Written by Amy K. Hall |
Monday, April 29, 2024
Do you regret your sin? Ask forgiveness because you have truly done something wrong that deserves punishment (just as Pilate and Judas did), but do not wallow in despair. Instead, receive your forgiveness—paid for in full by Jesus—and then rest in God’s sovereignty, knowing that even that sin you regret will, in the end, bring glory to God in some way. The fact that God is using even your sin to ultimately reveal his glory, work for your good, and further his plans for the world does not lessen the seriousness of your sin, but it does mean you can utterly rest from any fear and regret you have over it because God has redeemed both you and your sin.

If there’s one thing we learn from the book of Judges, it’s this: God can—and does—work through anyone and everything, including our sin and failures.
Throughout the book, we see flawed man after flawed man leading the floundering nation of Israel. Each time, God uses even their sin to accomplish his own purposes. It’s not just that their sin can’t derail God’s plan; it’s that God uses their inevitable sin as part of his plan. Of course, using sinners and their sin makes sense since God only has sinners to work with!
Take Samson, for instance, in Judges 13–16. In most ways, he certainly wasn’t anyone we would want to emulate, and he seems to have cared more about his own glory than God’s, yet God moved his plan of redemption forward through Samson, rescuing the Israelites and judging the Philistines through him for twenty years.
Samson’s death illustrates God’s providence perfectly. Through his own foolishness and sin, he ends up being captured by the Philistines, bound in chains, eyes gouged out, entertaining the lords of the Philistines at a giant rally for their god:
Now the lords of the Philistines assembled to offer a great sacrifice to Dagon their god, and to rejoice, for they said, “Our god has given Samson our enemy into our hands.” When the people saw him, they praised their god, for they said, “Our god has given our enemy into our hands, even the destroyer of our country, who has slain many of us.”
They thought they had won—that their god had conquered Israel’s God. Who wouldn’t? How much lower could Samson get? He was thoroughly defeated. But God wasn’t. Though by all appearances God had failed because of Samson’s sin, in fact he had one more judgment to enact against the Philistines in order to rescue Israel, and the situation was progressing precisely the way God intended:
Then Samson called to the Lord and said, “O Lord God, please remember me and please strengthen me just this time, O God, that I may at once be avenged of the Philistines for my two eyes.” Samson grasped the two middle pillars on which the house rested, and braced himself against them, the one with his right hand and the other with his left. And Samson said, “Let me die with the Philistines!” And he bent with all his might so that the house fell on the lords and all the people who were in it. So the dead whom he killed at his death were more than those whom he killed in his life.
Note that Samson had quite different intentions from God here. God was judging the Philistines and saving Israel. Samson was seeking revenge for his two eyes. The gap between these two intentions is ridiculously huge. God was just. Samson was pathetically self-centered. But the gap between them didn’t matter. God used even Samson’s sins to accomplish his purposes.
Even Rebellion Serves God’s Victory
This is exactly what we see happening on the cross a thousand years later. Fallen people sinfully put the Son of God to death, but did those sinners and their sin spoil God’s good plan? No!
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College students need to live around the older and younger members of the covenant community. It isn’t that other generations are better than the current generation of college students, but rather that they have different struggles than college students. They have lived experiences and perspectives that are needed for a well-rounded preparation for adulthood. The knowledge and wisdom that college students can glean from older saints who are seasoned in both the joys and challenges of the Christian life can help them see beyond the unique assumptions that accompany every new generation.

You’ve made it. You stand among the stately ivy-covered halls of your chosen college. You walk across the manicured quad, dorms, and library to your classes. You are on your way to higher education. Everything seems perfectly designed to prepare you for your future life and career—except it isn’t. The college life is not real life. This is not to say that real and important things do not happen in those college years; they do. However, the priorities, place, and pace of college life does not reflect real life and will not adequately prepare you for success in real life.
You cannot be properly rooted and grounded in your faith apart from Christ’s church. And if you are not rooted and grounded in the local church, you will major in the minors. Yet, a good local church rarely factors into the decision of choosing a college. More than luxurious dorms, award-winning faculty, a killer rec center, beautiful architecture, or a state-of-the-art library, college students need the church in order to be truly successful in college. College students need the church because all Christians need the church.
The priorities of college life do not reflect real life.
Even in many evangelical colleges, the pursuit of academic inquiry takes precedence over all other interests. The pressure to perform academically can be overwhelming and all-consuming. The brilliance of PhDs who challenge preconceived notions of truth can capture the imagination. Grades become the ultimate purpose for existence. Or perhaps the student is driven by the social life of college such that hanging out with friends is the sole interest of college. That social life might even be oriented around a parachurch campus ministry. But the emphasis is always, “What are we doing next?” Or maybe the college student is experiencing the modest rebellion of newfound independence and just wants to do his own thing. Independence and self-expression become paramount.
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Is the word defined by the “winsomer” or the “winsomee”? And Christians, well-meaning Christians, who want to be viewed as winsome in the public square, and are reading through their notes carefully before they go up to the public podium, are finding that their problem is not in their delivery, it’s not in their word choice, it’s not even in their body language. No, it’s in their actual beliefs. The problem is that the Christian perspective on marriage is viewed as hateful. And our winsomeness is being viewed as a mask, a get-out-of-jail-free card for ideas that should be banged up in solitary confinement.
 
