Praying for God’s glory means letting His sovereign wisdom decide what to do with your prayers and your life. It means keeping our focus on Him and on His glory over our own. “Prayer is not a convenient device for imposing our will upon God, or for bending his will to ours, but the prescribed way of subordinating our will to his.” When we can’t pray and mean “Your will be done,” we are essentially telling God “My will be done.”

Discerning our motives in prayer isn’t always cut-and-dried. As justified sinners, we should always be suspicious of our sinful hearts. “The temptation to misuse prayer is native to us and comes . . . automatically to every believer,” writes Ole Hallesby.1
Our goal behind evaluating our motives should also be to have a pure heart before God—not necessarily to have prayers answered according to our liking.
The following diagnostic questions overlap a bit, because it’s easier to expose dirty motives by shining light on them from several angles. If you can’t answer the following questions in the affirmative, then your prayers are out of bounds and it’s time to check your heart.

Am I Praying for God’s Glory?

God calls us to do all things for His glory (see 1 Cor. 10:31)— including prayer. This is why Jesus teaches us that “whatever you ask in my name, this I will do, that the Father may be glorified in the Son” (John 14:13). When we pray for our own glory, we clash with God’s purposes and exalt ourselves over Him. And our sinful motives often disguise themselves so well that we think we’re seeking God’s glory when we aren’t.
W. Bingham Hunter describes one subtle way of secretly seeking your own glory as “praying with faith in your faith.”2 This type of prayer twists the good promise of answered prayer into a formula. If I pray with enough faith, I will get what I want! And this not only doesn’t glorify God but also doesn’t often work. Hunter explains how praying this way leads to frustration:
When the answer is not forthcoming, we are left only with questions: Did I have enough faith? Did my friends who prayed with me have enough faith? Should I have fasted or perhaps claimed a different promise? Attention is centered on prayer methods and techniques for generating faith. Thoughts center on us. Then they begin to shift with measurable envy toward those who apparently had enough faith: Why him or her and not me? The progression may end in speculations about the reality of God’s love, justice and goodness. The results? We feel alienated from ourselves: we have too little faith. We feel alienated from others: they had enough faith. And we feel alienated from God who set up such a system in the first place. Essentially we are telling God how to glorify himself in our lives . . . and he wouldn’t do it.3
Praying for God’s glory means letting His sovereign wisdom decide what to do with your prayers and your life. It means keeping our focus on Him and on His glory over our own. “Prayer is not a convenient device for imposing our will upon God, or for bending his will to ours, but the prescribed way of subordinating our will to his.”4 When we can’t pray and mean “Your will be done,” we are essentially telling God “My will be done.”
A few questions will help you to evaluate whether you are praying for God’s glory:

Would the desired answer to your prayer cause God’s name to be praised?
Would your desired answer to this prayer bring you closer to God or push you away from Him?
How would your desired answer to this prayer impact others? Would it help you to love them more?
Would Jesus pray this prayer in the same situation?5

Am I Praying in Line with Scripture?

This question provides a helpful litmus test for our motives. If we ever pray for something that’s forbidden in Scripture (and thus outside of God’s will), we cannot expect to receive the answer we’re hoping for—and we likely have an idol in our lives to repent of. R.C. Sproul exposes one particularly heinous way of doing this:
Professing Christians often ask God to bless or sanction their sin. They are even capable of telling their friends they have prayed about a certain matter and God has given them peace despite what they prayed for was contrary to His will. Such prayers are thinly veiled acts of blasphemy, and we add insult to God when we dare to announce that His Spirit has sanctioned our sin by giving us peace in our souls. Such a peace is a carnal peace and has nothing to do with the peace that passes understanding, the peace that the Spirit is pleased to grant to those who love God and love His law.6
Don’t miss Sproul’s last point: peace isn’t from God if it’s a “peace” we’re feeling when our actions are flying in the face of scriptural truth. We should weigh every prayer and every motive against God’s Word.7 When we are clearly at odds with the Word, we need to repent. When we aren’t sure, we need to ask God to reveal sin in us and to consider what negative desires and powerful emotions may be warping our prayers.

Am I Pursuing Humility and Holiness?

After James explains the danger of praying with impure motives, he shares how we can repent of them. He quotes from Proverbs, which says that “God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble” (James 4:6; cf. Prov. 3:34), and then he presents this litany of commands:
Submit yourselves therefore to God.
Resist the devil, and he will flee from you.
Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you.
Cleanse your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded.
Be wretched and mourn and weep.
Let your laughter be turned to mourning and your joy to gloom. (James 4:7–9)
And then he closes with what ties everything he’s been saying all together: “Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will exalt you” (v. 10). Essentially, James sandwiches commands to repent between two calls to humility.
Being humble before God is a key part of testing our motives, because it (1) recognizes that our motives may be out of whack and (2) acknowledges that God both knows our sinful motives and is able to reveal them to us. If we want to properly discern our motives, we need to pursue humility and holiness, because a life of sin and pride will cloud our spiritual vision and make it difficult for us to discern our true motives.
James commands holiness and reconciliation with God. The “double-minded” person mentioned in James 1:8 is someone who claims to love God but actually loves sin. James says in verses 7 and 8 that a double-minded person is unstable in his ways and “must not suppose that he will receive anything from the Lord.” Does sin have a grip on your heart? Those who love Jesus keep His commandments (see John 14:15). In humility, repent of any double-mindedness in your life and pursue God as your greatest love. A healthy life of prayer must never be divorced from a faithful life of Christian obedience.
This article is an excerpt from the chapter “I Have Mixed Motives” of Kevin Halloran’s book When Prayer Is a Struggle: A Practical Guide for Overcoming Obstacles in Prayer. Pick up a copy of When Prayer Is a Struggle for more gospel encouragement and practical tools for growing in prayer. Visit www.kevinhalloran.net to learn more about the book or to connect with Kevin. Used with permission.

