Mountain View Chapel

Flesh or Phantom

Thu, 22 Oct 2026 00:03:27 +0000

Though early Christianity experienced persecution externally from Jews, pagans, and the Roman state, it also battled internal enemies: false teachers and heresies. Among the earliest challenges to the faith was a denial, not of Jesus’ being God, but of His being truly human!

It appears that denial of Jesus’ humanity had philosophical roots in the notion held by some of the ancients that matter was evil and spirit was good. If true, the thought that the greatest spirit of all could somehow inhabit a body of flesh was unthinkable. God can’t really eat and drink. God doesn’t need rest. God can’t suffer and He certainly can’t DIE!

Some early Christians tried changing the teaching of the apostles and said it only seemed that Jesus had a physical body, but He was actually more of a phantom. The Greek word for “seem” is dokeo, so this heresy eventually came to be called docetism. The apostle John was almost certainly battling an early form of docetism in his writings.

By this you know the Spirit of God: every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, and every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not from God. This is the spirit of the antichrist, which you heard was coming and now is in the world already. (1 John 4.2-3)

For many deceivers have gone out into the world, those who do not confess the coming of Jesus Christ in the flesh. Such a one is the deceiver and the antichrist. (2 John 7)

Notice how John opens his first epistle, vigorously emphasizing the physicality of the apostles’ experience of Jesus:

That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we looked upon and have touched with our hands, concerning the word of life—the life was made manifest, and we have seen it, and testify to it and proclaim to you the eternal life, which was with the Father and was made manifest to us—that which we have seen and heard we proclaim also to you… (1 John 1.1-3)

John’s gospel boldly proclaims the same truth: And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen His glory… (John 1.14a)

An early martyr, Ignatius, bishop of Antioch in Syria (d. c. 107) insisted in letters to several churches that Jesus “was truly of the seed of David” and that “He did eat and drink” and “He suffered truly, even as also He truly raised up Himself, not, as certain unbelievers maintain, that He only seemed to suffer, as they themselves only seem to be [Christians]” (from the Epistle to Smyrna).

Some may feel this is much ado about nothing, trivial theological arguments that don’t really matter.

But if Jesus is shifted away from being physical, it is a step toward removing His reality—His connection to our world and to us and our very real lives in this world. He can evolve into an idea or a teaching or a feeling.

The faith of the apostolic witnesses, however, insists on this odd and seemingly impossible union of the invisible God who is spirit and our physical human lives. Jesus is truly God and truly man. He truly suffered and understands our suffering (Hebrews 4.15). His physicality enabled Him to taste death (Hebrews 2.14), and His physical resurrection provides the hope of what is not only possible but promised to us.

Our faith is based on a historical and very physical reality. The apostles and early Christians insisted that only a Christ come-in-the-flesh is able to redeem the human race.

Christians: Haters of Mankind

Wed, 14 Oct 2026 16:18:14 +0000

I’ve decided to take a few blogs to lay out what I believe are interesting events in church history that Christians should be aware of.

The Great Fire of Rome (AD 64) burned for six days and seven nights. Just when they thought they had it under control, it broke out again. It appears to have burned for three more days. Only four of Rome’s fourteen districts (about 29% of the city) escaped the fire entirely. Three of the districts (about 21% of the city) were completely burnt to the ground. The remaining seven districts were mostly destroyed, being left with only a few damaged, half-burned buildings.

Though it appears to have been an accident, the word on the street was that the Emperor Nero had ordered the city burned because he wanted to rebuild it himself. The early 2nd century historian Tacitus goes on:

“Consequently, to get rid of the report, Nero fastened the guilt and inflicted the most exquisite tortures on a class hated for their abominations, called Christians by the populace. Christus, from whom the name had its origin, suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilatus, and a most mischievous superstition, thus checked for the moment, broke out not only in Judea, the first source of the evil, but even in Rome, where all things hideous and shameful from every part of the world find their center and become popular.

Accordingly, they first arrested all who pleaded guilty; then, upon their information, an immense multitude was convicted, not so much of the crime of firing the city, as of hatred against mankind. Mockery of every sort was added to their deaths. Covered with the skins of beasts, they were torn by dogs and perished, or were nailed to crosses, or were doomed to the flames and burned to serve as a nightly illumination when daylight had expired. Nero offered his gardens for the spectacle, and was exhibiting a show in the circus, while he mingled with the people in the dress of a charioteer or stood aloft on a chariot. Hence, even for criminals who deserved extreme and exemplary punishment, there arose a feeling of compassion; for it was not, as it seemed, for the public good, but to glut one man’s cruelty, that they were being destroyed.” (Tacitus, Annals XV.44, Church-Brodribb translation)

Tacitus was about eight at the time of the fire, most likely not in Rome at the time and not an eyewitness. But he went on to become a senator and consul (AD 97) and governor of Asia (now Turkey, AD 112-113). He’s not an insignificant nobody, but an educated important leader with access to original sources. His is one of the early secular accounts affirming the existence of Christ and Christianity, which he calls “a mischievous superstition”, a thing “hideous and shameful” that had made its way from Judea to Rome.

Tacitus says Christians were “hated for their abominations”, their “hatred against mankind.” That sounds odd to us, since we see Christianity as being about purity, forgiveness, and love, not abominable behavior and hatred. But Christian morals opposed much of Roman social practice, and Christians withdrew from social events driven by pagan religion, making Christians anti-social misfits—“haters of mankind”. They were despised more for their way of life than their theology.

This was more of an attempt to distract the political gossip chain that opposed Nero than it was a dedicated attempt to wipe out all Christians. Christians just happened to be the convenient scapegoat at the moment. Early Christian tradition says Peter and Paul were eventually martyred by Nero in Rome.

Being misunderstood, even hated, for living by Christ’s teaching is nothing new. Peter wrote to Christians who were being slandered as “evildoers” and told them to keep their conduct honorable “so that... [observers] may see your good deeds and glorify God” (1 Peter 2:12). The Romans called Christians “haters of mankind” because believers lived differently. When our culture calls our faithfulness to truth “hateful”, we stand in a long line of believers who were misunderstood in the same way.

No Raisins, No Haircuts, No Funerals

Mon, 05 Oct 2026 17:20:29 +0000

Is it good or evil?
Is it moral or immoral?
Is it legal or illegal?
Is it wise or foolish?

Those are the four spectrums of decision-making. For Christians (or perhaps religious people, in general) there is one more: Is it holy or common?

Sometimes we run all our terminology together, as though good, right, moral, wise, and holy are all exactly the same thing. Though they may be related, they aren’t identical. This is especially important in understanding the words surrounding the “holiness” spectrum.

“Holiness” involves a chosen separation of oneself to God. The promises of the Nazirite vow (Numbers 6.1-8) are an example. A person who took a Nazirite vow, “separating himself to the LORD” (Numbers 6.2), vowed not to eat grapes or anything made from grapes (including raisins)—not even the seeds or skins—or drink anything made from grapes (grape juice, wine, or vinegar). He vowed to never cut his hair, and he promised not to go near any dead body—not even for a family funeral!

Is there something evil about grapes? Is cutting your hair immoral? Are family funerals wicked? Not at all. All these things are good in and of themselves. But when you took a Nazirite vow, you “swore off” such things as a symbolic separation of yourself—a sort of “fast”—to God. Eating grapes is not an evil, but not keeping your promise to God is.

A Nazirite vow could last a lifetime (e.g. Samson) or for a chosen period of time (e.g. Numbers 6.5, “…until the time is completed for which he separates himself to the LORD, he shall be holy”). The Nazirite wasn’t to condemn the average person for eating grapes, cutting their hair, or being near dead bodies. The average person wasn’t less spiritual or wicked for doing these things. The Nazirite had simply made a special commitment that the average person hadn’t. The Nazirite vow was between self and God, not man and man. The Nazirite respected the average person’s right to eat grapes; the average person respected the Nazirite’s decision not to.

I think Christians today can make decisions for holiness. Fasting from sugar or TV for Lent is a chosen temporary holiness. Some people make lifelong choices to abstain from, say, alcoholic beverages or from eating meat. The biggest danger with such choices is to confuse the holy/common spectrum with the good/evil spectrum, and to see teetotaling or vegetarianism as a matter of good and evil demanded of everyone rather than as a voluntary choice of abstinence from a good in the interests of holiness.

Another holiness choice is the decision to set aside a day to the Lord (or a part of the day, say, committed to personal devotions). This is not a matter of good or evil, but of holiness—sanctifying (or setting apart) the day—making it special for the sake of your relationship to God. It is not a reason to judge everyone else as evil, immoral, or spiritually inferior—as many of the Pharisees did, provoking Jesus’ judgments against them.

If you’ve made such a commitment to holiness, keep it, but don’t condemn others for not making such a commitment or require them to live consistently with your commitment.

If you’re with someone who has made such a commitment to holiness, respect it. Don’t try to tempt them to break it.

“Each one should be fully convinced in his own mind.” (Romans 14.5b)

Wisdom's Questions

Wed, 30 Sep 2026 23:40:47 +0000

Is the thing I want to do legal or illegal (government standards)?
Is the thing I want to do moral or immoral (societal standards)?
Is the thing I want to do good or evil (God’s standards)?

Those are the questions I ask when making hard decisions. I would expect that all I need to do is line up the good poles and my decision would be easy. If a thing is good, moral, and legal, why would I not do it?

But even when those things line up, moral decision-making may require yet another spectrum of consideration: Is the thing I want to do wise or foolish?

General principles are certain, but the closer you get to the particulars of a case—reality as it is—the more often those principles alone fall short. For example, “help your family” is a sound principle of goodness; it is also moral, and depending on the help needed, not illegal.

But if a certain family member with a history of financial irresponsibility asks me to co-sign a loan, that good principle is not the only pertinent information to consider. The particulars of the situation make me ask: Is it wise to help this family member in this way?

Wisdom considers the variables of life and human behavior and knows that not everything is predictable. Principles involve abstract ideals; wisdom involves concrete reality assessed by experience.

Experience tells me to consider the costs and benefits of a decision. A cost is a good that is lost; a benefit is a good that is gained. If I co-sign the loan, what might it cost and who will pay the costs? Who benefits?

