For my purposes here, I’m observing two primary groups. On one side, some hold conspiratorial claims that the Jews hold disproportionate power in our society, which they wield in ways that benefit the nation of Israel more than their own country. Some argue the Jews are deliberately destroying the moral fabric of our society for their own gain. In this space are names like Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, and Ian Carroll.

On the other side is a more Zionist posture, that regards Israel as America’s #1 ally, to whom we should give total allegiance, and to criticize Israel is anti-semitic. In this space are Jewish names like Ben Shapiro, Yoram Hazony, and Mark Levin, and some Catholic names like Christopher Rufo and Rick Lowry. There are also evangelical names in this space, likely influenced by dispensational theology, such as Ted Cruz, Mike Huckabee, Paula White, Robert Jeffress, and Tony Perkins. While dispensational theology is not as prominent as it once was, it still informs evangelicalism’s reflexes, leading people to believe that Christians should support Israel because they’re God’s chosen people.

Who are the Jews?

The Jews persist as a unique people in human history. They are the only people group whose religious identity has a genetic component, yet they are not confined to a single geography. No other ethnic group has maintained a distinct identity over four thousand years without being absorbed by surrounding cultures.

Globally, Jews represent about 0.2% of the world’s population, with a little less than half of them living in Israel and the rest living in a diaspora around the world.

The Jews also tend to thrive wherever they are. In the USA, about 2% of our population is Jewish, yet they represent roughly 1/3 of the four hundred wealthiest Americans. They hold the keys to cultural power, being a strong force in Hollywood, the music industry, banking, technology, the news media, and pornography.

The nation of Israel was founded in 1948 after World War II, and that nation has been at the center of geopolitical conflict ever since. The October 7th Hamas attack, the Gaza war, and American foreign policy debates — none of this is going away.

I’m not in an informed enough position to adjudicate these things, I’m simply reporting on the kinds of discussions unfolding online on a daily basis. Every time these subjects come up, Christians don’t know what to think, because we’ve been given two options: (1) uncritical support for Israel because “they’re God’s chosen people,” or (2) a vague discomfort that we’re not allowed to talk about any of this at all for fear of being labeled anti-semitic.

Paul’s Anguish

Since the Bible doesn’t mention America or China or Russia or Ukraine, Christians of good faith need to apply biblical principles to our understanding of geopolitics. But the Bible does mention Israel by name, and we do have a country on the map by the same name. My aim here is to identify who the Bible is referring to, especially in Romans 9-11, and what it means for us today.

In Romans 9:3, Paul describes feeling a personal anguish over the Jews because they, his “kinsmen according to the flesh,” have largely rejected their Messiah. Paul is speaking specifically of the biological descendants of Abraham, who are “are Israelites, and to them belong the adoption, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the law, the worship, and the promises” (v4). Ultimately, “from their race, according to the flesh, is the Christ, who is God over all, blessed forever. Amen” (v5).

God adopted Israel as his own possession. He made a covenant with them, gave them the law, taught them how to worship, and promised to bless them as a people. He established the true faith through them. The genealogies of the Old Testament exist to preserve the Abrahamic bloodline because God’s purpose in choosing the Jewish people was to bring forth the Messiah. It was always about Jesus, even when it didn’t look like it, and the plan took over two millennia to unfold.

And when Christ finally came, they rejected him. Since God made these promises to the Jewish people regarding their Messiah—since God used the Jews to bring salvation to the world yet they did not receive it—Paul anticipates someone’s objection that perhaps “the word of God has failed” (v6). Did God’s word fail regarding the Jews?

Two Israels

Paul’s answer is a resounding “no,” and here’s the reason: there have always been two Israels.

Abraham has two kinds of descendants: (1) children of the flesh and (2) children of the promise. God promised to make Abraham a great nation, but he never promised that every single physical descendant of Abraham would be saved. God also promised that salvation would come through Abraham’s line, but he never promised that every individual in his line would be saved.

So God’s promise includes both a physical seed and a spiritual seed. Christians have been confusing them for a long time. Also, this is not something new, as though Paul is retroactively reading his experience back into the story of Abraham. Rather, Paul is exegeting the passages in Genesis to demonstrate that even within the first few generations of Abraham’s own family this distinction had always been made.

Abraham had two sons. Ishmael was the child of the flesh born to Hagar, and Isaac was the child of the promise born to Sarah. Even though Ishmael was physically Abraham’s son, he did not inherit the promise, because God’s promise was that Sarah would be the mother (not Hagar, Ishmael’s mother).

The same is true in the following generation. Isaac had twin sons. Esau was the child of the flesh, and Jacob was the child of the promise. In this case, both boys had the same mother, and yet, only Isaac was chosen to inherit the promise. God chose Jacob over Esau before either of them had done anything good or bad. The choice was entirely God’s, and it had nothing to do with ethnicity or birthright in the ordinary sense.

Therefore, even within Abraham’s own family, there have always been two Israels: children of the flesh and children of the promise. Throughout the generations of Israel’s history, there was always a larger nation comprised of Abraham’s physical descendants, and a “remnant” within that nation who were true believers.

The New Testament picks up this theme with John the Baptist. When the religious establishment comes to him with their credentials, he tells them: “Do not begin to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our father,’ for I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children for Abraham” (Luke 3:8). In other words, faith matters more than blood. God is establishing a faithful people, not merely collecting Abraham’s biological descendants (cf Rom 2:28).

Now that Jesus has come and fulfilled the promise, the nation of Israel as a political and ethnic entity has served its purpose: the preservation of the Messianic line. God’s judgment fell on Israel as a nation in 70 AD when the temple was destroyed, exactly as Jesus predicted. The vehicle had delivered its cargo. Its special status was finished.

The Stunning Reversal

So, here is what Paul’s anguish is actually about: the tragic irony of Jewish unbelief.

The unbelieving Jews of Paul’s day saw themselves as Jacob, the line of promise, but actually they are Esau, mere children of Abraham’s flesh. The unbelieving Jews saw themselves as Isaac, the child of the promise, but actually they are Ishmael, the son of the slave woman (cf Gal 4:21-31).

This is one of the great scandals of the New Testament. The Jews, Abraham’s physical descendants, Paul’s “kinsmen according to the flesh,” saw themselves as God’s chosen people. They regarded the Gentiles as cut off from God. In reality, unbelieving Jews are the ones who were cut off from God, and believing Gentiles have become the true sons of Abraham, children of the promise, and the true Israel of God.

Galatians 6:15-16 explicitly says, “For neither circumcision counts for anything, nor uncircumcision, but a new creation. And as for all who walk by this rule, peace and mercy be upon them, and upon the Israel of God.”

Therefore, God’s word has not failed, it was just fulfilled in ways they didn’t expect. True Israel is reckoned according to those share Abraham’s faith (i.e., faith in Christ), not those who merely share Abraham’s DNA.

Thus, God’s purpose of election played out exactly as God intended. He chose Jacob over Esau before either was born. He builds his covenant people not on the basis of ethnicity but on the basis of sovereign grace operating through faith. The promise to Abraham was always bigger than Abraham’s family. It was always aimed at the whole world.

What This Means Practically

This being the case, what does it mean for Christians and Jews in our day? Here are three simple conclusions we can draw.

First, unbelieving Jews have no special covenant standing before God. This cuts against the dispensationalist view which has exerted significant influence in evangelical circles. Dispensationalism holds that ethnic Israel retains a separate covenant status and prophetic future distinct from the Church. That view is wrong. There is one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, and there is no salvation apart from explicit faith in Jesus Christ (Eph 4:5-6). If you have an unbelieving Jewish neighbor or coworker, treat him like any other unbeliever. Be kind, share the gospel, treat him with respect, but do not defer to him or grant him a special status he does not possess. He has rejected his Messiah. That is the most important thing to know about him.

Second, the Bible does not require the United States to support the nation of Israel. This is the same principle as the above point at scale. Many sincere Christians believe America has a divine obligation to stand with Israel because the Jews are God’s chosen people. But that’s simply not true. The only people who can rightly be called God’s chosen people are Christians—we are the true circumcision, the true Jew, the Israel of God. Modern unbelieving Jews have no covenant standing with God. Just because the nation of Israel happens to be called “Israel” and occupied by Jewish people, it has no special status before God. We may choose to support them if doing so serves our national interests, but that is a political calculation, not a theological obligation. No verse of Scripture requires it.

Think of it this way: if the apostle Paul were walking through Tel Aviv today, he would not be talking about Iran or bombs or Bibi Netanyahu or the Gaza strip or foreign policy. He would feel grief in his soul because they are his kinsmen according to the flesh and they have rejected their Messiah. His concern would be for their souls, not their geopolitical interests. He would say, “These people need Jesus.” That is the right Christian posture toward the Jewish people: not political alliance, but evangelistic urgency.

So when you read about “Israel” or “the Jews” in your Bible, do not picture a country on a map. Picture a lost people group, some of whom live in the nation of Israel, and some who are scattered around the world, who need to receive their Messiah.

Third, God does have a future plan for the salvation of the Jewish people through faith in Jesus Christ. Romans 11 does teach that before Christ returns, God will bring about a mass conversion of ethnic Jews. This is a genuine promise and worth taking seriously. But it does not mean that unbelieving Jews currently enjoy a favored status before God apart from faith.

Think of it this way. You might have unbelievers in your life that you care deeply about right now. Further, you don’t realize it, but suppose they are elect and God will one day bring about their faith and conversion to Christ. Even though that unbelieving friend will one day become a Christian, he or she has no covenant standing before God. He is simply an unbeliever who is elect and will become a Christian someday. That’s what Romans 11 is saying. God will bring a large number of Jews to faith in Jesus Christ at some point in the future because he cares for their souls. But that’s not the same thing as assuming those unbelievers have covenant standing before God. And when that day comes, they will not be saved because they are Jews, they will be saved because they have repented of their sins and placed their faith in Jesus Christ.

Reformed Christians hold to the doctrines of grace in our theological systems but end up denying them in practice.

When I was a younger Christian, I struggled with a lot of doubts that hindered my faith and growth. I wondered, “what if Christianity is wrong and the Muslims are right?” Or, “what if the Jews are right, Jesus is an imposter, and I’m a blasphemer for worshiping a mere man?” Or, “what if the atheists are right and I’m just wasting my time and energy?” Or even, “what if Christianity is correct, but I believe the wrong tradition such that my soul is in jeopardy and I’m not truly saved?”

Under all these doubts was the fear that I was deceived, that God didn’t truly love me, and I was damned to hell. Thankfully, the Lord led me to resources to resolve all these questions, and God turned those doubts into a calling. But I still remember the fear, and that fear can still linger in the hearts of Reformed Christians whose good doctrine hasn’t completed the journey from their heads to their hearts.

Christians who feel this way are insecure in the love of God, which leads them to take their eyes off of Jesus, focus on themselves, and start trying to earn God’s approval. A Christian who is insecure in God’s love will be too afraid to attempt anything daring because he or she is afraid of being wrong. So they play it safe. They focus on killing sin, which is a good thing, but they don’t take any risks to build things that might fail. They’re afraid of failure because they doubt God’s love for them.

Some traditions overemphasize the love of God at the expense of his holiness and wrath. They might feel more secure in God’s love, but it’s a warped love that doesn’t fully account for man’s sin. They tend to be more antinomian. They have a false confidence that God just adores them and can’t live without them. We’re right to be critical of those teachings. But that’s not my point. My point is that Reformed theology presents the love of God more fully, and if we believed it more deeply, we’d be more confident to take risks and build great things. Simply put, we can be so introspective and hyper-cautious that we doubt God could ever love us at all, thus making us too insecure to build anything.

God Is For You

Romans 8:31 says, “If God is for us, who can be against us?” Note that first phrase: “God is for us.” When squishy evangelicals say “God is for you,” it makes Reformed Christians wince a little. Our instinct is to recoil a bit and think, “God is for GOD!” Yes, that’s true, but the two statements are not mutually exclusive. We get theologically technical at precisely the moment Paul is being most pastoral. Perhaps we resist it because we’re insecure in God’s love and verses like this sound too good to be true.

Paul asks the question in a way that answers itself. Reformed Christians don’t want to treat God like a cosmic vending machine, so God’s favor stays largely theoretical. We accept it as a doctrine but then live as if God is managing us from a distance, watching for infractions, one bad season of prayer away from withdrawing his favor.

I’ll admit I do this. I can easily fall into the habit of assuming God’s love for me is proportional to my sanctification. When I do this, I think about myself a lot more than I think about Jesus, which compounds the problem. Being insecure in God’s love makes me more self-focused, introspective, and cautious. I fear I’m being presumptuous of God’s love, so I start trying to prove to him I’m worthy of it.

The insecure Christian obeys God in a vain attempt to gain God’s approval, while the secure Christian obeys God because he’s confident he’s already gained it apart from his effort. The insecure Christian serves God like an employee who’s worried about his job security. The secure Christian serves God like the owner’s son who is fully invested in the family business.

If you’re an insecure Christian, you have a nagging, low-grade fear that God isn’t actually for you. Practically, that fear makes you timid. You don’t attempt bold things for the kingdom because you’re too unsure of your standing to risk getting it wrong. This isn’t a minor pastoral problem.

I notice this especially in the Reformed ecosystem of which I’m a part. Since there’s so much love-love-love talk from squishy evangelicals, we end up overcorrecting. We fully embrace God’s holiness, justice, and sovereignty, but God’s love can sometimes be held at arms length. Or it gets theologized into oblivion until it no longer carries the pastoral weight intended in the New Testament. We end up theologically careful and personally miserable.

What Christ Did at Calvary

Paul said, “God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Rom 5:8). He also said, “He who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all — how will he not also with him graciously give us all things?” (Rom 8:32).

God is the most supremely valuable being in existence. It follows that he loves what is supremely valuable, namely, himself. This might sound strange to modern ears, but it’s not a character flaw. It would be idolatry for God to love something more than himself, because nothing is more worthy of love than God. The Father’s love for the Son is the most perfect love in the universe. His love is eternal, unbounded, and without diminishment of any kind. God delights in his Son the way nothing else in creation can be delighted in, because nothing else in creation can compare to him.

What did God do? God gave him up. Why? Because he set his covenant love on us from before the foundation of the world and made us the objects of his eternal affection.

Which created a problem. Our sin stood between God and his beloved, and his own righteousness demanded its punishment. He couldn’t simply overlook it, because he loves his own holiness too much for that. So in a real sense, God himself was the obstacle between God and his people. The only way forward was for him to bear the penalty himself.

That’s what the cross was. The blood of Christ was the price God paid to acquire his bride, and he paid it gladly. Hebrews says Jesus endured the cross “for the joy set before him” (Heb 12:2). They didn’t need to nail him to the cross. His love would have kept him there.

So consider what Paul is arguing. If God was willing to give the most precious thing in existence, at the greatest possible cost, on what grounds would he withhold his favor from you? Paul said, “how will he not also with him graciously give us all things?” (v32), The cross is the guarantee of God’s continuing generosity towards us.

This means every time you catch yourself thinking God doesn’t love you because money is tight, your prayers went unanswered, or because your prayer life is weak, you need to go back to the hill outside Jerusalem and remember what was decided there. God gave you his Son. What more could he possibly give to prove the point?

Reformed Christians know all of this. We can say it in our sleep. The problem is the distance between knowing it and let it sink so deeply into our bones that we feel it all the time. And when that happens, we become unconquerable.

More than Conquerors

Paul continues, “in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us” (Rom 8:37). The Greek behind “more than conquerors” is a single word, huper-nikao. You could think of it as “super conquerors.” He’s describing what happens in our lives when we finally apprehend the astounding depths of God’s love.

We’re not merely survivors, white-knuckling our way through life till we get to heaven. No, we become super-conquerors “through him who loved us.” I’m talking about a joyful, victorious posture in your ordinary, Christian life. In other words, the capacity to conquer comes from Christ’s love. Which means the key to living like a conqueror is being more convinced that God is for you.

This is how Spurgeon put it: “Paul was so persuaded that Christ would never leave him that he became a fighter. He went in with all his might against the world, the flesh, and the devil. Some say this doctrine would send us to sleep. It never does. It wakes us up.”

This is what insecure Christianity gets exactly backwards. It assumes confidence in God’s love would render us more passive, as though we’d start taking God for granted. I’d say, anyone who takes God’s love for granted hasn’t fully comprehended it yet.

Paul says in his own testimony that he was beaten, shipwrecked, imprisoned, stoned, and more. He planted churches in cities that wanted him dead. He wrote his most triumphant theology from a prison in Rome. The security of God’s love didn’t make him passive, it made him dangerous. It can do the same for you. I pray Christians would be more dangerous, like Paul was.

The Christian who is insecure in God’s love is too focused on not sinning that he ends up not building anything. He buries his talent in the ground because he’s afraid of his master’s severity. But the man who is fully confident in God’s love is fearless enough to take risks, knowing that God will love him despite the outcome.

How do we know this? Because John tells us, “there is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear” (1 John 4:18). As Paul brought the first half of his letter to the Ephesians to a close, he erupted in a beautiful prayer that they, “being rooted and grounded in love, may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge” (Eph 3:18).

The Verdict

At the end of Romans 8, Paul ends his argument like a lawyer resting his case. He summons every kind of power one could possibly conceive of and holds it up against the overwhelming power of God’s unfailing love. He says, “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” (v38-39). None of these powers can withstand the power of God’s love.

He opens this statement by saying “I am sure” which doesn’t quite capture the utter certainty of what he’s saying. The original verb is in the perfect tense, indicating a rational, settled, unalterable certainty. It’s a final verdict, not a fleeting feeling.

Paul’s certainty was anchored in his own life experience. He catalogued his various suffering in 2 Cor 11, which included five beatings with 39 lashes, 3 beatings with rods, three shipwrecks, one stoning, and a night adrift at sea, not to mention being constantly hounded by danger, hunger, thirst, and the incessant pressure of anxiety for all the churches (v23-29). Satan threw the kitchen sink at him, but amazingly, Paul’s certainty of God’s love only grew through it.

Just like Paul, we, too are foreknown, predestined, called, justified, and already glorified in the mind of God. Not one link in that golden chain is broken because not one of them depends on us.

Reformed Christians have the richest account of this love in all of Christendom. We trace it from before the foundation of the world through the golden chain to the certain glorification that awaits us in eternity. The doctrine is there. It just hasn’t finished the journey from our heads to our hearts.

God is for you. The cross proved it. Don’t doubt it, trust and believe it.

I have a book coming out soon from Canon Press that develops some of the themes highlighted in this essay. It’s about why the church keeps losing, and why so many of our most trusted teachers have convinced us that losing is more faithful. It is the belief that passivity, retreat, and defeat are more Christlike than courage, ambition, and power. The first half diagnoses the problem and the people responsible for it. The second half prescribes the remedy. It describes what it actually looks like to live as more than a conqueror in ordinary Christian life. I wrote this book to help the church break free from this “loser theology” mindset and pursue a life of Christian victory.

I spoke to the publisher last week. An official title and release date are coming soon. They hope to have preorders ready to go in a few weeks and a ship date in early summer. I’ll keep you updated as things progress. Make sure you subscribe now so you don’t miss anything!

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There’s a lot of these in the Sermon on the Mount—sayings of Jesus that depict the “upside-down” realities of God’s kingdom, like “love your enemies” and “blessed are the poor.” I took a whole class on the Sermon on the Mount in seminary. That class ended up being one of my favorites, probably because it appealed to my youth zeal and idealism.

In my years of ministry since that class, I’ve noticed how these upside down kingdom concepts kept showing up in the evangelical world as fortune cookie statements that sound profound but don’t make a lot of sense practically.

Another one of these upside-down statements is in 2 Cor 12:9, where Jesus tells Paul, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness” (2 Cor 12:9). Paul responded to this statement by saying, “therefore, I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me” (v10).

Practically, then, this statement can be misconstrued as a call to actually become weaker, thinking that would create an opportunity for the strength and power of Christ to shine through. A student might think, “if I study for this test, I’m relying on the flesh. So I can not study for the test, giving God the opportunity to be glorified through my weakness.” This is foolish, but it’s the kind of foolishness that Christians can easily convince themselves is actually otherworldly, spiritual wisdom.

For a seminary student, half listening to a lecture and half daydreaming about future ministry, verses like that can stay abstract. It can even feel like a spiritualized excuse for being passive and lazy, thinking “if God is strong when I’m weak, I’ll choose to be weak so God’s power can work in my ministry.”

You might have heard people weaponize this verse against Christian ambition, cultural engagement, or masculine courage. The implication, as it’s usually wielded, is that striving for excellence is suspect. The properly humble Christian should approach life with a pre-commitment to weakness, which is defined as “non-power” or “non-effort.” To be “weak” means to not try very hard, to not assert oneself very much, or to “lead with a limp.” To do otherwise would be putting confidence in the flesh.

This misunderstanding has contributed to producing a generation of Christians who spiritualize their passivity, expecting God to bless their half-hearted efforts because they were appropriately “weak.” That’s not what Paul meant. So, what does this text mean by “weakness?” And what did Paul mean by his response that he would “boast all the more gladly of my weakness?”

What Weakness Actually Means

The “weakness” Paul describes in 2 Corinthians 12:9–10 refers to utter dependence on God for everything. Christ said, “Apart from me you can do nothing” (John 15:5) — which is another way of saying, “you are weak apart from me.” Compared to God, we are weak, and whatever human strength we have is a gift from him.

When Paul said, “therefore I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses,” he was not saying he would try to become actually weaker, but to acknowledge he has no strength of his own apart from God. His “boasting” is simply an acknowledgement of God’s power at work in him. Paul knew he could do nothing apart from Christ, so he gave God the glory in everything. And his thorn in the flesh was a divine reminder of this — given precisely because of the extraordinary supernatural revelations he’d experienced.

Thus, “weakness” should not be confused with things like inaction, indiscipline, or ignorance. When we make this mistake, “strength through weakness” becomes a magic wand to wave over incompetence, as if God promises extra blessings to those who don’t try very hard.

This thread of God’s power working through human weakness runs through both of Paul’s letters to the Corinthians. Here are six observations about strength and weakness that can help clarify what he actually meant.

How Power and Weakness Converge in the Christian Life

First, God is the source of all power. All human strength is on loan from God. In 1 Corinthians 3:6, Paul says, “I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth.” Paul and Apollos worked hard, but the ultimate result was in God’s hands. “We have this treasure in jars of clay, to show that the surpassing power belongs to God and not to us” (2 Cor 4:7).

Second, it is a sin to act as if the power comes from us. That’s the sin of boasting. “Boasting” is a recurring theme in Paul’s writing, especially in his letters to the church in Corinth, mentioning it some 37 times in those two letters. “What do you have that you did not receive? If then you received it, why do you boast as if you did not receive it?” (1 Cor 4:7).

This is the heart of the matter. Weakness doesn’t mean non-power. It means reliance on God’s power received as a gift. It means the righteous exercise of human power while always acknowledging God as the divine source. The issue isn’t power vs. non-power, but always giving God the glory for the power that operates within us (1 Cor 10:31).

Third, God’s power usually works through the natural abilities he gives us. God’s power normally operates in our lives in the form of spiritual gifts. Most of the time, spiritual gifts are ordinary abilities sanctified and empowered by the Spirit, such as teaching, helping, serving, exhorting, contributing, giving (1 Cor 12:4–6, Rom 12:6–8).

God distributes these disproportionately. Some people have greater gifts, others have lesser. Regardless, God providentially arranges them such that those with seemingly “weaker” gifts are regarded as vital to the life of the church (1 Cor 12:22). On occasion, God works in extraordinary or miraculous ways to demonstrate clearly that his power is at hand. But the ordinary pattern is sanctified human effort.

