Sometimes I’m in a hurry when I grab my Bible.

And when that’s the case, I usually open it right down the middle.

Any psalm will do, right? They’re all inspired.

There are worse habits, to be sure, than reading psalms at random. Especially if you take the time to pray them.

But this practice approaches psalms as if each were a fragment, merely an individual nugget of wisdom.

Each is packed with wisdom, of course. And even a few verses (a fragment of a fragment!) can stir your spirit:

When I consider your heavens,

the work of your fingers,

the moon and the stars,

which you have set into place,

what is man that you are mindful of him,

the son of man that you care for him?

Psalm 8:3-4

But merely viewing a psalm as a fragment misses something crucial too. The image in Psalm 8 helpfully shows why.

An individual star is a thing of wonder. Take our sun, for example.

And yet a single star is also part of a glorious whole.

So too with the Psalm cosmos.

I’d long assumed that the order of the Bible’s 150 psalms had to matter. In a God-inspired book, how could it not?

But I didn’t really read or treat the Psalms as a whole, and I couldn’t have told you much about why they’re arranged the way they are.

A book by Scott Aniol is helping me to see the fuller picture. It’s called Musing on God’s Music: Forming Hearts of Praise with the Psalms.

Early on, the book presents a crucial connection between Psalms 1 and 2. I’m very familiar with these Psalms but still didn’t realize how deeply their themes relate.

Aniol points out the key to this is the word blessed. In Hebrew it’s ’ashre.

It shows up at the beginning of Psalm 1:

Blessed is the man who does not walk in the counsel of the wicked. . .

It appears again at the end of Psalm 2:

Blessed are all who take refuge in Him.

In between lie two psalms that, at a glance, speak to very different topics. Psalm 1 serves as encouragement and warning for an individual believer. Meanwhile, Psalm 2 zooms out to capture a cosmic moral battle encompassing nations.

Yet whether applied to the small scale or the grand, God’s message through the Psalms remains consistent: even in a disastrously sinful world, those who surrender to the Lord can be blessed. This blessing arrives not in the form of an ideal or easy life. Rather, it comes as the experience of God’s presence, peace, and power, in the midst of a world where those are in short supply.

Psalms 1 and 2 also establish why God’s blessed presence isn’t the norm on earth. Right from the jump, Psalm 1 contrasts the blessed man with those it describes as wicked. The word sin is more familiar to us than wickedness, but the point is that opposition to God and His people is all too real.

Why, Psalm 2 asks, do the nations rage? Because people think that God’s ways are oppressive, rather than the source of true blessing:

The kings of the earth set themselves,

and the rulers take counsel together,

against the Lord and against His Anointed, saying,

“Let us burst their bonds apart

and cast their cords away from us.”

Psalm 2:2–3

It’s a bleak picture, but Psalms 1 and 2 also teach us how to resist falling prey to this deception. Another Hebrew word helps point the way, but this connection won’t usually show up in English.

In Psalm 1, the blessed man meditates day and night on Scripture (verse 2). In the Bible, meditation is not associated with breathing techniques or emptying your mind of thoughts. Instead, it means to ponder God’s word deeply, even to murmur it to oneself.

In Musing on God’s Music, Scott Aniol points out how Psalm 2 re-uses this profound word. It opens with this verse:

Why do the nations rage and the peoples plot in vain?

While few English translations capture it, the word in Psalm 1 that the ESV translates as meditate and the word in Psalm 2 translated as plot are the same word in Hebrew!

Together, Psalms 1 and 2 present the choice that will play out through the following 148 psalms. Will you set your mind on the goodness of God and allow His word to guide and transform you? Will you trust in His gift of divine grace and forgiveness for your sins? Will you ponder and meditate on His truth? If so, no matter what life throws at you, you will experienced His blessed presence.

Or will you set your mind on the false notion that God wants to oppress you? Will you believe the lie that true satisfaction is found in breaking free of the Lord’s “bonds” and “cords” (Psalm 2:3).

This is a choice of extraordinary consequence, as the end of Psalm 1 lays out:

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.

The 150 psalms go on to display the truth packed in this single verse. This is revealed through a crucial shift that takes place over the course of the book of Psalms. It’s a profound shift, and one that isn’t revealed through an individual psalm. You need the whole psalm cosmos to see it!

As Scott Aniol puts it, “The book actually starts pretty dark, and that darkness continues, with occasional glimpses of light, through much of the first 100 psalms.” Although there’s plenty of praise in these early psalms, they frequently include anguish and lament.

It’s not until the final 50 psalms that unrelenting praise really comes into focus. And by then the wicked have seemingly. . .vanished.

This “disappearance” reaffirms what was laid out in Psalm 1: “the way of the wicked will perish.”

They’ve been overcome by a sea of praise. And, moreover, by the one true God who is worthy of that praise.

And by the time we arrive at Psalm 150, praise is all that remains.

Praise the Lord!

Praise God in His sanctuary;

praise Him in His mighty heavens!

Praise Him for His mighty deeds;

praise Him according to His excellent greatness!

Praise Him with trumpet sound;

praise Him with lute and harp!

Praise Him with tambourine and dance;

praise Him with strings and pipe!

Praise Him with sounding cymbals;

praise Him with loud clashing cymbals!

Let everything that has breath praise the Lord!

Praise the Lord!

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In recent months, I’ve said hardly anything about current events.

The moral chaos had reached the point where I thought it wiser to take a long-term view. Singing psalms, it seemed to me, offered about the right approach. As the world around us crumbles under the weight of its sin, let those who dwell in God be strengthened and renewed.

Still, I couldn’t shake a desire to write about civic renewal. I really didn’t want to do it based on the latest crisis in the news though.

I’ve been reading, actually re-reading, John Meacham’s book American Gospel: God, the Founding Fathers, and the Making of a Nation. It’s not my ideal book on the subject. It doesn’t even use the word gospel the way most Christians do.

Yet I returned to it because it’s full of quotes from American leaders as they grappled with God publicly. It starts with the founders, but it moves through much of our history, including the civil rights movement and the decades that followed.

Importantly, it drives home how Christian ideas have always been a part of America’s civic life. My half-done response to the book was going to be a meager attempt to rise above the current fray.

It also kind of seems like a dodge right now. Not entirely. Those ideas still matter. They always matter.

But making that post right now, to me, would feel like talking past what is happening in Minneapolis and other American cities.

I want to be as clear as a can. I think a moment like this calls for it. I also want to be as fair as I can, although I’m not going to try to qualify my thoughts from every conceivable angle.

So here it is.

I’m not interested in painting Renee Good or Alex Pretti as a heroes. Let their friends tell their stories, and let God judge their souls.

What I can say confidently is that neither needed to die. There is no credible reason for the government to have sent thousands of federal agents to Minneapolis.

Is illegal immigration a problem in our country? Tens of millions of Americans answered yes with their votes in 2024. It’s one of the main reasons Trump is president again.

But problems call for solutions. And unleashing thousands of masked agents in a city whose elected officials and local law enforcement are pleading for them to leave is not a solution. It’s not even an attempt at one.

It’s a provocation.

It’s the opposite of seeking law and order. It stands opposed to rebuilding what is great about America.

And it’s happening at one of the most fraught moments in our country’s history. I don’t think that’s an overstatement.

Why has the federal government chosen Minnesota as its focal point? We can only speculate. Other states, like California, Texas, and Florida have far more illegal immigrants, even per capita.

If this were only about illegal immigration, we would see the government’s efforts unfolding very differently.

Sadly, I think we’ve been stumbling toward this point for a long time.

Conservatism is broken in our country. It is no longer trying to conserve anything, other than unrestrained government power.

Liberalism is broken. It long ago ceased to value liberty.

Or maybe those statements describe what did happen. Maybe something else is beginning now. Maybe conservatives are starting to remember why they once stood for limited government. Maybe liberals are recalling why it’s important to respect and support local police, those who invest their blood, sweat, and tears into your community.

One can hope.

Another thing—I’m not interested in painting ICE agents as monsters. I’m sure most of them signed up believing they were doing the right thing. Law enforcement is made up of human beings. Whether at the federal, state, or local level, officers can and do make mistakes under intense pressure. Were the deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti merely mistakes under pressure? I don’t know. The bottom line is that immigration agents never should have been put in this position.

Maybe some other tragedy will happen in the hours or days after I share these thoughts. Maybe the “narrative” you subscribe to will be upended or reinforced or who knows what for a while.

It doesn’t matter.

These tragedies were avoidable. We never should have had to weigh the murky actions and motives of one American against another like this. We never should have had to pit one cell phone camera angle against another.

Neighborhoods and families did not have to divide over this.

The administration and, ultimately, President Trump, are responsible for an overreach that never needed to happen. They need to allow self-government in American cities again.

They need to let the streets of America look like America again.

And we need to pray.

God help us all.

It started with a family funeral, a winding fall drive through the Ozarks. A farewell to a long-lived believer.

I didn’t make my usual post that week. Was tired from the drive, from sleeping in a hotel room, from shepherding little kids through all a memorial gathering entails.

I didn’t want to force writing out at that time. A one-week pause seemed wise. Surely, I’d quickly resume my usual routine, right?

After all, I already had a couple new essays on the back burner. One was even finished. It was thoroughly scriptural. I still agree with every word of it. It also bluntly addressed things some well-known political figures had, at the time, recently said.

I shared it with my wife. “Why don’t you hold off on that one and pray about it?”

I did.

The pause continued. In early December I realized I had eight drafts of different posts sitting unpublished, which is about eight more than I usually allow to pile up.

Although the pause was unplanned at the outset, I started to sense the Lord had a purpose for it.

I prayed and asked if I should continue putting time into writing at all. My life is full. Family, work, kids. Life is overflowing, really. In the best possible way.

And there are a lot of words on the internet. In particular, there’s far more than enough Christian writing. I say that not out of cynicism, and certainly not to slight any faithful wordsmiths. I just think it’s a matter-of-fact. A monk dedicated to consuming Christian content for a lifetime would die before even taking in all that will be published today.

Those of us who write, if we have even a splash of humility, realize that we don’t need to be writing. At least not for anyone else’s sake.

Soon I found I didn’t have a strong urge to get back to sharing my writing. A year ago, or even six months ago, that probably wouldn’t have been the case. And I think this change has been healthy for me.

Yet, at the same time, two themes kept coming back to mind. I had two ideas I couldn’t shake. They’re things I’ve written about before. In fact, my earliest handful of posts includes both. But the undergrowth of other ideas I found myself chasing eventually crowded those two themes out.

So my intention, in the coming year, is to get back to what I originally wanted to say. And I think these ideas are even more vital now.

So enough, already. What are they?

First, I want to urge people to live and pray in the Word of God. Now that sounds like wonderfully generic Christian jargon, doesn’t it?

Here’s how Psalm 1 puts it:

Blessed is the man. . .[whose] delight is in the law of the Lord, and on His law he meditates day and night:

It’s a simple sentiment, but within it two seeds of potential confusion are already sewn. First, a modern-day Christian hearing the word “law” will immediately think of verses like Galatians 3:2–3:

I would like to learn just one thing from you: Did you receive the Spirit by observing the law, or by believing what you heard? Are you so foolish? After beginning with the Spirit, are you now trying to attain your goal by human effort?

We hear “law” and think “bad,” don’t we? Isn’t the Law’s sole purpose to remind us of our sinfulness and need for God’s grace? Keep in mind that “law” in Psalm 1 refers broadly to Scripture. Jesus uses the word in this sense when He speaks of “the Law and the Prophets” (Matthew 22:40). And as it turns out, the kind of meditation that Psalm 1 is urging is one of the most effective ways to remind ourselves of both God’s holiness and His grace.

But the word “meditation” is, itself, another stumbling block. Most people today associate it with Buddhist or New Age religion. But to an ancient Israelite, it simply meant to ponder or to murmur. You speak the Word of God to yourself and you reflect on it. As with many psalms, you may be able to simply pray it word-for-word. It might communicate to God what’s already on your heart and mind. Or you might use it as a springboard for your own spontaneous prayer.

This is what I mean by living and praying in the Word of God. And when we consider that Psalm 1 urges us to do this day and night, each of us discovers we’ve fallen plenty short of God’s design for our lives. (There’s that sense of law again!) Yes of course, we then lean into the Lord and welcome His grace. And then, by His grace, we lean into the Word some more.

The trouble is that this leads us smack into another M-word. While “meditation” may raise eyebrows, “memorization” simply causes people to sprint in the other direction. Yet it’s very hard to sustain meditation on Scripture unless you know a fair bit of God’s Word by heart.

Here, again, the Psalms serve as the key to the lock. They were originally meant to be sung. And as anyone who’s ever had an unwanted song stuck in their head knows, music enables memorization (whether or not we want it to).

Alas, we’ve arrived at another obstacle. Many people don’t care to sing. Men, in particular, often find it uncomfortable. This, of course, is a quirk of our historical moment. David and Solomon, suffice it to say, weren’t hesitant to belt out a tune. But it is one of many real obstacles to widespread singing of the Psalms and other Scripture.

And those are the very obstacles I hope to take on in the coming year with my writing. I’m reading Scott Aniol’s Musing on God’s Music. I’m trying to understand the historical reasons why the singing of Scripture has waned. I’m looking for clues as to how people might find enjoyment in it again.

I have far more questions than answers. But I’m curious. And I’m eager to share what I’m finding.

I also have a little one up and in my lap at this point, so I’m going to wrap this up for now. I realize I haven’t even mentioned the second big theme that I want to re-focus my writing on.

But that’s probably worthy of another post anyway. And who’s to say, now that I’ve ripped off the bandage and started writing again, maybe I can make a habit of this again.

Happy New Year and God bless!

I originally published a version of this post in December 2024.

The recent Amazon Web Services outage, which seemed to take down half the internet, brought it to mind.

I clearly remember the first time I saw an Amish man pull a credit card out of his wallet. My wife and I had recently moved to a small Rocky Mountain town to help with a church plant. I’d taken a job at a hardware store. Its clientele included American Indians, ranchers, and well-to-do vacationers, as well as agrarian traditionalists of several Christian denominations.

In hindsight, I was naive to be surprised by this man’s use of a Visa. The Amish are not opposed to modern technology. They’re just slow to adopt it and very selective. They also have a reputation for financial acuity. The card Mr. Yoder produced was sleek and steely-colored. It whispered of status and impressive kickbacks.

I share that story to set the stage for one of those Bible quotes that seems hopelessly impractical:

Aspire to live quietly, and to mind your own affairs, and to work with your hands, as we instructed you, so that you may walk properly before outsiders and be dependent on no one.

1 Thessalonians 4:11-12

If these verses merely mean that we believers should think of ourselves as ordinary, hardworking folk, we’re quite fine with that. Conveniently, it’s how we like to see ourselves. But as a thought experiment, consider what life could look like if you applied these verses at face value. An Amish carpenter or a Christian auto mechanic might be able to nod knowingly and carry on. But what about those of us with desk jobs and smartphones?