Experience tells me to think beyond the first step, what Thomas Sowell calls “thinking beyond stage one.” If I co-sign, my irresponsible family member gets the loan. Then what? What is my family member’s likely response based on his history with money? And what will be the consequences to me if he fails to follow through on his financial commitment?
Experience asks: Can this decision be undone? If so, how easily can it be undone? Are there long-term adverse effects of the decision?

These are just a few of the kinds of questions wisdom may ask about a decision. While it may be legal, moral, and good to “help your family,” it may not be wise to co-sign a loan for a family member. The book of Proverbs repeatedly warns against it, whether one is doing so for a neighbor or a stranger (Proverbs 6.1-5; 11.15; 17.18; 20.16; 22.26-27).

Asking and answering such questions won’t make the final decision for you, but you’ll make the decision informed by reality rather than naïve optimism based on abstract ideals alone.

Complications That Demand Wisdom

Mon, 21 Sep 2026 15:19:32 +0000

In making moral decisions we try to line up three spectrums (good and evil, moral and immoral, legal and illegal) and ideally, we try to do what is good, moral, and legal. When those three things line up, the decision is easy. When they don’t line up—and often they don’t—moral decision-making gets complicated.

For example, sometimes actions are good, but illegal: hiding Jews in Nazi-occupied lands during WWII; protecting slaves through the underground railroad prior to the American Civil war; and churches continuing to meet in a country that restricts house-church gatherings.

Sometimes things are legal but evil—abortion where it is lawful, for example.

Some things can be socially approved (seen as moral) but evil. Eugenics—the belief that science could decide which individuals, races, or groups were superior and had a right to procreate and which shouldn’t—was a respectable progressive opinion in the early 20th century. Racial segregation was a settled moral consensus for generations but was a social evil. People today believe that affirming someone’s evil choices is moral kindness and confronting certain evil choices is unacceptable.

A thing can be morally acceptable (and perhaps even true good) in some circles but condemned as immoral (and even evil) by others: before the Civil War abolitionists were dismissed as social fanatics and troublemakers who were disturbing the peace; the Christian baker who declines to bake a cake for a same-sex wedding and is treated by neighbors and the court of public opinion as the evildoer; the employer or teacher who won’t use preferred pronouns and is labeled as unkind rather than principled.

There are also the very difficult cases in which things can be legal and even commonly socially approved (i.e. considered moral)—even in churches—but may still very well be evils in God’s sight. No-fault divorce is one example. Sports betting, legalized nationwide since 2018, is now mainstream entertainment that can quietly destroy households while carrying no social stigma at all. Multi-level marketing schemes are often praised for entrepreneurship that creates flexibility for stay-at-home moms while running on a business model that mathematically guarantees that most participants will lose money.

These are all cases where the three spectrums don’t necessarily line up, making a moral decision difficult.

There are other factors complicating moral decision-making as well. Timing, not just content, comes into play for actions and words. Jokes and humor are wonderful fun, but we generally find them inappropriate at the site of an accident or a funeral. In a similar vein, what’s acceptable for a congregational member to say in public may not be acceptable if spoken by a pastor or church leader who is often held to higher standards by the congregation. There are also things a pastor can say publicly because of his office that a congregational member could not say.

Sometimes we are forced to decide based on incomplete information and before a reasonable level of certainty is achieved. Waiting for certainty may be prudence; it may also be judged as cowardice.

Sometimes we are faced with competing claims on our time and loyalty. How, for example, does a pastor juggle the needs of a sick church member, the request of a struggling marriage for counsel, the needs of his own marriage and family, and the other duties required by his job (and/or his second job) when all the claims hit at once? All the claims are legitimate, but there is only so much time and so much of himself to go around. Choosing one means choosing against the others.

With nearly every decision there are unavoidable unintended consequences. Church discipline meant to restore someone may permanently drive them away from the faith. A benevolence policy meant to help can create dependency. A choice for good today can become an evil tomorrow for reasons no one could have foreseen. Even when potential error can be foreseen, the choice between the difficulties isn’t always easy. One can err toward too much severity or too much mercy, each with troublesome results. Which option do you choose?

Though some decisions are straightforward, most moral decisions have many moving parts, some of which we may not even be aware when we have to make our moral choice. These complications throw moral decisions into a final spectrum, perhaps the most difficult and complicated of all: wise and foolish.

And perhaps we’ll talk more about the spectrum in another installment…

70 in a Convertible

Mon, 14 Sep 2026 17:52:02 +0000

Since May 12th I’ve been building a blog series on moral decision-making. At the foundation of moral decision-making is goodness, determined by the character of God, and evil, a distortion of God’s goodness toward an end that opposes His design or intention.

When good and evil are applied in our world, we tend to speak of it as right and wrong. An act is right when it conforms to the goodness in God’s character in a given situation, wrong when it fails to do so.

Man’s finiteness and moral blindness due to sin muddy our grasp of God’s character and complicate moral decision-making. Choices about right and wrong are built on each individual conscience’s understanding of God’s character and its factoring in society’s moral perceptions (the moral vs immoral spectrum) and government and laws—the legal vs illegal spectrum. I’d like to devote this installment to the latter.

Some governmental laws merely recognize evils as wrong (murder, theft, perjury, adultery). But government can manufacture obligations that do not exist in nature, i.e. things not evil in themselves can be made wrong by law. Zooming along at 70 mph in a convertible, the wind in your hair, on a sunny summer day may be an exhilarating experience of the gift of life—certainly not an evil in and of itself—and on an open highway across Montana, no law stops you. Drop that same 70 mph onto a densely populated street in a town, and the calculus shifts. The 35-mph speed limit has some arbitrariness to it, but it is naming a real danger to real people who live there. Fast driving in a populated area moves in the direction of being, not just a violation of a prohibition, but a potential evil—recklessness that risks harm to the life of one’s neighbor.

Making moral decisions involves our consciences seeing alignment of social moral standards and legal prescriptions with goodness in God’s character. This, I believe, is how the apostles can tell us to obey legal authorities as God’s servants (e.g. Romans 13.1-4, 1 Peter 2.13-17) and yet, at the same time, when laws depart from the goodness of God’s character, they can say “We ought to obey God rather than men” (Acts 5.29 cf. disobedience to the kings’ decrees in Daniel 3 and 6).

At times, things arguably immoral or evil (at least from a Christian perspective) are legalized, e.g. abortion, embryo-destructive IVF practices, no-fault divorce, assisted suicide, and high-interest payday lending.

Perhaps more difficult are cases where both sides claim to be doing good, and the law chooses to legalize one side over the other, e.g. requiring expensive municipal permits to feed the homeless or banning the feeding of the homeless in certain neighborhoods, restricting gatherings (including church services) during the pandemic, and whistleblowing that leaks classified information to protect the public interest.

None of this makes the legal/illegal spectrum less important—only less final. Government is a God-ordained good, and law deserves our submission for that reason, not because it always gets things right. It can bind us to a 35-mph limit protecting a neighbor we'll never meet, but it can also call evil good and good evil (Isaiah 5:20). When it does that, each conscience must recognize the human throne cannot hold more than what the divine throne lends to it.

Braided Hair and Hemlines

Sat, 12 Sep 2026 08:17:58 +0000

The principle behind God's law doesn't change, only its clothing does — and the work of finding the right clothing for our own time, our own place in history, falls to us. It’s not an exact science. It’s a practical one—people in a community learning from one another, refining our stances and building connections among us as we go.

Let me use a test case to explain what I mean. Let’s talk about modesty.

Paul tells the women of Ephesus to “adorn themselves in respectable apparel, with modesty and self-control, not with braided hair and gold or pearls or costly attire, but with what is proper for women who profess godliness—with good works” (1 Timothy 2:9-10). The apostle Peter tells the women of Asia Minor: “Do not let your adorning be external—the braiding of hair and the putting on of gold jewelry, or the clothing you wear—but let your adorning be the hidden person of the heart with the imperishable beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit, which in God’s sight is very precious” (1 Peter 3:3-4).

Both apostles command modesty, but neither apostle gives a precise hemline, fabric, or price ceiling. They provide an aim: don't dress to be looked at or announce what you're worth. Dress in a way that points past yourself and let your character do the talking.

I don’t believe that aim is negotiable. It's stated plainly, twice, by two apostles writing to two different congregations. The fashion and styles that present that aim will differ from culture to culture throughout history. Braided hair and gold in the first century said something specific: wealth, status, look-at-me. It doesn't say the same thing in an American church in 2026.

The application moves. The aim doesn't.

I believe it is easy to go wrong here in two opposite directions.

The first mistake freezes an application and calls it the command. Somebody decides a particular hemline or a particular decade's sense of decency is what Paul actually meant to command, and then that person treats every departure from that standard as a departure from Scripture. It feels good because it feels firm. And it is firm. It’s just firm on the wrong thing.

The second mistake notices, correctly, that Scripture never names particular fashions and concludes that therefore there are no particular applications possible. Because no universal eternal expression of modesty is spelled out, it is not possible to have an expression of modesty anywhere at any time. Modesty, then, becomes each person making a rule for herself.

But this treats the absence of a rule as the absence of an aim. But the aim was stated twice, plainly, by two apostles who clearly thought it mattered. "We can't be certain where the line falls" is not the same claim as "there is no line."

I think the best answer lies between these two extremes: hold the aim firmly and the application loosely. Ask, in your own setting, whether what you're wearing functions to draw attention to your body or announce your wealth — and hold that judgment with real conviction, because Peter and Paul did. But hold the specific application— this hemline, this neckline, this cut — the way you'd hold any judgment call, because it is a judgment call. And we’re called to make it.

Recognize too that you’re part of a community, and your judgment on a matter like this affects a community. So though you make your individual decision, loving your neighbor means taking them into account to some degree. Your neighbor should be doing the same thing, and we all should be rubbing off on each other and learning from each other.

This, I believe, is one of the things that is most difficult for individualistic Americans. We seem to feel that if we take our neighbor into account, we are being made slaves to their opinions, and we believe in liberty, not slavery.