Fourth, God may use suffering and affliction to humble us. Paul said he faced afflictions so severe that he despaired of life itself (2 Cor 1:8–9, 6:4–10). That’s what Paul’s thorn in the flesh was about. Without question, Paul was a man of extraordinary gifts, and God afflicted him with a thorn in his flesh to keep him from becoming conceited. But this must not be regarded as a mandate for Christians to justify incompetence or lack of effort by calling it weakness.

Fifth, Paul’s approach in Corinth was contextual, not universal. Corinth’s most glaring sin was boastful arrogance — they were enamored with displays of miraculous power. So Paul chose not to showboat his gifts in their presence because it distracted from his focus on the cross (1 Cor 2:2). His restraint was strategic. His opponents even ridiculed him as a lightweight because of it (2 Cor 10:10).

Sixth, Paul explicitly reserved the right to display power when needed. His weakness, fear, and trembling in Corinth (1 Cor 2:3) were not spiritual absolutes for every believer in every context. Elsewhere Paul says the opposite: “God gave us a spirit not of fear but of power and love and self-control” (2 Tim 1:7). The restraint in Corinth was a ministry strategy, not a theology of Christian passivity.

Weakness, therefore, does not mean a pre-commitment to non-power. It does not mean God promises extra blessings to those who don’t try very hard.

What does it mean to “boast in our weakness”?

So what does it mean to “boast in our weakness?” First, it doesn’t mean “don’t try very hard so God gets the glory.” Paul says elsewhere, “whatever you do, work heartily, as for the Lord and not for men, knowing that from the Lord you will receive the inheritance as your reward” (Col 3:23-24). A Christian can be disciplined, hard working, and even powerful, yet when he acknowledges God as the animating force behind all his excellent efforts, he is “boasting” in God, not in himself. When we acknowledge God’s power behind every excellent work we do, we are “boasting in our weakness.”

A good example of this can be seen in Proverbs 21:31. It says, “The horse is made ready for the day of battle, but the victory belongs to the Lord.” Both sides of the strength/weakness paradox can be seen here. The line, “the horse is made ready for battle,” is where human effort and preparation come in. When men go to battle, they must do their preparations for the battle to succeed. There are various “battles” and challenges we face in our lives, and we have work to do to face them. The second line, “but the victory belongs to the Lord,” is where we boast in our weakness. We can do nothing on our own. Our preparations, planning, hard work, excellence, courage, and follow through—all these things are gifts from God who enables us to do these things. To “boast in our weakness” is to do all these things with all our might, yet acknowledge God’s power at work within us as we do them.

Therefore, the Christian life is not a posture of strategic non-effort waiting for divine compensation. It’s a race. Run it like you intend to win.

This essay expands on material from my forthcoming book with Canon Press, which makes this argument at length and applies it to some specific figures in contemporary evangelicalism who have gotten this badly wrong.

The book is about why the church keeps losing, and why we’ve been taught to feel good about it. The first half diagnoses what I call Loser Theology: the idea that passivity, retreat, and defeat are somehow more Christlike than engagement, courage, and power. The second half is the remedy — what high-agency Christianity actually looks like in practice.

It’s a pastoral book, not a political one. It came out of sitting across from men in my office who had been told by trusted teachers that ambition is pride and power is corruption. I wrote it for them. I'll have a title and release date to share soon. Make sure you're subscribed so you don't miss it!

The section of Isaiah known as the “Isaiah Apocalypse” runs from chapters 24 through 27. It opens with total devastation. Chapter 24 is not subtle. The earth is laid waste, its foundations are shaken, the heavens are undone — it’s judgment on a breathtakingly dreadful scale.

Then chapter 25 opens with praise. Verses 6–9 describe what follows the devastation: a feast, on a mountain, for all peoples, where God himself swallows up death forever. The emotional arc runs from devastation to celebration. That arc should sound familiar, because it’s the same arc of Jesus Christ. The cross was judgment. The resurrection is the party after the war.

But Isaiah isn’t merely describing what happened to Jesus. He’s describing what will happen to everything. The whole created order will follow the same pattern as its Lord — death, then life, judgment, then feast.

Put another way, Isaiah 24–25 is the Easter story of the cosmos.

The feast takes place on a mountain, which Isaiah specifies deliberately. In the Old Testament, mountains are where heaven and earth meet, where God shows up. Abraham nearly offered Isaac on a mountain. Moses received the law on a mountain. The temple was built on a mountain, Jesus was transfigured, crucified, and ascended from mountains. The Bible’s most consequential moments happen at high elevation. That’s not incidental geography — it’s the Bible’s way of saying the boundary between the divine and human is thin up there.

The mountain Isaiah has in mind is Mount Zion, the hill in Jerusalem where the temple stood, established as the setting in 24:23 where the LORD of hosts reigns on Zion immediately before the feast scene begins. But Zion carries far more weight than its coordinates. Isaiah returns to this mountain throughout his book. It is one of the controlling images of his whole prophecy. In chapter 2, at the very beginning, he describes Zion as the highest of all mountains, with nations streaming toward it from every direction. In chapter 65, at the very end, the wolf and lamb graze together and nothing hurts or destroys “in all my holy mountain.” The same image anchors the opening and the closing of the book, and it grows in significance each time it appears. By the time we reach chapter 25, this is not merely a hill in Jerusalem. It is the place where God meets the world, where the whole human story reaches its apex and proper end.

Zion has always held both mercy and judgment in tension. The sacrificial system operated there, which included the entire machinery of sin, guilt, and atonement. Blood was shed constantly at this mountain, precisely because this is where God’s holiness was most concentrated. Yet at the same time, the psalmists sang about Zion as a city that cannot be shaken, a place of refuge where God defeats his enemies and shelters his people. Judgment and salvation have always met on that mountain.

About a quarter mile away stood another hill called Golgotha, the place of the skull, where Jesus was crucified. Close enough that the temple complex was almost certainly visible from the cross. The people who watched Christ die on the cross could see the house of God in the background. Calvary is the place where Zion’s two functions finally and decisively converged — the judgment fell on God’s Son, and the salvation went to everyone who looks at him in faith.

The central verb in Isaiah 25:6–9 is the Hebrew word bala’ — to swallow. God uses it twice. First he swallows up the covering cast over all peoples, the veil of blindness and death that drapes the whole human race without exception. Then, more dramatically, he swallows up death itself, permanently.

Death is the great swallower — Isaiah 5:14 uses the same verb for Sheol, a hungry mouth that takes everything and gives nothing back. The whole world lives under something that devours without limit, that no one escapes, that renders every human achievement temporary and every human joy provisional. God’s answer to that is not to comfort us in the face of death or help us make peace with it. His answer is to out-swallow it. He takes the thing that consumed everything and consumes it. In other words, the predator gets eaten.

Paul knew exactly what Isaiah was doing. When he arrives at the climax of his resurrection argument in 1 Corinthians 15, he quotes Isaiah 25:8 directly — “Death is swallowed up in victory. O death, where is your victory? O death, where is your sting?” — not as a poetic flourish but as a fulfillment claim. The tomb is empty because Isaiah 25:8 had to come true. John says the same thing in Revelation 21, where the voice from the throne promises that God will wipe away every tear, that death shall be no more, that mourning and crying and pain are finished. That is Isaiah’s feast. The mountain, the veil removed, the tears wiped away, the reproach lifted. John isn’t inventing new imagery. He’s telling his readers that the vision Isaiah saw has arrived.

The feast itself is spread for all peoples and all nations, not just Israel, which was always the point. The God of Israel was never merely the God of one people. He chose a particular people as the means through whom he would reach everyone else, and the mountain that began in chapter 2 with nations streaming toward it ends in chapter 25 with those nations sitting at the table eating the finest food and drinking the best wine. The last verse captures the mood: “Behold, this is our God; we have waited for him, that he might save us.” Nobody at that table will be comparing their spiritual résumés. There is only the recognition that God did what only God could do, and the only appropriate response to that is joy.

That joy has already broken into history. The resurrection of Jesus Christ is the down payment on everything Isaiah described — the feast has started, even if the main course is still coming. Every time the church gathers, every baptism, every Lord’s Supper, we are tasting what Isaiah saw. The guests are still arriving. But death has already lost.

Isaiah prophesied it in advance. We are living in it now.

I am a church planter. In 2008, I moved my family to Cincinnati and planted Christ the King Church through the North American Mission Board’s (NAMB) Nehemiah Project—a church planting funding initiative tied to Southern Seminary (SBTS). NAMB made my church possible, and I am genuinely grateful for that. My church exists because of NAMB, SBTS, the Nehemiah Project, and the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC). I was greatly encouraged and fully supported as a church planter during those volatile early years of uncertainty.

This experience has also given me an insider’s perspective for nearly two decades into how the church planting engine works. I’ve seen both incredible fruit and significant carnage. I believe Southern Baptists deserve a clear picture of what their Cooperative Program dollars are actually doing.

Here is my thesis: NAMB has more money than qualified men to spend it on. That single problem, and the institutional pressures it generates, explains much of what has gone wrong with Southern Baptist church planting over the last fifteen years.

The Math Nobody Talks About

Consider what it costs to fund a church planter. When I first started, my support package from the Nehemiah project, my state convention, and local association was about $3,000 per month, plus health insurance, and lasted for over three years. Using rough numbers, that’s an investment of over $108,000 to plant one healthy church. If the numbers were always that straightforward and simple, no one would argue that’s a worthwhile investment to establish an SBC church that could last generations.

Now consider NAMB’s budget. The Annie Armstrong Easter Offering alone generates roughly $70 million annually, representing about half of NAMB’s total budgeted revenue.[1] Add in Cooperative Program (CP) receipts and NAMB is working with approximately $140–150 million per year.[2]

That staggering sum creates an interesting dilemma: what if NAMB has more money to spend than qualified church planters to spend it on? When money accumulates faster than qualified leaders, the pressure to spend it anyway becomes nearly irresistible.

Churches give generously to NAMB under the reasonable assumption that more dollars produce more churches. The logic seems intuitive, but it is wrong. Money cannot manufacture qualified pastors. If you have $10 million earmarked for church planting but no qualified planters to send, that $10 million will not plant a single healthy congregation. The irreplaceable ingredient is a godly, qualified man with the gifts, character, and calling to shepherd a flock. No budget line item substitutes for that. Apart from a work of the Spirit, all the money in the world will not plant one healthy church. Simply put, money can’t buy calling, qualification or gifting.

Another problem is that qualified church planters do not scale on demand. Leadership development is slow, organic, and resistant to institutional acceleration. But money does scale, and when money accumulates and compounds, it creates enormous pressure to justify its existence by being spent. In short, the church planting world has a leadership bottleneck that no amount of money can fix.

And yet, Southern Baptists are eager to fulfill the Great Commission, and we’re convinced that church planting is the best and most faithful way to do it. That presents us with a difficult choice. The first option is to lower the bar for church planters, which means taking risks on men who may not be qualified or ready to plant. This option is more pragmatic. Sometimes the gamble will pay off, and men will rise to the challenge to successfully plant a healthy church. It also enjoys the good optics of reporting to the convention a larger number of churches planted. This option has hidden costs that are rarely talked about: many of these men burn out or disqualify themselves, and their churches fail.

The second option is to maintain a high standard for church planters, which means fewer men will meet it, leading to fewer churches being planted. This option is more faithful, in my view, but the optics aren’t as good. Southern Baptists want their Cooperative Program dollars producing results; no one wants to report declining numbers of churches planted to the convention, even if those few churches have a higher likelihood of success and longevity.

As I will show, it seems NAMB has taken the first option because the money is there and the convention is eager for positive results, but I have seen too much pastoral carnage to look the other way.

The Church Planting Gold Rush

The 2010s were a church planting gold rush in evangelicalism, and NAMB was sitting on the mother lode. The launch of the Send Network, a marketing initiative targeting the top twenty-five urban centers in North America, turned NAMB into the most talked-about name in church planting circles. I once heard someone say, “NAMB will give money to anyone.” You can see that in the table below (and Appendix A) in terms of the sheer number of churches planted along with the actual NAMB expenditures in 2025 dollars.

Bars (left axis): number of new church plants only (excluding campuses, replants, and existing churches that joined the SBC as affiliates). Line (right axis): NAMB total actual expenditure restated to constant 2025 dollars (CPI-U). 2021–2024 denotes years where audited totals include non-operating and investment activity. The 2020 figure revised from 588 to 538 per Scott Barkley (Baptist Press Article, Sept. 2025).

That reputation had consequences. Church planters from a variety of networks began pursuing dual affiliation with the SBC. They did not do this out of any particular theological or ecclesiological loyalty to the convention, but because that’s where they could get funding. NAMB had money to give. These planters would retain their primary network identity while dually affiliating with the SBC, sometimes ditching the SBC as soon as the money ran out. It was, in the parlance of the moment, a NASCAR sponsorship phenomenon: put the logo on the car and collect the check.

The gold rush also created awkward incentive structures within existing churches. For years, the traditional pathway to becoming a senior pastor looked something like this: a young man with gifts and calling would come on staff as a youth pastor or worship pastor, learn under a seasoned elder, develop over time, and eventually rise to senior pastoral responsibility as he matured. It was slow and often frustrating for ambitious young men. But it worked.

The church planting boom short-circuited all of that. Why wait years for an uncertain ministry promotion when you could plant a church today? NAMB and the broader church planting culture promised aspiring young leaders the title of lead pastor immediately, multiple years of guaranteed funding, little accountability to an established eldership, and the adoring accolades of a grateful convention that would celebrate you as a hero doing the tough “trench work” of planting. For a young man eager to be recognized, eager to lead, and eager to prove himself, that is a nearly irresistible offer. And many took it.

Seminaries fed the same machine. Brick and mortar seminaries need tuition revenue to keep the lights on, which creates an institutional incentive to enroll students that are unlikely to be successful in vocational ministry. Their MA or MDiv diploma then functions as a valid credential for church planting assessment. It can be emotionally difficult to tell a man “no” to church planting when he has worked for years and made financial sacrifices to go to seminary to get to that interview, especially when you are sitting on a pile of cash and your annual report to the convention is measured in churches planted. There’s a lot of pressure to advance a man through the pipeline, cut him a check, and pray it works out.

What the Money Actually Buys

I have been on the receiving end of NAMB’s generosity from the beginning. When my wife and I were commissioned through the Nehemiah Project, NAMB flew what appeared to be hundreds of church planters and their spouses, possibly more than a thousand, out to Denver for the ceremony. It was an all expenses paid trip, including hotel rooms, travel, and meals. It was an impressive operation.

At the time, I thought, “they’re going out of their way to make this a special event,” and we appreciated being treated with such kindness. I especially remember one detail in particular—the name badges we all wore had our names engraved on them. That was a nice touch, but I couldn’t help but wonder what those cost to produce, especially in light of the other expenses. I thought perhaps they were willing to indulge a few luxuries to mark such a momentous occasion, but I later noticed NAMB had a way of spending a lot of money on other events as well.

For example, my wife and I were invited to go to the SBC annual convention in New Orleans, all expenses paid, with the expectation that I would sit for a video interview about church planting while we were there. I also went to a training event at NAMB Headquarters in Alpharetta, GA, again, on NAMB’s dime. Attendees were told to choose an item from the merch store to take as a gift. I chose a nice, NAMB jacket. On another occasion, my wife and I were invited to attend an all expenses paid, exclusive fundraiser in New York City with select, high profile pastors who had deep pockets. Our job was to mingle and be the face of urban church planting. I was honored to have been invited and express my appreciation for how NAMB made our ministry possible.

NAMB also blessed church planters in other, unexpected ways. I got an email once telling me to go to the online merch store and choose any item as a gift. This time I picked out a nice, Ogio laptop backpack which I still use to this day, ten years later. I was also notified that NAMB wanted to help church planters establish retirement accounts, so I would be receiving a $1,000 gift deposited into my Guidestone account.

Since we were in one of NAMB’s targeted SEND cities, all the church planter families in my city were treated to an all expenses paid trip to Great Wolf Lodge. At every turn, we were treated like royalty. We went to nice dinners in fancy restaurants and tickets to Cincinnati Reds ballgames. Church planting is a difficult ministry and we were blown away by the generosity shown to us by Southern Baptists through NAMB.

The Carnage

I need to speak plainly here, because the human cost of bad church planting is real and serious. I entered the church planting world in 2008, and in the years since, I’ve witnessed a great deal of carnage. If a zealous church planter isn’t able to build a self-sustaining church after a faithful effort, that’s unfortunate and possibly painful for those involved, but reasonable Christians understand that not every plant will succeed. My concern is for the unacceptably large number of church plants that have failed due to scandal surrounding the church planter. Let me give you some examples.

I visited a NAMB church plant in Cincinnati that first year before we launched ours. The pastor had no theological training. Rather than preaching that week, the pastor played a video of a Steven Furtick sermon, part of a pre-packaged multi-week series that freed him from the burdens of preparing a message. He was well funded and had institutional backing. He resigned after a few years.

Another NAMB church planter in my city of Cincinnati stepped down from ministry because his marriage was falling apart. He and his wife eventually divorced. During this time, he drifted away from orthodoxy and embraced a kind of mystical universalism. It is difficult to calculate the spiritual harm caused by these situations. I counseled with one woman from his church shortly after this happened. She said, “I sat under his preaching. I learned the gospel from him. If he’s a fraud, what do I do with what he taught me?”

One friend of mine planted a NAMB church in Massachusetts. My church financially supported him. When his church plant was unsuccessful, he ended up denying the Christian faith altogether, becoming an outspoken atheist who is hostile to Christ.

And then there is the church planting failure I find most disturbing. A man visited my church one Sunday who said he’d recently moved his family to Cincinnati to plant a church. I’d heard his name from some pastor friends who had red flags about him. He’d been assessed by two different church planting networks and was turned down—but he was approved by NAMB! He formed a core group with a few families and was building momentum. A year or so later, I received word that he shut it all down. Why? He had left his wife, abandoned his children and his church to come out publicly as a practicing homosexual. He now works for a homosexual-affirming congregation in my city.

Most of these churches were planted with NAMB resources and support. Their eventual collapse brought reproach on the name of Christ, not to mention the Southern Baptist Convention. And every soul who joined these churches trusted these pastors to shepherd them. When church plants fail in such devastating ways, the spiritual toll is incalculable to the body of Christ.

This is the cost of lowering the bar. It’s not an abstract statistical failure. It’s real people enduring real harm—these people sat under the preaching of these pastors, submitting to their leadership, and found themselves wounded, disillusioned, and often skeptical of the church for years afterward.

Incentives and Assessments

As stories of church planting problems have begun to circulate more broadly, the goodwill is beginning to fade. The gold rush of the 2000s and 2010s seems to have slowed down, as people experienced firsthand the pain of failed church plants and disqualified pastors.

Given NAMB’s mixed track record, not to mention the spiritual devastation left in its wake, two inevitable questions came to mind. First, how did so many men who crashed out in church planting pass their assessments? And second, given NAMB’s reputation for generosity and easy assessments, what sort of unintentional incentives did that generosity create?

When considered together, these two questions answer themselves. Let me explain. Good church planting assessments should filter out aspiring planters that should not be sent and funded. Assessments are not rubber stamps. They should rigorously verify and discern, as best as possible, whether the candidate truly possesses the gifting and calling to plant. Therefore, in effect, the best assessments lead to fewer churches being planted because the proper filters have been applied.

But given NAMB’s impressive war chest, not to mention its mandate from the convention to plant more churches, the incentives prioritize quantity over quality. NAMB justifies its resource allocation by reporting a high total of churches planted, and no one will raise the alarm if those churches are led by unqualified men. There’s no metric for faithfulness. Churches led by unqualified pastors are all reported the same way.

When rigorous assessments filter out men who aren’t good candidates for planting, fewer churches are planted, leading to a surplus of unspent church planting dollars. That money needs to go somewhere, and NAMB needs to somehow connect those expenditures to church planting.

Perhaps that can explain why NAMB is employing and deploying an army of coaches, strategists, mobilizers, and consultants. It would seem that NAMB has created a monster through easy money and weak assessments, then hired itself to kill it.

Financial Transparency Found Wanting

When pastors’ marriages are failing, their churches are crumbling, and many are disqualifying themselves altogether, it seems NAMB’s response is to deploy additional resources for coaching and consulting. That’s a noble goal, but the lack of transparency in the details about these special NAMB jobs is concerning. One could cynically argue that NAMB created the problem by funding men who were not qualified to plant, then solved the problem by funding men to fix the same problem.

NAMB employs a number of people with ambiguous job titles, such as “mobilizer” or “strategist,” ostensibly to provide on the ground support for church planters. Again, that’s a noble goal, provided they are good at their jobs and provide a real benefit for pastors. At this point, it’s not clear to me that this is the case. What is also unclear is their actual job descriptions and salary ranges. That opacity is itself a problem for an institution funded by the cooperative giving of ordinary Baptist churches.

An example from February 2026 is instructive. Vance Pitman, who served as president of NAMB’s Send Network, stepped down from that role. According to Baptist Press, Pitman announced that he sensed God leading him “into a different season of leadership.” In his new contracted role as “national mobilizer,” he will, per the announcement, continue “encouraging and influencing pastors, planters and ministry partners across North America.” The change, NAMB noted, “allows Pitman to launch a preaching, coaching and consulting ministry.”[3]

Read that carefully. This is a contracted position, meaning he is employed by NAMB, whose output is described as encouragement, influence, and the launch of a personal ministry. That looks like a golden parachute dressed in the language of calling. Of course, this may be perfectly benign. Pitman is a gifted man who has done genuine good. But without financial transparency, we cannot evaluate it. What does it mean to mobilize, encourage, and influence pastors? How is success measured? We cannot know what it costs, how it is justified, or how many similar arrangements exist throughout the organization.

Infantrymen and Special Forces

As stated above, the issue at hand is an asymmetry between money and men. Every pastor is an infantryman for Christ (2 Tim. 2:3-4)—faithful, trained, obedient to orders, willing to sacrifice. Every church planter is a pastor, but not all pastors should be church planters. Church planters are like special forces in the ministry world. They have a very particular assignment: to start a church where one did not exist before, which requires an additional and distinct skill set beyond what it takes to shepherd an existing congregation. Not every faithful pastor is a church planter. Not every gifted young man with seminary training is a church planter. The selection process for special forces in the military is brutal precisely because the stakes are high and the mission is specialized. The selection process for NAMB-funded church planters has, by all appearances, been considerably more accommodating.

Years ago, I was in a meeting of local pastors and an SBC Associational leader called a Director of Missions, where we were discussing church planting goals. Our Director of Missions asked, “How many churches do we want to trust God to plant in the next ten years?” One pastor suggested ten. The next pastor suggested twenty. Not to be outdone, a third suggested fifty. In situations like this, it’s easy to assume the larger the number, the greater the faith. There were only two of us present at that meeting who were actively planting churches and had seen the carnage. We looked at each other in astonishment. Somewhat sheepishly, I raised my hand and suggested, “In the next ten years, I recommend we trust God to plant five healthy churches led by well-qualified pastors.”

That was not the most popular perspective shared that day, but I stand by it. Fewer churches. Better churches. And far less carnage.

What Is NAMB to Do?

I want to be fair here, because there is a real structural bind.

NAMB cannot manufacture qualified men. If the convention is clamoring for more churches and the pipeline of genuinely qualified planters is limited, NAMB faces a genuine dilemma. It can (1) raise the bar, plant fewer churches, and be criticized for underperforming against its mandate, or (2) it can lower the bar, plant more churches, generate impressive-sounding numbers for the annual meeting, and obscure the downstream damage behind the noise of activity.