So here’s me choosing my Christian Word Of The Year.
Drum roll please, “The Christian word of the year is WINSOME!” Taa-dah!
That’s right, winsome! It’s everywhere you look at the moment. So please step forward “winsome” and take a bow. You’ve been over-used, over-realised, under-appreciated, over-stated, undered and overed, and whatever else can happen to a poor old lonesome winsome word in these topsy turvy times.
The big take away for 2022 is how Christians can engage in the public square in a way that is winsome. And if that is even possible. And of course the big question: Is winsome a strategy or a stance? We haven’t decided yet. We haven’t decided what winsome actually means. Does it mean speaking the truth in love? And when we’re told that certain truths that Christians hold can’t be loving in the first place, then we’re being told that we’re masking hate in love language. Where does winsome land in all of that?
As the culture wars roll on, (and on and on) and Christians find themselves in the firing line on ethical matters, is winsome is our ticket out of this? That’s a great question to ask, if only we could decide what winsome actually looks like.
So exhibit A was a great article I read in the New York Times last week by an orthodox Anglican priest in the US, Tish Harrison Warren, who called for respect from both sides of the marriage debate in the US. It was a thoughtful piece from a woman who is very clear about her view that marriage is between a man and a woman, God ordained, and unchangeable in bedrock definition irrespective of government intervention.
Yet at the same time she explored that because the law of the land has changed the definition of marriage legally, then both sides in this issue must find a way to get along with living side by side and respect each other’s differences. Without that ability then it’s going to be tricky to live in the same nation, let alone suburb, with those we deeply disagree with.
She told the story of her gay friend and his “husband” and her hope that he would support her religious school’s right to promote its view of marriage without fear of funding loss, just as she recognised but did not agree with him. He laughed and said, yes. I thought it was a useful article given the times we live in.
Tish Harrison Warren seems an impressive woman. As an egalitarian in the church she even recognises and affirms complementarians and refuses the trope (sadly even found increasingly among brothers and sisters in Christ) that it’s simply a mask for patriarchy. She states this:
Pluralism is not the same as relativism — we don’t have to pretend that there is no right or wrong or that beliefs don’t matter. It is instead a commitment to form a society where individuals and groups who hold profoundly different and mutually opposed beliefs are welcome at the table of public life. It is rooted in love of neighbour and asks us to extend the same freedoms to others that we ourselves want to enjoy. Without a commitment to pluralism, we are left with a society that either forces conformity or splinters and falls apart.
It was a totally winsome article from a woman who holds to a biblical orthodox view of marriage, but who is not looking for some sort of Christian nationalism that will enforce that view on everyone else. She’s nothing if not a realist. And nothing if not winsome.
And what was the response in the comments section of The New York Times? She was shredded. Absolutely shredded. Here I was thinking, “Wow, that’s the type of response we should be able to articulate, and that’s the way we should articulate it” and the general tenor of the comments was along the lines of “bigot, hypocrite, liar, abuser”, etc, etc, etc, including “equivalent of Jim Crow racist”.
Now granted it is The New York Times, which wouldn’t recognised a Hunter Biden laptop if it tripped over it. But winsome went right to the source, with a piece that was as Winsome McWinsomeface as you could get, and still the vast bulk of well over one thousand comments were in the “shred” category.
Which is all a way of saying, if we’re going to have a conversation around winsome (and something tells me it may well be word of the year for Christians in 2023, cos this debate is only getting started), then we’d better have a clear understanding of what we mean by winsome. And by that I mean determining who gets to define whether we are being winsome or not.
That’s the point isn’t it? Is the word defined by the “winsomer” or the “winsomee”? And Christians, well-meaning Christians, who want to be viewed as winsome in the public square, and are reading through their notes carefully before they go up to the public podium, are finding that their problem is not in their delivery, it’s not in their word choice, it’s not even in their body language. No, it’s in their actual beliefs.
The problem is that the Christian perspective on marriage is viewed as hateful. And our winsomeness is being viewed as a mask, a get-out-of-jail-free card for ideas that should be banged up in solitary confinement. That’s the problem right there. And the more words you say, words like “love”, “tolerance”, “acceptance”, “pluralism” are simply seen as special pleading. They are being used by the losers in the culture war to try and carve out a city of refuge to which they can flee for safety.
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