But love, to some extent and in some ways, IS a form of submission, isn’t it? In Ephesians 5 the apostle Paul depicts one of the effects of being filled with the Spirit as “submitting to one another out of reverence for Christ” (5.21). He goes on to spell out how that works in various relationships. Wives will submit to their husbands (5.22-24) and husbands will love their wives (5.25-32). This love is clearly an expression of submission to one another out of reverence for Christ. Paul goes on to talk about parent-child and master-slave relationships, portraying each as an example of mutually submissive relationship built on reverence for God and consideration for your neighbor. These are just a few examples of what the filling of the Spirit looks like when it’s fleshed out in God’s people.

That tells us what kind of people we each need to be in the Christian community. Be firm on your personal standards as you live before God. But recognize that not everyone will be in the same place as you or see things exactly as you do. Were we always in the place we find ourselves at this moment? Or did we change our minds, our stances, and our practices, as we matured and we changed? If we are still where we were when we were 3 years old, there is probably something wrong.

God stays the same and His aims stay the same because He is eternal and unchanging. We are not eternal and unchanging. WE are tentative and transient beings, passing through time like a vapor. When we look back through history, we can see that another culture, another decade, might reach the same aim by an entirely different code. A modest woman in 1830 covered far more than does a modest woman in 2026. The code was broader then and it's narrowed since. But it hasn't narrowed to nothing. Run the line through both eras and you hit the same floor: certain things stay covered, always, in 1830 and in 2026 alike. Different code. Same aim. Neither is more "biblical" than the other— the particulars of the code were never the point.

That should tell you where tentativeness belongs, and where it doesn't. Tentativeness, transience, attaches to the code, not the aim. If "we can't be sure exactly where the line is" is doing the work of justifying a choice that plainly serves the opposite of what Peter and Paul named—display, attention, status— that isn't humility about application. It's quietly walking away from an aim Scripture has clearly stated.

When There's No Rule for That

Wed, 02 Sep 2026 00:14:16 +0000

Good and evil are determined by the conformity of a thought or act to God’s character. When we bring principles of good and evil into our concrete world and apply them to particular behaviors we tend to call good “right” and evil “wrong”. In everyday thinking, we judge right and wrong in two key places: morals and law.

Let’s discuss morals by which I mean those behaviors judged by the individual conscience or by the general consensus of a community to be good and acceptable—or not.

Some aspects of morality are clear-cut, especially for Christians, because of biblical precepts. “You shall not murder” and “you shall not steal” are clear. Murder and stealing are evil and wrong. But—and this is the moral challenge that many conservative Christians fail to grasp—there are not as many straightforward precepts in Scripture as we might want.

For example, though the Bible presents gluttony and drunkenness as works of the flesh, it nowhere provides clear lines exactly defining either sin. The apostles counsel modesty in demeanor and dress but nowhere draw specific lines distinguishing appropriate from inappropriate. How do we know, then, what is appropriate and what isn’t?

The Bible warns about avarice and greed, but it never tells us where the line is between acceptable provision and those sins. There are warnings about debt being dangerous, but taking on debt is never prohibited. How much debt is too much? For what things is debt acceptable or unacceptable? Is it immoral to have a mortgage or use credit cards?

Likewise, we know that love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control are “the fruit of the Spirit”, but particular explanations of how each of these things must manifest themselves is, for the most part, lacking in the biblical instruction. Must I always be joyful—or is there a time to mourn and be sad? Is peace violated if I feel anxiety, and is anxiety always a sin? Can I be too patient and put up with too much wrongdoing? Can I be too forgiving? Is there a time for “tough love”? Does “tough love” violate kindness? If I rebuke someone is that a lack of patience on my part, or is there a time for rebuke? How do I know which is which?

These and many other things are not answered by biblical precept. For some of them we may find examples, e.g. David’s immorality or the self-righteousness of the Pharisees. Most of the time, however, we “feel” these things out by inference. We do our best to build our inferences on the principles of Scripture and by our own consciences and the perceptions of consciences around us.

There are problems with that, aren’t there? Our consciences can be poorly instructed or seared, hindered by the blindness resulting from original sin as well as our finiteness. Individual consciences can be misguided and so can social conscience. An entire society may have bad judgment about some matters, and different societies may judge matters differently. Societal perceptions change over time, so what is immoral in one time may not be deemed immoral in another.

For example, in the period from George Washington to James Monroe, men wore knee breeches. Only roughnecks and sailors wore long pants. With the shift to populism and the importance of “the little guy” under Andrew Jackson, the long pants of the average working man were suddenly a sign of that which was virtuous and knee breeches signaled that you were an out-of-touch aristocrat that didn’t care about the average person.

It’s not that good and evil change, or even that principles of morality change. People and human perceptions are not eternal. We change—our perceptions change—and so the things that signify and represent moral principles to us change. That makes moral practices fuzzier at the edges on certain points, and that makes anyone who demands certainty about everything uncomfortable, and in my experience one of the chief characteristics of conservative evangelicals has been the desire to be morally certain about everything.

There is not a divine precept for every moral point. To behave as though there is, is to believe a lie. Building some points of morality on inferences is just the nature of the world and of divine revelation, which is sufficient for us, but not exhaustive. Such moral principles can be held firmly but must be held tentatively, with a looser grip and a mind open to the possibility of different and better inferences.

The Law Behind the Law

Mon, 24 Aug 2026 18:02:58 +0000

Some people equate the law of Moses with the eternal law of God (true good and evil). But the New Testament makes clear that the Law of Moses (or at least a portion of it) is not eternal—and was never intended to be. Jesus declared all unclean foods “clean” (Mark 7.19 cf. Acts 10.15). Paul says the cross “abolish[ed] the law of commandments expressed in ordinances” (Ephesians 2.15) and that “[God] set aside” and “cancel[ed] the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands” (Colossians 2.14). Likewise, the bulk of the book of Hebrews (chapters 7-10) argues that the Old Testament law (and priestly rituals in particular) were illustrative, pointing forward to Jesus, and Jesus’ mediation of a new covenant made the Law of Moses “old”, no longer in force.

Circumcision, kosher laws, and some would say strict Sabbath observance were tied to the old covenant people and were done away by the new covenant of the Christian faith.

Laws tied to the old Israelite agrarian economic and social structures—the fifty-year jubilee and land sabbaths, laws allowing the poor to glean the fields after harvest, and levirate marriage (i.e. a man marrying his brother’s widow to protect the widow and raise up children to inherit his brother’s land) we no longer find directly applicable to our non-agrarian social structures.

Changes in social structure and criminal law enforcement have also removed the death penalty for adultery, Sabbath-breaking, religious apostasy, and incorrigible children. Likewise, we no longer practice the “avenger of blood” or “cities of refuge” to manage revenge in long-standing family feuds.

There are real principles of good and evil behind all these laws that can be practiced in new and different applications, but these applications no longer fit our world.

God hasn’t changed; people have.
God’s law is still applicable; it wears different clothing that we understand better.
God hasn’t written totally new law codes comparable to Moses’. Now, the responsibility falls to us to look through the lens of the Law of Moses and the prophets and more especially the corrective lens of Jesus and His teachings through the apostles and apply good and evil to our ever-changing situations.

That generates several important results that I believe we are forced to embrace.

First, in any given circumstance there may be more than one correct way to avoid evil and practice good. Different people, or different groups of people, may discover different applications, all of which may be correct, though some applications may prove better than others.

Second, this is hardly an exact science. It is more utilitarian, more practical—one person learning from another, one community learning from another—improving our doing of good and avoidance of evil by comparison of results of our differing methods and making deliberate changes.

Third, it seems to me that our application of good and evil will show up in at least two particular places—morals and law codes. Morals are generated by the consciences of individuals and communities and enforced by personal conscience and social pressure from the family, community, or the church. Law codes are generated by government and enforced by reward or punishment.

These are the next spectrums we will consider—moral vs immoral and legal vs. illegal—in upcoming blogs.

Parapets

Tue, 18 Aug 2026 23:36:25 +0000

When you build a new house, you shall make a parapet for your roof, that you may not bring the guilt of blood upon your house, if anyone should fall from it. (Deuteronomy 22.8)

Here’s an unusual law that makes no sense to us upon first reading. A parapet is a small wall built at the edge of a roof. Why would we want to add a small wall to the edge of the roof of our house? It makes no sense to us because we are accustomed to houses having steeply pitched roofs and we usually don’t go on our roofs unless we have to make repairs to them.

But houses in ancient Israel had flat roofs, and the roof often served as a sort of extra room. On hot nights, for example, people would sleep under the stars on the rooftop.

Once you understand the way Israelite culture worked—how houses were built and how roofs were utilized—the law makes very good sense. A parapet would prevent sleepers from accidentally rolling off the roof at night or small children from falling over the edge while playing during the day.

This particular law places the burden of responsibility on the homeowner to keep anyone going onto the roof safe from harm. If there were no parapet and someone fell off, God’s law says he has failed in his responsibility toward those who might fall off the roof. If there is a parapet, he has done his due diligence to protect others; if someone falls over the parapet, their injury (or death) is not the fault of the homeowner.

What does this law say to us—since we don’t go onto our roofs and don’t need parapets?

What is clear is the intent behind the law. A homeowner is responsible to do his due diligence to make his property and his home safe for anyone he welcomes onto his property. If someone is injured because he has failed to take sufficient protective measures, their injuries become his responsibility.

This law provides a particular way to live out God’s law and love your neighbors—build a parapet. But is God only concerned about falls from a roof and not falls elsewhere? Is God only concerned with falls and not other forms of injury, say—burns or poisoning? The law is case law and case law intends by its nature broader applications. Loving your neighbor means doing your due diligence to keep safe those welcomed onto your property.

We don’t utilize our roofs as living space, so we have no use for parapets. But we have stairs; having handrails on stairs is a way to keep people safe. Some people have swimming pools; building a fence around the pool to keep children from accidentally drowning is an application of the “parapet” law. Locks on closets or drawers containing dangerous poisons are another application of the law.

What I’ve just provided is an example of how biblical law works. It’s not that every law is able to be exactly applied; some are. But behind every law of Moses is a law of God—absolute good and evil—of which the law of Moses is a particular application. That particular application is a lens into God’s heart—real good and evil—which we then turn around and apply in our own context.

For Christians who believe in the authority of the Bible, this is the first step in understanding morality, i.e. good and evil applied in our daily context. We read the law of Moses, derive the principle that functioned there, and then reapply it in a culture that is nothing like Israel’s.