Live quietly? That’s fine, of course, if it’s the sort of thing you’re into. Mind your own affairs? Social media’s very appeal is instant access to the neuroses and gossip of complete strangers. When it comes to these verses from 1 Thessalonians, most of us will be ready with our caveats and qualifications before we even get to the instruction to “work with [our] hands.”

Which could be the reason we miss the why tucked at the end.

Be dependent on no one.

This line is perplexing. Every creature that breathes, after all, depends on God. And the Bible urges Christians to rely on one another for everything from prayer, to encouragement, to meal trains when new babies arrive. So why is dependence, here, something to avoid?

If you need help reading the Bible every day, I have a plan that will ease you into it. Today’s reading is Mark chapter 1, so it’s a great day to dive in.

To understand this, it helps to put ourselves in the shoes of ancient Thessalonian Christians. This church faced persecution. To depend on outsiders would have been to rely on some of the very people who wanted to snuff the church out. By working with their hands, believers ensured they could meet their own basic needs. A church that can provide itself with food, clothing, and housing is less likely to fold under searing pressure.

Let’s take a flying leap back to our modern day. We may not face the kind of straightforward threats that the Thessalonians did. Yet we’re also economically dependent on many people who oppose us. And we’re completely reliant on a global labyrinth of trade and technology that seems creakier by the year.

The food we eat today usually travels over a thousand miles before reaching our plates. The trucks that transport it rely on parts made in China and India. The logistics systems that guide it to grocery stores need computer chips from Taiwan. And, as we learned earlier this week, even when you have all the hardware, a software failure can still wreak havoc.

Which brings me back to Mr. Yoder, the Amish gentleman with the platinum-level perks. If our modern economy went belly up, he’d face some sacrifices too. But his tight-knit agricultural community would be far better equipped to carry on than most of us.

In our instant-gratification society, most people think little of long-term preparedness. Some, as the Amish know all too well, ridicule it. During our time living near “the Plain People,” my wife and I saw drivers speed up aggressively while passing horse-drawn buggies. Occasionally people threw garbage, and the ladies were often subjected to catcalls. I’ll give Weird Al the benefit of the doubt and call “Amish Paradise” good-natured. But the reason the parody draws laughs is because taking such a traditional lifestyle seriously calls our own ways into question.

I’m hardly the first to wonder if the Amish might be vindicated someday. But such a prospect raises grim possibilities for modern society. Some Christians will argue that those who have an eternal home shouldn’t worry about such temporary concerns. But motivation for self-reliance doesn’t have to be fear. It can also stem from a desire to be more resilient. Like the Thessalonian church, our aim could be to limit our dependence on the ungodly.

Working with your hands also offers immediate benefits. It’s an alternative to our tech-saturated ways that have done extraordinary harm, especially to young people. At this point, the challenge may not be persuading people that our gadgets are causing our souls to wither. Rather, it could be figuring out what can practically be done, now that our lives are so intertwined with our smartphones.

Any large-scale shift of this kind would be a work of God. Even a partial tech exit can take years of prayer and persistent effort. Thankfully, the Lord meets us right where we are. He invites us to re-embrace reality, one hands-on task at a time. Gardening, woodworking, and even changing the oil in your car are activities that bring us back to the here-and-now. You may not be ready to launch into full-on homesteading, but there are surely physical needs around your home, or your neighbor’s.

I’ve posted before about psalm singing and prayer. These and other faithful acts pair wonderfully with physical work. For those of us accustomed to cubicle jobs and “knowledge work,” vocational life involves continuously receiving and processing information. We can forget how strange this is, how unusual it is historically. Conversely, physical work can quiet our minds, readying them to be filled with prayer. This opportunity, although novel to many of us, was the norm for generations.

What I call “the long renewal” boils down to re-engaging God’s Word and God’s world. It’s the act of choosing reality over unreality. And then allowing the Lord, the ultimate Reality, to work out His change in us, however long it takes.

It’s worth the patient effort, because the alternative to renewal is regression. An Amish proverb makes this very point (and seems a fitting place to end).

Unless there is within us that which is above us, we shall soon yield to that which is about us.

Store Up the Word In Your Heart

I admit I got sidetracked there for a couple weeks. But I promise I didn’t forget about memorizing the opening verses of John. See if you can get through verse 5 this week.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through Him, and without Him was not anything made that was made. In Him was life, and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.

John 1:1–5

Over time, you’ll discover that much of the work of memorizing Scripture is maintaining what you already know. As you stretch yourself to learn more, earlier verses often become shaky. This is completely normal. Don’t worry if it sometimes feels like you recall less than you did the week before. As pastor and author Donald Whitney writes, “The goal is not to see how many verses we can memorize; the goal is godliness. The goal is to memorize the Word of God so that it can transform our hearts and lives.”

I’m praying this will be a week of God-given transformation for you.

Until next time!

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Einstein had made a mistake.

Alexander Friedmann, an unassuming thirty-three-year-old Russian mathematician, was sure of it. In 1922, he published a correction to Einstein’s general theory of relativity. He then mailed his article, along with a respectful note, to the renowned physicist.

Although dismissive at first, Einstein ultimately conceded that the young Russian’s calculations were correct. The implications were astonishing.

Like most physicists of his day, Einstein had been confident that the universe was static, neither growing nor contracting. Such a cosmos, religious skeptics comfortably assumed, had always existed. To ensure his relativity equations reflected this consensus, Einstein inserted a value that became known as the “cosmological constant.”

And therein lay his error. Friedmann’s correction to Einstein’s constant showed that the universe could, in fact, be expanding. And if that was the case, then the cosmos could have had a beginning. And if it had a beginning. . .

God, the Science, the Evidence by Michel-Yves Bolloré and Olivier Bonassies makes its English-language debut today. Having already sold over 400,000 copies in French, Spanish, and Italian, this sprawling book covers even more ground than its bold title suggests. Approximately half of its 562 pages are dedicated to “Evidence Within the Sciences.” For the sake of focus, I’ll mostly limit this review to that part. It’s followed by another section, roughly 150 pages, that draws on evidence outside science, including philosophy, accounts of miracles, and Christian apologetics, or reasoned arguments for the faith. A handful of introductions, conclusions, and appendices fill out the remainder of the book.

This breadth allows for an extraordinary range of topics, historical whistle-stops, and arguments. Interested in a thriller-style account of the persecution of Soviet physicists who claimed the universe had a beginning? It’s here. Eager for a takedown of the pseudo-scientific theory that we’re living in a multiverse? Included. Ever pondered the slim odds of the Jewish people surviving millennia of persecution and displacement? That’s on offer too.

But how effective is such a vast scope? Like a sandwich piled with every conceivable ingredient, does it work? Can so many flavors possibly harmonize?

The answer will depend on the reader’s taste buds. Personally, I’ll admit a soft spot for ambitious, grandiose books. Even so, I appreciated the authors’ note that the chapters work independently and can be read in any order. Most, I suspect, will find that God, the Science, the Evidence is best approached like a buffet line. You can start with what you find particularly appetizing, and grab another plate when you’re hungry again. You won’t soon run out of interesting dishes to choose from.

To great effect, the book captures the unexpected collisions between human scheming and scientific breakthrough. I, for one, had no idea that Karl Marx’s collaborator Friedrich Engels had raged against the second law of thermodynamics. But increasing entropy, or disorder, signaled a changing universe. And as Engels saw it, a changing cosmos suggested one with a beginning. And a beginning implied a Creator. Scientific discoveries that even hinted at such a possibility were therefore bitterly opposed by Engels, Marx, and their atheistic disciples.

Here, authors Bolloré and Bonassies offer a fascinating glimpse into a world before the hyper-specialization of modern thought. It’s a view of an era when great minds took seriously the connections between fields as varied as physics, philosophy, and politics. In such an atmosphere, scientific discoveries carried theological and even moral implications. As these emerge, readers are also reminded of evil’s potential to react fiercely against truth in any form.

To show this, the book turns to Alexander Friedmann, the Russian physicist who caught Einstein’s error. Friedmann was not a religious man. Nonetheless, he was bullied by the Soviet regime and pressured to bury his scientific insights. The mere implications of his calculations were too much for the paranoid Communists. Friedmann died, likely from illness, just a few years after his breakthrough. But many of his students continued to argue that the universe was, in fact, expanding. For this “crime,” some faced imprisonment and even death.

Thankfully, not all that God, the Science, the Evidence recounts is so grim. I found the section on the fine-tuning of the universe to be downright beautiful. It helped me better appreciate why some find science not just intellectually stimulating, but also emotionally compelling.

The logic of fine-tuning can be boiled down to this: the extremely precise clockwork of the universe implies a clock-maker. If the forces that hold atoms together were even slightly stronger or weaker, matter as we know it would fall apart. Meanwhile, if the gravitational force wasn’t "just so,” we’d be crushed. Yet scientists have no explanation for why these forces are. . .perfect. Some can’t help but describe them as “miraculous.”

Such evidence for fine-tuning would exist even if our universe were merely filled with space rocks. And yet we also have to account for the breathtaking complexity of life. Here, the book fittingly quotes Fred Hoyle, an astronomer whose own observations led him to abandon atheism.

The chance that higher life forms might have emerged [purely by accident] is comparable with the chance that a tornado sweeping through a junk-yard might assemble a Boeing 747 from the materials therein.1

God, the Science, the Evidence is chock full of compelling quotes. Faced with the grandeur of the cosmos, even unbelievers express awe and wonder. Consider this quotation, also found in the book, by the physicist and atheist Stephen Hawking.

The laws of science, as we know them at present, contain many fundamental numbers, like the size of the electric charge of the electron and the ratio of the masses of the proton and the electron. . .The remarkable fact is that the values of these numbers seem to have been very finely adjusted to make possible the development of life.2

For some, such quotes alone will make this book worth owning. I’m thinking particularly of Christians with a passion for science or those who enjoy engaging scientifically-minded skeptics.

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That’s not to suggest the book will please all believers. Young-earth creationists, in particular, will find its reliance on the timeframes of mainstream science unhelpful. Even Christians outside of the young-earth camp may not agree with some of the authors’ assertions about the book of Genesis.

Similarly, Protestants may be surprised to discover the book recounts an alleged miraculous appearance of Mary, the mother of Jesus. This event, which took place in Fátima, Portugal in 1917, is regarded by many Roman Catholics as a modern-day miracle. Yet it’s a curious inclusion in a book that, at the outset, suggested it would steer clear of any one particular religion’s understanding of God. In the book’s second half, it becomes clear that the authors have opted to include overtly Christian arguments. Even so, this chapter, pointing to one particular tradition, stands out.

Again, I liken the book to a buffet line. Christians who are comfortable passing by some of the dishes will still find a lot to savor.

But what about the skeptic? Does God, the Science, the Evidence possess that kind of persuasive power? I’m probably not the best person to judge that. But I do think an atheist or agnostic who engages the book seriously will experience quite a few “I never thought of that” moments.

Belief, of course, ultimately requires more than that. Hebrews 11:1 describes faith as “the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” Ultimately, God’s existence can’t be proven from the physical universe any more than the historical fact of Jesus’ resurrection can be proven from Luke’s gospel account.

But Scripture also reminds us that what is seen offers insight into the unseen. The first chapter of the Apostle Paul’s letter to the Romans makes this plain.

For what can be known about God is plain to [unbelievers], 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.

The authors of God, the Science, the Evidence have made a dogged effort to relieve the unbelieving of their excuses. Meanwhile, they offer the faithful an optimistic thesis, namely that modern science can, in fact, help point the world to faith.

Maybe the book’s eclectic nature will even prove to be a strength. To its credit, it’s refreshingly free of the safe, focus-group-approved quality found in so many contemporary Christian books.

Time will tell. In any case, this book serves as a great reminder. It offers the bold assurance that believers can stand confident in what can be known about God and his creation.

And it invites us to marvel at what cannot.

I originally published a version of this post in November 2024.

Also. . .if you’re one of the brave souls who’s been memorizing the opening verses of John’s gospel along with me, give verse 4 a go this week. I’ll offer some tips on this lost art next week.

A couple of years back, the internet was abuzz with the rumor that men typically think about the Roman Empire several times per week. I suspect there’s a type of Christian who thinks about Dietrich Bonhoeffer just as frequently.

He’s given us plenty to think about. Immediately after Hitler became Germany’s Chancellor in 1933, Bonhoeffer warned in a radio address against the dangers of elevating a leader to messianic status. That message was cut short—likely by government censors. Just four years later, he published The Cost of Discipleship. The book reminded believers that following Jesus necessarily involves repentance and suffering. Bonhoeffer, of course, would go on to pay the ultimate price for his commitment to Christ. Unwilling to bow to the regime, the Nazis executed him in 1945.

Eighty years later, he remains a towering, if confounding, figure. His reading of Scripture is too straightforward for theological liberals, his theology too eclectic for fundamentalists. While he lived with unwavering faith, his journals occasionally reveal searing doubts. He wrote movingly about marriage, though he, himself, died while engaged, still waiting to wed.

Bonhoeffer’s courage, however, was uncomplicated. He refused to be complicit with a government that sought to manipulate Christians and twist the faith.

“Do not be afraid,” along with its variations, stands among the Bible’s most frequent commands. In Matthew 14, when Peter tries to walk on water, it’s his fear that sinks him.

[Jesus] said, “Come.” So Peter got out of the boat and walked on the water and came to Jesus. But when he saw the wind, he was afraid, and beginning to sink he cried out, “Lord, save me.” [emphasis mine]

Matthew 14:29–30

Jesus then rescues Peter, famously responding, “O you of little faith, why did you doubt?” In other words, there is a close connection between fear and doubt. In the following post on Bonhoeffer, I wrestle with how Scripture connects saving faith to our faithful works. In sharing it again, I hope that, by God’s grace, it will help you to live—and act—with renewed faith and courage.

If you don’t read the Bible every day, try this reading plan. Just one chapter each day will take you through Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John by Christmas.

Subscribe to The Long Renewal and you’ll get insights each week that align with what you’re reading.

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Is It True That All You Need Is Jesus?

I’ve shared that the phrase all you need is Jesus was nearly ringing in my head the night I got saved.

It was part of what a street evangelist had told me years before:

You don’t have to do anything. You don’t have to prove anything. All you need is Jesus.

My salvation experience was overwhelming and convincing. Over the years, especially during difficult stretches, my memories of that night have helped anchor me. They’ve assured me that, yes, God is not only real, but he’s also active in our day. He truly does give grace to those who don’t deserve it.

Yet today, around fifteen years later, when I think of that phrase all you need is Jesus, I can’t help but ask:

Is it really that simple?

Are those words a helpful reminder that the Bible is, first and foremost, a story about God and not us? Could the saying help us to remember that we can never outgrow God’s grace?

Or is it a bit misleading? Could it be too tidy? Might it be used to justify half-hearted Christian living? After all, it takes a lot of effort to fight against sin every day. Conversely, it’s easy to rattle off a phrase like all you need is Jesus, and just like that, you can whitewash your laziness.

That phrase meant everything to me the night I got saved. It continued to anchor me in the years that followed. But, again, is it really that simple?

