The Lord lifts us out of the guilt and defilement that we bring on ourselves. He assures us of his faithfulness to forgive and cleanse us once and for all, based on the sacrifice of Jesus for our sins. He renews these objective realities to our hearts when we draw near to him burdened over our sins, with our eyes fixed on our righteous advocate who has already made propitiation for them all (1 John 2:2).

If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. — 1 John 1:9
When our lives are under a great amount of stress, it is easy to fall back into the mindset that our acceptance with God is performance-based. The best of saints struggle with this problem. Do you experience the sense of guilt that you are never doing enough to please God? Is there a lingering fear that maybe God does not love or accept you?
Stressful Times Can Lead to the Resurrection of Old Addictions and Struggles of the Past
Most likely, those sentiments arise in connection with certain sins in our lives. Maybe it is that same sin you have struggled with for years without the deliverance you thought would be given by now. Maybe it is because you struggle with how little your devotion is to the Lord. Maybe the experience of constant failure has become overwhelming.
What may actually be happening to many believers in times of uncertainty is not stronger devotion to Christ but rather the resurrection of old addictions and struggles of the past. Stress and anxiety have a strange way of prompting us to reach for old idols. Those idols always have been and still are death to us, and yet we grab them for relief. Through it all we wonder, does the Lord still accept us?
In 1 John 1:9 God Provides Ongoing Help for Those Who Are Already Forgiven of All Their Sins
At times like this, it is good to meditate on the promise of 1 John 1:9. The Holy Spirit inspired these words to reassure believers who are confused and struggling over the continued presence of sin in their lives. Here, God gives his prescription for how we can respond in faith when we find ourselves doing the things we do not want to do, or neglecting to do the things he wants us to do (see Romans 7).
In this remarkable promise, God provides ongoing help for those who are already forgiven of all their sins.
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The process of compiling an anthology of devotional classics was for me a continuous process of tracking down bits and pieces that were part of my literary and religious life that I had never pursued in detail. I will feel rewarded if my readers come to love the entries in my anthology as I have come to love them, and I will be doubly rewarded if my readers catch a vision for finding devotional riches in overlooked corners of their own reading lives.

The Devoted Heart
The following reflections on the devoted heart are occasioned by the recent release of my anthology of devotional classics, a book in which each devotional text is accompanied by a 500-word explication by me. I called the texts classics to denote that they possess qualities that raise them above the conventional entries in a daily devotional guide. The problems with the conventional devotional guide are multiple, as Charles Spurgeon discovered when he made a survey of existing devotional books. What Spurgeon found was predictability, monotony, a tendency toward abstraction, and lack of fresh insight and expression.
In compiling my anthology, I worked hard to find devotional riches in unexpected places. Many of the authors would doubtless be surprised by what I chose for devotional purposes. Although I did not primarily go in quest of superior expression, I found that freshness of insight and expression just naturally appeared, often because of the real-life situations from which the devotionals arose.

I will adduce four examples to illustrate what I am describing, and then I will explore the common ingredients that the selections in my book share, in effect offering a definition of the genre of a devotional classic.

Devotional Riches in Unexpected Places
The burial service in The Book of Common Prayer was not composed as a devotional. It was instead intended to be part of a funeral service. Yet it is a moving meditation on human mortality and immortality. Here is a brief excerpt:
In the midst of life we are in death; of whom may we seek for help, but of thee, O Lord, who for our sins art justly displeased? . . . O holy and most merciful Savior, deliver us not into the bitter pains of eternal death . . . [and] suffer us not, at our last hour, for any pains of death, to fall from thee.
When Victorian poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson was walking with a visitor in a garden, the visitor asked the poet what he thought of Christ. Tennyson’s response was not offered as a devotional, but it nonetheless rises to that status: “What the sun is to that flower, Jesus Christ is to my soul. He is the sun of my soul.”
William Shakespeare finalized and signed his will a month before his death in 1616. In doing so, he did not envision himself as writing something devotional, yet part of the preamble reads as follows: “I commend my soul into the hands of God my Creator, hoping and assuredly believing through the only merits of Jesus Christ my Savior to be made partaker of life everlasting. And my body to the earth whereof it is made.”
Painter Lilias Trotter made a practice of drawing plants in Algeria, where she served as a missionary in the latter nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As Trotter pondered the plants that she came to know intimately, the idea occurred to her that they were parables of spiritual truths. One of these parables was built around the idea that just as plants die and then revive to new life, for people, too, death is in multiple ways the gate of life. Here is a brief excerpt: “A gateway is never a dwelling-place; the death-stage is never meant for our souls to stay and brood over, but to pass through with a will into the light beyond . . . for above all and through all is the inflowing, overflowing life of Jesus.”
A Devoted Life is the Seedbed of a Devoted Heart
Before I turn to an analysis of the common ingredients of the genre of a classical devotional, I will pause to draw a conclusion from the examples I have just quoted.
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In a culture that has lost its way on marriage and gender, one of the best ways we can display the Gospel is by embracing what Scripture teaches about them and living lives that display their beauty to the world.  Christians need to take their cues from Scripture and perform the marriage and gender dance that God designed and prescribes so that the world will see the beauty of God’s design. 

Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh. This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church. However, let each one of you love his wife as himself, and let the wife see that she respects her husband.
-Ephesians 5:31-33, ESV
Recently, I observed how the American Church like the Jews of Malachi’s day has lost the fear of God and therefore has a cheapened view of Scripture that has led many American churches to deny what Scripture teaches about who God is, who we are, and how that impacts cultural issues.  One area where this is especially evident is with marriage and gender.  This obviously includes topics like homosexuality and transgenderism, but it also includes a cheapening of marriage in general through an acceptance of our culture’s understanding of no-fault divorce and casual approach to relationships.  But even many churches that do not compromise in these areas struggle with how to interpret the Bible’s teachings on marriage and gender roles.  Generations of feminism have made any view of distinct gender roles ugly to many American Christians, causing them to reject any interpretation of Scripture that would perpetuate what they see as negative historical norms.  If these roles are a result of the Fall, we should seek to leave them behind as we labor to build the Kingdom of God.  But if these roles are part of God’s good Creation before the Fall, we must not abandon them as ugly remnants of sinful patriarchal oppression but instead embrace them as part of God’s beautiful design of who we are that reflects who He is.
But first, I need to address the objection that I as a single man am in no position to write about the topic of marriage. It is true that I lack any experiential qualifications, but that matters little. Saying that only members of a certain demographic are qualified to speak about issues unique to that demographic is a form of ad hominem attack that has no place in healthy debate. In actuality, demographics have little to do with qualifications, and qualifications do not determine the validity of an argument. More importantly, I am writing about what Scripture clearly teaches, not my own opinions. It doesn’t matter what I say but what God says. With that, lets see what God has to say about marriage and gender, starting from the beginning.
Begin at the Beginning
Since the crucial question is whether or not the distinction between genders predated the Fall, we need to go back to the beginning.  We know that all God made was very good (Genesis 1:31), so if we find evidence of the distinction between male and female there, then those distinctions must be very good too.  Here is what we find in Genesis 1:
Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.” So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. ”
-Genesis 1:26-27, ESV
From this passage, we see that God created mankind as male and female in His own image (verses 26 and 27).  This means that the unity yet distinctness of the persons of the Trinity is reflected by the unity yet distinctness of men and women (more on that here).  Reflecting the ontological equality within the Trinity, men and women are equal in dignity and value.[1]  This is the basis for the high value of women in Christian cultures, and conversely the reason why non-Christian cultures often devalue and mistreat women.[2]  But men and women are also fundamentally different reflecting the economic distinction with the Trinity.  This passage also teaches us that God created mankind as male and female to accomplish a purpose: to be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth, subdue it, and have dominion over it (verse 28), which is known as the Cultural Mandate.    Just as the persons of the Trinity fulfill different roles, men and women image (reflect and represent) God by fulfilling their distinct roles in the Cultural Mandate.  These differences do not change the equality of men and women in value and dignity.[3]  But this equality is not substitutionary: you cannot substitute one for the other and get the same result.  As I already covered when refuting transgenderism, since there are only three persons in the Trinity and they cannot become one another, there are only two genders: men and women, who cannot become one another.  After the Fall, the distinctions between male and female are sometimes less obvious, but they are still there.  So both the equality in value and distinction in roles of men and women are part of what God made as very good.
Which distinctions predated the Fall?  For this, Genesis 2, gives more detail about how mankind was created on Day 6.  This starts with God forming the man from the dust and breathing life into him (Genesis 2:7) before placing him in the Garden of Eden “to work and keep it” (verse 15), commanding him not to eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil (verse 16).  It is at that point that God declares (before sin) that something is not good: “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him” (Genesis 2:18).  The man cannot keep the Garden or fulfill the Cultural Mandate without help, so God begins the process of creating a helper suitable for the man.  As a quick but important side note, the term “helper” is often used of God (e.g. Exodus 18:4, Deuteronomy 33:26,29, Psalm 33:20, 115:9-10, Hosea 13:9), so it is not denigrating in the slightest.[4]  God brings the animals to the man to name (Genesis 2:19-20a), both to show his authority over them and to prove to him that no animal existed that could provide the help he needed (Genesis 2:20b).[5]  God then created the woman from the man’s rib (verses 21 and 22) and brought her to the man, thus instituting marriage as the lifelong union between one man and one woman (verse 24). Upon seeing the woman for the first time, the man immediately recognizes her as the perfect partner for him and joyously declares: “This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man” (Genesis 2:23).  From this, we can see that the man was created first and given both a mission and the authority to accomplish that mission.  The woman was then created to help him in that mission, so gender roles are not some distortion of God’s very good creation but part of it.
The Distortion of the Fall
God’s very good design was greatly tarnished by the Fall in Genesis 3.  I cover the Fall more generally elsewhere, but for now recall that the first sin goes far beyond a poor diet choice.  Satan usurped the created order by addressing Eve rather than Adam (Genesis 3:1).  As head of his family, Adam then failed to both reinforce right doctrine to Eve and protect her from spiritual assault, instead standing by passively as Eve was tempted (verse 6b).  As far as we can tell, she engaged with Satan and then ate the fruit without looking to him for spiritual leadership (verses 2 to 6a).  But Adam’s passivity indicates that he too was rebelling against God in his heart and waiting to see if any harm came to her before he ate.  Therefore, he abandoned his calling to protect and provide for his wife, instead risking her well-being for his own pleasure.  As a result, they both sinned and then both immediately realized that their ideal world had been shattered (verse 7).[6]  God then calls out to Adam, showing that He still holds him responsible as head of his family.  Adam tries to blame Eve (even blaming God in the process), and Eve then tries to blame Satan (verses 9 to 13).
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