This process is admittedly difficult—hardly an exact science. Our perception of truth is dimmed by sin, and our understanding of the ancient laws is at times limited, making applications foggy. We do our best and our shortcomings in perception and understanding we trust to be covered by the patience, grace, and mercy of God.

Monkey Wrench

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 08:45:57 +0000

Good and evil are absolutes determined by God’s character. Christians should always seek to align character and behavior with God’s character, with that which is good.

Christianity, however, throws a monkey wrench into that endeavor. Catholics called it “original sin”. Protestants called it “total depravity”. Christian theology in general refers to it as “spiritual death”.

When God said “In the day that you eat of it, you will surely die” (Genesis 2.17), He clearly didn’t mean physical death. Adam and Eve ate and still lived long lives. But Christian theology doesn’t believe God lied. He was referring to a different ‘death’. Man’s sin separated the race spiritually from God. We no longer knew Him; we didn’t go looking for Him to confess what we had done wrong. Instead, we tried to hide our guilt and shift the blame. We were driven from His presence, left to ourselves outside.

The New Testament says we were “dead in our trespasses and sins” (Ephesians 2.1) and that by nature we do not know God (e.g. Galatians 4.8, 1 Thessalonians 4.5). Our understanding has been darkened and we are alienated from God’s life because of ignorance and hardness of heart (Ephesians 4.18).

Some Christians argue that our spiritual death means we inherently know nothing about God nor can we learn anything on our own. We are dead, they say, totally unable to function in a Godward direction. While I understand the interpretation, I think it reads too much into the imagery and ignores other Scriptures that indicate man in his natural state has some perception of God.

Paul depicts pagan Greeks as groping towards God (Acts 17.27). The apostle tells the Romans that God’s “eternal power and divine nature” can be perceived in the creation (Romans 1.19-20) and that Gentiles, by nature, can do what the law requires and their consciences can bear witness to them (Romans 2.14-15). In Genesis 20, Abimelech, a pagan king with no covenant relationship to God, hears from God in a dream and recognizes that taking another man’s wife is displeasing to God.

It’s not that we have zero reliable access to understanding God. It’s that our access is mixed. It is partial and incomplete and because we don’t inherently know Him exhaustively, it is difficult for us to determine accurately which of our perceptions of Him are accurate and which are not.

This separation from God, this blindness in us, requires God to reveal Himself to us. But even revealing Himself to us, we are incapable of grasping His character and goodness exhaustively. Because of God’s enormity and complexity, we are unable to see “His face”. He mediates knowledge of Him to us on our terms. John Calvin called it “God lisping” to us, the way a woman simplifies speech to an infant.

God reaches down to us. I’ve often said that the Bible is more of a coloring book than a divine encyclopedia. What God reveals about Himself in His Word is not exhaustive, but it is sufficient—sufficient for us to know Him to the extent that we need to. What He reveals to us is limited in scope, but not in accuracy.

Our inability to see good and evil perfectly ought to humble us. Though we wanted to be like
God knowing good and evil, we don’t really have the capacity for it—and I believe that’s why it was withheld from us in the first place. Since we grasped for it, God gave us what we sought: the responsibility of determining and judging good and evil. History shows that again and again we fall short of the glory of God in our attempts. We need His gracious mercy and instruction.

Evil Parasite

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 15:43:12 +0000

If God is good and everything He created is good (Genesis 1.31), then God did not create evil. What, then, is evil, and where did it come from? The answer is simple: evil has to be a good that has somehow “gone wrong”. This is consistent with the opening chapters of Genesis.

In Genesis 2.18, God says “it is not good that man should be alone”. In the midst of the creation process where everything has been good, the Spirit of God speaks this sour note about a lack of goodness. It is not that there is an outright evil, but that there is a sort of void—a gap—that needs to be filled before God can finally declare His entire creation “very good”. He fills that gap, that aloneness, by creating a woman.

But God proposes that she be created for the man—fitted perfectly to him—to be his helper. In other words, there is something (or things) that he cannot do without her. She completes him, and without her, he can’t accomplish the calling given him by God.

As I noted in the last installment, a chief characteristic of goodness is that a thing does what it was made to do. Being deprived of its ability to do that is not good. God doesn’t call it outright evil, but He does say that it is not good—being incomplete.

It is not that “not-goodness” is a separate entity that exists on its own. It is rather a distortion or privation of the good itself. The creation was good. Adam was good. But there was an ingredient missing—the woman—that deprived him of being what God intended him to be, and that lack deprived the creation of being what God intended it to be.

That initial hint about non-goodness shows up again when the man and his wife stand before the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and are tempted by the serpent. The first mention of the tree was Genesis 2.17 in the sentence immediately before the statement that it was not good for man to be alone. The man is told not to partake of that tree and that in the day that he does so, he will surely die.

God had created nothing evil; there was only good. And yet God speaks of the possibility of the existence of evil. Both good and evil, and the distinction between them, can be known. Presumably eating the tree would give such knowledge. That God can speak of such knowledge would indicate that He has it—and that would make such knowledge, in and of itself, good. That God prohibits man from having it would indicate that man’s possession of it would not be good. It is a knowledge not intended for man.

Genesis 3 confirms these ideas. The serpent’s temptation is strange because he uses truth—good things—to lie. He uses God’s words, but reinterprets them, giving them a meaning other than the meaning God intended.

God had said “in the day you eat of it you will surely die.” The serpent said they would not surely die (3.4). This was true in the sense that they did not immediately expire, and not dying is a good thing. (Theologians usually argue that a different kind of spiritual death occurred in them that day.)

The serpent said their eyes would be opened and they would be like God, knowing good and evil, all good things. God confirms that these points are true (Genesis 3.7,22). Their eyes were opened to their own guilt of being disobedient to God’s commands—and they experienced shame. It was an experience of real evil.

Evil was not merely a being or entity equal and opposite to the good God. Rather it was the distortion, the twisting, the misuse of the divinely created good in ways and toward ends that God did not intend those things to be used. As C.S. Lewis put it in Mere Christianity, “Goodness is, so to speak, itself. Badness is only spoiled goodness…Evil is a parasite, not an original thing.”

Consider how this works out practically. Because every evil has within it a distorted good, temptation focuses our attention on the root goodness and ignores or distracts us from the distortion of that good—which is the evil. Most people who end up doing evil believe that they are doing good because they are focused on the grain of good that has been distorted. For example, we don’t talk about killing the unborn; we talk about a woman’s freedom to choose, women’s healthcare, and reproductive freedom. We don’t say “I abandoned my marriage or family”, but “I needed to find myself” or “to be free” or “to be happy”. We don’t say that we slandered someone but that we’re just “keeping it real” or “telling it like it is”. Evil is always some form of distortion of good.

God can’t distort His own good will because He only wills goodness. Evil arose, not from Him, but from other beings that He created—beings that are not Him—beings created with freedom to choose (a good thing)—who choose to reinterpret, distort, and misuse the good things in ways or toward ends that God never intended. The serpent did so and so did the man and the woman who obeyed him rather than God.

Because evil is a parasite upon good, disentangling evil from its good “host” requires discernment—sometimes very fine-tuned discernment. It requires knowledge of the hidden details of hearts and minds that only God possesses.

In my experience of life, I have found that God’s throne of judgment is too big. I cannot comfortably take a seat there. But the first man and woman left us with little choice. The need for discerning wisdom is a necessary part of our life. We must do our best knowing what we know of God’s wishes to figure out good and evil, though we often find that our best falls short of His glory.

That’s why we need God’s grace to forgive us and His wisdom to instruct us.

The Mighty Good Umpire

Mon, 27 Jul 2026 12:38:23 +0000

In the last blog I introduced six spectrums that we use in moral thinking: good/evil, right/wrong, holy/common, legal/illegal, moral/immoral, and wise/foolish. I’d like to discuss each of these, and I’ll start with the one I believe is foundational to all the others: good/evil.

What do we mean when we say that something is good? That seems like it should be an easy question to answer, but the more you ponder it, the more difficult it becomes to define.

The first thought that comes to my mind is that something is good if it is beneficial. But then we need to ask: “Beneficial to whom?”. I might find exposure to sunlight a beneficial thing; a person with pale skin and freckles who burns easily will not.

If that is the way to see, define, and understand goodness, there isn’t really such a thing as goodness in itself. There are only different people with different ideas of goodness. Goodness is an idea in someone’s head, not a real quality that exists in the thing itself, and any talk of good and evil becomes essentially meaningless. We can’t say a thing—or an act—IS good or evil, only that some people think it is.

That is exactly how many in our society think about good and evil and that is why many conversations about good and evil deteriorate into a cycle of fruitless assertions of my opinion against yours. There is no way to resolve this difference if good is merely subjective.

To speak meaningfully about good and evil, there has to be an umpire—a judge of some sort—outside of us, above us, with the ability (and the right) to judge between our opinions and determine what is good and what is not. In our Christian faith, God (and His Word) stand in that place because the Bible puts Him in that place from the very start.

A key theme in the opening chapters of Genesis is good and evil. In Genesis 1 God creates all that exists and declares seven times that as it comes from His hand, that creation is good; the final summary says it was very good (Genesis 1.31). I find five important truths tucked into that presentation.

First, God IS before all things. This is a contrast with all other ancient views of the gods, who were depicted as arising from the already existing material world. And God’s name is “I am”—the One who is—He is, in His essence, “being” itself—and He gives other things independent of Himself being.

Second, He calls their being, separate from His own, “good”, implying that He is good (as 1 John 1.5 states plainly: “God is light and in Him is no darkness at all”) and has the right and ability to determine what is good. Goodness is pronounced, not self-declared. Creation doesn't certify its own goodness — God, standing outside it, renders the verdict. Goodness comes from the umpire, not the thing itself.

Third, goodness is material, not just spiritual. God's "good" falls on light, water, land, plants, animals, bodies—ordinary physical stuff—before humanity appears. Matter is not lesser or suspect by nature.

Fourth, order and distinction are part of goodness. God separates light from darkness, waters above from below, day from day—differentiating things out of formlessness. Rightly ordered distinction is itself part of what "good" means, not a later imposition on neutral chaos.