To think through these questions, I’ll use a contrast. First, I’ll touch on my experience as a new Christian in the early 2010s. All you need is Jesus fit pretty well alongside the preaching I received at that time.

Next, I’ll draw from a sermon that I heard more recently. It was about Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German pastor who was martyred by the Nazis. To strengthen Christian ministers so they wouldn’t capitulate to Hitler, Bonhoeffer organized underground seminaries. He hoped that through rigorous training, prayer, fasting, and psalm singing, believers would remain steadfast—even in the face of extraordinary government pressure to cave.

Although the backdrop of World War II Germany makes Bonhoeffer’s story unique, it raises a question that applies in every era:

If all you need is Jesus, then what’s the purpose of the kind of heavy spiritual lifting that Bonhoeffer urged?

Old Memories of New Calvinism

Although I was Catholic when I got saved, within a couple of years I found my way to a church heavily influenced by New Calvinism. How I got from one to the other might be worth recounting at some point, but that won’t be the focus here.

It was 2010 when I showed up at my new church. Although I hadn’t heard of New Calvinism or “Young, Restless, and Reformed,” I happened to arrive right around the peak of that movement’s energy and influence. Names like John Piper, Timothy Keller, and, yes, Mark Driscoll, came up all the time.

My church emphasized the futility of trying to earn God’s favor through your own efforts. We were reminded—correctly—that the forgiveness of our sins was only possible because of Jesus’ death on the cross. We were taught that we couldn’t outgrow the good news of the salvation by grace. In other words, it was a mistake to think that after trusting in Jesus and receiving his forgiveness, you could simply move on to doing good Christian deeds. No matter how many faithful works we might pile up, we still needed to rely on God’s grace. As one common saying put it, we’d always be at the foot of the cross.

That much, I think, few Christians would take issue with.

So all you need is Jesus, after all, right?

The problem is that even essential truth can be distorted. It’s necessary to understand that human efforts can’t earn God’s forgiveness. But when you camp on that particular point, it’s possible to accidentally cast suspicion on good, faithful works.

I saw this mistaken tendency show up at times. I find the 2013 observation by Paul Washer, a pastor sympathetic to New Calvinism, helpful:

The lifestyle of at least some young reformers borderlines on an antinomianism that flaunts its supposed freedoms and shuns rigorous piety as little more than bondage to the Law.

By antinomianism, he means a distorted form of the faith that asserts Christians don’t need to obey any moral laws. According to this misunderstanding, if you trust in Jesus for your salvation, it won’t make any difference whether you manage to break free of sinful patterns in your life. All your sins are forgiven regardless, after all.

Many churches have been influenced by New Calvinism in different ways and to various degrees. I’m not suggesting that all churches touched by the movement threw the importance of moral obedience out the window. Overall, I don’t think that mine did. But at times I saw glimpses of what Washer describes.

And my broader point is that a person could slip into a dismissive attitude toward moral obedience and keep right on claiming what I heard years before from that street preacher:

You don’t have to do anything. You don’t have to prove anything. All you need is Jesus.

All You Need Is All of Jesus

Of course, if you read the Gospel accounts, you quickly discover that Jesus was instructing his followers to do lots of things. To take just a few examples from Matthew, believers are to pray,1 to forgive those who wrong them,2 to love their enemies,3 and to make more disciples.4

If all you need is Jesus, maybe we should strive to obey all of Jesus, meaning all that he said.

And while we may intend to pray, how vibrant are our prayer lives, really? We know we’re supposed to forgive, but it’s so much easier to hold a grudge. And what would it even be like to love our enemies? Does anyone really live like that?

When we realize how difficult it is to obey Jesus, the temptation to settle for a flat understanding of the faith can emerge. An over-simplified understanding of all you need is Jesus has a certain appeal. That’s because living as Jesus instructs us to and making even more disciples who live like that is very, very hard.

Bonhoeffer’s Rigorous Path

If anyone understood the difficulty of making faithful disciples, it was Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Two years ago, I was reminded of this in a sermon that centered on the German’s life and practices. Early on, the pastor brought up 1 Timothy 4:7–8:

Train yourself for godliness. For while bodily training is of some value, godliness is of value in every way, as it holds promise for the present life and also for the life to come.

You might expect this verse to be used along with a modest encouragement like, “Now please go home and read your Bibles a little more.” But in this particular message, the pastor connected the idea to Bonhoeffer’s courageous life and his rigorous style of ministry.

The sermon drew from a story in Jon Tyson’s book Beautiful Resistance. It recalls a historian named Wilhelm Niesel, who traveled to the seminary near Finkenwalde, Germany for a firsthand look at Bonhoeffer’s ministry.

In 1935, Bonhoeffer had founded a Christian community designed to reflect the ethic of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. Participants also had to develop the spiritual tenacity to resist capitulation to the Nazis. As one writer puts it, “Hitler did not merely want to rule Germany politically; rather he wanted to control the hearts and souls of its citizens.”5 In response, seminary life was strenuous. It required prayer, Bible study, and communal worship at set times. Some, like Niesel, wondered whether so much rigor was really necessary.

To make a vivid case for his approach, Bonhoeffer took Niesel to a hill where they could see German soldiers training for battle. Fighter planes were taking off and landing. Soldiers were marching in formation. Bonhoeffer explained to Niesel that the Nazi soldiers were practicing disciplines that trained them “for a kingdom . . . of hardness and cruelty.”6 His view was that Christians needed to respond with a life of biblical discipline. Bonhoeffer summed it up bluntly:

What we're doing at the seminary has to be stronger than what Hitler's doing in forming his army.7

Grace and Grit

If you’re hoping I’ll tie all of this together with a bite-sized takeaway, you’re going to be disappointed. A deep dive into the topics here (grace, Christian obedience, Bonhoeffer’s story, Christians caving to ungodly government, etc.) could fill many books. I’ll offer a few thoughts meant to provoke deeper questions about both grace and obedience.

First, we can’t overstate the importance of God’s grace. Whatever efforts we make to obey God, these are only possibly because of the gift of grace that God gave us first. There’s good reason why many Christians regularly bring up Ephesians 2:8-9:

For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God.

In well-meaning response, some Christians become concerned that vigorous efforts at obedience will undermine our appreciation of God’s grace. I’ve heard it said that believers generally lean toward legalism (over-emphasis on godly obedience) or license (laxness with regard to Jesus’ commands).

I’ve written about why I think that formulation is overly simplistic. But even if it’s a fair generalization, the idea can still nudge us in the direction of a serious mistake. It can lead to the assumption that if a believer makes a lot of effort to obey God’s word, that person probably has a legalistic streak. This, in turn, sets up mediocre, half-hearted Christian living to appear as the ideal.

After all, as the logic goes, too little obedience might be a sign of spiritual carelessness or license. But on the other hand, too much obedience might be a sign of equally dangerous legalism. Splitting the difference, then, appears to be the sweet spot. The wisest option, according to this logic, is to make some effort to grow in Jesus but not too much. After all, why work hard and risk getting labeled a legalist? Especially when you could ease up a bit and enjoy the acceptance of more Christians.

But Scripture confronts the notion that zeal for good works is a warning sign of legalism. In fact, it connects salvation by grace directly to our active, faithful response.

I brought up Ephesians 2:8–9 earlier. This time I’ll include verse 10 [emphasis mine]:

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.

A similar bridge appears in Colossians 1:29:

For this I toil, struggling with all His energy that He powerfully works within me.

The author of Colossians, the apostle Paul, pours extraordinary effort into his ministry. Nonetheless, he knows that his toil ultimately reflects God’s power working through him.

Recall Bonhoeffer’s quote about how the disciples’ efforts at the seminary needed to be stronger than the Third Reich army. Without the power of God, his notion is ludicrous. But with the Holy Spirit’s involvement, who’s to limit what the Lord might do through our efforts?

Finally, Bonhoeffer’s era is not as unusual as it seems. Those of us who’ve known relative peace in our lives might view the rise of Nazi Germany as a terrible exception. And thankfully, in many ways, it was.

But the Bible makes clear that an unseen battle between good and evil continues to unfold throughout all of history. The demonic powers that made Hitler possible might be restrained or more subtle in our time and place, but they’re still around.

Christians rely on God’s grace in all things. Yet, we should also approach life with the discipline of an athlete, as the apostle Paul describes in 1 Corinthians 9:

Do you not know that in a race all the runners run, but only one receives the prize? So run that you may obtain it. Every athlete exercises self-control in all things. They do it to receive a perishable wreath, but we an imperishable. So I do not run aimlessly; I do not box as one beating the air. But I discipline my body and keep it under control, lest after preaching to others I myself should be disqualified.

1 Corinthians 9:24-27

Run the race, brothers and sisters. Train like the heroes of the faith. Let your hearts be free of fear. And by the grace of God, receive the everlasting prize.

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If you’re interested in reading through Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John before Christmas, download the PDF below. The plan kicked off last week with this post, and it’s still easy to get caught up.

Bible Reading Plan

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“I’ve gotten kind of bored with Jesus.”

When was the last time you heard a Christian admit something like that?

Given a suitable setting, believers will talk about their battles with lust. Many will confess that their tempers get the best of them. From time to time, you’ll hear a Christian admit that a sobriety streak just came to an end.

But nobody ever says out loud that Jesus seems stale. That doesn’t mean, however, that no one ever feels that way.

This fall marks fifteen years of churchgoing life for me. And while I wouldn’t volunteer to relive my early years as a believer, I know that Jesus’ words often don’t grab me today as they did back then. Years ago, even familiar verses seemed to me to crackle. They were stirring and enticing. Mysterious, yet inviting.

Today, while I can still experience Jesus that way in the Bible, it rarely happens by accident. Down below, I’ll get to how our encounters with Him can remain fresh. For now, just keep in mind that however long you’ve been following Jesus, He invites continual rediscovery.

Then the disciples of John came to him, saying, “Why do we and the Pharisees fast, but your disciples do not fast?”

And Jesus said to them, “Can the wedding guests mourn as long as the bridegroom is with them? The days will come when the bridegroom is taken away from them, and then they will fast.”

Matthew 9:14–15

When was the last time you heard a man who’s neither married nor engaged refer to himself as a groom? Put yourself in the shoes of Jesus’ original hearers. You’re simultaneously trying to figure out why exactly His disciples resemble wedding guests, how He, Himself, could possibly be a bridegroom, and, above all, why in the world He’s going to be taken away. As a first century Jew, you’d have been overloaded with perplexing images and analogies.

Huston Smith, a scholar of world religions, described Jesus’ language as “compact” and said it “invariably cuts to the quick.” Those who heard Him firsthand put it even more bluntly: “No one ever spoke like this man!”1

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It’s in Matthew 8, today’s chapter in the reading plan, that Jesus tells one of his disciples to “leave the dead to bury their own dead.”2 The hearer, if he continued to follow Jesus, would have to forsake his familial duty to bury his own father. Next, in Matthew 9, Jesus is smeared by the religious authorities for eating with tax collectors and sinners. His response is to effectively own the accusation, and then frame His entire mission in terms of it.

Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. . .I came not to call the righteous, but sinners.

Matthew 9:12–13

Jesus, of course, isn’t merely a quick wit. Again and again, He’s challenging those with small-minded misconceptions of Him to think much bigger. It’s also in Matthew chapter 9 that He compares Himself to a bridegroom, as quoted earlier. And then He makes it clear that His arrival represents something utterly transformative for Judaism—and the world.

No one puts a piece of unshrunk cloth on an old garment, for the patch tears away from the garment, and a worse tear is made. Neither is new wine put into old wineskins. If it is, the skins burst and the wine is spilled and the skins are destroyed. But new wine is put into fresh wineskins, and so both are preserved.

Matthew 9:16–17

With images like these, I used to wind up in the cul-de-sac of overanalysis: If Jesus, as the patch, is shrinking, then why is Jesus, as the wine, expanding?

Anymore, I don’t think Jesus is concerned with the precise mechanics of how the garment and wineskins come to ruin. Rather, He’s saying that He’s an entirely new chapter in Israel’s story. He’s come to fulfill. . .everything. The sacrificial system. The promises made by generations of wild-eyed prophets. The prediction that a once-and-for-all King would arrive to sit on David’s throne. Jesus has come to trample humanity’s ultimate fear and offer ultimate hope: victory over death itself.

But how can we really experience Scripture as brimming with that hope? How is a well-worn Jesus saying going to excite you when you’re reading it for the umpteenth time?

The answer is this: the same way it grabbed you before. It’s only by the power of the Holy Spirit that we can ever understand who Jesus is. And it’s only by the Spirit that we’ll ever be captivated by His Words.

Back at the beginning of this year, I invited readers to pray the Bible. That simply means that as you read God’s Word, you pray in response to it. It’s uncomplicated, and if you haven’t tried it before, I can promise you that nothing magical will happen the first time you do it. But I can also promise you if you make a habit of praying the Bible, over the long haul, it will transform how you relate to God.

Psalms, as I’ve written, are well-suited to this kind of prayerful engagement. They make for a great onramp. But ultimately, the goal is to interact with all of Scripture while actively communing with God. As you read Matthew, feel free to pray as the Lord moves you. I’d also encourage you to pray specifically that God would startle you with the full wonder of who Jesus is. Ask that the Holy Spirit will enable Jesus’ words to land on you afresh. That you’ll recognize their full brilliance, force, and beauty.

And when, on occasion, you do feel a little bored with Jesus, just admit that to Him. Trust me, He won’t be offended. In fact, it’s His joy to enliven your heart and mind again and again. And as you experience that, you’ll be equipped to serve as a guide to others who need to be startled—for the first time or the five-hundredth—by Jesus of Nazareth.

Store Up the Word in Your Heart

Last week, we started by memorizing John 1:1.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

If you managed that, try adding verses 2 and 3.

He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through Him, and without Him was not anything made that was made.

There are lots of tips and tricks for memorization. As I offer some in the weeks to come, give those that appeal to you a try. Stick with those that you find work.

This week, consider writing the verses out to help you memorize them. The act of writing the words will help to anchor them in your mind.

If you’ll take on learning just a verse or two each week, you’ll have memorized the opening of John’s gospel by the time we start reading it in a couple of months.

I’m the type who cringes at the arrival of Christmas decorations on store shelves. It’s a timing thing. The leaves haven’t even fallen yet!

That said, I’ll gladly start getting ready to celebrate Jesus’ birth. To that end, this post kicks off a Bible reading plan. It will guide you through the gospel accounts of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John by Christmas.

What better way to spend the fall than rediscovering Jesus? What better preparation for the arrival of a newborn King?

Feel free to download the plan, print it off, and tape it to your fridge. Or save it to your phone. Or bookmark this page and return to it right here. Whichever works best for you.

You need only read one chapter per day. It’s a pace that invites you to success. If you do fall behind, you won’t feel buried, as you can with more aggressive plans. If you read ahead, you could even carve out a day for revisiting standout passages. And for digging into the questions that Scripture’s sure to raise. One chapter per day offers that flexibility.

And persistence, in my view, is much more important than quantity.

