess I need to get back to this habit. God’s command to his redeemed people is, Be thankful (Col 3:15). When we stop and think about it, has any earthly blessing enriched our lives more than the gift of our wife and mother of our children? Are we thanking God enough for the gift of one who GOD SAYS is more precious than jewels?

E. Employ “feminine beauty recognition” technology. Just as facial recognition technology identifies key components of a human facial profile and then uses that profile as a lens to later identify a person, lets identify key components of godly womanhood so our profile lens is set to spot such beauty when we see it in our wives. This profile, revealed in Proverbs 31:10ff is an acrostic; each verse begins with the next word of the Hebrew alphabet so that every young girl in Israel could memorize this profile of excellent womanhood. We need to learn these profile distinctives so our feminine beauty recognition program will click “match” when they appear in our wives’ behavior and attitudes. Here are some examples of the inner beauty profile with possible words of praise that match this profile.

Vs 12: The heart of her husband trusts in her, and he will have no lack of gain. She does him good, and not harm, all the days of her life. You’re so dependable. You do such a great job on follow-through. You’re such a great partner because I know I can count on you. I love having a partner I can trust to make wise decisions. Thanks for all the ways you love me by making our house a great home. Thanks for your emotional support; it helps me succeed in the rest of what God wants me to do. You add so much to my life! Thanks for serving me by…..

Vs 13, 18: She seeks wool and flax, and works with willing hands. She puts her hands to the distaff, and her hands hold the spindle. In her culture she was responsible for clothing her family. Instinctively her hands are busy taking care of other’s needs. Thanks for the way you devote yourself to taking care of the needs of our family. You do a fabulous job of thinking about the little things we need for everyday life. Thanks for stopping and picking that up at the store—I wouldn’t have even thought of it until it was too late. I’m proud of the way our kids are so well dressed when we go out in public.

Vs 14: She is like the ships of the merchant; she brings her food from afar. You are the best shopper I know. I can’t believe what a smart shopper you are. How did you get those for such an amazingly low price? Thanks for all the online work you put in to find such a good deal.

Vs 15: She rises while it is yet night and provides food for her household and portions for her maidens. I can’t believe how well you automatically think about what is needed for tomorrow. Thanks for all you do to plan the meals around here! That dinner was awesome; how did you make it taste so good?

Vs 16, 24: She considers a field and buys it; with the fruit of her hands she plants a vineyard. She makes linen garments and sells them; she delivers sashes to the merchant. She perceives that her merchandise is profitable. Clearly, she is engaged in business, enriching her family through her earnings. Honey, thanks for sharing the economic support of the family ALONG WITH EVERYTHING ELSE YOU DO FOR US. Your industriousness has made it possible for our whole family to enjoy so many nice things! Your skills are amazing; we could never reach our family’s financial goals without the awesome success of your business.

Vs 17: She dresses herself with strength and makes her arms strong. Her lamp does not go out at night. Your endurance when you are involved in a project to serve others is amazing. Your commitment to looking after our practical needs is so like Jesus; it really challenges me. I love the way you are always doing something with your hands to serve us, sorting laundry, knitting or something else, even late in the evening while relaxing.

Vs 20: She opens her hand to the poor and reaches out her hands to the needy. I’m so glad that you invited them over to our house. I love the way you are always thinking of others. You are so thoughtful; what a great way to love on them. I love your generous heart—always wanting to share with others our blessings.

Vs 21: She is not afraid of snow for her household, for all her household are clothed in scarlet. Honey, you are the best at planning ahead. You do such a great job of staying ahead of our needs; how do you do that? You always pick out such cute clothes for the kids.

Vs 25: Strength and dignity are her clothing, and she laughs at the time to come. Have I ever told you that I love your modesty and the elegant way you dress? Your jewelry with that outfit is awesome; it makes you even more beautiful. I respect the way you’ve been so patient with the way she’s treating you. Thanks that you have so much inner strength; I know I need a partner who can carry a lot of weight. Your refusal to worry about anything in the future, because of your faith, inspires me.

Vs 26: She opens her mouth with wisdom, and the teaching of kindness is on her tongue. You have so much to teach young wives and moms. Your life is such a model of kindness—focusing your eyes on what others need and providing that for them; I’m sure your example is having a great impact on others. You are so wise and discerning, I need your thoughts on this….

Please become familiar with this profile of virtuous femininity so that when your wife matches it—like facial rec software does—you notice it and then can lavish her with encouragement.

The power of encouraging words and notes of affirmation never ceases to amaze me. I think of a true story about a middle school math teacher who handed her students a list of the names of all the students in their class, and asked the students to each write the nicest thing they could say about each of their classmates. She then collected them, compiled them, and handed each student the list of positive things said about him or her. Several years later, one of those students, Mark Ekland, was killed in Vietnam. The math teacher and many of the students attended the funeral. At the luncheon afterwards, Mark’s father approached the math teacher and said, “They found this on Mark when he was killed. We thought you might recognize it.” He handed her two, folded, sheets of notebook paper that had been taped, folded, and refolded many times. It was the list of good things Mark’s classmates had written about him in eighth grade. Several of Mark’s classmates were standing nearby and overheard the conversation. One by one they began to reveal that each of them still carried his or her sheet of comments and read it often. Some carried it in a wallet; one had even put it in his wedding album. One young man said, “I think we all saved our list.”

“The power of life is in the tongue,” says God. The words we say to build up our wife’s self-esteem, when life has hammered it, bring LIFE. That muscle has enormous power to energize, empower, build up, and express reassuring love to our wife. May all of us commit today to thoroughly exercising that muscle!

For Further Prayerful Thought:

In your own words, describe the inner feelings of a wife who is suffering from low self-esteem.
In your view, what are the weightiest arguments for the husband being the primary means by which these inner feelings of inferiority are alleviated?
Of the five steps to praising our wives more, the first four had to do with getting our hearts to feel grateful for her. What insights did you gain that might help you better do that?
What steps do you need to take to program your “inner feminine beauty recognition” program to better recognize your wife matching the woman of virtue in Proverbs 31 and turn that recognition into words of praise?

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Romance That Awakens a Wife’s Heart

On 08 February, 2024 By Gary Yagel

If you are married, the founders of Family Life, Dennis and Barbara Rainey, have a command of God for you to consider: “In the Song of Solomon, God enters the bridal chamber, where the newlyweds lay entwined in each other’s arms. He raises his hand over them and blesses them. His benediction urges them to feast on the joy of their sexual union. ‘Eat friends: drink and imbibe deeply, O lovers.’” (Simply Romantic Nights.) God wants husbands and wives to drink deeply and frequently of the refreshing waters of their partner’s sexuality. But most of us, whose marriages have lasted beyond the honeymoon stage, have found that sustaining romantic and sexual passion has been a lot harder than we ever thought it would be, especially because our wives are NOT wired the way WE are. This episode looks for biblical clues to understanding how and why a woman’s view of romance and sex is so different than her husband’s.

Christian counselors Les and Leslie Parrott have discovered that both the quantity and quality of sex in marriage are central to a good overall relationship. “In one survey on the importance of sex for marriage, the results were compelling: Couples who rated their sex lives positively also rated their marriages positively, and those who rated their sex lives negatively, rated their marriages negatively as well. In other words, if coupes report that sex is unimportant to them, it is very likely that they view their entire marriage as unhappy. (Eight Little Things That Might Make a Big Difference in Your Marriage.)

Another Christian counselor, Dr. Kevin Leman, encourages couples,

“A fulfilling sex life is one of the most powerful marital glues a couple can have…The kind of sex I’m talking about takes a little work and a lot of forethought—but the dividends it pays are more than worth the effort. If your husband is sexually fulfilled, he’ll do anything for you. He’ll take a bullet, he’ll race a train, he’ll do whatever it takes to make sure you’re okay. And, men, if your wife knows that you view sex as a special gift to give her; if you can make her feel things she’s never felt before; and if you will learn to become a selfless, sensitive, and competent lover she’ll purr like a kitten and melt in your arms” (Sheet Music).

Last week, we noted from Genesis 2 that marriage is the joining of two LIVES—therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the joining of two BODIES—and they shall become one flesh. In the next verse, God discloses his purpose for marriage: And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed. Marriage is given as the one safe arena where husband and wife are naked, body and soul—laid bare and vulnerable to each other. God wants us to proactively pursue loving intimacy of heart through conversation and loving intimacy of body through sex. We know that the Bible condemns joining bodies without also joining lives in marriage (I Thes 4:3). But it also condemns joining lives in marriage without joining bodies in sex (1 Cor 7:3). Both are foundational for marriage.

Non-biblical influences have caused Christians at times to devalue sex. One woman put it, “Because I want to be godly, I can’t allow myself to be too earthly—and sex is definitely earthly. I allow myself to experience a little pleasure—but only so much. If I got really carried away it would be too fleshly” (Dillow and Pintus, Intimate Issues). Sadly, this woman’s attitude towards getting carried away is exactly the opposite of God’s! God says to husbands, Let her breasts fill you at all times with delight; be intoxicated always in her love. He commands godly men to regularly get drunk with their wives on sexual pleasure! In fact, fulfilling the sexual desires of your marriage partner is so important to God that he commands couples, The wife does not have authority over her own body, but the husband does. Likewise, the husband does not have authority over his own body, but the wife does. Do not deprive one another…so that Satan may not tempt you because of your lack of self-control. This text makes it every married Christian’s responsibility to make sure his or her partner’s sexual desires do not go unfulfilled.

Tragically, the church and Christian counselors have largely neglected this teaching. We observed last week that 83% of wives say their husbands don’t know how to meet their need for emotional intimacy. In a different study, the same percentage—83% of husbands said that their wives didn’t understand their need for sexual intimacy (Hart, The Sexual Man). Many wives build resentment towards their husbands because “men only one want thing: sex.” Equally resentful, men want to shout, “Yes! That’s the way I’m made by God; why do you condemn me for that? I’m trying to stay pure and direct all that desire towards you as God commands me to.” Through our struggle, my wife and I have discovered that there is great power to overcome resentment and stop demanding that our mate’s sex drive be like ours—in discovering and celebrating how different God designed our spouses’ sexuality to be.

DESIGNED TO BE DIFFERENT

Just as last week, we went back to the creation account of Adam and Eve to understand Eve’s need for heart intimacy, we return to this account to see how their difference in sexual desire flow from the differences in their design.

A. Adam is created for the ground, from the ground, given a name that means ground, tasked to work the ground, and his sin brings a curse upon the ground.

Adam’s innate orientation is toward the physical world.
So, why should it surprise us that Adam’s sexual desire is triggered through physical sight. Sight of the naked, female, physical body does it; no relationship with the person inside the body is necessary (which our wives find horrifying). “The sheer biological power of sexual desire in a male is largely focused on the physical body of an attractive female.” (James Dobson, What Wives Wish Their Husbands Knew About Women).
His sexual appetite comes from his physical body: Dobson continues:

When sexual response is blocked, males experience an accumulating physiological pressure, which demands release. The prostate gland, a small sac containing semen, gradually fills to capacity; as it reaches this maximum level, hormonal influences sensitize the man to all sexual stimuli. Whereas a particular woman would otherwise be of little interest to him, he is now eroticized in her presence (or in front of naked women on screens) when he is in a state of deprivation…She should recognize that his desire is dictated by definite biochemical forces within his body, and if she loves him, she will seek to satisfy those needs as meaningfully and as regularly as possible.

For men physical, sexual release in orgasm opens men’s hearts and floods their soul with feelings of love for their wives. Everyone knows that wives need to feel in love in order to want to make love. But fewer realize that a man needs to make love in order to feel in love. A man’s physical orgasm is the pathway to him to feeling again how precious she is to him.

B. Now let’s consider how different is God’s designed of Eve and how much sense it makes that her sexual desires are so different from Adam’s. Eve is NOT made from the physical ground but from a PERSON, Adam. She is designed for relationship. She is made for the man, given a name that means “out of the man,” assigned to assist the man, and her sin brings a curse upon her relationship with the man.

Eve is created with an innate orientation towards relationships.
It shouldn’t surprise us that being designed for a relationship with her husband, her desire for sex grows out of the closeness of her relationship with him. Christian counselor Barbara Rossberg says to men, “Men, your sex drive is connected to your eyes. You become aroused visually. Your wife’s sex drive is connected to her heart; she is aroused only after she feels emotional closeness and harmony” (The Five Love Needs of Men and Women.)
Women’s sexual desires arise from being relationally attracted to the PERSON. “Their desire is usually focused on a particular individual whom they respect or admire. A woman is stimulated by the romantic aura that surrounds her man, and by his character and personality. She yields to the man who appeals to her emotionally as well as physically” (Dobson).
A woman’s sex drive may be just as strong as her husbands. But she won’t FEEL the hunger for sex with a man until their relationship makes her FEEL warm affection, closeness, and care. The condition for her to feel her hunger for sex is that her relationship with him is making her feel closeness and love. One woman explains, “To a woman sex is not an event—its an environment, it’s not an act, it’s an atmosphere.” She needs to feel in love before her sex drive can surface causing her to want to make love.

So, the idea that masculine sexual hunger flows from his physical body, but feminine sexual hunger flows from how she feels about her relationship with the man is perfectly consistent with what God tells us about their creation in Genesis 2. This difference is also reinforced by looking at the love poem God has given to us in Song of Solomon, where we see this same pattern. Solomon’s sexual words to the Shulamite are almost all about the beauty of her physical body, which he longs for. Thirty-one verses express his attraction to the beauty of her physical body. Two verses express longing to enjoy a relationship with her. In contrast, in accord with her feminine design, the Shulamite devotes twenty-eight verses to expressing her longing to enjoy a relationship with her man and sixteen speak of her attraction to his physical body. He dreamed of her BODY. She dreamed mostly of a RELATIONSHIP with him and half as much of enjoying his BODY.

THE CHALLENGE TO EVERY CHRISTIAN HUSBAND AND WIFE

Misconnecting over our God-designed sexual differences can be extremely painful because sex is so closely related to our self-esteem. Truth be told, a man’s unrelenting sex drive is a real inconvenience to wives. It feels to a wife like her husband just wants to use her body to scratch his itch. More than one wife has been accused of not loving her husband because her desire for sex wasn’t keeping up with his. That is unfair. She’s not made to be able to turn on her sex drive at any moment. But from his point of view, his biological build-up of semen is not his fault; it is the way God designed him to drive him back into the arms of his wife where his need for heart intimacy (which he doesn't even know he has) is met as she surrounds him with her warm receptivity and love. Allowing sexual stimulation to always take him into his wife’s arms instead of to a screen or another woman is a great virtue in today’s eroticized world. Our designed differences can cause a lot of frustration, anger, and pain. Here are a few ways that Shanon Ethridge, author of Every Woman’s Battle points out.

Men crave sexual intimacy. Women crave emotional intimacy.
Men give love to get sex. Women give sex to get love.
Men can disconnect body from mind, heart, and soul. Women’s body, mind, heart, and soul intricately connected.
Men are stimulated by what they see, women don’t feel sexual hunger until they feel cared for and close to their husband.
Men have a recurrent semen build up cycle. Women have a recurring need for conversation with their husbands.
Men are vulnerable to unfaithfulness in the absence of sex. Women are vulnerable to unfaithfulness is the absence of emotional connection.

Why not consider inviting your wife to read the first part of this blog (or listen to the first part of the podcast) and then make a covenant together: We will try to respect the differences in our mate’s sexual and romantic desires because we value God’s perfect design of each other and schedule time for both conversation and lovemaking because pursuing both is God’s design to erase aloneness and experience loving intimacy.

ROMANCE: THE CONDITION WHICH ENABLES A WIFE TO FEEL SEXUAL DESIRE

One therapist writes, “Woman love great sex as much as men. The difference between a woman and a man is that she doesn’t feel her strong desire for sex until her need for love is first satisfied” (John Gray, Mars & Venus in the Bedroom). She needs first to feel loved, cherished, and desired. “When her heart is opened in this way her sexual center begins to open, and she feels a longing equal to or greater than what any man feels.” (Ibid). Men are easily sexually aroused by sight. But a wife doesn’t feel her sexual desire unless certain conditions are first met.

A. Avoid three conditions that bury her sexual desire for her husband.

Not feeling close to him. When I return home to my wife after a week away, my body wants my wife’s body as soon as I walk in the door, especially since I’ve been fighting the temptation to look at something I shouldn’t. But I’ve learned that she needs an evening or day to reconnect her relationship with me emotionally before her sexual center wants to open to me.
The pressures of her job, her family, and her home. Unlike men, whose desire for sex is physiologically produced and therefore always present, her desire for sex gets lost beneath the load of her responsibilities. It’s not that she doesn’t love her husband as much as he loves her. It’s that her sexual desire for him gets lost. When a woman feels temporarily relieved of her pressure to care for others, she can begin to feel her sexual desires. That is why one wife said to her husband, "Could we not make love with that full clothes basket in the room. That just makes me keep thinking about the laundry I need to do." Our wives can’t feel their sexual desires for us when their hearts are busy focusing on their other responsibilities.
A tired body. James Dobson writes, “another sexual inhibitor, which husbands should understand, is fatigue. Physical exhaustion plays a significant part in women’s ability or inability to respond sexually. When she is tired, sex feels like an obligation rather than a pleasure" (Ibid). Although it is an obligation—spouses are not to deprive their mates of sexual fulfillment—it is wiser for us to pursue lovemaking when her body is rested. When she feels physically refreshed, she is much more likely to feel sexual desire for her husband instead of feeling like she has one more obligation to check off her "to do" list.

B. Create ROMANCE, which allows her to feel her sexual desire.

Romancing her means finding out how her day went and listening for what is on her heart. Sharing her heart precedes her wanting to share her body. The Shulamite in Song of Songs shows her sexual desires intertwined with her friendship longing, His mouth is most sweet, and he is altogether desirable. This is my beloved and this is my friend (5:16).
Romancing her means lifting the weight of her responsibilities from her shoulders. Only when she stops feeling that weight will she be able to feel her sexual desire for you. That is why romantic weekends are so powerful. That is why on date night YOU take care of the details. YOU feed the kids. YOU line up the baby-sitter and if you're not going out but sex is planned for the night you say, “Honey, I’ll put the kids down. Why don’t you relax in a warm bubble bath?”
Romancing her means making her feel cared for. Linda Dillow and Lorraine Pintus put it bluntly, “When she offers to help you organize your tool bench, it counts as an interruption. When you offer to vacuum the house, it counts as foreplay” (Simply Romantic Nights).
Romancing her means treating her like a princess. One female said, “As long as he shows me that I'm special--no matter where we are or what we're doing--that's romance. (Sana and Miller, How to Romance the Woman You Love). Pamper her. Treat her like royalty!
Romancing her means cherishing her. A few years ago, while speaking to a Mothers of Preschoolers group, I asked the wives, “What makes you feel most loved by your husband?” Their answer was, “feeling cherished.” What that translates into for us is making her feel treasured, highly prized, deeply appreciated, precious.
Romancing her means helping her get into a romantic mood. Help her relax physically with a foot or back massage. Bring on the candles, flowers, little notes, and soft music. Also, although spontaneous sex is fine, it often helps wives “get in the mood” when they can mentally prepare for sex ahead of time. A woman knows her most powerful sex organ is her mind. (The above insights are derived from Gen 2, Eph 5, Prov 31, Song of Solomon 4-5 and alot of the writings of Christian counselors.)

C. Develop the skills of a good lover to increase her sexual desire (Song of Solomon 4-5).

When it comes to arousal, men are microwaves, women are crockpots.
Always touch her heart before you touch her body.
Warm her heart through affectionate non-sexual hugs and kisses to her non-erogenous zones.
Make her feel beautiful and desirable with words. I love your smile. I love the way you laugh. You look beautiful tonight. I love the smell of your hair. I love the touch of your smooth skin. You still have what it takes to light my fire.
Gradually touch her erogenous zones, circling back to non-erogenous zones, then back to her more sexual parts. Listen for clues about what she likes.
As her sexual engine gets revved up, she will want a rhythmic stroke.
Wait until she invites you to enter her

After studying the feminine design from which a wife’s sexual desire for her husband flows, it makes great sense that feeling romance in her relationship with her husband is the condition her feminine nature requires in order to feel her sexual desires come alive. But, as every woman will tell you, romance means much more to a wife than getting her sexual engine running. In fact, after studying their survey results for writing the book, What Wives Wish Their Husbands Knew About Women, James Dobson concluded: “If I had the power to communicate only one message to every family in America, I would specify the importance of romantic love to every aspect of feminine existence. It provides the foundation for a woman’s self-esteem, her joy in living, and her sexual responsiveness.”

For Further Prayerful Thought:

What would you say to persuade a Christian brother and sister that married couples having a great sexual relationship is important to God?
What are some of the ways that feminine sexual desire seems consistent with what God has revealed to us in Genesis 2 about how he has created woman?
How would you use the fact that God created Adam to be ground focused and Eve to be relationally focused to explain why difference in sexual desires can create resentment in marriage?
What stood out to you about how to romance a woman?

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Your Wife Craves Heart Intimacy with You

On 03 February, 2024 By Gary Yagel

Today, we begin a new series, Loving Our Wives Well Because We Understand the Needs of Their Hearts. Here is a quiz. How would you summarize these statements made by women as to why they were divorcing their husbands?

My husband is no longer my friend.
The only time he pays attention to me is when he wants sex.
He is never there for me, emotionally, when I need him most.
I hurt all the time because I feel alone and abandoned.
We’re like ships passing in the night—he goes his way and I go mine.
My husband has become a stranger. I don’t even know who he is anymore.

What these wives were starving for was heart intimacy with their husbands. It is a heart need of wives that wasn’t even on the screens of these husbands. However, this foundational need of wives for heart intimacy with their husbands is spelled out in at least 5 biblical texts, which this episode explores.

It should not surprise husbands who thoughtfully read of the creation of Eve that a wife has a profound heart need that he doesn’t experience nearly as strongly—the need to feel connected to her husband. After all, she is designed FOR relationship. Adam is created for the ground, from the ground, given a name that means ground, tasked to work the ground, and his sin brings a curse upon the ground. No wonder he loves the earthy part of connecting to his wife! But Eve is made for the man, from the man, given a name that means “out of the man,” assigned to assist the man, and her sin brings a curse upon her relationship with the man. No wonder a lack of heart connection to her husband would be so excruciating to a wife!

This feminine longing for heart intimacy is a foundational part of God’s marriage design. In Genesis 2:24-25, we read, A man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh. And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed Notice that the goal of marriage is loving intimacy (vs 25) to be “naked and unashamed.” Such loving intimacy happens by joining lives, “a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife,” and by joining bodies, “they shall become one flesh.” As husband and wife join their lives, they share their ideas (mind), their decisions (will) and feelings (emotions). This union of hearts, minds, and wills is then celebrated by the joining of bodies in sex. The marriage commitment is to regularly join hearts and bodies. Most men love joining bodies but are clueless about the fact that equally important to God, and usually more important to wives is connecting two naked hearts. Peter seems to have understood this reality, for he commands husbands:

A. Meet her need to feel understood. Live with your wives in an understanding way (I Pet 3:7). “Your wife’s first need” says Peter, "is for you to understand her, which means discovering what is going on in her heart." Literally this text says, dwell-together according to knowledge. Dwelling together refers to sharing everyday life. The Greek word for “know” is not the word for observing objective facts. Rather, this particular word indicates a relationship between the knower and what is known that progresses into deeper understanding. Peter seems to recognize what psychologists have discovered—that one of the deepest of human needs, especially among women is to feel understood. An astonishing number of men, including ME, entered marriage clueless about this fundamental dimension of marriage—connecting two naked hearts, i.e. emotional intimacy. Steve Arterburn and Fred Stoker, in their book, Every Woman’s Desire, observe:

84% of women feel they don’t have heart intimacy (oneness) in their marriages.
83% of women feel that their husbands don’t even know the basic needs of a woman for emotional intimacy (oneness) or how to provide it.
A large majority of female divorcees say that their married years were the loneliest years of their lives.

Let’s sharpen our picture of heart intimacy. Christian counselor Barbara Rosberg in, The Five Love Needs of Men and Women, cowritten with her husband, explains:

“The word, ‘intimacy’ comes from a Latin word that means ‘innermost.’ What this translates into for those of us in the marriage relationship is a vulnerable sharing of our inner thoughts, feelings, spirit, and true self…This support is achieved through listening, empathy, prayer, or reassurance.”

"Heart intimacy" to a wife means feeling so thoroughly loved and accepted that she easily and constantly shares with her lover what is going on in her heart. To a wife, the heart intimacy she craves is having her husband be her best friend—who loves to talk with her about everything—because that is what best friends do. Rosberg describes one wife’s yearning for heart-to-heart connection: “Melody’s idea of intimacy is sitting on the love seat with Dan, a couple of cappuccinos beside them, a roaring fire in front of them, no kids around them, and plenty of time for a good, long, heart to heart talk” (Ibid). While many Christian men look back on their wedding day as the beginning point for having regular sex, their wives look back upon it is the day they married their best friend. Romance is icing on the cake for them. The core of the relationship is being such close best friends that they stroll through life, arm in arm, sharing the secrets of their hearts, knowing that those secrets will always be valued because their husband loves them unconditionally. The next three biblical truths show how to build and maintain that intimacy.

B. Know what’s happening in her heart. Husbands should love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. (Eph 5:28). Paul recognizes two characteristics of men: 1) they take care of what belongs to them and 2) they default to taking care of themselves. In the deepest possible way, our wives are worthy of special care and devotion because their body so thoroughly belongs to us that to love them is to love ourselves. Here is the point: Men pay constant attention to their bodies. When my body aches, I groan. When my body is hungry, I eat. When my body is tired, I rest. When my body craves sexual release, I pursue my woman. When my body is wounded, I care for the wound. When my body is sleepy, I nod off. We are so united to our bodies that we cannot ignore them for long. They get our continual attention.

Men default to treating our marriages like our cars or lawnmowers: so long as they keep running, we take them for granted; it is only when they breakdown that they get our attention. Paul says, “Men, take the opposite approach. Your nervous system tells you immediately when your body is in pain. You should be so vigilant to know what is happening in your wife’s heart, that you know right away what she is feeling. Your connection with your wife’s heart should be so strong that it is like the nervous system of your own body.”

Intentional attention to her heart requires skillful listening to help her open it to us. Christian Counselor, Paul Tournier writes “In order to really understand, we need to listen, not to reply. We need to listen long and attentively. In order to help anybody to open his heart, we have to give him time, asking only a few questions, as carefully as possible, in order to help him better explain his experience” (To Understand One Another).

Principles for Helping Her Open Her Heart to Us

1. Proactively make it your job as husband to know what is going on inside her (to the degree that she feels safe sharing it) by asking, “How is your heart?”

2. Pay attention. There is no substitute for locking our thoughts onto what she is talking about. Tournier explains, “A woman thinks in detail. Details interest her more than general ideas. She has a need to tell all the days happenings, once she is with her husband… To him this appears very small and dull. When the wife senses that her husband no longer is listening to her, she feels terribly alone” (Ibid).

3. Practice shutupping. Therapist, Emma McAdam observes, “In general, people ask too many questions under the guise of listening. (Therapy In a Nutshell Video Series). Interrupting with questions makes the other person feel like she is being interrogated. Or worse—it puts you in control of the conversation and guessing about what is going on inside her instead of letting her continue to talk about what is going on inside of herself! Good husbanding IS about being interested in her day and asking about it. But once she starts to answer, my job is SHUTUPPING.

4. Use body language that shows you are engaged with what she is sharing. If she starts to well-up always move physically towards her and perhaps show the kind of touch, hand on shoulder, or hug that fits the moment. Lock your eyes to hers.

5. Mostly listen solely with the goal of understanding what she is trying to communicate. Listen for the deeper meaning behind the words, especially her FEELINGS. Tournier continues. Through speech men express ideas and communicate information. Women speak in order to express feelings, emotions. I discovered this truth as a pastor, when I called one of the moms in our congregation who had four kids. I casually asked, “Kathy, How are ya doing?” She answered, “Well I’ve got four nooses up on our porch. I’m about to hang all four of my kids.” After I got off the phone, I asked my wife, “Do I need to worry about what Kathy said?” Sandy laughed and said, “Honey, Kathy was just telling you how she FEELS. That’s what women do!”

There is a place for giving advice and problem solving. One of my sons has started asking his wife, “Do you need me right now more to understand what you are feeling or give advice?” But keep in mind that our primary goal is helping our mate share her feelings so she can lay bare her heart and still be cherished. Giving advice too quickly feels like you are 1) discounting her feelings, 2) trying to change her, or 3) not grasping the complexity of the problem instead of giving her the gift of understanding and cherishing the vulnerable inner self, she has just revealed.

6. Occasionally mirror back to her what you think she just said, especially looking for her feelings. You may say, “I think you’re saying ABC," and she may say “No, that’s not it at all.” That’s okay. The goal is to cause your bride to feel like you are trying to understand what she is feeling because you cherish her. Here are a few phrases to use to summarize what you think she was trying to communicate:

“So, from your point of view….”
“It sounds like you’re feeling….”
“You believe….”
“It seems like….”
“What I guess you’re feeling is….”

So, Paul commands husbands, “Be so in touch with, and responsive to your wife’s heart, that you are as quick to react to what is happening there as your nervous system is quick to react to pain in your body.”

C. Nourish her heart. Paul continues his instructions for husbands in Eph 5:19: Husbands should love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. For no one ever hated his own flesh, but NOURISHES and CHERISHES it. Here, Paul goes to the world of tender care for infants for an analogy, using two words loaded with meaning. The first is nourish. The Greek word is EKTREPHO, from TREPHO to rear, to feed, primarily used of children + EK from or out of. The heart of a wife needs to be regularly fed with the ingredients required to nourish her heart just as an infant is dependent upon its mother’s breast milk. Women contemplating marriage seem to intuitively know this. In a pre-marriage class, each fiancée was asked, “What do you hope to get out of your marriage that you wouldn’t get if you were to remain single?” Here are some women’s answers:

Anna: “I want companionship and a sharing of intimate moments. I want to have a relationship with the Lord together.”

Vickie: “I can’t explain it real well, but I want a partnership, emotionally and physically. I haven’t got a best friend and haven’t had one for a long time. I want that in Craig.”

Kathryn: “I would like a bond that no one and nothing can touch, through good times or bad.”

Stacy: “I want companionship and love and my very own cheering section. I want someone to be there to accept me as a whole person, good and bad, someone I can count on.”

Sadly, many husbands who failed to provide the nutrients their wives’ hearts required were utterly shocked when out of the blue, they heard from them, “My feelings for you have died.” One such man was Fred Stoeker, author of the book, Every Woman’s Desire. He recounts the event “I sat across the kitchen table from my wife, Brenda, and I could tell she was waiting for my undivided attention. Then she looked intently into my eyes and changed my world. ‘I don’t know how else to say this to you, so I’ll say it straight,’ she began. ‘My feelings for you are dead.’ Her words arrived like a fastball pitch to the solar plexus. Dead? My head spun. Where was this coming from? Our marriage had started out with such promise.”

Stoeker goes on to observe that Brenda’s feelings had died because he had not devoted himself to “oneness.” “Oneness has terms,” he writes. “Comply with the terms and emotional closeness will follow.” Stoeker had failed to make deposits into Brenda’s heart that kept her feelings for him flourishing. Here is a list of heart nutrients that counselor Barbars Rosberg says make wives’ hearts thrive (The Five Love Needs of Men & Women.)

Loving her at her greatest point of pain
Loving her at her greatest point of vulnerability
Loving her at her greatest point of failure.
Encouraging her.
Standing with her.
Respecting her opinion.
Talking with her and listening.
Being tender with her.
Spending time with her.
Serving her.

These nutrients of our love are needed to cause her heart to thrive.

D. Warm her heart through giving her your affection. Back in Ephesians, there is a second word that Paul uses for the tender care husbands are to provide their wives. Husbands should love their wives as their own bodies…he nourishes and CHERISHES it. The Greek word for cherish is THALPO, the word for warmth. It is used of birds covering their young under their wing, keeping them close, providing warmth. What is in view is the warmth of familial affection. The NT word for affection, PHILOSTORGOS, is from a combination of the two words, PHILEO--friendship love and STORGE--family love. The warm, protective, affection pictured here is non-sexual hugs, non-sexual touch, tenderness. Counselor Willard Harley has seen many tragic stories of husbands who did not “affair-proof” their marriage by meeting their wives’ needs for constant closeness and non-sexual physical affection. Here is a summary of one (from His Needs Her Needs Building An Affair-proof Marriage.)

When Jane fell in love with Richard, she knew she had found her prince. Dates with Richard felt exciting, and when he held her in his arms the passion level went right off the scale. However just a few months after marriage, the passion began to pall. Jane started noticing something that was odd to her. Whenever she cuddled up for a hug or a little kiss, Richard became sexually aroused. Almost without exception physical contact led straight to the bedroom. Her love-tank craving for non-sexual affection was soon sitting on “E.”