Finally, goodness includes a thing fulfilling the purpose for which it was made—an observation made by Aristotle (4th century BC) and baptized by Thomas Aquinas (13th century AD). Genesis spells out the function of things before God pronounces them "good”. Light divides day and night and mark seasons. Plants and animals reproduce "according to their kinds". Man, made in the image of God, is made to reproduce and rule the earthly creation. Goodness goes beyond bare existence. A created thing is ordered toward a designed end.

So, God is good and defines goodness. What He sees as good and calls good IS good. Everything that He made was good.

Goodness is the foundation of all things. Nothing God made was evil. Making evil would require Him to make something He hated, and the goodness of His nature did not allow Him to do that. Evil did not exist in the universe as God made it.

But if we’re going to talk about the spectrum of good and evil, we have to understand evil itself. If God didn’t create it, where did it come from? I’ll address that in the next blog.

Good and Wrong -- At the Same Time

Tue, 21 Jul 2026 15:44:43 +0000

Pharaoh’s law commanded midwives were to kill all baby boys born to the Hebrew slaves. The midwives disobeyed and would not kill the babies. Saving the babies was good, but illegal. A thing can be good and illegal at the same time.

If a teenage son has a bad temper that is always getting him into trouble, the father who always rescues his son from the consequences has good intentions but his actions are foolish (Proverbs 19.19). A thing can be good and unwise at the same time.

When Peter drew his sword to protect Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane, Jesus rebuked Peter for interfering. Peter’s impulse to protect Jesus was good—but wrong. A thing can be good and wrong at the same time.

Giving to those in need is a good thing, but obtaining the goods you wish to give by stealing them from someone else is immoral. A thing can be good and immoral at the same time.

David, while running from Saul, took the holy bread from the tabernacle as sustenance for himself and his supporters. Yet Jesus used this example to show that some violations of holiness are not evil. A thing can be good and profane at the same time.

Some may protest that I’m complicating things. I would counter that reality can be quite complicated.

When we learn how to make moral decisions as children, our young minds can only handle simple categories—what I’m calling “binaries”. A thing is legal or illegal, moral or immoral, wise or foolish, right or wrong, good or evil. All good things (holiness, legality, morality, wisdom, right) cluster at the “good pole”; all bad things (uncleanness, illegality, immorality, foolishness, wrong) at the “bad pole”.

This is the best way to teach little children moral behavior and decision-making. But childhood is only the foundation of life—the starting place, not the finish line. Maturing and growing wise requires more.

We assess reality using, not one spectrum (good and evil), but several—and they don’t always overlap perfectly. I’ve identified six that I use regularly when I’m making moral decisions.
There are likely a few more (e.g. beneficial/harmful, loving/unloving, beautiful/ugly, public/private).

The foundational spectrum is good versus evil. It describes what a thing is in its nature, prior to or apart from choices made. A sunset is good, but it isn’t a moral agent making choices. On the opposite end, evil doesn’t have to involve choices either. Birth defects, diseases and natural decay (e.g. rust) are examples of “evils” that do not involve choice.

Right and wrong bring good and evil into the realm of choice. Choices are weighed against a standard. If they meet the standard we call them “right”; if they don’t, they are “wrong”. To determine right and wrong we must ask “What does the chooser owe?”, i.e. is she doing what she ought to do?

Morality involves right and wrong behaviors as understood by a particular group of people. To determine the morality of an action one must ask “What does this particular group currently approve (or shun)?”

Another particular expression of right and wrong is legality. Legality measures an action against a standard demanded by a civil authority.

Holiness (vs. commonness or “profanity”) is a spectrum that asks “whether and how a thing has been set apart (or not set apart) for God”.

The sixth spectrum is wise versus foolish. It is the practical outcome that leads to final decision-making. It asks this: “Given everything I’ve culled from the other spectrums, what is the prudent course of action in this circumstance at this time?”

Sometimes these spectrums all overlap perfectly, but often they do not. When they don’t, wisdom must recognize where the distinctions lie and make decisions accordingly.

A Pastor's Mid-Year Musings

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 14:52:18 +0000

When you insist that VBS songs have too many hand motions coming too rapidly for normal human being to learn—and then you see the entire row of early elementary school girls in front of you performing the motions with ease—you know it is no longer “your day”.

People detest prophets because they warn of danger when everything seems to be going rather well.

I’ve learned from umpiring baseball that the people who know the least express their opinions with the greatest vigor and the most volume.

For the longest time I was annoyed at the growing number of people who had terrible diction. Then I got hearing aids.

It’s amazing how sensitive teeth are. If something as fine as a piece of hair enters your bite, you know it immediately.

The best education is learning how to learn.

Think about how precise language can be. There is quite a difference between saying “take time for yourself”, “take your time”, and “you certainly took your good old time”.

I used to think watching birds was something only old people enjoyed. But in the past few years I’ve really come to enjoy it, and I’m only 65.

Some people believe capitalism is evil because it doesn’t distribute resources to everyone equally. But nature doesn’t distribute resources equally either.

In a fallen world, you must learn to embrace the imperfect and work to improve it gradually—and repeatedly.

Traveling doesn’t necessarily make you better at living among your neighbors.

Perhaps the most liberating aspect of growing older is discovering that it is acceptable to say “I don’t really have an opinion on that.”

Botanically speaking, oranges, zucchinis, and cantaloupes are berries, but strawberries, raspberries, and blackberries are not.

Coffee in Church: Part 2

Mon, 06 Jul 2026 17:46:10 +0000

To allow coffee in the church service, or not to allow coffee in the church service—that was the question! I chose not to prevent people from bringing beverages into our services. Here’s why.

First, there are no divine commands prohibiting beverages in a service in a church building—in large part because there are few instructions about church services and none about church buildings.

Some may claim that 1 Corinthians 11.17-34 prohibits eating and drinking in church. It’s a long passage and the details of the context aren’t entirely clear. Paul’s solution to the problem, however, is clear: “So then, my brothers, when you come together to eat, wait for one another” (11.33). It is clear that (a) Christians were eating at church meetings and (b) Paul offered regulatory instruction but didn’t disallow the practice. There is nothing inherently evil about food and drink in church.

Prior to the 4th century Christians met in homes and secret places to avoid persecution. They prayed and sang together, studied Scripture together, and as noted, ate together and shared in communion as part of that meal. After the 4th century, Christianity was legalized and Christians began building public buildings for worship. They were called basilicas, modeled after Roman public meeting places and intentionally distinguished from pagan temples (which housed idols but weren’t constructed as meeting places for large groups).

At the same time Christian leaders began using the terminology of Jewish Temple worship to speak of Christian worship, e.g. making connections between bishops and high priests, churches and the Temple, the communion table and the altar. Church architecture over the next centuries developed to follow that language and churches were built to be—and viewed as—Christian temples. Rails separated the congregation from the holy place where the priest served and the inside of the church became sanctified—a sanctuary.

These developments were man-made traditions. They are old, long-standing traditions but that doesn’t make them divinely commanded. There may be great value in these traditions, but they are still subject to change.

The change was introduced by the Protestant reformers of the 1500s. They moved the sanctification from the building to the congregation. The people are the church sanctified by the Holy Spirit in them. God dwells in them—not the church building. They are God’s house, the Temple (e.g. Ephesians 2.19-22; 1 Peter 2.4-5).

The Reformers didn’t make radical changes in attitudes toward church buildings as sanctuaries. Protestants still treated their buildings with reverence while at the same time unwittingly planting seeds that would eventually germinate into radical changes.

Strangely enough those radical changes on how church buildings were viewed eventually arose among conservatives—evangelicals in particular. From the mid-19th century on, mainline denominations retained traditional formats (e.g. architecture, robes, liturgy) but became extremely liberal in doctrine (e.g denying the miraculous, the virgin birth, the deity of Christ). Conservatives retained traditional doctrine but gradually jettisoned traditional formats, largely in the name of making better connections with changing culture—which increasingly lost its concern for ecclesiastical symbols.

Evangelicals—meaning ‘gospel-preaching’—were concerned with evangelism, with reaching a culture that was changing with the saving message of Jesus Christ. The old symbols, once rich with meaning that was now lost to the common man, were shed—and that included the use of buildings. In the 1940s, amid much contention, churches began to add social halls and gyms that allowed practical opportunities for personal connection with people. By the time I entered ministry in the 1980s, a church having that kind of space was a necessity and not an option.

Church architecture soon focused more on practical efficiency and economy and “sanctuaries” became multipurpose rooms—by definition the opposite of a holy place. Holy places are set apart only for special use; multipurpose rooms are intentionally built to be used in many ways.

I don’t think this change from church building as sanctuary to church building as multipurpose is without theological significance. The old traditional churches were built to create a sense of God’s transcendence. In cathedrals, basilicas, and even many churches, attention is drawn upward. There is amazingly detailed artwork on the ceiling where it can only be appreciated by God. The artistry of the buildings and their décor is magnificent and grand, to make one feel small in the presence of a great God. There is nothing wrong with this tradition and upon entering these places one can still experience the same feelings. Many, in fact, recognize that modern church architecture does not give that feeling.

Modern evangelical architecture seems to me to focus, not on God’s magnificence or transcendence, but on His immanence—that God is with us, became man, walked among us, and still, by His Spirit in His people works in the world through such ordinary people in simple and ordinary ways. Our buildings reflect that. They are functional and economical. The people, not the architecture, must be the bearers of the message of the gospel. That is the evangelical tradition.

Our churches don’t point you to a God who is distant and far away, but to a God who has come down and walked among us and who works among us. He is a God “with skin on him”.

And He ate and drank among us and with us.

So now, people accustomed to having beverages in public places come into our services and they bring their morning Joe with them. If I welcome them at the door with a smile but insist their coffee is unwelcome in “the holy place”, I am asking them to behave according to a symbol whose meaning was lost to our culture long ago and which my own tradition does not honor. It gives too much weight to a trivial detail that contributes more to driving them away—I believe unnecessarily so—than drawing them to the Savior we’re trying to point them to.

Coffee in Church

Mon, 29 Jun 2026 18:17:24 +0000

Over my years of ministry, I have often found myself between two groups of sincere, committed Christians—one wanting to change a church practice that the other wants preserved. Everything from paint colors to pulpit or no pulpit, from how to run VBS to whether or not beverages should be permitted in the sanctuary.