That principle applies to Bible memorization too. Wait, say what? Yes, I’m also encouraging you to commit God’s Word to heart. Just below the reading plan is a single verse to get you started. Before long, you’ll join with the psalmist in saying, “I have stored up Your Word in my heart, that I might not sin against You.”1

The Reading Plan

The M-Word

This week, try memorizing John 1:1.

It might seem like I should choose a verse from Matthew, since that’s where our reading starts. But I’m playing the long game. Week by week, we’ll commit John’s opening verses to memory. Then, by the time we actually get to John at the end of November, you’ll already know the intro by heart.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

• I’m quoting the ESV. Feel free to use your preferred translation.

• In the spirit of Deuteronomy 6, you could bind this verse as a sign on your hand, wear it on a decorative band on your forehead, and write it on the doorposts of your house.

• You may also find modern wonders like sticky notes and notecards helpful.

A World Without Sin

The Gospel According to Matthew opens with a family history. This genealogy presents Jesus as the fulfillment of Israel’s long, winding story. And what has the One who fulfills Israel’s hopes come to do? An angel of the Lord soon makes this clear.

[Mary] will bear a son, and you shall call His name Jesus, for He will save His people from their sins. (emphasis mine)

Matthew 1:21

Jesus came into this world to save His people from their sins. We could add plenty of texture and color to that statement. We could, in other words, say much more about Jesus’ purpose. But we can’t say any less. And if we ignore this truth, or gloss it over, we’ve lost the plot.

A crucial teaching can lose its electricity with time. We need the Holy Spirit to reawaken our awe again and again. We have to stay astonished that Jesus saves.

It’s said that a zealous individual once approached a well-known Christian and asked, “Are you saved?” The believer confidently replied, “I am saved. I am being saved. And, by God’s grace, I will yet be saved!” In the first version of this story I came across, D.L. Moody was cast as the believer of renown. In the next, it was Bishop Foss Westcott. In other words, the story itself might be bogus. But its point remains entirely true.

If you’re a believer, at some time in the past, Jesus rushed in to save you from the consequences of your sins. You trusted that He died in your place and then rose from the grave. You might say that He opened your blind eyes. Or that you were born again. You might recall experiencing what the well-worn hymn Amazing Grace calls “the hour I first believed”—or you might not. But something definitely happened. God really raised you from spiritual death to everlasting life. Jesus saved you.

Jesus is still saving you. The author of Hebrews urges those who’ve already professed faith to “draw near to the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need.”2 Relatedly, the Apostle Paul reminds the church at Corinth that the Lord is slowly reshaping them into the likeness of Christ. The apostle describes this process as proceeding gradually, “from one degree of glory to another.” Jesus saved you yesterday. He’ll save you again tomorrow. And after each deliverance, your life will radiate just a little more of His holy character.

You’ve been saved. You’re being saved.

And the most astonishing rescue is still yet to come.

It doesn’t matter how many times I read Revelation 21. Its glimpse of a fully renewed world still gives me shivers.

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.”

Revelation 21:3–4

Here and now, our thoughts can leap into the gutter without warning. Regrets can lurk, ready to crush us. Every new day brings fresh sins to confess.

But someday every one of those will vanish like a strange mist. They will be extinguished by God’s holiness. And in that moment, we will step into an existence so wonderful that, at present, we can barely fathom it. No sin. No sorrow. No death. No pain. Every cruel trace of the Fall will be swallowed up in the tangible presence of the Lord of love.

Forever.

A one-hundred-year life on this earth will then seem but a flicker. A fleeting and forgettable glint.

I don’t think we reflect on this enough. One day God will dwell with His people. He will do so in the fullest possible sense, and that will never change. For those in Christ, the time will come when ninety-nine percent of our existence will have been free of sin. Even then, our new era will be in its infancy. Everything we will experience—perhaps all we’ll remember—will be infused with the Lord’s shalom.

It’s this perspective that allows the Apostle Paul to view great suffering as a “light, momentary affliction.” One that is preparing God’s people “for an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison.” The key to this outlook, Paul tells us, is to “look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen.”3

The gospel accounts are an invitation to see into the unseen. Their portrait of Jesus reveals the Savior in ever-startling clarity. We’ll follow in His footsteps in the coming months. We’ll look into His face. As we do, my prayer is that you will remember, where He is leading us, endless joy awaits.

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It was while I was rocking my young son to sleep. That was when the weight of Charlie Kirk’s murder really landed on me. Charlie was a Christian. He was an extremely effective political activist. Those things have long been well-known.

He was also a husband.

And a father.

Millions have already weighed in on this young man’s death. Many with raw, visceral emotion. Some with grace and dignity. And yes, some with bile.

But for me, late Wednesday night, in the dark and quiet of my kids’ bedroom, there were neither hot takes nor tributes. There was only the weight of the child I held. And this thought: Charlie’s kids won’t get to drift off to sleep in their father’s arms again.

Thursday morning we woke up to 9/11. It’s been twenty-four years since the towers went down, since that day when terrorists killed thousands.

Anger is an honest response to evil. Sometimes, in the face of unmistakable wickedness, it feels like the only fitting reaction.

“Be angry,” the psalmist tells us. And then he adds four confounding words, “and do not sin.”1

Anger’s grip can feel strangely satisfying. But if you surrender to it, it will eventually do one of two things to you. Either it will fade, leaving you empty and exhausted.

Or it won’t. And then it will corrode your soul.

Like anger, our technology holds us captive to moments of destruction. The same images of violence flash across our screens again and again. For a time, that split-second of horror seems inescapable.

And then it’s gone. And you’re left trying to figure out how it could possibly have taken a couple of decades with it.

The kids who lost their parents on 9/11 have become adults. Many of them have children of their own now.

What kind of America are we going to pass on to their generation?

Sit with that a moment.

What will our families look like in twenty years? What about our communities? Our churches?

The answer to all of these questions depends what we choose to do with the days to come. It depends how we fill the weeks, the months, and the years ahead.

Our choices matter. Our prayers matter2.

Jesus matters.

When she was still alive, my grandmother wrote me many cards. There were handwritten birthday cards and Christmas cards. There were just saying hello cards. Back in my days of unbelief, she’d now and then include the note, “Don’t forget about Jesus.”

Are there a thousand reasons why America, today, is a shell of the country many of us remember? Are there countless explanations for why our future suddenly seems so fearful? Yes and yes.

And beneath them all, there’s one.

We forgot about Jesus.

Many simply abandoned church. Tens of millions, as it turns out. Others stayed, but remade Jesus according to their liking. For some, he became a lovey-dovey soul who would never pass judgment on anyone. For others, he was a prizefighter, ready to verbally pound anyone your Christian clique deemed impure. For yet others, he became an idea, a dry, well-formulated concept, ready to be dusted off whenever you longed to feel intelligent. Others made Jesus into a therapist, a politician, a life coach, an entrepreneur. I could go on.

Without question, some have distorted Jesus more severely than others. But if you’re reading this, you’re likely aware of that. That’s because call-out culture now dominates online Christian conversation. Of course, it’s a good thing if you have the courage to have a heartfelt conversation with a friend who’s drifting into error. But the non-stop, algorithm-fueled panic over the supposed impurity of the wrong kind of believer is something else entirely. It has, itself, become a snare to millions.

Less comfortable, but far wiser, is the path of responsibility and repentance. All of us live in an age where Satan “prowls about like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour.” Every one of us faces the temptation to twist who Jesus Christ really is. And that sinister pull, I believe, will only increase in the months and years to come.

So starting next week, I’m inviting you to rediscover the true Jesus. By reading just a chapter a day, you’ll finish the four gospel accounts before Christmas. That’s a walk through Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, at a very do-able pace.

Only about 10% of Americans read the Bible daily. So even if you’re someone who regularly digs into Scripture, you surely know someone who needs to experience the story of Jesus. Bible sales were way up last year. In its painful way, this world is pressing more people to ask the questions that matter. Many simply need that invitation. Maybe it will come from you.

I’ve shared the plan below. On its face, yes, it’s just another Bible reading plan. But through the posts I’ll be including along the way, you’ll find something more. It won’t just be an invitation to read Scripture. It will include ways to pray in response to Jesus’ story. I’ll be showing you how to immerse more and more of your life in the Word that reveals who Jesus is.

The plan kicks off next Tuesday. So for now, save it or print it out. Look it over, pray about it. And think about who you could invite to look into the face of Jesus.

He’s willing to answer questions and can also send you email updates about his ministry, if you’d like. I receive these updates myself and can say that each one of them is a powerful reminder of how, even in the most devastating circumstances, God remains present and active.

Like most missionaries, James and his family rely on financial support. If you’d like to bless them in this way, he can provide the necessary details by email.

Lastly, I realize many of us skim when we read online. Given the nature of what James has chosen to share, I’m asking that you make time to read the full post. And please pray for this extraordinary family. Thank you. – David

Hello, this is James Hopkins, a long-time missionary who has been living in Ukraine for 28 years. I first lived for 6 years in Kiev, the capital city. For the last 22, I’ve lived in Lutsk, which is in the Northwestern part of the country.

Yes, I have been here all during the war. In fact, when it started, we as a family were ready for it. We prayed about running or staying. As you might know, over 6 million people ran to other countries.

When Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022, we thought they would invade our area first, but they did not, thankfully. As an American, it would have been bad. Turns out it was bad. They went all the way to Kiev in central Ukraine. We had no idea what to do or how bad it would get. Everything changed.

For me, as a husband and father, my job is to protect my wife and two teenage daughters. When the invasion began, the girls were 14 and 15 years old. But we all prayed and felt we were to stay. The Scripture that stood out for us as we prayed was John 15:13, “Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for his friends.”

I understood what God was saying and so did my wife.

WOW, stay, that means be ready. Are we ready? Are we prepared for death? Writing this brings a lot of emotions, like pain. How brave my family is. The tests would come, and it would be much, much more serious than we imagined. Well, in some ways.

Soon, more than a thousand refugees came. These were people we would house, care for, feed, and share Jesus with. We were feeding roughly 30–100 people a day at our small ministry center that normally had beds for 22. That went on for two-and-a-half months.

Our home is next to the ministry center. I remember all the horrific stories we were hearing from the refugees who were running from the Russians. In Eastern Ukraine, a husband had been shot in the head in front of his wife and 10-year-old son. They came to us in shock. We heard from girls who had been raped. It went on and on.

I was standing in our backyard praying and crying, as we all did every day. The pain and the horror of war can break the strongest man, the strongest Christian. I prayed and I cried out in deep pain. God, what to do?

After 3 months of war, Ukraine took back much of the land Russia initially invaded. But that left thousands devastated and tens of thousands dead and wounded. Children had been stolen from their parents. Homes, businesses, schools, and hospitals had been damaged or destroyed.

I'm an evangelist, and God said, “Go, go to the broken people.” By this time, there were hundreds of thousands of landmines scattered throughout the country. People were broken and hungry. There were food and gas shortages.

I grabbed a new friend, a refugee from Eastern Ukraine named Evan. He had come to us for shelter. I said to him, “Let’s buy food and help people on the frontlines.” Since he knew that area, I asked, “Will you be my guide and help?” He said yes.

We’ve also helped the military by buying hundreds of tourniquets and bulletproof vests. In the beginning, the military was ill-equipped. They were very grateful for the help.

Then it got crazy. My daughter, Samantha, said, “Dad I want to come with you into these once-occupied frontline villages.” She was 14.

I told her, “No, no way.”

She kept pushing me and did not let up. So, I said, “Ok, you go to Mom. If Mom lets you go, ok, you can go.”

I knew 100% she would say no. She went to Mom, who said NO. Samantha then asked her mom to pray about it. Long story short: We were doing worship and the song came on, “I Surrender All.” My wife later came to me and said, “I’m supposed to let her go. Trust God.”

Now, I can’t tell you everything about that conversation because it would be too long of an article, so just imagine this happening to you. And maybe you would say, “James, I would never put my family into such a position.”

I wish I was not in such a position, but I and my family want to live for the Lord, not for ourselves. Our position is that Christians should be running to help people, running to the sick, not closing our doors. We should even be willing to give our lives, if necessary. Ukraine was and is suffering unbelievable pain. How can we leave our friends, our Christian brothers and sisters? I want my children to run toward them and help, rather than run away to protect ourselves while others suffer.

We ended up taking 37 trips, each lasting 6–10 days and reaching from 16–32 villages.

Through the trips, we’ve seen more than 9,000 people come to faith in Jesus Christ. We’ve delivered more than 100 tons of food and clothing, as well as thousands of Bibles. We helped rebuild many homes, and the ministry has been able to pay for many new windows and roofs.

We have seen more than 22 new church plants. Our ministry center has been able to provide millions of dollars worth of hospital equipment, hospital beds, crutches, walkers, wheelchairs, and much more.

My girls both ended up going on these trips many times. More recently, my wife joined too, but she’s the prayer warrior. She has paid a huge price praying long hours during rough nights. She was praying for us and getting texts from the girls telling her how terrified they were as bombs fell nearby. I'm proud of them. We are a team. Besides my family, many brave volunteers came with us. I was always surprised how many wanted to come.

But now, because of the war, we have a shortage of men who can travel with me on these trips. If you feel called, you can write to me. But please remember I cannot guarantee your safety. My email is jvhoplutsk@gmail.com. Some trips are quiet and some not.

There were several trips when we were not sure we would survive the bombings. I remember holding my girls’ hands in the city of Kherson. They were terrified and crying. Everyone was quaking and praying that we would not get hit by all the bombs, munitions, or drones.

For me, the stress can be massive. In all this, in my mind, I am thinking, “Is one of these decisions going to kill one of my family? Or one of the brave people that came with me?” I need to trust God. Whatever the outcome, God is still my God and King. He knows this, and I have been tested.

I have a deep respect for Ukraine’s military commanders, team leaders that send their people on dangerous missions. They know their orders can get someone killed. It’s a tremendous weight on one's heart. For me personally, making life-and-death decisions in ministry is tremendously painful. Causing more tears than can be counted.

This is our calling. It's not for everyone, of course. Just our calling. God equipped us and gave us strength to go. I’m so grateful God chose us, he chose me, chose us, to serve Ukraine. It's a privilege to serve God and Ukraine.

Pray for us. Even now, while writing, this is painful. We have all lost friends in this war. The first guy I baptized, back in 1999, was killed. So were many others we know about. They say 600,000 Ukrainians and 1.2 million Russians have been killed. No one knows exact numbers, but it's a lot.

Our ministry team is still going out to the frontline areas, but not as aggressively as before. I need a new knee. This has been a long time coming, and I should be able to get the procedure soon. God willing, we will get back out. Now, we are focusing on the new church plants, as well as churches we partnered with on these trips.

Ukraine needs your prayers. They are powerful, and we all feel and see the results.

Our ministry is called 99for1ukraine.

If you have questions or want to help us or our ministry, you can write to me at jvhoplutsk@gmail.com for more information.

Thank you for reading and perhaps sharing this.

Please pray for Ukraine.

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Would you pray for me? I’ve included a few prayer requests after the post. Thanks!