Over the last fifteen years or so, it has chosen the latter, and the incentives make that choice nearly inevitable. The best way for NAMB to market itself to the convention as a success is to tout the raw number of churches planted. The health of those churches, and of the pastors who lead them, is, as far as the marketing goes, largely irrelevant. As long as nobody is asking hard questions about what happened to the church planted in Cincinnati or Indianapolis or Memphis three, five, or ten years ago, the machine keeps running.

But the machine is not, on net, producing what it claims to produce. Its output is a mixed bag. I know of many outstanding churches NAMB has planted in the last decade and a half. And yet, alongside those successes, there are too many failures, compromises, and disasters to ignore, while only the success stories are presented to the people funding the whole operation.

Conclusion

I am not calling on churches to stop giving to NAMB. I am not dismissing the real good the institution has done. NAMB planted my church. I would not exist as a pastor without it, and for that I will always be grateful.

But the current system is not working. And the case for reform rests on two simple convictions:

• First, NAMB should set a high standard for church planters and refuse to deviate from it. In my view, it is time to reevaluate the “more churches” mantra in favor of a “fewer and better” approach. A smaller number of healthy, thriving, doctrinally sound congregations does more for the kingdom than a larger number of failing, compromised, or simply mediocre ones. The people in those failing churches bear the cost, and they deserve better stewardship from the institution that sent their pastor.

• Second, financial transparency is absolutely essential. An institution operating on $147 million of cooperative giving owes the churches that fund it a full accounting of where that money goes—including staff salaries, consulting arrangements, event costs, and all the rest. Without that transparency, the convention is flying blind. We have enough anecdotal evidence, at this point, to warrant serious concern. A formal audit would either confirm that concern or put it to rest. Either outcome would be valuable.

I’m confident that NAMB is capable of being the world’s premier church planting organization. It already is, in some ways, but only in terms of sheer volume. The day NAMB begins measuring itself by the long-term faithfulness and ecclesiological health of its plants—rather than by the raw count it can report at the annual meeting—is the day it will begin producing something worthy of the investment the convention has entrusted to it.

Until then, the money will keep flowing, the numbers will keep climbing, and somewhere in a city near you, a church planter who should never have been funded will be preaching to a congregation that deserves better.

[1] North American Mission Board, “Southern Baptist giving to Lottie Moon, Annie Armstrong offerings surpasses $278 million” NAMB.net, October 13, 2025; North American Mission Board, “The Mission” AnnieArmstrong.com, Accessed March 2026.

[2] For the 2024–2025 fiscal year, NAMB trustees approved a budget of $147 million. See North American Mission Board, “NAMB trustees approve budget, celebrate work of NYC missionaries,” NAMB.net, October 10, 2024.

[3] NAMB Staff, “Pitman Moves to National Mobilizer Role with NAMB’s Send Network,” Baptist Press, February 19, 2026.

Editorial note: This essay is adapted from a talk (audio mp3) my wife gave to a mom’s group in our church with her friend, Suzanne. But these lessons would be profitable for men and women.

Introduction

My friend Suzanne and I have been meaning to talk about friendship for years. Every semester, we’d sit down to plan topics for our women’s group at church, and friendship would come up, and then we’d never actually get around to it. I think we kept putting it off because it’s one of those topics that sounds simple but isn’t. Everybody agrees that friends matter. Nobody really wants to admit how hard it is to make them and keep them.

When we finally did sit down and have the conversation, what came out wasn’t a tidy lesson. It was messy and honest and a little all over the place—which, honestly, is kind of how friendship works in real life. What I want to do here is take the best of what we talked about and lay it out in a way that might be helpful, not just for the women in our church, but for anyone who’s ever felt like they’re the only person in the room who doesn’t have friends. Because I promise you, you’re not.

Why This Matters

This matters because life is going to get hard. There’s going to be a difficult diagnosis, a miscarriage, financial trouble, marriage trouble—you name it. And when that happens, your pastors can only do so much. You need people. You need people in your life that you can turn to when things fall apart.

When someone comes to us going through something hard, the first thing I think is: who are they connected to? What small group are they in? Do those people know what’s going on? Because that’s how the body of Christ is supposed to work. It’s not just showing up on Sunday and worshiping and leaving. We’re supposed to function together, and that only happens through real relationships.

The Lies We Believe About Friendship

One thing Suzanne kept hearing from people was the same story over and over: “I don’t have any friends. I can’t connect.” And what was wild is that she was hearing it from everybody. The person who felt like they had no friends? The person they were envying was saying the exact same thing. Everyone was looking around thinking everyone else had it figured out, and nobody did. If no one initiates because everyone’s waiting for someone else to go first, then nobody’s going first. We just all sit there feeling lonely together.

Suzanne told me about how she used to walk into church events and just sit somewhere and hope someone would talk to her. And then she’d go home and tell her husband, “Nobody talked to me.” And he’d say, “Did you talk to them?” And she’d be like, “Well, no, but they should talk to me because I’m the new person.” I think we’ve all been there. But nobody was making her feel that way. It was all internal.

So here are some of the lies that kept coming up as we talked to people.

“People won’t like me if we make different choices.”

This one is huge, especially for women. There are so many things that can become dividing lines: Do you homeschool? Did you have a home birth or a hospital birth? Are you crunchy or not crunchy? It can go on and on. Guys seem to have an easier time here—they’re like, “We’re both Christians, cool,” and that’s enough. But for a lot of us, the comparison game is relentless.

If you’re someone with strong opinions, that’s fine. But just be careful how you hold those opinions in group settings. You might not realize it, but someone who made a different choice might be hearing your confidence as a judgment on them. And if you’re on the other side—if you tend to feel less-than—understand that a lot of that is coming from inside you, not from the person with the different opinion. We can be friends with people who have made difference choices than us. That’s not a threat. It’s actually a gift.

“Friendship should look like it did in a previous season.”

Many people form deep friendships in college because you’re together 24/7 and you don’t have many responsibilities. Then you graduate, you start over somewhere new, you don’t know anybody. And it takes so much longer to get to know people.

Then you get married and your husband becomes your priority. Then you have little kids and you get together with friends and you can’t string two sentences together because you’re constantly correcting somebody. It’s okay. It’s okay to embrace the fact that life is different now. It’s not going to look exactly like it did, and holding on to that expectation is just setting yourself up for disappointment. If you go in expecting it to feel like college forever, you’re going to be let down. But the friendships you build in these harder seasons? They’re just as real. They just look different.

“My friends have to be in my exact life stage.”

It’s natural to gravitate toward people in the same season. Newlyweds want to hang out with newlyweds, young parents with young parents. There’s nothing wrong with that. But when you narrow your focus to the point where the only people who could possibly be your friends are people doing exactly what you’re doing, you’re cutting yourself off from some of the richest relationships out there.

Suzanne told a story about an older woman at her previous church who became one of her closest friends—someone in her seventies. They showed up one day wearing the same shirt, and Suzanne just loved that. This woman cared for her, prayed for her, showed up for her in quiet, steady ways. Meanwhile, Suzanne had been so focused on trying to break into a specific friend group of people her own age that she almost missed the people God was actually putting in her life. Older friends who’d pull her aside after Bible study and say, “I went through that too. I’m praying for you. Can I bring you a meal?”

And younger friends bring something too. They’re not as jaded. They see things with a freshness that can challenge your cynicism. Suzanne said being around younger people reminded her how her own kids might be experiencing the world, and she could ask them questions that actually helped her parenting. The point is: a spectrum of ages in your friendships is not a consolation prize. It’s a gift.

“Friendship should just happen naturally.”

This might be the most common lie, and it creates a vicious cycle. You show up somewhere, nobody talks to you (or you don’t talk to anybody), you go home feeling bad, and then you don’t want to come to the next thing. And it just gets worse. Research out of the University of Kansas found that it takes about three years of consistent engagement to develop what you’d consider a good friendship, and about seven years for someone you’d call a lifelong friend. That’s a long time. Especially when you have little kids and being consistent feels almost impossible.

When my husband Michael and I first got married, there was this group of couples at our church that we really wanted to be friends with. We kept trying to get ourselves invited to stuff, and it just wasn’t happening. And then one Sunday there was this new couple, and we just said, “Hey, you wanna grab lunch?” And they said “yes!”. We ended up spending the whole day together—like eight hours. And from that one invitation, we ended up with a mid sized friend group that would hang out every Sunday from after church till late in the evening. But none of that would have happened if we had just kept wishing the other group would invite us. We had to put in the effort with someone new.

Friendship requires effort. It requires humility. It requires being willing to feel a little awkward. And even then, it’s not always going to be a love connection at first. But you show up, you try, and you trust that God is working in it. Even the idea of a “best friend” can be kind of an unrealistic expectation. God uses all kinds of different people for different things in your life, and I think we’d be a lot happier if we were just thankful for that instead of holding out for one perfect person.

“I don’t have time or energy for friends right now.”

I think a lot of people would honestly say this is true of them. And your capacity might be limited—maybe you don’t have transportation, or you’ve got a bunch of little ones at home, or you’re just exhausted. I get that. But limited capacity is not the same as no capacity. You might need to get creative, but you’re going to really regret it if you just don’t have any people in your world.

For Suzanne, COVID exposed a lot of relational problems in church. People left. Relationships were lost. And she got to a place where she was like, “People are just so much work.” She knew it wasn’t right, but that’s where she was. And then she was reading Paul’s letters and came across the part where he says he’s been “spent” for the people he serves, and he’s glad for it. And she said that just wrecked her. Because we should be willing to be spent for each other. That’s what we’re called to.

If you would honestly say you don’t have time or energy for friends, I’d gently ask: where are you with the Lord right now? What’s going on in your heart? Because I think a lot of times, that statement is covering something deeper. You might be hiding. You might be depressed. You might be protecting yourself from being hurt again. And I get all of that. But I’d encourage you to not stay there.

How to Be a Good Friend

Initiate

Here’s something that really reframed things for me: the Bible doesn’t command us to be loved. It commands us to love. That’s a big difference. I can’t make people love me—God doesn’t command that of me. But He does command me to love other people. So instead of sitting around wishing someone would reach out, just reach out. Text someone. Walk up to someone on Sunday. Say, “Hey, how can I be praying for you this week?” Set up a monthly lunch. If you make the decision once—like, the first Friday of every month we’re getting together—it takes the pressure off of having to remake that decision every time.

And if you’re new somewhere, just remember: most of the people around you probably feel new too. The person you’re hoping will come talk to you? They might be hoping the exact same thing about you. A friend of ours, Lily, is great at this. She’ll just text out of nowhere: “Yo, I’m thinking about you.” And it always seems to come on the hardest days. That kind of thing costs almost nothing and can completely change someone’s day.

Don’t Keep Score

In your marriage or your friendships—don’t keep score. Who texted last? Who initiated last? Who seems to care more? That kind of thinking will poison everything. People have different capacities and different communication styles, and somebody not texting you back right away doesn’t mean they don’t care. I’m terrible at responding to texts. It takes me three days sometimes, or I just completely forget. It doesn’t mean I don’t love the person. I got distracted. I struggle with making decisions. If you’re asking me for a decision over text, that’s especially hard for me. So just—give people grace.

Don’t Be Quick to Take Offense

Oh man, this one. I had a text exchange with someone recently that went completely off the rails. My intention was to encourage this person—like, “Hey, way to go, look at this great thing.” And they took it as me giving them rules. Like I was telling them what to do. They were hurt and offended, and I’m sitting there thinking, can you go back and read those messages in the spirit I intended them? It’s so easy to assume the worst over text. A missing exclamation point suddenly means they’re mad at you. No punctuation at all? They must be furious.

First Corinthians 13 says love “believes all things.” That means believing people are saying what they mean, not looking for the hidden insult. If you have low self-esteem, everything can be filtered through the lens of “people are annoyed by me, I’m a burden.” But that’s not fair to the people around you. An older woman at Suzanne’s previous church told her once: “Don’t worry about what people are thinking, because they’re not.” And honestly, that’s gotten me through some hard times too. Most people are way too busy thinking about themselves to be scrutinizing you.

Point Them Back to Jesus

This is what you want your friends to do for you, and it’s what you should be doing for them. When someone comes to you with all their problems, you don’t just want to be like, “Yeah, that’s terrible.” You want to know your Bible well enough to point out the lies they’re believing, encourage them with truth, and pray for them. You don’t want to be a friend the way the world does friendship. And that means pointing out sin when it’s appropriate, too. Not in a harsh way, but in a “I love you too much to let you stay here” way. That’s what real friendship looks like.

Be Vulnerable

If you want your friendships to go deeper, someone has to go first. Someone has to be the one who gets honest in the small group. Someone has to cry. And it might need to be you. Suzanne said she doesn’t really have a choice—she’s just that person. First day of any group, she’s crying and sharing things. Has she been burned by it? Yes. Has she shared too much at times? Definitely. But way more often, people come up afterward and say, “Thank you for being honest about that. I feel the same way.”

You can be wise about it. You don’t have to share everything with everyone. There’s a time and a place. But don’t let the fear of being burned keep you locked in surface-level relationships forever. The risk is worth it. And confessing your own sin goes hand in hand with this. When you’re honest about your own failures, it gives other people permission to be honest about theirs.

Ask for Feedback and Accountability

This is scary, but it might be the most important thing on this list. If there’s an area you’re insecure about, ask someone you trust: “Is this actually true of me?” A lot of times, what’s been tormenting you turns out to be a lie, and just hearing someone say “No, that’s not you at all” can be incredibly freeing. But sometimes there is something. There might be a blind spot, a habit, something you do that puts people off without you realizing it. Wouldn’t you rather know?

My husband Michael talks about how when he was a student leader in college, the staff sat him down and told him he wasn’t being chosen for a leadership position because he had a pride problem. That was devastating at the time. But years later, he tracked those people down to thank them. They loved him enough to say the hard thing, and it changed his life. Proverbs says the wounds of a friend are faithful. When someone who loves you tells you something hard, receive it. It might hurt for a while. But it’s one of the greatest gifts a friend can give.

Ask Questions

Don’t talk about yourself all the time. I know, that sounds obvious. But Suzanne told a story about realizing one day that she had a really close friend and she didn’t even know the woman’s favorite color or what she’d gone to school for. Because Suzanne had been doing all the talking. When she gets nervous, she just talks. And she’d give someone a second to respond, and if they hesitated, she’d fill the silence with more of herself. She said it’s embarrassing to think back on, but it wasn’t really caring. She had to learn to slow down and be genuinely interested.

Some people were raised in families where asking questions felt nosy. Michael’s mom is like that—in her mind, if you want her to know something, you’ll tell her. And we’re over here thinking, “If you loved us, you’d ask.” We’re all coming from different places. But here’s a practical tip that was actually life-changing for someone I shared it with years ago: when you’re talking to someone, try to ask at least three questions about them. That’s it. Three questions. It sounds small, but it forces you out of just talking about yourself, and people notice. They feel cared for. And that’s a huge part of what love looks like.

Pray for Them

When your friend is going through something hard, you can be there and they can cry on your shoulder, but you can’t really fix it. Taking their needs before the Father is the biggest gift you can give them. And I know prayer can feel like a small thing. People have even said to me, “All you did was pray?” But I’ve seen prayer work too many times to think that.

When Suzanne first came to our church, she was pregnant and the doctor told her she was going to lose the baby. That little girl turned eleven this year. I’ve had moments too—where I’ve been really upset about something, texted a few friends to pray, and the shift in my heart was almost immediate. I could feel it. So pray. Pray for your friends. It’s a bigger deal than we realize.

Examining Ourselves

Check Your Expectations

A lot of the pain we experience in friendship comes down to expectations we didn’t even know we had. It’s the same as marriage—you don’t know what your expectations are until somebody isn’t meeting them. You might be carrying around this unspoken idea that your friend should text back within an hour, or that your spouses should all be best friends, or that you should be getting together weekly. And then when it doesn’t happen, you’re hurt, and you don’t even really know why.

But here’s what I learned. Much of the time when I’d get hurt in a friendship, it turned out to be my own issue—I’d said yes to something I should have said no to, or I had an expectation I’d never communicated and then I was resentful when it wasn’t met. We don’t even voice some of these expectations because deep down we know they’re kind of unreasonable. I don’t respond to every text, but when somebody doesn’t respond to me? Clearly they hate me. We have to check ourselves on this stuff.

Deal with Your Past Hurts

If you’ve lived on this planet, you’ve been hurt by friendship. I think friendship hurts are actually unique—they cut in a different way than romantic heartbreak. Because with a romantic relationship, okay, the attraction faded or it didn’t work out. But when a friend rejects you, it hits at something deeper: you don’t even want to be around me? Suzanne talked about a childhood best friend who lived across the street and one day just called her up and said, “I don’t care. I don’t want to be friends with you anymore.” She said that rocked her world. And those kinds of wounds get carried into every new relationship if they’re not dealt with.

You start seeing rejection where there isn’t any. You pull back before anyone can get close enough to hurt you again. You treat every new friend like they’re the person who wounded you. Recognizing those patterns and asking the Lord for healing is so important. You’re not a victim forever. The hard things you’ve been through have shaped you, but they don’t have to define you. And you don’t want to be eighty years old still blaming your current relationships on something that happened decades ago. Ask God to heal you from whatever makes you insecure, whatever makes you afraid to let people in.

Be Willing to Do the Work

If you consistently struggle to make or keep friends, at some point it’s worth asking someone who loves you: is there something I’m not seeing? There might be nothing. But there might be something—a way you come across, a habit you don’t realize you have. And when someone does tell you something hard, try not to get defensive right away. Ask yourself: am I offended because what they said is wrong, or am I offended because it hurts because they’re right? We’re all blinded to our own faults. Being willing to hear hard things and actually do the work to grow—that’s what maturity looks like. And it’s one of the most hopeful things you can do for your future friendships.

Conclusion

If you feel lonely, here’s my first piece of advice: sign up to do something. Join a small group. Go to the next church event. Volunteer to serve somewhere. I know some people are like, “I hate small talk, I hate initiating, it makes me die inside.” I get it. But you have to find ways to connect, and sometimes that means doing stuff that feels uncomfortable.

And here’s the thing about showing up to the same things over and over: you need that repetition. You have to keep talking to the same people. Some folks will say, “I always just talk to the same people at these things,” like that’s a problem. But that repetition is exactly how friendships are built. You keep showing up, you keep having conversations, and over time, depth comes.

One really practical tip that’s been a game changer for me: when you want to get together with someone, text them with your calendar open. Don’t say, “We should hang out sometime.” That’s never going to happen. Say, “Are you free Friday?” If they’re not, say, “What about the following Tuesday?” Set it up right there. It sounds so simple, but it makes all the difference. The gap between wanting to be friends with someone and actually being friends with them is usually just the willingness to schedule the next step.

God Provides

C. S. Lewis wrote something in The Four Loves that Suzanne found while we were preparing for this talk, and it’s stuck with me. He said that in friendship, we think we’ve chosen our peers. But for a Christian, there are no chances—a “secret master of ceremonies” has been at work. Christ, who told his disciples “You have not chosen me, but I have chosen you,” can say the same to every group of Christian friends: “You have not chosen one another, but I have chosen you for one another.”

I love that. Because it means the friendships in your life right now—messy, inconvenient, not what you imagined—they’re not accidents. God has placed specific people in your path for specific reasons. He’s been faithful to provide friends in my life, even when I couldn’t see it at the time. Looking back, I can see why certain people were there in certain seasons, and why some friendships didn’t work out. And I’m grateful.

So take the risk. Send the text. Ask the awkward question. Share the hard thing. Walk up to someone you don’t know and just say hi. It will feel uncomfortable. It will require humility. You might get burned. But on the other side of that discomfort is the kind of friendship that holds you up in your darkest seasons, sharpens you when you’re complacent, and keeps pointing you back to the God who made you to need each other.

But I need to say something before I proceed. This piece is about discerning how propaganda works in Christian circles, not about the video itself.

I’ll say this upfront so it’s crystal clear: This article is not about rushing to Trump’s defense because I voted for him. This article is not about whether or not the clip at the end is racist. This article is not about whether or not Trump should have posted it, or whether the White House should have better quality controls, or whether or not Trump knew what it contained. Finally, this piece is not about Trump’s response to the controversy or whether or not he should have fired whoever supposedly posted it.

This piece is about us. This piece is about how so many Christians and pastors got bullied–once again–into engaging in a virtue-signalling denunciation ritual that communicates unquestioning allegiance to a misleading narrative pushed by the Left.

Slow Down: Scripture, Discernment, and Refusing to be Steered

Let’s start with some scriptural reminders about how to assess “breaking news” and “shocking claims.” First, Proverbs 18:13 teaches us that, “If one gives an answer before he hears, it is his folly and shame.” I’ve done that before. I’ve weighed in prematurely and ended up with egg on my face. Have you?

Exodus 23:2 is even more to the point: “You shall not fall in with the many to do evil, nor shall you bear witness in a lawsuit, siding with the many, so as to pervert justice.” In other words, time and truth go hand in hand. Hot takes, not so much.

I first heard about the video because of the outrage it triggered. I hadn’t seen it myself yet, but my initial assumption was that Trump had posted something intentionally provocative. I usually ignore such things. Trump does like to troll people sometimes, so I didn’t give it much thought. But it kept coming up again and again, and I started to wonder if something bigger was afoot.

I wondered, “Did Trump really post a video depicting the Obamas as monkeys?” If so, that would have been politically foolish. What’s the upside? What did he have to gain from doing something that would obviously trigger such a massive backlash?

So I found the original video online and watched it for myself.

Here’s what I saw: a serious video about election integrity, a topic Trump has been talking about ever since 2020. It wasn’t a cartoon. It wasn’t a troll video to make fun of people. It was one minute long and, as I said, the tone was serious throughout.

Since Trump prefers to post on Truth Social, his own social media site, any video posted there must first be recorded from the original source and then reposted there. But as the original video was ending, the algorithm autoloaded another video, which was an AI cartoon depicting the Obamas as monkeys with “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” playing in the background. The Obama video had nothing to do with the original video, and it is plain to anyone willing to be honest. Whoever did the screen recording didn’t edit that part out and posted it, unedited.

The most plausible explanation—by far—is that this was an editing or screen-recording error, not an intentional act of racism.

But the propaganda machine doesn’t care about that. Propaganda isn’t interested in truth; it is interested in compelling action, and that’s where this incident is relevant for Christians.

How Emotional Manipulation for the Outrage Machine Works: Denounce First, Truth Later, Apologize Never

I’ve written a couple of pieces about propaganda recently. The first piece is “How Propaganda Works-And Why Christians are Easy Targets.” The second piece is “Christian–Stop Falling for Weaponized Empathy.” Consider this the third entry in that series, where I’m trying to help Christians better discern how we’re being played by propaganda, weaponized empathy, and emotional manipulation.

As I argued in the “How Propaganda Works” piece, propaganda isn’t so much about spreading outright lies; it’s about provoking a particular action, which the individual later justifies with adjusted beliefs. I’ll say that again, because this is important: Propaganda aims to provoke action without reflection. This is the action-first engine of propaganda.

But every engine needs fuel. Propaganda doesn’t give us a new set of values. Propaganda takes our existing values and moral instincts and points them in a particular direction. Don’t miss that–propaganda doesn’t create moral instincts for you. Propaganda takes your existing moral instincts and tells you what you must do with them, always insisting that you ACT NOW!