I have found that the greatest obstacle to effectively navigating these questions is the emotional investment that people have in their side of the issue. We all claim to want to follow Scripture, but most things that people disagree about in our churches are NOT direct commands from God’s Word, but rather man-made traditions.

Traditions are often born as symbols to represent beliefs, so much so that the symbol becomes the public expression of the belief. For example, in early America respectable men wore knee-breeches, stockings, and buckled shoes. Long trousers were the apparel of ruffians—sailors, frontiersmen, and the poor. The French Revolution changed all that. French revolutionaries called themselves sans-culottes (“without breeches”) because they rejected the nobility and showed it by rejecting aristocratic dress. Long trousers became a symbol of the common man and republican virtue; knee-breeches weren’t just “old-fashioned”; they expressed scorn for the working man.

The same thing happens in churches. Traditions are created to represent beliefs, and then the tradition becomes the belief. But over time, the perceptions of people change and that often changes perceptions of the meaning of the traditions.

For example, one long-standing tradition was that the church building is a sanctuary, i.e. a holy place. God is there and so we don’t use the church building for common things. Special behaviors are required in the church e.g. reverent silence, no food or drink, no playing of sports or other common diversions, and so on. Many people have grown up with that idea of “church”.

The Protestant Reformation (1500s) refocused the definition of “the church”. The church, the reformers said, was not the building but the people of the congregation. Initially, the church building retained the sense of “holy place”, but as Protestantism grew more aggressively evangelistic, use for mission surpassed the importance of the church building’s holy status. Churches built food pantries for the poor and social halls for fellowship gatherings and gymnasiums for youth activities—and not without much now-forgotten argument and consternation! The traditions were reformed and those reforms have become our traditions.

When I became a pastor in the 1980’s, traditions were shifting again. Keeping costs down led to the “sanctuary” being constructed as a “multipurpose room”. On Saturday it may house a youth concert or wedding reception (common use), on Sunday a worshiping congregation (sacred use). If it’s multipurpose, and if some of the purposes are common, then technically, it’s no longer a sanctuary.

When we constructed a new building in 2003, we designed the “sanctuary” as a multipurpose room. But some people saw it as (and called it) “the sanctuary”—a sacred term. Others called it “the auditorium”—a secular or common term.

That may seem like a small distinction, but how you speak about a thing reveals how you think about it. If you’re thinking of it as an auditorium, a multipurpose room and not as a holy space, why not bring a beverage into it while you listen to a sermon?

And this is where the two sides approach me and ask me to adjudicate the matter.

In one ear I hear:
…“Is this God’s house or a cafeteria?”
…and “Doesn’t the Bible say that we have houses to eat and drink in?”
…and “Why can’t people respect God’s house and just drink their coffee before they come to church?”
…and “People are going to spill on the church fabric and the stains will ruin the chairs. Don’t you care about that?”

And in the other ear I hear:
…“I don’t understand—we can drink beverages in the auditorium at a wedding reception on Saturday but not in the church service on Sunday?” …and “What’s the harm of bringing a beverage into the service?”
…and “Other Bible-preaching churches allow coffee in the service? Why wouldn’t we?”
…and “Does the Bible say we can’t bring a beverage into the church service?”

When confronted with this, I chose to allow people to bring beverages into the church. In next week’s blog, I will explain how I arrived at that decision.

Questions God Doesn't Answer

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 20:04:09 +0000

The biblical prescriptions for Israelite worship and community life are numerous and detailed. By contrast, the New Testament directions for operating Christian churches are vague and sparse.

We are to meet regularly (Hebrews 10.25), to observe baptism (Matthew 28.19) and the Lord’s Supper (1 Corinthians 11.23-26), to proclaim the Word (2 Timothy 4.2), to be generous and giving, and that elders and deacons are the prescribed church officers (1 Timothy 3; Titus 1). There may be a few more but that’s about as much as I could round up.

Now consider things that AREN’T commanded, questions we may have that go UNANSWERED in Scripture:
…What should be included in a church meeting and what should be the order of service?
…What should music be like and what instruments should (or should not) be used in the church?
…What should we wear (or not wear) to church?
…What kind of bread should we use for communion?
…Must we use wine or can we use grape juice for communion?
…How often should we take communion?
…Who may (and may not) take communion?
…Who may (and may not) be baptized? Believers? Children? Babies?
…Who may (and may not) baptize? Only leaders—or anyone?
…What are the different job descriptions of elders and deacons?
…Do the elders run the church or can church members vote on things?
…Can we add other offices beyond elder and deacon (e.g. treasurer, secretary, etc.) and who decides that—and how?
…Who chooses the leadership?
…Must leaders be ordained?
…How long should sermons be and who may preach them?
…May we use responsive readings?
…May we use written prayers or must they always be spontaneous?
…Who may pray in public—only the leaders or anyone in the church?
…Can we (should we?) have creeds or doctrinal statements?
…Must a church have by-laws?
…May we give altar calls? Must we give altar calls?
…Who may (and may not) be a member of a church—or should we even have formal membership—and who determines that?
…What kind of furniture or art or decoration may we use (or not use) in the church building? Crosses? Flowers? Pulpits? Pews or chairs? A communion table? A sound system?
…Should we even have church buildings?
…How should our church buildings be designed (e.g. may we include a social hall and a gym)?
…What holy days should we (and should we not) celebrate and how? Should there even be “holy days”?
…Must we worship on the Sabbath (Saturday) or must it be Sunday (the Lord’s Day) or can we meet anytime?
…How do we choose and support missionaries?
…Can we develop age-appropriate ministries: nursery, Sunday School, youth group?
…Can we have special children’s ministries (e.g. AWANA, VBS)?
…Are weddings and funerals the concern of the church, and if they are, how are they to be conducted?
…What may (or may not) a church building be used for and who determines that?
…How do church members give to the church—or should they?
…Is there a required level of giving?
…Who determines how offerings given to the church are to be used?
…Can people use credit cards to give? Can they give stocks or properties as gifts? Can they leave money to a church in their will?
…Can a church utilize online giving—or must we pass baskets?

These are just a few of the questions we might ask (and about which I have been asked)!

And we haven’t even touched on questions of biblical interpretation or theology (e.g. views on loss of salvation or the end times) or everyday life (e.g. daily devotions, use of alcohol, dress standards, schooling of children, dating, birth control, and political issues)!

We don’t have clear-cut commands from Scripture on most of these things. Christianity grants more breathing room and requires, not that we follow explicit commands on these matters, but that we create traditions built on biblical principles.

And over the centuries, many different traditions have been built on all these things. Under close scrutiny, though we don’t often think about it, most of the details about what we believe and practice are traditions built upon principle—and designedly so.

We—especially we conservatives—often forget the distinction between God-given law and traditions built on God-given principles/law. We identify the two as the same thing. We resist the notion that truth can update its wardrobe; that if we support such change we are somehow abandoning God’s Word.

I believe—especially for us conservatives—the first thing we need to grasp to balance the polarities of tradition and reform is the distinction between God’s Word and traditions based on the principles of God’s Word. They are indeed two different things and must be treated differently.

Truth Changes Clothing

Mon, 15 Jun 2026 19:04:11 +0000

I’m a dyed-in-the-wool conservative but I’ve also lived through being the one to lead in bringing about change. Some of my readers have encouraged me to elaborate my thoughts on these things, traditions and change, so let’s survey the components of tradition and change in religious matters. (Secular matters are a slightly different concern.)

I believe in a God who doesn’t change. What He likes, the good, and what He hates, the evil, is eternal. His character and tastes are always the same—yesterday, today, and tomorrow. HE doesn’t change.

But people change. We were not made to be immutable. We are always learning and changing, constantly adapting to God’s world and finding new ways to use it and live in it. Every new discovery changes the way we live and behave and think. We change and we change the world, and the changing world changes us.

Though God Himself stays the same, He doesn’t hesitate to change His dealings with us. He is always good, faithful, and true to Himself, but there are points at which He will adapt to our changing understanding. The illustration I like to use is truth changing its clothes. There is unchanging truth from an unchanging God, but it expresses itself in different clothing to the changing understanding of people.

I think that’s true of the Law of Moses. Many think of the Law of Moses as the eternal and unchanging Law of God. But the book of Hebrews depicts all priestly rituals as temporary illustrations (or types) pointing to Christ. A planned obsolescence was built into them. They were of no further use once Christ appeared.

Kosher food laws are another example of the same principle. The New Testament makes clear they had no further use. I believe there are other commands in Moses’ Law that operate the same way. They fit in the original context in which they were issued but no longer fit in changing contexts, e.g. the commands to wear tassels or leave beards untrimmed. These laws in an ancient context expressed a truth of God’s eternal character, but as people changed, the expressions lost their relevance. Truth didn’t change, but its clothing did, and that was part of God’s design.

The final component in this discussion is man-made tradition built atop the Law of Moses. Originally, these traditions were “new clothing” for truth. Pharisaic tradition created detailed explanations of how to carry out Moses’ Law. For example, if I must cleanse myself after contact with something unclean, what is sufficient cleansing? The Pharisaic traditions described exactly how much and what kind of water to use and what parts of the body must be cleansed and so on.

Jesus’ clashes with the Pharisees were usually over this third component. The Pharisees, He argued, tied all three components together too tightly. They saw their traditions as the only proper execution of the Law of Moses, and the Law of Moses they saw as the perfect expression of the person of God. In theory they may have seen a distinction between these three things, but in practice, they treated their traditions as the voice of God that ought not be adjusted.

Jesus argued against this point repeatedly and on two fronts. First, some traditions were held mindlessly and for their own sake: We always did it this way, so it must be important (e.g. Matthew 23.23—tithing herbs). Trivial points were raised to importance and weighty truths were missed (i.e. straining at gnats and swallowing camels).

Second, some traditions undermined the spirit of the Law—the core truth of God’s unchanging person. The Law was twisted by tradition to avoid obedience to God (e.g. Mark 7.9-13—claiming family inheritance was dedicated to God and so couldn’t be used to “honor” and care for aging parents; when the parents died, the money was recharacterized as personal inheritance).

The problem, according to Jesus, was not God’s will, the Law of Moses, or even the Pharisaic traditions themselves, but how men connected and used them. I believe that Jesus’ criticisms are on point and apply to today’s Christians, including and perhaps especially us conservatives.