What if one disastrous idea lies behind the emptiness of modern life—but few had noticed?

With his book, On the Origin of Species1, Charles Darwin achieved the 1859 version of going viral. The original 1,250 printed copies sold out the first day. A firestorm that spanned scientific, religious, and philosophical circles had begun.

By means of what he called “natural selection,” Darwin proposed that biological life, in all its complexity and variety, had emerged as the result of blind chance. He understood the theological implications of his theory and wrestled with this personally. As he wrote to biologist Asa Gray in 18602,

This is always painful to me. . .I had no intention to write atheistically. But I own that I cannot see, as others plainly do, & as I should wish to do, evidence of design and beneficence. . .

I see no necessity in the belief that the eye was expressly designed. On the other hand I cannot anyhow be contented to view this wonderful universe & especially the nature of man, & to conclude that everything is the result of brute force.

I am inclined to look at everything as resulting from designed laws, with the details, whether good or bad, left to the working out of what we may call chance. Not that this notion at all satisfies me.3

Darwin wanted to believe that life had resulted from both “designed laws” and, somehow, by “what we may call chance.” But, as he admitted, he wasn’t satisfied with this fusion. He knew it was logically contradictory.

In her book Total Truth, Nancey Pearcey zeroes in on what’s at stake: “If the world itself was not designed, then there can be no design or purpose for human life either.” She quotes historian Jacques Barzun, who describes the modern controversy over Darwinism4 as one particular skirmish between “the believers in purpose and the believers in mere chance.”

The believers in purpose and the believers in mere chance.

We might be convinced our feelings, opinions, and choices matter. But in a universe that’s the result of mere chance, they can’t. They’re nothing more than fleeting perceptions in a cold, pointless universe.

It would follow that compassion is an illusion. Self-sacrifice would be the height of foolishness. Any human aspiration beyond passing our genes on to the next generation would be utterly without purpose—and one could question whether even that would have meaning. What, after all, could be the greater purpose of perpetuating a meaningless species?

The bleak moral logic that Darwinism yields is too often overlooked. One major reason for this is that few Darwinists live by convictions that are consistent with their first principles. As a modern example of this, Pearcey points to Robert Wright, author of the evolutionary psychology book The Moral Animal. In it, Wright states, “We believe the things—about morality, personal worth, even objective truth—that lead to behaviors that get our genes into the next generation.” In other words, what we call “truth” is really just a means to an end, a useful fiction. Yet, later in the same book, Wright claims we need to “correct the moral biases built into us by natural selection” and practice “brotherly love.”5

Wright’s mental gymnastics may seem obviously flawed to Christians, but it pinpoints the worldview collision that has been roiling the West for over 150 years. It’s a clash between purpose and chance, the latter usually followed by a desperate attempt to recover a sense of purpose.

So, as “believers in purpose,” did Christians unite against the emptiness of “mere chance”? Not according to Pearcey.

The bitterest debates [involving Christians] were often not with atheistic evolutionists but among believers with conflicting scientific views: young earth creationists, old-earth creationists, flood geologists, progressive creationists, “gap” theorists, and theistic evolutionists. . .

Meanwhile, secularists were happy to fan the flames. As [Intelligent Design proponent] Phillip Johnson once put it, “They all but said, ‘Let us hold your coats while you fight.’” For if Christians were going to endlessly divide, then it was clear that secularists would conquer.6

And conquer they did.

It’s hard for us today to appreciate how massive a shift Darwin’s ideas unleashed in Western intellectual life. There were certainly skeptics of Christianity in academia before Darwin. Philosophers like Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) and David Hume (1711–1776), for example, had already challenged some religious assumptions. But their influence was limited by the fact that they didn’t have an all-encompassing idea in which to ground their skepticism. They could snip at branches of Christian thought, but they couldn’t uproot the whole tree.

And then, in 1859, that changed.

Now, after more than 150 years of Darwinism, Robert Wright can breathlessly argue that all truth claims “are, by Darwinian lights, raw power struggles.”

If that sounds familiar, it’s because ideas like this have overwhelmed colleges and universities. This notion of power struggle now shows up in fields ranging from economics to sexuality. It’s unknown whether Darwin would have agreed with his concepts being used this way. But ideas often take on a life and force all their own.

Of course, humans can’t thrive without meaning. And as Robert Wright revealed with his yearning for “brotherly love,” we can’t help but seek a higher purpose. We may be living in a moment when ideologies built atop the emptiness of “mere chance” are revealing their weakness. This is a hopeful possibility, and one I intend to take up in a future post.

In the meantime, fill your minds with the true, the good, and the eternal. Abide in the words of Philippians 4:8:

Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.

Prayer Requests

I probably should have asked for your prayer sooner. Not because I’m going through anything unusually difficult, but because every worthwhile thing we do needs the support of prayer.

Since writing is how I connect with you, I’d especially appreciate prayer related to that. Feel free to expand on these requests and pray as the Lord leads you.

1. Please pray that the words I write would help people to grow in their walk with God. (If that isn’t happening, I should put my efforts elsewhere!)

2. Please pray that the Lord would help everyone He’d like to be reading The Long Renewal to find it.

3. I shared last week that I have an idea for a book. I’d appreciate prayer for God’s wisdom in how to proceed with that. The main challenge I face is that. . .

4. My time for writing is very limited. Please pray that I use it wisely. I do the vast majority of my writing when my kids are asleep. This limitation makes it very challenging to keep up with things I’d like to write!

I’m also praying for you. If you ever have any specific requests, feel free to share them in a comment below or DM me on Substack. This week, just before publishing, I prayed Numbers 6:24-26 for all of my readers.

The Lord bless you and keep you;

the Lord make His face to shine upon you and be gracious to you;

the Lord lift up His countenance upon you and give you peace.

I’ve convinced myself I’m going to try to write a book.

You’ll find some thoughts on this below the main post, as well as some paranoia about the Amazon self-publishing machine.

Scripture urges us to pray without ceasing. (1 Thessalonians 5:17)

But in Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, we also find this caution flag:

“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.” (Matthew 6:7)

Trying to pray continuously is daunting enough. Combine that with a warning against empty phrases and the task can seem hopeless. Pray all the time, but whatever you do, don’t pray like this!

Thankfully, as the passage continues, Jesus offers an example of how His people should pray. It’s concise and to-the-point. You’ve heard it before. It starts like this:

Our Father in heaven,

hallowed be your name.

Your kingdom come,

your will be done,

on earth as it is in heaven.

Some Christians pray this word-for-word. Others prefer to improvise on its themes. Either way you lean, passages like this invite you into a richer prayer life.

Almost all of us rely on some amount of prayer “filler.” This usually happens when we talk to God for a longer stretch. Maybe our enthusiasm wanes, maybe our minds wander. And soon the words we’re using, even if they aren’t “empty phrases,” aren’t exactly rich and meaningful either. Thankfully, Scripture offers the opposite of filler and empty spiritual calories. It’s like whole milk, the real deal, with nothing skimmed off. In 1 Peter 2:2, the apostle Peter urges believers to “crave pure spiritual milk, so that by it you may grow up in your salvation.”1

So when possible, keep a Bible handy when you pray. Start as you usually would. You can praise God. You can tell Him what’s on your mind. You can ask that you’d be more aware of His presence moment-to-moment. You can pray for friends and loved ones. Don’t think too hard about it. Just pray.

Then, whenever you start to feel your momentum stall, simply turn to the Word. Some passages, like Matthew 6:9-13, can be prayed as written. Or you can take an idea from the text, turn it over in your mind, and pray in response. Either way, you’ll likely find that God’s Word recharges your own heartfelt prayer. You’ll discover that recitation, reflection, and spontaneous prayer can all serve one another.

The Bible offers countless passages that work well for this. As you notice them in your regular reading, it’s a good habit to bookmark some. Then they’re easy to find when you need them.

The examples here are just a small fraction of what you might choose.

Psalms are a classic go-to for prayer.

“Oh Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth!

You have set your glory above the heavens. From the lips of children and infants you have ordained praise because of your enemies, to silence the foe and the avenger.

When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what is man that you are mindful of him, the son of man that you care for him?” (Psalm 8:1-4)

The New Testament letters are chock-full of possibilities.

“I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” (Romans 8:38-39)

Daniel’s prayer guides us into repentance.

O Lord, the great and awesome God, who keeps His covenant of love with all who love Him and obey His commands, we have sinned and done wrong. We have been wicked and rebelled; we have turned away from your commands and laws. We have not listened to your servants the prophets, who spoke in your name to our kings, our princes and our fathers, and to all the people of the land. (Daniel 9:4-6)

Hannah’s prayer in 1 Samuel 2 invites us to rejoice2.

My heart rejoices in the Lord; in the Lord my horn is lifted high. My mouth boasts over my enemies, for I delight in your deliverance.

There is no one holy like the Lord; there is no one besides you; there is no Rock like our God.

As you explore passages like this, you can respond to them with your own prayers, as I’ve written about before. Or, as I’m suggesting here, you can allow the Scripture to be your prayer.

Whichever approach makes sense to you, and wherever you are today in your prayer life, the goal is simply growth. If you go days at a time without talking to the Lord, trying to “pray without ceasing” for hours on end probably won’t be successful.

Remember that the Lord’s invitation to us to pray is designed to uplift us. It’s not a challenge meant to burden us. Using Scripture as “prayer filler” should relieve your efforts. It shouldn’t add pressure to find just the right verse.

“Come to me,” Jesus said, “all you who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.” (Matthew 11:28)

Let your prayers rest in the Word, and let your soul and spirit rise.

Could the World Possibly Need Another Christian Book?

It’s not exactly unheard of for someone with a blog to proclaim they’re going to write a book. So even if this announcement doesn’t surprise you, it did surprise me. During my first year posting here, I’d kept the idea of writing a book safely in the “someday” category.

And I wish I had a more spiritual story for why I suddenly moved it to “why not now?” It occurred to me one day (while eating my lunch) that I could outline a book and slowly write it post-by-post. Excited, I wrote a couple of (very short) chapters.

I originally intended to share some of what I came up with in this post. But somebody warned me that might be a problem. Amazon, I was told, crawls the web to catch copyright violators who try to self-publish with them. This makes sense, in principle, but causes problems. The person who reached out to me had Amazon refuse to print her book. She believed this was because she had shared part of it on her blog.

I have no idea what the odds of that happening are, but any chance might be too high. As a no-name, never-published author, I feel like Amazon is kinda the ballgame. I mean, if I can’t self-publish there, then where? Kinko’s?

I looked at the fine print for Amazon’s print-on-demand arm, Kindle Direct Publishing. Sure enough, it says they enforce their guidelines “using a combination of machine learning, automation, and dedicated teams of human reviewers.” I have a hunch their bots are plentiful, but their human reviewers are few. And I’m guessing those humans are hard to get a hold of and plead your case to if you get mistakenly blackballed.

If anyone knows more about this or has experience using Kindle Direct Publishing, please let me know. Is the way I’m thinking wildly paranoid? Or wise?

I did have a couple of ideas for how I might share drafts with you while staying in the clear. One was to record portions of what I write as audio. If you’re still reading at this point, first, thank you! Also, let me know what you’d think of that.

Do you ever listen to audio on Substack? Would you give it a try if I shared some of my book project that way?

Subscribe now

“You don’t have to do this.”

The lawyer had a plan that he hoped would spare his client’s life.

If Franz Jägerstätter (YAY-ger-shteh-ter) would simply sign the document in his attorney’s hand, he might still avoid execution. With a pen stroke, the Austrian farmer could declare his intention to serve the Nazi war effort in a non-combatant role, perhaps as a medic or clerical worker. The death sentence that hung over him could vanish.

But Jägerstätter rejected the compromise. Any role he accepted, after all, would require him to swear allegiance to Hitler and the Third Reich. He was unwilling for such a lie to pass his lips, as he explained to the lawyer. And furthermore, he refused to aid a regime he viewed as murderous and indefensible.

Friedrich Feldman, the court-appointed attorney, was becoming exasperated. He wanted to shout, “You have a wife and three children!” But he opted for an approach he thought more likely to persuade the stubborn thirty-six-year-old. The war won’t last forever, he argued. If Franz served, he might one day return to his family. But if he refused, his execution was assured. Millions of other Catholics, the lawyer pointed out, had reconciled their faith with their duty to the nation. That included many seminary students and priests.

“They have not been given the grace to see otherwise,” the prisoner replied.

The attorney pushed back. “Do you know of a single instance of a bishop calling upon Catholics not to support the war effort? Or to refuse military service?”

Franz admitted he did not, but believed that made no difference. “They,” he said, “have not been given the grace either.”1

On August 9th, 1943, Franz Jägerstätter lay beneath a Nazi guillotine. The day that the blade fell, hardly anyone outside of St. Radegund, an Austrian farming village, had ever heard of him. And most of the townspeople, as Franz knew, thought he had made a tragic and foolish mistake. Among the locals, Franz’s well-known religious zeal was believed to have mutated into madness.

Although some Austrians had welcomed Hitler’s forces in 1938, many saw them as unwanted foreign occupiers. Yet even among those who loathed the Third Reich, very, very few refused to serve the military effort.

Today we recognize the Nazis as a uniquely evil regime. But for European peasant farmers during World War II, information about Hitler’s atrocities was limited. Furthermore, a call to military service spoke to one’s sense of honor, as well as duty to kin and country. Most Austrians viewed this sense of obligation as distinct from their personal opinion of the Third Reich or the morality of its war.

Such a backdrop makes Jägerstätter’s unwillingness to serve all the more striking. And yet, this extraordinary story could easily have been lost to history. In the 1960s, sociologist Gordon Zahn was researching Catholic resistance to Nazism when he caught wind of the bold resister from St. Radegund. Intrigued, he traveled to the village, where he interviewed many who knew Franz personally. The resulting 1964 book, In Solitary Witness: The Life and Death of Franz Jägerstätter, introduced the world to this singular figure.

One part reflection on steely Christian resolve, one part meditation on agrarian community and memory, the book presents a captivating portrait. Zahn spoke at length with Franz’s beloved widow, Franziska. He conversed with a priest who admired Franz, and to whom the farmer had explained his decision. He engaged many villagers who knew him personally. Almost without exception, they recalled Franz warmly. And yet most believed that mental illness, not moral principle, had been behind his unwillingness to serve the German military.

Many of these people had, of course, seen their own fathers, uncles, and brothers die in the war. And if Jägerstätter’s refusal to serve Hitler was morally right, how were they to make sense of the deaths of loved ones who had? How were they to justify their own complicity with the regime?

The theory that Franz had become mentally unhinged offered the people of St. Radegund a moral loophole. It allowed them to avoid condemning a man they loved and saw as one of their own. It also permitted them to make sense of his actions without questioning the faithfulness of their tightly-knit Roman Catholic community.

In interviews, Zahn repeatedly heard that Jägerstätter was a good man, but that he had taken his religious zeal too far. In his teens and early twenties, Franz had been known for carousing and brawling—no more so than many young men, locals were quick to add. But even if his youthful conduct wasn’t unusual, it nonetheless carried consequences. While unmarried, Franz likely fathered a child.