In other words, propaganda is about compliance, and the moral urgency doesn’t give you time to think or reflect. Its goal is to “move you, hurry you, shame you, flatter you, or frighten you until the actions you take feel like Spirit-led instincts — which you then justify with changed beliefs after the fact.”

The Trump video from last week gave us a textbook example, and Christians walked right into it. Many Christians did not discern the situation properly and got played. How so? Let me show you.

There’s a three-move pattern: (1) Highlight suffering, (2) Create urgency, and (3) Enforce compliance.

Step One: Highlight suffering. In this instance, the video was seen as clear evidence of Trump’s racism, which activated the outrage machine to talk about how much “harm” and “pain” the video caused. When I (and many others) pointed out that it was actually an editing error, not a deliberate act of racism, the responses clearly demonstrated that propaganda was at work. It was obvious because so many were absolutely convinced that the only explanation is that Trump is an unhinged racist and he deliberately posted a video to inflict maximum suffering. Even though that’s not true, it doesn’t matter. Propaganda doesn’t care about what’s true. It only cares to provoke the desired reaction (I’ll get to that in a moment).

Step Two: Create urgency. Urgency is an essential feature of propaganda because you need people to take action on what they perceive as an emergency. No time to think, pray, reflect, or discern, something must be done NOW. Why now? Because people are suffering, and human suffering makes everything an emergency. Refusing to be rushed is not indifference to sin or suffering; it’s obedience to the ninth commandment.

Step Three: Enforce compliance. Another feature of propaganda is that it isn’t centrally controlled. There doesn’t need to be a mastermind behind the curtain pulling the levers to make propaganda work. It’s largely an organic phenomenon that seems to operate on its own. So what do I mean by “enforce compliance?” Nobody sent you a memo telling you what to do, right? And yet, so many people did the very thing propaganda aimed at: they performed a denunciation ritual.

I’ll give you some high-profile examples. First, Russell Moore posted a screenshot of the image of the Obamas looking like monkeys, and said, “Racist. Deranged. Humiliating to our country. The fact that we have decided to pretend to this is normal every day is a moral abomination.”

He didn’t post the entire video, of course, because if he did, it would be more obvious that this was an editing error. No, he only posted a screenshot that would inflict maximum PR damage on Trump.

Second, John Piper chimed in. He reposted Moore’s post, but added this commentary: “One not to be so afraid of sounding “quasi-woke” that one cannot agree with Russell Moore on this.” So, Piper approves of Moore’s assessment that Trump was posting something “racist” and “deranged.”

There’s something interesting about this. John Piper is a “father in the faith” to many and is considered a reasonable, valuable voice on a number of subjects. Piper doesn’t post often on social media.

A few weeks ago, when a worship service at Cities Church in Minneapolis was invaded by a horde of disruptive agitators, Piper said nothing, even though Cities Church was planted by Piper’s own church in the city where he’s ministered for decades. Certainly, if anything would merit Piper’s unique comment and wisdom, it would be this one. But he said nothing.

That’s fine; he does not owe anyone a comment unless he chooses to give it. But it’s at least worth noticing what does and does not prompt public comment from Piper: Not a hostile invasion of a church planted out of his ministry, but a meme video he assumed was racist, even though that’s highly implausible.

A third example, this one from Mike Cosper, from Christianity Today, who posted this: “Let’s be very clear: Donald Trump, who took out a full page ad calling for the summary executions of the Central Park 5, who was the chief profligate of the Obama Birth Certificate conspiracy theory, who made sh**hole countries comments in his first term in the oval… I’m supposed to believe there’s no way he intentionally reposted a racist meme presenting his black predecessor and his wife as apes? Okay folks.”

Cosper is certain Trump posted this intentionally, though in so doing, there’s nothing to gain and everything to lose.

This is the power of propaganda. Upon close inspection, the manipulative outrage offered and demanded by Moore, Piper, and Cosper is unwarranted because the facts clearly point to the video debacle being an editing error, not a deliberate act of sinister racism.

But truth doesn’t matter in this case. What matters is ensuring the whole world knows you denounce it. Why? Because propaganda has told you to.

Propaganda told you the video was racist, sinful, and had caused great pain to many people. Since people are suffering, it’s an emergency, and we need to act as quickly as possible to ease their pain. Therefore, we must perform a denunciation ritual. We must tell the world how evil Trump is, how racist he is, how we’re not like that evil man, who is a moral monster and beyond redemption.

Further, anyone who claims the video is simply an editing error is also an evil person, most likely a racist, who doesn’t care about all the pain and suffering Trump has caused, and we want nothing to do with them.

Sound familiar?

The Real Danger: Christians Forsaking Truth and Becoming Pawns of the Media Outrage Machine

Here’s what concerns me most. It’s not that Christians got this one incident wrong. It’s the pattern that keeps playing out every few weeks. Whenever a new outrage cycle begins, people get worked up and impulsively say and do things before the facts have a chance to come out.

Remember this: every time there’s a politically and emotionally charged news story, the initial reports are almost always wrong. But when we go online and perform a denunciation ritual before all the facts are known, we end up looking foolish. But rather than just admitting it and saying, “Hey, I got that one wrong, I’m sorry,” we double down. We don’t want to give our enemies ammunition to use against us, so we stand by our naive takes and foolish posts, even though we know they were wrong, until we start believing them. Eventually, we lie to ourselves so many times that it gets harder to discern the truth at all.

I’m a pastor, and yes, I’m also a conservative who enthusiastically voted for Trump. But I’m not writing these things to defend Trump. I have no problem criticizing the President if I think it’s needed, and I’ve done so in the past. Allie Beth Stuckey offered helpful remarks on what legitimate criticism vs. weaponized (and suspect) criticism of President Trump looks like (especially from the Big Eva class).

I’m writing because truth matters, and I’m worried that Christians are getting pulled deeper and deeper into the vortex of propaganda, and it’s distorting their ability to see clearly, discern rightly, and obey God according to the truth.

And yes, I’m aware that conservatives fall for propaganda too, which I addressed in my “How Propaganda Works” piece cited above. I’ve seen the same dynamics on the right—selective clips, inflated claims, premature moral outrage. I’ve addressed that elsewhere, and I’m not pretending immunity here. But ultimately, this isn’t a Left-or-Right issue. Discernment is predicated upon a relentless pursuit of the truth, even when truth is inconvenient, uncomfortable, or even damaging to “my side.”

I’ve fallen for propaganda before myself. I’m not immune to manipulation and deception. We’ve all jumped to a false conclusion, posted about it online, and then felt the sting of embarrassment when the facts came out later.

The question is whether we’ll learn from it or keep doing it. The people most easily deceived and propagandized are those who assume they are immune to it. That certainty — that unshakable confidence that your emotional reaction is identical to moral truth — is not discernment. It’s the absence of it.

So, I’ve made it a priority in my own life to follow the truth, difficult as it can be to discern, and follow it wherever it leads. Christians must learn to pause, verify, and refuse to be rushed, especially when outrage feels righteous.

Seriously, your naivete might feel warm, nice, friendly, and loving. But that’s not how true Christian love works.

I saw a post by the radical progressive “pastor” Benjamin Cremer that was getting shared a lot on Facebook. The post listed all the “un-Christlike things” he claims that ICE is supposedly doing, such as using “children as bait,” “shooting unarmed protesters,” “teargassing families,” and “terrorizing immigrant communities and people of color.”

The whole post went on and on like this, dripping with moral outrage and emotional manipulation. It was a textbook emotional ambush. No argument, no evidence, just big feelings.

What troubles me is that so many Christians were sharing this as though it were wise and insightful. But it’s not—not in the slightest.

The logical holes were so massive you could drive a truck through them. But the author wasn’t making a case for his perspective based on biblical reasoning. His case was based entirely on feelings, and church people fall for that kind of thing all the time.

False teaching almost always bypasses the mind and works directly on the emotions. That’s why scripture warns us to watch out for it. Paul says false teachers “cause divisions and create obstacles” by using “smooth talk and flattery” to “deceive the hearts of the naive” (Rom 16:17-18). That’s exactly what Benjamin Cremer was doing in his post.

He was using emotional manipulation to make error feel like love. It works like a charm on naive people.

That’s a big problem in the modern church. Too many people are gullible, and gullible Christians are causing a lot of harm in the church. These people aren’t blue-haired radical leftists we see at ICE protests in Minneapolis. No, they are ordinary Christians who sit next to you in church on Sunday but are led by their emotions. They are the nicest people you’d ever meet. They just don’t have the stomach to face hard realities. They think being “Christlike” is whatever makes them feel good.

But here’s the truth: it isn’t Christlike to be gullible. It isn’t Christlike to believe and share debunked propaganda. It isn’t Christlike to be led by your emotions. It isn’t Christlike to outsource your critical thinking skills to the left-wing activists in the mainstream media.

So why are Christians so gullible? It’s because they’ve been trained to think “love” means whatever it feels like in their happy place. They assume Jesus just wants us to be nice and get along and never do unpleasant things like hold people accountable for their actions. They equate “love” with their feelings. They assume Jesus wants them to go around and feel sorry for people, no matter what they’ve done to bring harm upon themselves, because Jesus is all compassion and zero accountability. And if people are held accountable in ways that cause them pain, then that is not being “Christlike.”

This thinking is wrongheaded. Biblical love isn’t about pointing your emotions in a particular direction. Biblical love is defined by actions and attitudes prescribed in scripture. How you feel about it is secondary.

Look carefully at Paul’s prayer from the beginning of Philippians. He says, “And it is my prayer that your love may abound more and more, with knowledge and all discernment, so that you may approve what is excellent, and so be pure and blameless for the day of Christ” (Philippians 1:9-11).

First, notice that Paul is praying that their “love may abound more and more.” That’s clear enough. We’re talking about genuine Christian love. But love isn’t merely an emotion. Paul describes the kind of love he has in mind.

Second, he prays that their love will abound “with knowledge and all discernment.” That’s important. Christian love is a thinking love. Christian love needs to be well-informed. Christian love is discerning; it makes proper distinctions and draws clear moral boundaries. But why is that important?

Third, these things matter so “you may approve what is excellent, and so be pure and blameless.” In other words, we need knowledge and discernment to anchor our love in what is good and right. Or as Paul says, to “approve what is excellent.” This is true Christian love, the kind of love that is “pure and blameless.”

Therefore, love that lacks discernment is not pure and blameless. In fact, undiscerning “love” is not real love. It is all feelings and no wisdom. That’s the kind of irrational, undiscerning, corrupted “love” we’re seeing these days from gullible Christians. They hear sad stories and believe them immediately. They don’t realize they’re being lied to and propagandized. They don’t think in biblical categories; they think in terms of their emotions. They equate “loving the stranger” with open borders. They assume every illegal immigrant is an innocent victim and we’re supposed to just “love” on them, just like Jesus would. Since they genuinely feel sorry for people and don’t want anyone to suffer, they assume that must be what Jesus would want them to do. After all, God is a God of love, and they assume God’s love is just as emotional as theirs. This is love without discernment, which causes a lot of harm.

Biblical love is love PLUS knowledge PLUS discernment. In other words, love requires discernment. Period. Discernment is the rope that keeps people tethered to reality. Without it, love becomes a weapon that evil people use against you. Undiscerning love makes people very easy to manipulate. All you need is a sob story to make people feel sad, and Christians will take up their cause.

Without discernment, love gets twisted into a sentimental monstrosity. For the gullible and undiscerning, this kind of pseudo “love” claims the moral high ground. It does have some rhetorical advantages, which is why so many people fall for it. It sounds biblical enough to convince undiscerning people it must be right. But it’s not. These are not arguments or facts. They are ear-tickling slogans, nothing more.

Just as discerning love is pure and blameless, undiscerning love is impure and blameworthy. Obviously, the unhinged rioters and agitators bear the blame for their actions. But their nice, Christian enablers who feel big feelings of “love” bear some of the blame too. To claim the mantle of Christlikeness in the service of lawlessness is evil, even if the one doing it thinks they are just showing Christian love. Their undiscerning love is just a front for the wickedness they are enabling. So, the blame belongs to those Christians who are so desperate to feel compassionate that they’ll believe anything, question nothing, and call it love.

Christians, we are morally responsible for how we love. We don’t just get to feel sorry for an illegal immigrant and “stand up” for them and call it love. That’s not love, no matter how strongly you feel it. Love does not spread leftist propaganda, “love rejoices with the truth” (1 Cor 13:6).

So, for all the gullible Christians who are angrily venting about ICE, your Christian love is not pure. It is not blameless. You are functioning as agents of chaos. You bear the blame for your irrational outrage, even if you present it as love and care and compassion.

So, I’ll say it again. Being gullible is a sin. Being undiscerning is a morally culpable act. Allowing anti-Christian and anti-American radicals to manipulate you through weaponized empathy is a sin. It is wrong to carelessly wield the name of Christ, making false accusations against law enforcement and making excuses for criminals.

Your emotions and subjective ideas of Christlikeness don’t dictate reality. Truth does. And truth requires discernment, not just feelings. We don’t get to emote all over the place and call it love.

So Christians, stop being gullible. Start being discerning. That’s what real love requires.

This essay was originally published at the Center for Baptist Leadership.

Update: this essay prompted some discussion on Facebook which ironically ended up illustrating my point. Notice how this commenter bypasses discernment and moves straight to “Jesus calls us to love.” But her idea of love lacks knowledge and discernment. It’s just warm, happy feelings for “the foreigner, the hurting, and those who are scared.” Notice how she assumes the people being loved are victims. What if the foreigner is a violent murderer or rapist? Should we not also love our neighbors by protecting them from those who would do them harm?

Romans 5:3-4 says, “we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope.”

There’s a divine progression here. Suffering isn’t random cruelty. It has a purpose. God uses it to produce endurance in you—the strength to take a punch and keep going. That endurance then gets forged into godly character. And that character produces a hope that doesn’t waver when the next storm rolls in.

Think about the strongest Christians you know. The ones who are unflappable. Steady. Rock-solid in their faith. I’ll bet you my paycheck they’ve been through some hard things. They’ve cried rivers of tears. They’ve poured their hearts out to God in the dark hours. And God used all of that pain to turn their spines into steel.

This is the typical way God works. Show me a godly, steadfast saint who’s been walking faithfully for forty years, and I’ll show you a man or woman who has been made strong through suffering.

On the other hand, show me a Christian who’s always had the good life, who’s had everything handed to them on a silver platter, and who’s never really been tested—and very often (though not always) you’ll find someone who hasn’t learned endurance yet. They’re fragile. They haven’t had their weakness trained out of them.

Now here’s the hard truth: godly Christian character is not forged in a Sunday school class. You don’t become unshakeable by listening to podcasts about perseverance or reading books about trials. Those things help, for sure, but they’re just one piece of the puzzle. The other piece, the one we don’t like to acknowledge, is that God beats these truths into your soul through pain.

That’s an unfortunate reality, but it is the reality. Godly character is very often forged in the flames of adversity.

The Wrong Response

Here’s where we need to get honest. When suffering comes—and it will come—you have a choice to make. Many Christians today don’t make the right choice. We’ve gotten so comfortable, so soft, that we feel like we’re being uniquely afflicted by God whenever hard things happen.

We may not like it, but it’s the truth: this is just the way life is.

Nobody wants to suffer. Nobody wants to lose their job. Nobody wants sick kids. Nobody wants to get cancer. Nobody wants marriage trouble or financial ruin or chronic pain. But when it happens, you’ve got to make a decision about how to handle it.

If you’re whining and complaining and grumbling against God, if you’re getting bitter, wallowing in self-pity, crying “woe is me” every time life gets hard—my friend, you need to repent. I know that sounds harsh. God is not honored by a grumbling spirit.

Not only is that response a sinful lack of faith, it’s also a missed opportunity for growth. God brought this trial into your life for a reason. He’s working to make you stronger. He’s working endurance into your soul, forging character in you, anchoring hope in you. But if you respond the wrong way, you’ll miss all of it. You’ll just get bitter and angry and envious of others who seem to have it easier.

There are no humility points for falling apart. There’s no virtue in being fragile.

The Right Response

So what’s the right response?

As crazy as it sounds—and I know it sounds crazy—here’s what you do when you face suffering. Close your eyes, take a deep breath, gather yourself, and rejoice.

I’m not saying you have to be glad for your suffering. I’m saying you can choose to rejoice in your suffering. In other words, you can give thanks in it. You can pray, “Lord, your word says this trial is for my good. I don’t like it. I don’t want it. But I’m choosing to trust you in it. Thank you. I’m choosing to rejoice in this suffering as an act of faith.”

Then you look at that painful circumstance directly and greet it as a friend: “welcome, suffering, my old friend. I did not ask nor want your visit. But I welcome you nonetheless, because God sent you to me. Here I am. Accomplish in me the purpose for which God sent you.”

When you do this, by faith, scripture promises that endurance, character, and hope will begin to accrue in your life. The suffering will produce endurance. The endurance will produce character. The character will produce hope. And you will become one of those precious saints that others look to and say, “I want to be a rock like that. I want to be the kind of man or woman that knows how to suffer well, like they do.”

The Promise

Do you have the faith to trust God with your suffering? Do you believe he will make it glorious in his time?

God wants you to be resilient and strong. He wants you to be able to take a punch and keep going. He wants you to be an unconquerable Christian—not because you’re tough in yourself, but because his Spirit dwells in you and his love has been poured into your heart.

Right now, you might be going through trials that are rocking your world. You’re hanging on for dear life. You’re in the thick of something menacing and awful. So here’s what I want you to know: God is using this. He’s not being cruel. He doesn’t hate you. He’s making you into the saint he’s called you to be.

One day, if you respond rightly to this suffering, you’ll be one of those unflappable old Christians. Steadfast. Firm. Strong. The kind of person whose faith has been tested by fire and proven genuine. The kind of person others look to for an example of how to endure.

And one day not too far from now, Christ will wipe away every tear, and all pain will be no more, and you’ll stand before your Savior with a hope that was forged through suffering, endurance, and character. You’ll know in your bones what it means to be saved by grace, and you’ll have the scars to prove that God’s promises are true.

That’s the kind of Christian God wants you to be.

Not fragile. Not brittle. Not quick to despair. You’ll be strong. Resilient. Hopeful. Unshakeable.

So take a deep breath, saint of God. Whatever trial you’re facing, God is with you. He will not leave you. He will not forsake you. And he will use every bit of this suffering to make you more like Christ.

Upcoming Conference in Ridgecrest, NC

This May 7-9, I’ll be speaking at the Manhood and Womanhood Conference: The Glory of God in the Creation Order, a national conference hosted by Church and Family Life.

Other speakers include Dr. Joel Beeke, Dr. Tom Ascol, and Scott Aniol, among many others.

The conference website says,

God has displayed His glory throughout creation—a beautiful glory clearly seen in how He made man and woman.

In answer to the gender confusion of our day, Church and Family Life is pleased to be hosting Manhood and Womanhood: A Conference on God’s Glory in the Creation Order, to be held on May 7-9, 2026 in Ridgecrest, North Carolina.

The goals of the conference are threefold:

Proclaim the power and beauty of God’s created order for masculinity and femininity

Rejoice in it!

Mobilize us to action to fulfill the heavenly vision

If you’re in the area and would like to attend the conference, it’s looking like it will be a fantastic event for the whole family. I hope to see you there!

More info can be found here.

We live in an age saturated with information, urgency, and moral pressure. Christians are constantly told what to fear, what to celebrate, and how quickly we must respond. Without realizing it, these factors form our habits of thought and action. This essay is not an attempt to relitigate culture-war skirmishes or assign new enemies. Rather, it is an effort to name how propaganda works on all of us, how it bypasses judgment, and why Christians who sincerely want to be faithful must learn to slow down, think clearly, and resist being trained to act without wisdom.

Here’s the painful reality: Christians who read their Bibles, uphold the truth, and distrust the world often think they are immune to propaganda. They assume propaganda only works on ignorant, immoral, and unserious people. This assumption is false. In this essay, I’m going to explain why faithful, Bible-believing, godly Christians can be even more susceptible to propaganda than your average person.

Propaganda is all around us and arrives in a variety of ideological packages. Progressive propaganda typically relies on narrative construction, often detached from reality. Conservative propaganda is different. It borrows real truths, exaggerates legitimate concerns, and uses them to demand tribal loyalty or suppress good judgment.

Personally, I’m committed to the truth of Scripture. I want to believe what is true and right, no matter what, even if it’s personally costly. Over time, I’ve gotten pretty good at recognizing and resisting leftist propaganda. But conservative propaganda is harder to detect, because conservatism is what I believe and the world I inhabit. It’s my tribe. So, the challenge is not only discerning propaganda from the Left, but also from within my own camp.

That’s the difficult thing for conservatives to admit: we use propaganda too. Not mainly to persuade outsiders, but to police boundaries and behaviors within the tribe. And conservatives are more susceptible to conservative propaganda because our coalition claims to value truth.

Conservatives propagandize one another because some are jockeying for position within the coalition. Sometimes they’re driven by ambition. Sometimes by money. Conservative propagandists profit from the genuine concerns and legitimate fears of sincere believers. In an age of thick lies, how can we discern truth from error? How can we know if outside actors are exploiting us to sow division and confusion? When someone comes along claiming to have uncovered the “real truth” about some issue, how can we know if they’re trustworthy or not?

It’s a cold, hard fact of modern life. Propaganda is everywhere, and we’d be fools to think we’re immune to it. And conservative Christians who think they are “red pilled” can be even more vulnerable to propaganda, precisely because they think we always see things clearly. We are not vulnerable because we reject the truth, but because our commitment to truth convinces us we are immune to manipulation. Then, we end up acting on impulses supplied by propaganda while sincerely believing we’re acting on Christian principles.

Propaganda is a system of social conditioning aimed at producing conformity of action and thought through emotional pressure, repetition, and total immersion in a controlled symbolic world. It is difficult to resist, or even detect, because of its sheer size, scope, and omnipresence, all of which are amplified by modern technology and mass communication. That is the mechanism, and it explains far more about modern Christian confusion than most people are willing to admit.

What follows are eight realities about propaganda that can help you discern and resist it. Before going any further, I need to name my source. These insights are drawn primarily from Jacques Ellul’s important book Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes (1963). I am not an Ellul scholar, and this essay is not a summary of his book. I’m simply a pastor trying to help Christians learn how propaganda works so we can resist its manipulative power more faithfully.

1. Propaganda Aims to Provoke Action Without Reflection

Most people think propaganda is about falsehood, such as fabricated claims, obvious lies, and crude manipulation. That’s not true. The best propaganda doesn’t lie overtly, because propaganda is chiefly interested in compliance. Propaganda’s goal is to move you, hurry you, shame you, flatter you, or frighten you until the actions you take as a result feel like Spirit-led instincts which you later justify with changed beliefs. Thus, the ultimate aim of all propaganda is to provoke action without prior thought.

The most effective propaganda relies on selectively curated facts. Those facts are carefully selected, exaggerated, framed, and arranged into a narrative that gives emotional coherence to scattered data. Ellul writes, “Facts are treated in such a fashion that they draw their listener into an irresistible sociological current… propaganda must be based on some truth that can be said in few words and is able to linger in the collective consciousness” (p 55). In other words, propaganda’s favorite facts are memorable and sensational.

Propaganda trains us to act first and reflect later. The goal is to get people involved. It can even be small actions, like “wear this ribbon,” “put this frame on your profile picture,” or “share this clip.” Once the desired action is secured, our beliefs will follow to justify the actions we’ve already taken. Ideally, the action will be public, making it part of your identity. Everyone saw what you did. At that point, you are psychologically invested. You retroactively align your beliefs to justify what you’ve already done.