At work, Jane was transferred to a new department, and there she met Bob, a warm and affable fellow who loved everyone. Bob had the habit of draping his arm over the shoulder of whomever he walked with—male and female alike. No one took offense. He was just a friendly man who liked everybody. Jane noticed that she started to look forward to Bob’s occasional hugs. They always made her feel good—warm and comfortable and cared for. One day they met in the hall. Bob greeted her as he gave her a little hug. “You know, Bob,” she said, “I’ve meant to tell you for a long time how much I appreciate your hugs. It's nice to meet a man who loves to do that.” “Well then come here!” He laughed and gave her another hug and little kiss on the cheek. Jane tried to act calm but that little peck started her heart pounding. It continued pounding in the following weeks as she started receiving little notes from Bob. They were always tasteful, caring, sweet, and non-sexual. But, before long Jane found herself having an affair with Bob. What happened? Did Jane’s wedding vows mean nothing to her. No. Jane was so starved for affection that she was literally hugged into an affair. In the counseling room there is a nearly universal complaint voiced by wives—he only gets affectionate when he wants sex. But this text commands husbands to give their wives non-sexual affection constantly. It keeps the warmth of their feelings for their husbands kindled. To most women affection symbolizes warm care, security, protection, safety, and love, like a baby bird being tucked under its parent's wing. To neglect this command of God is to rob them of the constant source of reassuring love they are designed to need.

The old Puritan author, Matthew Henry, seems to have grasped the need of a wife to be to be cherished and connected to her husband’s heart. He wrote. “The woman was made of a rib out of the side of Adam; not made out of his head to rule over him, nor out of his feet to be trampled upon by him, but out of his side to be equal with him, under his arm to be protected by him, and near his heart to be beloved by him.”

For Further Prayerful Thought:

Why do you think 84% of wives say that their husbands are not meeting their need for heart intimacy with them?
What do you most need to remember about listening well to your wife to help her open her heart to you?
What is your reaction to this statement: For most wives the pain of their husbands never connecting with them at the level of heart intimacy would be like the pain a husband would feel if his wife never had sex with him.
What do you think of this description of a wife’s need for affection: it is regularly communicating in small, non-sexual, ways that you care about them. What else besides hugs fit this category for your wife?

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Equipping Our Followers to Be Champions

On 27 January, 2024 By Gary Yagel

Tennis superstar Venus Williams won 7 Grand Slam singles titles, 5 Wimbledon championships and 4 Olympic gold medals. Her little sister Serena won 23 Grand Slam singles titles, 7 Wimbledon championships and 4 Olympic gold medals. These two sisters becoming two of the greatest athletes of all time did not happen by accident. It was the result of their father, Richard Williams, executing his plan for his daughters to become tennis royals, which he had formulated before they were even born. “King Richard” is the movie that tells the story of the leadership of a father relentlessly committed to helping his daughters reach their potential, becoming tennis phenoms. I know of no claim by Richard Williams to be a Christian. Yet, his remarkable devotion to helping these daughters reach their God-created potential in the athletic world stands as a powerful challenge to every Christ-following man who is the leader of his home: Am I that devoted to equipping those under my care to reach their full potential in Christ?

This is the final episode in our January series, Leading Our Homes Well in a Culture That Doesn’t Want Us to Lead. We’ve addressed the first two leadership questions, Where am I taking my family and How do I motivate my followers to come with me. This episode answers the third question, How are we going to get there? The leader equips his followers to reach the goal. Richard Williams could see his daughters’ potential as superstar tennis players and provided the knowledge, training, coaching, encouragement, and opportunities they needed to reach that potential. Biblical leadership requires a relentless commitment to helping those under our care to be champions—reaching the full potential God designed into them spiritually, mentally, emotionally, and athletically. There is no greater treasure loaned to you by God, to be cherished, and whose potential for radiant inner loveliness you are to bring out than your wife. If you are a dad, you have been entrusted by God with the greatest of all treasures, a priceless child, on loan from God for the purpose of helping that child be all God created him or her to be.

The rest of this episode examines how we do that. Remembering that the goal and destination of our leadership at home is spiritual maturity as Christ’s disciples, it makes sense that Christ’s leadership of his family, the church, would serve as a model for us. In fact, God went to great trouble to enable us to understand three specific roles that Jesus fills that enable US TO GROW UP TO SPIRITUAL MATURITY. These three roles, called the three offices of Christ, are directly related to the Hebrew word MESSIAH and the Greek word CHRISTOS, which both mean “Anointed One.” The three offices in the OT to which men were anointed were prophet, priest, and king. The early chapters of Hebrews make clear that these three offices in the OT were pointing to and fulfilled in Christ. Each of these roles of Jesus as leader of his family, the church, gives US specific concepts to understand what knowledge, equipping, training, and encouragement WE need to provide OUR family members to help them grow up into Christ.

PROPHET

The OT prophet was the mouthpiece of God. We read in Hebrews 1:1 Long ago, at many times and in many ways, God SPOKE to our fathers by the prophets, but in these last days he has SPOKEN to us by his Son. Jesus is the Word of God incarnate. As we consider the means God has appointed for growing Christ-followers to full maturity, we discover that God’s Word is the ultimate equipping tool. 2 Tim 3:16 tell us, All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, EQUIPPED for every good work. Here is a four-step process in Deuteronomy 6 for maximizing impact when teaching kids the Word.

A. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might (vs 5). Teaching Scripture to our kids begins in OUR hearts with wanting to obey his Word because we love him and want to please the one who redeemed us, NOT because we think God is a rules-obsessed tyrant or that we need to earn his love. The Ten Commandments were given to Israel after they had been freed from slavery to Egypt to show us how to respond to his redemptive love already poured out upon us. Out of delight and confidence in his goodness proved at the cross, we trust that his law is for our benefit. Counselors, Cloud and Townsend point out, “When we finally understand that God isn’t mad at us anymore, we become free to concentrate on love and growth instead of trying to appease him” (How People Grow).

B. Deuteronomy 6 continues: And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart (vs 6). There is a natural flow from loving God with all our being to having his Word on our hearts, so that we can obey it. In this text, God is saying what Jesus would later repeat, in John 14:6, If you love me, you will keep my commandments. Psalm 119:11 says, I have stored up your word in my heart that I might not sin aginsst you. Devotion to obeying Scripture is not legalism; it is the proper expression of love for the God who first loved us. Jesus taught that the mark of kingdom people is hungering and thirsting for righteousness (Matt 5:6).

C. Deuteronomy 6 continues: You shall teach these words diligently to your children (vs 7) The Hebrew word for teach is used for imprinting the official seal upon a letter. It pictures rote memorization. Especially from ages 4-12, we have an awesome opportunity to anchor our child to God’s truth through memorizing Scripture verses and catechism questions. A three-part plan is required: 1) Decide with your wife on a meal or time-block each week when you will do this. 2) Make these times creative and fun while staying focused on memorization. 3) Decide which foundational truths you want to plant in your child’s soul. My favorite starting point for kid’s memorization is Psalm 1:1-3. Blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the wicked, nor stands in the way of sinners, nor sits in the seat of scoffers; but his delight is in the law of the Lord, and on his law, he meditates day and night. He is like a tree planted by streams of water that yields its fruit in its season, and its leaf does not wither. In all that he does, he prospers.

I highly recommend the New City Catechism for Kids: It has a curriculum for parents to use to teach the biblical ideas surrounding each question, making “family memorization times” easy to lead. Here is a sample of early questions.

What is our only hope in life or death? That we are not our own but belong to God.
How did God create us? God created us male and female in his own image to glorify him.
How can we glorify God? By loving him and obeying his commands and law.

Helping your child memorize foundational biblical truths and key passages of Scripture is indisputably one of the best investments in your child’s soul that you could ever make. So, the third step of teaching Scripture for life-impact is the hard work of impressing it upon the brain, i.e. memorizing it.

D. Deuteronomy 6 continues: And shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise (vs 8). The reason for having the Law on our hearts is so that we can meditate on it during the day and so we can teach it to our children all through the day, applying it to everyday life. Arguably the most successful believer of the OT era was counseled by God, This Book of the Law shall not depart from your mouth, but you shall meditate on it day and night, so that you may be careful to do according to all that is written in it. For then you will make your way prosperous, and then you will have good success. Joshua defeated the most enemies in Israel’s history and his family leadership influence caused four generations to walk with God. Equipping our kids to be all God created them to be requires doing the prophet’s job—getting God’s Word into their lives applying its wisdom for everyday life.

PRIEST

Hebrews 5:1 explains the priestly role of the OT that was a pattern, pointing to Christ. For every high priest chosen from among men is appointed to act on behalf of men in relation to God, to offer gifts and sacrifices for sins. This rich image of Christ as our Great High Priest points to three components of our leadership role in helping our wives and kids reach their full potential in Christ.

A. Our Great High Priest SACRIFICED HIMSELF for us. In Ephesians 5:2, Paul commands, Walk in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God. Godly manhood has always meant that we sacrifice for the welfare of our loved ones. We take the bullet and die so they may live. The problem is that men are better at the heroic than the mundane—dying to ourselves every day to put the needs of my wife and kids ahead of my own desires. Our delight in our wives and kids take us a ways towards denying ourselves for them; but feelings don’t have the power to overcome selfishness for long. To love with Jesus’ love is only possible by leaning upon Christ who indwells us through the Holy Spirit to produce agape, self-sacrificing love. When our feelings dissipate, the raw power to put others first comes from saying to Jesus, “I need you to love them through me because I can’t.”

B. Our Great High Priest GIVES US MERCY when we draw near. The author of Hebrews encourages us all, We do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin. Let us then with confidence draw near to the throne of grace, that we MAY RECEIVE MERCY and find grace to help in time of need (Heb 4:15-16.) This Greek word, ELEOS refers to compassion for the one suffering because of his sin. When giving painful consequences for wrong behavior as fathers, two seemingly contradictory attitudes are required: firmness—whom the Lord loves he disciplines—and compassion—as a father shows compassion to his children, so the Lord shows compassion to those who fear him. (Psalm 103:14). Let’s consider what this might look like in a parenting conversation with a son who did not get his chores done. “I know that you were looking forward going to the park this afternoon with Billy’s family, but the deal was that you had to have your room cleaned before then.” “But Dad, I’ve been looking forward to this all month.” “Son, I know it sucks to miss out on being with your friends because you put off tackling the pile of work you had to get done. Believe it or not that happens to be sometimes—I missed going skeet shooting a few months ago with Jim and Pete because I put off replacing the kitchen light fixture until the Saturday morning that your mom was having the bridal shower. Then I had to get it done.” “So, since you know what it feels like, let me go.” “What I know is that painful consequences teach life lessons. The answer is, ‘No.’”

C. Our Great High Priest INTERCEDES for us. Hebrews 7:25 tells us that Jesus’ vocation right now is praying for us. He ever lives to intercede for us. In Paul’s Romans 8 text demonstrating that God is for us, he argues that Christ died, for us, rose for us, ascended for us, and IS INTERCEDING for us. Even when our Great High Priest was on earth, he interceded for those under his care in prayer. In the days of his flesh, Jesus offered up prayers and supplications, with loud cries and tears (Heb 5:7). Jesus’ words to Peter on one occasion are sobering for fathers. “Satan demanded to have you, that he might sift you like wheat, but I have prayed for you.” (Lk 22:31-31). One of the great tragedies of our day is that fathers and grandfathers don’t realize how much power they can access in prayer to help their children fight their spiritual battles. One prayer veteran reminds us,

“God wants your prayer life to be filled with petitions and intercession for others and for the advance of His kingdom. He wants answers to such prayer to become your thrilling and frequent experience. One of the great joys of prayer is securing wonderful answers that seem so long delayed and so humanly impossible. God wants answers to your prayers to be frequent and blessed. He wants you to prove repeatedly the mighty power of prayer in your own experience. He wants you to become not only a prayer veteran but also a constant victor in situations where the answers bring great glory to God and great consternation and defeat to Satan" (Wesley Duell, Mighty Prevailing Prayer).

Only in eternity will kids see the impact their interceding fathers had on their destiny. But one son, who ended up on the mission field in the South Pacific, John Patton, recounted the striking impact of his dad’s prayer life upon him. Patton’s father, James, worked in a shop in the family home in Scotland. James used a small room in the house as a prayer closet. His regular visits during the day and after meals led the kids “to understand that prayers were being poured out for us.” On the day that John left home to study theology, he had to walk forty miles to a train station. His father walked the first six with him. They spoke about the Lord. His father gave counsel. For the last half mile, they walked in silence, but John could see his father’s lips moving in silent prayer for him while tears streamed down his face. When they parted, the father grasped his son, saying, “God bless you, my son! May your father’s God prosper you and keep you from all evil.” Overcome, he could say no more but his lips moved in silent prayer. John later wrote that as he walked the remainder of the distance, he “vowed deeply and often by the help of God to live and act so as never to grieve or dishonor such a father and mother as God had given him." (How Should Men Lead Their Families, Joel Beeke.)

KING

Hebrews 1 continues the story of The Anointed One. After making purification for sins, he sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high….Of the Son, God says “Your throne, O God, is forever and ever, the scepter of uprightness is the scepter of your kingdom” (vs 3, vs 8). Jesus rescued Adam’s kingdom from Satan and sin and is now spreading his kingdom of righteousness. But such conquest is only accomplished through community. Paul points out, “When he ascended on high he led a host of captives, and he gave gifts to men. And he gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the shepherds and teachers to equip the saints for the work of ministry. As prophet, the leader equips through the Word. As priest, the leader equips through the power of intercessory prayer. As king, the leader helps his followers discover, hone, and employ their gifts and opportunities for ministry. Here are four ways to maximize our followers' kingdom impact:

A. Help them discover their unique design and spiritual gifts. In the discipleship process of Romans 12, steps 1-3 are: responding to God’s mercy, offering ourselves to God, and being transformed by the renewing of our minds. Step 4 is focusing on our spiritual gifts. One of the best things I did as a father was to help each of my 5 kids determine their SHAPE (see Rick Warren), spiritual gifts, heart passions, abilities, personality, and experiences that make them unique. (My podcast series, Helping Our Loved Ones Flourish Using Their Spiritual Gifts, S2 E 38-41 7/18-8/8.)

B. Help them link their skills and interests to a vocation. We need to reassure our kids that they are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them (Eph 2:10) Today, kids don’t just follow the family profession. The mobility and diverse vocational opportunities they have require our help matching the way God created them to a career. (A great resource we used is Crown Ministries’ Youth Exploratory Survey.)

C. Help them connect to Christian friends. As we saw, Jesus’ ascension was accompanied by the outpouring of the gifts of the Spirit, pointing to our need to be connected in the Body of Christ. We need to do whatever is necessary for our wives to have sisterhood relationships and our kids to have Christian friends.

D. Help them develop the skills they need for ministry. Parents (and the dollars of grandparents) send their kids to summer sports, art, and music camps. We ought also to think strategically about developing our kids’ ministry vision and skills. My wife and brother were trained in discipleship via the Navigator’s summer program. Short term mission trips are often life changing. I know dads that have taken their kids through books to develop listening, leadership, evangelism, and apologetics skills. In today’s world our kids need training to understand its worldviews, which can be provided through online resources such as the Colson Center.

Dads and Granddads, like Venus’ and Serena’s dad, Richard, we have been loaned a precious diamond to be cut and polished into its greatest possible brilliance. But the time we have with each child flies by in a flash. Even the opportunity to influence our grandchildren is fleeting; they will soon be busy with teen friends and adult life. One dad reflects:

"I pass a lot of houses on my way home—some pretty, some expensive, some inviting—But my heart always skips a beat when I turn down the road and see my house. I guess I’m especially proud of the house and the way it looks because I drew the plans myself. It started out large enough for us—I even had a study; two teenaged boys now reside there. And it had a guest room; my girls and nine dolls are permanent guests. It had a small room Peg had hoped would be her sewing room; the two boys swinging on the Dutch door have claimed this room as their own. So, it really doesn’t look right now as if I’m much of an architect. But it will get larger again—one by one they will go away, to work, to college, to service, to their own houses. And then there will be room—a guest room, a study, and a sewing room for just the two of us. But it won’t be empty—Every corner, every room, every nick in the coffee table will be crowded with memories. Memories of picnics, parties, Christmases, bedside vigils, summers, fires, winters, going barefoot, leaving for vacation cats, conversations, black eyes, graduations, first dates, ball games, arguments, washing dishes, bicycles, dogs, boat rides, getting home from vacation, meals, rabbits, and a thousand other things that still fill the lives of those who would raise five. And Peg and I will sit quietly by the fire and listen to the laughter in the walls" (Bob Benson, “Laughter in the Walls”).

For Further Prayerful Thought:

How might you become and remain as passionate about developing the potential of each of your family members as Richard Willims was about developing Venus’ and Serena’s tennis abilities?
What are the biggest obstacles to being devoted to the Word of God and leading your family to be shaped with the Word of God?
What is the biggest obstacle to interceding for your loved ones, giving them the power to exhibit Christ-like attitudes and resist temptation? What can you do to remove that obstacle?
What struck you about the way that King Jesus gifts us to participate in the church’s mission to make disciples of the nations? What might you do to enhance the fruitfulness of your loved ones for Christ?

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Maximizing Our Influence As Family Leaders

On 20 January, 2024 By Gary Yagel

Some years ago, I found myself praying about whether I should pursue a DMin degree and write my dissertation on men’s ministry. But a rather sobering thought struck me. If my kids are in my home roughly twenty years and I live to be seventy, they are only going to be with me 2/7ths of my life. The price of pursuing the degree now will be paid by my 5 kids, who will get less time with me. I decided to put it off until 4 of my 5 kids were in college.

The years of greatest influence in our kid’s lives go by in a flash; so, dads whose kids are still at home, need to know how to maximize their influence, before their kids are launched into a world full of destructive worldviews. But it is not only Dad’s with kids at home who care about their influence. Even if our kids are already launched or have gifted us with grandkids, we also want to know how to maximize whatever influence we can have with both our adult kids and grandchildren. This episode examines God’s two-part design of the influence we wield as spiritual leaders of our home, positional influence and relational influence. In both cases, we must overcome false worldviews that undermine the way God wants us to lead our homes.

This is the third episode in our January series, Leading Our Homes Well in a Culture That Doesn’t Want Us to Lead. Last week we answered the first leadership question, “Where am I taking my family?” noting the biblical answer, to spiritual maturity as Christ’s disciples. Like Paul, home leaders say, One thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus… Brothers, join in imitating me. (Phil 3:13ff). Today’s episode examines the second leadership question, which has to do with my relationship with my followers. “How do I use my leadership influence to motivate them to come with me?” The biblical answer to this question, once again, requires us to overcome strong cultural headwinds, i.e. worldviews promoted in the culture, which undermine a man’s leadership calling. We identify four.

A. False Worldview #1: Men are unnecessary. This view is rooted in feminism, egalitarianism, and the LGBTQ+ movement. A lesbian couple can parent as well as a heterosexual married couple. Men bring nothing unique to the process of raising children. Egalitarian-leaning, church-going men know their wives have more intuitive insight about kids than they do. When the kids ask permission to do something, their response is, “Go ask your mom.” Such men don’t wear the pants in their family.

Biblical View #1: Fatherhood is irreplaceable.

Creation, itself, tells us that the nuclear family is not just a social construct. The biological fact that conception takes place in the context of husband and wife making love speaks volumes about the best environment for nurturing that child to healthy adulthood. In God’s obvious creation design, for a child to thrive, he needs a family built on mom and dad’s love for each other.
The family code sections of Ephesians and Colossians are significant. They address wives, then husbands, then children—commanding them to obey their parents. So, we might expect the next group Paul addresses to be parents; but it is not. How about mothers? No. It is striking that when Paul addresses the training of the children, he doesn’t mention mothers but gives commands to fathers. This pattern of responsibility began with Abraham, the Father of the Christian Faith. God said of Abraham, I have chosen him, that he may command his children and his household after him to keep the way of the Lord by doing righteousness and justice, so that the Lord may bring to Abraham what he has promised him (Gen 18:19). Perhaps fathers are specifically addressed because we inherited Adam’s passivity. He should have protected Eve from Satan and reinforced the truth of what God said.
Substantial research confirms that fathers and mothers discipline their children differently. Focus on the Family writes, “Dad takes an objective approach and provides his children with much needed instruction in the area of moral absolutes and the consequences of right and wrong actions. Mom, on the other hand, emphasizes compassion, empathy, relationship, and the importance of appreciating the uniqueness of each individual” (Online article, Mom and Dad Approach Discipline Differently). Both Mom and Dad are needed.

B. False Worldview #2 teaches a PARENT-CENTERED approach to children’s discipline. In our narcissistic culture, it should not surprise us that some approaches to discipline are more about the parent’s feelings than the child’s behavior. It is reactive discipline. Here is an example. A dad on the playground says to his son, “Stop playing on the monkey bars.” But his son knows that this command means nothing. His father will not act until he has told the boy four or five times to stay off the monkey bars. So, the son continues to ignore his father’s command. The father, who is busy talking, yells at him again, but the son knows that his dad is not steamed up enough to act. Finally, the father reaches his limit and explodes,“You’ve got me really angry with you now. Get into that car.”

Instead of clarifying his instruction once, and then giving painful consequences for disobedience, this parenting approach is based upon the exasperation of the parent. Kids live up to whatever is demanded of them. The dad didn’t want to be bothered with the responsibility of being a good parent, but instead to continue his conversation. Furthermore, when my parenting is based upon how patient I feel, or how irritated or angry I am, punishment becomes random, and inconsistent, which provoke hot anger in a child. One moment, he gets away with murder, the next moment he barely steps across the line and is slammed with punishment. The dad trained his son not to obey until he started to get angry. He also made the issue HIS anger instead of the son’s disobedience. Good parenting isn’t rooted in how a parent FEELS but how a child BEHAVES. In fact, good parenting makes sure that the child understands that painful consequences for his misbehavior are NOT personal and do not interfere with the parent’s love for him.

Biblical View #2: Disciplining children is part of a training plan for the child. Paul writes, Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord (Eph 6:4).

Here are four wrong approaches to discipline that provoke anger: 1) Inconsistent discipline, as we’ve seen. Consistent discipline trains a child to know what the boundaries are because the parents have thought them through ahead of time. It is not a seat-of-the-pants, reactive discipline. 2) Discipline that attacks a child’s character using the words, you always or you never instead of correcting behavior provokes anger. 3) Disciplining a child in public will wound his spirit. 4) Discipline that is more frequent than praise wounds our child, also provoking anger. Studies show that parents use critical words ten times more than they use words to praise their children. Mostly correction with little or no affirmation CRUSHES kids’ spirits and can lead to a rebellion.
In context, as Ephesians 6:4 continues, Paul implies that the alternative to provoking anger in our children is to exercise discipline in connection with the rest of the training plan for the child. Paul describes the plan: 1) bring them up: Dads are NOT to watch their children grow up but to actively raise them with intentionality 2) in the discipline: This Greek word is PAIDEA, from which we get pediatric. It means using consequences to train children. A father’s punishing authority is never to be used selfishly, or reflexively, but as part of a TRAINING plan. Paul continues, 3) and instruction (of the Lord): Instruction, means literally “to put into the mind.” This requires a plan for what biblical truths, godly qualities, and characteristics of Jesus we plan to impart to our kids.

C. False Worldview #3: Punishment stifles children and makes them feel bad about themselves. This humanistic view of human nature is that giving consequences for bad behavior is unnecessary, harmful and maybe even oppressive, labeling paddling abuse. Critical theory advocates see prison inmates as victims, and the police as oppressors. The concept of spanking a child is horrifying. This refusal to bring painful consequences to correct wrong behavior is so harmful that the Bible calls it HATRED. I want to say that again. The Bible calls a refusal to use painful consequences to correct behavior HATRED. Proverbs 13:24, Whoever spares the rod hates his son, but he who loves him is diligent to discipline him. The reason this false worldview promotes hatred for our children is given in Proverbs 22:15: Folly is bound up in the heart of a child. That folly will destroy him. But, the rod of discipline drives the folly far from him.

Biblical Worldview #3: Whom a father loves he disciplines. In Hebrews 12:5-8, God points to the universally recognized role of fathers in his creation—they discipline their children—to help the Hebrew believers cope with their suffering. This glimpse of God’s view of a father’s responsibility is full of wisdom for us. My son, do not regard lightly the discipline of the Lord, nor be weary when reproved by him. For the Lord disciplines the one he loves and chastises every son whom he receives. It is for discipline that you have to endure. God is treating you as sons. For what son is there whom his father does not discipline? If you are left without discipline, in which all have participated, then you are illegitimate children and not sons….For the moment all discipline SEEMS PAINFUL rather than pleasant, but later it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it.

Although the author of Hebrews appeals to the common cultural understanding of his day that all fathers discipline their children—western egalitarian, humanism wasn’t on his mind! We are often told that LOVING a child means ACCEPTING his wrong behavior instead of CORRECTING it. And even the moderating views of others are mistaken, when they say, “A child needs both love and discipline.” But discipline is NOT something that balances love; it IS love put into action. It is cruel to allow a child to become the victim of his unrestrained sinful nature! Some parents see firm discipline as negative because they experienced the out-of-control abuse of men using force to coerce behavior. They need to distinguish between this corruption of God’s design of fatherly discipline and the firm discipline that God calls love in action.
The biblical view that love requires parents to train their children through giving painful consequences for wrong behavior is rooted in the biblical worldview of HUMAN NATURE. Unlike the humanist who thinks we just need to let a child grow in every direction he wants to—all he needs is affirmation, Christians know better. Just as growing excellent grapes to make rich wine to the glory of the vineyard owner requires pruning, Christian parents know that growing excellent kids means pruning wrong behavior through painful consequences. In case we weren’t shocked enough by God saying the refusal to punish our child is HATRED, he also equates the failure to discipline a child to killing him! Discipline your son while there is hope, and do not desire his DEATH (Prov 19:18). Painful consequences for bad behavior and rewards for good behavior are required because of the child’s sinful nature, called “folly.”

The Folly of Every Child’s Heart

1. He is out of control and unable to say, “no” to himself. If uncorrected, this will lead to the tragedy of going through life unable to resist his destructive impulses. Left alone, he will never learn to delay gratification so he can accomplish his tasks and fulfill his responsibilities. In contrast, painful consequences for inappropriate behavior train a child to resist what he is feeling to fulfill his responsibilities. Self-control is a golden virtue and will benefit a child his entire life.

2. He is trying to control everyone around him to get his way. Cloud and Townsend, in their book, Boundaries with Kids, write, “An accurate description of children is that they are little people who are out of control of themselves and attempting to control everyone around them.” The irony is that when parents give in to a child, instead of requiring obedience, it creates insecurity in a child. When a child pushes against the boundaries and they are firm—his world feels secure. But if they give way, the child tends to conclude that HE must control everything to be safe. And child’s need to be in control to feel secure will bring massive problems into his life in his relationships.

3. He does not want to conform to reality but wants reality to conform to him. Parenting requires us to prepare a child for the real world, where the law of sowing and reaping functions. If I work hard, I can advance in my career. If I walk on the treadmill, I will strengthen my heart muscle. Our discipline plan must have reality consequences. Choose to do your chores, you play. Choose to avoid your chores you pay. “Don’t ride your bike past the corner or you will lose it for a week.” Positive consequences are important too. “Since you’ve been obeying the rule to only ride to the corner, I think you are ready to ride down to Billy’s house.”

4. He blames circumstances and others instead of taking responsibility for his actions. Parents who raise healthy kids teach them to take responsibility for their feelings, attitudes, behaviors, and choices. Blaming others isn’t permitted. The folly that parents fail to drive out leads to an "entitled" mentality and the misery that goes with a life of anger and envy towards those more fortunate than they.

5. He is so self-absorbed that he won’t succeed at love. Love requires a person to know how his behavior affects others. For example, allowing a child to yell at us is cruel. Many in our culture would say, “He needs to vent. Don’t stifle his feelings.” But his relationships in life will end in disaster if he is not taught to overcome his feelings and treat others with respect.

Discipline’s purpose is to impose SHORT RUN, SAFE, pain in order to avoid LONG RUN, DESTRUCTIVE pain. Prov 29:1 says, A person often rebuked who becomes obstinate will suddenly be broken beyond remedy. Teaching a child to obey teaches him mastery over his impulses. Such mastery is an invaluable attribute that will cause a child to thrive his entire life. On one occasion I saw a friend’s five-year-old racing across a parking lot, heading into a lane of traffic he was not tall enough to see. But his father did see the fast-approaching car and yelled, “Billy stop!” His son immediately stopped, and the car zoomed by. George had worked for many frustrating days to train Billy to instantly obey his voice. Kids live up to the standard of obedience we demand from them. In this case, firm training may have saved Billy’s life. Paddling a toddler who runs into the street uses, safe, controled pain to prevent further, more serious harm.

D. False Worldview #4: Patriarchal authority is oppressive. The biblical teaching of male leadership results from the male privilege that the writers of the Bible experienced. That fallen men would abuse their leadership was no surprise to the Bible's authors. In fact, the Bible shows the consequence of using a leadership position selfishly on the part of King Rehoboam, Solomon’s son. When Rehoboam perceived a threat to his throne by the request of his people to lighten their taxes, he got counsel from two different sources. One group counseled Rehoboam to show the power of his authority. Thus shall you say to them, ‘My little finger is thicker than my father's thighs. And now, whereas my father laid on you a heavy yoke, I will add to your yoke. My father disciplined you with whips, but I will discipline you with scorpions.’ But the second group understood that true leadership always involves more than positional influence, but relational influence as well. They wisely counseled, “If you will be a servant to this people today and serve them, and speak good words to them when you answer them, then they will be your servants forever.” The second group giving Rehoboam advice understood the biblical concept of leadership far better. Leadership is influence, sometimes positional but always relational. Rehoboam failed to understand that leadership is influence, not position. He chose option one and ten of the twelve tribes of Israel rebelled against his rule.

Biblical Worldview #4. The call to biblical leadership is the call to serve our families. Accepting our positional authority and using it to firmly discipline our children is crucial for effective influence upon our children. Parenthetically, we don’t need to fear that wielding such authority will harm our relationship with our kids. Scripture assures us, We have had earthly fathers who disciplined us AND WE RESPECTED THEM. Firm discipline, in the long, run wins our kids’ respect. They will not respect a dad who just wants to be their play buddy. On the other hand, to maximize our influence there is no substitute for winning their hearts by caring for them well. Here are 5 ways that Jesus built his relationship with his followers:

Through UNDERSTANDING. By taking on human flesh, God, the Son came into our world. He sweat real sweat. Hitting his fingers with the hammer hurt him as much as it hurts us. He is now our Great High Priest, allowing us to draw near by his blood, and full of empathy for our weakness.
Through AFFIRMATION. Peter had denied him three times. Then Jesus went out of his way to present Peter with a chance to reaffirm his love for Jesus three times and reinstating his call.
Through COMPANIONSHIP. In Mark 3:14, Jesus reveals to us another vital key to leadership influence. He appointed twelve so that they might BE WITH HIM. No relationship can be built without investing in time together.
Through COMPASSION. The twelve continually saw Jesus’ heart in action. When a leper came to Jesus saying, “If you are willing you can make me clean,” Mark says that the apostles saw that Jesus’ heart was filled with compassion.
Through ATTENTIVENESS TO THEIR PRACTICAL NEEDS. The best way to win another’s heart is to unselfishly focus on serving him or her—meeting their practical needs, which Jesus demonstrated constantly in his healing ministry and in feeding the five thousand and four thousand.

The best way to influence our wife and kids to follow us to win their hearts by loving them well, building a caring relationship with them and serving them.

Leading our homes is not just being the decision maker; it is intentionally using our authority to relational influence to sculpt a child’s character. Cloud and Townsend write: “You are preparing your child for his future. A person’s character is his destiny... Child rearing is primarily about helping children to develop character that will take them through life safely, securely, productively, and joyfully” (Boundaries With Kids).

For Further Prayerful Thought:

How would you argue with a Christian brother who said, “My wife is better with the kids, so I leave their discipline to her?”
How does the discipline approach, “Your behavior is making mommy and daddy feel angry with you” violate the principles of biblical parenting?
Why do you think God makes such harsh statements about the failure to bring painful consequences for wrong behavior—you hate your child, you bring death to your child?
Why is biblical leadership more about winning the hearts of followers by serving them, than it is having responsibility for making decisions?
Which component of Jesus’ leadership practices with the twelve do you most need to put into practice in your leadership role?

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Effective Family Leaders Know Their Destination

On 13 January, 2024 By Gary Yagel

The father of a third-grade boy named Johnny decided to pick him up right after school and take him out for a “dad date” for lunch. The father recounts the incident. “I pulled up to the school playground and before I could get out of the car, Johnny opened the door and got in. I remarked, ‘Boy that was fast.’ And he answered, ‘Yeah, I know. I wanted the kids to see who I was going to lunch with.’ Then he rolled down the window and yelled good-bye to his friends.” Proverbs 17:6 says, The glory of children is their fathers. It’s hard to overstate how much every child longs for his dad’s love, attention, and approval.

This is the second episode in our January series, Leading Our Homes Well in a Culture That Doesn’t Want Us to Lead. No dad reading this blog wants to fail his child. But, as we saw last week, leading our homes at this cultural moment requires heading into gale force winds. Furthermore, as we also saw last week, our calling to be the head of our homes is staggering. It not only makes us accountable to God for directing our family members in the way they should go, but also calls us to help them reach their full, God-given potential, protect them physically, emotionally, and spiritually, from harm, and continually refill their emotional tanks with unconditional love. Family leadership isn’t for the half-hearted. And it is not always appreciated by our followers! Let’s be honest. Johnny was a third grader, not a teen. A more realistic picture of teen attitudes towards their dads comes from Mark Twain, who said, “When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant that I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at much he had learned in just seven years.” Our leadership won’t always be appreciated! What is worse is that our leadership attempts can fail, disheartening and demotivating us. But as Wayne Gretzky has pointed out, “You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.” So, let’s look at what leadership at home looks like, so we can give it our best shot.

