A Prayer Against Despair When You Battle Sin
Even though I am distressed, I am not broken. Even though I am overwhelmed and all I feel is despair, there is hope. Keep me from losing heart. Paul says that though my outer self is wasting away, my inner self is being renewed every day. Help me to see this. Help me to look not at the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen. Give me grace to lift my eyes off my here and now and know that the battle I’m fighting in this moment isn’t pointless; it carries eternal weight (2 Corinthians 4:8, 16–18).
The following is meant to help those who are weary in their battle to overcome sin and need to know how to pray and cry out to God for help.
Father, help…help, God. I don’t know what else to do to get rid of this thing—why won’t you take this away?!
Sexual obedience? Integrity? How is that possible when the temptation chases, hounds, calls out to me day after day? Why do you allow me to feel these things and not have them satisfied? Will it ever get easier? Will I ever be free from this? Is this the cross to bear that people talk about, something that dominates every day of my life? How is this fair? These questions haunt me.
My feelings seem to have the loudest voice right now, so I’ll start there. Looking at porn last night felt good! Sure, it was horrible two hours later, but even though I know that stuff is evil, somehow it does help me forget about the rest of my broken life… so much that I can’t find the words to pray. I earnestly desire to fix my eyes on Jesus, but how do I do that when my feelings are just a swirl of inner turmoil? I feel like the man in Mark’s gospel who cried out to Jesus, “I believe; help my unbelief!” (9:24). I admit that it feels so hard to believe right now. Oh please, help me to feel differently, to think with the mind of Christ (1 Corinthians 2:16) and to trust you. Help, God! My unbelief is wrecking me.
I resonate with the words of the Psalmist when he says, “My heart throbs; my strength fails me, and the light of my eyes—it also has gone from me” (Psalm 38:10). My attempts to help myself have failed.
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What Is the Regime?
Any institution that potentially competes with the influence of the regime (e.g., families, churches, other private associations or subsidiary units of government) is opposed, usually through subversion rather than open hostility. Thus, the individual is made a fit subject of the regime by a process of emancipating the individual from any non-regime source of authority and alienating the individual from any competing human societies. Culture war flare-ups, like CRT, LGBTQ+ activism and COVID-19 are merely the most visible effects of the deeper tectonic project.
Part 1: An Explainer
This is part 1 of a series explaining the concept of the regime, how it relates to Christians and their institutions, and how it should be opposed.
Why has the pace of social change increased so rapidly over the last 15 years? Why have all major institutions in society become intellectual monoliths committed to the same shibboleths in policy and practice? Why have the people who comprise these institutions become so cowed, apparently incapable of meaningful dissent or critical thought? How have facially absurd ideas, like COVID-19 hysteria, transgender transitions for minors and ESG investing criteria come to so thoroughly mainstream institutions and crush dissent? The best explanatory framework for these dizzying developments is the idea that a new regime has ascended.
You will encounter this term regime if you spend five minutes on right-wing Twitter or in the pages of New Right publications. The phrase may strike you as odd at first, especially since it is often used to refer to non-governmental actors. But the phrase is vital. It can be defined with precision. It names something real that might otherwise escape notice. And it has incredible explanatory power in deciphering why social “progress,” often facially insane and politically unpopular, has so quickly advanced.
If you want a quick and dirty heuristic for identifying the regime, just look for any institutions that fly its banner – the Progress Flag.
But if you want a more precise understanding of the regime, read on. I propose the following:
A set of public, quasi-public and private actors exercising coordinated power for the purposes of advancing a shared agenda for social and political control.
The definition includes actors typically considered to be part of any regime – i.e., governmental actors – but also much more. And crucially, the regime is not under the control of the electoral process. Now, to be fair, conservatives have long decried how the administrative state inevitably grows and is impervious to reform-minded presidential administrations. Even the most wildly successful conservative administrations succeed only in temporarily halting its growth. And of course, substantive administrative law is laden with one-way ratchets that quickly facilitate progressive expansion but make rollback of progressive agenda items nearly impossible. So far, this may all sound like a traditional conservative account.
But we must next consider the interactions between formal government actors and quasi-public actors – actors that are technically private, but in fact function under administrative state control because of expansive financial or other regulatory controls. Some of these quasi-public actors are professional associations or other bodies with licensing functions who have de facto monopolies over certain regulatory functions and play a pivotal role in the work of the administrative state (i.e., regulatory rulemakings, adjudications and licensure). Examples include various licensing and accreditation agencies, the American Medical Association and bar associations. In other cases, the administrative state commandeers quasi-public actors in order to further policy goals through expansive uses of existing statutory authority (e.g., higher education and Title IX, or DEI requirements amongst government contractors).