Yet, the townspeople later noticed a newfound religious devotion in Franz. At first, they admired this. In 1936, the year he married, he became the parish sexton. This role included maintenance of the church building and grounds, earning him much appreciation. But when he refused to serve the Nazis, friends began to paint his faith as runaway religious fervor, perhaps even derangement. After all, what mentally stable man would willingly leave his family behind?

But the evidence is overwhelming that Franz Jägerstätter was of sound mind. Published in 2009 as Letters and Writings from Prison2, the Austrian’s own words reveal a grounded man with a deep affection for his wife and children. He never once advocates uprising or violence against the Nazi regime. His writings offer no hint of a grandiose self-image, let alone mental illness or a longing for martyrdom.

Rather, his letters are filled with the ordinary concerns of a farmer, husband, and father. On April 25, 1943, his letter included a note for his young daughters:

My dear children, how did things go for you with the Easter eggs? Were you so strong that you broke a lot of them during the egg rolling? Now you will not be able to pick all of the flowers. . .Your father warmly greets you. Do not forget me.

Shortly after, on May 2, he wrote to his wife:

One can always and in general use God’s blessings. You could ask Schmied [a neighbor] about a new rotating ploughshare. . .How does the grain look? You see, I am no less curious in how everything is at home. One remains interested when one loves his home.

Again and again, Franz reveals his heart for his family, farm, and homeland. He asks about the extra work Franziska has to take on in his absence. He inquires how his young daughters are faring. He mentions his love of Austria, calling patriotism a “good and healthy thing.” Now and then, with the same level-headedness and compassion, he brings up Scripture that supports his stand.

The letters reveal both his biblical reasoning and broader spiritual convictions. Like nearly all Austrians of his day, Franz was Roman Catholic. And on subjects including Mary, purgatory, and even how a sinner is justified in the sight of God, his letters include no shortage of statements that will give Protestants unease.

And yet, he also upends stereotypes. Contra the view of many Protestants that Catholics outsource their moral decision-making to the Roman hierarchy, Franz’s religious overseers never endorsed his stand. Rather, he draws arguments for why he cannot serve the Nazis straight from Scripture. “Fear not those who can kill the body but not the soul,” he writes in one letter, quoting Matthew 10:28, “rather fear Him who can destroy both body and soul in hell.”

While such warnings strengthened his resolve, Scripture’s promises of everlasting life drew out his hope and warmth. Just months before his death, he wrote to his wife:

If it is God’s will, we shall have a reunion with each other again in this world. If not, then we hope for it in the next world where the visiting time will be somewhat longer than fifteen to thirty minutes [the time allotted a prisoner for visitation].

The remarkable letters span several years. In 1940 and 1941, before he refused active duty, he chose to take part in military training. From their letters during this time, it’s clear that he and his wife were praying fervently for an end to the war. As Franz became increasingly resolved that he would not fulfill his service, an end to the conflict became his best hope of survival. His participation in the training allowed him to buy time.

And then time ran out.

His three daughters, ages three to six at the time of his death, would grow up without him. Fani, as he affectionately called his wife, raised the girls on the farm and never remarried. She would live as a widow for seventy years, passing on in 2013 at age 100.

This is the most wrenching part of the Franz Jägerstätter story. His act of faith would be vindicated when the full horror of Nazi Germany was exposed. The Catholic Church would come to officially recognize his heroism. But none of that changed the fact he left his wife without a husband, his children without a father.

Reflecting on Fani’s visit to him in prison about a month before his execution, he wrote:

I wanted to spare you this suffering that you have borne for me.

However, you know Christ’s words: “Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, even life itself, cannot be my disciple” (Luke 14:26). How it must have brought Christ much heartache as He inflicted pain on His mother through His suffering, which is not comparable with our suffering. And Jesus endured all of this only out of love for us sinners.

Franz fully understood he was going to cause extraordinary pain to his wife and daughters. Yet, he took God at His Word that allegiance to Him must come first.

The life and death of Franz Jägerstätter raise deep questions, including many that still resonate in our day. This one is inescapable: how did a peasant, whose formal education ended at age fourteen, arrive at such moral certainty? Such wisdom?

He didn’t hesitate to engage clergy with his objections to Hitler’s war. When he did so, he was often told that an ordinary person lacked the ability to determine the justice or injustice of the conflict.

Was Franz then correct in what he said to his lawyer? Was he among the very few who to whom God had graciously given such moral certainty? Or did many of his contemporaries also see the evil of the Reich, only to count the cost, and then veer onto a path of compromise?

Franz’s farewell to his beloved Fani, and to life on earth, was marked by the same straightforwardness as so much of his writing. To the end, he was an ordinary man with faith in an extraordinary Savior.

Four weeks ago today we saw each other on earth for the last time. This morning, at approximately 5:30, I had to get dressed immediately for a car was waiting. I went with other condemned prisoners on the ride from Tegel to Brandenburg. We do not know what will happen to us. At noon someone told me that the verdict would be confirmed at 2:00 p.m., and that it would be fully enacted at 4:00 p.m.

I want to write all of you a few words of farewell. Dearest wife and mother, I am deeply grateful for everything that you have done for me in my life, for all of the love and sacrifices which you have shown me. . .

I thank our Savior that I could suffer for Him and may die for Him. I trust in His infinite compassion. I trust that God forgives me everything and will not abandon me in the last hour.

Freshman year of college I made the terrible decision to take a summer job selling reference books door-to-door. (Apparently at least one company still thought this business model was viable in the early 2000s.) I wound up in North Carolina, which, to a kid from Montana, might as well have been a foreign country.

The whole thing was a fiasco, and a short-lived one at that. But it produced one warm memory. A sweet elderly lady who had no interest whatsoever in my books welcomed me into her house, invited me to sit on the couch, gave me a tall glass of iced tea, and asked,

“Do you have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ?”

Having grown up Catholic-lite, it wasn’t a question I was used to. “I’m still working on that,” I stammered. I thought it was a polite enough brush-off, but her face drooped with disappointment.

A handful of years later, after Jesus opened my eyes, her disappointment finally made sense to me. Encountering and truly knowing the living God is extraordinary beyond words.

And yet even today, while I’m completely on board with what she meant, I admit I still wince a little at the “personal relationship” language. I’m not against it. I know a lot of wonderful Christians for whom those words emerge as naturally as breathing. I just have a (no pun intended) personal hang-up with the phrase. Maybe it’s because it has a “Jesus is my boyfriend” ring to it. Maybe it’s because it’s grown stale from overuse. I don’t really know.

But today I’m gonna run with the “personal relationship” idea. Whatever (real or imagined) flaws it may have, it does point to a practical, ever-ready, not-very-mystical way to understand God’s presence. Think about it this way: if you enter into the presence of a human being, what happens next? Usually, it will be one of two things. Either you’ll talk to each other, in which case you’ve begun a relationship. Or you’ll endure an awkward silence together.

With that in mind, let’s consider God’s presence. Yes, you can encounter God on top of a fourteen-thousand foot mountain. And you can experience Him in a cathedral or a monastery. But you can enter His presence just as reliably on your living room couch. The key to doing so is simply talking to Him. Communication, relationship, and presence are all interconnected.

This is why I’m such a proponent of praying the Bible. It’s a practice many others have encouraged, and one I’ve written about before. It’s as simple as reading something like this:

Holy, holy, holy is the Lord Almighty;

the whole earth is full of His glory.

(Isaiah 6:3)

And then praying something like this:

Lord, thank you for reminding me that you’re holy. You’re set apart from the sin and the mess of this world. And yet somehow you’re still right here with us. Thank you, God, for letting us see you in the things you’ve made. You put your goodness and your glory on display everywhere. Help me to see more of you. And to be filled with more of your holiness.

Or maybe just praying something like this:

Wow, Lord. You’re amazing.

Praying the Bible offers an active means by which to know God. It’s as effective as it is remarkably simple. The Lord speaks to us in His Word. And we answer.

This exchange is downright miraculous. The problem is that it seems so ordinary. It won’t usually coincide with a supernova or angels descending. Similarly, an encouragement to pray the Bible can seem very mundane. Some have even experienced that urging that as a well-meaning, if off-putting, shove.

Remember to read your Bible!

Don’t forget to pray!

How’s your Bible reading been going lately?

There’s a certain type of church where prayer and Bible reading are the only spiritual disciplines that ever seem to come up. (And it’s not one where you’ll hear the term spiritual disciplines.) Alas, seeking God in prayer and Scripture can just seem. . .too obvious.

Meanwhile, other options for Jesus-followers abound. In Practicing the Way (2024), John Mark Comer encourages periods of solitude. Dallas Willard’s Spirit of the Disciplines (1988) offers celebration as a possibility. In Spiritual Disciplines for the Christian Life (1991), Donald Whitney proposes that simply reading for lifelong learning can be a spiritual discipline.

Each of those books also, to be clear, urges prayer and deeply investing yourself in Scripture. And as their varied publication dates show, interest in spiritual disciplines isn’t all that new. Comer’s mega-bestseller has upped the buzz there recently. But Christians in every generation look for practical ways to grow in Christlikeness.

This desire is a great thing. But even good desires can lead to disappointment. If you dive into the literature mentioned above, you could soon find yourself planning a 15-point overhaul of your spiritual life. If you can sustain something like that, I’ll be the first to congratulate you. But most who try that route will sputter out after about a week. The truly tenacious might make it two.

Praying the Bible has the horsepower to drive tremendous change in your life long-term. It’s also not too hard to stick with. This is especially true if you can bring friends or others in your church into it with you. If you already have decent Bible-reading habits, it can feel more like fine-tuning than jamming another practice into your life. And yet, you’ll find it occasionally nudges you to try other spiritual disciplines. Like a tributary flowing into a larger stream, it can gradually, sustainably, lead you into the kind of life you wanted when you lunged for the 15-point overhaul. Because if any practice can be genuinely described as a spiritual discipline, surely God’s Word will point you to it sooner or later.

It will also point you to God’s grace. “We love because He first loved us” is a powerful reminder of what makes any of this possible (1 John 4:19). All of our human efforts, whether or not they show up on a list of “official” spiritual practices, need to flow out of God’s love and grace. And the love Jesus showed us by laying His life down for our sins opens the door to our faithful response.

The sequence of God’s grace, followed by our response, is wonderfully captured in the pattern of praying the Bible. As with grace, Scripture must be received as a gift. No human is its ultimate author, after all. And as the Word itself reminds us, it’s a gift we respond to—by talking plainly and honestly with the Giver. And what better place to start? Every great relationship, after all, begins with good conversation.

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“Why do we see so little change in Christians?”

The compassion in the pastor’s voice underscored his concern. I was seated at a table, along with him and four or five classmates. We quietly let the weight of the question sink in.

“In our day,” he continued, “We have every kind of resource you can imagine for studying the Bible. What’s available to us far surpasses what any past generation had.”

He paused, possibly for effect, although it felt as if he was pondering the question right along with us.

“Yet why so little change?”

I heard that question around 2014.

I recalled it later that decade when I saw the confidence of the New Calvinist movement shattered by pastoral scandal. And as I saw friends drift away to unbelief.

I recalled it again when a small town church asked me to step in and preach for them during a transition. Here, the pastor had served faithfully for thirty years, and a head injury had forced a sudden retirement. The hearts of the people in that church were warm and welcoming, but the congregation had dwindled to around fifteen souls. In a town of five hundred, it was the last remaining church that upheld the Bible as fully God-breathed (2 Timothy 3:16).

Some ask, “Why so little change?”

In this town, many were asking, “Why so much?”

After the birth of our first child, my wife and I came to the difficult decision that bi-vocational ministry wasn’t our future. We shared an emotional goodbye with our church. We moved and I found work as a delivery driver. Able to listen to books and podcasts on the job, I took in a wide range of Christian perspectives. I was struck by how fractured the church had become. Although the fault lines had surely been forming for some time, it was still shocking to see the fissures out in the open. The atmosphere was starkly different from what I had discovered a decade earlier as a wide-eyed new believer.

Why so little change?

Why so much?

Both were fair questions. And I was becoming convinced they were related.

By the early 2010s, Christians in the United States were swimming upstream. And we knew it, even if just on a gut level. Eager for a positive spin, we tried this narrative: although our numbers were dropping, those who remained were becoming more committed and pursuing a deeper understanding of God’s Word. To put it the clunkiest way possible, our quantity was decreasing, but surely our quality was improving.

Unfortunately, this silver lining was likely wishful thinking. A 2022 study by Ligonier Ministries found that almost half of evangelicals1 agreed with the statement that “Jesus was a great teacher, but he was not God.” The same poll discovered that a majority—58 percent—believed that God accepts the worship of all religions.

Around that same time, researchers put numbers to the feeling in the pits of our stomachs. Over the previous 25 years, a staggering 40 million people had stopped attending church. That’s almost 12 percent of America’s entire population. We had been living through the biggest religious shift in our nation’s history. In terms of the headcount, it was larger than all of historic revivals in the United States combined.

Pause and consider the collective weight of our challenges. First, leadership scandals, both high-profile and local, had become an expected part of Christian life2. Meanwhile, roughly half of supposed believers lacked a basic understanding of the faith. Further, a colossal number of Americans had stopped bothering with church entirely. For those who remained, the landscape was full of tripwires ready to fuel mistrust and spark further division.

Fortunately, the tide may be turning. Bible sales jumped unexpectedly in 2024. Church attendance has ticked up slightly among younger Americans, men in particular. Even some atheists are realizing that Christianity’s decline has cost our country something priceless.

It’s a shift I’m still adjusting to personally. It can feel like I’ve lived my whole believing life in a fog of Christian disappointment. This new flicker of optimism is compelling, but unfamiliar to me. And even if we do see a genuine Christian awakening in our country, it will come with extraordinary challenges.

“Why so little change?”

After a pause, the pastor offered these two words: “No application.”

In his view, Christians knew all about the Bible, but few were living like it. In case you’re wondering, this sixty-something pastor was, in his own words, “a once-saved-always-saved guy.” He would have completely rejected any notion that we could earn God’s love or mercy. Rather, he longed to see believers respond to that divine gift with vigor and persistence.

Maybe he was right. And maybe this is where the dots connect. Could decades of too many Christians settling for too little change in their own lives have triggered the landslide of unwanted change we’re now reeling from? Had so little change, in fact, become the cause of so much?

Other factors have surely contributed. We’ve seen extraordinary shifts in technology, politics, and sexual morality in recent decades. And while these have undoubtedly taken a toll, we need to be cautious how much power we attribute to them. That’s because while it’s comfortable to point the finger at changes largely outside the church, it also disempowers us.

The alternative, while it stings, actually offers more hope for the long haul. What we can take responsibility for, by God’s grace, we can change.

“No application.”

He didn’t choose the most inspiring way of putting it. But I believe this seasoned pastor was urging believers to take responsibility for our actions. And that much, I certainly still agree with.

Even so, these days, I’d choose a somewhat different emphasis. I’d say we need to get upstream of our own application, actions, and efforts.