We begin by identifying the three components of leadership: 1) The leader is assigned this responsibility in the family by God. We must avoid thinking that being a leader is having the gifts to be an upfront person. As we saw with Johnny, the glory of children is their father. God gives all children a natural inclination to welcome their father’s influence. 2) The followers are our wife, kids, and since family headship is multi-generational, our grandkids. Leadership isn’t a position on an organizational chart—it is impacting those under our care to follow us. “He who thinks he is leading when no one is following is only taking a walk.” 3) The destination is the third part of leadership. Leaders take their followers somewhere. There is a goal to achieve, a destination to reach. Many men fail to lead because their destination is fuzzy and ill-defined. The goal of our spiritual leadership at home is mature discipleship. God’s destination for the members of Christ’s Body is spelled out in Ephesians 4, when he explains the goal of church officers: to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ, until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to MATURE MANHOOD, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ (vs. 12-13).

When it comes to the leadership process, there really are only 3 questions that need to be answered to be an effective leader. Where am I going? How can I inspire my followers to come with me? How are we going to get there? The answers to these questions define the process of leading.

1. The leader has a clear understanding of and stays focused on the goal: The leader is called the leader because he is out in front of his followers going hard after the goal. Paul said, One thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus… Brothers, join in imitating me. (Phil 3:13ff). So, we must be striving hard after Christ. But our kids don’t need an example of perfection; they need an example of one who, though he falls because of his sin—just as they will—gets up quickly and gets back in the race. What we model is DIRECTION not PERFECTION.

2. The leader motivates his followers to come with him. There are two vital components of leadership influence. 1) Structural or positional influence. Bosses motivate their employees structurally by paying them, giving them raises, or threatening to fire them. Fathers exercise structural influence by firmly disciplining their children. Whoever spares the rod hates his son, but he who loves him is diligent to discipline him (Prov 13:24). Firm discipline is critical for children. Consequences are vital training in godliness during a child’s early years. But as parents transfer the responsibility for their lives to their teens, the strength and quality of our relationship with our kids dramatically impacts our influence. Researcher Virginia Hearn interviewed 37 Christian adults raised by Christian parents, asking the adults, “What did your parents do right to steer you towards Christ?” One man responded, “My father was my counselor, pastor, teacher, and friend…My parent’s authority was not something that was beaten into me; they won my respect and loyalty with their actions…My father’s devotion to Christ was transparent. I think I grew to love the Lord because I loved my father, and you just couldn’t separate the two” (What They Did Right).

3. The leader equips his followers to reach the goal. This may be the most neglected part of spiritual leadership at home. The leader EQUIPS and ASSISTS his followers to keep taking steps towards spiritual maturity. The best leader is not a hero; he is a hero maker. Effective leaders 1) help their followers see their own potential, 2) encourage them to discover their own, God-given gifts, 3) equip them with training needed to succeed, 4) give them honest feedback. Last week we saw that our leadership role in marriage calls us to strive to present our wife to Christ in all her radiant inner beauty. Dads have this same calling to help their kids reach their fullest potential spiritually, mentally, and physically. Dads often understand this part of fathering in the sports arena. We do everything we can to help our kids discover their athletic gifts. We take them to countless practices, get them the best coaches, and root obnoxiously for them during the games. Bob Hamrin of Great Dads asks Dad, Do you put as much energy into helping prepare your child to succeed spiritually as you do athletically?

For the rest of this episode, we will zoom in on this first part of the leadership process—clearly defining and staying focused upon our goal.

THE DESTINATION: WHAT DOES A MATURE DISCIPLE LOOK LIKE?

When it comes to being effective spiritual leaders of our homes, we begin by asking, “what is our destination?” As the Cheshire Cat said to Alice, “If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will get you there.” We observed that Paul said the goal of spiritual leadership is spiritual maturity as disciples. When Jesus gave us this Great Commission, to go and make disciples, those hearing it understood the meaning of that word, disciple. Bands of disciples with their masters were not uncommon in Jesus’ day. Everyone knew that a disciple (MATHETES) was a FOLLOWER of a master. Jesus’ hearers knew three things about disciples:

1) The disciple had the deepest kind of PERSONAL FRIENDSHIP with the master because they did life together. So, a disciple is called TO Christ—to enjoy a love relationship with him. Christ’s primary role as HIGH PRIEST is to enable us to achieve this foundational part of our mission, experiencing a personal relationship with God. For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin. Let us then with confidence draw near to the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need (Heb 4:16-17).

3) The disciple, as a “follower” joined in HIS MASTER’S CAUSE. Jesus came into the world to overthrow the kingdom of darkness and establish his kingdom of righteousness. Joining in that mission means we are called to EXERCISE DOMINION FOR Christ—to implement Christ’s righteous agenda in our role as husband, father, employee/employer, neighbor, church member, steward, and ambassador of the kingdom.) Christ’s primary role as KING is to overthrow evil and establish his kingdom of righteousness over the earth. He sends us out to further his mission. Seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness (Matt 6:33).

So, the target on the wall in family leadership is us all growing in the three parts of our calling from Christ—to him, to be like him, and to exercise dominion for him. The accuracy of this three-part understanding of our calling is verified by its perfect correlation with Jesus' three offices, priest, prophet, and king. As leaders, first and foremost, must be our commitment to these callings in our own lives. Paul wrote to Timothy: You know all about my teaching, my way of life, my purpose (2 Tim 3:10). Paul called attention not just to what he had said, my teaching, but to his everyday way of life, and even to what Paul was pursing as his mission, my purpose. Paul stayed focused on his mission, leading from his life.

FOCUSING ON THESE 3 DISCIPLESHIP CALLINGS OURSELVES!

A. We are Called TO Christ—to enjoy a love relationship with him. Question #1 of the WCF Shorter Catechism is: What is the chief end of man? The answer is “to glorify God and enjoy him forever.” Humans are designed so that only when our hearts are regularly being refreshed by delighting in God, knowing how much he delights in us, are our affections aligned properly. Perhaps, that is why God makes such a staggering promise in Psalm 37:4. Delight yourself in the Lord and he will give you the desires of your heart. John Piper makes an astute observation about the cost of failing to feast on a steady diet of God’s love:

“One reason lust reigns in so many is that Christ has so little appeal. You were created to treasure Christ with all your heart—more than you treasure sex or sugar. If you have little taste for Jesus, competing pleasures will triumph. Plead with God for the satisfaction you don’t have. Quote Psalm 90:14, 'Satisfy us in the morning with your steadfast love that we might rejoice and be glad all our days.' Then, look, look, LOOK at the most magnificent person in the universe until you see him the way he is" (Desiring God).

Three Hindrances to Enjoying God

Looking for ultimate satisfaction in other places. Because of the fall, our sinful nature directs us to seek heart satisfaction in any place but God himself. Whatever things we look to for soul satisfaction become idols. As foundational as our vocational call is to discipleship, our work exposes us to a treasure trove of intoxicating rewards: recognition from coworkers, titles that build our self-esteem, authority that makes us feel significant, financial rewards that let us wear things, travel places, and buy things that make us feel good. But as David discovered, real joy is being in God’s presence. In your presence there is fullness of joy; at your right hand are pleasures forevermore (Psalm 16:11).
Inability to grasp the truth of our adoption as sons. Many men have grown up with fathers who have been absent or emotionally distant, leaving them with no pattern for relating to their heavenly father. Initially, they will have trouble building a personal relationship with God. But if they persevere, the reality of their adoption as sons will become very precious, as will calling God, “Abba.” For you did not receive a spirit that makes you a slave again to fear, but you received the Spirit of sonship. And by him, we cry Abba, Father (Rom. 8:15-16). J.I. Packer describes the power of adoption. “Adoption is a FAMILY idea, conceived in terms of LOVE, and viewing God as FATHER. In adoption, God takes us into his family and fellowship, and establishes us as his children and the heirs. Closeness, affection, and generosity are at the heart of the relationship. To be right with God the JUDGE is a great thing, but to be loved and cared for by God the FATHER is a greater thing.” (Knowing God).
Busyness: No relationship can grow without frequent time together. In a culture dominated by screens, our focus is constantly riveted to the outer, physical world, not the inner world. We do not default to shutting out the physical world to commune with God. Time to feast our hearts on God’s love and delight in us will not happen without taking charge of our schedule and structuring intentional time to do so.

B. We are Called to BE LIKE Christ—to holy, Christ-like attitudes. One of the must fundamental truths of life is that God’s main tool for developing Christ-like character is everyday trials and frustrations. A careful look at the context of the verse we often look too when things are going wrong—all things work together for good for those who love God who are called ACCORDING TO HIS PURPOSE—reveals that Paul explains what that purpose is: to be conformed to the image of his Son. What this biblical truth means is that every frustration, pressure, difficulty, and trial of life, although painful, is an opportunity to develop Christ-like character. Jeff Kemp in his recent book, Facing the Blitz, compares these trials and frustrations to a blitz in a football game. Pointing out that the word blitz means "a sudden overwhelming bombardment," Kemp takes us back to a Monday Night football game when he was quarterbacking the Philadelphia Eagles, and they were playing at Houston. The game was tied 3-3 and they had worked their way down to the Houston 20-yardline. But it was third and eight. He writes,

“The instant the snap from the center hit my hands pandemonium broke loose. Houston threw everything they had in my direction. Two extra linebackers were bearing down on me, with the free safety approaching at a sprint after having snuck up to the line of scrimmage…As I dropped back, I was fully aware that in the next few seconds something very bad—or very good—was about to happen. Thankfully, during my time in the league, I had learned not to panic at the sight of a full-on blitz. In fact, the first thought that went through my head that night was, If I move quickly enough we’ve got a touchdown…I couldn’t see much, with so many Houston players blitzing, especially with the free safety in my face. The ball flew from my hand and hurled past the ear hole of the blitzing free safety.”

It turns out that his All-Pro tight end Keith Jackson had seen the blitz and played it perfectly. The ball sailed into his arms and Jackson sprinted across the goal line for the winning touchdown. I believe Kemp’s analogy is a good one. We are all faced with a series of great opportunities brilliantly disguised as frustrations, trials, and pressure. These are opportunities to grow Christ-like.

“But,” says Kemp, “many of us, when facing a life blitz, only see the negative and not the opportunity…Trials can humble and even hurt us, but they can also teach and motivate us. It all depends upon the attitude we bring to the blitz. The key is our lens. If we get bogged down by the frustration of the circumstances and think only about survival, a blitz will be primarily negative and possibly devastating. However, if our mindset is to look for something more, for the blessing hidden amidst the challenge, a blitz gives us a chance to live our lives at an entirely different level.”

When frustrations and trials blitz us, we need to figure out which aspect of Christ-like character, those specific challenges require us to demonstrate, virtues like faith, patience, forgiveness, and loving those who are hard to love.

C. We are Called to EXERCISE DOMINION FOR Christ—to implement Christ’s righteous agenda in every sphere of our lives. The task assigned to Adam and Eve was to SHAPE the culture. To accomplish this part of our mission we need to be equipped to winsomely articulate the biblical worldview of the issues of the day. A resource I recommend is the Colson center’s What Would You Say website, which contains over a hundred 6-7-minute videos on topics like, gender, sex, abortion, homosexuality, critical theory, socialism, separation of church and state, etc. To illustrate, here is a summary of the text from, Is the Bible Still Relevant?

You're in a conversation and someone says, “the Bible just isn’t relevant anymore. Our world has moved beyond it.” What Would You Say? Three points to make:

Atheist historian Tom Holland argues in his book, Dominion, that freedom, human rights, orphanages, hospitals, women’s rights, care for the poor, and opposition to things like slavery were birthed from Christianity’s influence on the world. “[The idea] that every human being possessed an equal dignity was not remotely a self-evident truth. A Roman would have laughed at it…The origins of this principle lay not in the French Revolution, nor in the Declaration of Independence, nor in the Enlightenment, but in the Bible.”
Modern science is a product of biblical assumptions. Most of the founders of modern science were Christians. Men like Blaise Pascal, Johannes Kepler, Isaac Newton, believed certain things about the universe that made science possible. The scientific method itself relies on biblical worldview assumptions. This is why empirical science only emerged out of and flourished in the Christian West.
The Bible is the most influential book on the planet. By 2050, the number of Christians globally is expected to top 3 billion, and a third of them will live in Africa. So, by 2025, Lifeway predicts that 110 million Bibles will be printed every year. The Bible has been translated into over 700 languages Though, at present, it may have fallen out of favor in the West, if current trends hold, it’s not the Bible, but dismissive ideas about the Bible, that will become increasingly irrelevant.

Effective family leaders know their destination. Their leadership begins, as the Apostle Paul's did, with staying focused on their mission themselves: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.

For Further Prayerful Thought:

What did you learn about the leadership process that you want to remember?
In your own words, what is the destination that Christian men who are leading their homes are pursuing with their family members?
Why might it be argued that investing in your calling to love God with all of your heart, mind, soul, and strength while drinking in his love for you is the foundation of our mission?
How can you better connect the frustrating blitzes of your life to the qualities of character God might be teaching you through them?
When might you steal an hour to spend on the website What Would You Say, to get better equipped to verbalize the biblical worldviews on the issues of the day as salt and light?

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Rejecting Jesus’ Call to Biblical Manhood

On 06 January, 2024 By Gary Yagel

Today I want to camp for a moment on the way we introduce the podcast: Hello and welcome to the podcast devoted to helping you hear “Well done” from the lips of the Master after running the race he has marked out for you. For those of us with families, I think the commendation we most want to hear some day from Jesus’ lips is, “I entrusted to you this wife and these kids to love and lead. Well done. They have been enriched and I have been honored.”

But to be honest, there are so many forces in today’s culture, our own hearts, our wife’s heart, and churches today that are pushing hard against men taking leadership in their homes and churches, that daring to lead our families is tough. It isn’t for sissies. It demands courage to overcome our uncertainty about what we are doing, a thick skin to resist peer pressure, and determination to defeat our passivity. But men, we can’t let our families bear the cost of our rejection of Jesus’ call to biblical manhood. They will suffer. This episode is for those who refuse to offer Jesus a slight nod and mediocre commitment to being a godly man. It challenges men instead to say to Jesus, “I don’t care how strong the resistance is, how unequipped I feel, or how many times I fail, by God’s grace I am going to define MY role as a man in MY home BIBLICALLY and lead My wife and children according to that design as best I can for their welfare and Jesus’ honor.”

At this cultural moment the biggest assault against God by the kingdom of darkness seems to be the attack on his image—his design of male and female differently to complete one another in the loving union of marriage. Satan has launched an all-out frontal assault against respecting God’s gender design. This attack includes an assault upon OUR COMMITMENT to embrace God’s design for godly manhood. The question is, “Are we going to stand against this assault or cave? In the words of Chuck Colson, “If we fail to stand for Christ at the place where the world is denying Christ’s Lordship, we are missing the mark” (Who Speaks for God.) Martin Luther sees such a denial as personal disloyalty to our Master, Jesus. He astutely observes,

If I profess with the loudest voice and clearest exposition every portion of the truth of God except precisely that little point which the world and the devil are attacking at that moment, I am not confessing Christ…Where the battle rages, there the loyalty of the soldier is proved, and to be steady on all battlefields besides, is mere flight and disgraces if he flinches at that point (Ibid).

Any man determined to lead his family well faces fierce headwinds coming at him from multiple sources. Let’s consider six:

From egalitarianism: The very idea that one partner in marriage has the leadership role is oppressive and a Christian wife being told to submit to her husband reeks of chauvinism. Never mind that Jesus, who was equal in dignity to the Father submitted to the Father to accomplish our redemption.
From feminism: Making any distinctions between males and females is sexist. Generalizations are oppressive. Never mind that women happen to have a womb and breasts to nurture, and that behavioral science has proved repeatedly that differences in testosterone and estrogen cause clear differences in male and female behavior.
From critical theory: Gender roles and distinctions are cultural constructs imposed on women by oppressive men. Never mind that common sense, 4000 years of history, and the very survival of the human species that requires one man and one woman uniting to procreate—all show that male and female are different.
From gender theory: Everyone has the right to determine his own gender. Never mind that this delusion is refuted by science. The presence of the XY chromosome in male babies, instead of XX, irreversibly shapes his brain differently than girls'. Every cell in the normal female body—over thirty trillion—is marked XX.
From the world of religion: Today some “Christians” twist Scripture to deny its clear teaching of two genders and two gender roles and are drawing our loved ones into their false teaching, bending Scripture to go along with culture instead of standing against culture. Never mind the fact that some who claim to be Christians have always gone along with culture instead of standing against it—for example against chattel slavery, or against the Third Reich.
From our fallen nature, which rationalizes, “My wife is smarter and more spiritual than I am. Besides, Jesus taught that authority is for serving. My wife decides where we should be going and I focus on serving her. My wife and I co-lead our home.” Never mind the fact that in God’s own words, Adam was punished for “listening to the voice of his wife” instead of leading.

I believe that Jesus stated the same warning about compromising in a hostile culture that Martin Luther articulated. He said, “You are the salt of the earth, but if salt has lost its taste, how shall its saltiness be restored? It is no longer good for anything except to be thrown out and trampled under people's feet (Mt 5:13).

To be sure, there are many Christians today who are, perhaps, even unconsciously rejecting biblical teaching about gender differences, whose intentions are right. Toxic masculinity is real. And way too often it has been covered up by males who hold power in churches, Congress, and business. Sexual harassment in the military was excused far too long. Women have been unfairly denied participation in many occupations and unfairly underpaid in the marketplace. They have been demeaned by unbiblical traditionalism that confined them to cooking, cleaning, and taking care of the kids. There is no denying the way women have been abused, taken advantage of, and devalued. No Christain can ignore this fact. All women carry the full weight and dignity of being God’s image bearers that men do.

But we need to help others think carefully about this mistreatment in a fallen world. Is the problem the structure of order that God gives for the home? Or is it the sinful nature of those living out the structure? In my experience, for every Christian man discovered to have turned his leadership role into an excuse to abuse his wife or kids, there are fifty Christian men using their leadership role trying to sacrifice daily to love and lead their wife and children well. The problem is NOT the structure, but human sinful nature in both women and men. However, the hurricane-force winds of ideologies that undermine God’s gender design are being felt intensely by our loved ones. They are at risk of being drawn into destructive worldviews not because they are true but because no one is refuting them. The one who states his case first seems right, until the other comes and examines him (Prov 18:17). There is zero ambiguity about the biblical teaching that God created male and female for different roles in the family and church.

Eve is created to be the vital assistant (suitable helper) that Adam needs; Adam is NOT created to be the assistant of Eve.
Eve is brought to the man; Adam is not brought to Eve.
Adam names Eve, a universally recognized expression of his authority in the ANE.
Sarah is commended for obeying her husband. For this is how the holy women who hoped in God used to adorn themselves, by submitting to their own husbands, as Sarah obeyed Abraham and called him lord. (1 Pt 3:5-6).
Colossians 3:1-2: Wives, be subject to your own husbands.
Since the church is the household of God, men are to lead there as well. Speaking with Apostolic authority about ordering worship, Paul wrote, I do not permit a woman to teach or to exercise authority over a man; rather, she is to remain quiet. The teaching in view here is the authoritative teaching done by pastors from the pulpit. Although in Gal 3:28 Paul insists that women are full members of the Body of Christ, he sees no contradiction in God assigning the leadership role in the church to qualified men.
An overseer must be above reproach, the husband of one wife. Paul did not say or the wife of one husband, even though there was a strong group of Christ-following women, including Mary the mother of Jesus who were part of the church.
The NT teaching of gender roles was not confined to Paul. Peter wrote, “Wives, be subject to your own husband.”
Ephesians 5:22-24. Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife even as Christ is the head of the church, his body, and is himself its Savior. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit in everything to their husbands. A man who refuses to accept his leadership role but insists, “We co-lead our home” sins profoundly against his wife, his children, and his God. This verse means what it says. Either this is God’s perfect design for marriage or not. Either God’s Word is so impotent, and God so incompetent that he needed modern feminists, egalitarians, and critical theory advocates to correct his Word, or his Word needs to correct feminists, egalitarians, and CRT advocates.

WISDOM TO HELP US SEE THE MAGNIFICENCE OF GOD’S GENDER DESIGN

God does not leave us in the dark about what the “headship” of the husband looks like in marriage. We are going to see that this ugly, evil term to egalitarians, feminists, and gender theory ideologues, in fact describes a magnificent design. In 1 Corinthians 11:3, we read, I want you to understand that the HEAD of every man is Christ, the HEAD of a wife is her husband, and the HEAD of Christ is God. We’re going to examine four characteristics of God’s headship of Christ, and Christ’s headship of the church to determine what the husband’s headship of his wife should look like. We are going to see NOT an ugly, disgusting picture of patriarchal oppression, as anti-Christian ideologies allege, but a glorious picture of strength, sacrifice, and protective care that has the potential to melt the hearts of wives and which honors God.

A. Headship Is Leading. In John 17, God (Christ’s HEAD) sends Christ to accomplish the plan of salvation. God the Father leads and initiates. Jesus responds to the Father with “obedience even to the point of death” (Phil 2). Jesus is accountable to God, his HEAD. In a parallel way, Christ (our HEAD) sends us into the world to accomplish his mission--the spread of his kingdom--calling us to obey everything he has commanded us, being accountable to Christ, our HEAD. In a parallel way, we (our wife’s HEAD) are to take the initiative and lead our wife and family to follow Christ. We are the ones accountable to Christ for our family, not our wife. Respecting our leadership, for her, does NOT mean passive obedience. To the contrary, it means letting her husband see what she sees, and providing assistance that only she is equipped to provide him. However, if they can't agree, in the end, she is to submit to him. This design enriches a wife’s life. It frees her from carrying the weight of responsibility for the family since her husband is the one accountable to God. When he carries that weight, she is free to flourish, contributing her greatest assets, i.e. being eyes to help her husband see what he does not, and nurturing others along their path.

B. Headship is Coaching. What I mean is that the goal of headship is to see the one under our authority honored. Headship is being a hero-maker. In John 17:1, Jesus’ words to the Father (his HEAD) reveal Jesus’ knowledge that the Father’s intent was to honor him. “Father, the hour has come; GLORIFY YOUR SON that the Son may glorify you.” A few verses later, he said the same thing, “I glorified you on earth, having accomplished the work that you gave me to do. And now, Father, GLORIFY ME.” God, who was Christ’s HEAD was motivated by the desire to see him glorified. In a parallel way, later in the same prayer Christ (our HEAD) expresses his desire that we be glorified by being sanctified in truth. At the core of headship is a sacrificial commitment to see those under our care flourish. That is what Jesus taught in Mark 10:43-45: You know that those who are considered rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great ones exercise authority over them. But it shall not be so among you…For even the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to GIVE HIS LIFE AS A RANSOM FOR MANY."

Jesus, our HEAD, died so that we might flourish, being set free from sin’s slavery to reach our fullest potential and glory as humans. This definition of headship corresponds with Adam’s calling in Genesis 2:15 where he is placed in the Garden to cultivate it. The Hebrew word, AVAD means to help reach its fullest potential. This same headship principle is assumed by Paul when he says, Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, THAT HE MIGHT SANCTIFY HER—(helping her reach her full potential)—having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, so that he might present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish. We don’t wash our wives in our blood but our headship calling with our wives is the same as Jesus’—that our bride reach her fullest potential of sanctification becoming filled with the radiance of inner beauty. How does this design enrich a wife’s life? What wife’s heart would not be melted by a husband who sweat, striving to do everything he could to provide for her, so that she could reach her greatest potential and highest level of lovliness?

C. Headship is Protecting. Christ our HEAD prayed in John 17, Holy Father, keep them in your name… I have guarded them, and not one of them has been lost except the son of destruction, that the Scripture might be fulfilled… I do not ask that you take them out of the world, but that you keep them from the evil one (vs 11-15). Adam, the HEAD of Eve was placed in the garden not only to cultivate it (AVAD) but to protect it, (SHAMAR). Most commentators believe that Adam failed in his responsibility to protect the garden paradise and Eve from evil. As Larry Crabb points out, when Adam saw the serpent speaking to Eve, he should have stepped up saying something like this:

Headship requires husbands to protect their wives, physically, emotionally, and spiritually. What wife wouldn’t want a husband devoted to keeping her safe from harm in all three of these spheres?

D. Headship is Loving Unconditionally. God (the HEAD of Christ) loved him. We see this reality in Jesus’ request of God in John 17:24: Father, I desire that they also, whom you have given me, may be with me where I am, to see my glory that you have given me because YOU LOVED ME before the foundation of the world. We also see the affirming, nurturing component of headship love in God’s audible words to Jesus, “This is by beloved sin in whom I am well pleased.” In a parallel way Christ, our HEAD loved us unconditionally and sacrificially in going to the cross. Headship for husbands requires this same sacrificial, unconditional love for our wives. It is a preoccupation with concern for our wife’s needs that is as natural as paying attention to our own body. Husbandly headship nourishes our wife’s soul through attention to her inner beauty and a commitment to encourage her with the words, “Many wives have done excellently. But you surpass them all” (Prov 31:29). The headship calling to love unconditionally those under our care meets the deepest needs of a wife’s heart. Christian Counselors Gary and Barbara Rosberg write, “Every wife’s life story is different, but every wife shares this same need for unconditional love and acceptance. That became clear to us when a majority of our female survey respondents said that the need for unconditional love and acceptance was their number on love need” (The 5 Love Needs of Men & Women).

The ugly portrayal of headship is a lie that Satan is using to harm millions today! But where do we get the courage to walk steadily into hurricane-force winds?

THREE ROOTS to COURAGE to EMBRACE GOD’S GENDER DESIGN in a HOSTILE WORLD

Humility: God devotes 5 verses in Genesis 1 to emphasize Adam and Eve’s equality and 21 verses in Genesis 2 to emphasize their differences. Adam is made for the ground (the garden is described as needing a gardener), from the ground, given a name that means ground, called to work the ground, and when he sins, what is cursed is the ground. In an exact parallel structure Genesis tells us that Eve is made for the man (to provide companionship), from the man, given the name woman (ISHA) because she came out of the man,(ISH), called to the work of assisting the man. When she sins, what is cursed is her relationship with the man and their kids. If I cringe at saying "Woman was created FOR man," where does the problem lie? With Scripture or with ME? I need the humility to say that the shaping of my egalitarian culture is the problem, not Scripture. Every culture's values are contradicted at some point by Scripture.

Love: True love does not compromise the biblical teaching of roles because it makes people feel bad. To the contrary, Scripture teaches us that real love rejoices with the truth. Agape love provides what another needs. In view of God’s revelation to us about his intentional design of male and female to equally share the role of his image bearers, it follows that many of men and women’s needs would be the same. But he also intentionally created male and female differently, with distinct needs and abilities, (the whole point of Genesis 2), so that they could come together in the loving unity of marriage, completing what is lacking in the other as the loving unity of the Trinity completes it. So, God intends males and females to be different! A husband cannot love his wife well without understanding femininity.

Allegiance to Jesus: In public settings, when someone is criticized for making male and female distinctions, we can have the courage to say, “I don’t agree with that assumption. Common sense and science tell us there are significant differences between males and females.” When gender theory is being pushed, we can say, “The idea that a teen girl has the right to require others to identify her as male, which contradicts both science and common sense, comes from a radical ideology called gender theory. We should base policy on common sense and science not radical ideological myths." Ultimately the courage to take a stand for Biblical truth is about loyalty to Jesus. I want to repeat what Martin Luther, a GIANT IN STANDING AGAINST FIERCE CULTURAL HEADWINDS, said. “If I profess with the loudest voice and clearest exposition every portion of the truth of God except precisely that little point which the world and the devil are attacking at that moment, I am not being faithful to Christ…Where the battle rages, there the loyalty of the soldier is proved."

For Further Prayerful Thought:

What to you is the hardest thing about a Christ-following man’s call to be the leader of his wife and kids?
What most stood out to you about the “headship” of husbands in marriage?
How best can you help other Christians grasp the magnificence of this design?
Which parts of headship do you most want to remember and concentrate upon if you have a family?
Which roots of courage to stand alone sometimes in this culture for God’s gender design have to most power to energize you?

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Discipleship When Your Master is the Prince of Peace

On 30 December, 2023 By Gary Yagel

Today, we complete our series Learning from the Actors in the Christmas Drama by considering what discipleship should look like for us in 2024 when we consider the fact that our master is the Prince of Peace.

In my view as a men’s ministry leader, one of the great tragedies of the church today is that we have failed to capture the hearts of men with the greatness of our mission. This episode focusses on just one aspect of a decision that every Christian who is listening to this podcast has made—choosing to be a follower of King Jesus. Disciples follow their masters’ example. They apply his teaching. They embrace his cause. This episode looks at just one facet of Jesus’ identity that has enormous implications for following him. He is the Prince of Peace who brings shalom.

SHALOM in the OT and the Greek word for peace, EIRENE, mean more than just a cessation of hostilities; they refer to “total well-being both personally and communally” (ESV Study Notes: Matt 5:9). Shalom refers to harmony in four spheres: 1) harmony in his relationship with God, 2) internal harmony—relationship with himself, 3) harmony in his relationship with other humans, and 4) harmony in his relationship with the material world of creation. Author, Hugh Whelchel writes, “When these relationships are functioning properly, we experience the fulness of life God intended—SHALOM. We were originally created to have peace with God. From this perfectly intimate relationship with God and a heart focused on our Creator would flow the peace in our hearts that we long for and the peace with others we struggle to find.” (All Things New).

Of course, peacemaking is now necessary because our race’s war against God shattered this SHALOM—the relational harmony of the entire universe. The unity and peace God had woven into this world, SHALOM, began to unravel as soon as Adam and Eve sinned. Steve Corbett and Brian Fikkert, in their book, When Helping Hurts, explain the devastating effects of the fall on all of humanity’s relationships. “Their relationship with God was damaged, as their intimacy with Him was replaced with fear; their relationship with self was marred, as Adam and Eve developed a sense of shame; their relationship with others was broken, as Adam quickly blamed Eve for their sin; and their relationship with the rest of creation became distorted as God cursed the ground” (When Helping Hurts).

But the Prince of Peace has come to fix all four broken relationships, i.e. reweave SHALOM. Paul says it this way, All this is from God, who through Christ RECONCILED us to himself and gave us the MINISTRY OF RECONCILIATION; that is, in Christ God was RECONCILING THE WORLD TO HIMSELF (2 Cor 5:18-19). This ministry of reconciliation is the work of peacemaking, which Jesus calls us to in Matt 5:9. It is restoring shalom in all four relationships.

PEACE WITH GOD

Our race’s rebellion against God fractured our relationship with him. Instead of our hearts being satisfied by the joy of walking in a love connection with him, our hearts are filled with guilt and shame that drives us away from him. At the same time, God’s judicial wrath against all sin causes him to be hostile towards us. Only the atoning sacrifice of Christ can propitiate, i.e. turn away the wrath of God against us because of our sin. By faith Christ’s righteousness is imputed to us. We are declared righteous. In Paul’s words to the Romans, since we have been justified by faith, we have PEACE WITH GOD through our Lord Jesus Christ.

Being a peacemaker begins with faithfulness to pray for and seize opportunities to lead others to faith in Christ. In Christ God was…entrusting to us the message of reconciliation. Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ, God making his appeal through us. We implore you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God (2 Cor 5:19-21). Few Christian men I know (including myself) are satisfied with the level of their commitment to sharing their faith. For this reason, one of the accountability questions on the Check 6 card that our ministry uses is: Who are the non-believers you are building relationships with and how can I pray for your strategy to share Christ with them. I have discovered firsthand that God loves to answer such prayers. Some years ago, my wife and I had been praying for months for a neighbor to come to faith. We had discovered that the neighbor’s wife, Ashley was a member of a nearby Evangelical church. Her husband, Bill had gone to Young Life but had never made a commitment to Christ. Sandy and I reached out and prayed. Before long I discovered that Bill had a problem with becoming abusive towards Ashley when he had been drinking. Late one Saturday afternoon I returned home from a meeting with a lot of my sermon still to finish that night. But Sandy said, “Bill came over this afternoon. Ashley told him she is leaving him. Bill wants to talk to you.” I crossed the street to their house thinking “Maybe this is the opportunity I’ve been praying for to lead Bill to Christ—but I’ve got so much work still to do on my sermon. I’ll put in an appearance and come back tomorrow afternoon to share the gospel.” As I walked through the door, though, Bill’s first words were, “I need Christ in my life.” This spiritual baby was coming down the birth canal. So, I sat down, went through the gospel and Bill prayed to surrender his life to Jesus.

If you are dissatisfied with the number of lost folks that you have been leading to faith in Christ, one decision on your part can make a massive difference. That decision is this: Grab a prayer partner and pray intentionally for 1) the right strategy by which to build relationships with the non-believers in your life 2) the opportunity to share Christ with them. I know that is a prayer God answers!

PEACE WITH SELF

A compassionate desire for others to experience restoration to inner wholeness has always marked the ministry of Christ-followers, especially for those whose self-esteem has been shattered. Megan Kane ran away from home at fourteen. By fifteen she was a mother. By nineteen she was a stripper, prostitute, and addict. Within a few years she faced felony drug possession charges. The prospect of serious jail time and losing custody of her daughter, Taylor, was the wake-up call Megan needed. That’s when she heard about The Way Out recovery program. This outpatient program consists of sixteen classes that help the women deal with sexual and drug addiction, depression, and living within boundaries “These women’s spirits are broken, their souls are damaged, and they need time to heal,” said director Carol Wiley. So, A Way Out offers that time by providing clothing, counseling, financial assistance, job training, and biblical teaching. Megan came to faith in Christ. Her heart filled with turmoil became a heart filled with Christ. With new life in her blue eyes, and a newfound ambition in her heart, Megan began to study nursing at the University of Memphis. “The important thing,” she said, “was where she was going not where she’s been.” (Restoring All Things, Stonestreet & Smith.) Could Jesus be leading you into 2024 more determined to notice those around you whose hearts are filled with turmoil, who, for that very reason may be open to Jesus’ love?