Once this happens, arguments stop functioning as truth claims. They become action-defenders instead. Reasoning becomes a tool to protect past behavior. As Ellul puts it, “Action makes propaganda’s effect irreversible… He who acts in obedience to propaganda can never go back” (p 27). Whenever discernment is replaced by urgency, emotion, or moral pressure, propaganda has already won.

2. Propaganda Simplifies Reality Through Moral Compression

Propaganda thrives in morally charged environments, especially when reality is complex. And propaganda is most effective when it provides simple explanations for complex realities.

Modern society produces information overload, making it impossible to process and reflect on the news of the day. Propaganda offers relief by providing simple explanations for complicated problems. It gives people an all-encompassing moral map and a clear way to signal allegiance.

Simplicity is essential. Propaganda cannot tolerate complexity because complexity slows people down. Careful reflection takes time, and propaganda needs momentum. So reality is compressed into rigid moral binaries: good versus evil, victim versus oppressor, ally versus enemy. This is not accidental. Mass compliance requires moral compression.

Once these categories are established, questioning them becomes an act of betrayal. That’s because propaganda is not about evaluating ideas. It’s about taking sides. And once people are divided into “good guys” and “bad guys,” self-righteousness becomes extreme and irrational. Ellul notes that the propagandist must insist on the purity of his own intentions while hurling accusations at the enemy.

Projection becomes a standard tactic. Ellul observes that propagandists often accuse their enemies of precisely the intentions they themselves possess. Those preparing for domination accuse others of tyranny. Those seeking conflict loudly proclaim their peaceful motives. The accusation itself reveals the accuser’s aims.

3. Propaganda is Driven by Moral Urgency

Propaganda is most effective on moral people who care and want to do good. It works by attaching itself to an individual’s existing moral instincts, such as justice or compassion, and weaponizing them. Propaganda needs its causes to feel righteous and urgent. Sober-minded reflection becomes an obstruction in a morally urgent cause. Urgency is the mechanism propaganda uses to demand impulsive action.

This is why propaganda opportunistically seizes current headlines to demand immediate action. The “current events man” is its ideal target. To discern the wisdom of an action is considered a delay, and delay is the same as harm. “Justice delayed is justice denied,” they’ll say. “We can’t just sit by and do nothing while people are suffering! Something must be done!” Not taking the prescribed action feels immoral.

Propaganda borrows the vocabulary of goodness and turns it into a lever used to exert moral pressure. Christians are especially vulnerable here because we care about righteousness, justice, mercy, and love. But Scripture never sanctifies hasty, bad decisions because someone’s heart was in the right place. Love “rejoices with the truth” (1 Cor 13:6). When moral language is used to demand compliance apart from cultivated wisdom, propaganda is already at work.

4. Propaganda Treats Emotion as Evidence

Once propaganda has attached itself to a cause and simplified reality through moral compression, it leans hard on primal emotions, such as fear, shame, outrage, and sympathy. These emotions are not simply responses to facts. Emotions are the facts. Propaganda is not interested in what is true, only what feels true. Emotion is regarded as evidence. Emotional satisfaction is the measure of reality.

A propagandist can misleadingly edit a video clip to provoke an emotional reaction. The emotional impact of the clip will be significant as it goes viral. The nuanced corrections and retractions that appear later will go largely unnoticed. Everyone has already gotten drunk on the outrage. Thus, if someone feels harmed, the claim is authoritative. Why? Because their emotions are all the evidence needed to verify the claim. To question the inerrancy of someone’s pain is to commit violence. Ellul says, “modern man does not think about current problems; he feels them. He reacts, but he does not understand them any more than he takes responsibility for them” (p 47).

Since emotions eclipse reason as a validating factor, rational thought and consistency go out the window. When emotions dictate the reality everyone is living in, facts are irrelevant. Facts simply won’t move the needle in a cognitive system that uses emotions as sufficient evidence. Since emotions are often irrational, irrationality becomes a key feature of propaganda. Irrationality can even make the matter feel more real. As Ellul says, “The skillful propagandist will seek to obtain action without demanding consistency, without fighting prejudices and images, by taking his stance deliberately on inconsistencies” (p 35).

Ironically, irrational contradictions can reinforce the power of propaganda. Ellul continues, “It is always surprising that the content of propaganda can be so inconsistent that it can approve today what it condemned yesterday” (p 18). Since people don’t have the time or mental space to evaluate each news story closely, we just accept what we’re told, regardless of the inconsistencies or hypocrisy involved.

5. Propaganda Works Best on Moral, Educated People

Propaganda works best on educated, moral, and sincere people. They think they are immune to it. That’s because people who are confident in their goodness and intelligence are less guarded. They have lower defenses because they think they are too smart to be deceived. Their moral and intellectual confidence is precisely what makes them vulnerable to propaganda.

This is arguably Ellul’s most unsettling insight. The people most susceptible to propaganda are intelligent, educated, follow the news closely, and are convinced they are impervious to it. Educated people assume they are thinking freely, unaware that they are being steered by propaganda. Ignorant people, on the other hand, know they are vulnerable, so they are more likely to be on guard.

Christians who read widely, follow the news, listen to podcasts, and take pride in being informed assume they are discerning. They think they can’t be deceived because they know all the latest trends and follow the controversies closely. They’ve read the articles, listened to the podcasts, and absorbed all the data. They think more information makes them wiser. More likely, it makes them overwhelmed and exhausted. Being overwhelmed and exhausted makes people more vulnerable to simple, all-encompassing explanations.

Ironically, not even intelligence is a sufficient shield against propaganda. Highly intelligent people can more adeptly justify their bad instincts. They confuse intelligence with wisdom, making them more vulnerable to elite propaganda that is cleaner, subtler, and more ego-flattering. Propaganda feeds on intellectual arrogance. Most people lack the intellectual humility to read slowly, think critically, and honestly admit, “I don’t know.” Uncertainty is distressing. We find comfort in intellectual certainty, even though it may be unwarranted.

6. Propaganda Functions Like a Church

Propaganda functions like a church, offering answers to the most emotionally distressing problems of modern life. Propaganda tells you who you are and what to believe; it gives you a tribe to belong to, a moral cause to join, and villains to despise. In this way, propaganda functions like a church and enjoys the same levels of religious devotion.

Ellul notes that one of man’s deepest needs is to feel that he is right—right in his own eyes and right in the eyes of others. Propaganda supplies that feeling of righteousness. It assures the individual that his cause is just and his actions are good.

Propaganda also supplies enemies. It legitimizes hatred by framing it as a moral duty. Hatred becomes righteous, and violence is justified (cf Isa 5:20). Finally, propaganda resolves anxiety by offering a total explanation of the world. Nothing is mysterious anymore. Everything fits the narrative.

In these ways, propaganda takes the place of religion in people’s lives. It makes you feel righteous. You belong to the “right” group. You support the “right” cause. In a chaotic world, this is psychologically comforting. You don’t accept it because it’s true; you accept it because you derive identity and purpose from it.

7. Propaganda Cannot Be Defeated by Information Alone

A common mistake people make, especially conservatives, is to assume that speaking the truth is all one needs to defeat propaganda. Conservatives are people who care about truth, so when we see the deceptive power of propaganda, we assume we can make arguments and use truth to overcome it. We assume the correct information, using facts and logic, will dislodge propaganda from another’s mind. That’s not true. It won’t work.

Propaganda works by “flooding the zone” with information. Ironically, adding more facts can strengthen propaganda by overwhelming the hearer, driving them to retreat to simplistic explanations and conclusions presupposed by propaganda. A propagandized man will hear logical facts and arguments and think, “This is just another power play to control me.” Information without formation exhausts people, and exhausted people comply with propaganda. It just feels safer.

This is why endless articles, explainers, and “awareness” campaigns rarely clarify anything. They just keep people anxious and emotionally elevated. Then, they calcify in their original positions and seek refuge in their “church,” which is a heavily propagandized ideological community. Simply put, more content is not enough to dislodge propaganda, even if it’s true. Propaganda must be dislodged through spiritual formation, which is a virtue cultivated over time.

8. Discerning Propaganda Begins by Acknowledging Our Complicity

Here’s the hard truth: you have been deceived by propaganda. So have I. We all have. Propaganda is everywhere. None of us stands above it.

And don’t think you’re immune to it because you’re a red-pilled, Bible-believing, conservative Christian. Lots of people who are heavily propagandized fit that description. Being a Christian who believes the Bible doesn’t grant you immunity. I’ll admit that’s a hard reality to face, but it is a crucial step towards growing in discernment. Are we so arrogant to assume we’re never wrong? Are we so blind to our human frailty or our propensity to be emotional thinkers?

Enough of the bad news. Here’s some good news. God sees all things perfectly. And God has equipped us with what we need to grow in discernment if we have the intellectual humility to apply the tools properly. Jesus said, “Do not judge by appearances, but judge with right judgment” (John 7:24).

Humility is the first defense. Discerning propaganda begins with accepting that it is everywhere and unavoidable, and that we have all been propagandized to a degree. Thus, to see the world more clearly, we must first see ourselves more clearly (Rom 12:2). We must see that we have been manipulated by propaganda, and then, more painfully, we must admit that we have even participated in it.

Discernment is not just another technique. It is a way of seeing. One must intentionally choose to slow down, soberly reflect before rushing to judgment, and resist taking impulsive action. Unfortunately, we no longer live in a high-trust society where we can trust the experts. Discernment cannot be outsourced to others; it is something individuals must cultivate. Further, discernment is a skill that can be acquired and sharpened through practice (Heb 5:11-14). Scripture tells us to “test everything; hold fast what is good. Abstain from every form of evil” (1 Thes 5:22). Ultimately, the most discerning people will be those whose loves, loyalties, and judgments have been slowly shaped by Scripture, worship, spiritual maturity, and the fear of God.

A Final Word

Jacques Ellul warned that propaganda is a permanent feature of technological society. The modern man is the most propagandized man. If Ellul was right, and I believe he was, then the church’s task is not to out-shout propaganda, or out-inform it, but to form and train people to not be so easily moved by it.

Christians serve a King who is Lord over propaganda. And the church was designed to resist precisely this kind of moral manipulation by forming people who can wait, judge, and obey God rather than the moment. Discernment is not a skill you pull out occasionally when you need it. It is a habit you cultivate long before the pressure arrives. The most discerning people will discipline themselves to resist propaganda and help their churches resist ideological fads. As the people of God, they will work to shape the spiritual instincts of God’s people towards goodness, truth, and beauty.

This piece was originally posted at The Center for Baptist Leadership.

Every few years, a new variant of an old, poisonous theme emerges about why the Bible is unreliable and untrustworthy. One of these from Newsweek caught my attention a few years ago. It was entitled, “The Bible: So Misunderstood It’s a Sin.” The cover art for the article featured a Bible stitched together by several bright red, demon-like hands.

The article goes on to report several thoroughly debunked anti-Christian claims.

Here’s a sample: The Bible is “a fundamentally flawed document. Errors and revisions by copyists had been written in by the fifth century, and several books of the New Testament, including some attributed to Paul, are now considered forgeries perpetrated by famous figures in Christianity to bolster their theological arguments. It is small wonder, then, that there are so many contradictions in the New Testament. Some of those contradictions are trivial, but some create huge problems for evangelicals insisting they are living by the word of God.”

In other words, you can’t trust the Bible. It’s not God’s word. It’s the word of man pretending to be God’s word.

The article is embarrassingly inaccurate in its details, but accuracy was not its goal. You have to realize, Newsweek isn’t reporting a story; they’re preaching a sermon. Their un-subtle agenda is to undermine Christianity in the guise of journalism and intimidate believers into doubting their faith.

In this article, my goal is to briefly construct a theology of scripture that can give you confidence in the Bible. I also hope this will encourage you to get to know the Bible for yourself by committing to reading through it next year.

So the question at hand is this: Can you trust the Bible? To answer this question, I’ll make six points and answer two objections.

1. God Reveals Himself Through Words

When you open Scripture, you see from the opening verses that God is a talking God. He creates by speaking. Don’t underestimate the importance of that fact. This shows that God is knowable and takes the initiative to make himself known. God’s ultimate self-disclosure is Jesus Christ, the Word made flesh (John 1:1-5, 14). But even then, everything we know about Christ is given to us in written words.

Words are the currency of relationships. God reveals himself in words and sentences and paragraphs and books. We are created in the image of God, and we likewise relate to one another with words, the way God relates to us. Without words, there is no clarity, no trust, no knowledge of the other person. That’s why silence from God would mean darkness for us. We can’t access the mind of God apart from God’s decision to reveal Himself.

Without revelation, we’re left with speculation, and speculation is just guessing. A lot of people will tell you what God is like, or what God thinks about this or that, but if they say these things without demonstrating it from scripture, they’re just guessing. God does not allow that. We’re not permitted to pontificate about God without a textual warrant.

Incidentally, Satan’s first recorded words in the Bible are an attack on God’s word: “Did God really say?” From the beginning, Satan’s primary tactic is to attack the word of God. Newsweek is amplifying Satan’s chief line of attack against God. Satan sounds like he could have been a staff writer for Newsweek.

2. God Has Revealed Himself in the Bible

The secular view is that the Bible is a human book, where men pontificate, or “guess,” about God. The biblical view is that the Bible is a divine book in which God, the Creator, discloses Himself to us, His creatures. The Bible isn’t the record of ancient people reaching upward toward God; it is the record of God reaching downward toward us. The theological word for this is revelation.

Peter says, “No prophecy of Scripture comes from someone’s own interpretation… but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit” (2 Pet. 1:20–21). This means every passage of Scripture has two authors: a divine Author, who revealed himself to the mind of the writer, and the human authors, who wrote down what God revealed to them. This does not mean “dictation.” That’s a caricature of revelation. The voice and personality of the human writers are preserved as they wrote under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit.

3. The Bible Is the Inspired Word of God

As revelation is the mind of God being revealed to the human author, inspiration is the mind of the author to the page of Scripture. What they wrote is exactly what God intended them to write. Paul says, “All Scripture is breathed out by God…” (2 Tim. 3:16).

Theologians use three words to make this more specific: (1) verbal, (2)plenary, and (3) inspiration. “Verbal” means the words themselves are inspired—not just the concepts, ideas, and ethical categories—but the words of the text itself. “Plenary” means all the words. Every single word in the Bible is inspired by God. “Inspired” means breathed out by God. The Holy Spirit carried along the biblical authors such that the words they wrote down perfectly reflect what God wanted them to say.

Inspiration does not mean the biblical authors got “inspired” one day and then wrote the Bible. Paul didn’t go outside, look at a pretty sunset, get “inspired,” and write the book of Romans. Also, inspiration does not mean that the authors themselves are perfect. The human authors were flawed and sinful, just like we are. They needed grace, just like we do. And yet God used imperfect men to communicate his perfect truth.

Jesus himself affirmed this when he said, “Not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the Law until all is accomplished” (Matt 5:18). Jesus affirmed the inspiration of scripture down to the most minor marks of Hebrew punctuation. Similarly, Paul built a theological argument in Galatians on the difference between whether the word “seed” was singular or plural (Gal 3:16). Scripture is that precise.

The doctrine of verbal, plenary inspiration is vital because liberal scholars will tell you, “the Bible itself is not God’s word; rather, the Bible contains God’s word.” In other words, God’s word is the impression someone gets while reading the Bible, but the Bible itself is not God’s word. That view is incorrect. The actual words of scripture are inspired by God, which means the Bible itself is the word of God.

4. The Bible Is Sufficient for Salvation and Christian Living

Since God inspired every word of the Bible, it is therefore sufficient to give us all we need to know how to be saved and fully obey Christ. God did not leave anything out. He did not forget anything. If it is not in there, you do not need it. If it is in there, you absolutely need it. Therefore, God forbids us to add to it or subtract from it. Deuteronomy 12:32 says, “Everything that I command you, you shall be careful to do. You shall not add to it or take from it” (cf Deut 4:2, Rev 22:18-19).

Someone might object, saying, “The Bible was being added to over the course of 2000 years. How can God say we can’t add to it?” The Bible was not revealed all at once. God revealed himself to his people “at many times and in many ways… by the prophets” (Heb 1:1). When God acted in history, he authenticated his word to the prophets through miraculous signs. If someone were a false prophet, God commanded them to be executed. So there were great consequences for adding or taking away from God’s word.

Thus, God gave his people what was needed at each stage of redemptive history leading up to the time of Christ, who is the final revelation of God. In Jesus Christ, God revealed himself completely and fully by his incarnation, the “word made flesh” (John 1:14). The Word of God became man and dwelt among us. This means Jesus Christ is the fullest and finest self-disclosure of God.

Christ lived a perfect life. The reliable, historical account of his life and his teachings is recorded in the gospels. He died on the cross for our sins, rose again on the third day, and ascended to be with the Father. Now that Christ has fully accomplished everything necessary for our salvation, there is no need for any further revelation. What more could God say? What more is there to say? Salvation is accomplished, redemption is done. We know everything that we need to know to be saved and to live a Christian life. To add to the Bible is to imply that God didn’t say enough in Jesus Christ. That is an insult to God. Jesus Christ, the Son of God, is the final word. Nothing can be taken away. Nothing new can be added. There is nothing more to say.

5. The Holy Spirit Illuminates the Word of God to the Mind and Heart of the Reader

The doctrine of illumination teaches that the Holy Spirit opens the mind and heart of God to the reader. On the road to Emmaus, the disciples said, “Did not our hearts burn within us while he talked to us on the road, while he opened to us the Scriptures?” (Luke 24:32). Since the Holy Spirit “inspired” the Scriptures, we depend on the Holy Spirit to understand it. That doesn’t mean Scripture is obscure; it means our hearts are. Sin and pride darken the mind and heart. But the same Spirit who inspired the Word now shines light on the Word so that we grasp it rightly. Illumination means God turns on the lights of our hearts through the reading, teaching, and preaching of his word (cf 2 Cor 4:4-6).

Hebrews 4:12-13 says, “the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and of spirit, of joints and of marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart. And no creature is hidden from his sight, but all are naked and exposed to the eyes of him to whom we must give account.”

The Holy Spirit and the Scriptures work in tandem. The Holy Spirit wrote the Bible, and the Holy Spirit lives within the heart of every believer. God helps us understand and obey him better through regular exposure to God’s word. Scripture is like kindling that the Spirit of God sets on fire in your heart. The more scripture you have in your heart, the more kindling there is to burn.

God’s word is living and active. It is not a dead book. It is sharp like a sword. The Bible will cut you open; it will slice you down to the bone, through the muscles and the sinews, down to the marrow. And as you read the Bible, the Bible reads you. You cannot hide from it. It lays you bare, naked, exposed.

Reading the Bible is like looking into the mirror of God. God says, “This is you.” It exposes hidden heart motives; it reveals all kinds of things that we are uncomfortable with. We do not want to be read that way. We do not want to be exposed that way. We feel ashamed. We feel embarrassed. That is why we do not want to hear the word of God. We do not like the discomfort that the word of God brings us. And this is precisely the discomfort we need.

Illumination does not mean new revelation. The Spirit is not adding fresh content. He is enabling us to see what is already in the text—what God has already spoken. When a Christian reads Scripture and feels conviction, clarity, encouragement, or a sudden realization of truth, that is the Spirit of God opening the eyes of the heart.

6. The Canon of Scripture Is the Complete Word of God

God revealed Himself progressively through redemptive history, never leaving His people without the words they needed. The word canon refers to the list of books that belong in the Bible.

By the time of Christ, the Old Testament canon was unofficially settled. Jesus himself referred to the three sections of the Old Testament that were universally acknowledged as scripture at that time, saying, “everything written about me in the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms must be fulfilled” (Luke 24:44-45). The Law, the Prophets, and the Psalms (or “the writings”) contained all that we now know as the Old Testament.

Jesus handpicked twelve disciples, whom he appointed as apostles, and gave them authority to serve as eyewitnesses to the resurrection. Thus, Jesus himself commissioned what we now know as the New Testament. Every book of the New Testament was either (1) written by one of the twelve apostles or (2) authorized by one of the apostles.

Therefore, Jesus is Lord over the whole canon of scripture. He is the final and fullest revelation of God. He personally affirmed the entire Old Testament canon, even down to the punctuation marks. He personally commissioned the New Testament canon by appointing the apostles who wrote or authorized the writing of those books. Now that our redemption has been accomplished, the gospel is now fully revealed, and the apostles recorded the life and teachings of Christ.

Upon the death of the apostles, the apostolic age ended, and the canon is now closed. Sixty-six books, Old and New Testaments, no further revelation is needed. God has spoken. Christ is the final Word. The Bible is complete. (cf Rev 22:18-19).

Dispensing with Two Objections to the Trustworthiness of Scripture

In my years of pastoring, I’ve heard two main objections raised against the reliability and trustworthiness of Scripture. I want to bring those up here and respond to them each in turn.

First, I hear people say, “How can the Bible be true when there are so many errors and contradictions in it?“

There are two ways the Bible can “contradict” itself, but neither of which is an actual contradiction.

First, you can have parallel accounts of the same event that report conflicting information. For example, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John all give eyewitness accounts of the life of Jesus, but differ in some of the details. In the resurrection accounts, Matthew says the women encountered one angel, Mark says one man, Luke says two men, and John says two angels.

Skeptics see these as contradictions, but we should not expect the Bible to report information that modern journalists would. These are not contradictions but complementary accounts that can be harmonized, with each author reporting information that suited their purposes. The simplest way to harmonize this account is this: two angels appeared at the empty tomb in the form of men.

The second way the Bible can contradict itself is when theological statements seem to contradict each other. This is not a problem when we recognize that God’s word often teaches us through paradox. God affirms things that seem to contradict but do not actually contradict. For example, in Exodus, Pharaoh is sometimes said to harden his own heart, and at other times it says that God hardened his heart. Which is it? The answer is both. That’s not a contradiction, that’s a paradox, and by affirming both realities, Scripture teaches us about the intersection of God’s sovereignty and man’s agency.

This is necessary to a degree. Scripture is teaching the eternal mind of God; there will certainly be things too high and lofty for us to fully comprehend, but that doesn’t make them untrue. Though scripture teaches paradoxical things, there is no actual contradiction. Deuteronomy 29:29 says, “The secret things belong to the Lord our God, but the things that are revealed belong to us and to our children forever, that we may do all the words of this law.”

Second, I’ve heard many other people say, “How can the Bible be true when we don’t even have the original copies?”

Here’s how the Newsweek article put it: “At best, we’ve all read a bad translation, a translation of translations of translations of hand-copied copies of copies of copies of copies of copies, and on and on hundreds of times.”

Basically, it’s saying you think the Bible is the word of God, but really, it’s just a really elaborate telephone game that has got the weight of divine authority behind it. This statement is laughably untrue. Every modern Bible is translated directly from the original manuscripts of Hebrew and Greek. And the sheer multiplicity of manuscript copies is a good thing because it serves as an authenticating feature. In fact, the more copies of ancient manuscripts we have, the easier it is to know what the original was.

The early church was a period of rapid expansion, and copies of the biblical writings needed to be circulated to instruct new believers. So there was an urgency to make copies of the Bible so it could be distributed far and wide. Thus, we now have early manuscripts from all over the ancient world, and their volume is astounding compared to other ancient texts. This can give us greater confidence in the original’s accuracy, especially since believers took scripture’s wordsvery seriously and were committed to maintaining accuracy.

When you compare different manuscripts to one another, you do find a few discrepancies. Does that mean there are errors in the Bible and you can’t trust it? Of course not. The more manuscripts you have, the easier it is to compare them to one another to determine the original reading. There are an estimated 5800+ Greek NT manuscripts, plus thousands more manuscripts in other languages.