If we’re going to see renewal in our day, the kind that lasts, I think we need to go to the headwaters.

We need to spend time in God’s presence.

Everything else that is holy and redeeming, everything truly desirable, originates there.

Because in Him we live and move and have our being (Acts 17:28).

How will you seek God’s presence this week? If you’ve been a reader here for a while, you know some of my favorite ways. But if you haven’t, you might actually be at an advantage.

See, this is the heart of the conundrum: the moment I say, to discover God’s presence, try . . .

Then I’ve slipped back into application. Into to-do’s. Which I’m actually fine with. I’ve spent time in Christian circles where to-do’s have gotten a needlessly bad rap. Jesus, you may have noticed, gave a lot of commands.

But He also sought His Father’s presence. And He didn’t always do it in exactly the same way.

So that’s what I want to leave you with this week. It’s not how I intended to end this post when I began. But it feels right to me.

I don’t know exactly how you should seek God’s presence today. Or tomorrow.

But He does.

Ask Him.

Greetings! I know the gap between posts was a little longer than usual, but all is well! A new role at work shuffled my schedule a bit, and I’ve been enjoying some summer fun with the family too.

This week marks one year since I started this Substack. Lately I’ve wanted to summarize its main themes in a single post, and the anniversary seems like a good excuse to try. So keep an eye out for the upcoming, “What Is the Long Renewal?”

And welcome to all the newcomers! For reasons unknown to me, a bunch of people have subscribed since I last posted. I guess it turns out that the secret to finding new readers is to take a couple weeks off.

There’s no thrill quite like swinging a broom at bats whizzing by.

Or so my dad tells me.

His early years on a farm in Eastern Washington were the setting for countless adventures. A favorite escapade took place in the barn. It began with climbing hay bales stacked up nearly to the rafters. By this route, a clan of cousins, most with ages still in the single digits, ascended to the upper loft. It was a mysterious world where slumbering bats dangled just overhead. Quietly, the crew placed tarps over any openings to the outside world. Soon every winged escape path was sealed.

Then they turned the lights on. The bats went into a frenzy.

Dad and his co-conspirators were ready with their brooms. The goal, apparently, was to whack a bat so hard it wound up dazed and rolling around on the hay. Then, naturally, you put it in a jar.

But echolocation made the task tricky.

“Harder than you might think to hit one,” Dad says.

Growing up, I would hear the farm stories on summer evenings at family reunions. One involved trying to smoke a squirrel out of a hole in a tree (not recommended). Another featured Dad at age six or seven climbing unnoticed onto a tractor. He drew some attention as soon as he disengaged the gear and set the machine in motion down a hill. His own father, fittingly, came to the rescue (and nearly lost his leg in the process).

At the family gatherings, you could never predict when Dad and his siblings would start reminiscing. But once they did, it was as if a champagne bottle of memories had been uncorked. Their laughter was deep, and their joy was evident.

From Soil to Screens

The stories, from the late 1950s and early 1960s, are still within living memory. And apart from a few modern wonders like the tractor, their experiences would have been familiar to children going back countless generations.

What’s happened since? I think of the cartoon trope where a hapless character is sucked up in a tornado, then gets plopped down in an unfamiliar location. We’re all sitting here stunned now, staring out at the modern world, blinking occasionally. It’s no surprise we can’t make sense of it. Until very recently, wisdom collected over millennia remained practical and relevant. But now each generation’s experience is foreign to the last.

When he started elementary school, my dad lived on a farm. At the same age, I put a floppy disc into a computer and played Oregon Trail. Today, my kids would watch John Deere tractor videos on YouTube all day if I let them.

And for most children now, that’s all agriculture is: optional entertainment. Even back in 2019, a study found that kids were logging an average of 150 minutes of screen time per day at age three. Pixel-based amusement didn’t put an end to the family farm, but it did gobble up our attention after its demise. And a vicious cycle is emerging with excessive time on devices fueling emotional problems in young people, who then turn back to screens to cope.

You’d have to go back earlier than the 1950s to find a time when childhood on a farm was the American norm. But it’s still startling how quickly the dirt-under-the-fingernails childhood has vanished. And how it’s been replaced by the gleam of the screen.

What stories will today’s kids have to tell? What will they reminisce about when they’re grown?

Whether you’re new here or a familiar face, please say hello in the comments. And if you’re inclined to share: What’s a childhood story that you still tell today?

Pushing Back

Reflecting on so much rapid change poses its own challenges. Some will feel regret or defensiveness. Others may simply shrug and pivot to false choices: You have a rosy view of a farming life you never knew? Leery of technological change? Maybe you should just join the Amish!

Many will agree that a shift is badly needed, but find it hard to sustain. A goal of simply reducing screen time will probably fail—for kids or for any of us. Choosing to not do something is hard, and doubly so when that something draws us back with sound effects and glowing images. A better chance of success will come with aiming for something. We need something positive to aim our attention at. A replacement.

The soil offers a great antidote to digital delirium. Unlike media that offers one instant dopamine hit after another, growing plants is wonderfully slow. And you don’t have to upend your life and buy a farm to experience this. Last winter I built a garden box that’s now bursting with food our family enjoys. The kids love watering and even weeding it.

If I’ve piqued your interest, an internet search for “raised garden bed plans” will turn up plenty of options. You don’t even need much in the way of tools or skills. I put ours together with a cordless drill and a few screws. A store that sells the wood will usually also cut it to length if you ask.

Like the idea but don’t want to build anything? Just use pots. There are options for nearly every skillset and living space. And there are plants for every season (summer isn’t too late to get started).

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Cultivating the Mind of Christ

I’m about to turn a corner here. Of course, if you know my writing, you already know I have more on my mind than just fresh tomatoes or a screen-free hobby. As a Christian, I want to fill my mind with God’s Word and orient my life to its rhythms. I want that for our whole family. I want that for you and yours.

A shift back from the screen to the soil, even a small one, helps in this regard. The connection between gardening and the Bible isn’t immediately obvious, so I’ll explain.

Consider. . .did you possibly skim your way to this point in the post? Don’t worry, I don’t take it personally. Almost everyone on a device does that. A 2008 study found that people were only reading about 25% of the words on a webpage. That number is likely much lower today. And the rise of screen reading has transformed the way we read everything, including the Bible.

In turn, even the way we think about Scripture has changed. As we skim, we quickly ask, “What’s my takeaway from this passage?” We’ve trained our brains for efficiency. We want to distill information as quickly as possible and then move on. To put it a tackier way, we approach God’s Word asking, “Where’s a good spiritual life-hack I can use?”

The problem is that Scripture eventually disappoints when you approach it like this. You won’t experience the kind of growth in God that truly satisfies.

Consider that fact as you read Romans 5:1-5:

Therefore, since we have been justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have gained access by faith into this grace in which we now stand. And we rejoice in the hope of the glory of God. Not only so, but we also rejoice in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope. And hope does not disappoint us, because God has poured out his love into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, whom he has given us.

There’s a cascading quality to this passage, with each idea overflowing into the next. Yes, you could skim it, remind yourself that God loves you, and carry on. But sitting with each powerful statement and contemplating it will yield much more.

Justification. Peace with God. Faith. Grace.

Those four ideas are mentioned in just the first sentence. And each offers a whole universe of scriptural associations to meditate on.

See, to really internalize Scripture we need the mind of a gardener. We need to be patient and observant. We need to understand that the formation of a Christ-like soul is a slow, mysterious process.

Embrace it.

And don’t forget to share the stories you gain along the way.

Alarm Bells

Even when it’s silent, you can almost hear them. Sirens. Alarms. Every day. New headlines. New warnings. It’s not just reflexive fear or pessimism. A lot is really going wrong all at once.

Consider:

• We’re living through an economic crisis. Most Americans’ earnings have been stagnant for decades. The real wages of working-class men have been flat for over 40 years. Millions of middle class Americans have given up the dream of owning a home.

• Our crisis is also cultural. Whatever your views of immigration, the stability of the Western world has been upended by a backlash against porous borders. Meanwhile, we hotly dispute the meanings of the words male and female.

• Our crisis is geopolitical. The longstanding trust that bound the United States to the rest of the West is evaporating. China, a high-tech surveillance state, believes its moment to surpass America’s influence has arrived. Israel and Iran are now at war, and a brutal conflict still rages three years after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

• Our crisis is ecological. Eighteen of the nineteen hottest years on record have occurred since 2000. God’s creation is changing unpredictably, with the variety of plant and animal life declining rapidly. Even in America, millions lack clean drinking water.

• Our crisis is technological. The average person now stares at a small screen for nearly five hours every day, a number that keeps increasing. Big tech algorithms fuel anger, anxiety, and loneliness. Rates of depression sit at an all-time high. The average child is now exposed to pornography around age 12. And as ChatGPT aims for a billion users, AI could soon make past technological disruptions seem mild by comparison.

• Amidst all the disorienting change, “old” tragedies persist. Think of drug and alcohol addiction, domestic abuse, broken families, or abortion.

Even if our politics were healthy, these challenges would be daunting. And yet, at this crucial moment, our civic fabric is unraveling. Imagine hearing that some other government was disappearing people off the streets and shipping them to foreign jails. And then picture that country opening the door to its military detaining its citizens1. You know exactly what you’d think if that were happening somewhere else.

Why are so many pillars of sanity and morality and liberty teetering all at once?

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The Crisis Behind the Crumbling

One key answer lies in yet another crisis: over the last 25 years, 40 million Americans stopped going to church. That’s equal to the entire population of twenty-two states2. We’re talking about one-in-eight Americans. It’s the biggest religious shift in our country’s history. In sheer numbers, the loss is more than the believers added by all of America’s past revivals combined.

That’s tens of millions who are no longer shaped by God’s word. Tens of millions no longer connected to live-giving Christian community. Think of the countless hours of dead-end pursuits that could have been spent in Scripture. Think of the millions of prayers that were never prayed.

Of course falling numbers in the American church don’t account for all of the rising chaos. But if you know the power of God personally, you understand that losses on that scale explain a lot.

Do Not Lose Heart

Despair, of course, is one possible response. But it can’t be the choice of God’s people, who are commanded to rejoice in all circumstances (1 Thessalonians 5:16). Consider also Paul’s words from 2 Corinthians 4:16–18:

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 us for an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, as we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal.

With faith in Jesus Christ, it’s possible to view anything we suffer in this world as a light momentary affliction. I don’t emphasize that to be dismissive of your pain. I say it because the same Holy Spirit who dwelt within Paul is available to all who believe. If he remained faithful through shipwrecks, beatings, and betrayals, we too can persevere whatever the future holds (2 Corinthians 11:24–27).

Paul’s recounting of his sufferings also pushes back against another temptation: denial. This holds appeal, even for Christians. The shelves at the stores are still stocked. Gas isn’t being rationed. Most Americans who want a job have one.

Yet, just as Paul doesn’t sugarcoat or deny the sufferings he endured, we shouldn’t dismiss the ominous clouds that are gathering. We’re called to be a discerning people. “Wise as serpents” is how Matthew 10:16 puts it. Thankfully, this kind of savvy doesn’t suppress our hope. That’s because even if world we know crumbles, the Spirit will keep pointing us to the “glory beyond all comparison” that lies ahead.

Examine Yourself

With that in mind, it’s a good time to take stock of your faith. Reflect on the simple truth that God “shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” (Romans 5:18). When we first respond to the Lord in faith, we receive the fullness of his love and grace. Consider how God chooses to see his children. In his sight, we are not smeared in our sin, but clothed in the righteousness of his Son Jesus (2 Corinthians 5:21). Astonishing as it may seem, weary sinners who believe are already forgiven in God’s eyes. He already sees us as holy.

Remember the words of the Apostle’s Creed:

I believe in God, the Father almighty,
Creator of heaven and earth.

I believe in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord.
He was conceived by the power of the Holy Spirit
and born of the virgin Mary.
He suffered under Pontius Pilate,
was crucified, died, and was buried.
He descended to the dead.
On the third day he rose again.
He ascended into heaven,
and is seated at the right hand of the Father.
He will come again to judge the living and the dead.

I believe in the Holy Spirit,
the holy catholic Church,
the communion of the saints,
the forgiveness of sins,
the resurrection of the body,
and the life everlasting. Amen.

These are the steadfast truths that will sustain souls in an unpredictable world.

Do you believe them?

Do you live them?

Do you gather together with other followers of Jesus to celebrate them? Do you receive communion, the Lord’s Supper? Do you rejoice in baptisms? When you mourn departed saints, is even your grief lifted up by the hope of everlasting life?

Confession Brings Renewal

I promise I didn’t stack up all those crises earlier to unnerve you. I did it so that you won’t deny what you feel in your gut. We really are living in a strange and dangerous time. It’s not your imagination.

The Bible instructs us to live without fear (Isaiah 41:10, among many other verses). But that doesn’t mean we should deny that there are fearful things in this world. Christ makes it possible for us to be clear-eyed about how terrible this world can be and to live with hope, purpose, and peace.

I know I’ve already said a lot in this post, but I’ve got one last appeal. And it could be the most important step you take to prepare for the road ahead.

As I said above, examine your heart and mind. And then ask the Lord if you’re carrying any sin that you haven’t brought out into the light. Then set yourself free by confessing it to another trusted believer.

Don’t miss the two specifics I mentioned. First, don’t assume you don’t have anything you need to confess. Years ago, shortly after I became a Christian, the Lord brought a sin to mind that I’d completely forgotten about. The term “repressed memory” would likely apply. The book of Proverbs compares a man’s heart to deep water (20:5). We don’t always realize what’s hidden beneath the waves.

Next, if the Lord brings a sin to mind, confess it to an actual person. A lot of us are good at coming up with excuses to sidestep this. But James 5:16 reminds us to confess our sins not only to God, but also to one another. The verse’s context raises the possibility that this could bring physical healing.

If such talk of healing gives you pause, consider this: the line between the healing of our bodies and our sprits is blurrier than many today appreciate. I think every time I’ve ever confessed sin, I felt better physically afterward. It was if I became lighter, relieved of a burden I only dimly realized I was carrying.

Start Wherever You Are

Given where I began this post, confession might seem an unexpected place to end. I agree with that. I see reaffirming our faith and confessing our sins as the starting point in our response to rising challenges. There’s much more to say about the path ahead. Lord willing, I’ll get to pick up those themes in the future. But to run any race, you have to first cross the starting line.

There’s no quick fix to any single earthly problem we face. And they’re all coming at us at once, often tangled up with one another. For a time like this, you want to know that you know God’s love and forgiveness. You need to be set free of any sin that you’re carrying.

The renewal we need began two thousand years ago. That’s because the Son of God laid down his life and rose from the grave. His resurrection was a victory over sin and death. Today, the forces that corrode and corrupt our world are still potent. But they are also like walking corpses, destined for defeat.

God’s renewal will get the last word. Let it begin today in your heart, mind, and life. And watch it spread outward from there.

Could one single habit transform your walk with God?

Before you dismiss that idea as gimmicky, give this a try.