PEACE WITH OTHER HUMANS

The horizontal component to peacemaking begins by taking the initiative to reconcile any OF OUR OWN broken relationship. Biblically, I am responsible for restoring broken relationships, both when I’ve offended another (Matt 5:23-24) and when another has offended me (Matt 18:15-17). But the call to be an agent of reconciliation in a world of broken relationships goes way beyond our own relationships. We are called to provide restoration help for the culture, from marriage counseling to divorce-recovery help, to building orphanages, to foster care, to teen pregnancy help, to fatherhood initiatives in our cities where 70% of black kids grow up without dads. Let's pause to think about this gigantic need. Barack Obama’s words in Chicago could not be more clear:

Children who grow up without a father are five times more likely to live in poverty and commit crime; nine times more likely to drop out of school, and 20 times more likely to end up in prison. They are more likely to have behavioral problems or run away from home or become teenage parents themselves. And the foundations of our community are weaker because of it. How many times have our hearts stopped in the middle of the night with the sound of a gunshot or a siren? How many teenagers have we seen hanging around on street corners when they should be sitting in a classroom? How many are sitting in prison when they should be working, or at least looking for a job? Yes, we need more jobs and more job training. But we also need families to raise our children. We need fathers to realize that their responsibility does not end at conception. We need them to realize that what makes you a man is not the ability to have a child — IT’S THE COURAGE TO RAISE ONE.

Caveats to Being a Biblical Peacemaker

Paul recognizes that we can’t always fix broken relationships. Romans 12:18, If possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all.
As we seek to bring about reconciliation in fractured relationships, we must realize that forgiveness is not the same as restoration to the same level of relational trust. Such restoration requires repentance, then time to rebuild trust. All Christians whose spouses are unfaithful must forgive them; but they should not take them back sexually until they have demonstrated repentance.
Christ-following peacemakers don’t try to build harmony at the expense of truth. Christians today are being told by leaders inside the church not to speak out on any moral issue that is political and by progressives outside the church that THEY are the cause of polarization in the culture. Both are sending us the same unbiblical message: YOU SHOULD HIDE YOIUR LIGHT UNDER A BASKET.
Peacemaking is not appeasement. Appeasing children by giving in to their wishes to stop their behavior from disturbing our peace is folly. Prov 29:15 says, The rod and reproof give wisdom, but a child left to himself brings shame to his mother. Appeasing political enemies who commit unjust attacks upon us is not a biblical prescription for achieving peace, either. God’s ordained method for stopping evil is the power of the sword, given by God to punish lawlessness.

Peacemaking Requires Wisely Combatting Racism

In my view, it is necessary to address racism today because many young Christians, who rightly want to see the church admit its racist past, are being drawn into a false, destructive analysis of it. Meanwhile, many older Christians close their hearts to admitting their biases because they see younger Christians’ focus on institutional racism as originating from the ungodly cultural Marxist view called Critical Theory. Here are two thoughts about overcoming this polarization.

1. Christians who are concerned about the misuse of white power should clearly and publicly deny the fundamental tenet of Critical theory that culture is to be viewed through the lens of oppressor/oppressed. The correct lens from Scripture is not the oppressed class—blacks vs the oppressor class—whites. The Bible condemns the SIN of partiality, not majority culture MEMBERSHIP.

2. “Privilege” biblically is NOT a sin but requires gratefulness to God and compassion for those outside of majority culture privilege. I believe “racism” is an unwise, emotionally loaded term. Most older Christians believe that calling “racist” a nation that has overcome its racist past far more than other racist cultures, the evidence of which is electing Barack Obama president twice, is an unfounded insult to America, rooted in cultural Marxism. A better term is majority culture bias, which carries far less baggage and has biblical merit. Former Black NFL star Miles McPherson in his book, The Third Option: Hope for a Divided Nation recommends that rather than adopting the oppressor white/oppressed black, lens, Christians choose a third option: “unity through honor.” Rather than following CRT, Christians should treat those of every race with dignity, who possess unseen potential as God’s image-bearers, while majority culture Christians develop compassion for those less privileged than themselves. He illustrates with the story of ten entrepreneurs who were attempting to teach business skills to ten prison inmates. They stood shoulder to shoulder on one side of a line mirrored by ten inmates standing across from them. Everyone in the room answered a series of questions at the same time:

If you had two parents who tucked you in at night and told you they loved you, step forward. None of the inmates stepped forward, all but one of the executives did.
If you went to school where you didn’t fear gang violence, and had up-to-date books & technology, step forward. No inmate moved; all the executives did.
If you had breakfast every day before school and took a packed meal to lunch with you to school, never going through your day on an empty stomach, step forward. Not one inmate moved; all the executives did.
If you were addicted to drugs before the age of twenty, step forward. All of the inmates stepped forward; only two of the executives did.
If you grew up with an immediate family member in prison step forward. All the inmates stepped forward; none of the executives did.
If you lost a family member due to gun violence while you were a child, step forward. All of the inmates stepped forward; none of the executives did.

Tears welled up in the eyes of everyone present, the inmates over memories of their broken childhoods, the executives because their hearts broke for the inmates. Compassion for those who did not have the privileges we had growing up is a Christian virtue, which Christians must cultivate. McPherson’s “third way” is biblical peacemaking. But stirring up resentment towards the privileged is evil.

PEACE WITH THE CREATED ORDER

As we’ve seen, human flourishing takes place when the four relationships of life function harmoniously. But sin fractured all four relationships, including man’s relationship with the physical world, which is placed under God’s curse. Now, natural calamities destroy entire towns, requiring immediate relief. Broken bodies need healing. Broken economic systems exploit the weak. A broken world brings death to husbands, leaving widows destitute and to parents leaving orphans exploited. The curse on the ground makes work harder, causing millions in poverty to barely eke out a subsistence existence. The process of developing the earth’s resources is now corrupted by business owners exploiting workers through unjust wages. The rich exploit the poor in the courts, perverting justice, etc

This is the physical world that Jesus came to fix, inaugurating his ministry in with the words in Nazareth’s synagogue, The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor… Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing. (Lk 4:18-21). Authors Corbett and Fickert imagine the response of those hearing Jesus:

"Could it be that Isaiah’s prophecies were really about to come true? Was it really true that justice, peace and righteousness were about to be established forever? Would this king really bring healing to the parched soil, the feeble hands, the shaky knees, the fearful hearts, the blind, the deaf, the lame, the mute, the brokenhearted, the captives and the sinful souls, and would proclaim the year of jubilee for the poor? Jesus’ answer to all these questions was a resounding “yes” declaring “Today this Scripture is fulfilled in your hearing” (Ibid).

The shalom Jesus brings is the renewal of the whole world. Christians understood this call to bring shalom to the cities of the empire, which were characterized by poor sanitation, contaminated water, high population density, open sewers, filthy streets, unbelievable stench, rampant crime, collapsing buildings and frequent illnesses or plagues. Historian Rodney Stark describes the impact of the Christians:

“The Christian concept of self-sacrificial love of others, emanating from God’s love for them was a revolutionary concept to the pagan mind, which viewed the extension of mercy as an emotional act to be avoided by rational people. Christianity revitalized life in Greco-Roman cities by providing new norms and new kinds of social relationships able to cope with many urgent urban problems.

To cities filled with the homeless and impoverished, Christianity offered charity as well as hope.
To cities filled with newcomers and strangers, Christianity offered an immediate basis for attachment.
To cities filled with orphans and widows, Christianity provided a new and expanded sense of family.
To cities torn by violence and ethnic strife, Christianity offered a new basis for social solidarity.
And to cities faced with epidemics, fires, and earthquakes Christianity offered effective nursing services."

Biblical discipleship never devalues this material world, physical suffering, bodily needs or the economic impact of injustice upon the material wellbeing of others.

In closing, I’m reminded of a story about a Christian pastor on a plane flight who was asked what he did for a living. He answered. “I work for the largest enterprise in the world.” His seat mate was intrigued. “Microsoft?” “No,” “Apple?” “No,” “Amazon?” “Nope, bigger than Amazon.” “Bigger than Amazon! I give up.” The pastor answered, “I work for a worldwide enterprise called the Kingdom of God. Our people are busy in every neighborhood, business, school, and nation seeking to fix everything broken in this world by sin.” That is what it means to be a disciple of the Prince of Shalom.

For Further Prayerful Thought:

What steps can you take to increase the likelihood that that next year at this time you will look back and say, “I was a faithful agent of reconciliation of the kingdom. I prayed for, the building of relationships with the lost around me and for opportunities to share my faith, and seized those opportunities”?
How can you better notice the inner turmoil of those around you and take a small step in pointing them to Jesus? How can you support ministries of those reaching those who have been broken by life?
What caveats do you want to remember about being a peacemaker among humans?
What do you think of Miles McPheron’s third option?
Why might it be important in your world to remember that Christians aren’t call just to fix spiritual things—but respond with compassion to those impacted by the brokenness of the physical world?

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How is Believing in Jesus Any Different Than Believing in Santa?

On 23 December, 2023 By Gary Yagel

As 2024 dawns and the rising generation leaves the influence of their homes and churches, we can expect their exposure to the Internet and pluralistic culture to cause them to question the reliability of Scripture, hearing “it is socially regressive in its views of women, homosexuality, and slavery because the writings originated from sexist, bigoted, men—NOT from a loving God.” They will likely be told to act like adults and stop viewing the Bible’s fairy tales as anything more than morally uplifting stories like The Little Mermaid, The Lord of the Rings, or Santa Claus. After all, according to this worldview, a story doesn’t have to be true to be legitimate. Besides, insisting that Bible stories are true is divisive and intolerant of those who don’t. Against this backdrop, we must help our children and grandchildren, before leaving home, realize that believing in Jesus is far different than believing in Santa Clause. This episode seeks to make clear this vital difference.

PHILOSOPHICAL OBJECTIONS TO BIBLICAL FAITH BEING ROOTED IN TRUTH

A. Belief doesn’t have to be based upon truth. At one of the most prestigious academic institutions in the world, Harvard University, students are taught that if they believe they are males in a biologically female body, they ARE males; and their choice must be respected or it is hate speech. This is a shocking leap into the abyss of irrationality. Transgenderism, like anorexia, is a delusion. Such a disconnect between an imposed worldview and reality is academia at its worst, since no one, including Claudia Gay, Harvard’s president, actually lives her life believing that the truth of her beliefs doesn’t matter. Everyone knows that when you drive through an intersection, your belief that the cars on the left and right will stop at their red-light MATTERS. If your belief is wrong, you will end up dead. It matters whether my belief that the pilot has been trained to fly my plane is true or not; my life depends upon it. The faith of all rational people is based upon evidence that their beliefs are true. That is why faith and trust are used as synonyms. We need to teach our loved ones that anyone who tries to get them to believe something that is disconnected from truth is deluded and perhaps trying to manipulate them.

B. The presupposition that there can’t be just one true religion. How do we respond to this often-heard objection to Christ’s exclusivity claim, “No one comes to the Father but by me.” We need to point out its cultural bias. Most people in the world, including many who are just as educated and intelligent as intellectuals in the West, do NOT hold the view that all religions are equally valid. As Tim Keller observes, “Most non-Western cultures have no problem saying that their culture and religion is best. The idea that it is wrong to do so is deeply rooted in Western traditions of self-criticism and individualism. (Reason for God). Sceptics reflect the subjective values of their own culture when they assume that any exclusive claims to a superior knowledge of spiritual reality cannot be true. This objection, itself, reflects Western culture’s bias; it is an unproved, arrogant presupposition.

THE CHRISTIAN FAITH IS BASED ON EVIDENCE THAT DEMANDS A VERDICT

A. Eyewitness Testimony Evidence. A world that is so focused on science sometimes mistakenly forgets that science, historically, is not the only arbiter of truth. Since the beginning of legal systems, eye-witness testimony has been admitted as proof, sufficiently valid to cause one convicted by it to lose his life. The cornerstone of the Christian faith is this kind of proof—the eyewitness testimony of those who saw the risen Jesus, proving his resurrection. In the classic arrogance that accompanies many academic elites today, it has been argued that the Jesus story is a legend—mythology perpetuated by dishonest, power-hungry ecclesiastical leaders. This thesis lies behind books and movies like The Da Vinci Code. “The real, ‘historical Jesus,’” it is argued, “was a charismatic teacher of justice and wisdom who provoked opposition leading to his execution. After his death, different parties and viewpoints emerged among his followers about who he was. Some claimed he was divine and risen from the dead, others that he was just a human teacher who lived on spiritually in the hearts of his disciples. After a power struggle, the ‘divine Jesus’ party won and created texts that promoted its views. They allegedly destroyed all the alternative texts showing us a different sort of Jesus. Recently, some of these suppressed, alternative views of Jesus have come to light,” they point out—"like the ‘Gnostic’ gospels of Thomas and Judas.” But there are numerous reasons for rejecting such faulty reasoning. The strongest is that the timing of NT documents is way too early for the gospels to be legends.

Matthew, Mark, and Luke were written 40-60 years after Jesus’ death.
We know that Paul wrote 1 Corinthians in the spring of AD 53, 54, or 55. In 15:3ff Paul gave the tenets of Christian belief, which had already been circulating for years: For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have fallen asleep. This is historical proof that the biblical accounts of Jesus’ life were circulating within the lifetimes of hundreds who had been present at the events of his ministry. You can’t write that in a document designed for public reading unless there really are witnesses whose testimony agreed, who would confirm what the author said.
Luke states that he got his account of Jesus’ life from eyewitnesses who were still alive (Lk 1:1-4). Mark says that the man who helped Jesus carry his cross was “the father of Alexander and Rufus” (Mk 15:21). There is no reason to include the names unless the readers know or have access to them.
It was not only Christ’s supporters who were still alive when the NT books were written. Also, still alive would be many bystanders, officials, and enemies of Christ who witnessed these events. They would have been ready to challenge any legendary fictions perpetrated on the masses.
As Tim Keller observes, logic tells us: For a highly altered, fictionalized account of an event to take hold in the public imagination, it is necessary that the eyewitnesses (and their children and grandchildren) all be long dead. They must be off the scene so they cannot contradict or debunk the embellishments or falsehoods of the story. The gospels were written far too soon for this to occur (Ibid).

B. Historic Accuracy of Documents Evidence. Let’s consider 4 ways to test the accuracy of any document, including today’s Bible. This test examines the transmission of the original writings to the present day by evaluating the quantity and quality of manuscripts, time span between events and manuscripts, dating of the manuscript, and archeological evidence to support its historical accuracy. Consider the:

Quantity of Manuscripts. In the case of the OT, there is a small number of Hebrew manuscripts because the Jewish scribes ceremonially buried imperfect and worn manuscripts. The number of NT manuscripts, however, is unparalleled in ancient literature. In museums around the world, there are 24,000 ancient manuscripts of portions of the NT. By comparison, the number of manuscripts of the writings of Plato is 7, the writings of Aristotle is 49. The second highest number of manuscripts behind the NT 24,000 is 643 copies of Homer’s Iliad. With so many copies of the NT manuscript in hand, we have a very good idea of what the original said.
Quality of Manuscripts. Boa & Moody in their book, I’m Glad You Asked say, The entire scribal process was specified in meticulous detail to minimize the possibility of even the slightest error. The number of letters, words, and lines were counted, and the middle letters of the Pentateuch and the Old Testament were determined. As a result of this extreme care the quality of the manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible surpasses all other ancient manuscripts (I’m Glad You Asked, Boa and Moody). The 1947 discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in caves near the Qumran community excavation revealed an intact copy of the book of Isaiah, scientifically dated to about 100 BC. These scrolls contain fragments of 38 out of the 39 OT books. Regarding the NT, the sheer quantity of manuscripts do display various copying errors; but they enable scholars to have tremendous certainty about 99.5 percent of the original texts and no variant readings are significant enough to call into question any of the doctrines of the NT.
Time Span of Manuscripts. Apart from the Dead Sea Scrolls, the earliest text of the Old Testament is 895 AD due to the systematic destruction of prior texts by the Masoretic scribes. We now have some NT manuscripts dated from the first century and most of the NT from the second century. So, the time span between the actual writing of the gospels or Paul’s letters and our oldest manuscripts is less than 75 years in many cases. The contrast to the other best-known ancient writings is enormous. For example, the span between Homer’s writing of the Iliad and the oldest manuscript copy we have is 500 years, between Plato’s writing and our oldest manuscript 1200 years, between Aristotle’s life and our oldest manuscript 1400 years. The historic evidence that our current Bible is what was originally written is unsurpassed by any other historical or religious book in the world.
Archeological Evidence: Because the historical narratives of the Bible are so specific, its details are open to archeological investigation. And today, archeology is the Bible’s best friend, having proven the accuracy of the biblical writers, time and time again. It was not always this way. Consider:

Nazareth. For years, sceptics asserted that the village from which Luke tells us Mary and Joseph came, never existed. But archeologists then found a list in Aramaic of 24 families of priests dispersed after the destruction of the temple in 70 AD and one of the families was listed as having dispersed to Nazareth. We now know where Nazareth’s synagogue was located. I, myself stood at the cliffs over which the synagogue elders wanted to throw Jesus.
Herod’s Slaughter of Bethlehem’s Children. Sceptics argue that this slaughter couldn’t have happened since the Roman historian Josephus never mentioned it. However, such reasoning reveals its bias. What history does prove is that Herod was so insecure about threats to his throne that he murdered his own wife, two of his sons, and many others. In other words, Herod’s ruthless treatment of any threats to his throne is well documented, which is exactly what the story in Matthew recounts. In fact, Herod’s ruthlessness insecurity was so well known that Caesar Augustus said, “it is safer to be Herod’s pig than his wife” (because Herod tried to please the Jews by keeping their dietary laws.) Josephus’ failure to mention the slaughter of the children in an obscure village was very likely because Herod’s elimination of threats was so common.
Luke’s description of the Census. Luke’s narrative claims that Mary and Joseph were required to go to Bethlehem for the census conducted while Quirinius was the governor and during the reign of Herod the Great. But we know that Herod died eight years before Quirinius began to rule Syria. So, skeptics claimed Luke was wrong. But archeologists discovered a coin with the name of Quirinius on it revealing that Quirinius was proconsul of Syrian during part of the time that Herod the Great ruled. There were two proconsuls of Syria named Quirinius. Dr. Luke got it right.
Luke 3:1. In a similar incident Luke was scoffed at because he mentioned a man named Lysanias, the tetrarch of Abilene. But historians knew that Lysanias wasn’t a tetrarch, and he didn’t rule over Abilene but over Chalcis, fifty years earlier. Then archaeology stepped in. An inscription was found from the time of Tiberius, (AD 14-37), which names Lysanias as tetrarch in Abilene near Damascus. Luke’s accuracy was confirmed again.
Luke’s geography. One prominent archaeologist carefully examined Luke’s references in his gospel and the book of Acts to 32 countries, 54 cities, and 9 islands, finding not a single mistake. (Norman Geisler & Thomas Howe, When Critics Ask).

C. Profile Evidence. Both prosecution and defense attorneys seek to create a profile in the mind of the judge or jury that corresponds or does not correspond to the suspect’s behavior. How does Jesus’ life give evidence that he was Immanuel, God himself, in the flesh? One could point to his miracles, or his resurrection, which had never happened before. But here are some, perhaps more striking ways that Jesus fits the profile of God.

He forgives sins. A human can forgive sins committed against him. But only God can forgive sins in general, which are committed against God. In Luke 5:17 ff, Jesus saw a paralyzed man being lowered through the ceiling he said, “Man, your sins are forgiven you.” The next verse says, And the scribes and the Pharisees began to question, saying, “Who is this who speaks blasphemies? Who can forgive sins but God alone?”
Claiming to be sinless. It is true that some people’s character is such that they are called righteous, in Scripture. This list includes Job, Zechariah and his wife Elizabeth, and Joseph of Nazareth. But we have no record of them saying, as Jesus did, with a straight face, “Which of you can convict me of sin?” If I said that, all the hands of my family members would instantly shoot right up! Holiness is an attribute of God alone.
Claiming to be the Son of Man. Jesus’ favorite term for himself was taken from an obscure text in Daniel. Yet, it was loaded with significance: With the clouds of heaven there came one like a son of man and he came to the Ancient of Days (God) and was presented before him. And to him was given dominion and glory and a kingdom, that all peoples, nations, and languages should serve him (Dan 7:13-14). This portrait of the coming messianic king reveals that the Son of Man is FROM HEAVEN.
Jesus claimed to be God (and his enemies put him to death for it).

He said, “I and the Father are one” (John 10:30).
He said, “He who has seen me has seen the Father” (John 14:9).
He said, “Before Abraham was, I AM”—a claim to be Yahweh (John 8:58)
He claimed authority over the Sabbath (Mark 2:23-28).

Neither Moses, Muhammad, Gautama Buddha, nor Joseph Smith, claimed to be God. But Jesus of Nazareth did. That fact makes a watershed difference between Christianity and other religions. Furthermore, Jesus can’t be a great moral teacher if he was mistaken or lied about the chief topic of his teaching—his own identity. As C.S. Lewis pointed out. You can 1) shut Jesus up for a fool, or 2) you can spit at him as a demon, or 3) you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord. But let us not come up with any nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.

D. Fingerprint evidence. Jesus and Jesus alone matched over twenty very specific prophecies about the coming of the Messiah. The mathematical probability of any one person meeting all these criteria is infinitesimal.

Born of a virgin—Isaiah 7:14, Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign. Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel.
The Son of God—Psalm 2:7, Hebrews 1:5, For to which of the angels did God ever say, “You are my Son, today I have begotten you”? Or again, “I will be to him a father, and he shall be to me a son”?
The seed of Abraham—Genesis 22:18, In your seed all the nations of the world shall be blessed.
From the tribe of Judah—Micah 5:2, But you, among the clans of Judah, from you shall come forth for me one who is to be ruler in Israel.
From the line of Jesse—Isaiah 11:1, There shall come forth a shoot from the stump of Jesse, and a branch from his roots shall bear fruit.
From the house of David—Jeremiah 23:5, Behold, the days are coming, declares the Lord, when I will raise up for David a righteous Branch, and he shall reign as king and shall execute justice and righteousness in the land.
Born in Bethlehem—Micah 5:2, But you, O Bethlehem Ephrathah, who are too little to be among the clans of Judah, from you shall come forth for me one who is to be ruler in Israel, whose coming forth is from of old.
His birth would cause weeping in Ramah—Jer 31:15, A voice was heard in Ramah weeping and loud lamentation, Rachel weeping for her children; she refused to be comforted, because they are no more.
Preceded by a messenger—Isaiah 4:3, A voice cries in the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord; make straight in the desert a highway for our God.
The child of Elizabeth and Zechariah would prepare his way—Luke 1:68-79, And you, child, will be called the prophet of the Most High; for you will go before the Lord to prepare his ways.
Will be called a Nazarene—Matt 2:23, And he went and lived in a city called Nazareth, so that what was spoken by the prophets might be fulfilled, that he would be called a Nazarene.
His ministry will be in Galilee—Isaiah 9:1, In the former time he brought into contempt the land of Zebulun and the land of Naphtali, but in the latter time he has made glorious the way of the sea, the land beyond the Jordan, Galilee of the nations.

The truth is that unlike the beliefs of many around us, the Christian’s faith is not a leap into irrationality, into a fantasy world contradicted by evidence. The evidence for the truth of the Bible and Christianity is staggering. Only something as powerful as sin could cause anyone to deny it--which explains why the lost refuse to believe. But so did WE. Apart from God’s grace to us, the sin that darkens human understanding would still be blinding US. So, out of gratitude, may we enter 2024 determined to live a life worthy of our calling out of darkness into light!

For Further Prayerful Thought:

How would you answer the objection, “I can’t believe in Christianity because I can’t believe God would be so narrow minded that only one religion could be right?
How would you answer Da Vinci Code fans who insist that the idea that the baby in Bethlehem’s manger was made up by a faction of Jesus’ followers?
Which examples of archaeology’s validation of biblical accuracy do you most want to remember?
How might Jesus’ fulfillment of so many specific prophecies be a tool to help you ask those who don’t know him to consider his claims?

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The Magi Bring Worship AND Horror

On 16 December, 2023 By Gary Yagel

The October 7th horror witnessed around the world—women and children brutalized by sadistic Hamas butchers—is the closest picture I can think of to portray a part of the Christmas story we hear little about—what happened to Bethlehem as Herod’s soldiers sliced to pieces every male child two years-old and under. How do we fathom such raw evil? What worldview can possibly explain such horrific, inhuman cruelty?

The worldview sweeping our colleges and universities certainly can’t. This morally bankrupt ideology, called critical theory, was on display ten days ago in the halls of Congress. New York Congresswoman, Elise Stefanik, asked the three university presidents of Harvard, Penn, and MIT, “Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate your school’s code of conduct? Yes, or no?” All three presidents refused to say, “yes.” Such a lack of moral clarity is appalling. How could any moral human being refuse to say that calling for a holocaust against the Jews is immoral?

However, there is a very plausible explanation for their behavior. The radical ideology that replaced these college president’s conscience is the same worldview that has guided their “inclusion” policies. It is critical theory, which divides society into the oppressors and the oppressed, justifying lawlessness by the “oppressed” group against the oppressors. Harvard president, Claudia Gay, for example, told incoming freshmen that the refusal to call a transgender person (the oppressed) by his/her chosen pronouns was hate-speech (by the freshmen cisgender oppressors) and would be severely punished. This same ideology views Israel as the oppressor and Hamas as the oppressed, blinding its college president adherents to the moral evil of Hamas. This episode examines the biblical worldview through which to view society. We do that by examining the Christmas story of the Magi.

The oppressor-oppressed lens for viewing culture is attractive to some Christians who are concerned that today’s Christians stand against injustice. Hower, Christian compassion for the disenfranchised cannot be a bedfellow with critical theory. Not only does critical theory justify lawlessness, but its solution for helping the poor is also thoroughly flawed. It spreads a victim mentality and proposes solutions that undermine the very creation ordinance of marriage between one man and one woman, which God has designed as the foundation for a flourishing society. The correct biblical lens for viewing society is given by the Apostle John.

And this is the judgment: the light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light because their works were evil. For everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his works should be exposed. But whoever does what is true comes to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that his works have been carried out in God. (Jn 3:19-21).

The Biblical paradigm is not oppressor/oppressed; it is those who hate the light/those who love the light. The story of the magi is a great contrast between those who came to the light and Herod, who loved the darkness. Matt 2:1-12.

Now after Jesus was born in Bethlehem in the days of Herod the king, wise men from the east came to Jerusalem, saying, “Where is he who has been born king of the Jews? For we saw his star when it rose, and have come to worship him.” When Herod heard this, he was troubled, and all Jerusalem with him; and assembling all the chief priests and scribes he inquired of them where the Christ was to be born. They told him, “In Bethlehem of Judea.” Then Herod summoned the wise men secretly and ascertained from them what time the star had appeared. And he sent them to Bethlehem, saying, “Go and search diligently for the child, and when you have found him, bring me word. After listening to him, they went on their way. And behold, the star that they had seen when it rose went before them until it came to rest over the place where the child was. When they saw the star, they rejoiced exceedingly with great joy. And going into the house, they saw the child with Mary his mother, and they fell down and worshiped him. Then, opening their treasures they offered him gifts, gold, frankincense & myrrh. And being warned in a dream not to return to Herod, they departed to their own country by another way.

Now when they had departed, behold, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream and said, “Rise, take the child and his mother, and flee to Egypt for Herod is about to search for the child, to destroy him.” And he rose and took the child and his mother by night and departed to. Then Herod, when he saw that he had been tricked by the wise men, became furious, and he sent and killed all the male children in Bethlehem and in all that region who were two years old or under, according to the time that he had ascertained from the wise men.

THE MAGI—LOVERS OF THE LIGHT

Who were the magi? The word magi is the word from which “magic” comes. But these were not necessarily sorcerers, worshippers of Satan. The word refers to the priests and experts in mysteries in Persia and Babylon, who were students of wisdom and sacred writings. They were an elite political and spiritual force with king-making power since before the time of Daniel, who was appointed as one of their number (Dan 2:48; 5:11). Owing to the presence of the exiled Jewish community in the Babylonian-Parthian area during the 70-year captivity, the Jewish Scriptures had become part of the magi’s vast accumulation of knowledge.

It appears that a subset of this group became believers in the Hebrew Scriptures and their God. Called God-fearers, Paul discovered many as he traveled the Roman world. Historians say that at this time in history, there was widespread expectation of the coming of some kind of deliverer. The magi were probably aware of Numbers 24:17. “A star will come from Jacob and a scepter will arise from Israel.” The Greek word for star, ASTER, also means radiance or brilliance. There is a strong case for the “star” being the glory of God, visibly shown to these believers in the God of the Bible, just as God’s Shekina glory cloud went before God’s people in Exodus and appeared in the radiance of Jesus in his transfiguration.

Lessons to Learn from the Magi

A. The Messiah’s kingdom is the WORLD not just ISRAEL: More than any other Gospel Matthew portrays the kingship of Jesus and the radical uniqueness of his kingdom. Only Matthew includes in his Christmas story the arrival of the Gentile, “king making,” magi. Perhaps it is noteworthy that the magi were from the same part of the world, where it is thought that the Garden of Eden once existed. In any event, Matthew’s inclusion of the Gentile, God-fearers in his second chapter points to the reality that the throne from which Jesus, the second Adam, would one day rule, was Adam’s, i.e. mankind’s, not the throne of a political entity called, Israel.

Despite the widespread notion that the kingship of the Messiah would be in the form of a political/military state, the messianic prophecies had always contained clues that the oppressors of God’s people to be overthrown were more deadly than earthly rulers. For example, Isaiah 9 reads His name shall be called, Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. Of the increase of his government and of peace there will be no end, on the throne of David and over his kingdom to establish it and to uphold it with JUSTICE and with RIGHTEOUSNESS FOREVERMORE. A kingdom of righteousness and justice requires evil to be vanquished. A kingdom that will be forever requires the vanquishing of death. Jesus came to overthrow Satan, sin, and death, not Rome.

B. The Messiah’s Kingdom would not be POLITICAL but SPIRITUAL. On the surface, this story may suggest that since the magi had inside information about the future of the child-king, they were seeking to find the future ruler of Israel to curry favor with the royal family. After all, they identified Jesus as “the king of the Jews.” But a closer look reveals that they understood the Messiah to be much more than a political ruler. In Jerusalem, they explained their intent to worship this king. This group of Gentiles, who believed the teachings of the Torah, would have known that to bow down to worship a human would have been to worship a false God, a violation of the very first commandment. They had to know, somehow, that this child was Immanuel, “God with us” as Isaiah had said (7:14). No mere human could break the slavery of Adam’s kingdom members to sin. Only God, Himself, could do so. That was Jesus’ mission and why Christ-followers are commanded, “Seek first the spread of Christ’s kingdom of rightness over earth.”

C. Children of the light FALL DOWN in WORSHIP to Jesus. The magi seem almost obsessed with the desire to bow in adoration before this king, who is probably too young to even talk. God created human hearts with an enormous capacity to worship, i.e. with a craving to be obsessed with SOMETHING. It may be winning, succeeding, status and respect, romantic passion, or having the amount of money I need to be satisfied, which is defined as just a little more. Since God’s commandments are always given to lead to our fulfillment, it should not surprise us that the greatest commandment is “BE CONSUMED WITH THE RIGHT THING.” “You shall love the Lord your God with all of your heart, mind, soul, and strength." I wonder if sometimes in this hectic world, dominated by our screens, we are settling for second best when it comes to feeding our hearts. C.S. Lewis’ words often come to my mind, It would seem that our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased (Sermon, “The Weight of Glory”). To spark our praise, here are a few observations about the awesomeness of God’s nature revealed in the Christmas story:

Loving US so much that he became a bloody, mucus covered, newborn baby.
The humility of his entrance into the world: Born to a peasant girl, from a small town, in a district so despised that Galileans were prevented from reading the Torah in the synagogues of nearby Judea because of their “hick” accent, in a powerless, militarily occupied country, arriving in a feeding trough, in a stable that stank of manure, whose parents were too poor to offer a lamb for his mother’s purification ritual after birth, who were outcasts by mainstream culture, the announcement of whose birth was not send to the aristocracy but to the lowest on the status rung—shepherds. Transcendence that is humble?
God’s tender provision for a teen named Mary—1) causing another miraculous pregnancy to take place in her cousin, Elizabeth, to strengthen Mary’s faith, 2) causing Elizabeth to supernaturally cry out that she was looking at her savior’s mother, Mary, before Elizabeth had heard a single word of Mary’s story, again strengthening her faith, 3) providing the precious sisterhood Mary shared with Elizabeth in their months of pregnancy. Transcendence that cares tenderly?
The Father’s love for the Son. It would seem that the Father would not let his son go through the humiliation of the incarnation without sending multitudes of the heavenly host proclaiming, “Glory to God in the highest,” and that the Father wanted so much to honor his son that he sent his Shakina glory cloud to guide the magi to the feet of his son, where they bowed in reverence before Jesus and honored him with extravagant gifts, though Jesus was only a toddler.

Perhaps we should resolve to enter 2024 feasting our souls more by delighting in our Lord who is more wonderful than our finite minds can even fathom.