Consider this example. Suppose Nicholas Cage actually did steal the original Declaration of Independence, accidentally dropped it into the Potomac, and destroyed it. Does that mean we no longer live in a constitutional republic, and America has to be annexed back into Mother England? Of course not, because you can find several copies at any decent elementary school. But what if there’s an error in one of them? That’s not a problem, because you can gather up several copies from different places, compare them to one another, and identify the error. The multiplicity of copies is to our great benefit. It gives us even greater confidence in their accuracy.

Did you know that 99.5% of the New Testament is considered certain? That leaves 0.5% of the NT where there’s some discrepancy in the manuscripts. When there is a discrepancy, most of those are easily resolved. Most are very obvious, such as misspelled words, duplicated or omitted words, or transposed words, like “Jesus Christ” versus “Christ Jesus.”

The issues that remain after that add up to roughly 700 words in about 50 passages, none of which affect a significant point of doctrine (for comparison, this essay is about 3400 words). The discrepancies are tiny and relatively insignificant, such as an uncertain place name or the number of deaths in a battle.

Biblical scholars have compiled all the best manuscript evidence and scholarly research into two books: a Hebrew edition of the Old Testament and a Greek edition of the New Testament. Now, every Bible translation in every language on earth has been translated from the original Hebrew Bible and the original Greek Bible. It’s not a game of telephone. The Bible has been translated into around 776 languages, all from the original Hebrew and Greek. The New Testament has been translated into nearly 1,800 languages, all from the original Greek manuscripts. All told, at least some part of the Bible has been translated into about 4,000 languages.

Conclusion

The bottom line is this. You can trust your Bible. It’s rock solid. The Bible is not fragile. It is not ambiguous. It is not the product of scheming men stitching together a tool of oppression. It is the voice of God in human words, clear enough for the simple and deep enough for the scholar.

God is knowable and wants to be known, and God ordinarily reveals himself through words, sentences, paragraphs, and books. This is the Bible. The Bible has two authors: a divine author and the human authors. God inspired the biblical authors to write the words of scripture, and every word in the Bible is breathed out by God and is without error. God canonized his word in the 66 books of the Bible, with Jesus affirming the OT canon and commissioning the writing of the NT canon. And when you read the Bible for yourself, God illuminates his word to you, helping you see him and know him, so you might worship and obey him.

This essay was adapted from a sermon preached on December 7th, 2025, at Christ the King Church in Fort Thomas, Kentucky.

2025: Year in Review

• Christ the King Church: After several years of praying and trying to discern God’s direction for Christ the King Church, we finally were able to purchase a new building in Fort Thomas, KY. We started meeting there for worship in February. It’s been a tremendous blessing that I’m thankful for every day.

• King’s Domain conference: This ministry held our third annual conference in May with a stellar lineup of speakers. We had a fantastic time.

• Articles: I published over 45 articles on my substack this year. Writing helps me think and I enjoy it, so it’s a fun and productive hobby.

• God’s Good Design: My first book has done very well, especially given that this was my first book and I’m not a big name author. I’ve heard very encouraging feedback from people who have enjoyed it and benefitted from it. It’s got an average rating of 4.7 out of 5 stars on Amazon.

2026: Writing Projects

• Loser Theology Book: My second book is due out in 2026 from Canon Press. It doesn’t have an official title yet. The main thesis is that many evangelical Christians have accepted losing as a badge of Christian faithfulness that makes us passive and weak. I diagnose and illustrate the problem and prescribe “high agency Christianity” as the way forward.

• Discernment book: I’ve begun writing my third book which is about discernment. The main thesis is this: Discernment is trained moral sight. It is the learned ability to see reality as God defines it and to judge and act accordingly. The modern church has lost it not because we lack information, but because we fear the cost of clarity. I’ve only seen a couple of books on discernment in the last couple of decades, neither of which approach the subject the way I plan to do. I don’t have a publisher yet, but the book should be very marketable, so I’m not worried about finding a publisher.

Top Five Posts of 2025

#5

My #5 post of this year got a mention on the Frank Turek podcast. I don’t remember the date of that episode so I can’t include a link.

#4

#3

#2 (and a bonus)

I combined two articles in the #2 slot because they were both related to the assassination of Charlie Kirk. Christian political commentator Nick Freitas read my entire “cognitive dissonance” piece to his 1.45 million subscribers on his podcast (I clipped it here). The entire episode is here.

#1

My top essay this year was a warning to young men about being seduced by the “forbidden woman” from the book of Proverbs.

Finally, thank you for subscribing to this substack and for reading and sharing my posts. I hope you find them helpful.

God bless, and have a wonderful 2026!

John 1:1-5 says: “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 any thing 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.”

The English word “word” in John 1 is doing a lot of work. The Greek word for “word” is “logos.” For the ancient Greeks, “logos” was a loaded philosophical concept. It referred to an impersonal principle of reason—the rational force that gave order to the universe. The logos was what held the world together. It was the source of all that exists, even the logic behind the laws of nature themselves.

John takes that familiar, impersonal concept and does something shocking with it. He connects it directly to Old Testament teaching—and then he gives it a name. What the Greeks called the logos is actually the God of all reason, all nature, all creation, and all life. Even further, the logos is Jesus Christ—God wrapped in human flesh.

All of creation exists because a personal God chose to make a world within which he would make himself known. In Old Testament times, God revealed himself through miraculous works, supernatural signs, angels, and prophets. In New Testament times, God revealed himself by personally stepping into space and time and making himself known to us.

This leads me to seven observations about Christ, the incarnate Word, and what that means for us.

#1: The Word Is Eternal

The words “In the beginning” is a deliberate echo of the creation account in Genesis 1. But now Genesis is being interpreted in light of a fully developed doctrine of Christ. The eternal Word of God is Jesus Christ, the Son of God. Just as God has always existed, the Word has always existed.

Jesus the human man was born in Bethlehem, to Mary and Joseph. He grew up in Nazareth. That story is familiar. But Jesus the Logos is the eternal Word—without beginning and without end. The Word had being before the world had a beginning.

#2: The Word Was with God, and the Word Was God

John creates tension immediately. The Old Testament is clear that God is one. “Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one” (Deuteronomy 6:4). Since God is one, logically speaking, God alone can be eternal. And yet here John tells us there are two eternal realities. God is eternal. The Word is eternal. They are distinct, and yet both are God.

John is ratcheting up the tension and placing us in an uncomfortable position. This is the first thing we encounter when we read his Gospel. It sounds like a contradiction, but it is actually a paradox—one we cannot fully resolve or comprehend. John doesn’t hide the tension, he puts it front and center. This tension is a hard driving feature of his entire gospel.

#3: The Word Is a Person

The Greeks knew the logos as a subject to be studied. John introduces the logos as a person to be known. “He was in the beginning with God.” The Word is not an impersonal force. The Word is a person.

Jesus Christ, the man from Nazareth, whose earthly parents were Mary and Joseph, was no ordinary man. He is divine. He is God. In other words, before the world existed, Jesus Christ was there. He is equal with God. He is God himself, and yet distinct from God.

In Christian theology, this is called the “hypostatic union.” Jesus Christ is one man with two distinct natures. He has a human nature—born of the virgin Mary, raised by his earthly father Joseph, fully human. And he has a divine nature—he is the logos, the preexistent Son. Along with the Holy Spirit, this gives us the Trinity: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

This doctrine of the trinity is foundational for the Christian understanding of God’s love. Christians believe eternality and love are two essential attributes of God. First John 4:8 says, “Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love.” Love, by definition, is relational. Thus, for love to be an essential attribute of God, there would need to be an eternal object of love. An eternal being whose essence is defined by love demands an eternal object of love. Love cannot be an essential attribute of God unless there is an eternal object of love.

The doctrine of the Trinity provides the philosophical grounding for the Christian claim that “God is love.” God Love is not something God learned. Love is not something God acquired after creation. Love is eternal because God is eternal, and God has eternally existed as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—perfect, full, joyful fellowship of love within the godhead.

Jesus himself says this in his high priestly prayer: “Father, I desire that they also, whom you have given me, may be with me where I am, to see my glory that you have given me because you loved me before the foundation of the world” (John 17:26, ESV).

Christianity alone gives us a God whose love is not dependent on creation. In fact, Islam cannot and does not claim that “Allah is love,” because Islam denies the trinity, which is necessary for an eternal being to also be loving. Islam may claim that Allah is merciful and just, but not loving. Only Christianity has the philosophical coherence, intellectual depth, and moral clarity that can satisfy the deepest questions of man.

#4: The Word Is the Creator

God did not create in order to become loving. God created because he already was loving. Creation is the overflow of the love that has always existed within the trinity. John says positively, “All things were made through him,” and then negatively, “without him was not anything made that was made.” In other words, creation was not a solo act of God the Father. Jesus Christ—the Son, the Word—was the active agent in creation.

Hebrews says the same thing plainly. “Long ago, at many times and in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed the heir of all things, through whom also he created the world” (Hebrews 1:1–2).

Since God is Trinity, God did not need to create us in order to fulfill some divine emptiness or unmet need to love. God is never lonely. God is never bored. God never grows tired of delighting in himself within the eternal fellowship of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The triune God is the very definition of fullness, delight, and happiness—perfect and eternal communion.

Therefore, God did not create from a need to love. God created from the overflow of his love. Paul says it this way in Ephesians:

“Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, even as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him. In love he predestined us for adoption to himself as sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will, to the praise of his glorious grace, with which he has blessed us in the Beloved” (Ephesians 1:3–6).

Here, we see that God set his love on his people “before the foundation of the world.” This means, before God ever said “let there be light,” he knew you. He knew your name. He knew what you looked like. He even knew the sins you would commit and the price he would pay to save you from them. He also knew what you would become in glory, completely sanctified, “holy and blameless before him.” He did all this “according to the purpose of his will.” Why? So that we would be “blessed… in the Beloved.” Christ created us because he already loved us.

In other words, creation was not a divine hobby. God was not bored and decided to play a game with planets and people. The love shared eternally between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit was so full, so rich, and so free that it pleased God to create a world upon which that love would be poured out.

As Matthew Henry said, “this proves the excellency of the Christian religion—that the author and founder of it is the same one who was the author and founder of the world.” Jesus created the world, and later he came into that world to save it.

#5: The Word Is Light and Life

John says, “In him was life, and the life was the light of men” (v4). Before creation, God was all there was. Other than God, there was no light and there was no life. Again this echoes Genesis 1. God created the world by saying, “Let there be light.” Then he goes on to fill creation with life.

In Genesis 3, man fell into sin. The condition of sinful man is often described with two words: death and darkness. At the fall, death entered the world, and the light of man turned to darkness. There was no life and no light. Jesus Christ, the Creator, came to restore light and life.

Jesus does not merely have life. Jesus is life. He is the source of all life. Everything that lives does so because of him. As Jesus says, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:6).

God alone has life in himself. No created being has life apart from God. Every living thing exists because God wills its existence. This attribute of God is called aseity. God alone is self-existent; everything else is contingent.

You exist because God willed your existence. You are alive because God wills your life. Every breath you take and every heartbeat you have comes from him. That tells you something important: your life matters to God. You were created for a purpose. You can either fulfill that purpose by living for God, or you can reject that purpose and live for yourself.

Also, Jesus does not merely shine a light. Jesus is light. Only by the light of Christ can you know and fulfill your purpose. Apart from Christ, we have no light. We are in darkness. Apart from Christ, we have no life. We are dead. Jesus describes hell as “outer darkness.” The soul is spiritually dead, and yet it goes on forever.

Jesus says, “I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life” (John 8:12). Similarly, Paul says that the Lord Jesus Christ “dwells in unapproachable light, whom no one has ever seen or can see” (1 Timothy 6:15–16).

#6: The Word Became Flesh

This is John’s great reveal: “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1:14). The eternal Word is Jesus Christ. The Bible teaches a clear Creator–creature distinction. God is not creation, and creation is not God. And yet the Creator entered into creation and wrapped himself in flesh. He took on a real human body.

The eternal, omnipotent, omnipresent, infinitely holy Son of God stepped into space and time as a baby. He was truly human. He had to grow up. He had to eat and drink. He got tired and needed sleep. And he lived his entire life in the presence of corrupt human beings—the Holy One of God dwelling among sinners. And he experienced physical pain. And because he became like us in every way, God became killable.

From the moment of his conception, Jesus inhabited a human body, and he will continue to do so forever. Even now, Jesus is in the presence of the Father in a glorified human body, from which he will one day return bodily.

John has been setting this up all along. Christ is the light shining in the darkness of the world. Christ is life in the midst of death. Therefore, Jesus Christ is both Savior and Lord. He is the author of creation, and he is the author of salvation.

Paul writes, “He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation” (Colossians 1:15). Jesus makes the invisible God visible. He is the fullest and clearest self-disclosure of who God is.

Jesus perfectly pleased God in every way. He was filled with the Holy Spirit without measure. He was sent to reconcile us to God. He possessed the fullness of the knowledge of God and perfectly taught us the way of God—the way of salvation. He had perfect compassion for his people, showing patience and grace in all our failings.

#7: The Word Was Full of Grace and Truth

This is where the identity of Christ matters for our sakes. John tells us that Jesus was “full of grace and truth” (John 1:14). It is hard to imagine anything the world needs more than those two things!

All of this matters because Jesus did all of this for our sake—to bring us home. How do we receive this grace? John tells us plainly in the verses just before: “But to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God, who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God” (John 1:12–13).

Grace is not an abstract substance God hands out. We receive grace by receiving Christ himself. “To all who did receive him.” When you become a Christian, you receive Christ. And the way you receive Christ is by believing in his name—that is, by faith.

Believing does not mean mere intellectual agreement with facts about Jesus—his life, his teaching, or his miracles. Believing means trusting his person. It means submitting to him in a personal relationship. To believe in his name means trusting all that is true about him and building your life around it. It is a faith commitment that says, “Lord Jesus, I believe your word is true. I believe what it says about you. I believe you are Savior and Lord. I have no hope apart from you. Forgive my sins. Make me your own.”

For everyone who does this, God gives the right to become his children. They belong to him as sons and daughters.

Conclusion

The Bible as the Word of God matters because it is the written testimony of Jesus Christ, who is the Word of God in human flesh. Jesus Christ matters because he is the eternal Word of God—the Word who was with God and who is God. All of these things matter because Jesus Christ was full of grace and truth, and he was incarnate for our sakes, so we can believe in him, be adopted into his family, and become sons of God. And because we are sons, we are full heirs with Christ of every spiritual blessing.

This is why we celebrate Jesus Christ as God’s gift to us. God came near. God made himself known. Jesus Christ is the greatest gift you could ever receive.

“Struggle sessions” aren’t just relics of communist China. They’re creeping into evangelical churches, and Christians need to learn how to spot and resist them.

Originally, struggle sessions were a form of psychological torture. Victims were publicly humiliated, accused of imaginary crimes, and pressured by friends and enemies alike to confess their guilt. These sessions served to advance the political goals of communist China’s Cultural Revolution: break social bonds, coerce ideological conformity, and force total allegiance to the state.

As crazy as it may sound, a softer version of this has become common in Bible-believing churches. Typically, outspoken conservatives are the primary targets. Why? Because they hold views that make their left-of-center peers uncomfortable, and their willingness to speak out makes them anxious. If someone is vocal about hot-button cultural issues, like LGBTQ, feminism, race, or immigration, people at church will start getting nervous, accuse him of “getting too political,” and tell him he should keep his opinions to himself because the church should focus on “preaching the gospel.”

Ironically, these conformity enforcers may not even disagree with the speaker’s views. They just think Christians shouldn’t talk about them publicly because doing so might offend people who disagree. They might say something like, “Brother, I agree with you that illegal immigration is a problem in our country, but that’s not our focus as a church. We just need to preach the gospel and love people.” Meanwhile, our neighborhoods are being rapidly overrun by people who can’t even speak English and worship idols.

Sometimes, they pit neighbor-love against confronting sin. They might say, “Brother, we believe homosexuality is a sin, but it’s not our job to play the Holy Spirit or alienate people with hurtful rhetoric. We just need to love our gay neighbors and show them the love of Christ.” Meanwhile, our local schools and libraries are pushing a gay agenda on our children.

In these and similar cases, those holding unacceptably conservative views must be silenced. The Christians trying to silence them see themselves as doing the right thing–serving the body of Christ by correcting their overzealous and judgmental brothers. They see themselves as just doing what Jesus would do—eating with tax collectors, welcoming sinners, and spreading the love of God. Speaking boldly about cultural sins is an obstacle to that mission.

Their moral compass is calibrated by progressives priorities. If a leftist is offended by what a Christian says, that’s clear proof that Christian is in error. The church’s “public witness” must be protected. This is done by staying “above the fray.” They say the church should just “preach the gospel,” which is narrowly defined as preaching about God’s love, the death and resurrection of Jesus, and forgiveness of sins (without naming them).

Sometimes, a disagreement may escalate to the point where corrective action must be taken. A common example is a social media post that gets people worked up. Sometimes, a pastor may preach a bold, uncompromising sermon that offends church members, so they grab their pitch forks and torches to make sure that never happens again.

Regardless of the particulars, struggle sessions are usually triggered by a single inflection point, where someone did something that prompts a wave of collective anxiety in the church, often led by anxious women (and their compliant husbands). This inflection point enables everyone’s accumulated frustration to focus on one person who went too far. An example must be made of him. Everyone must learn that outspoken conservatism is not Christlike and such behavior will not be tolerated.

From here, the subsequent struggle sessions follows and all too familiar script: call out the offending party; accuse him of vague, subjective, and imaginary sins; demand a public apology to those who were “hurt” by his insensitive actions; and take disciplinary action to ensure neither he nor anyone else repeats his error. Perhaps he is required to submit to some kind of counseling. In extreme cases, he is fired.

The emotional dynamics in such situations are wonderfully described in Joe Rigney’s book, Leadership and Emotional Sabotage. The people behind the struggle session think they’re doing the right thing. They don’t realize they are punishing courage and reinforcing a church culture of capitulation and weakness. Sometimes, church leaders can put members through struggle sessions to silence them. At other times, church members and elders can put their senior pastor through a struggle session.

I’ve seen it many times, and it always follows the same playbook. I’ve outlined three steps below to help you identify and resist it.

Step One: Accuse the Victim of Imaginary Sins

The goal of a struggle session is control. The accusers want to extract a confession from the accused for imaginary sins, subjective offenses, and violations of the therapeutic code that can’t be measured. In the woke struggle sessions of the world, people are charged with an array of -isms and -phobias, such as racism, sexism, homophobia, or xenophobia. The harm supposedly is always psychological. Someone’s feelings got hurt because the truth spoken was too much to bear.

Churches do the same, using biblical language to lend weight to their accusations. But the supposed “crime” is never a violation of clear biblical teaching. It’s always an accusation of some vague, difficult-to-define, “heart-issue” sin. For example, a man who speaks plainly against the popular sins of the Left and refuses to caveat his words may be accused of arrogance, quarrelsomeness, stubbornness, lacking compassion, or being hurtful. In each of these cases, the accuser’s subjective interpretation of his actions is sufficient evidence to prove the charge. Sometimes, a vague cloud of witnesses is summoned to amplify the charge: “Brother, I’m not the only one who feels this way. I’ve heard reports from others who also found your comment hurtful.”

Evangelical struggle sessions are effective because they weaponize the Bible’s teaching about sins of the heart against the victim. Since all Christians acknowledge that our actions and motives matter, accusers work to convince the accused that there must be some sin to confess, even if the action that triggered the struggle session isn’t itself sinful. The spiritual vagueness is key, because we believe that even our best good works are tainted with sin (Rom 7:21). So even if people are upset at the accused for saying something true, they will accuse him of saying it in a sinful way.

Sincere Christians are especially vulnerable. They’re accustomed to humble, self-examination, so they start to wonder if the accusations might be right. Churches that emphasize “heart idols” and introspection can be especially prone to this, since vague accusations feel spiritual and humble. Reformed churches, ironically, are often the easiest targets. Then, the accusers add to the weight by saying things like, “You don’t want to wound your brothers and sisters in Christ, do you?”

One of the most common charges is the failure to “love your neighbor.” That sounds weighty. After all, it’s the second greatest command (Matt 22:39). But in practice, even loving one’s neighbor is defined subjectively, according to the accuser’s feelings, not God’s law.

The accusers may present themselves as wise, voices of reason. Being captive to the therapeutic spirit of the age, they think they can “see the sin beneath the sin.” They rely heavily on secular, psychological concepts. Being outspoken for truth becomes “bullying.” Being decisive becomes “controlling.” Being a strong leader becomes “authoritarian.” Not caving to the emotionally manipulative tactics of the angry mob makes one “divisive.” All of these labels are rhetorically powerful. These words can ruin a man’s reputation.

He’s trapped in a Catch-22. There’s no escape. Any response reinforces their narrative. If he denies any wrongdoing, he will be accused of being “defensive.” His refusal to confess his sin is regarded as further evidence of his “pride.” And if all the above labels fail to accomplish their objective, the granddaddy of them all is “narcissist,” which means the accused is hopelessly imprisoned in his sinful, self-delusion.

Remember, the goal of the struggle session isn’t justice. Nor is it truth. The accusers running the struggle session will say they are seeking “accountability” and “restoration.” Not true. The goal is submission. The accusers are trying to control the accused by asserting enormous psychological pressure on him to participate in their humiliation ritual.

And their accusations against him don’t even need to be true. They just need to feel true enough to get him to question his reality or even his own sanity.

Step Two: Leverage His Social Circle Against Him

As the social pressure mounts on the accused, those closest to him also feel the heat. If he caves to the pressure, he will be humiliated and hung out to dry publicly. If he stands his ground, the pressure will continue until no one wants to associate with him. This is especially difficult for his wife, because she is torn between two important feminine instincts. On the one hand, she doesn’t want her relationships disrupted. But on the other hand, she wants to stand by her man.

The accused knows how burdened she is, and he fears she may resent him for the pain she’s feeling. Even though he knows, deep down, he’s not guilty of what they’re accusing him of, he’s nevertheless under enormous psychological strain. So he shuts down, panics, loses sleep, and maybe even relationships. In extreme cases, he loses his job. He becomes a hollow shell, demoralized, living in a confusing world where truth seems irrelevant.

As he and his family feel the noose tightening, paranoia can easily set in. He feels as though his world is collapsing around him. One by one, the people who initially stood by him start abandoning him. They see the strain he’s under and interpret it as a man with a guilty conscience beginning to break, which only supports the agenda of his accusers.

Step Three: Require Penance Through a Humiliation Ritual

Struggle sessions follow a predictable pattern. Most often, the accused will cave, confess his guilt, and issue a public apology. Sometimes he might be required to go on an “apology tour,” personally grovelling before various accusers as a form of penance. He may be required to attend counseling or submit to other corrective measures.

If he is truly innocent of wrongdoing yet he submits to the humiliation ritual to appease the mob, he’s cooked. Even the smallest of apologies empowers the accusers and sets the template for their next victim. Mentally, he might justify the confession, knowing there was probably some kind of sin going on, even if he doesn’t know what it was. In this way, his conscience gets distorted. He starts equating righteousness with submitting to mob demands. He loses confidence. His moral clarity is eroded. He’s been neutered and gaslit. His “guilt” is now a matter of public record, making him vulnerable to future manipulation.

I’ll say it again: Struggle sessions like these in the church a form of psychological torture and spiritual abuse. I’ve seen many good men be subjected to them by weak, spineless men who targeted them. I’ve known many courageous pastors who were accused of fake, unprovable, therapeutic thought crimes and lost their ministries as a result. Yet their accusers are dead certain of their victim’s guilt.