For Christians there is a complex theological problem here. Jesus said He didn’t come to abolish the Law but to fulfill it (Matthew 5.17-20) but that fulfillment appears to have, in some sense, abolished the Law (Ephesians 2.15; Colossians 2.13-23; Hebrews 8-10). I think the value of studying the Law is seeking to understand how an eternal truth was temporarily “clothed” in the ancient context so that I may understand proper ways to clothe the same truth in our own context. The core truth will be the same but will wear different dress. I can only flag this tension for now; it requires far more than a paragraph.

The second (and in practice, I believe, the more prominent) difficulty has to do with man-made traditions. The New Testament didn’t replace the Law of Moses with a clearly written code. Instead, the Spirit of God works in our hearts so we “sense” the first level of truth—the heart of God. Then we live based on what we know of His heart, and we construct our lives, both as individuals and as churches, on that foundation.

Do we ever perfectly understand the heart of God? Or are we always learning, growing, and changing? But if I can only live on the basis of what I know—if my understanding tomorrow will differ from today’s—how can we go about building our lives and the lives of our communities and churches in a way that truly pleases God?

I must leave you with these unanswered questions and tensions for now…

The Fork That Scandalized Venice

Tue, 09 Jun 2026 18:06:00 +0000

Giovanni Orseolo, a prince of Venice in the early 11th century, married Maria Argyropoulina, a Byzantine princess who brought with her a fascinating little piece of technology that the Venetians had never seen: a two-pronged golden fork. She shocked everyone by using it to eat her meals. Peter Damian, a fiery monk, denounced the fork as a sinful luxury. As the story is told by some, Damian insisted that God gave us “forks”—our fingers—so using the fork was an affront to divine design. Princess Maria died of the plague, but supposedly Damian declared it was a divine judgment for her use of the fork.

Despite that divine judgment, forks are now commonplace in the Western world. Even at church dinners.

This strange anecdote illustrates an important truth: nearly everything that becomes tradition was once a radical and unwelcome change. All truths seem to pass through three stages—first, they are ridiculed, then they are violently opposed, and finally, they are accepted as self-evident. Changes become new traditions which eventually yield to further change. Despite the regular repetition of this cycle, many people struggle to accept it as the way the world works.

From infancy we learn to navigate the world. We take that learned navigation as “the way things are—and have always been”. Changes require that we re-learn a new way of seeing, thinking, and doing, and most of us aren’t fond of that exercise.

Back in the mid-1980’s our church wanted to add contemporary Christian guitar-led choruses to our singing of hymns (accompanied by piano). The choruses weren’t in the hymnal; lyrics would have to be projected with an overhead projector. When I proposed the change, one old saint protested, “JESUS NEVER USED AN OVERHEAD PROJECTOR!” It never dawned on the dear soul that Jesus never used a hymnal or a piano either!

Some people objected that a guitar didn’t belong in church. They insisted that the piano was the appropriate instrument for church music—not realizing that just a century before church-goers protested the piano, an instrument from the saloon, replacing the pipe organ. A century before that the Puritans dismantled pipe organs in English churches, complaining that they were worldly instruments.

Many have complained about modern music replacing the “ancient” hymns. But I analyzed our hymnal and found that…
…almost half of the hymns were from the 20th century;
…40% were from the 1800’s;
…10% from 1700’s
…2% from the 1600’s
…1% from the 1500’s
We have very few truly “ancient” hymns. Some of the oldest still known hymns are those of Isaac Watts (1674-1748)—Alas and Did My Savior Bleed; When I Survey the Wondrous Cross; O God Our Help in Ages Past, and the Christmas favorite, Joy to the World. Ironically, Watts was fiercely opposed by his contemporaries for the audacity of composing his own lyrics (rather than using the biblical Psalms).

Church music provides many examples of the cycle, but there are others. When Sunday School was introduced in the 1780’s much of the clergy opposed it. Within 25 years it had spread to nearly every Protestant denomination.

In the 1940’s many people condemned the new trend of church social halls as worldly. Churches were for worship, not socializing. Today, providing a social hall for funeral luncheons, wedding receptions, and other large gatherings is a given of church architecture.

Changing times and changing perceptions led to changes in traditions. Ridiculed and opposed at the outset, the changes ended up becoming the new traditions.

If everything we call ‘tradition’ was once radical change, what exactly are we defending when we defend tradition? And what are we attacking when we attack it?

The Tension Between Tradition and Change

Tue, 02 Jun 2026 22:48:06 +0000

I converted to evangelicalism as a teenager convinced I was leaving error for truth. I left Catholicism because so many practices seemed unbiblical and its traditions of repetitious liturgy seemed to lack life. Evangelicalism, I was sure, would be different. Evangelicals trusted the Bible, the Word of God rather than the traditions of men. How could evangelicalism go wrong with that foundation?

My college years cured me of that confidence. I discovered that evangelicals had their own unexamined traditions, entrenched leaders, and gaps between profession and practice. For a season, I became an angry young man convinced that reform to “fix” the last generation’s errors was the answer. Replacing dead traditions with my “better informed” practices would bring spiritual health back to the church.

I was not entirely wrong, but I missed the mark by a wider margin than I realized. I had to learn that tradition and change are not enemies, but two goods in permanent tension with each other. Wisdom is not choosing one over the other but learning how to hold both in tension.

The traditionalist in me said “Jesus Christ, the same yesterday, today, and forever”. I felt our evangelical churches had moved away from biblical traditions in our previous reforms. “Good change” meant returning to biblical traditions—doing things exactly the way the Bible prescribes.

That sounds like faithfulness to God’s Word—a good thing. But I found it difficult to put that principle into practice consistently. Should we have a church building (the apostles didn’t) or did we need to sell our building and meet in home or a rented hall, as early Christians did in Acts? The apostles didn’t use pianos or organs or hymnals, pulpits or overhead projectors or offering baskets? Could we? What about head coverings or jewelry or braided hair for women (1 Corinthians 11; 1 Peter 3.3-4)? Did we have to do everything the way it was done in the first century?

In sermon preparation I discovered that first century synagogues preached first (and the preacher sat to speak) and then closed with congregational songs of praise. I decided to follow biblical tradition and sat down, preached the sermon, and then closed the service with several hymns. The immediate response of our people was: “Don’t EVER do that AGAIN!”. The change was too extreme and too uncomfortable.

Going back to the Bible was not as simple a proposition as I had thought. Though God Himself never changes, He never hesitated to adapt His dealings to ever-changing humanity and its customs!

I would need to rethink my understanding of both tradition and change. Both are necessary. Deciding when to use which, and how to do so, is the real challenge.

A Pastor's Pain: Wounding with Truth

Tue, 26 May 2026 18:26:45 +0000

As a pastor, I have often been put in a difficult place by people I love. They claim that something I have taught or that our church stands for has hurt them. “If you were teaching truth,” they say, “I wouldn’t feel hurt. And if you really love me you will apologize, recant what you’ve said, and change your teaching.”

Every time a pastor experiences this—and all pastors experience it—he is placed in a tension between truth and mercy. Which is more important: maintaining a belief or maintaining a relationship? If I prioritize truth and risk the relationship, I am portrayed as cold and lacking love. If I prioritize the relationship and try to alter biblical teaching, I am seen as a spineless people-pleaser.

How should a pastor think about this—and what should he do?

If the situation is seen as merely binary (one pole is right and the opposite is, of necessity, wrong; see my previous blog), then I must simply choose the “right” pole. But if the situation is polar (both poles are good things) then I must find the right relationship between the two goods and navigate them accordingly.

The first problem to be navigated is the complainant’s binary perspective. “If you were teaching truth, I wouldn’t feel hurt.” Look at the binary beliefs tucked into this complaint:
(1) Truth doesn’t hurt; therefore, falsehood does.
(2) Feeling pain is bad; therefore, feeling good is always good.
(3) Love wouldn’t make someone feel pain; therefore, those who make me feel pain don’t love me.

Each of these binaries is an oversimplified view of the world and a person committed to them has “rigged the game”, so to speak. The simplistic thinking forces me to compromise and love them—or to stand for the truth and hate them.

But each of these oversimplified binaries can be false. Many lies, flattery in particular, are designed to do painless damage. Truth often hurts and those willing to risk hurting you may be your truest friend: “Faithful are the wounds of a friend, profuse are the kisses of an enemy” (Proverbs 27.6). Pain is nearly always a necessary part of healing, and absence of pain (or inability to feel pain) is not necessarily a sign of health. Many die of diseases that present no painful warnings.

These things are true spiritually as well. Jesus said following Him meant taking up your cross daily (Luke 9.23)—not a painless prospect. Likewise, Jesus taught that all men speaking well of you is not a good thing (Luke 6.22-23,26). Conviction of sin and the personal discipline of confession and repentance are painful but productive (e.g. Psalm 32.3-5; Hebrews 12.11; Revelation 3.19).

To understand this, however, one must abandon binary thinking and grasp polar thinking. The problem here is not good versus evil, but good versus good. How do I navigate relationships to truth versus relationships with people?

My experience has been that if the person refuses to abandon binary thinking for polar thinking when the situation requires it, it is a no-win situation. They insist that the matter can only be understood their way.

That forces me as a pastor to navigate the channel between two other goods: maintaining the truth or maintaining the friendship. The strain I feel when that happens isn’t intellectual; it is emotional and relational.

When I refuse to concede the truth or revise our beliefs, it isn’t because I want to alienate a friend. I am protecting something that pastors are called to protect: the integrity of the gospel and the authority of Scripture. False teachers have always compromised truth to make people feel better, saying “peace, peace” when there is no peace. False teachers don’t like having enemies and prefer to avoid conflict. It seems easier. It is easier. Always.

But I am also protecting something else when I side with truth and risk friendship. Though my alienated friend sees me as cold, uncaring, and lacking compassion—maybe even hateful, I am protecting the truth of the only real mercy that can resolve the guilt and pain for sin. Not only for him, but for others. That is what it costs me on the love side of the tension.

My choice for the truth doesn’t make the tension go away. It maintains the tension. I must bear the pain of one lost friendship for the sake of a truth that I believe will be a far more important blessing to many more people in the long run.