HEROD—LOVER OF DARKNESS

Who was Herod? He was not Jewish but was appointed the ruler over Israel and Judah by Rome. He was at times benevolent, selling some of the gold objects in his palace to feed his people during a famine, rebuilding the temple, and erecting stadiums for sporting events. But he ruthlessly dealt with any perceived threats to his throne, murdering his own wife, and two of his own sons.

Kingdom of Darkness Revealed: Lessons from the Slaughter of Bethlehem’s Boys

A. Sin viciously destroys. The atrocities we witnessed Oct 7 and we relive in reading of the slaughter of Bethlehem’s sons ought to convince us there is no compromise with evil. It viciously destroys us, our loved ones, our community, and our nation. Romans 12:9 commands Abhor, (i.e. intensely hate) what is evil.

B. Never underestimate evil. It often lies hidden in the heart, as it did in Herod, who did many good things for his people. But given the right circumstances, the hidden evil of our hearts can seize control. For Herod, it was perceiving a threat to his throne. For David, it was walking on a palace rooftop and noticing Bathsheba bathing. One author compares sinful sexual desire to a volcano. It can remain dormant for long periods of time. “But when it erupts it can lay waste to everything in its path including honor, chastity, reputation, families, fidelity, good intentions, life-long promises, and spiritual commitments” (Hart, The Sexual Man). Paul warns us not to underestimate the power of sin. Therefore let anyone who thinks that he stands take heed lest he fall (1 Cor 10:12). Chuck Swindoll writes, “I have formed the habit of asking about accountability when stories of someone’s spiritual defection or moral fall come to my attention. Without fail, I ask something like, ‘Did he or she meet with one, two, or three folks for the purpose of giving and receiving counsel, prayer, and support?’ Without exception—hear me, now—without a single exception, the answer has been the same. No!” (Living Above the Level of Mediocrity). In today’s world of screens and attractive women working beside us, the stakes are too high, the battle too fierce, the enemy too wily, the attacks too frequent, the cost of defeat too severe for any Christian man to fight his spiritual battles alone.

C. Behind the October 7th and Bethlehem atrocities is a MONSTER of EVIL named, SATAN. Satan knew of God’s promise to Adam and Eve that the “seed of the woman,” would one day crush his head. It is likely that Herod’s slaughter of Bethlehem’s male children was Satan’s attempt to kill this “the seed of the woman.” In fact, had God not warned Joseph to flee, Satan would have succeeded. The atrocities of October 7th and Herod’s soldiers are reminders that behind evil is Satan, the Prince of Darkness. Those horrific pictures should motivate us to look behind our visible world to see what the lost are not privileged to see—the real explanation for what happens in the world is the conflict between the kingdoms of darkness and light. For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places (Eph 6:12). Paul’s subsequent commands are 1) Put on your armor. 2) Pray. As destructive ideologies overpower the rising generation and the world is engulfed in war, may that reality fill us with greater motivation to pray. The real battle is spiritual!

D. The DESTRUCTIVE VALUES of Satan’s kingdom of darkness will shape culture UNLESS Christians put our light—biblical worldviews—ON A LAMPSTAND for others to see. The biblical recognition of evil in the world shapes or view of:

PARENTING: Folly is bound up in the heart of a child, but the rod of discipline drives it far from him (Prov 22:15).
PARENTAL LOVE: It is not always affirming a child’s wishes (e.g. to change gender). The rod and reproof give wisdom, but a child left to himself brings shame to his mother. (Prov 29:15).
GOVERNMENT PUNISHMENT of CRIME. Peter says rulers are sent by God to punish those who do evil and to praise those who do good (1 Pet 2:14).
USE OF FORCE TO DETER AGRESSION. Evil is deterred by repentance and force, not naïve trust in adversaries who are untrustworthy. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for (governments) do not bear the sword in vain. For he is the servant of God, an avenger who carries out God's wrath on the wrongdoer.

E. The October 7th and Bethlehem brutality remind us that ENORMOUS SUFFERING is still a part of life in today’s world, which is not yet redeemed from sin. The full Christmas story is not just “joy to the world, the Lord is come.” For the residents of Bethlehem, it was, "horror has come," the crushing, gut-wrenching trauma of the loss of loved ones. I have so easily sailed through the joys of Christmas—a special time for my intact family. I am asking God this year to smack me in the face, to realize that:

Though Christmas is a time of joy with my family, for many it is a time of grief over broken family relationships and the crushing loss of loved ones.
Though I sit by the warmth of my fireplace, there are homeless across America, many Veterans, many with bipolar and other mental issues living on the streets. Though many are there by choice, they still need Jesus!
While so many in my family have come to the Light of the World and know Jesus, so many in the neighborhood around me still walk in darkness, which may one day become for them eternal. Sin has consequences; hell is real.
The Christian worldview must not be the Pollyanna, tinsel covered idea that everyone at Christmas time is merry!

The right lens through which to see the world, is not a Marxist-driven dichotomy between the categories oppressor and oppressed, but the divine categories of those who walk in darkness and those who walk in the light. The light still shines in the darkness, John reminds us, and the darkness has not overcome it (1:5). It never will. Though today, heavy darkness covers our world, especially those who have lost oved ones, there is another day coming. It was described by John (Rev 21ff).

And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God. He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away….

And the city has no need of sun or moon to shine on it, for the glory of God gives it light, and its lamp is the Lamb. By its light will the nations walk.

For Further Prayerful Thought:

How does John’s worldview lens of 2 categories of people, those who hate the light and those who come to the light correspond to reality as you have experienced it?
What truths stood out to you about Matthew’s inclusion of the story of the Magi in his gospel? Why do you think it is so rare today to find a group so “driven” to want to worship Jesus?
What do you most want to remember about the dark side of Christmas?

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Mary’s Femininity Was Not a Social Construct

On 09 December, 2023 By Gary Yagel

May I ask you a question? Is anything more beautiful, spectacular, and wonderful than God’s creation of WOMAN? I think not. She is the crowning achievement of God’s creation process. She is the one for whom a husband is to die. Yet, we live in a culture that has profoundly marred the portrait of fulfilled womanhood as God designed it to be—and it is our feminine loved ones who are suffering from it. This episode seeks to put a spotlight on the egalitarian, feminist culture that is MISSHAPING our loved ones’ views of womanhood in sharp contrast to God’s perfect design revealed in Scripture. We then examine this portrait in the person of Mary, the mother of Jesus, so that we who are husbands, fathers and grandfathers can help our female loved ones delight in biblical womanhood instead of being ashamed of it.

Here is a sample of what our daughters and granddaughters are hearing today about womanhood.

Your feelings of wanting to be a nurturer need to be denied. Real fulfillment comes in being like men. Wanting to nurture children makes you weak and exposes you to male oppression.
Observing differences between girls and boys is old-fashioned and sexist; it causes girls and women to be exploited.
To have value, you must prove you can do anything a male can do.
Seeing males as protectors is old-fashioned, weak, sexist, and even dangerous. Be independent. NEVER let yourself be in a relationship where you must depend upon a man.
The gender binary was imposed on culture by white, Christian males, to oppress transgender people.
If you don’t fit the stereotype of girly girls, you are transgender.
A wife submitting to her husband is demeaning. Period. It proves she thinks she is inferior to him. She is NOT inferior and should NEVER submit to him!
God never said a wife should be submissive to her husband. That was Paul’s idea and the other MALE writers of the Bible who were influenced by the backwards, misogynist, ancient cultures of the Jews and Romans that didn’t yet understand women’s equality.
Never acknowledge that estrogen affects you as a woman or that testosterone in males makes them any different from you. You must prove you are no different from men.
All generalizations about gender behavior and characteristics are evil, outdated stereotyping. Valuing motherhood is passee and proves you are out of touch with modern womanhood.
The biblical view that marriage is between one man and one woman and that children need both a mother and a father is passee, and homophobic.
You may be romantically attracted to men but you can’t know your sexual orientation for sure until you try sex with another woman.

These false narratives are causing something very precious to erode in the hearts of the rising generation of girls—an understanding of the womanhood she was designed by her creator to experience. God’s message to our daughters is, “Do not be conformed to this world.” God’s message to us as men is “Pick up your weapons and fight to guide your daughter into truth. The weapons of our warfare have divine power to destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God, and take every thought captive to obey Christ (2 Cor. 10:5). Notice the words in this description of battle that have to do with thinking correcting—arguments, opinion, knowledge, thought. Ideas have consequences. Bad ideas have victims. Those victims are our beloved, treasured daughters.

Four Pollutants in the Cultural Water We Drink and Swim In

A. The lie of egalitarianism—all hierarchal structures of authority are unjust. No matter how good or a democratic republic may be at the national level of government, God did not design the home and church as democracies.

Egalitarianism’s hatred of authority structures emanates from the heart of Satan, the ultimate egalitarian, who said, “I will be like God,” as he rebelled and who tempted Eve “to be like God” and rebel against his authority.
The argument that submission implies inferiority is thoroughly refuted by Jesus who submitted himself to the Father to accomplish our redemption.
Everyone knows that organizational structures are needed for society to function. They reveal nothing about a person’s worth. The quarterback calls the plays, but that doesn’t make him the MVP of the team. Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet submitted to the director in the production of the Titanic, but they were still the stars. Tom Brady the GOAT, greatest of all time, submitted to his coach, Bill Belichick.

B. The lie of critical theory--the most accurate way to view society is through the lens of the oppressors (like white, male, heterosexuals) and the oppressed (people of color, females, homosexuals).

The accusation of the Bible as promoting unjust oppression of women by men comes from this false worldview that makes all men oppressors and all women oppressed, by definition.
This evil ideology justifies the revolutionary overthrow of government. It was used by Lenin & Stalin in the Soviet Union, Mao in China, Polpot in Cambodia and led to the wholesale slaughter of over 85 million people. It was used by Black Lives Matter to excuse burning and looting in our cities in 2020.
Few in history were oppressed like the Christians were by the Roman emperor Nero, who were fed to wild beasts in the arena and used as human torches. Yet Paul’s counsel to Christians IN ROME is a total contradiction of critical theories’ justification of lawlessness’ by the oppressed in critical race theory. Let every person be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God. Can you imagine what would church history would have looked like if Christians had fomented rebellion against the Roman government?

C. The lie of subjectivism. We are seeing the triumph of the modern SELF. This irrational ideology convinces its adherents that their feelings ARE truth. It is embodied in the false, unscientific claim that gender is a social construct.

Transgender ideology attempts to base reality on the subjective feelings a person has instead of biologic and genetic reality.
Feelings don’t determine reality anywhere else in life. We don’t allow our feelings to determine our height, weight, eye color, skin color or shoe size. Those ae objectively determined for us at birth. Even if we are adopted, we can’t change the DNA that shapes our eye color, height weight, and shoe size. That is REALITY. That reality doesn’t change according to how we FEEL about it. Feelings don’t determine gender either.

D. The lie that the Bible is mysogynistic. We must help our rising kids know the true facts of history: the biblical has consistently elevated women.

Lies about the biblical treatment of women. In nearly every ancient culture but Israel’s, women were considered inferior to men. Aristotle, for example, considered women to be essentially the result of birth defects—they were “misbegotten men.” It is a fact of history that Jewish women were more highly valued than women in any other culture.
When God, himself, broke into history we see Jesus demonstrate revolutionary respect for women. From Jesus’ healing of the woman with an issue of blood, to his protecting of the woman caught in adultery, to his affirmation of the woman who washed his feet with her hair, Jesus was radical in the way he treated women as the full equals of men—having intrinsic value because they, like men, are fully made in God’s image.
Christianity has always affirmed women to be full members of the Body of Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus (Gal 3:28). This is consistent with Genesis 1 and 2, women are equal but different from men.
History records that because of Roman disdain for females, the typical family would keep all the healthy boys born to them but only one girl, drowning or abandoning the rest. But the early Christians would find the abandoned little girls, adopt them, and raise them in their loving homes. Several generations after this practice began—Roman men ran out of Roman women to marry! They found lovely wives in the homes of Christians, who led the men to Christ. In fact, that is part of the way Christianity spread through the Roman Empire.

Mary—Beautiful Femininity in Action as It Was Designed to Be

Luke 1: 34ff: And Mary said, “How can this be since I am a virgin?” And the angel answered her, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be called holy—the Son of God. And behold, your relative Elizabeth in her old age has also conceived a son, and this is the sixth month with her who was called barren. For nothing will be impossible with God.” And Mary said, “Behold, I am the servant of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word.” And the angel departed from her.

Mary goes to be with Elizabeth. When Mary enters the house John the Baptist the baby in Elizabeth’s womb stir’s causing Elizbeth to cry out, Blessed is she who believed that there would be[g] a fulfillment of what was spoken to her from the Lord.” Then we have Mary’s song of praise which is called the Magnificat. It reveals the magnificent picture of the heart of a godly woman.

“My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior, for he has looked on the humble estate of his servant. For behold, from now on all generations will call me blessed; for he who is mighty has done great things for me, and holy is his name. And his mercy is for those who fear him from generation to generation. He has shown strength with his arm; he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts; he has brought down the mighty from their thrones and exalted those of humble estate…

Peter, who knew Mary, would latter identify four characteristics of godly women in his first letter 3:1-4: meekness, a quiet spirit, purity, and reverence. Let’s examine these four characteristics of feminine beauty lived out in Mary.

A. Meekness: The Greek word PRAUTES is used to describe the strength of a spirited horse, which yields to the control of its rider. This inner heart attitude of surrender to the Lord makes a woman beautiful, says Peter. And we see this heart in Mary—in spades, beginning with her response to Gabriel’s words, “I am the handmaiden of the Lord. Be it unto me according to your word.” Michael Card, in his commentary on Luke comments,

Of all that she does not know, one thing seems perfectly clear to her. It is a perspective that will help her navigate the deep waters into which the small vessel of her life is about to go. It will be the source of her disturbingly clear obedience. She perfectly articulates this fundamental reality with her first response to the angel’s troubling news, “I am the Lord’s slave.” Different translations soften the language. Some render the word DOULE (feminine form of DOULOS) “servant.” Others use the even softer “handmaiden.” But Mary is affirming that she is the slave of the Lord. She is surrendering her rights, her hopes and dreams and her own body absolutely to him. Mary seems to know that she is owned by Another.

Meekness is humbly surrendering to the role God assigned me to play, because I trust him and belong to him. This is the exact opposite of the attitude of modern feminists who rail against God’s design of male and female to be equal in worth yet assigned different roles in the home and church. Femininsts arrogantly demand that THEY will decide what EQUAL is—and such EQUALITY must erase distinctions! They substitute sameness for equality.

Affirming meekness in daughters

In what ways do you see your daughter responding to God the way Mary did—I am yours. Do with me what you will?
How does your daughter demonstrate unselfishness?
How does she demonstrate a servant’s heart.

B. A Quiet Spirit. Back in I Peter 3, the Greek word Peter used for quiet was HESUCHOIOS, which indicates tranquility arising from within, causing no disturbance to others. Having a quiet spirit means being at rest inside. It arises from contentment and trust in God to handle the circumstances. It is the opposite of complaining. Mary does ask Gabriel how she could be the Messiah’s mother since she was a virgin—a simple inquiry that Gabriel seems happy to answer. However, unlike Zechariah, the father of John, who was punished for his unbelief, Mary does not doubt Gabriel’s words, but quietly trusts God to work out the details of her life. Her confidence in God to work out everything for her ultimate good is the key to her contentment. She trusts God with the circumstances over which she has no control. That is a quiet spirit.

Affirming a quiet spirit in daughters

Have you seen her quietly trust the Lord with some hard things?
In what ways have you seen your daughter overcome worry with her faith?
How have you seen her choose a contented attitude over complaining?

C. Purity. Mary and Joseph though engaged were virgins. In a world that will scorn the daughters of our church for saving sex for marriage, we need to protect their hearts from the lies of Satan and the culture. We need to help them see:

That sex is exhilarating, heart-pounding fun, and an enormously pleasurable gift of God to married couples.
That their instinctive feeling of discomfort when we are naked in the locker room or doctor’s office tells them something. It causes them to quickly cover their private parts. This God-given instinct to cover our nakedness is intended by God to protect us. It reminds us that nakedness is unsafe. The regular vulnerability of sex only works in the safety of a pledge by the one sharing our nakedness to love us unconditionally—in plenty and in want, in joy and in sorrow, in sickness and in health, as long as we both shall live.
That having sex with one who is not committed life-long to unconditionally loving you but moves on is like two pieces of paper glued together and trying to tear those papers apart again. Their soul gets torn.
That it is Christianity’s high view of sex as precious, the ultimate expression of vulnerability, and of giving one’s whole self to another, that lies behind its teaching that it be saved for marriage.

Gloriously, Mary was sexually pure.

D. Reverence (Fearing the Lord, Not Man). In discussing this aspect of a woman’s inner beauty, Peter’s command to Christian women is to disregard what anyone thought of them but God. That is reverence. The Greek word is PHOBIA. In context, it refers to the fear of the Lord rather than the fear of man concerning fashion. Christian women don’t pursue beauty based upon the culture’s latest fads: Your beauty should not come from outward adornment, such as elaborate hairstyles and the wearing of gold jewelry or fine clothes. Rather, your beauty should be that of your inner self, the unfading beauty which is of great worth in God’s sight (vs 3-4). When we look at Mary’s Magnificat, we see her lifting up those who FEAR the LORD rather than fearing man. She exalts the upside-down values of God’s kingdom people in contrast to the wrong values of the fallen world: And his mercy is for THOSE WHO FEAR HIM from generation to generation. He has shown strength with his arm; he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts; he has brought down the mighty from their thrones and exalted those of humble estate (Luke 1:50-52).

Only heaven will reveal the true beauty of Mary’s determination to fear God rather than men. When she allowed God to make her pregnant without being married, the price she paid in her legalistic, Jewish, small-town community must have been staggering. As soon as she began to show, the tongues must have started wagging—that Mary girl seems really pious, but if you ask me, she and Joseph have been messing around! How many jokes would have been cracked about Mary and Joseph’s explanation for the pregnancy? Into the only home she knew and only extended family she had, she brought enormous shame in a small town where everyone would know about her out-of-wedlock pregnancy. It is hard to imagine one suffering the rejection of her community any more severely. Had Mary and Joseph not had to leave Nazareth to go to Bethlehem, might they have been thrown out of the synagogue? But, Mary chose to fear God not men.

Affirming reverence, the fear of the Lord and not man, in daughters

How has she demonstrated that she wants to please God?
How have you seen her demonstrate courage?
In what ways have you seen her resist peer pressure to do the right thing?

Mary is a portrait of true feminine beaty: a servant’s heart, quiet inner trust in God about her circumstances, a devotion to saving her sexuality for her husband so she can give it freely to him when she marries, a determination to be pleasing to the Lord instead of a people-pleaser. When we see a glimpse like this in our ladies, such glorious beauty deserves our proud praise. And with that, perhaps a reminder that this kind of beauty lasts forever.

For Further Prayerful Thought:

Which of the 4 pollutant worldviews in our culture about womanhood concern you most?
Which of the 4 pollutant worldviews in our culture have you found hardest to refute?
What part of Mary’s beauty most stood out to you?
What part of Peter’s portrait of womanhood, also seen in Mary, do you want to most remember to notice in your feminine lived ones so you can praise them for it?

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Joseph of Nazareth—A Glimpse of True Manhood

On 02 December, 2023 By Gary Yagel

One of the most destructive worldviews shaping western culture at this moment is an ideology that views society through the lens of just two categories of people—the oppressors and the oppressed. This umbrella worldview, called critical theory, dichotomizes society members into the privileged, oppressor group or the victimized, oppressed group. By definition, whites oppress people of color. The rich oppress the poor. Heterosexuals oppress homosexuals. Cisgender people oppress transgender people. Men oppress women. Much of this oppression, for example that of heterosexuals, cisgender people, and men is caused, according to this view, by the structural oppression of patriarchy taught in the Bible. Therefore, making any distinctions between male and female is deemed oppressive and labeled sexist.

In this cultural setting, the Holy Spirit whispers God’s command to Christ-followers, “Do not be conformed to this world.” But are we? I see Christian men and leaders everywhere who are hesitant, tentative, afraid to say that God designed men to lead their homes and churches. I felt like, in one sermon I recently heard on Ephesians 5, (which included Ephesians 5:22, Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord) the pastor spent half the message apologizing for the Word of God. We are so apologetic about God’s created role differences that we seem to think the church needed the invasion of feminism to shed its oppressive patriarchal teaching and get its gender teaching right. But as God commands, we need to stop being conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind. This episode renews our mind about masculinity. It examines the example of Joseph of Nazareth who was not afraid to live his life and love his family in the way God designed him to function—as a MAN.

One of the things I love about Joseph, the man God chose to be the earthly father of his own son, was that Joseph was a man who just did it. No fanfare, no bright lights, no slick talk. Never in the limelight, Joseph is the actor in the Christmas drama who is sort of an afterthought. He was always the one in the background, whom we hardly see, the one who was just an ordinary man trying to make a living and raise a family. In fact, unlike Mary, Zechariah and Elizabeth, whose words reacting to the supernatural events surrounding Jesus’ birth are recorded by Matthew or Luke, there are no words spoken by Joseph recorded in the Bible—just his ACTIONS. That was Joseph.; he was just a worker, a tradesman. Like many Christian men I know, and way before Nike dreamed up the slogan—Joseph just did it. His example has much to teach men. So, let’s bring this background figure out from the shadows and put a spotlight on him to see what we can learn about manhood that will challenge us. Let’s read from Matthew 1.

Now the birth of Jesus Christ took place in this way. When his mother Mary had been betrothed to Joseph, before they came together she was found to be with child from the Holy Spirit. And her husband Joseph, being a just man and unwilling to put her to shame, resolved to divorce her quietly. But as he considered these things an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream, saying, “Joseph, son of David, do not fear to take Mary as your wife, for that which is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. She will bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins”….When Joseph woke from sleep, he did as the angel of the Lord commanded him: he took his wife but knew her not until she had given birth to a son. And he called his name Jesus (vs 18-25).

After the wise men find out where the messiah was to be born the story continues.

And going into the house, they saw the child with Mary his mother, and they fell down and worshiped him. Then, opening their treasures, they offered him gifts, gold and frankincense and myrrh. And being warned in a dream not to return to Herod, they departed to their own country by another way. Now when they had departed, behold, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream and said, “Rise, take the child and his mother, and flee to Egypt, and remain there until I tell you, for Herod is about to search for the child, to destroy him.” And he rose and took the child and his mother by night and departed to Egypt and remained there until the death of Herod….But when Herod died, behold, an angel of the Lord appeared in a dream to Joseph in Egypt, saying, “Rise, take the child and his mother and go to the land of Israel, for those who sought the child's life are dead.” And he rose and took the child and his mother and went to the land of Israel. But when he heard that Archelaus was reigning over Judea in place of his father Herod, he was afraid to go there, and being warned in a dream he withdrew to the district of Galilee (Matt 2:1-22).

Six Lessons From Joseph About Godly Manhood

A. First, notice that God directed Joseph as the leader of his home, not Mary.

God directed Joseph to follow through on the betrothal and marry Mary.
God directed Joseph to leave Bethlehem and go to Egypt to escape Herod’s executioners.
God directed Joseph to bring his family back to Israel from Egypt.
God directed Joseph when the southern part of Israel was ruled by Herod’s unstable son, to settle in Galilee, which was under the rule of Herod’s safer son.
Mary did not come to Joseph saying, “God said you are to marry me,” or “God said we must move to Egypt” or “back to Galilee.” It is true that Mary shared equally the dignity of Joseph as the image-bearer of God. Moreover, Mary’s response to the angel, “Behold, I am the servant of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word,” is the ultimate lordship paradigm for all Christians, male and female, as we seek to live out God’s Romans 12:1 command to put our bodies on the altar to him as a living sacrifice. Unquestionably, Mary was a spiritual superstar. Yet, God led her family through Joseph.

As men following Christ, we need to be sure that the current western culture’s resistance to men leading their homes and churches does not weaken our resolve to lead both well. God’s design matters. And its disregard harms our families, churches, and land. God did not create a unisex world. To the contrary, he provides an extended biblical explanation of how differently he created Adam and Eve to be. Although God devotes seven verses in Genesis 1 to the equality of Adam and Eve in dignity as those called to bear God’s image, He then devotes twenty verses in Genesis 2 to revealing how different he designed male and female to be. In David Pawson’s courageous book, Leadership is Male, he writes,

There are real differences between men and women both in their nature and in their relationships, which are rooted in the original creation and will be permanent features of a healthy society. Any attempt to obliterate these distinctions, even in the name of equality, whether through legal or social pressure, will, in the long term damage our humanity….A unisex society is contrary to divine creation, not just Hebrew tradition.

B. Our second observation from Joseph’s life is that he was a “just” man. The word, DIKAIOSUNE—is the same word that is used in Jesus’ command, “Seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness”. It refers to one whose life is characterized by obedience to God’s moral law. Joseph and Mary appear to be part of the faithful remnant of Israel that put into practice the teachings of the Torah. For example, forty days after Jesus’ birth, they went into the temple in Jerusalem to make the burnt offering and sin offering required for the purification of the mother after the birth of her first born, a son. We also know that it was the habit of Joseph’s family to make an annual pilgrimage to Jerusalem to celebrate Passover (Luke 2:41). Most importantly, we know that it was in the family led by Joseph, that Jesus “grew in wisdom and in stature and in favor with God and men.” Jesus, being truly human, Scripture says grew in wisdom. So, Scripture reveals that Joseph was leading his home and following the example of Abraham the father of his faith, about whom God had said, For I have chosen him, that he may command his children and his household after him to keep the way of the Lord by doing righteousness and justice, so that the Lord may bring to Abraham what he has promised him. (Gen 18:19).

Incidentally, we discover a little more about Joseph’s parenting approach in Luke 2:42ff, which records an incident from Jesus’ boyhood. When he (Jesus) was twelve years old, they went up according to custom. And when the feast was ended, as they were returning, the boy Jesus stayed behind in Jerusalem. His parents did not know it, but supposing him to be in the group they went a day's journey, but then they began to search for him among their relatives and acquaintances, and when they did not find him, they returned to Jerusalem, searching for him. After three days they found him in the temple, sitting among the teachers, listening to them and asking them questions.

When you read this story, you probably think, as I do, “How does a twelve-year-old get separated from his family and the parents don’t realize it for three days? Admittedly, in our culture we have little understanding of such annual pilgrimages that were far more like extended family reunions than car or plane rides. Nevertheless, the independence Mary and Joseph gave Jesus at age twelve is striking. Ok, he was a perfect kid! But still, Jesus had to learn wisdom and obedience. The kind of independence shown by twelve-year-old Jesus had to be earned by being responsible. One of the foundational principles of parenting is teaching responsibility, which is the opposite of the victim mentality being promoted by critical theory in our culture today. Here are a few tips from my favorite parenting specialists: One of the hallmarks of maturity is taking responsibility for one’s own life, desires and problems. If we show up late for work, we don’t blame the freeway. If we want to advance in our career, we take courses. If we are angry, then we deal with whatever made us angry rather than waiting for others to soothe our feelings. (Boundaries With Kids, Cloud and Townsend).

Let’s return to Matthew’s description of Joseph as a just man. Joseph, being a just man and unwilling to put her to shame, resolved to divorce her quietly. It is interesting that in Matthew’s mind there were two sides to being a just man.

One might think that Matthew’s description of Joseph as a “just” man would have led to intolerance of her sexual sin. And Mary’s apparent sexual immorality did lead Joseph, because of his biblical moral standards, to break off his engagement to a woman of such questionable moral character. Yet, being just (righteous) in Matthew’s mind also describes a man who, because of his love for Mary, did not want to expose her to shame, and possible execution as an adulteress, so he resolved to divorce her quietly. This happened before Joseph knew what had happened. Joseph would have felt deeply wronged and disgraced by Mary’s seeming disloyalty to him. He could have said to their friends “Don’t accuse me of getting her pregnant! While away at Zechariah and Elizabeth’s she played the whore and got pregnant. She deserves to be stoned.” But he did not. His righteous, just character reminds us that true righteousness is expressed in love.

C. The third characteristic of Joseph was his outstanding immediate obedience to God’s prompting. After the first angelic visit we read, WHEN JOSEPH WOKE FROM SLEEP, he did as the angel of the Lord commanded him (Matt 1:24). No delay, no excuses, no argument. He immediately obeyed. When an angel visited him a second time, telling him to get up and go to Egypt, we read, And he rose and took the child and his mother by night and departed to Egypt. Again, the language implies immediate obedience—he woke Mary up and left right away. In the third angelic visit, Joseph is again commanded to get up and go. Again, we read, And he rose and took the child and his mother and went to the land of Israel. What an example Joseph is to all men of immediate obedience!

Notice also that Joseph’s obedience to God protected his family--from the slaughter of Jesus by Herod or his son Archelaus. Men, every time we choose to obey God, we are choosing to benefit our families. It is our wife and kids who benefit most when we resist lust and channel our sexual desires only towards our wives. It is our families who benefit from controlling our anger instead of yielding to it and ripping into our loved ones. It is our families who benefit from our discipline of praying often for their spiritual battles. David gives God’s striking promise to those who surrender to God’s lordship; our families benefit enormously. The steadfast love of the Lord is from everlasting to everlasting on those who fear him, and his righteousness to children's children, to those who keep his covenant and remember to do his commandments (Ps 103:17-18).

D. Joseph also demonstrated the courage to take the world’s disdain. Although he and Mary knew she was pregnant through the Holy Spirit, if he obeyed God and married her, everyone would know that the child was born sooner than nine months after the marriage. So, either they had sex before marriage, or she had been unfaithful to him while visiting her relative Elizabeth. In either case, in their shame-based society, they would be scorned, excluded, and rejected. By saying, “Yes,” to God, they are choosing to be scorned, second class citizens forever in their small town. Obeying God meant kissing his stellar reputation good-bye.

What is the application for us? If you want Jesus in your life, it means having the courage to take the disdain of the world. Can you imagine Joseph trying to explain why his fiancée is pregnant? “Oh, I can explain. This angel told me she is pregnant by the Holy Spirit.” This is, of course, is an extreme example, but it helps us see a truth stated by Paul to the Corinthians. The natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned (1 Cor 2:14). We will never gain the approval of the secular world; they can’t see the value of what we stand for. Joseph chose to value the approval of God, rather than the approval of men. He challenges Christian men to have the same courage.

E. Joseph’s plans are continually disrupted by God; but Joseph doggedly remains obedient. Joseph is probably just trying to be a faithful tradesman, looking forward to his upcoming marriage to Mary, raising a family in Nazareth, and expecting to take over his father, Jacob’s trade as a craftsman. But then Mary’s pregnancy and the angel come crashing into his quiet life. First, he has to move up his wedding date, then he’s got to figure out how to get Mary who is eight and a half months pregnant ninety miles south to Bethlehem. It appears that they began their new family in Bethlehem instead of returning to Nazareth, but before Jesus even reached his second birthday, Joseph has to pick up his family and travel a hundred miles or so south to Egypt. Then, when God says to return to Israel, Joseph disrupts his life again but walks right into another dangerous situation. He ends up in a land governed by the former Herod’s son, Archelaus, who has shown himself to be as cruel as his father, is now ruling the southern part of Israel—Idumea, Judah, and Samaria. Having obeyed God, Joseph finds himself between a rock and a hard place. Joseph is like Moses who obeyed God and led the people out of Egypt only to end up with the Red Sea to his east and Pharoh’s army bearing down on them from the west. Both had carefully obeyed the Lord but found themselves in impossible situations. But God delivers them both.

God rarely makes our path easy. Joseph’s story jolts us into remembering a truth about being a Christ-follower that parallels one of the sayings of the Navy Seals: "The only easy day was yesterday." Joseph’s message to us today would be, “If you want an easy, comfortable, safe, life—don’t surrender your will to Yahweh.” He would advise, “Don’t get angry because God allows your plans to be disrupted, your hopes to be dashed, or your expectations to be crushed. Don’t demand that God make your life easy as a Christ’s follower.” We live out our commitment to Christ in the midst of a raging battle in which we are constantly under siege by our own sinful nature, by the temptations of the Evil one, and by the results of evil reigning in parts of the culture that defies justice and biblical truth. No one ever said it was easy to follow Jesus; but nothing is more soul-satisfying.

F. Our sixth observation about Joseph is that he experienced God’s astonishing provision for his and his family’s needs. Providing for our families is part of Adam’s calling in Genesis 2 when he is given the responsibility to cultivate (avad) the garden. At times, men are frustrated with our inability to provide financially as we would like to. It is noteworthy that Joseph and Mary were poor. The offering they made forty days after Jesus’ birth, was either “two turtledoves or two young pigeons” (Lk 2:23), which was the sacrifice option for those who were too poor to offer a lamb. In a world where there was no “paid leave,” Joseph was also disrupted from making a living for his family numerous times: because of the travel south for the census starting a new job in Bethlehem, moving to Egypt and seeking a job he could do when he didn’t even know the language, and eventually moving back to start over again in Nazareth. In the midst of this challenge to provide for his family including the travel costs, Joseph saw Jehovah Jireh (a name for God which means, the LORD will provide) at work. Shortly before having to flee with Jesus and Mary to Egypt as refugees, God sent the Magi to give valuable gifts to Jesus—gold, frankincense, and myrrh. Jehovah Jireh provided all that Joseph would need to travel to Egypt and care for his family while he found work or started a business to put food on their table. I think Joseph’s message to us today, would be, “When God calls you to do something, don’t ever doubt that he will give you all you need to obey his call.”