Finally, this regime expands outward even to actors traditionally considered to be entirely private. In some cases, the regulatory state is the explicit cause of such coordinated action – the SEC, for example, now requires companies to disclose certain ESG metrics and in some states, public companies are even subjected to DEI requirements for their boards or executive teams. In other cases, America’s security apparatus exerts pressure through means that we cannot entirely ascertain, but appear to be effective – the CIA and FBI, for example, now routinely coordinate with social media companies to suppress certain viewpoints and factual reporting. But in most cases, companies voluntarily participate in the social change agenda, walking in lockstep even in cases where doing so demonstrably imperils the bottom line.
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Why Is Love Called the Greatest of These? (1 Corinthians 13)
It is impossible for a sinful human to embody love perfectly—particularly when Christians use their spiritual gifts when the church meets together. But the gospel requires God’s holy people to mature in purity and unity; that is, Christians must mature in love. Love for one another is the mark of Jesus’ disciples (John 13:35). So Christians must grow to love others just as God unselfishly and sacrificially loves others (cf. John 3:16; 1 John 4:8–10, 19).
1If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. 2And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. 3 If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing. 4Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant 5 or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; 6 it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. 7Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. 8Love never ends. As for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away. 9For we know in part and we prophesy in part, 10but when the perfect comes, the partial will pass away. 11When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways. 12For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known. 13 So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.—1 Corinthians 13
The Way of Love
What Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 12 on spiritual gifts prepares the Corinthians for what follows. Paul directly addresses the specific problem in chapter 14: some Corinthians desire the gift of tongues more than the gift of prophecy. Prophecy is what Paul has in mind when he commands, “Earnestly desire the higher gifts,” that is, “the greater gifts” (NASB, NIV, CSB, NET), the gifts that most build up the church when the church meets together. To paraphrase: “You are earnestly desiring the gift of tongues, but you should earnestly desire more edifying gifts instead—like prophecy.” But before Paul directly addresses that problem, he shows the Corinthians “a still more excellent way”—namely, the way of love (ch. 13).
“Love” translates the Greek word agapē, “the quality of warm regard for and interest in another, esteem, affection, regard, love.”1 Paul begins with three illustrations of how superlatives without love equal nothing (1 Cor.13:1–3). Then he describes this essential love (1 Cor. 13:4–8a) and compares it to other gifts (1 Cor. 13:8b–13). Love is not a spiritual gift. It is essential for using spiritual gifts, and it is more important than spiritual gifts.
It is important to understand chapter 13 in its literary context. This passage is one of Paul’s most well known, especially verses 4–7 (“Love is patient and kind . . .”). If one looked at only some of Paul’s words in chapter 13, one might think this passage applies primarily to a marriage, an intimate relationship that requires love in order for it to function well. Because so many people have chosen to have this passage read during wedding ceremonies, a lot of people think this passage is referring to love between a husband and wife. While it applies indirectly to a marriage relationship, it applies most directly to the issue in chapters 1 Cor. 12–14. When the Corinthians first heard these words, they would not have thought, “Aww, how sweet. What beautiful, inspiring words!” They would have received Paul’s words as a verbal spanking: “Ouch!” The repentant might pray, “God, forgive us for being so unloving. The way we are acting is ugly, but the way of love is beautiful.”
The Corinthians were abusing the gift of tongues by wrongly elevating it as more important than other gifts. They were not using it to edify others. So Paul argues in chapter 12 that all of the diverse members of the unified body of Christ are important and that it is foolish to elevate certain gifts, such as speaking in tongues, over other gifts in importance.