I began this year by urging people to pray the Bible. By that, I just mean when you read Scripture, pause from time to time and pray in response. If you’re not used to doing that, it might feel a little awkward at first. But stick with it and I promise you’ll get into a flow.

Psalms lend themselves readily to this kind of prayer and are the best place to try it out. But it’s when you discover that you can pray any part of the Bible that you tap into the real power and potential of the practice.

So let’s start in the beginning.

About a week ago, when I opened up my Bible to Genesis 1 and started praying, I didn’t have a plan. I had no idea where it would go and no particular expectation for what this post might become.

I did know I was headed into more challenging territory than I was used to. After all, I’m much more accustomed to praying verses like those that open Psalm 91.

He who dwells in the shelter of the Most High will rest in the shadow of the Almighty.

I will say of the Lord, “He is my refuge and my fortress, my God, in whom I trust.”

Here, you might pray, Lord you are my refuge. You are a fortress. Thank you that I can dwell in your shelter. You are the only one who offers protection that never ends. Your shadow is where I can find true light and true rest. Thank you, God. I trust you.

Those verses practically script your prayer for you. On the other hand, a passage like Genesis 1 may not lead to an obvious prayer reflection.

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.

I paused. I wasn’t quite sure how to respond to that. Thank you, Lord, for making everything!

It was a start. On to the second verse:

Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.

At this point, I was feeling kind of stumped. Whenever I need a prayer fallback plan, another thank you, God will almost always do the trick. But even that seemed a little odd here. Thank you for hovering over the waters?

I decided to grab a notebook to shake things up. And if you happen to have one where you are, I’d encourage you to do the same right now.

Although I first heard of journaling prayers long ago, I have to admit I’ve rarely ever tried it.

I found it drew out prayers that differed from my usual. Maybe the nature of writing lends itself to asking questions. Because I suddenly found myself including lots of those.

And since that looks like a doctor’s scrawl on a prescription, I’ll type the questions too.

• Lord, what were you thinking as you hovered over those waters?

• Is thinking even the right word to use? Do I risk making you too human?

• Were you filled with the joy of anticipation?

Try this right now. Re-read the first two verses of Genesis and write down your own prayer response. It doesn’t have to be anything like mine. It doesn’t even need to sound particularly spiritual. It just has to be honest.

When you hear the Lord “speak” these words, what’s your first response?

Genesis 1 is unique among the Bible’s chapters in that, through most of it, human beings don’t exist yet. Praying in response to it, then, might scuttle our go-to prayer requests. It could press us to ask God questions, as it did with me. Or it might give us space to simply praise the Lord for who he is (Psalm 96:4).

Removing ourselves from our own prayers is a great practice from time to time. Then later, when we do return to God with our requests (Philippians 4:6), we’ll find they’re shaped by a deeper awe for who he is. They’ll contain more gratitude, even in those times when our needs are great.

Move on to the next verses now. Again, just write your first, honest response. What does this word from the Lord spur you to say back to him?

And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. God saw that the light was good, and he separated the light from the darkness. God called the light “day,” and the darkness he called “night.” And there was evening and there was morning—the first day.

You might have noticed that I didn’t bias you this time. I asked you to write down your prayer response before I shared mine.

Here, I found myself contemplating how light, throughout the Bible, is an image of God’s goodness and love. And yet, every aspect of the Lord’s character existed before he spoke the momentous words, “Let there be light.” That original light was physical light as we know it. But it was more than that. It revealed something of God’s essence. Or at least it would have, had anyone been there to perceive it.

I felt joy welling up in me as I pondered these mysteries, pen to paper, in the presence of God. Meditating on the “evening and morning” refrain, I began to think about the in-between age we live in. No sooner does the light arrive in full than the darkness begins its return. That darkness is then followed by light, only to be pursued by darkness again. On and on it goes. And then the Lord lifted my thoughts to the end of that cycle.

There will be no more night. And [God’s people] will not need the light of a lamp or the light of the sun, for the Lord God will give them light. And they will reign forever and ever. (Revelation 22:5)

Take some time to continue praying to the Light-giver. Ponder his goodness on display in creation.

If you’re still holding out, go grab that pen and notebook now. And if you’ve already begun, carry on. It will be time well spent.

Richard Wurmbrand’s story must be told. And yet, how to share it?

Beginning in the late 1940s, the Romanian Lutheran pastor endured two separate periods in prison for his faith. Over a total of fourteen years, he suffered extraordinary cruelties at the hands of his nation’s Communist regime.

From his 1967 book, Tortured for Christ, it’s clear that Wurmbrand himself wrestled with how to share some aspects of his testimony. On the one hand, his account is searing and direct. He writes that “all the biblical descriptions of hell and the pains of Dante’s Inferno are nothing in comparison with the tortures in Communist prisons.”

Yet he withholds specific descriptions of some of the things he saw and experienced. After recounting a particularly graphic humiliation suffered by a priest, Wurmbrand writes, “Other things simply cannot be told. My heart would fail if I should tell them again and again. They are too terrible and obscene to put in writing.”

How do you share a story with parts too terrible to tell?

How do you shine the light of Christ into an unfathomably dark place?

For Wurmbrand, one key is recalling how it will all end. He transcends the wretchedness of prison by remembering the glorious future that awaits those who suffer for Jesus.

I had around me men like Lazarus the beggar, hungry and covered with boils. But I knew that angels would take these men to the bosom of Abraham. I saw them as they will be in the future. I saw in the shabby, dirty, weak martyr near me the splendidly crowned saint of tomorrow.

His hopeful vision even extended to his tormentors.

But looking at men like this—not as they are, but as they will be—I could also see in our persecutors a Saul of Tarsus—a future apostle Paul.

Wurmbrand writes that he witnessed many officers of the Communist secret police come to faith in Jesus. Again and again, it was the compassion of the very Christians they afflicted that eventually opened their hearts. It was the faithfulness of those who truly loved their enemies.

During his imprisonment, this irrepressible, Christlike love took hold of Wurmbrand. Consider this encounter, following his imprisonment, with Western believers who had come to Romania:

[These believers] told me that they had heard that at this address there was someone who had spent fourteen years in prison, and they would like to see him. I told them that I was the man. They said, “We expected to see someone melancholic. You cannot be this person because you are full of joy.”

Yet another difficulty of telling Wurmbrand’s story arises. Here, it’s tempting to shoehorn his life into a trite takeaway: remain faithful and you’ll know joy no matter what life throws at you!

There’s truth to that tidbit. But there’s also a tidiness that betrays what Wurmbrand—and countless other persecuted Christians—have experienced.

That’s one reason it’s worth reading Wurmbrand’s account, or another like it, in full. It takes time to consider the deep contours of such a harrowing experience. Brief retellings can seem mired in contradictions. Yet, a lengthy reflection will reveal credible paradoxes: the pastor’s mind fiercely rejected communism while his heart overflowed with mercy for communists. His unfathomable suffering brought forth a deep wellspring of joy in Christ.

I chose Wurmbrand’s story because of its relationship to Brother Andrew’s, which I shared recently. Andrew’s clandestine ministry delivered Bibles behind the Iron Curtain. He even traveled to Romania in 1957. Years later, he and Wurmbrand would meet.

While the lives of the two men clearly had parallels, the contrasts are starker. Brother Andrew, astonishingly, was never imprisoned during his years of Bible smuggling. Many consider this fact to be a miracle.

Wurmbrand contends that he too experienced a miracle, although one of a very different kind. Without supernatural intervention, he feels certain that the abuses he endured in prison would have killed him.

Again, how do we tell a story like this? Do we recall it with awe that moves us to worship God? Or do we tell it with anger? Or with fear? How do we account for the workings of a God who wields supernatural power, yet allows his beloved people to suffer the unspeakable?

Perhaps we simply have to stop. We have to let go of our efforts to make intellectual sense of it. And then we can join with Paul in saying, “Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways!” (Romans 11:33)

Then with ears to hear, we can return to voice of Richard Wurmbrand:

One great lesson arose from all the beatings, tortures, and butchery of the Communists: that the spirit is the master of the body. We felt the torture, but it often seemed as something distant and far removed from the spirit which was lost in the glory of Christ and His presence with us.

Thank you so much for reading. In a couple of weeks, give or take, I’m going to follow up with another post on Wurmbrand. There, I’ll consider some of the direct challenges he presents to readers in his book and how we might respond.

In the meantime, you might take a look at The Voice of the Martyrs, the organization he founded.

Have a blessed week!

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Let’s imagine a pair of twins separated at birth, Zeke and Zach.

Despite growing up in different families on opposite sides of the country, both brothers become Christians in high school.

And while both are still attending church in their mid-twenties, their lives look vastly different by this time. Zeke wakes up at 5 AM each morning to read his Bible and pray. He fasts twice a month and often teaches Sunday school. He hasn’t watched an R-rated movie in years.

For his part, Zach shows up to church almost as often as his brother, but sometimes it’s with a self-inflicted headache. See, Zach’s been known to have a few drinks on Saturday night. Even so, he seems to be a sincere Christian. He’s slowly gained a good grasp of the Bible. He’s honest about his faults, and he drinks less frequently than he used to.

Zeke and Zach are a thought experiment, not real people. And yet you might know believers who fit those profiles. Maybe one or the other even reminds you of yourself.

Are you the rule-following Christian who’s seen as leaning toward legalism?

Or more of the lax, carefree type, who tilts toward an attitude of license?

In church circles I’ve known, people often assume a believer fits one of the two molds. This idea is often unspoken, influencing our attitudes like a river’s undertow. Other times it’s presented plainly.

And I know this generalization rings true for many. But the framing still strikes me as too tidy. Last fall, in a post about God’s grace and Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s tenacious ministry, I wrote:

I think this [idea that most people are tempted by either legalism or license] is an oversimplification, personally. But even if it’s a fair generalization, the idea can still nudge us in the direction of a serious mistake. It can lead to the assumption that if a believer makes a lot of effort to obey God’s word, that person probably has a legalistic streak. This, in turn, sets the stage for making mediocre, half-hearted Christian living seem like the ideal.

After all, as the logic goes, too little obedience might be a sign of spiritual carelessness or license. But on the other hand, too much obedience might be a sign of equally dangerous legalism. Splitting the difference then can be assumed to be the sweet spot. The safe option then seems to be making some effort to grow in Jesus but not too much, to avoid being labeled a legalist.

I still agree with this, and this time I’ll throw in a diagram for good measure. I’ll even give it some juicy gossip (by church standards).

Again, if you want to insist that every Christian you know is either a Zeke or a Zach, that’s fine. I’m not too concerned with how applicable the generalizations are. My question is whether this framework could do harm as well as good.

Consider the charming believer who succeeds at splitting the difference between the two poles. Are we really sure this person is steering clear of legalism? It depends how we think about the concept.

In every church I’ve ever known, you’ll find social acceptance as long as you avoid profanity and the “big sins.” Don’t cuss, don’t have sex outside of marriage, and ideally don’t get addicted to anything. If you are an addict, you’ll still get by as long as you can keep your sin reasonably private. You’ll eventually make friends in any church if you can be polite and follow those rules.

Wait, did I say rules? Yes, Christian culture is guided by the unspoken rules I just mentioned. If you can follow them, you’ll gain favor. If you can’t, you likely won’t. People may still be nice to you (we’re Christians, after all!), but you won’t find the same level of acceptance.

Of course, there’s a distortion on display here. The purpose of following Jesus isn’t to gain social status in the here-and-now. It’s to receive everlasting life and help others to do the same. But this gets to my point. We recognize that a Zeke could, at least in principle, be offering up a superficial moral performance. Likewise, many churchgoers abide by the simplified rules of moral performance that I described earlier. Those who do so could very well land at the sweet spot of acceptance in the diagram above. Meanwhile, their motivations could be just as misguided as that of a (genuinely legalistic) Zeke. They just have fewer rules to follow!

Let’s come at this from another angle. We just saw how the “middle of the chart” Christian could be embracing a subtle form of legalism. Now let’s ask whether someone like Zeke is necessarily a legalist.

To think through this, let’s look to the apostle Paul. And let’s be plain, the man was a fanatic. Even as he leapfrogged from tightly-wound Pharisee to ardent Christian, his type-A disposition remained. I’m reminded of this by 1 Thessalonians 2:8–9:

We loved you so much that we were delighted to share with you not only the gospel of God but our lives as well, because you had become so dear to us. Surely you remember, brothers, our toil and hardship; we worked night and day in order not to be a burden to anyone while we preached the gospel of God to you.

It’s humbling to remember that Paul often funded his ministry by working as a tentmaker. Apparently, he pulled this off by putting in very long hours. In modern church culture, someone laboring as relentlessly as Paul would likely be considered a workaholic. Maybe even a legalist. After all, if you really understood that your salvation was made possible by what Jesus did for you, couldn’t you chill out a little?

Paul surely enjoyed some times of rest, but likely not nearly as many as we’d expect today. Consider 2 Corinthians 11:24–28:

Five times I received at the hands of the Jews the forty lashes less one. Three times I was beaten with rods. Once I was stoned. Three times I was shipwrecked; a night and a day I was adrift at sea; on frequent journeys, in danger from rivers, danger from robbers, danger from my own people, danger from Gentiles, danger in the city, danger in the wilderness, danger at sea, danger from false brothers; in toil and hardship, through many a sleepless night, in hunger and thirst, often without food, in cold and exposure. And, apart from other things, there is the daily pressure on me of my anxiety for all the churches.

Suffering and persecution aren’t the same as self-imposed acts of obedience. Yet the symmetry isn’t hard to see here. Paul’s willingness to repeatedly throw himself into difficult situations fits with the lifestyle of “night and day” toil that he described in 1 Thessalonians. Calling him zealous for good works would be an understatement.

And so we arrive at the paradox of this great saint. If anyone might have appeared to be trying to earn his salvation, it was Paul. Meanwhile, he’s the go-to guy in the Scripture on salvation by grace. Romans 3:22–24 is but one of many examples:

This righteousness from God comes through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe. There is no difference, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus.

There’s no doubt many have found the “legalism versus license” framework helpful. At the same time, if we could see into the depths of the human heart, I wonder if we wouldn’t find this paradigm upended.

Maybe the people with the deepest appreciation of God’s grace are those whose lives are filled with the most astonishing works. Paul is surely an example of this. Modern-day believers like Corrie ten Boom, Brother Andrew, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Richard Wurmbrand point to the same conclusion.

Why is this? Maybe a deep appreciation of the Lord’s mercy is the very thing that forges vibrant, obedient souls. Possibly it’s because vigilant faithfulness makes our need to rely on God all the more evident. A Christian who makes a half-hearted effort might cling to the illusion that more rule-following could yet deliver him to a higher spiritual plane.

But the one who’s exhausted himself through obedience knows the foolishness of that. And so this weary believer looks, once again, to Jesus on the cross. This depleted saint turns to the One who accepted every human limitation. He relies on the One who endured insults and suffering. He again surrenders his life to the One who entered the grave, only to rise from it and shatter its power. And it’s then, reassured of the Father’s love and renewed by the Spirit, that this soul discovers the strength to carry on.