Our final observation about Joseph is that, in all likelihood, he died early. If he was 18 when betrothed to Mary, (a distinct possibility) he did not make it out of his forties. By the time Jesus began his ministry, at age 30, Joseph had faded completely from the story. That was just like Joseph. No fanfare, no bright lights, no slick talk; he was just an ordinary guy. The kind of man God uses. Like many Christian men I know, Joseph just did it. Let’s ask God to help us learn from his example.

For Further Prayerful Thought:

1. Which of the 6 characteristics of Joseph do you most admire?

2. Which of the 6 characteristics of Joseph do you think required the most spiritual might?

3. Which of the 6 characteristics of Joseph do you most want to remember?

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Becoming Like Jesus Hurts

On 25 November, 2023 By Gary Yagel

Everyone loves the children’s story, Alexander, and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day because we all know Judith Vorst took a page out of OUR diary to write it. Alexander’s day started badly but got worse. By evening he was saying,

“There were lima beans for dinner, and I hate limas. There was kissing on TV, and I hate kissing. My bath was too hot, I got soap in my eyes, my marble went down the drain, and I had to wear my railroad-train pajamas. I hate my railroad-train pajamas. When I went to bed, Nick took back the pillow he said I could keep, and the mickey mouse night light burned out and I bit my tongue. The cat wants to sleep with Anthony not with me. It’s been a terrible, horrible, no good very bad day. My mom says some days are like that.”

Every one of us has days like Alexander’s. We realize that God is sovereign, ordaining whatsoever comes to pass. If we are honest, we can’t escape God’s role in taking us through frustrating, painful, difficult, even crushing experiences of life. If you are like me, you wonder sometimes, “Why does life have to be so hard so often?” As both everyday irritations and more serious problems crowd into our lives bringing out our bad attitudes, we are slammed in the face with James’ almost impossible command, Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds, for you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness. “Be joyful,” says James, “because when it hurts, God is building into you the Christ-like quality of steadfastness.” This same, priceless attribute of Christ-like character, steadfastness, is identified by Peter as one of the eight in the golden chain of Christ-like virtues we’re studying. This episode examines how on our terrible horrible, no good, very bad days, we can exhibit the inner toughness of character that responds as Jesus would—with steadfastness, i.e. not giving in to lousy, self-absorbed, wrong attitudes. We continue to examine the final three virtues in Peter’s golden chain of virtues.

Today we complete our study of the process God uses to empower Christ-followers to become LIKE Jesus, or in the words of Peter, to become partakers of the divine nature, having escaped from the corruption that is in the world because of sinful desire. As we’ve noticed, in 2 Peter 1:3-8, God lays out a three-step process of accessing Christ’s divine power for becoming Christ-like. Let’s review.

His divine power has granted to us all things that pertain to life and godliness, 1) THROUGH THE KNOWLEDGE of him who called us to his own glory and excellence, by which he has 2) GRANTED TO US HIS PRECIOUS AND VERY GREAT PROMISES, SO THAT THROUGH THEM you may become partakers of the divine nature, having escaped from the corruption that is in the world because of sinful desire. For this very reason, 3) MAKE EVERY EFFORT to supplement your faith with virtue, and virtue with knowledge and knowledge with self-control, and self-control with steadfastness, and steadfastness with godliness, and godliness with brotherly affection, and brotherly affection with love. For if these qualities are yours and are increasing, they keep you from being ineffective or unfruitful in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Step # 1: through the knowledge of him. The Greek word for knowledge is GINOSKO, which refers to personal knowledge. It is the knowledge that comes with abiding in Christ, walking closely with him. Knowing Jesus means knowing that he empathizes with us as our High Priest. When it comes to responding to the painful experiences of life, I believe Jesus wants us to take our feelings to him; that is what the Psalms were written for. For example, when those shaping culture rage against the Lord, we can process our emotions through Psalm 2:1-2. When the evil prosper more than the godly, we can identify with Asaph in Psalm 73. When we are slammed by earth-shattering calamity, we can take our feelings to God through Psalm 46:1-4. When I am in despair over the evil of my own heart, I have Psalm 51. When our souls are deeply troubled, we can find comfort in Psalm 6:1-3. When God seems to ignore my pain, Psalm 13:1-2 helps me express my frustration.

Step # 2. After we take our pain to Jesus, we are ready to trust the great and precious promises of God. Regarding our painful trials, we can claim Romans 8:28-29. And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose. For those whom he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, in order that he might be the firstborn among many brothers. We trust God’s promise that whatever pain he allows into our lives is for his good ultimate purpose—which is conforming us to the image of Christ. I personally believe that the more Christ-like we become in this life, the greater will be the depth of our joy in eternity.

Step # 3. After we still our hearts by trusting God’s promises, we are to Make every effort to supplement your faith with virtue, etc. This step is making an intentional commitment to build this golden chain of Christ-like virtues. Notice the deliberate order, revealing a process.

Focus on VIRTUE. This quality is pursuing supreme, moral character, righteous attitudes that are so visible to others that we are renowned for our character.
Supply this commitment to virtue with KNOWLEDGE. Knowledge of Scripture and God’s purposes is required to build a biblical perspective. For example, James tells us to have an attitude of joy in trials because of our perspective—they are necessary to produce in us the Christ-like quality of steadfastness. When all kinds of trials and temptations crowd into your lives my brothers, don’t resent them as intruders, but welcome them as friends! Realize that they come to test your faith and to produce in you the quality of steadfastness. And let steadfastness have its full effect, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing (James 1:3-4).
Although knowledge gives us an understanding of the biblical view of life, our attitude in any given situation is determined by which perspective we choose, which requires SLEF-CONTROL. I can choose to have an attitude of welcoming a trial as a friend because enduring that trial produces endurance, a vital part of the character of Christ—and being like Jesus pleases him. Or I can choose to ignore that perspective, feel sorry for myself and complain.

So far, what we’ve shared has been a review. So, let’s move on to the last four components to Christ-like character in Peter’s golden chain.

STEADFASTNESS

As I’ve suggested, the grammatical structure of adding each virtue to the others suggests a logical sequence. So, the above logical sequence continues. FAITH, i.e. trusting the promises of God takes care of the anxiety, fear, and self-preoccupation that clouds our hearts. VIRTUE—a commitment to Christ-like character is the starting point for building character. But that takes KNOWLEDGE to gain God’s perspective, but then SELF-CONTROL to choose to put the Biblical lens to our eye through which we look at the situation. The problem is that doing that once or twice isn’t God’s goal. He is building character—which means that it is characteristic of us that we have this good attitude towards trials. That is why he is so relentless. The word to describe a consistent attitude under trial is STEADFASTNESS. The Greek word, HUPOMONE is HUPO under + MONE from MENW, the word for abide. So, it means literally to remain under. It is also translated persevere. Perseverance is the only way character can be fully built. Notice what James says about steadfastness, And let steadfastness have its full effect, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing.

A good coach makes his team persevere in running hills and wind sprints all week long. He has to get them into shape (mature and complete), so in the last quarter they can overpower their opponents and win. He knows the truth of the saying, “No pain, no gain.” Our God is a superb coach. His focus is the Day when Jesus Christ is revealed—a day that will continue into eternity. We can not become like Christ in our character without enduring pain. Pain is the fire that refines our attitudes. We hate pain because we focus on right now instead of game day. God loves us too much to do that. So, steadfastness, even though it hurts, is the only way to grow in character towards godliness, the next virtue

GODLINESS

The Greek word EUSEBIA comes from EU well + SEBOMAI reverent. So, the concept is being well-pleasing to God. This virtue is being motivated throughout my life to please God—to shape my life so that on the Day of Christ, we will hear, “Well done” from the lips of the master before the whole world and celebrate what those words refer to for eternity. Those shaped by this value take as their life-verse, John 15:8 By this my Father is glorified, that you bear much fruit and so prove to be my disciples. Jesus is the vine, we are the branches. The Father is the owner of the vineyard. The reputation of the vineyard owner is based on the quality and abundance of the grapes. The ultimate vineyard owner is glorified by the quality and abundance of fruit of the Spirit, Christ-like attitudes, which demonstrate that we are patterning our life, as disciples do, after the behavior of our Master. One commentator describes this character quality this way, "The great characteristic of EUSEBIA is that it looks in two directions. The man who has EUSEBIA always correctly worships God and gives him his due; but he also correctly serves his fellow man and gives them their due” (Barclay Commentary). This is the attitude of one whose heart’s greatest desire is to please Jesus. It is a mark of inner valor—of one who regularly fights the battle against his selfish inclination to please himself and whose devotion to Jesus is mighty enough to regularly win that battle.

BROTHERLY AFFECTION

This quality is more than just friendship love, PHILEO. It is friendship love combined with the word for brother, ADELPHOS, thus PHILADELPHIA, which is why the city in PA with this name is called the city of brotherly love. Godly character always moves Christ-followers towards relational connection in the Body of Christ. Men, especially, need to hear that although the call to manhood is the call to strength—to be those others can lean upon—it is never a call to autonomy. Maturing, godly masculinity moves towards deeper connection in the Body of Christ, not isolation. Former Army Ranger, Stu Weber writes,

“How can a man learn to be a man, a husband, a father, a provider and protector—a full-orbed king, warrior, mentor, and friend? By walking with other men who are doing it. You learn to play ball by playing ball. And masculinity is a team sport. You and I, as men living in a tragically disoriented culture, need to experience the life-building of what Paul called a “brother, fellow-worker, and fellow-soldier.” It is time we heed the call of the High King to His High Communion. It is time God’s men come to his table in the round and, in the company of men, drink deeply of a fresh understanding of his kingdom and just what it takes to enjoy a man’s role in it” (Locking Arms).

It feels counter-intuitive, but Peter tells us that as we grow into mature, stronger character, i.e. up the golden chain of virtues, we will increasingly exhibit not autonomous, independent strength but greater recognition of our need for horizontal connection, brotherly love. The more we grow in godliness, the more we recognize the truth that we grow up into Christ the head of the through connecting with each other in the Body of Christ. Tom Joyce, a retired Navy pilot, gives us a great picture of brotherly love and affection while stationed at the Naval Air Station Miramar. He recounts:

“Six other brothers and I met in the chaplain’s office every Tuesday morning at 6 AM for bible study and prayer. These were strong brothers--accountability partners of mine. They found out that I had been selected to command a squadron that was located right down the road from the chaplain’s office. One Tuesday morning, they all got to the study early, but when I arrived there was a note on the door, ‘Report to Squadron 111 immediately.’ That was the squadron I was going to command.”

So, I drove over to the squadron, a young sailor let me in and took me upstairs to the commanding officer’s office, and there were my six brothers in that office. They had a chair in the middle of the office and said, “Here’s your chair.” They sat me down and one spokesman of the guys said, “We know you’re heading to this squadron right here to be the CO in the next couple of months. We want to help prepare you for that.” Then, one by one, they began praying into me the leadership principles from Joshua 1. “Will you help this man, God, to know your word?” “Will you help this man, God, to live out your word?” Will you help this man, God, to never forget who he has to report to—that he reports to you.”

You see, I had 270 men, an all-male fighter squadron, thirteen airplanes each worth fifty-five million dollars, and umpteen number of families connected to these men—a huge responsibility on my shoulders. And I knew where I was going. I was taking these men to a combat zone. My brothers sitting here with me were helping to prepare me for leadership.

LOVE

There are at least four words for love in Greek. PHILEO is friendship love, two standing side by side both absorbed in a great calling. EROS is romantic love, man and woman face to face delighting in each other. A third is STORGEE, humans in a circle, familial love. Peter’s word is AGAPE, which is sacrificial love, supreme allegiance. It is sacrificing even what is dearest to you to meet another’s need. God so AGAPED the world that he gave what was dearest to him—his own Son, that whoever believes in him should have his need for a savior met, not perishing but having eternal life (John 3:16). Jesus said, “Greater AGAPE love has no one than this that he lays down his life (what is dearest to him) for his friend.”

Jim and Bill were best friends who enlisted together to fight in World War I. During the long muddy days of trench warfare in Europe, the battle became a stalemate. Every so often the men would be ordered over the top to move up to the next trench; but in this new era of the machine gun, row upon row would be mowed down. On one occasion, Jim and Bill were ordered over the top to advance to the next trench. Enemy fire broke out and Jim fell mortally wounded. Bill worked his way back in retreat to the previous trench with his commanding officer. But he could hear Jim out on the battlefield crying in pain and wanted to go rescue him.

His commanding officer said, “No, don’t risk your life. Didn’t you see where he was hit? He’s a gonner.” But when the C.O. turned away, Bill went out of the trench into the fire to be with his friend, Jim. A little bit later, he returned alone to the trench in a hail of bullets. The C.O. snapped, “Why did you do that? I told you he wasn’t going to make it. He’s dead isn’t he?” Bill said, “Yeah, he is.” The C.O. replied, “That was the stupidest thing you could have ever done.” Bill mumbled, “But he was alive when I got there.” “He was—well what did he say to you?” Bill answered, “He said, ‘I knew you’d come…I knew you’d come.’”

This virtue is both unwavering allegiance, supreme devotion to our Commander in Chief, and a willingness to die to myself for those around me in need. One of the most striking examples of this kind of love in the Body of Christ that I know of is the example of some of the Christian men who surrounded Chuck Colson, when he came to faith in Christ. While serving his prison sentence, Colson found out that his son named Christian had been arrested for narcotics possession. In Colson’s words,

“I picked up the phone in the prison and heard the words of my attorney, ‘Your son, Christian, has been arrested for narcotics possession. He’s in jail, but we’ll have him out on bail in a few hours.’ I couldn’t reply; my stomach went again, like someone had kicked me in the middle. I thought I had been through all the tribulations one person could take. My son in prison seemed the worst blow of all.”

“The brothers at Fellowship house rallied to my aid. On Tuesday, January 28, Al Quie called. ‘Chuck, I’ve been thinking about what else we can do to help you. All of us today signed a letter to the President appealing for mercy, but is there anything else?’ The voice on the other end didn’t sound like Al; the words came slowly and seemed laden with sadness. ‘Al, you guys are doing everything possible,’ I told him, ‘and I love you for it. I just don’t know what else you can do.’

‘There’s got to be something else, Chuck. I have been thinking.’ There was a long pause. ‘There’s an old statute someone told me about. I’m going to ask the President if I can serve the rest of your term for you.’”

Stunned, I could only stammer a protest. Al Quie, with twenty years in Congress, was the sixth ranking Republican in the House….That very day, Doug Coe sent me a handwritten note. ‘All the brothers would volunteer to serve my sentence,’ he explained. As it turned out, they never had to. Yet, their willingness to sacrifice their own freedom for their brother is a striking picture of the greatest virtue of all—love.

For Further Prayerful Thought:

Why does becoming like Jesus hurt?
Character is not having the right attitude once in a while but consistently enough so that such an attitude is characteristic of you. How is this truth related to the quality of steadfastness?
How would you answer a Christ-follower who said, “When I was a younger Christian I needed to be connected in the Body of Christ because I was so screwed up, but now that I am stronger, I’m handling things on my own okay?”
As you look back upon the 3-step process for accessing divine power to build the golden chain of virtues that rest upon one another, where would you say is the biggest breakdown in your life?

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Actually Becoming Partakers of the Divine Nature

On 18 November, 2023 By Gary Yagel

It has been said, probably mostly in the manufacturing world, that imitation is the highest form of flattery. I think there is truth in that statement—at least when it comes to how we pattern our life. The highest of all compliments to another is probably having a passion to be like him or her. When it comes to thanking Jesus for his unfathomable grace and love for me, I’m not sure anything would mean more to him than passionately seeking to BE LIKE HIM. This episode is the third in our study of the astonishing first chapter of 2nd Peter in which God tells us that his divine power makes it possible for us to do that very thing--become partakers of his divine nature, escaping the corruption of our sinful desires. Today, we examine step 3 for accessing that divine power.

Let’s review what we have seen in this text, Peter 1:3-8, so far. We noted last week that this 3-step process of becoming Christ-like, ends with the promise that continuing this process of growing into Christ-like character guarantees that our lives in Christ will NOT BE ineffective or unfruitful. Verse 8: For if these qualities are yours and are increasing, they keep you from being INEFFECTIVE or UNFRUITFUL in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ.

We noted that Peter explains this three-step process beginning in verse 3: His divine power has granted to us all things that pertain to life and godliness, through the KNOWLEDGE of him who called us to his own glory and excellence. Step #1 in being transformed into the likeness of Christ is KNOWING him well, personally, gazing upon his gory and excellence. Paul sends us the same message about how we are transformed writing, And we all…. BEHOLDING the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another. For this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit (2 Cor 3:18).

Last week, we examined step #2 in this process of accessing the power of the Holy Spirit to become Christ-like. Verse 4: by which he has granted to us his precious and very great promises, SO THAT THROUGH THEM you may become partakers of the divine nature, having escaped from the corruption that is in the world because of sinful desire. Why are God’s great and precious promises a key to a Jesus-like heart? Perhaps it is because our self-centered preoccupations, compulsions, fears, and anxieties so take over our hearts that they push the Christ-like heart commitment to love God and others to the side. However, when I can transfer all those self-centered preoccupations to God, knowing he will take care of whatever I fear or worry about, I am emotionally free to focus on loving—God and others. For example, if my heart is filled with anxiety over whether I have the money to pay my mortgage, I will not be able to concentrate on listening well or notice another's needs. I am too preoccupied with worry. But claiming God’s promise in Phil 4:19, My God will supply every need of yours according to his riches in glory in Christ Jesus sets my heart free to focus on others.

So, step #1 in this pathway to Christ-like heart attitudes is abiding in Christ, the Vine, walking with him and being transformed as we see his glory and moral excellence. Step #2 in this pathway to Christ-like attitudes is walking daily by faith—trusting in his great and precious promises to provide all we need. Today we come to step #3: Verse 5: MAKE EVERY EFFORT to supplement your faith with virtue, and virtue with knowledge, and knowledge with self-control, and self-control, with steadfastness, and steadfastness with godliness, and godliness with brotherly affection, and brotherly affection with love. Step #3 in this pathway to Christ-like heart attitudes is to be intentional about building Christ-like character. That is what Peter commands. Make every effort to build a golden chain of virtues.

Let’s look at this list of virtues.

FAITH

The beginning virtue, FAITH, refers back to step 2--living daily by claiming the promises of God. The foundation of Peter’s golden chain is trusting God’s promises, which frees our hearts to be OTHER-focused instead of SELF-focused. Escaping from desires ruling my heart that exhibit preoccupation with ourselves is only possible by trusting Jesus to worry about all those concerns SO WE DON’T HAVE TO. Let’s consider how this works.

If the fear of being rejected is dominating my heart, I will not be sensitive to the other’s needs to be affirmed and valued, but unconsciously maneuver to make sure I am seen in the best light. However, if the truth of Zephaniah 3:17 captures my heart, reassuring me that I am deeply loved by God, such confidence will drive out my self-centered need to feel valuable, empowering me to love others well by affirming THEM. The Lord your God is in your midst, a mighty one who will save; he will rejoice over you with gladness; he will quiet you by his love; he will exult over you with loud singing.
If my heart entertains secret doubts about God’s goodness, I will not want to come into his presence. Hebrews 11:6 says, Whoever would draw near to God must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who seek him. But if I claim Ps 34:10, I will run to God. Even the young lions suffer want and hunger; but those who seek the Lord lack no good thing.
If God has ordained circumstances that are painful for me, filling my heart with doubts about his love, rebellion may creep into my heart. But if I claim God’s promise in Rom 8:31-32, rebellion flees from my heart (momentarily)! If God is for us, who can be against us? He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things? Then my heart is free to love God in his love language, “If you love me keep my commandments" (Jn 14:5).
If the fear of being alone overpowers my heart, I will easily compromise my moral convictions to fit in. The potential pain of being left out drives me. But my heart is freed from this fear when I lean upon Is 41:10. Do not fear, for I am with you; do not be dismayed, for I am your God. I will strengthen you and help you; I will uphold you with my right hand. I can take a stand for righteousness that will also help others in the room do what is right.
When my heart is empty and I feel unsatisfied, like trying to follow Jesus is not worth it, discontent, and envy of others can take over. But when I lean on the truth of Psalm 37:4, Delight yourself in the Lord, and he will give you the desires of your heart, my heart is free to take my empty tank to God to fill.
When I am at the end of my rope, having asked God over and over to change a situation which causes a lot of pain but he refuses to do so, distrust can take over my heart. In such moments, I need to rely upon verses like, I Pet 5:7, You can throw the whole weight of your anxieties upon him, for you are his personal concern.

Step #1 in becoming Christ-like is abiding in Christ. Step #2 is freeing our hearts from their default preoccupations by claiming the great and precious promises of God. But the process doesn’t end after just two steps; there is a third. MAKE EVERY EFFORT to supplement your faith with virtue, and virtue with knowledge, etc. Step #3 is an intentional focus on building Christ-like character. Jesus does not say through Peter, “Walk closely with me getting to know me, then daily claim my promises to free your hearts from self-preoccupations AND THAT IS ALL IT TAKES. Rather, he says, “Walk closely with me getting to know me, and daily claim my promises to free your hearts from self-preoccupations, then, make every effort to build seven components of Christ-like character. The English translation supplement is from the verb, to bring in and the noun supply. It is the idea of furnishing completely, lavishly.

VIRTUE

There is a logical sequence to the golden string of seven Christ-like virtues that Peter commands us to build upon the foundation of a faith that daily trusts his promises. First, we must have the right goal. We must shape our lives according to the right PURSUIT. Peter says, make every effort to pursue virtue. The Greek word for virtue, ARETE, has a rich background. We discern four facets to this diamond.

It was the word in Greek culture to describe the ultimate moral excellence of character. It described one whose character was of the highest moral order.
The word ARETE can also be translated praise. So, the character envisioned is praiseworthiness or even renown. It means worthy of universal praise. This virtue is used earlier of God’s praiseworthiness (moral excellence), which draws humans to praise him. The parallel suggests that the excellence of Christians character is so well-known that it draws others to praise God
ARETE was also used to describe courage, the strength of character that refuses to back down from doing what is right in the face of external pressure. The concept is virtue that is so thorough that it refuses to compromise at any point. Integrity. Someone has said that the difference between God’s best and Satan’s best is one small moral compromise. I am reminded of the apocryphal story of Sir Winston Churchill who regularly traded insults with Lady Aster.

Churchill: "Would you sleep with a man who offered you five million pounds?"

Lady Aster: "My goodness, Mr. Churchill... Well, I suppose for 5 million pounds once—I suppose I would.”

Churchill: "Would you sleep with him for five pounds?"

Lady Aster: "Mr. Churchill, what kind of woman do you think I am?!"

Churchill: "Madam, we've already established what kind of a woman you are. We are only haggling about the price.”

The virtue embodied by the word ARETE has uncompromising integrity.

4. ARETE describes the moral excellence of God, himself. Back in verse three the divine power given is to share in God’s own glory and excellence (ARETE). What praiseworthy examples do you see?

He entered the synagogue, and a man was there with a withered hand. And they watched Jesus, to see whether he would heal him on the Sabbath, so that they might accuse him. And he said to the man with the withered hand, “Come here.” And he said to them, “Is it lawful on the Sabbath to do good or to do harm, to save life or to kill?” But they were silent. And he looked around at them with anger, grieved at their hardness of heart, and said to the man, “Stretch out your hand.” He stretched it out, and his hand was restored. The Pharisees went out and immediately held counsel with the Herodians against him, how to destroy him (Mark 3:1-6).

I am sure you would have much to add to my list. But I have, love for the Pharisees by confronting them, fearlessness, compassion, mercy, anger at hardheartedness, grieving over evil, and again sacrificial love for the healed man. This incident was one of many that caused the Parsees to execute Jesus. So, step 3a is intentionally pursuing the moral excellence of Jesus.

KNOWLEDGE

Step 3b is to furnish virtue with knowledge. Peter here affirms the same importance of knowledge that Paul does in his letter to the Romans, in which he criticizes the unbelieving Jews of his day, saying, I bear them witness that they have a zeal for God, but not according to knowledge (Rom 10:2). Indeed, knowledge is so basic to the Christian walk that Paul tells the Christians at Colossae, From the day we heard (of their conversion), we have not ceased to pray for you, asking that you may be filled with the KNOWLEDGE of his will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding, so as to walk in a manner worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing to him: bearing fruit in every good work and increasing in the KNOWLEDGE of God (vs 1:9-10).

Recovery of true knowledge is paramount for godliness because our sinful nature causes us to suppress the truth in unrighteousness (Rom 1:18). Paul identifies this corruption of our thinking when he urges the Ephesian believers, You must no longer walk as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their minds. They are darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them, due to their hardness of heart. The knowledge needed to overcome ignorance due to the fall is in Scripture. All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work (2 Tim 3:16). This tool is vital for the transformation described by Paul: Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind (Rom 12:2).

The importance of gaining the knowledge of God is revealed in Paul’s words about spiritual warfare. For the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh but have divine power to destroy strongholds. We destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God, and take every thought captive to obey Christ (2 Cor 10:4-5).

The Greek word for knowledge is, GINOSKO. Besides being the word used for personal knowledge, it has the connotation of practical, everyday knowledge, what we would call “know how.” The knowledge of Scripture brings PERSPECTIVE to everyday life. For example, in Hebrews 12, God gives us the correct perspective to have about our trials. The Lord disciplines the one he loves and chastises every son whom he receives. It is for discipline that you have to endure. God is treating you as sons. For what son is there whom his father does not discipline? If you are left without discipline, in which all have participated, then you are illegitimate children and not sons (vs 7-10).

The sinful, un-Christ-like attitudes of our hearts result from a loss of perspective.

Resentment is allowing the momentary pain caused by others to do long-term damage to my soul. We can’t afford bitterness; it will destroy us from the inside out.
Judgementalism views others as morally beneath us, forgetting that God’s standard is that to whom much is given, much is required.
Selfish anger forgets that wounded people wound people and being hurt is the chance to put salve on the other’s wound.
Sexual impurity satisfies a momentary urge now, only to make the battle to “say no” to illicit sexual cravings next time harder.
Murmuring when God allows frustration and pain in my life results from forgetting that I am creature made for HIS glory. He is not my genie in a bottle to help ME escape the unpleasantness that he knows is best for me, building character.

SELF-CONTROL

The Greek word, EGKRATEIA, means literally, the ability to get a grip on oneself. It is the ability to resist our passions controlling the decisions we make. This word means that WE control and steer our physical appetites into righteous avenues in which they are satisfied, not our desires steering US. But I want to suggest that EGKRATEIA goes way beyond controlling our physical appetites. It is choosing to look at life from a biblical perspective. Our attitudes, be they right or wrong, are shaped by our perspective. The principle that choosing your perspective is to choose your attitude was understood well by motivational speaker Zig Ziggler. He recounts this story about arriving at his airport gate upon his return to Dallas after speaking.

The ticket agent looked at me, smiled, and said, “The three o’clock flight to Dallas has been canceled.” To this I enthusiastically responded, “Fantastic!” When I said that, the ticket agent, with a puzzled look on her face, asked, “Now why in the world would you say ‘fantastic’ when I’ve just told you the three o’clock fight to Dallas has been canceled?” I smiled back at her and said, “Ma’am, there are only three reasons why anybody would cancel a flight to Dallas. Number one, something must be wrong with that airplane; number two, something must be wrong with the person who is going to fly that airplane; number three, something must be wrong with the weather they are going to fly that airplane in. Now, Ma’am, if any one of those three situations exist, I don’t want to be up there. I want to be right down here. Fantastic!

Your perspective determines your attitude! So, the sequence of Peter’s golden virtues makes sense. Add the pursuit of moral excellence to your foundation of trusting God’s promises. But pursing righteous attitudes requires the right perspective, so next we must add knowledge. Knowledge gives you the right PERSPECTIVE to produce godly attitudes. But just having the knowledge yet not letting that knowledge shape your perspective won’t lead to godliness. You need to add self-control to your knowledge so that you choose the right perspective to have resulting in right attitudes. Here are some examples of the way that the self-discipline of choosing the right perspective empowers godly character.

Forgiveness: refusing to demand that another person treat me perfectly when God has forgiven a thousand times more imperfections in me.
Humility: recognizing that God and others are actually the ones responsible for the achievements in my life.
Contentment: realizing that God has already provided everything I need for my present happiness.
Patience: realizing that others’ imperfections that inconvenience me provide the opportunity to show them Christ-like unconditional love.
Security: structuring my life around what is eternal and cannot be taken away.
Attentiveness: Showing the worth of a person by giving sincere attention to his words.
Truthfulness: Earning future trust by accurately reporting past facts.
Orderliness: Preparing myself and my surroundings so that I will achieve the greatest efficiency.
Thoroughness: Knowing what factors will diminish the effectiveness of my work or words if neglected.

I can’t think of anything more honoring to Jesus than for each of us to conclude this episode by saying, “Lord, I want to spend my life honoring you by striving to be just like you. Please help me.”

For Further Prayerful Thought:

In this episode’s review of last week we again looked at how claiming the specific promises of God to care for our needs frees us from having to worry about them knowing they are taken care of. Why might this step be required before we can focus on Christ-like attitudes towards others?
What ideas about pursuing virtue, praiseworthy character stood out to you.
What do you think of the statement having the right attitude comes from looking at life from God’s point of view? What reasons for knowing the Word of God stand out to you as most important.
Do you agree or disagree with this statement. Self-control is more about choosing your perspective in a given situation than about resisting cravings?

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Peter’s Words When Evil Seems to Be Winning

On 10 November, 2023 By Gary Yagel

New Testament scholars tell us that Peter most likely wrote his second letter, the one we’re studying, sometime between AD 64 and AD 67. For thirty years after Jesus triumphantly said, “All authority in heaven and earth has been given to me. Go, therefore and make disciples of the nations,” Christianity had indeed spread throughout the world despite persecution. But at the time Peter penned this letter, the insane Roman emperor, Nero, had come to power and was lighting his palatial gardens by pouring oil over Christians and setting them on fire. Peter appears to have written this last letter from Rome while awaiting execution. The despair of his readers over the way evil was triumphing caused Peter to look back in history to the days of Sodom and Gomorrah to try to find hope, writing:

If God rescued righteous Lot, greatly distressed by the sensual conduct of the wicked… tormenting his righteous soul over their lawless deeds that he saw and heard, then the Lord knows how to rescue the godly from trials, and to keep the unrighteous under punishment until the day of judgment, and especially those who indulge in the lust of defiling passion and despise authority (2 Pet 2:7-10).

Against a moral backdrop much like ours, in which evil seemed ready to envelop the whole empire, Peter gave specific advice to the Christ-followers of his day. This episode examines that advice and how we can follow it in today’s world.

It is astonishing to me that in a world in which Peter’s readers were feeling like evil was winning and the church of Jesus was losing—Peter begins his letter by saying, “Let me explain to you how Christ-followers in your situation, can ALWAYS WIN.” Huh? He lays out a 3-step process for them to follow in their cosmic battle with the kingdom of darkness, stating audaciously, “If you follow this process, it will keep you from being INEFFECTIVE or UNFRUITFUL in your faith.” Peter turns the thinking of his readers about the battle of Christ’s kingdom of righteousness against the kingdom of evil away from the OUTWARD fight and towards the INNER battle to overcome our ungodly desires and become partakers of God’s holy nature. As we consider @ Peter 1:38- again, notice first the process he describes and then the reward he promises.

PROCESS: His divine power has granted to us all things that pertain to life and godliness, through the knowledge of him who called us to his own glory and excellence, by which he has granted to us his precious and very great promises, so that through them you may become partakers of the divine nature, having escaped from the corruption that is in the world because of sinful desire. For this very reason, make every effort to supplement your faith with virtue, and virtue with knowledge, and knowledge with self-control, and self-control with steadfastness, and steadfastness with godliness, and godliness with brotherly affection, and brotherly affection with love. REWARD: For if these qualities are yours and are increasing, they keep you from being INEFFECTIVE or UNFRUITFUL in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Peter says, “You can’t control what is happening out there. But there is another spiritual battle going on and if you fight this battle with the right strategy, I guarantee your life will matter.” Peter seems to know something about the way humans are hardwired, especially men. We want our lives to make a difference. We don’t want to fail in the mission assigned to us. So, Peter uses two powerful negative images to motivate believers. The first is INEFFECTIVENESS. The Greek word is ARGOS, which means “yielding no return,” “wasting your effort.” Peter says, “If you want to avoid a wasted life, labor spent in vain, seeing no results from your effort, appropriate the spiritual power that is yours in Christ and pursue the moral excellence of God himself, becoming a partaker in his godly character.” And in case we missed the point, Peter uses another word to describe the life we want to avoid—UNFRUITFUL. This synonym for ineffective means, not delivering what is expected, failure to bring the desired result, wasted effort. Peter is saying, “Yes you are called to seek the spread of Christ’s agenda of righteousness over the earth, and it does feel like we are losing. But that restoration of righteousness is to begin in our own hearts by overthrowing sinful desires.” If you stay focused on THAT MISSION, your life will never be INEFFECTIVE or UNFRUITFUL!

So, let’s continue to dig into this PROCESS of fighting our sinful desires to become more Christ-like. As we saw last week, Jesus’ mission of bringing the kingdom of God to earth involves nothing less than a re-creation of the world, one person at a time. As we unraveled 2 Peter 1:4a, we noted that we’ve been granted all the power we need that pertains to godliness, a word that describes being 100% motivated by a desire to please God. Verse 4a introduced step #1 in the process of accessing divine power to become Christ-like—knowing God intimately. We saw that this teaching is consistent with Paul’s words, And we all, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another and Jesus’ teaching that the fruit of godly character comes from abiding in him.