They didn’t see it coming. They were probably naive enough to think the church is the one place where speaking the truth is valued. And they paid a steep price for being gullible.

Conclusion: Stand Firm

If this is happening to you, I have one simple word of counsel: Don’t give in. Yes, your theology tells you to humbly confess your sins, but scripture also forbids false accusations. Yes, all deeds are tainted by sin, but that’s not a valid basis for subjective guilt. You are being bullied and manipulated. They’re trying to silence you.

Require them to name a specific, concrete sin. If you are guilty of an actual sin, then of course, repent. But if you are accused of a made up, subjective sin, and if the only evidence of guilt they can provide is someone else’s hurt feelings, you are being struggle-sessioned, and it is your duty to resist the manipulation. Yes, doing so may cost you friendships, but the alternative is worse. You’ll wound your conscience and damage your soul if you cave to manipulation by confessing faux guilt.

Trust God. Stand your ground. Preserve your dignity. It’s hard, but holding the line is worth it. You are not alone. Be courageous. Speak truth with wisdom, pray for clarity, and let your conscience—not the mob—guide your actions.

The truth is that women are the more beautiful sex, which is by God’s design. This fact is a source of great power and great temptation. Naturally, men are drawn to feminine beauty. An attractive woman has power because she will be desirable to men. And when feminine beauty is paired with modesty, it becomes glorious. This is the way God made the world.

Modesty, then, doesn’t exist to suppress beauty but to sanctify it. Scripture teaches women to be modest not because beauty is bad, but because beauty can be distorted. Modesty adorns feminine beauty with holy discretion.

Modesty can practically communicate that a woman respects her body and her sexuality is not cheap. Her body belongs to her and to the man she selects, her husband, the man she commits her life to, because he is worthy of her love and has likewise committed himself to her.

My aim in this essay is to help Christian women recover this truth: modesty is not the enemy of beauty. Women should pursue physical beauty, refined and enhanced by godly modesty.

The Modern Challenge of Modesty

In our day, however, modesty presents a significant challenge. In Proverbs 7:10, the forbidden woman, “dressed as a prostitute,” seduces the foolish man. We aren’t given a detailed description of what she’s wearing, but we don’t need one. We already know what she looks like. Prostitutes wear clothing that draws attention to the parts of her body that men like to look at. They are selling a product and their clothing puts it on display.

Modern fashion designers produce limited options for modest women. That’s because the industry is driven by two primary forces: sex and money. They design clothes to be sexy because sex sells. But a less obvious reason is that it’s cheaper to make tighter, more revealing clothes because it uses less fabric.

This puts Christian women who desire modesty in a difficult position. There’s just not a strong market for clothing that is both modest, reasonably priced, and beautiful. A Christian girl who goes shopping for school clothes won’t have very many affordable options that fits her body and makes her feel beautiful. She may want to dress modestly, but many of the options available to her feel “plain” when she tries them on. Fashion trends will always steer away from modesty, making modest clothing feel out of date.

There’s another factor at work. Modesty beauty is an art form, and many Christian women simply haven’t learned from other women how to do it well. Perhaps its because mothers don’t teach their daughters how to beautify themselves, and maybe that’s because these mothers never learned it themselves. There’s a generation of younger Christian girls who grew up without an attentive mother, so they learn fashion and beauty tips from TikTok and Instagram.

Some girls did grow up with attentive, conservative mothers, who only taught their girls the modest part but not the beauty part. So these girls absorbed a subtle message that modesty means looking plain. For these women, they simply don’t know how to translate the biblical call to modesty into wardrobe, hair, and makeup combinations that are both modest and beautiful. They might even give up trying, thinking it’s not worth the time and effort to learn. Perhaps they even think looking plain is more godly because it’s more modest. Perhaps this can even become a spiritualized excuse for not putting much effort into their appearance.

Every virtue can get twisted and distorted, and the virtue of modesty is no different. Since modesty commands are directed at the sexual desirability of women, some women may end up pathologizing their sexuality, thinking their sexual desirability itself is the problem. This is especially common with girls who have been sexually abused.

If a boy gives attention to a girl who thinks this way, she may act disinterested, or even recoil in disgust. She doesn’t want to respond with feminine grace and an invitation to pursue because she’s uncomfortable being noticed in that way. Expressing her femininity might attract male attention and that feels threatening. She doesn’t like being seen as a sexual being at all, so she wears baggy clothes that obscures her body, feeling ashamed of her femininity and curves.

Different Kinds of Modesty

Not all modesty is the same. There’s a conservative Bible college I’m familiar with that requires women to dress modestly, but it seems their commitment to modesty has come at the expense of beauty. They don’t wear makeup. They pull their hair into a pony tail. And they typically wear T-shirts with long denim skirts and sneakers. They’ve confused modesty with plainness.

Preachers don’t do women any favors when they speak as though outer beauty is irrelevant. I once heard a sermon where the preacher, speaking about attractiveness in dating relationships, said “godliness is sexy!” I do not deny that godliness should be a woman’s highest pursuit, and godliness certainly makes a woman more attractive, but his comment assumes too much. He spoke as though outer beauty is an irrelevant factor at best, or a worldly distraction at worst.

I suspect he was trying to encourage women who don’t feel they’re very attractive with a hopeful message. But this kind of message plays into our modern, gnostic tendency to retreat into metaphysics, as though physical beauty is a worldly concern. I know men who try to force themselves to be attracted to women on the basis of godliness alone, apart from any consideration of physical attraction.

This is foolish. It’s not fair to him or her. Cultivating physical beauty need not be considered worldly. Just because inner beauty is a woman’s highest pursuit doesn’t mean she is free to disregard the importance of outer beauty. Besides, what woman would want to be with a man who doesn’t find her physically attractive?

God designed us to respond to both inner and outer loveliness. It is good for women to beautify themselves, and it is good for men to desire their beauty. Christians need not regard physical beauty as spiritually suspect. Rather, scripture teaches the rightly ordered priority of inner beauty that lasts over outer beauty that fades. Thus, it’s important for Christian women to learn how to beautify themselves practically and in appropriate ways, especially when they’re young and single.

Helping Women Pursue Modest Beauty

Many years ago, I had a friend who went to beauty school, who explained that the shape of a woman’s face could determine which hairstyle made her most attractive. She also said a woman’s makeup choices should suit her hair color, eye color, and skin tone. And so it went with color combinations in her wardrobe, accessories, etc.

That blew my mind. I’d never thought of that. But she was more attuned to the practical reality of beauty than most people. Some women have an effortless, natural beauty, but most women need to learn to work with what they’ve got. My friend knew how to help a woman accentuate her most attractive features while hiding her less attractive features. What works for one woman won’t work for another. Beauty is highly individualized and it takes skill and practice for each woman to master what works best for her.

Women should help each other in this regard. In an age where fewer women were raised by godly mothers who could teach them both beauty and modesty, the church can step in to help in a Titus 2 kind of way. Older women can teach younger women what combinations of hair, makeup, and clothing can highlight the beauty of each woman. This will make her feel more confident, which only adds to a woman’s overall attractiveness.

If a woman doesn’t have the skills to make herself beautiful, she may stop trying altogether, congratulating herself for her godliness and modesty. But it is neither godly nor modest for a woman to neglect her beauty. She’s actually suppressing something God gave her as a gift. The world is starved for beauty these days, and Christians have a worldview that affirms the goodness and glory of feminine beauty that God made to adorn the world.

So my message to Christian women is simply this: modesty is not the enemy of beauty. Modesty doesn’t mean looking plain. True beauty is refined by modesty and glorified by godly character. You may not have learned these skills from your mother, but there may be spiritual mothers in your church that would love to talk with you about how you can make yourself most beautiful.

Additionally, think of beauty and modesty as partners. While beauty attracts attention, modesty directs it rightly. A woman of modest beauty covers what needs to be covered and reveals what is appropriate to reveal. She is not a hidden woman. She presents herself as a whole woman who is confident, radiant, and elegant.

Thus, modesty isn’t about obscuring beauty but about revealing it rightly. When modesty and beauty walk hand in hand, the result is a distinctly Christian femininity—graceful, dignified, and glorious. This is the sort of rare and unmistakable beauty that honors God and captivates men without corrupting them.

You have to hand it to Carl Trueman—he has a knack for memorable labels.

He coined the term “Big Eva” a few years ago, referring to celebrity-driven Christianity and its assortment of conferences and publishing houses that wielded outsized influence over local churches and their pastors. Big Eva pastors aren’t just well-known pastors. Instead, they intentionally seek and leverage celebrity status to exert a kind of informal authority within the evangelical world, thereby weakening the authority of local churches. As evangelicalism has fractured in recent years, the days of Big Eva giga-conferences led by a couple of dozen superstar pastors are drawing to a close.

Now, Trueman is back with another label. This time it’s “Gig Eva,” referring to an exclusively internet-driven phenomenon that has arisen from the ashes of Big Eva. Basically, Gig Eva is the Temu brand Big Eva. Not as big or impressive. Not as powerful or influential. Not as well funded or organized. Same song, second verse. Gig Eva is just a poor man’s Big Eva, but it’s arguably worse.

How so? Whereas Big Eva celebrities were only accountable to each other, Gig Eva voices are “accountable to nobody.” Gig Eva functions entirely in the digital realm of social media, podcasts, and blogs. Operating outside the Big Eva machine, they build their own platforms to promote their message. How dare they!

There’s no “final boss” in Gig Eva–the uber famous names we all know like John Piper, R. C. Sproul, or John MacArthur who could fill ten-thousand-seat convention halls, just an endless labyrinth of resentful voices who “validate their personal authenticity by their constant iconoclasm, their decrying of anything that stands in their way, and their priority of disembodied, cost-free online engagement over the more expensive demands of service-and accountability-to real people in real time, in church and in homes.”

Thus, Trueman concludes, “Big Eva had its problems. Gig Eva is only set to intensify them.”

I’m certainly not part of “Big Eva,” so I suppose that puts me in the “Gig Eva” camp. I don’t have an axe to grind with Trueman, but I won’t hide my annoyance at his characterizations of people who are like me. Let me tell you why.

First of all, I’m a nobody. I’m just an ordinary pastor who moved to Cincinnati’s inner city in 2008 to plant a church there. We launched in 2010, and I’ve been working in relative obscurity ever since. My online presence only increased in the last couple of years. There’s a reason for that.

After ministering for a decade and a half in a progressive, inner-city, collegiate neighborhood and dealing with the various challenges of sexual ethics in this context, I wanted to write a book on biblical sexuality to serve as a resource in my local church, benefiting others facing similar challenges. I wanted a book that articulated a conservative, explicitly biblical vision for sexuality that any pastor could recommend to a church member without qualification. I finished it in early 2023.

The only publishers I thought would consider publishing a book of this sort would fall in the “Big Eva” camp. So I sent pitches and manuscripts to a few of them. Names you would know and trust. True “Big Eva” publishing houses.

I didn’t get any response.

As a side note, I always wondered how some authors got published. A large number of published authors at big-name publishing houses aren’t pastors. Some are scholars and academics. That makes sense. In that world, it’s “publish or perish.” However, others were neither pastors nor scholars, but rather individuals who worked for niche parachurch ministries. Since I wasn’t familiar with the publishing world, I just assumed they were all Really Smart Guys™ who were well qualified for their prominence.

I wasn’t bothered by the non-response from publishers. It was a long shot they’d notice me. After all, I’m a nobody. I didn’t have much name recognition or social media presence, and I’ve been told that bigger publishers won’t consider you unless you’ve got a large social media following. Fair enough. So I started posting.

It’s easier to get published by independent publishers, but what I discovered is that, when you go that route, the author is on the hook for unsold copies of the book. Smaller publishers lack a substantial marketing engine to promote their books. The author is responsible for all their own promotions. If it doesn’t sell well, the author could find himself deep in debt to the publisher for unsold copies.

I found one indie publisher, Reformation Zion, who didn’t play that game and had a reputation for publishing conservative books that would have been deemed too “controversial” for big-name publishers. Reformation Zion published Zach Garris’ book, Masculine Christianity, a solid work on biblical sexuality, which served as a source in my own book. I reached out to them, hoping they’d give me a chance, and they did.

I was surprised to discover that Garris, the author of Masculine Christianity, actually founded Reformation Zion. He never said this himself, but I always suspected he founded his own publishing company because no Big Eva publisher would publish his book. He also published two books by Jon Harris, neither of which would have seen the light of day in Big Eva publishing houses.

Books are marketed through endorsements, so that was the next step for me. I asked some big-name Christian leaders in the biblical sexuality space (names you’d recognize) for endorsements, but they all turned me down. Again, I had no name recognition, so I didn’t mind. I ended up working a few connections and landed endorsements from CR Wiley, Megan Basham, Michael Foster, and Owen Strachan.

Once the book was published, pastors, scholars, and ordinary readers gave it great reviews. I was hoping to get some well-known magazines or journals to review it, and mailed them copies. American Reformer gave it a very good review, as did Clear Truth Media. CBMW gave it a mostly positive review, but it was tempered by its nitpicky “sober caveats,” in the reviewer’s words.

Reformation Zion isn’t a big-name publisher, and they don’t have a slick marketing machine. It’s just one guy (Garris) who was willing to help me promote the book with street marketing, hustle, and grit. I went on every podcast that would have me. I wrote about sexuality on X, FB, and Substack to demonstrate a degree of subject matter expertise. Through this kind of organic, word-of-mouth exposure, the book has since reached a decent-sized audience, leading to a few speaking opportunities at various churches. I’m thankful for the exposure.

What’s my point?

I became part of “Gig Eva” because “Big Eva” wouldn’t give me a shot. The same could be said of so many other Gig Eva guys who were gatekept out of the Big Eva mainstream and had no recourse but to build their own platforms to reach their audience.

I’m not bitter about this; this is the way things work. What I do find frustrating, however, is when Big Eva guys sneer condescendingly at men who hustled their way into the public discussion, driven by courage, a love for the church, and biblical conviction, only to have Big Eva guys treat them like children.

When I wasn’t able to get a foot in Big Eva’s publishing door, “Gig Eva” gave me incredible opportunities to find an audience. I’ve written for outlets like the Center for Baptist Leadership, American Reformer, and Truth Script.

These publications (and related podcasts) are now leading the discourse on the most pressing issues of the day, and are doing so without the institutional support of Big Eva, and quite often despite their opposition.

Time and time again, Gig Eva writers and podcasters have been so far ahead of the curve on cultural issues that Big Eva guys think they’re crazy. But they are almost always vindicated in the long run. I’m thankful for them because they amplified my puny voice before anyone ever heard of me.

Yes, Gig Eva guys are often edgy and unrefined. They don’t have big budgets and editorial staff, but great movements are built on the strength of conviction. They aren’t usually top-down movements, driven by institutional elites, but are bottom-up, grassroots movements. The gatekeepers know this and don’t very much like being outgunned by the punk rockers of evangelicalism.

Thus, the “Gig Eva” moniker seems to be yet another gatekeeping attempt to prevent newer voices from finding an audience. Since Trueman didn’t name names, I don’t know who exactly he was criticizing, but I suspect many of them are my friends, or even me. Regardless, I find the characterization insulting.

Trueman says Gig Eva guys are “accountable to nobody,” suggesting that these people “marginalize the actual church by making their own platforms and declarations the source of all wisdom.” Come on. I know dozens of these guys, and none of them are the unaccountable rogues Trueman described.

These men aren’t losers with “time to spend living online,” trying to “become a celebrity without having proved himself beforehand in any real service to the church.” These men are pastors, entrepreneurs, and business leaders of all sorts. The Gig Eva guys I know didn’t have their platforms handed to them; they created their own platforms because Big Eva gatekept them out.

I’ve appreciated much of Trueman’s writing in the past, and I even quote him favorably several times in my book. But the condescension in his piece is too thick to ignore, especially when he indicts hard-working, faithful men who are too conservative ever to get the time of day from Big Eva gatekeepers.

This is nothing new. This year’s “Gig Eva” is last year’s “Moscow Mood.” I’m sure they’ll roll out another cute slogan in 2026 to keep the wrong people from gaining too much influence.

In the meantime, the “Gig Eva” guys I know will keep plodding ahead. They will continue to build new institutions because Big Eva gatekeepers deem them too “controversial” for their own. They will continue to pastor their churches, reform, write, speak, record, post, and grow because they are confident that they have a message worth hearing that will bless and strengthen the body of Christ.

And they’re savvy enough to leverage new technology to get the word out.

The Bible’s vision of humanity is larger and more dignified than the self-loathing, false humility that passes for spirituality today. The Christian life was never meant to be small. Redeemed men and women are not required to limp through life. Rather, he made us for glory.

I’ve written about what I call “loser theology” in other places, so I won’t rehash that here. In this essay, my focus is on the pursuit of glory.

Consider Paul’s words in Romans 2:6-7:

“He will render to each one according to his works: to those who by patience in well-doing seek for glory and honor and immortality, he will give eternal life.”

For a long time, I’d come to this verse in my Bible reading plan and it struck me as odd. Paul can’t be saying we are saved by seeking glory and honor, since the whole book of Romans teaches the opposite. We are saved by grace, not works. So what is Paul saying?

Here’s my answer in a nutshell that I’ll develop below:

God originally created man to pursue glory, honor, and immortality through faithful obedience and exercising dominion over creation. Since Adam sinned, he “fell short” of this glory. But Christ, the Second Adam, succeeded where Adam failed and restored man to his original purpose. Therefore, redeemed Christians are now free to pursue glory and honor by faith, in the power of the Holy Spirit, exercising godly dominion for the glory of God.

Adam’s Lost Glory

To understand Paul’s statement in Romans 2:6-10, let’s go back to the Garden of Eden. Genesis 2 teaches that there were two trees in the garden: (1) the tree of life, and (2) the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Adam was permitted to eat from the first tree, but forbidden to eat from the second.

When Adam sinned, the verdict was exile. “[God] drove out the man, and at the east of the garden of Eden he placed the cherubim and a flaming sword that turned every way to guard the way to the tree of life” (Gen. 3:22–24).

The trees represented two possible destinies: glory or death. Had Adam persevered in obedience, he would have eaten from the tree of life and entered into immortality. Instead, he reached for forbidden knowledge and fell under the curse of death.

Though Adam was created in innocence, he was not yet as glorious as he could have become. God gave him a gloriously ambitious task to “be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and take dominion” (Gen 1:28). That’s a global ambition. Adam’s task was to take the wild and untamed world outside of Eden and bring it under subjection to him. In other words, God created Adam with an eschatology—an purpose, telos, or end—that he might rise from innocence to glory through faithful obedience.

To fulfill God’s command, Adam would need to develop various skills he wasn’t created with. He would have needed to learn to plant gardens, name animals, lead a wife, and raise children. Those latent potentialities would have been drawn out of him through experience over time.

In other words, though Adam was morally innocent, he was not yet as glorious as he would have become had he been faithful to God’s commands. He could have attained glory by becoming a more skilled and excellent man in the pursuit of glorious goals. In so doing, Adam would have grown intellectually, physically, spiritually. In other words, innocence was the starting line, glory was the finish line.

With this in mind, notice Paul’s famously description of sin as not merely “doing bad things” but falling short of the glory of God (Romans 3:23). That’s important. Sin is more than merely breaking the rules; it is the forfeiture of glory. Because of Adam’s sin, he was no longer able to attain the glory God made him for. He “fell short of the glory of God.” And humanity has been falling short ever since.

Christ, the Second Adam, Attains the Glory of God

But the story doesn’t end in failure. Scripture presents Christ as the “last Adam” who succeeded where the first Adam failed. In His human nature, Christ sinlessly retraced Adam’s path.

The author of Hebrews (quoting Psalm 8) draws this out explicitly:

“What is man, that you are mindful of him,

or the son of man, that you care for him?

You made him for a little while lower than the angels;

you have crowned him with glory and honor,

putting everything in subjection under his feet.” (Heb 2:6-8)

Notice Hebrews 2 and Romans 2 both use the same word pair: “glory” and “honor.” The author or Hebrews 2 is citing Psalm 8, which is a commentary on Genesis 1-2. In other words, these texts tie together the creation of man, the image of God, and the dominion mandate.

Hebrews 2 also connects the creation of Adam with the incarnation of Christ, who was likewise crowned with glory and honor. And through His suffering and death, Christ brought “many sons to glory” (Heb 2:10).

Thus, Christ succeeded where Adam failed. And the result of Christ’s obedience was glory. Jesus said it himself: “Was it not necessary that the Christ should suffer these things and enter into his glory?” (Luke 24:26).

Therefore, Jesus hit the reset button on the human story. Adam’s sin broke the circuit of glory, but Christ reconnected it. Jesus secured the glory that Adam lost and offers it freely to His people. He restores humanity to its intended place as rulers over creation, crowned with glory and honor, who must once again revisit the dominion mandate given to Adam.

Thus, Christ completed the redemption arc of humanity. The fullest Christian life will not be marked by mediocrity, but glory. And our savior will reward his faithful servants who pursue it. Through Christ, obedience is glorious again.

Redeemed Humanity Restored to the Pursuit of Glory

This brings us back to Romans 2:6–7. When Paul says that God “will render to each one according to his works,” he isn’t teaching salvation by merit. He’s describing the reward of faith—the fruit of a life transformed by grace. Those who “seek for glory and honor and immortality” are not grasping for self-exaltation; they’re following the path of Christ, the Second Adam, who entered glory through obedience.

Christians are to do all things to the glory of God (1 Cor 10:31) while also hoping in glory as our inheritance (Rom 5:2). Those united to Him by faith are once again free to pursue what Adam forfeited.

God is ambitious. The Creation Mandate is ambitious (Gen 1:28). The Great Commission is ambitious (Matt 28:18-20). These ambitions are global in scale and and can only be accomplished by Spirit filled men and women who dare attempt great things for God. Thus, redeemed Christians are likewise made to pursue great and glorious ambitions.

Thus, Christians who think small, equating humility with mediocrity, are settling for less than what God made them for. God intends His people to exercise dominion under Christ’s authority—to build, teach, create, and govern. To seek glory, honor, and immortality is to seek what God Himself promises to the faithful.

Glory Is Not a Zero-Sum Game

Perhaps you may find it surprising to hear that when we obey God, giving God the glory, there is also a glory that overflows back to us. But it does. God’s glory is not a zero-sum game.

Take David’s victory over Goliath, for example. Who gets the glory for that? That’s actually a trick question. David could have stayed home that day, tending his sheep, playing it safe, and keeping his hands clean. If he’d stayed home, he would have remained innocent, but he would not have received glory.

Innocence isn’t the same as glory. One can remain innocent while doing nothing. Glory requires risk, faith, and obedience. When David stepped onto that battlefield, he was seizing the opportunity to magnify God through courage. That’s why we know his name. King David is on the Mount Rushmore of the Christian faith because he didn’t stay home. We know his name because he courageously rushed into battle.

In the defeat of Goliath, God gets the glory, but David also shares in it. That’s because God’s glory is not a zero-sum game, it is expansive. The more we glorify God, the more His glory spills over onto those who take courageous action by faith.

When some Christians feel satisfaction for succeeding at a great task, they might feel a little guilty for enjoying it. They might wonder if it’s pride, or selfish ambition. That’s certainly possible, but it’s also possible that they’re merely enjoying an echo of glory in their achievement.

Rather than allowing the fear of pride to smother the glory we’re meant to enjoy, it is better to pursue glory while repenting of any pride that we see arising within us. Better to repent of sin while pursuing great things than to bury your talents and avoid the risk.