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A Glorious Doctrine with a Silly Name
Written by Samuel G. Parkison |
Monday, November 22, 2021
The person of Christ is no less than his human nature. That human who lived and died and rose and ascended and will one day return really is Christ, the Second Person of the Trinity. He is human, yes, and he is infinitely more. His person is truly human in nature, but his person is not circumscribed by his human nature. Christ exceeds. This is why you should feel absolutely no embarrassment or shame in reading through the gospels while worshiping Jesus Christ, the man—son of Mary, brother to James, cousin to John, eater of fish, drinker of wine. The man who said things and felt things and did things with his hands. You should feel absolutely no embarrassment about longing to hug his resurrected body with your resurrected body—and feel no embarrassment about longing for the day when you can look into his human eyes and say “thank you,” and to watch his human lips curl into a human smile.In the incarnation, God reveals his Triune beauty for us in language we can understand. He communicates his astonishing beauty with human language, and with skin and bones, and he does this for our benefit. He does this for our worship. I have devoted a rather significant portion of my life considering this idea of Christ revealing divine beauty for our benefit, but for all my attempts to articulate it, nothing I’ve ever written or said holds a candle to this paragraph from fourth century church father, Athanasius:
For since human beings, having rejected the contemplation of God and as though sunk in an abyss with their eyes held downwards, seeking God in creation and things perceptible, setting up for themselves mortal humans and demons as gods, for this reason the lover of human beings and the common Savior of all, takes to himself a body and dwells as human among humans and draws to himself the perceptible senses of all human beings, so that those who think that God is in things corporeal might, from what the Lord wrought through the actions of the body, know the truth and through him might consider the Father.[1]
What exactly is he saying? He’s saying that God, recognizing our inability to lift our gaze up from the created order to heaven, came down from heaven to the created order to stand at our eye level. He’s saying, “Since human beings couldn’t seem to stop worshiping creation instead of the Creator, the Creator became a creature to accommodate their limitations!” This is what I do when I need to get my son’s attention while he is preoccupied with making a mess all over the floor: I drop down to the ground. I stoop to bring myself to his eye level.
That’s what God does for us in the incarnation: he stoops and makes himself available. In this way, he becomes intelligible enough for us to worship him. We can identify this human being—Jesus Christ, the most beautiful human being ever to exist—as the central object of our worship and offer all of our praise to him without the fear of dishonoring God precisely because he is no mere human: he himself is God. He has become man in order to accommodate our limitations in worship. We couldn’t reach up onto the top shelf to get God, so God places himself on the bottom shelf—right within our reach—in the person of Jesus Christ, the carpenter from Nazareth.
“Without Ceasing to Be God”
It is precisely at this point, however, that many well-meaning evangelicals go astray. For they often miss the very central point that while, in the incarnation, God the Son brings himself down to the bottom shelf in one sense, there is another sense in which he stays right where he is. Every Christian agrees that the incarnation—with its doctrinal emphasis on Christ’s two natures, one human and one divine, united in one person—is one of Christianity’s central mysteries. But often, this mystery is neglected for the sake of rhetorical convenience. “Christ was so generous he left behind his divine attributes,” is how this point typically appears. And to be fair, it sounds attractive on the surface. Isn’t this how Christ “sympathizes with our weaknesses” (cf., Heb. 4:15)? Doesn’t he sympathize with our weakness by giving up his divine strength? As shocking as it may sound, I want to say no.
Some might object to a very important section of Scripture that appears to make the very point I intend to reject, however. This passage is Philippians 2:4-8, which says, among other things, that Christ, “though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking on the form of a servant, being born in likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.” There you have it! What else could his “self-emptying” mean but a relinquishing of his divine attributes or divine prerogatives? But the issue is not as simple as that. For one thing, the central phrase of this passage does not provide its own direct object. Christ “empties himself” … of what? To assume that the answer to this question is, “his divine attributes,” or “his divine prerogatives,” is a bridge too far. The passage simply doesn’t make that point. Instead, we see a grammatical tangle, that very intentionally keeps Christ “in the form of God”—wherein he “did not need to grasp for equality with God” because he already had it—and yet, while being in the form of God, he “self-empties.” Paul is very careful with his language precisely to bring us to the very limitations of language itself. Again, we would expect this verb “self-empties” to have a direct object explicitly stated. Instead, we have to look for the direct object from within the context, and the direct object turns out to be a grammatical paradox—which is fitting, given how mysterious the incarnation is. Christ empties himself, not by giving anything up, but specifically by “taking on the form of a servant.” The way Christ “empties himself” is not actually by emptying—how our self-emptying would necessarily work—rather, Christ “empties himself” precisely by adding to himself a human nature: his “self-emptying” is a subtraction by addition!
So, no, Philippians 2:4-8 (and other similar passages) do not teach us that Christ leaves his divine attributes behind when he assumes a human nature. But we can and must reject such a notion not only because it isn’t taught in Scripture, but also because it contradicts important doctrines that are taught in Scripture. Let me conclude this section with two reasons for rejecting the idea that Christ gave up any part of his divine nature or glory in the incarnation.
Chalcedon and the Gospel
First, to say that Christ “gives up his divinity” or “gives up his divine attributes” (or even some of them) in the incarnation is to misunderstand the hypostatic union (i.e., the doctrine that describes how the divine nature and human nature are united in the Person, Jesus Christ). The fifth-century statement on Christology from Chalcedon emphasizes the hypostatic union by describing how Christ is “truly God and truly man.” It goes on to say that Christ is “consubstantial with us according to manhood,” and “begotten before all ages of the Father according to the Godhead.”
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