VS 4b: Step #2 To Develop a Christ-like Heart--Living by Faith in God’s Promises

By which he has A) granted to us his precious and very great promises, B) so that through them C) you may become partakers of the divine nature, D) having escaped from the corruption that is in the world E) because of sinful desire.

A.Granted his precious and very great promises. Peter uses strong emotional words here. The word for precious means “costly” or “dear.” The cost of our redemption is never far from Peter’s mind, who had said in his first letter, You were ransomed from the futile ways inherited from your forefathers, not with perishable things such as silver or gold, but with the precious blood of Christ, like that of a lamb without blemish or spot (1 Pet 1:18-19). Very great translates the Greek word MEGAS, used in the English word, megaton and megawatt.

The promises of God are the foundation of our faith. Saving faith is not mere intellectual assent. James corrects that view. You believe that God is one; you do well. Even the demons believe and shudder! (James 2:19). Biblically understood, faith is trust. Saving faith is trusting the death of Christ alone as the atoning sacrifice for sin, instead of trusting my good works. Similarly, becoming Christ-like happens through faith—trusting the power of Christ to empower holiness in us. As Paul summarizes in Galatians 2:20, I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. Living by faith every day is the call of those who belong to Christ. The righteous shall live by his faith. (Hab 2:4, Rom 1:17). Living by faith means living in dependency upon Christ’s provision for us. The foundational principle of the kingdom is that those who are blessed are the poor in spirit, those who recognize their utter spiritual poverty and dependence upon God. Theirs is the kingdom of God.

B. So that through them. Here, Peter reveals step #2 in the process of developing a Christ-like heart—i.e. trusting the promises of God. I believe TRUSTING God’s promises is God’s means of setting our hearts free from the concerns that dominate them so Christ-like desires can replace them. Our hearts are driven by impulses like our insecurity, the need to prove ourselves, our fears, our anxieties, a host of unhealthy preoccupations, all of which shape our desires—what we WANT.

Freedom from such compulsions comes by trusting specific promises of God.

CONCERNS THAT CAN RULE OUR HEARTS: DRIVEN AWAY BY GOD’S PROMISE

Worry about material needs.

Phil 4:19. And my God will supply every need of yours according to his riches in glory in Christ Jesus.
Matt 6:33. But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you.

Fear of failure.

Joshua 1:8. This Book of the Law shall not depart from your mouth, but you shall meditate on it day and night, so that you may be careful to do according to all that is written in it. For then you will make your way prosperous, and then you will have good success.
Ps 1:1-3. Blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the wicked, nor stands in the way of sinners, nor sits in the seat of scoffers; but his delight is in the law of the Lord, and on his law he meditates day and night. He is like a tree planted by streams of water that yields its fruit in its season, and its leaf does not wither. In all that he does, he prospers.

Fear that the future will bring more than I can handle.

Jer 29:11. ‘For I know the plans I have for you’, declares the LORD, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.
Is 43:2. When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; and when you pass through the rivers, they will not sweep over you.

Doubt that surrendering to God is to my benefit.

Ps 34-10. The young lions suffer want and hunger; but those who seek the Lord lack no good thing.
Matt 7:9-11. Or which one of you, if his son asks him for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a serpent? If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him!
Rom 8:31-32. If God is for us, who can be against us? He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things?

Fear of being alone.

Heb 13:5. I will never leave you nor forsake you.
Is 41:10. Do not fear, for I am with you; do not be dismayed, for I am your God. I will strengthen you and help you; I will uphold you with my right hand.

Fear of being ridiculed for my weaknesses.

Heb 4:15-16. We do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin. Let us then with confidence draw near to the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need.
2 Cor 12:9. But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me.

Fear of being ridiculed for my stupidity.

James 1:5. If any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask God, who gives generously to all without reproach, and it will be given him.
Matt 7:7-8. Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and the one who seeks finds, and to the one who knocks it will be opened.

Passivity and laziness causing me to fail to get the most out of life.

Ps 37:4. Delight yourself in the Lord, and he will give you the desires of your heart.
Prov 3:13-15. Blessed is the one who finds wisdom, and the one who gets understanding, for the gain from her is better than gain from silver and her profit better than gold. She is more precious than jewels, and nothing you desire can compare with her.
1 Pet 5:6 Humble yourselves, therefore, under the mighty hand of God so that at the proper time he may exalt you.

The security of being unconditionally wanted and loved.

Zeph 3:17. The Lord your God is in your midst, a mighty one who will save; he will rejoice over you with gladness; he will quiet you by his love; he will exult over you with loud singing.
Rom 8:38-39. For I have become absolutely convinced that neither death nor life, neither messenger of Heaven nor monarch of earth, neither what happens today nor what may happen tomorrow, neither a power from on high nor a power from below, nor anything else in God’s whole world has any power to separate us from the love of God in Jesus Christ our Lord!
I Pet 5:7. You can throw the whole weight of your anxieties upon him, for you are his personal concern.

Hesitation to give generously because of depleting my resources

Luke 6:37-38. Give and it will be given to you—yes, good measure, pressed down, shaken together and running over will they pour into your lap.
Prov 3:9-10. Honor the Lord with your wealth and with the firstfruits of all your produce; then your barns will be filled with plenty, and your vats will be bursting with wine.

Discouragement over tough unchanging circumstances

Rom 8:28. And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose.
Heb 12:9ff. For the moment all discipline seems painful rather than pleasant, but later it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it.

Our hearts were designed to be compelled by love for God and love for others. But instead, it is driven by self-preoccupation. We need to first dispel these heart compulsions by training ourselves to trust God’s comprehensive promises to provide everything we need. Then our hearts become FREE to LOVE as we were created to.

C. (So that) you may become partakers of the divine nature. Partakers is the word, KOINONOS, which is the word for followship, i.e. the sharing of life. Again, we are struck by the truth that this moral excellence is not an external manufactured Christ-likeness, but it is the character, the heart of Christ produced in us through the work of the Holy Spirit. Perhaps it is noteworthy that Peters first great sermon, given on the day of Pentecost was about the outpouring of the Holy Spirit that is part of the New Covenant.

D. Having escaped from the corruption that is in the world. The Greek word for flee is PHEUGO. The word used here adds APO, from. So APOPHEUGO means to flee from. The emphasis is upon intentionality—deliberately turning away from the corruption caused by evil. Corruption refers to destruction brought about by a corrupting influence, thus the destruction brought about by sin. As oncologists hate cancer, we are to abhor evil (Rom 12:9) because of the way it destroys life.

F. Because of sinful desire. To build a Christ-like heart in us, the Holy Spirit must extinguish “sinful desire” in us. One of the challenges we face in this heart transformation process is that the sinful desires inside our hearts are hard to see. Perhaps it helps to realize that our hearts were designed to be compelled by love for God—to love him with all our heart, mind, soul, and strength and consumed with love for others—you shall love your neighbor as yourself. Bit, we love ourselves instead. Let’s try to see how self-love supplants these two callings to love.

Love for God: The DESIGN Compared to REALITY

Loving God is our highest calling: But we default to self-interest.
Pleasing him should matter most: But the acceptance of others matters more.
Praise should happen frequently because we adore God: But instead, we grumble about what is going wrong (interfering with our ease and comfort).
Looking beyond our blessings to be grateful to God for them should happen regularly: But that takes effort and life tires us out too much.
Loving God means remembering that we were created for His glory: But asking “what will glorify God in this situation” gets shoved to the back of our minds.
Loving God means setting aside time to enjoy him: But often he gets the leftovers of our time.

Love for Our Neighbor: The DESIGN in I Corinthians 13 Compared to REALITY

Love is patient: But we project hostility towards others whose imperfections inconvenience us.
Love is kind: But instead of focusing on the other, our insecurities preoccupy us with whether or not we are making a good impression.
Love does not envy: But we feel displeasure and discontent for our plight when others enjoy pleasures that we don’t, instead of being glad for them.
Love doesn’t boast. But unconsciously we default to wanting to make sure we make a good impression on others, instead of wanting to exalt them.
Love is not rude. But we disrespect many image bearers of God. (If you doubt that think about what you say about other drivers.)
Love does not insist on its own way. But we tire of putting others first.
Love is not irritable. But when we feel grumpy, we don’t want to overlook others’ deficiencies and treat others as interruptions rather than human beings.
Love is not resentful. We can give more than 50% for a while. But eventually we start balancing what we are giving against what we are getting back.
Love does not rejoice over evil. But we feel pleasure inside when our opponent loses or suffers.
Love rejoices in the truth. But we bend or hide the truth to avoid embarrassing disclosures that would lower others’ opinions of us.

The moral rot of self-love in our hearts is more pervasive than first meets the eye. But the habit of trusting God’s rich array of promises to care personally for all of our concerns empowers us to escape the corruption of self-love the rules our hearts. So, Christ’s divine power restores our hearts to what they were created for—loving God with all of our heart, mind, soul, and strength, and loving others well.

For Further Prayerful Thought:

Why do you think Peter tries to motivate his readers to fight the battle against evil desires and supplant them with a heart like that of Jesus—by appealing that such effort guarantees that their commitment to Christ will not be INEFFECTIVE or UNFRUITFUL?
Step 2 for accessing Christ’s power to overcome selfish attitudes (from verse 4b) stresses that the power to partake of Christ’s moral excellence comes through his precious and great promises. How can living by Christ’s promises dispel the turmoil and self-preoccupation that tend to rule our hearts?
Which specific promises of God stood out to you?
Which selfish compulsion of you heart needs to be expelled by claiming a promise of God?

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Untapped Spiritual Power

On 03 November, 2023 By Gary Yagel

Author, David Murrow, in his book, Why Men Hate Going to Church, observed that Jesus demonstrated the pattern of a man on a mission. He writes.

"Jesus had a vision. He called it the kingdom of God. It was huge. It involved nothing less than a re-creation of the world, one person at a time. And we are His partners in this task. This vision was the focus of his entire life. Everything about his life was tied up in this vision. This vision is what kept him focused on his mission. It was the reason he lived and died" (Why Men Hate Going to Church).

As followers of Jesus, we have joined his mission—to restore rightness to every square inch of planet earth, or as Jesus put it, to seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness. Spreading the kingdom of righteousness begins with the loyalties of my own heart; I am called TO CHRIST to enjoy a love relationship with him. Spreading the kingdom then moves outwardly to encompass my heart attitudes; I am then called TO BECOME LIKE CHRIST. The reign of King Jesus over my heart attitudes expels wrong attitudes. Paul explains this part of the Christ-follower's mission when he said to the church at Ephesus, “You’ve been taught to put off your old self, which belongs to your former manner of life and is corrupt through deceitful desires, and to be renewed in the spirit of your minds, and to put on the new self, created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness.

Great men, in the eyes of Jesus, are those who fight the sinful attitudes of their hearts, self-centeredness, pride, resentment, lust, selfishness, impurity, rivalry, idolatry, greed, envy, selfish anger, laziness, lack of love for others. They surrender in humility to God’s reclamation project of re-making them into the toughness of character that Jesus showed. They channel their masculine aggression towards overpowering the dark attitudes of their fallen hearts. This episode explores what the Apostle, Peter, taught about how to unleash the power God has provided to overcome the selfish attitudes and wrong desires of our hearts.

To overcome the wrong attitudes and desires that arise from our sinful nature, we need spiritual power. In fact, we need the mightiest power there is since the greatest power in the world is the power to overcome evil. Today, we begin a new November series, Becoming Men Who Exhibit the Toughness of Jesus on the Inside, based upon 2 Peter 1:3-8. Let’s explore what Peter said about accessing that power.

His divine power has granted to us all things that pertain to life and godliness, through the knowledge of him who called us to his own glory and excellence, by which he has granted to us his precious and very great promises, so that through them you may become partakers of the divine nature, having escaped from the corruption that is in the world because of sinful desire. For this very reason, make every effort to supplement your faith with virtue, and virtue with knowledge, and knowledge with self-control, and self-control with steadfastness, and steadfastness with godliness, and godliness with brotherly affection, and brotherly affection with love. For if these qualities are yours and are increasing, they keep you from being ineffective or unfruitful in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Let’s dig into this amazing passage that tells us how to access the unlimited power God has provided us for winning this battle over our heart attitudes. Verse 3.

A. His divine power. Jesus located sin in the human heart. The message of Christianity is that only Christ, God himself come in the flesh, could defeat evil, and dethrone it from its control over the human heart. The summary message of Paul’s great theological tome, Romans is that righteousness is from God (1:16-17, 3:21-22). Righteousness from God not only saves us from the penalty of sin (justification) and saves us ultimately from the presence of sin (glorification), righteousness from God also saves us right now from the power of sin (sanctification). This word, power, is DUNAMIS, from which we get dynamite.

Trusting Christ’s power to overcome wrong attitudes is described by another Apostle, Paul. I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me (Gal 2:20). The relentless battle against our sinful attitudes requires a constant supply of spiritual might that is found only in Christ’s resurrection defeat of evil and its consequences. Just as faith is trusting God to impute Christ’s righteousness to us so that we are justified, faith is trusting God to impart Christ’s moral power to have right attitudes, i.e.be sanctified.

B. Has granted to us all things. The grammatical structure of the Greek sentence begins with the word all things, putting the emphasis on the sufficiency of this power source. Years ago, the manufacturers of the infamous Rolls Royce refused to identify the exact horsepower of the engine. They simply listed it as adequate. The power over sin granted to us is adequate to get the job done.

The word translated granted is DOREOMAI, which literally means “freely given as a present” This word is not the common word for give but puts the emphasis on free gift, gratis, without payment. The verb tense, “has granted,” implies that the past act of granting continues its effect to the present day and is thus to continue. Jesus paid a high price for us to have this power to overcome sinful attitudes. Peter had written in his first letter, You were ransomed from the futile ways inherited from your forefathers, not with perishable things such as silver or gold, but with the precious blood of Christ, like that of a lamb without blemish or spot (1 Pet 1:18-19). Having paid such a high price, our master wants us to unleash this untapped spiritual power.

C. That pertain to life. Jesus said that he came that we might have life and have it abundantly. The power, which is in view here, is the power for restoration to the life God intended. The wage of sinful heart attitudes is always death. Paul urges believers to never doubt that truth though they may not see the destructive consequences of sinful attitudes. Do not be deceived: God is not mocked, for whatever one sows, that will he also reap. For the one who sows to his own flesh will from the flesh reap corruption, but the one who sows to the Spirit will from the Spirit reap eternal life (Gal 6:7). The biblical concept of eternal life is not just existence that begins after we die and continues forever. It is the quality of life that begins in this world when it is partially restored by the power of Christ to what it was created to be, before the fall, which and continues into eternity. This high-quality, abundant life is described by David in Psalm 63:

Because your steadfast love is better than life my lips will praise you. So I will bless you as long as I live; in your name I will lift up my hands. My soul will be satisfied as with fat and rich food, and my mouth will praise you with joyful lips, when I remember you upon my bed, and meditate on you in the watches of the night for you have been my help, and in the shadow of your wings I will sing for joy (vs 3-7).

So, this divine power enables a soul-satisfying life.

D. (Granted all things that) pertain to godliness. The Greek word, EUSEBIA, comes from EU well, and SEBOMAI to be reverent. Vine says it is a way of life “which, characterized by a Godward attitude, does that which is well-pleasing to him.” This word describes the character of one who has overcome the attitudes of the sinful nature. He is one used to the tough inner combat of going to war daily against his sinful attitudes and actions. In Galatians 5 Paul illustrates the outflow of our sinful nature, putting such expressions of sin into four categories:

1) Sexual sins.

--sexual immorality: sex with anyone not your opposite sex marriage partner

--impurity: awakening sexual desire towards anyone not your mate

--sensuality: getting sexual pleasure without personal connection to a real spouse.

2) Wrong worship sins.

--idolatry: letting anything take the place of God in our affections or dependency

--sorcery: opening our soul to the powers of darkness

3). Relational sins.

--enmity: a hostile or antagonistic attitude towards another

--strife: fighting, conflict, contention, discord.

--jealousy: painful awareness of a rival’s benefit & desire to possess it instead.

--fits of anger: an attitude of hostility towards one who has hurt us or treated us unjustly.

--rivalry: an unloving attitude towards a competitor that prefers his defeat, instead of what is best for him.

--dissentions: disagreement in opinion leading to quarrelsome discord.

--divisions: placing greater value on being right than on love and harmony.

--envy: competitive displeasure at what benefits a rival and desire to remove it.

4). Recreational sins.

--drunkenness: being under the control of alcohol or drug to get high.

--orgies: participating in activities where sex is public.

--things like these: partying in a way that includes or celebrates wrong behavior.

E. Through the knowledge of him. Notice the all-important word through. It indicates that Peter is about to tell us how this divine power available from Christ is accessed. The answer is through knowledge of God. There are two primary words in Greek for knowledge. One, OIDA, refers to objective facts that are seen or perceived. The second is GINOSKO, which refers more to subjective knowing. In the NT the use of this word frequently indicates a relationship between the person knowing and the thing or person known. It is the category of knowing mentioned in Genesis, when Genesis 4 say’s “Adam knew Eve and she conceived.”

The Greek word Peter uses for knowledge, EPIGINOSKO has this kind of subjective knowledge as its root. Adding EPI then makes it more intensive—to personally know very well. So, we access the power to defeat wrong attitudes by walking intimately with Jesus, knowing him and the Father very well. Here are two passages of Scripture that reinforce this principle that spiritual power to overcome sinful desires and attitudes comes through knowing the Lord, personally, very well.

Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another. For this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit (2 Cor 3:17-18). Paul does not reveal why gazing upon the glory of Jesus transforms us. Maybe it is because the more we get to know him the more we will love him. Maybe it is because gazing upon Jesus makes us see his holiness, the plumbline that sharpens the clarity of our sin. Maybe it is because gazing upon him inflames our passion to please him more. Maybe gazing upon Jesus convinces us that he wants us to lean on him for his strength. Maybe gazing upon his brilliant glory strengthens our confidence that obedience to him is the path of life. All we are told is that gazing upon the glory of the Lord transforms us.
Paul’s observation seems similar to Jesus great teaching in John 15:4-5: Abide in me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit by itself, unless it abides in the vine, neither can you, unless you abide in me. 5 I am the vine; you are the branches. Whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing. The fruit of godly character comes through that intimate, abiding connection. So, let’s take a moment to consider some obstacles to walking intimately with Jesus.

Obstacles That Keep us from Walking Intimately with Jesus

Failure to get the gospel from our head to our heart, believing Satan’s lie that our sins are too gross and frequent for a holy God to want closeness with us.
A closet housing a few sins we don’t want to give up; so, we don’t know the freedom of being all in—everything on the altar. Maybe in that closet is tithing, or letting a trusted person know about a porn problem.
Distrusting God. When I was a kid, I was afraid that if I every totally gave Jesus the throne of my life he would make me be a missionary.
Busyness. No relationship can be built apart from taking charge of our calendars. Lack of personal discipline in time management kills relationships.
Settling for second best. Time can’t actually be saved; every second gets spent. The question is whether we are directing it or letting our most priceless possession be squandered on good things but not the best things.
Being secularized. God’s design is for us to enjoy his material world with all its joys and pleasures—and then let that delight drive us back to him. We enjoy the pleasures of this world but forget to let them lead us back to the creator. David’s linking of the two enriched his walk with God. He sang,

On the glorious splendor of your majesty, and on your wondrous works, I will meditate. They shall speak of the might of your awesome deeds, and I will declare your greatness. They shall pour forth the fame of your abundant goodness and shall sing aloud of your righteousness. The Lord is gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love. The Lord is good to all, and his mercy is over all that he has made. All your works shall give thanks to you, O Lord, and all your saints shall bless you! (Psalm 145:5-9).

F. Who called us. Following Jesus is not like going online and clicking yes to an evite. It is our personal response to the personal voice of Jesus calling our name. Strength for battling my sinful attitudes comes from realizing that it is part of Jesus' call. Os Guiness writes, “Answering the call of our Creator is “the ultimate why” for living, the highest source of purpose in human existence…Calling is the truth that God calls us to Himself so decisively that everything we are, everything we do, and everything we have is invested with a special devotion, dynamism, and direction lived out as a response to His summons and service” (The Call).

G. To his own glory. Perhaps the most astonishing statement in these early verses of 2 Peter 1 is Peter’s observation that the call to Christ-like character is the call to share God’s own glory. Remember, Peter, unlike any other living person at that time but John, had seen Jesus transfigured causing him to say a few verses later in 2 Peter, “We were eyewitnesses of his majesty.” John would later write, “We beheld his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.” God’s glory, DOXA, seems to be inextricably bound to the blazing light of righteousness that exposes the darkness of evil. In Matthew 17:2 we read, And he was transfigured before them, and his face shone like the sun, and his clothes became white as light. The Apostle John reveals his revelation of Jesus, one like a son of man, clothed with a long robe and with a golden sash around his chest. The hairs of his head were white, like white wool, like snow. His eyes were like a flame of fire…from his mouth came a sharp two-edged sword, and his face was like the sun shining in full strength (Rev 1:13ff). Sanctification, i.e. battling wrong attitudes and choosing the inner heart perspective of Jesus, is to recover some of the very glory that Adam and Eve were given as those called to IMAGE GOD. Peter restates this truth in verse 4 by saying that Christ’s divined power enables us to be partakers of the divine nature. Peter refers not to God’s supernatural attributes but to his moral perfections, which the next phrase makes clear.

H. To his own excellence. The Greek word is ARETE, which means moral excellence, virtue. The ESV text notes say, “The word ARETE was used by Greek writers to describe the sum of all desirable character qualities.” Remember, the wording of this call: It is not just a call from God to moral excellence—it is the call to share HIS OWN MORAL EXCELLENCE. God has granted to US the divine power to be like God. Think of it! The irony is that Satan appealed to the desire of mankind via Adam and Eve to be like God in power, autonomy, status, which belong to the sovereign God alone. But all along, humans were intended to be like God in moral perfection. That calling is what Jesus came to restore.

Peter reminds us that our master has granted to us a reservoir of spiritual power to fulfill our calling to overcome our sinful attitudes and partake of Jesus’ glory and moral excellence. But we are the ones who must step into that battle and unleash that power. WE must respond to Jesus’ call to become like him. To do so is the path to the greatest possible fulfillment in life. Os Guinness asks, Do you want to accept a challenge that will be the integrating dynamic of your whole life? One that will engage your loftiest thoughts, your most dedicated exertions, your deepest emotions, all your abilities and resources, to the last step you take and the last breath you breathe. Listen to Jesus of Nazareth; answer his call (Ibid).

For Further Prayerful Thought:

If God has freely granted us the power to overcome sinful attitudes, why do we surrender to them so much?
How does Paul’s explanation of sanctification in 2 Cor 3:17 make sense? And we all, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another.
What obstacles keep you from intimacy with Jesus?
How can we do a better job of remembering that fighting our wrong attitudes so that our inner character looks like that of Jesus, is a personal call from him?

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Jesus’ Command—BE WATCHFUL not ASLEEP

On 25 October, 2023 By Gary Yagel

One of the most fundamental jobs of manhood is to protect children. In our culture, that does not mean standing at the door to stop marauding bandits from kidnapping our kids to sell them into slavery. The protection our kids need today is much tougher to achieve. It is protecting them from marauding ideologies that capture their hearts and minds, enslaving them and dragging them down a path to destruction.

In the last ten years there has been an explosion of confusion among adolescent children about their gender. Girls doubting their femininity are suffering. Boys uncertain about masculinity are unsure of themselves. Alarming statistics reveal that the more confused children are about their gender, the greater is their risk of suicide. Allegations of biblical patriarchy are causing the rising generation to forsake God’s design of male and female opening the door to the unhappiness and turmoil in their marriages that accompany the rejection of God’s creation design.

This crisis is not imaginary; statistics bear it out. In the generation born between 1965 and 1980 (Gen X) one in twenty identifies as LGBTQ+. In the next generation, born from 1981 to 1996 (Millennials), one in ten identifies as LGBTQ+. In the current generation of teens and twenty-somethings born between 1997 and 2013), one in five identifies as LGBTQ+. In addition, forty percent of millennials and Gen Z identify as religious; so, this explosion is not limited to just secular kids. These numbers constitute an unprecedented transformation of teen culture in the last fifteen years. The question is, “What are we, the men of the church, going to do about it?” As I have mulled this over, I think God gives us an answer to how we should protect our children from this enslaving ideology in his words to the men of the church at Corinth. Be watchful, stand firm in the faith, act like men, be strong (1 Cor 16:13). This episode seeks to apply these four imperatives to the battle that the men of this cultural moment MUST fight for their children.

This is the fifth and final episode in our series, The Battles Men Fight. It is no accident that you and I are called to a battle to protect our children from an ideology that is enslaving millions. You and I were perfectly designed for this cultural moment, and it is for us to apply Paul’s universal admonitions to men in 1 Corinthians 16:13. So, let’s dig into this study.

BE WATCHFUL

The Greek word, GREGOREO means to watch, to keep awake. It means to be vigilant, to be looking for, to be alert, to have your eyes open, to take notice of, to not miss. It is the opposite of unaware, uninformed, asleep, blind to, ignorant of, naïve about, being AWOL (absent without official leave). This term was used by Jesus to rebuke his closest disciples when they were both physically and spiritually asleep to the spiritual battle going on in front of them. We read, He came to the disciples and found them sleeping. And he said to Peter, So could you not watch with me one hour? Watch and pray that you may not enter into temptation (Mt 26:40-41). This command to watch for spiritual danger is much more significant than we often realize. For example, Scripture says:

BE WATCHFUL in contrast to the lost: So then let us not sleep, as others do, but let us KEEP AWAKE (GREGOREO) and be sober (1 Th 5:6).
BE WATCHFUL as a regular part of prayer: Continue steadfastly in prayer, being WATCHFUL in it with thanksgiving (Col 4:2).
BE WATCHFUL as one of the responsibilities of leadership: I know that after my departure fierce wolves will come in among you, not sparing the flock; and from among your own selves will arise men speaking twisted things, to draw away the disciples after them. Therefore, be WATCHFUL (Acts 20:29-31).
BE WATHFUL as a part of godly masculinity. Be WATCHFUL, stand firm in the faith, act like men, be strong (Cor 16:13).
BE WATCHFUL as a believer who is not naïve: Be sober-minded; be WATCHFUL. Your adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour (1 Pet 3:8).

Notice that Jesus has told us that in all three roles we fill—as leaders, as men, and as everyday Christians we MUST BE WATCHFUL. We cannot allow ourselves, to be unaware of, naïve about, uniformed about, blind to radical gender ideology, which is destroying the lives of millions in the rising generation today. We must become informed about it so we can recognize it, see its tentacles creeping into the thinking of our loved ones, winsomely counter its lies, and then remain vigilant. This is a worldview battle that is not going away any time soon. I urge every one of those reading this blog to become informed about this crisis taking place in the lives of our children and grandchildren. Here are some resources:

Our ministry has uploaded to YouTube 4 FREE video lectures: Understanding Gender Theory and its Origin, Understanding Today’s Transgender Craze, Countering Radical Gender Theory, and for teens to listen to with their youth group leaders or parents, Biblical Worldview of Sexuality.
Gospel Coalition article, “Transformation of a Transgender Teen” July 6, 2022, written by Sarah Zylstra. This article tells the true story of a Christian girl who came out as trans at age twelve but came back to embrace her womanhood through what her parents did to win her back.
Our Daughters and the Transgender Craze: Responding with Grace and Truth. This 48-page booklet helps parents know how to respond to the current explosion of teen girls coming out as trans.

Here is a sampling of what less than 1% of Christians know about gender theory.

Gender theory is being promoted through a graphic designed, by Trans Student Education Resources, to capture the hearts of children—the Gender Unicorn. Its fractured view of sexual personhood splits a human being into five separate parts, which every individual has the right to determine for himself or herself—their gender identity, gender expression (gender role), sex assigned at birth (biological sex), physically attracted to (sexual orientation), romantically attracted to. This diagram is being used for sex education of first graders in some states and has been translated into over 10 languages for promotion overseas.
Magnus Hirschfeld, the grandfather of gender theory, was a homosexual activist, who founded the World League for Sexual Reform. The league’s purpose was “liberation of the marital relationship from church domination,” and to free sex from being “complicated by any sense of guilt.”
The father of gender theory, John Money, was not a scientist but a psychologist who coined the phrase gender identity as distinct from one’s biological identity. His unscientific theory was that gender identity is 100% caused by NURTURE and 0% caused by NATURE. The myth that he labored all his life to promote was that gender identity had nothing to do with one’s physical body, paving the way for the fantasy that gender is a social construct.
John Money’s theories were formulated over fifty years ago and the sciences of embryology, biochemistry, endocrinology, and genetics have since proven his theories completely wrong.

Once again, PLEASE GET INFORMED through one of the resources listed above or others you know about. We simply CANNOT BE WATCHFUL IF WE DON’T KNOW WHAT WE ARE LOOKING FOR.

STAND FIRM IN THE FAITH

This often-repeated NT admonition is the opposite of giving ground, backing down, being intimidated, staying seated, being AWOL, being run over by the enemy. We need to stand firm in this battle three ways:

Stand firm by stepping into the gap where the battle rages. Our Christian worldview recognizes that we have been chosen for impact at this cultural moment. It recognizes further that marriage between one man and one woman is intended by God to be the foundational institution for every culture. It recognizes that God has chosen his design of male and female differently to complete one another in marriage as they way the triune God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit image themselves and that Satan wants to mar and destroy this image in every way he can.
Stand firm by accepting our responsibility in the faith for leading our homes. Here is God’s statement about Abraham, the father of the Christian faith.Abraham shall surely become a great and mighty nation, and all the nations of the earth shall be blessed in him. For I have chosen him, that he may command his children and his household after him to keep the way of the Lord by doing righteousness and justice, so that the Lord may bring to Abraham what he has promised him (Gen 18:18-19). Christian fathers are assigned the responsibility by God of leading our households to “keep the way of the Lord.” Paul’s language was, “Fathers, bring your children up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord” (Eph 6:4). It is our job to fight spiritually for them.
Stand firm for God’s creation design. It is our responsibility to guide our households into a celebration of God’s design of gender and sexuality and into grief at the way the Gender Unicorn fractured view of sexual personhood is inwardly destroying millions. Here are five myths that our children are hearing, which are promoted by many in social media.

Myth #1: The Bible’s creation account demeans women by telling wives they were created to be their husband’s helper.
Myth #2: The Bible is the origin of oppressive patriarchy.
Myth #3: The Bible is sexist, promoting the archaic, oppressive idea that a wife should submit to her husband, which demeans women.
Myth #4: The Bible oppresses women by teaching traditional family roles—that dad goes off to an exciting career while mom is stuck caring for the kids.
Myth #5: The Bible oppresses women by teaching traditional family roles—that a woman’s place is in the home while her husband pursues a career outside the home.

The inability of those in the rising generation to receive adequate answers to these questions has caused more than one young adult raised in the church to be captured by radical gender ideology and caused many others to join the heretical Progressive Christianity movement or abandon the faith altogether. If you don’t feel equipped to give good answers to these questions, check out the resource Our Daughters and the Transgender Craze.

ACT LIKE MEN

The ESV text notes explain the background behind this command, ANDRIZOMAI. “Act like men was a frequent command in the Greek translation of the OT and is used in contexts encouraging people, (especially soldiers), to act with courage and strength in obedience to the Lord and with confidence in his power.” In that culture it was understood that being manly was to be strong and act with courage. We can go a little beyond this understanding by realizing that the biblical worldview of masculinity is given in Genesis 2:15. The LORD God took the man and put him in the garden to work it (AVAD) and keep it (SHAMAR).

A. AVAD. At the core of godly manhood is a commitment to cause the garden (where we live out our vocation) and those in it who are under our care to flourish. In a world in which the rising generation is being taught to doubt the goodness of God’s creation of male and female with different roles in the home and church, WE KNOW BETTER.

When it comes to understanding gender, Christians have something far, far better to offer our children and culture than the Gender Unicorn. It is not human disintegration—the splitting apart of one’s biological sex from one’s sexual identity and sexual role, or the separation of gender from emotional attraction. It is an integrated view of body and soul that sees God’s design of male and female to be glorious.

We need to repeat often that the biblical view of gender affirms every woman as fully equal in worth, dignity, and importance to any man. Male and female share equally the role of God’s image bearers and the call to exercise dominion over the earth. But each gender was created with deficiencies—we need the other to be complete. Genesis 1 teaches the equality of men and women but male and female are NOT interchangeable. Genesis 2 teaches the differences. We need to understand that God calls men to 1) sacrifice themselves to cause those under their care to thrive (Gen 2:15a), 2) devote themselves to protecting those under their care (Gen 15b), 3) take the initiative to pursue a woman to whom he devotes himself as her lover and leader of her home (Gen 2:24-25) and 4) devote themselves to strength (see the verse we’re studying). We need to identify and praise these qualities in our boys from an early age. Such affirmation of God’s gender design in them is increasingly vital in a gender confused world.

Similarly, fathers need to know what the call to biblical womanhood looks like. God has 1) uniquely gifted women with the ability to partner with another, specifically a wife to partner with her husband as a God-like ally. That is what the word helper (EZER) in Genesis 2:18 actually means. 2) God has created woman to be a nurturer—a giver of life (Gen 3:20). 3) Though God created Eve to share in Adam’s exercise of dominion over all the earth God has exceptionally gifted Eve's daughters to exercise dominion over their homes as the Proverbs 31 portrait of the virtuous woman conveys. 4) Finally, as men are called to strength with the emphasis on spiritual strength, women are called to beauty with the emphasis on inner beauty (I Pet 3:3-4). As with our sons, men who want to see their daughters reach their full potential must reinforce their growth into creational, godly womanhood. Social media (at least as it currently exists) is NOT going to do that!