I hate losing friends for the sake of the truth, but I don’t hate them for walking away from me. I am more disappointed than angry. It is part of a pastor’s dying to self and bearing the cross.

But more than once a good God has turned my disappointment to joy, sometimes after many years, by powerfully turning around my ‘enemy’s’ perspective and making them my friend once again.

Succeeding Without Teeth

Mon, 18 May 2026 15:40:58 +0000

The mayor of Los Angeles, Karen Bass, recently proposed “free” (i.e. taxpayer-funded) dental care for the city’s crystal meth addicts because “you can’t succeed without teeth!”

This proposal is compassionate, and showing compassion is good.
Those who support the proposal are compassionate, support a good thing, and are therefore good people.
Opponents of the proposal must lack compassion and must therefore be bad people.

That is how most of us learn to think. As children we were taught simple binaries (opposites). Big opposes small. Loud opposes quiet. Good opposes bad. Simple binaries form the foundations of a child’s thought.

The foundations.

Functioning adequately in the adult world necessitates a more complex moral superstructure to be built on those foundations. I had to unlearn the assumption that every important question is a matter of two opposites, one good and one evil.

Though some questions are that simple, those are usually the easy ones. The more difficult questions of life involve two choices, each of which is good. These kinds of choices stand in tension against each other. They are not equal but opposite binaries. I describe them as polar—like a magnet, with each pole attractive to different goods. I must weigh the goods. It’s not that one pole is completely right and the other wholly wrong. Rather, I must figure out the relationship between the poles and determine how each good must come into play in my decision to act. I must figure out how to navigate the poles.

Let’s use the example from Mayor Bass. Compassion—the capacity to be moved by another person’s pain and to act to reduce or eliminate that pain—is a real and genuine good, one of the most Christlike things we can experience.

But compassion standing alone without qualification can lead in a bad direction. Mayor Bass was correct that you can’t succeed without teeth. But she has ignored the fact that you can’t succeed while addicted to crystal meth either!

The flaw in Mayor Bass’s vision is not her compassion, but the failure to recognize the important good at the opposite pole: calling the meth addict to personal responsibility for his own life! The Mayor’s binary sense of compassion places that burden on the taxpayer and sends the message that sloth (an evil) is actually a good. Compassion is a good thing, but an equally important good is requiring each soul to take personal responsibility for his own life.

Another pole that may lie opposite compassion is restraint. Imagine a child permitted to forego studying because he wants to play with friends. The parent, wanting to show compassion (“Childhood is so short; let the child be a child!”), allows the child to play. The child fails the test the next day and cries to his parent that the test was too hard or was unfair. The parent demands a meeting with the teacher and insists that the child be permitted to retake the test or that the grading be curved.

In this parent’s simple binary mindset, the good of freedom to play (and it is a good!) was placed against the evils of the pain of self-discipline, of learning self-restraint for a greater good. The pain of failing—the natural consequence of freely playing—the parent treats as an evil by demanding that the teacher (rather than the student) alter the way they have behaved. Compassion was shown by the parent and felt by the child, but because of the failure to balance the poles with the good of self-discipline, the child was actually taught entitlement and a fragility that makes him unable to absorb failure and make changes that lead to success.

But in polar thinking, parental instruction in restraint and correction are good things—as are compassion and understanding. It’s not that one pole is freely indulged as good and the other totally avoided as evil, but that the poles must be weighed and used in appropriate measure in the relevant circumstances.

I began my own journey practicing simple binary thinking. The opposite of the good was always evil. I was, in the terminology of Proverbs, simple.

Mature thinking isn’t about unlearning right versus wrong; there are times where questions are that simple and binary. But mature thinking has to distinguish those simple binary questions from the more difficult polar questions—weighing good against good—and navigating issues by balancing the poles in our thoughts and deeds.

Why I Rarely Give Simple Answers

Tue, 12 May 2026 19:55:44 +0000

I've noticed a pattern in how people respond when they bring me hard questions. Sometimes they leave satisfied. But sometimes — maybe more often than not — they leave with more questions than they came with. People come hoping for a clear answer and instead find me saying something like it depends or there's more than one thing true here or I'm not sure that's quite the right question.

I want to explain that. Not to defend it — but because I think understanding why might be more useful than any simple answer I can give.

I didn't start out this way. Early in ministry I was much more certain. I had a system. I had positions. I had frameworks. I could tell you fairly quickly what I thought about most things. All of it was genuine conviction and most of it was the confidence of youth. But a good bit of it — I can see now — was that I hadn't yet been sufficiently schooled by the real world.

Reality is a demanding teacher. It doesn't care about your framework. It just keeps presenting you with situations that I have repeatedly found don't fit as neatly into my framework as I’d like. Real lives were much more complicated than my neat categories. People had to make decisions where every available option cost something real. And I often found moments where two things I was completely sure of pointed in opposite directions.

You can respond to things like that in a few ways. You can maintain a tight grip on your framework and force reality into it — which produces a certain kind of confidence at the cost of actually paying attention what's in front of you.

Or you can abandon your frameworks altogether and just react — which produces a different kind of confidence but no wisdom at all.

Or you can let reality teach you something harder and more useful: that most important questions aren't puzzles to be solved but tensions to be navigated.

That third path is the one I’ve learned to choose and is what I want to write about in this series.

I'm not going to present a system because I don't think wisdom comes in systems. Instead, I hope to share a little bit of what four decades of paying attention has taught me — about how reality is actually structured, about what it means to think and live well inside that reality, and about why the shortcuts our culture offers are often shortcuts to places we don't really want to go.

I'll warn you in advance: some of this will be uncomfortable, not because I'm trying to be provocative, but because honest thinking is often uncomfortable. It was for me.

We live in a moment that rewards certainty and treats complexity as weakness. I will suggest almost the opposite — that wisdom requires holding things in tension without collapsing them into a simplistic answer to a complex problem, and that developing wisdom takes time, costs something, but, as Solomon said repeatedly in Proverbs, is worth everything.

I'm writing this partly because people have asked me over the years why I think the way I do and I want to put it down on paper to help me figure myself out. I'm also writing it partly because I am increasingly aware of my mortality—that I won't always be here—and that there are things I should leave with those that will be here when I am not.

Perhaps you will be able to use some of what I have learned. I don’t believe the world you're inheriting is going to reward simple answers, and I feel a responsibility to leave my congregation with some things that might equip you for that.

Christianizing the Christians

Tue, 05 May 2026 14:18:32 +0000

We seem to be living at a time when “the centre cannot hold” for much longer. The nation is polarized. Politicians and the media call for unity but they can’t unite around ideology or practice. They perpetuate the division. Social media extends the battlefield to the citizenry. We heatedly re-argue the points put out by the media without any resolution. We on the right see the world falling into chaos and disorder, while the left fears that we are losing our democracy to rigid right-wing despotism.

When the world is coming apart at the seams, people want to understand what is happening. We, Christians included, seek certainty. Christians seek it in biblical theorizing about the end-times or in theories about ‘evil’ groups or organizations controlling the world. These theories provide a sense of certainty about the out-of-control external world, and we take comfort in our “interpretation”.

I do not lead in either of these directions. I came to evangelicalism during the 1970s end-times craze that proved utterly mistaken. Church history reveals a long line of completely mistaken end-times crazes that discredit the faith when they fail. I try to avoid those speculations.

Conspiracy theories are appealing because government and the media have earned our distrust. Conspiracies need only be suggested, not proven, and by design cannot be disproven. Built on suspicions rather than solid evidence, they don’t warrant the confident assertions they make. I find their certainty illusory and trust in them ill-founded.

The pendulum will always swing between the desire for liberty and the desire for order. But America’s founders identified a deeper force that moderates that swing: Christian morality. John Adams observed, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

What did Adams mean by “a moral and religious people”? Like most of the Founding Fathers, Adams refers, not to the rituals of Christianity but to the established points of morality that governed European Christianity in the 18th century.

Each soul is required to govern himself, having a sense of accountability to God (above the state). The cornerstone of self-governance is taking personal responsibility for one’s actions—to pursue, wherever possible, those things that make for peace and prosperity and to avoid actions that disturb the peace of the community. Sobriety and temperance—the control of and resistance to appetites that can enslave and destroy self and others—are important virtues.

Not destroying, harming, or killing others is crucial (“you shall not murder”). Justice—treating all people as equals, regardless of social standing—is another important value (“do unto others as you would have them do unto you”).

There is a high premium placed on truthfulness (“you shall not bear false witness”) and integrity in all dealings—honoring promises, oaths, vows, and contracts.

The foundational social unit is heterosexual marriage. Fidelity within marriage (“you shall not commit adultery”) for the creation of a stable atmosphere for the birth and rearing of children is a central value. Parents are responsible to train children, and children are responsible to obey and honor parents (“honor your father and mother”). This becomes the template for proper relationships with legitimate authorities beyond the home.

Work, a part of the original creation, is a blessing and honest labor and industriousness are virtues to be pursued (“six days you shall labor”). The right of personal property—the fruits of labor belonging to the laborer to be disposed of as he sees fit—is an important Christian value, as is the necessity of respecting the property rights of others (“you shall not steal”).

“A moral and religious people” will hold these principles to be true and right and will seek to live by them. Doing so, the Founders believed, would moderate wild swings of the pendulum between liberty and order. If the moderating force is the unchanging set of values held by “moral and religious people”, and the moral and religious people compromise those values to appease an unbelieving world, should we expect anything but wild swings of the pendulum?

Not only are these values not practiced, but they are also no longer held sacred or, in some cases, even believed—not even by many who name the name of Christ. They have been eroded by unbelief, and the cost of experiencing the disdain of the unbelieving world has become too much for many.

Many believe the answer is political activism (i.e. “culture wars”)— Christianizing the unbelieving world by law. Perhaps we need more work on Christianizing “the Christians” by faith.

Jesus’ admonition to the “lost sheep of the house of Israel” was this: “You are the salt of the earth, but if salt has lost its taste, how shall its saltiness be restored? It is no longer good for anything except to be thrown out and trampled under people’s feet.” (Matthew 5.13)

Israel had lost sight of its holy calling. Jesus came to restore them. Though the national machinery resisted, God powerfully used those that were willing to believe and obey to change the world.

He is still in that business.