The Greater the Ambition, the Greater the Glory

This matters because glory can be a powerful motivator for faithful Christians to pursue ambitious goals. The greater the ambition, the greater the glory when it is accomplished.

Put another way, glory scales with ambition. The kid who wins a backyard football game may feel a taste of glory, but the man who wins a Super Bowl ring experiences it in full. This same pattern applies to life in God’s kingdom: the greater the goal, the greater the glory. Glory is out on the battlefield, not at home on your couch.

There’s glory in raising faithful children, mastering your craft, building a business that blesses others, and serving others with excellence. Christians should be the most competent, disciplined, and creative people in the world. Why shouldn’t we be? We are indwelt by the Holy Spirit, sent on a divine mission, and commanded to take dominion. That means aiming high, not low.

Aim Higher

Since many Christians don’t think this way, they end up aiming way too low. They pray, go to church, pay a tithe, read their Bible, and stay out of trouble, thinking that’s the fullness of the Christian life. None of those things are wrong, but they’re not glorious either. Innocence is where the journey begins, but glory is where we should end up.

So if there’s a promotion offered at work, go for it. If you’ve got a business idea, build it. If you’re presented with a leadership opportunity, take it. Godly Christians should make the best business owners and bosses in the world, should they not? Pursue excellence in your vocation such that you will be a blessing to others. That’s what practical dominion taking looks like.

God has given you gifts and opportunities. The question is: what will you do with them? Will you aim low out of false humility? Or will you seek glory, by faith? We were never meant to limp through life as losers or apologizing for our successes. God crowned us with glory and honor and set us loose in His world. So don’t smother your ambition under the guise of humility. God doesn’t call us to be beautiful losers. He called us to reign with Christ. So aim higher. Pursue greatness for the glory of God. And when you succeed, give Him the glory, and enjoy the reciprocal glory he delights to share with you. May your pursuit of glory lead you upward, outward, expanding, and fruitful.

This essay was adapted from a sermon I preached on October 26, 2025.

Related essays:

• How Loser Theology Is Poisoning The Church

• Four Poisonous Features of Loser Christianity

• High Agency Christianity: The Answer to Loser Theology

I’m indebted to Rich Lusk for this article that was helpful in this study.

I’ll use two examples from recent years to set this up. The first one is Daniel Penny, a former U.S. Marine from Long Island who, in May 2023, restrained Jordan Neely, a homeless man acting erratically on a New York City subway train. Penny put Neely in a chokehold that lasted several minutes, during which Neely lost consciousness and later died. Penny said he acted to protect passengers from a perceived threat. He was charged with second-degree manslaughter and later acquitted.

The second example is Iryna Zarutska, a a 23-year-old Ukrainian refugee who fled the war in her homeland and moved to Charlotte, North Carolina. On August 22, 2025, she was fatally stabbed aboard a light rail train by Decarlos Brown Jr., a 34-year-old man with a lengthy criminal history. Brown’s attack on Zarutska was completely unprovoked. Sitting behind Zarutska on the train, he suddenly stood up and brutally stabbed her in the neck multiple times. After this, surveillance video shows her looking up at him in utter terror and shock, before collapsing moments later in her seat.

In the first case, Daniel Penny used force to stop a threatening man on a subway train. In the second case, several passengers watched passively, doing nothing as Decarlos Brown, Jr. murdered an innocent woman.

The existence of violence is a brute fact in a fallen world. Righteousness and virtue restrains good men from committing evil, but evil men are not restrained by virtue. Thus, as the saying goes, evil wins when good men do nothing.

Is Violence Always Wrong?

The modern West has become morally confused about the nature of violence. Many Christians instinctively treat all forms of violence as evil, as if peace were the natural state of the world and force a regrettable deviation from God’s will. Yet the biblical witness tells a different story.

Violence is not merely a symptom of sin. God sanctions violence in some instances as a means of restraining sin. Wicked men, left unchecked, will use force to oppress and destroy. God, therefore, delegates lawful authority to restrain their evil, sometimes through the righteous use of force by good men.

In other words, violence is sometimes a lawful necessity in a fallen world. It can be a moral good when exercised under divine authority and for just ends. Far from contradicting Christian ethics, such force fulfills God’s mandate for justice and protection. Modern aversion to this truth reflects not biblical fidelity but the soft sentimentalism of a culture that has forgotten the cost of peace.

Violence in the Divine Order

From Genesis to Revelation, violence is part of God’s providential rule over creation. God is not a passive observer of human wickedness but an active judge who wields the sword of justice.

For example, God ratified his covenant with Abraham with the blood of animals, signifying that one who breaks covenant will incur violence and death. God’s destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah demonstrated that divine wrath is not metaphorical but physical, catastrophic, and just. In Deuteronomy 20, the Lord commanded Israel to destroy the wicked nations of Canaan. While offensive to modern sensibilities, these acts reveal the seriousness of sin and the holiness of God.

Even in the New Testament, divine judgment retains its violent character. Jesus spoke of “light beatings” and “severe beatings” (Luke 12:47–48), warned of “weeping and gnashing of teeth” (Matt. 25:30), and promised final judgment in which He Himself “treads the winepress of the fury of the wrath of God” (Rev. 19:15). The crucifixion, without a doubt the most unjust act of violence in history, was also the very means by which God achieved redemption. In this, we see that violence can be not only just but redemptive when wielded by the righteous hand of God.

Violence, therefore, is not alien to divine justice; it is intrinsic to it. God’s judgments reveal His moral order, and His delegation of authority to human beings extends that moral order into civil society.

The Sword as Delegated Authority

The delegation of lawful violence first appears in Genesis 9:6: “Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed, for God made man in his own image.” Human beings, bearing the divine image, are entrusted with the responsibility to avenge the shedding of innocent blood. This mandate establishes both the sanctity of life and the moral legitimacy of capital punishment. Violence, in this sense, becomes a form of justice.

The apostle Paul affirms this in Romans 13, where the civil magistrate is called “God’s servant, an avenger who carries out God’s wrath on the wrongdoer.” The sword is not a symbolic ornament but a real instrument of coercive force. Government exists not only to legislate but to enforce. The threat and, when necessary, the use of violence by lawful authority is therefore a means of divine grace in a disordered world.

This principle exposes the naiveté of modern pacifism. Pacifism presumes that evil can be restrained by reason, empathy, or diplomacy alone. But history and Scripture both teach otherwise. Evil men are not persuaded by appeals to conscience; they are restrained by the credible threat of force.

As Pete Hegseth recently said, “Pacifism is a luxury belief that only survives because braver men stand ready to do violence on its behalf.” Peace is not the absence of conflict but the fruit of strength under authority.

Lawful and Unlawful Violence

Of course, affirming the necessity of violence in some circumstances is not to sanctify all forms of it. Scripture consistently distinguishes between lawful and unlawful uses of force. Unlawful violence is selfish, impulsive, or cruel. It is violence exercised for domination, revenge, or gain. Lawful violence, by contrast, is measured, principled, and ordered toward the defense of the innocent and the punishment of the guilty.

This moral distinction underlies the Christian doctrine of Just War, which developed from Augustine and Aquinas and remains vital for moral reasoning today. Violence is just when the cause is righteous, the authority legitimate, the intention pure, and the means proportionate. These principles apply not only to nations but also to individuals. A father defending his family, or a citizen restraining an assailant, exercises the same moral logic as a magistrate punishing a criminal. The difference is not scale but authority.

Thus, when a violent man assaults a woman on a subway car and bystanders do nothing, their passivity is not moral neutrality. Their passivity is cowardice. It is failure to perform a basic civic duty for the strong to protect the weak.

When Daniel Penny restrained an attacker to protect others, his action exemplified the moral principle that lawful violence in defense of the innocent is not only permitted but required. Justice demands that good men be willing to use force when necessary.

In ordinary situations, lawful authorities are authorized to enforce justice on our behalf. That’s why police officers carry guns and are authorized to use them when necessary. But sometimes, extraordinary circumstances grant a temporary authority for private citizens to use force. This was the case with Daniel Penny. He wasn’t an officer of the law on that train, but the extraordinary circumstances granted him a temporary authorization to use force.

The Sin of Cowardly Non-Violence

One of the moral diseases of the modern church is the confusion of cowardice with faith. Too many Christians imagine that “trusting God” means refusing to act decisively against evil. But faith does not preclude obedience to God’s commands, and one of those commands is to protect the weak. To stand by while others suffer injustice is to betray both God’s law and one’s neighbor.

Jesus’ command to “turn the other cheek” applies to personal insult, not to criminal assault. It restrains vengeance, not justice. The same Jesus who forbade retaliation also commended the Roman centurion for his faith and never told soldiers to abandon their posts. John the Baptist instructed soldiers to act justly, not to lay down their swords. Scripture nowhere condemns the possession of arms or the exercise of force for righteous ends.

Modern Christian pacifism often arises from sentimentality rather than Scripture. It substitutes moral sensitivity for moral clarity. The result is a church that condemns violence in principle while depending on violent men in practice—police officers, soldiers, and ordinary citizens who risk their lives to keep evil at bay. Such hypocrisy undermines both the witness of the church and the moral foundation of society.

Masculinity and the Moral Burden of Strength

In God’s design, men bear a particular responsibility for the exercise of protective strength. Scripture calls woman “the weaker vessel,” not to demean her but to assign to men the corresponding duty of protection. Physical power is a burden of stewardship.

When men abdicate that role, women are left unprotected, families exposed, and societies destabilized. A culture that mocks masculine strength or condemns the use of force in defense of the good is a culture that invites tyranny. Feminized pacifism, cloaked in moral language, leaves the door open for violent men to rule unchecked. A biblical theology of violence calls men to recover their vocation as protectors. They must be strong, disciplined, and governed by righteousness rather than rage.

Ordered Love and the Limits of Peace

The command to love one’s enemies must be understood within the framework of ordo amoris, the proper ordering of love. We love our enemies as human beings made in God’s image, but that love does not override our duty to love and protect those under our care. A man who refuses to defend his wife or children in the name of loving his enemy does not love rightly; he fails to love those God has specifically entrusted to him.

Likewise, Christ’s title as “Prince of Peace” refers to His reconciling work between God and sinners, not to an earthly cessation of all conflict. Until His kingdom is consummated, civil order requires the sword. Jesus Himself warned, “I did not come to bring peace, but a sword” (Matt. 10:34). The peace of Christ in the heart does not eliminate the need for justice in society.

Conclusion

Therefore violence, in itself, is neither moral nor immoral. It is a tool, capable of doing wickedness when misused, but also capable of righteousness when governed by principles of God’s law. God Himself employs violence to execute justice, and He delegates that authority to human rulers and, at times, to individuals defending the innocent.

To deny this is to ignore both the biblical record and the tragic realities of life in a fallen world. Evil cannot be negotiated out of existence; it must be restrained by force. The theology of violence thus calls Christians, especially men, to reject both barbarism and cowardice. The first abuses strength for domination; the second withholds strength from duty. Both are sins.

The faithful path is disciplined strength under the rule of love. Violence, rightly ordered, is not the enemy of peace but its guardian. When good men are willing to act, justice is preserved, evil is restrained, and God’s moral order is upheld in a world that desperately needs it.

When I think about many of the Christian leaders I once looked up to, I wonder how many of them are experiencing some serious cognitive dissonance right now as they survey the cultural and political landscape in America.

One month after the assassination of Christian martyr Charlie Kirk and his gospel-saturated memorial service that God used to bring the good news of Jesus Christ to over 100 million viewers worldwide, I can only imagine that they are. Everything they thought and taught about “effective ministry methods” in a “postmodern” world has been turned upside down by the life, death, and testimony of a young man who never went to college and never coddled the Left.

The Failures of an “Inoffensive Gospel” Ministry Model

In my seminary and early church planting days, I was taught a model of cultural engagement that emphasized “non-offensiveness” as a ministry non-negotiable. Of course, my teachers acknowledged the offense of the cross, but students were told to keep political discussions and condemnation of cultural sins to a minimum. Those were considered stumbling blocks to the gospel.

As these ideas took shape, the label “gospel centered” stuck. The premier exemplar of this sort of preaching was Tim Keller. The chief textbook for this method was Bryan Chappell’s book, Christ-Centered Preaching. An army of proponents of this model coalesced into organizations like The Gospel Coalition and training institutions like Westminster Theological Seminary, Covenant Theological Seminary, and Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary. I was first trained in this gospel centered teaching method in 2005, while I was on staff with CRU.

In theory, I found these methods compelling. Who could argue that we should avoid giving unnecessary offense? Preach the gospel. Preach the cross. Yes and amen.

In practice, however, I found it stifling. I planted an inner city church near the University of Cincinnati in 2010, and found this methodology wholly inadequate for the challenges of real ministry. I felt that my preaching lacked real power. My messages had no teeth. Sure, I was preaching gospel grace and the forgiveness of sins, but I felt constrained from explicitly naming and denouncing those very same sins.

I felt handcuffed. I could thunder about God’s love and the lavish grace of Christ, but whenever I called out abortion, homosexuality, or wokeness, I’d be accused of not “preaching the gospel.”

So I made a deliberate choice to reject that approach. It took me a couple of years to fully deprogram my ministry instincts and retrain myself to be bolder and more outspoken. I suspect a number of my seminary peers are constrained in similar ways — and still are.

How Charlie Kirk Broke the Mold

Then I think of men like Charlie Kirk. He didn’t go to college or seminary. He didn’t build a platform by adopting the tactics of the credentialed experts. He built his platform with guts and grit. Kirk spoke with a powerful combination of grace towards those who were receptive, but did not shrink from prophetically denouncing with crystal clarity the fashionable moral evils of our day.

If Kirk had gone to a typical evangelical seminary, he likely would have lost his edge. He would have learned to be more careful. He would have learned to be more measured. There’s a good chance he would have had his prophetic voice “educated” right out of him. He may have ended up as just another celebrated academic, publishing white papers at ETS, and speaking on the lecture circuit.

I’m not against those things. I thank God for theologians and academics.

My point is that our theological institutions are far more adept at producing academics when the need of the hour is more prophets.

We need men of courage and conviction these days, but the evangelical leadership that shaped the last generation of pastors trained men to bury their courage. Given the state of the church today, one can only wonder how many men go to seminary and graduate more on fire for Christ?

That’s why, in light of Kirk’s death and the incredible gospel testimony evident in his memorial service, I suspect many of those older Christian leaders are feeling cognitive dissonance right now.

Why? Because the man who arguably had the most significant gospel impact in a generation did not go through their credentialing process. He didn’t wait for the gatekeepers to stamp his preaching passport.

In fact, he did the opposite of what they would have trained him to do.

How do you make sense of that? If, as we were told, Christians should avoid political or hot-button cultural issues to maximize gospel impact, how do we make sense of the once-in-a-generation response to his assassination? It’s too soon to say it’s a genuine revival of God, but it’s undeniable that we’re seeing a resurgent interest in the intersection of biblical Christianity and conservative politics. Could it be that downplaying the cultural implications of the gospel has actually neutered our Christian witness?

And then, I’m disturbed by more questions. How many young men have had their wings clipped by the “credentialed class,” who told them that to be effective in ministry, they must be inoffensive? How many young men with hearts on fire for God sought ministry training only to have the leaders they respected train the zeal right out of them?

The Cultural Impact of Kirk’s Assassination

Charlie Kirk’s death has awakened the consciences of a generation of young men. They admire his courage, boldness, clarity, and zeal. In the aftermath of Kirk’s death, many of these young men are looking for leaders who can sharpen them and direct their zeal.

So the question before us now is this: who do they have to look to? Who will train them? Who will affirm their zeal and teach them to sharpen and wield their blades, not dull them in the dirt of non-offensiveness?

Kirk’s bold voice, testimony to the gospel, massive appeal, and effective platform are a rebuke to the credential class who would have advised him to “tone it down” and play the “long game” so that he could have a “nice career.”

Don’t get me wrong, there are still some very courageous voices out there, but many of them are speaking from outside the system because their bold voices threaten the status quo. All the incentives of the academy punish courage expressed in a conservative direction while rewarding courage expressed in a progressive direction. The academy favors innovation and breaking new ground for liberalism. It does not favor taking brave stands for time-tested orthodoxy and defending our political and theological heritage.

Students show up at seminary with hearts ablaze for the glory of God, expecting their teachers to show them how to contend for the faith once for all delivered to the saints. What they often find, however, is the tired, old corpse that refuses to die of 18th-century German liberalism, or the morally vacuous, theologically repackaged political socialism of 19th-century Karl Marx.

It’s a tale as old as time. The devil hates bold, outspoken, prophetically gifted men. And those are the kinds of men we need in our day. Lots more.

One thing is clear: Going forward, the status quo is not going to cut it. Everyone senses it. The way forward for the church is more voices in the mold of Charlie Kirk, not less.

Unfortunately, the roster of men who not only could, but would, train the next generation of Charlie Kirks is pretty thin. Most evangelical churches these days seem more likely to excommunicate the next Charlie Kirk, rather than embrace him.

But God will not leave his church without leaders, even if they come from unlikely places and use “impolite” ministry methods that offend the Kellerites. Scripture says, “God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise” (1 Cor 1:27).

That will be part of Charlie Kirk’s ironic legacy. He did the opposite of everything Christian leaders are taught to do, and ended up building a ministry platform that produced the largest single gospel preaching event in human history.

Right-wing unbelievers know what time it is, and they’re hungry for a message that gives them hope and purpose. Give it to them.

I’m convinced that the most fertile mission field right now is right-wing unbelievers. Specifically, right-wing men. Even more specifically, right-wing men under 40.

Let me explain.

Right-wing and left-wing unbelievers are not the same. It’s a naive pipe dream for churches to try to play the middle, offending neither the Left nor the Right in theory (which almost always means happily offending the Right while coddling the Left in practice) in a misguided effort to reach both with the gospel. It won’t work.

We don’t live in a monoculture. We’re going to offend somebody. It’s only a matter of who and why.

Right-wing unbelievers generally believe in God and have some respect for the Bible or the natural law. Yes, they live lives that fall short of Christian teaching and God’s righteous standards, but in broad strokes, they are living according to God’s creation order, and not against it. They have some knowledge of God’s truth and know they don’t live up to that standard. In other words, they are sinning against the light of knowledge.

Left-wing unbelief is different. It’s explicitly secular. Usually atheistic. If they do believe in God, it’s a pagan perversion that only bears a faint resemblance to the God of Scripture. Having rejected the light of truth, they’ve gone on to rebel against nature itself. They remind me of what Paul describes in Romans 1.

As people rebel against nature, Romans 1 describes their downward spiral into a moral abyss. When you think of a garden-variety leftist, you likely think of someone who is openly hostile to God, Christianity, history, tradition, laws, norms, and the civil order. They wear moral anarchy as a badge of pride. Therefore, God has given them over to all manner of sin (Rom 1:24). These people are some of the most arrogant people you’ll ever meet. They hold Master’s degrees and PhDs, yet they think that if you drug up a little boy with cross-sex hormones, they can turn him into a girl. They struggle to construct a rationally coherent argument for any of their beliefs, operating almost exclusively on pathos over logos: “Claiming to be wise, they became fools” (Rom 1:22).

They are emotional thinkers who have “exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator” (Rom 1:25). Thus, they also exchange natural sexual relations for those that are “contrary to nature” (Rom 1:26). Leftists are full-throated advocates of the LGBTQ revolution, almost without exception.

The Left has also mainstreamed political violence. Watch videos of Antifa or “No Kings” protests and you’ll see all manner of unrighteousness, evil, covetousness, malice, slanderers, haters of God, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless (Rom 1:29-31).

Right-wing unbelief reminds me more of Romans 2. Even though they aren’t Christians, they possess enough light of truth to acknowledge God, hold the Bible in high regard, show some respect for the rule of law, and strive to uphold natural law and the civil order. Garden variety right-wing unbelievers are responsible adults with families and kids. Since we do not live in a monoculture, it is naive for a church to act as though it can play the middle to reach people on both sides.

The Left is clearly morally worse than the Right, and churches that refuse to acknowledge this fact come across as disingenuous at best or dishonest at worst.

Churches that refuse to confront the evils of the Left will be offensive to the non-Christian Right. If a right-wing non-Christian shows up at a squishy church and hears about “evil on both sides,” they’re going to think that church has lost its mind. Their fear of the Left’s growing wickedness may have prompted them to come to church in the first place. I’m not saying churches should pander to right-wing unbelievers, I’m just saying don’t act like both sides are the same.

Most normal right-wing unbelievers won’t take offense at having their sins called out. They expect it and respect it. That’s what preachers and churches do, and they are aware of it. But a right-wing unbeliever will be deeply offended at any preacher who panders to the Left. He’ll walk away thinking, “That preacher has no spine.” Most right-wing unbelievers aren’t looking for preachers to pander to them. They are looking for preachers they can trust to tell them the truth.

A right-wing unbeliever may have a wife and kids. If not, a right-wing young man will desire these things, though he will probably believe the social deck has been stacked so high against him that he may never be able to have them.

The right-wing non-Christian husband and father will naturally want to protect and provide for his family, and he’s looking for help in an increasingly dangerous world. If he shows up at church and the preacher talks about Christ conquering evil powers, he’ll sit up and take notice. And if the preacher says, “You need to get your own house in order first. Get rid of porn. Take care of your body. Be more disciplined. Take care of your family. Repent of your sin, and Jesus will forgive your failures. Then trust his power to overcome them and grow,” there’s a good chance he’ll turn to his wife and say, “This is our church.”

In other words, right-wing unbelievers know what time it is, and they’re hungry for a message that gives them hope and purpose. They understand that the Left is trying to destroy their way of life. They need to hear that Christ has overcome the evil one, and in His power, they can too.

The bottom line is this: One way or another, you’re going to offend somebody. There is no such thing as a non-offensive position. You can’t play the middle between Left and Right; you must pick a side. You must choose.

To be clear, since I was wrongfully accused of coming “perilously close to telling Christians that a certain class of non-Christian is unworthy of being evangelized,” that’s not at all what I am saying. I’m providing observational and analytical commentary on where, as a pastor of over 15 years and someone who pays close attention to various cultural currents, I see the most significant opportunities for fruitful evangelism and gospel ministry. And what I am ultimately suggesting here is not some new form of seeker-sensitive approach to ministry, but rather a “putting off” of a watered-down, “Third Way” approach that was never biblical to begin with.

Preach the Bible and apply a white-hot gospel to the reality of the world we live in today, and the reality of our current political climate, and I believe the rewards you will reap are the salvation of souls on the Right in particular. If that same message reaches a leftist, praise God! But don’t be surprised when it doesn’t. There are different kinds of soil in the human heart (Matthew 13:1-23). Sow the seed indiscriminately. But don’t be surprised when it grows in the heart of non-Christian right-wingers, particularly right-wing men. And be careful not to place unnecessary stumbling blocks to reaching this fertile ground because you’ve been fooled into adopting a failed “neither Right nor Left” paradigm.

Left-wing unbelievers will be offended by churches that confront sins and call people to repentance. Right-wing unbelievers will be offended by churches that don’t confront sins and don’t call people to repentance.

For this reason, I’m convinced that the most fertile mission field right now is right-wing unbelievers.

Jesus himself recognized that some unbelievers are “not far from the kingdom” (Mark 12:34). Right-wing unbelievers are closer to the kingdom because their values are more conducive to and compatible with Christian belief.

So right-wing unbelievers may not (yet) know Christ, but they still want to live in a Christian society. From there, it’s not a far leap to explicit Christian faith.