B. SHAMAR (PROTECT). Here is a reason that our current teens, known as Gen Z, are in special need of our protection. Dr. Allison McFarland of Bethel College is a specialist in studying the characteristics of Generation Z. She has found that the highest value of this age group is authenticity. Let’s consider the characteristics of the largely pubescent girls who come out as trans. They don’t fit their own or their parents’ stereotype of femininity; they are not girly girls. They don’t fit in with the cheerleaders and homecoming princesses. They don’t like their developing curves, feeling extremely uncomfortable with their body’s transition to womanhood. So, the most authentic thing they can do, in their minds, is to admit all of this and join other girls who feel the same way by coming out as trans.

McFarland points out that the second highest value of Gen Z is finding a place where everyone is welcome. Think about the appeal of the LGBTQ+ community to a group of teens for whom acceptance is the highest value. In the LGBTQ+ world, everyone is welcome. Acceptance is the highest value. Nobody bullies the socially awkward there. Nobody tells them same-sex attraction is wrong. Nobody says homosexual sex is a sin. Nobody tells trans kids that transgender identity is a delusion. Approval of every form of sexuality is the highest value of the LGBTQ+ movement. What teen does not crave unconditional acceptance, and a non-judgmental place to belong? So, our teens are very vulnerable to being captured by this false ideology.

BE STRONG

Our children inside the covenant community and the children outside the church need Christian men to be strong in two ways.

A. Be strong by speaking up for the truth about gender and gender theory. No man wants to act like a coward. Yet it is easy to fall into silence on the topic of gender when we are afraid that we will say the wrong thing. For example, if our teen comes home from school and says gender is “assigned at birth,” there is a better approach than saying, “NO its not. What the *** are they teaching you at that ***school.” How about this approach:

What makes you say that?

That is what my social studies teacher said.

So, use your imagination. Picture the birthing room right after a baby comes out. The doctor cries out, “it’s a boy.” What makes the doctor say that?

I guess the doctor looks at the baby’s privates.

Right, so did they arbitrarily “assign” it’s gender or “observe” its gender?

I guess they observed it.

So, is gender “arbitrarily assigned at birth” or is it a biological reality “discovered at birth?”

You win. I guess it is a biological reality discovered at birth.

We can’t expect to speak up wisely for truth about gender without getting equipped. You can do this by viewing the 3rd message, Countering Radical Gender Theory on the FREE YouTube lectures, A Biblical Response to Confusion and Transgenderism, or by going to the Colson Center’s, What Would You Say website.

B. Be strong for your loved ones by being strong in prevailing prayer.

Pray to King Jesus, Gird your sword on your thigh, O mighty one, in your splendor and majesty! In your majesty ride out victoriously for the cause of truth and meekness and righteousness when it comes to gender (Ps 45).
Pray for the Spirit of God to employ the weapons of our warfare which are not of the flesh but have divine power to destroy strongholds, destroying arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God, and take every thought captive to obey Christ (1 Cor 10:4-5).
Consider joining our ministry’s “Protect Our Children from Gender Confusion” prayer campaign. Please click the link to the website page where you can find out more about this effort to enlist praying Christians in this particular, spiritual battle.

For Further Prayerful Thought:

What do you see as the implications of God’s command, “be watchful,” regarding our response to radical gender theory’s influence in our day?
What do you see as the implications of God’s command, “stand firm in the faith” regarding our response to radical gender theory’s influence in our day?
What do you see as the implications of God’s command, “act like men,” regarding our response to radical gender theory’s influence in our day?
What do you see as the implications of God’s command, “be strong,” regarding our response to radical gender theory’s influence in our day?

Resources To Enable Men to BE WATCHFUL

FREE YouTube Video Series, A Biblical Response to Gender Confusion and the Transgender Movement. The 4 lectures are Understanding Gender Theory, Understanding Today’s Transgender Craze, Countering Radical Gender Theory, Biblical Worldview of Sexuality (For teens and youth leaders).
Gospel Coalition article. Sarah Zylstra, “Transformation of a Transgender Teen,” The Gospel Coalition, July 6, 2022.
48-page booklet, Our Daughter and the Transgender Craze: Responding with Grace and Truth.
Anchoring Your Child to God's Truth in a Gender-Confused Culture: Helping Our Children Embrace Their Calling to Godly Manhood or Womanhood
What Would You Say Colson Center website.
“Protect Our Children from Gender Confusion” Campaign—our ministry’s call to get prepared, get praying, and get promoting this campaign on Facebook.

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What Hamas’ Atrocities Teach Us About Worldviews

On 20 October, 2023 By Gary Yagel

This is the fourth message in our October series, The Battles Men Fight. Because of the Hamas attack on Israel two weeks ago, I’ve changed the topic of today’s episode to address a battle that all Christians are called to fight—the battle to shape our culture’s worldview to conform to biblical truth, instead of letting false worldviews blind our culture to reality, because we are silent. This episode examines how Hamas’ worldview is very different from that of the western world and why it led to the inhuman massacre that we have all witnessed.

Ideas have consequences. BAD ideas have VICTIMS. On October 7, in a highly coordinated attack on Israel, the Islamic terrorist group Hamas fired thousands of rockets, overwhelming the nation’s Iron Dome defense system, and sent hundreds of heavily armed militants, breaching the border. In this barbaric assault, civilians, including women and children, were targeted, in neighborhoods, at bus stops, and at public events. At least 1400 Israelis were killed making it the worst day of slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust. When you compare the 1400 death toll to its small population, this horrific day was ten times worse for Israel than 9/11 was for America. Videos poured in from the attack documenting the atrocities. The site of the largest slaughter was a music festival, where some 5,000 people gathered for what was billed as “a journey of unity and love.” Nearly 300 were killed, and women were raped next to the bodies of their friends. Hamas didn’t just commit atrocities: they filmed and broadcast them.

As the world tried to make sense of such incomprehensible evil, I was struck by John Stonestreets’ Breakpoint commentary at the Colson Center:

“The despicable and horrendous attacks by Hamas against civilians last week, including beheading children and kidnapping the elderly, seems a throwback to some distant, barbaric past of human history. We may have thought the world had long ago outgrown such barbarity, but it hasn’t. In fact, as shocking as it is, the kinds of atrocities carried out by the Hamas terrorists are the norms of warfare throughout most of human history. Modern notions of just war, proportionality, and distinguishing between civilians and combatants are exceptions to the kinds of warfare conducted by the Assyrians and Babylonians, the Vikings, the Mongols, and the Aztecs. Similar barbarity continues today such as the Rwandan genocide, the actions of terror groups like Boko Haram, and in African civil wars. Such brutality should sicken us, but it is far more common in human history, even modern history, than we want to admit.”

However, if such barbarity is so horrifyingly and historically “normal,” where did the world get the idea that such inhuman acts are so wrong? Why did most of the world shudder in disbelief and revulsion at what Hamas did?

The answer is the impact of the Christian worldview in the west and through the west’s influence throughout most of the world. Although some ancient arguments were made against murdering civilians because they were more useful as working slaves and sex slaves, the Christians’ ethical arguments about the conduct of war, in contrast, saw the protection of non-combatants as a matter of moral principle. That principle was grounded in a view of human value unique and distinct to Christianity, that every human being is made in the image and likeness of God. The story of the way that Christian Just War theory changed the world’s culture is a story our kids need to know about. Here is the story:

Just War Theory. In the 13th century, theologian Thomas Aquinas synthesized biblical teachings on peace and war, proposing what was called Just War Theory. His thinking had a lasting impact on later generations and was part of an emerging consensus in Medieval Europe on just war. It was developed further by scholars into international law. Just war ideas, which were well established by the 19th century, found their practical application in the Hague Peace Conferences and in the founding of the League of Nations in 1920. They became the basis of the humane treatment of civilians and prisoners required by the Geneva Conventions.

The Geneva Conventions (April 21-August 12, 1949) are international humanitarian laws that establish international legal standards for humanitarian treatment in war. Rooted in the Christian concepts of the dignity of every human, and biblical thought about just warfare, the purpose of these four conventions was to establish protections afforded to non-combatants in wartime, including civilians under military occupations and prisoners of war. As you hear this description of what is morally right in warfare, note its contrast to what Humas did.

“Noncombatant” includes all civilians, soldiers who have surrendered, wounded soldiers who have ceased fighting, and captured combatants. Noncombatants may not be harmed in any way.

Specifically, those captured must be “treated humanely, without any adverse distinction founded on race, color, religion or faith, sex.”
The killing of all civilians is prohibited.
Beating, rape, cruel treatment of any soldier or civilian is prohibited.
Mutilation, torture, outrages upon dignity…humiliating and degrading treatment are forbidden.
Taking civilian hostages of any kind is forbidden.

In a culture where many take shots at Christianity, our children need to know that every one of the above articles of required conduct for treating other humans humanely in war is the result of the biblical worldview that every human is made in the image of God, having inestimable worth and dignity. It is THOSE CULTURES impacted by this worldview that adopted the Geneva Conventions like the United States and Israel, which abide by these moral principles. So long as these core ethical ideas of the Judeo-Christian tradition hold sway, they act as a check on the worst impulses of our fallen nature, impulses that quickly surface in time of war. Of course, war crimes still occur by Western actors. But because of the influence of the biblical worldview, such barbarities are crimes for which soldiers will be tried in a court of law, and if guilty, severely punished. What a contrast to what we saw Hamas doing.

On October 7th, our children and the rest of the world saw the inhuman barbarity that can happen in places where this Christian ethic is missing, as it is in large parts of the Middle East. This is especially true of Islamic nations. Islam rejects as idolatry the idea that humans are made in the image of God. The Hadiths, a source of Islamic authority second only to the Quran, calls for the extermination of the Jews, a fact explicitly noted in the Hamas charter. Without grounding for the value and dignity of every human of every tongue and tribe and nation, false ideologues and religions justify hatred of those outside their tribe.

QUICK HISTORY OF THE MIDDLE EAST CONFLICT

To understand the moral claims made by the actors in the Middle East we need a quick history lesson. Before WWI, Palestine was part of the Turkish Ottoman Empire. During WWI, Britain passed the Balfour Declaration, in 1917, announcing its support for the establishment of a "national home for the Jewish people in Palestine.” Remember the Jews were dispersed across the world after 70 AD when Jerusalem was pillaged by the Romans and the temple destroyed. Palestine in 1917 was an Ottoman region with a small minority of Jewish population. British politicians adopted the Balfour Declaration partly to garner the support of Jews for their war effort against the Turks.

The declaration called for “safeguarding the civil and religious rights for the Palestinian Arabs” who composed the vast majority of the local population. (But the British government acknowledged twenty years later that the local population's views should have been taken into account and in 2017 that the declaration should have called for the protection of the Palestinian Arabs' political rights.) The local Christian and Muslim community of Palestine, which constituted almost 90% of the population, strongly opposed this declaration. During WWI, Britain’s army drove the Ottoman Turks out of the Middle East. The Britts then broke their word to non-Ottoman Arabs, and in 1920, through the League of Nations, set up a geopolitical entity called Mandatory Palestine. Meanwhile, in Europe the Jewish Zionist movement called for Jews to migrate to Palestine to repatriate Israel. As might be expected, Arab nationalists opposed this effort, asserting Arab rights over the former Ottoman territories and seeking to prevent Jewish migration. As a result, Arab–Jewish tensions grew over the next 25 years in the Britt’s Mandatory Palestine.

The influence of Zionism grew and in November of 1947, The United Nations approved a plan for 1) an independent Arab State, 2) an independent Jewish State, and 3) the city of Jerusalem to be under an international trusteeship system. The UN’s vote caused joy in the Jewish community and anger in the Arab community. Violence broke out between the sides, escalating into civil war. The Arab League members, Egypt, Transjordan, Syria, Lebanon and Iraq refused to accept the UN partition plan and proclaimed the right of self-determination for the Arabs across the whole of Palestine. The Arab states marched their forces into what had, until the previous day, been the British Mandate for Palestine, starting the first Arab–Israeli War. After an initial loss of territory by the Jewish state, the tide turned in the Israelis' favor and they pushed the Arab armies back beyond the borders of the proposed Arab state.

I present this history to prevent Christians from mindlessly assuming that Palestinian citizens have no case to oppose Israel. Their land was taken from them and given to others through the influence of Zionists upon the United Nations. There are two sides to this conflict and Britain has admitted it was unjust in giving Palestinians (many of whom are Christians) no say in the two-state plan. My point is that there IS political justification for Palestinians to oppose Israel. However, there IS NO MORAL JUSTIFICATION for the actions Hamas took. None.

4 OBSERVATIONS LINKING HAMAS BEHAVIOR TO THEIR WORLDVIEW

1. Unspeakable savagery committed against women, children and the elderly can be expected when the biblical worldview is missing. Hamas demonstrated this truth. But the horrific brutalities we witnessed are no different than those that took place from April through June 1994 when more than 800,000 Rwandans were brutally slaughtered by fellow citizens in a state-led genocide targeting the Tutsi ethnic group in Africa. About 75% of the Tutsi population died in the mass slaughter. What we have the opportunity to teach our kids and grandkids is how important it is for Christians to speak truth into their culture. The Hamas brutality springs directly from its worldview. My prayer is that the massacre perpetrated upon Israel’s people by Hamas will motivate every Christian to see what happens when Christians don’t function as salt and light in the culture.

2. Hamas’ immoral disregard for the value of and dignity of human life proves there is NO moral equivalency between their actions and Israel’s. There is NO MORAL JUSTIFICATION for Hamas’ barbarity. You will hear many pro-Palestinians try to argue moral equivalency. After all, Israel took their land. But the Biblical worldview cannot support that argument. Perhaps warfare (I’m not smart enough to know) could be justified. But biblically, there is NO MORAL EQUIVALENCY here for the barbaric slaughter of civilians, rape, mutilation, civilian hostage taking, or firing of missiles at civilian targets. There is no justification for such horrific acts. Only a godless worldview could see equivalency.

3. Hamas’ disregard for the value and dignity of human beings is demonstrated in their use of Palestinian civilians as human shields in Gaza. Hamas’ utter disregard for human life is manifest in the well-established fact that it launches its missiles from hospitals and schools, using civilians as human shields. Such cruel attempts to cause the Israeli army to kill civilians through collateral damage while destroying Hamas’ rocket-launching capability are despicable. The savagery of this disrespect for life is unfathomable. In Gaza, Hamas has set up blockades to prevent Palestinians from leaving Gaza before the Israeli invasion. They want Palestinians Arabs and Christians to die so Hamas can use their deaths for propaganda purposes.

In sharp contrast, the IDF is bound by the Geneva conventions. They will do all they can to prevent civilian casualties. Israel is dropping leaflets from the air, telling people to leave Gaza. Israeli soldiers will die because Israel tries so hard to eliminate civilian casualties. This is NOT because they are Christians or worship Yahweh; Israel is one of the most secular countries in the world. They will protect civilians because their public and personal morality has been shaped by the spread of the biblical worldview that values human life throughout western culture.

4. Hamas’ ideology urges them to HATE Jews. Outside of a few reformers, Islam rejects as idolatry the idea that humans are made in the image of God. The Hadiths, a source of Islamic authority second only to the Quran, calls for the destruction of the Jews. The words are, You will fight against the Jews and you will kill them until even a stone would say: Come here, Muslim, there is a Jew (hiding himself behind me); kill him. A global caliphate (kingdom where Sharia Law is imposed) has been the acknowledged aim of Muslim terrorist groups for the last twenty years. The Hamas charter specifically identifies the goal of establishing a national caliphate in Palestine which requires the destruction and removal of the nation of Israel. The extermination of the Jewish race is expressly called for in the Hamas charter. This is the destructive worldview that led to the massacre the world witnessed on October 7.

It is worth noting that the racial hatred of Hamas is quite parallel to critical race theory being promoted today through social media. Hamas’ ideology is that Israel is the OPPRESSOR; therefore, every action against them is morally justified. This is the same argument that Mao Zedong used with his teenage Red Guard justifying the slaughter of the rich OPPRESSIVE landowners. It is the same argument promoted by Black Lives Matter. Burning and looting businesses in city neighborhoods is morally justified because the rich (white) business owners are the OPPRESSOR CLASS. Because cisgender, white women are part of the OPPRESSOR CLASS, they have no moral right to privacy or safety in locker rooms when men claiming to identify as trans women invade their private spaces. The Hamas’ version of critical race theory needs to be identified for what it is, so that the rising generation learns to recognize this destructive ideology which tries to justify doing evil in the name of justice.

ONE MORE WORLDVIEW OBSERVATION ABOUT THE WAR IN ISRAEL

It is widely believed today that one of the barriers to world peace is religion. After all, most religions make exclusive truth claims, which lead to the fanatical intolerance that you see between Islamic extremists and Zionist extremists. I have heard the war between Hamas and Israel described in these terms. Such claims are misguided, however:

Israel is not a religious country at all. In fact, it is one of the least religious, most secular nations in the world. But its worldview has been shaped by western thinking about protecting civilians rooted in Christianity’s high view of the value of human life.
The great twentieth century experiment of eliminating religion so that world peace could be experienced ended in utter failure. Mao, Stalin, Lenin, and Polpot outlawed religion but under their iron-fisted rule, 85 million humans were slaughtered. As one author wrote, The 20th century gave rise to one of the greatest and most distressing paradoxes of human history; that the greatest intolerance and violence of that century were practiced by those who believed religion caused intolerance and violence. (McGrath, The Twilight of Atheism).
It is not religion that causes intolerance; it is what the religion teaches about those outside its tribe. Hamas’ worldview is that every Jew should be exterminated along with any who assist them (like Americans). Christianity’s worldview could not contrast more. The early Christians mixed people from different races and classes in ways that seemed scandalous to those around them. The Graeco-Roman world tended to despise the poor, but Christians gave generously not only to their own poor but to those of other faiths. In broader society women had very low status, being subjected to high levels of female infanticide, forced marriages, and lack of economic equality. Christianity afforded women much greater security and equality than had previously existed in the ancient classical world. During the terrible urban plagues of the first two centuries, Christians cared for the sick and dying in the city, often at the cost of their lives. As Tim Keller points out, "Christians have within their belief system the strongest possible resources for practicing sacrificial service, generosity, and peace-making. At the very heart of their view of reality was a man who died for his enemies, praying for their forgiveness. Reflection on this could only lead to a radically different way of dealing with those who were different from them" (The Reason for God).

It meant that when they followed the WORLDVIEW, which they professed to believe, they could not act in violence or oppression towards their opponents. Ideas have consequences. GOOD ideas have BENEFICIARIES.

For Further Prayerful Thought:

Contrast the worldviews of the Hamas terrorists with the worldview of those who experienced abject revulsion at what they did.
What observations stood out to you about the link between Hamas’ worldview and their behavior October 7th?
How does the Hamas Israel war illustrate the truth that ideas have consequences—bad ideas have victims and good ideas have beneficiaries?
How would you answer the statement—the constant war between Islamic terrorists and Israel just proves the intolerance of religion is the reason we can’t have peace in the world?

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Overcoming SELFISHNESS to Love Others WELL

On 13 October, 2023 By Gary Yagel

No man likes to lose at ANYTHING. Especially, we don’t want to fail our wives and kids. Despite loud cries to the contrary in our culture, we men are assigned the position of head of our marriage, which means if we love our wives well, they will flourish. As those assigned the role of father, our concrete love for our kids is designed to prepare them to see and welcome the parallel but invisible love of God the Father. This strategic position means we must win the battle to defeat our own selfishness, building a pattern of denying ourselves to meet the needs of our wife and children. This episode examines how it is that we daily tap into the power of Christ in us to overcome our default self-preoccupation, learn to die to ourselves, and better focus on meeting the needs of others, not only loving well the wife and kids we cherish but showing Christ’s love to those God has placed around us.

Let's take a big picture, biblical look at this calling to love. One of the foundational doctrines of Christianity is that humans are created as the image-bearers of God. When we realize that God, himself, exists as three persons who love each other, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, we understand why John would say that God IS love. The most significant way to image (and honor) HIM is to love. This creational capacity to love matches Jesus’ description of the two greatest commandments, “You shall love the Lord your God with all of your heart, mind, soul, and strength and your neighbor as yourself.” Humans are gloriously designed with a capacity to LOVE.

But the Bible teaches that humans, in their rebellion, remain glorious. But we are a glorious ruin. Our capacity to love has become corrupted. We put loving OURSEVES ahead of loving OTHERS. SELF-LOVE prevails over OTHER-LOVE. We were created to love God first and then our neighbor as ourselves. What is RUINED is that we prioritize self-love over other-love. (Parenthetically by self-love, I don’t mean a healthy self-respect, inner confidence, or good boundaries. I mean SELFISHNESS.) The great theologian, Augustine pointed out that the moral cancer of sin, which corrupts the human heart, is a disordering of OUR LOVES. It is fine to love our work, but when we love our work ahead of our families, work becomes an idol. It is okay to love affirmation, but when we love pleasing others more than we love pleasing God, we sin. Augustine describes the extremes of sinful selfishness in contrast to holiness this way: Sin is “the love of SELF to the contempt of GOD.” Holiness is “the love of GOD to the contempt of SELF.” Contempt of self sounds a bit severe, and it is. Nevertheless, it is Augustine’s way of stating what Jesus said in Luke 9, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will save it" (vs 23-24).

Overcoming our default attitude of putting self-love first is the essence of learning to love others. As you know, the biblical view of marriage calls us to the mind-boggling challenge of loving our brides the way Jesus loved his. Doesn’t Paul realize how subtly and easily our default sinful nature puts my focus on what I need in a mate—one who doesn’t nag me, who doesn’t cramp my style, who is beautiful enough to excite me, gifted enough to help me accomplish my goals, sexually responsive enough to satisfy me on my timetable, who accepts me as I am and who fits well into my world. My anger and resentment towards my wife when she doesn’t meet this standard betrays the fact that I, too often, view marriage just like the world does. As one study found,

Both men and women today want a marriage in which they can receive emotional and sexual satisfaction from someone who will simply let them “be themselves.” They want a spouse who is fun, intellectually stimulating, sexually attractive, with many common interests, and who, on top of it all, is supportive of their personal goals and of the way they are living now. (Tim Keller, The Meaning of Marriage).

In Ephesians 5, Paul calls Christian husbands to a radically different view of marriage. In short, we are to see it as Christ’s call to sacrifice. The word he uses for love is AGAPE, the word for sacrificial love. A useful definition of AGAPE is “sacrificing whatever is necessary to meet the needs of another.” John uses this word in his gospel to describe God’s love for the world (John 3:16). “For God so loved (agaped) the world, that he gave his only Son (sacrificing what is dearest to him), that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life (our need for a savior is met).

To love our wives as Christ loved the church means sacrificing whatever is necessary to meet her needs. Most men have a common grace understanding of this calling to die. We would take a bullet to protect our wives and kids. Men tend to be great at the HEROIC. When it comes to the MUNDANE, however, saying “no” to ourselves on a daily basis in the little things, our sinful nature comes out. Agape love requires death to ourselves—our interests, preferences, comforts, rights, appetites, preferences—when necessary to meet another’s needs. It is costly love that flows from a willingness to follow the example of Jesus, as he pointed out in Luke 9, of dying to ourselves.

FIVE WAYS TO OVERCOME SELFISHNESS TO LOVE OTHERS WELL

A. Keep our love tank filled. The message of Christianity is that we can’t consistently put the love of God and others ahead of love for ourselves in our own strength. The only human to have ever done that was Jesus. Jesus had his loves ORDERED rightly. Out of supreme love for the Father, Jesus said, “Not my will but yours be done” and went to the cross. When it came to love for others, Jesus said, “Greater love has no one than this that he lay down his life for his friend,” and then did that. God’s plan is to restore us to our creation calling of loves ordered properly, i.e., making the love of God and our neighbor the priority over self-preoccupation. (If you wonder how severe the disease of self-preoccupation is, consider this question. If you are handed a group picture with you in it, where do your eyes go first? To OURSEVES, hoping it is a good picture of us!) Loving others is the first fruit of the Spirit mentioned in Scripture. Jesus told us that the spiritual fruit of godly heart attitudes can only be restored in us through abiding in him.

Abide in me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit by itself, unless it abides in the vine, neither can you, unless you abide in me. I am the vine; you are the branches. Whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing (John 15:4-5).

To abide in Christ means to abide in his love, as Jesus said four verses later. The truth is that you and I, because we have been appointed to love and lead our homes and churches, must constantly replenish our spiritual/emotional tank in order to keep giving love to others. But let’s consider a major gas cap that prevents God from refueling our hearts with his love. OUR SIN. We know that our obedience pleases God as it does all fathers. Messing up displeases him; so, we feel ashamed. David, after committing adultery with Bathsheba and murdering her husband, Uriah, experiences this self-loathing shame,

Against you, you only, have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight….Hide your face from my sins, and blot out all my iniquities…Cast me not away from your presence… Restore to me the joy of your salvation, and uphold me with a willing spirit (Ps 51:4, 9-12).

Remember that a primary strategy of Satan, your opponent, is to heap so much shame on you that you feel too dirty for a Holy God to want anything to do with you. But if you are in Christ, that is a lie. Do not let him lead you to despise the BLOOD OF JESUS shed for your sin. It is ENOUGH. God, like the prodigal’s father, is always prepared to run to you, throw his arms around you, and restore you fully as his child. The ESV text notes point out, “The father cast aside all behavioral conventions of the time, as running was considered to be undignified for an older person, especially a wealthy landowner such as this man.” The father does NOT CARE. All he cares about is his son coming home! Sometimes we need help getting the truth of God’s unconditional love and delight for us from our heads into our hearts. That need makes me think of the story of Maria.

“Maria knew exactly what her fifteen-year-old daughter, Christiana, would have to do for a living if she ever ran away from her village to the city. That is why her heart broke when she awoke one morning to find her daughter’s bed empty. Maria knew immediately where her daughter had gone and what she must do to find her. She threw some clothes in a bag, gathered all her money, and bought a bus ticket for Rio de Janeiro. She stopped by the drugstore to take as many pictures of herself as she could afford.”

“Maria visited every hotel night-club, or bar where prostitutes hung out. At each place she left her picture—taped on a bathroom mirror, tacked to a hotel bulletin board, fastened to a corner phone booth. On the back of each photo she wrote a note. But before long, Maria was out of photos and money. So, broken hearted, she returned home.”

“A few weeks later, Christiana descended the hotel stairs. Her young face was tired. Her big brown eyes no longer danced with the laughter of youth, but spoke of pain and fear. Her dream had become a nightmare. She longed to trade these countless beds for the secure pallet of her bedroom at home. But the little village was in too many ways too far away. As she reached the bottom of the stairs, her eyes noticed a familiar face. She looked again and there on the lobby mirror was a small picture of her mother. Christiana’s eyes blurred with tears as she crossed the room and removed the small photo. Written on the back was this compelling invitation: ‘Whatever you have done, whatever you have become, it doesn’t matter. Please come home.’ She did” (Lucado, No Wonder They Call Him Savior).

B. The second way to overcome our self-preoccupation and love others well is to ask God to take care of every detail of our needs and trust him to do so. In Matthew 6, Jesus teaches that Kingdom heart attitudes cannot prevail in us if we are preoccupied with earthly treasure, with what we are going to eat or drink or wear. The answer to these concerns, which preoccupy any healthy human, is not to suppress them. Rather, it is turning those anxieties into prayer. Do not be anxious about anything, writes Paul, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus (Phil 4:6-7). In my life a key principle for temporarily denying myself to give sacrificially to serve another is confidence that God has my needs covered—I don’t need to be preoccupied with them. God is better at providing my needs than I am, anyway. This is crucial. Sacrificial love does not require denying that I have needs. That is unhealthy codependency, allowing myself to be taken advantage of, abused because I have so little value that my needs don’t matter. Yes, they do. Loving others never says your needs don’t matter. Denying myself is denying the self-love that elevates MY needs over those of others, which I am only able to do because I know God has my back.

Notice also that the peace of God in this Philippians text is not promised to those who just have a HEART trust in God to meet their needs. Peace is promised to those who specifically tell God what they need. JB Phillips puts it. Don’t worry over anything whatever. Tell God every detail of your needs in earnest and tankful prayer and the peace of God which transcends understanding will keep constant guard over your hearts and minds as they rest in Christ Jesus.

C. The third way to overcome selfishness and love others well is by self-control—cultivating the ability to say “no” to self, in order to say, “yes” to God. We KNOW it is God’s will to give us the power to do this for two reasons. First, Jesus promised, “If you abide in me, and MY WORDS ABIDE IN YOU, ask whatever you wish, and it will be done for you. By this my Father is glorified, that you bear much.” Scriptire identifies self-control as one of the fruits of the Spirit, so we KNOW it is God’s will to produce it. Second, Jesus said, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me” So, we know from this portion of God’s Word that his will is for us to deny “SELF.” In addition, we have the promise of God, articulated by Paul, I can do all things through him who strengthens me (Phil 4:13).

God loves to hear us ask for help in loving others. Just last week I saw God answer three simple, everyday requests for his help:

I asked for wisdom for how to handle a delicate situation with one of my kids and God answered it by one of my battle buddies saying, “just treat the person and the situation the way you normally would.” Maybe obvious, but to me it was clear direction.
I asked for help putting my nervousness about speaking out of my mind at a steak and shoot event at which I spoke last weekend, and God answered.
A guest and wife were attending a church where I was speaking, and I asked for wisdom about what would make them feel most comfortable, sitting with me up front or in the back, where they were less noticeable. God orchestrated it so that upfront with me was clear.

D. The fourth requirement for overcoming selfishness and loving well is seeing what other’s needs are. Loving a person well requires building other, prior virtues like attentiveness and discernment. Agape love is sacrificially giving to another’s needs, so it requires knowing what the loved one’s needs really are. This principle is seen in Paul’s prayer for the Philippian Christians, And it is my prayer that your love may abound more and more, with knowledge and all discernment (1:9).

One of the motivations for spending time in God’s Word is to understand life, which gives wisdom to enable us to love better. David prayed, Oh how I love your law! It is my meditation all the day. Your commandment makes me wiser than my enemies, for it is ever with me. I have more understanding than all my teachers, for your testimonies are my meditation. I understand more than the aged, for I keep your precepts (Ps 119:97-100).

Here is a list I have compiled over the years, of a wife’s needs:

To know God's love for her (strengthened with power to know how wide and deep and long and high is the love of God for HER--Eph 3)
Emotional intimacy with you (connecting at the level of the heart)
Partnership with you on the home front
Spiritual intimacy with you, her spiritual leader
Specific words of affirmation from you
Romance (which to her is making her feel like a princess)
Female friends
Protection and rest
A secure home and secure finances

When it comes to understanding what our wife needs, I do want to address a particularly discouraging situation for husbands--the impossibility of ever fully understanding your wife’s needs. Many, many husbands find it discouraging to sacrifice, suck it up to do what they think their wife wants or needs, only to find out they were completely wrong. God made them COMPLICATED. I guess we need to adopt the famous attitude of Thomas Edison when he failed again in his effort to create the electric light bulb. “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” I now have one more misunderstanding of what she needs!

Here is a list of what each of our children needs for a loving relationship with us:

Understanding (John 1:14).
Affirmation (Matt 3:17).
Companionship (Mark 3:14).
Compassion (Mark 1:40-42).
Affection (Luke 18:155-16).
Attention to our practical needs (Luke 9:16)
Spiritual leadership (Eph 6:4).

E. The fifth way to overcome selfishness to love others well is to meditate on the detailed portrait of love, which God in 1 Corinthians 13.

Love is patient: Impatience with others wounds their tender self-esteem.
Love is kind: Kindness is proactive thoughtful attentiveness to another’s need.
Love does not envy: Envy is rooted in insecurity and feels displeasure at the success of a rival. It is evil self-centeredness.
Love does not boast: It ruthlessly detects and eliminates subtle comments towards others that are calculated to impress.
Love is not arrogant: It does not cherish inflated ideas of its own importance.
Love is not rude. It treats others with respect by showing good manners.
Love does not insist on its own way. In humility, it listens to those with other opinions. In meekness, it does not demand its rights, but sacrifices them.
Love is not irritable. It overlooks the minor wounds cause to us by others. It takes seriously the way sin has all of us in this fallen world.
Love is not resentful. It is quick to forgive when hurt by others, even if the wound hurting them is not repented of.
Love does not rejoice at wrongdoing. Caring for someone never means compromising with sin. It is never loving to meet needs by doing wrong.
Love rejoices with the truth. It moves towards transparency as trust in the relationship is built. It does not lie to cover shame.
Love bears all things. It does not keep an account of evil. It is not conditional. Another’s sin against us causes us to love them MORE. Wounded people wound people.
Love believes all things. This does not refer to being naïve. It defaults to trusting the motives of another until there is strong evidence not to.
Love hopes all things. The word hope means expectation and anticipation. Love sees the potential of the other casting a vision for the loved one’s future success.
Love endures all things. Love never gives up on another. Never. This is love's choice: to give, and give, and give.

The battle we men must fight with our self-preoccupation, pride, and self-centeredness in order to love them well is worth the fight. There is NO gift we could give them that is more precious. “So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three,” writes Paul. “but the greatest of these is love” (1 Cor 13:13).

For Further Prayerful Thought:

What are some of the things that you think blind men to their own self-centeredness?
How have you seen the action of putting the love of SELF above love for God and others bear destructive fruit?
Of the five ways we examined to overcome selfishness and sacrificially love others, which is the hardest to do for you? Which is the easiest?

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