O. Hallesby, Prayer, trans. Clarence J. Carlsen, updated ed. (Minneapolis: Augs- burg Fortress, 1994), 122.
W. Bingham Hunter, The God Who Hears (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Books, 1986), 161.
Hunter, 161–62.
John R. W. Stott, The Letters of John: An Introduction and Commentary, rev. ed., Tyndale New Testament Commentaries (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1988), 188.
This last question is a paraphrase of Hunter in The God Who Hears, 198. 76
R.C. Sproul, The Invisible Hand: Do All Things Really Work for Good? (1996; repr., Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 2003), 209, quoted in Paul Tautges, Brass Heavens: Reasons for Unanswered Prayer (Adelphi, MD: Cruciform Press, 2013), 27.
It’s also worth mentioning here the utility of regularly praying Scripture, which helps us to keep our hearts and motives tied to the truth of the Word. Doing so is a prayer-filtering mechanism that makes discerning our motives easier and more automatic.

The filmmakers insist 1946 is “not an attack on Christianity or the Bible” but rather “a quest to discover biblical truth and honor God’s Word.” However well-intentioned the film might be, its ultimate claim does not stand up to linguistic and historical critique.

“What if the word ‘homosexual’ was never meant to be in the Bible?” That is the question the new documentary 1946: The Mistranslation that Shifted a Culture is dedicated to answering.
The documentary explores the linguistic history of the word “homosexual” and its appearance in the Revised Standard Version (RSV) of the Bible, first published on February 11, 1946. In short, the film seeks to show that the RSV’s use of the term “homosexuals” instead of “sexual perverts” is an inaccurate translation of the Greek words malakoi and arsenokoitai. (It is worth noting that although recent editions of the RSV have reverted to using “sexual perverts,” many other translations still translate it as “homosexuals.”) According to the documentary, homosexual sex is biblically permissible, and the RSV’s “mistranslation” has influenced subsequent English translations of the Bible, resulting in Western society believing that “sexual and gender minorities must choose between their faith and their identity.”
The filmmakers insist 1946 is “not an attack on Christianity or the Bible” but rather “a quest to discover biblical truth and honor God’s Word.” However well-intentioned the film might be, its ultimate claim does not stand up to linguistic and historical critique. 1946 undermines biblical sexual ethics under the guise of honest hermeneutics.
Evaluating the “Mistranslation” Allegation
Alan Shlemon from the Christian apologetics ministry Stand to Reason writes that, despite 1946’s captivating premise where power-hungry white men oppress “sexual minorities” through Bible translation, “Even if the film’s claims are true, it doesn’t matter. The entire documentary is a non sequitur.”
There are many reasons the film 1946 fails to be intellectually compelling, including:

subsequent Bible translators did not use the RSV’s English translation unchecked;
the prohibition of homosexual sex is found elsewhere in the Bible and is well-attested throughout church history, not just since 1946; and
one young seminary student, whom the film follows, would not have had the expertise to truly dispute the RSV translation committee.

Despite these realities, the documentary is often cited as proof that the Bible does not condemn homosexuality and that the church should re-examine its view on sexual ethics.
To address the film’s claim that same-sex relations are not prohibited in the Bible, we will answer three questions:

What do the allegedly mistranslated words in 1 Corinthians 6:9 mean?
What is the biblical sexual ethic?
Why is the biblical sexual ethic good news for everyone?

By answering these questions, Christians can refute the radical claim that the Bible permits homosexual sex with knowledge, clarity, grace, and love.
What Do the Allegedly Mistranslated Words in 1 Corinthians 6:9 Mean?
1 Corinthians 6:9-10 states:
Or do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: neither the sexually immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor men who practice homosexuality, nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God.” (ESV, emphasis added)
The contested phrase translated “men who practice homosexuality” comes from the Greek “ο¿τε μαλακο¿ ο¿τε ¿ρσενοκο¿ται,” transliterated as oute malakoi oute arsenokoitai. The phrase oute…oute means “neither…nor,” so the verse is saying “neither _____  nor _____ … will inherit the kingdom of God.” So, we must fill in the blanks. What do malakoi and arsenokoitai mean?
In his book The Bible and Homosexual Practice: Texts and Hermeneutics, Dr. Robert A. J. Gagnon explains that the term malakoi can carry a variety of meanings depending on the author and context. Often it meant “soft” or “effeminate.” In ancient usage, malakos could range from those who had a penchant for “soft” or decadent living, to those averse to the rigor of a philosopher’s life, to the passive partner in homosexual intercourse. Thus, while at first glance it might seem challenging to know exactly how Paul is using the term in this passage, context is key. Based on the context of 1 Corinthians 6:9—a list of unrepentant sins displayed by those who will not inherit the kingdom of God—and Jewish understanding of the term at the time, Paul’s intent is clear. As Gagnon summarizes, “In 1 Cor. 6:9, malakoi should be understood as the passive partners in homosexual intercourse” (p. 312).
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Do ministries suffer from the innovator’s dilemma? Yes, they do. It is hard for us in leadership to see it, though, because often we are living inside the system that is suffering from it. 

A problem we face as leaders is that the original mission is almost always overtaken by the way that mission is delivered. In 2005, the late Clayton Christensen wrote the book The Innovator’s Dilemma. He observed what happened inside businesses when they successfully developed a service or product and brought it to market. The dynamics hold true for ministries as well.
As a business has success with a new product, increased demand requires more organization. The delivery process is refined. There may be investment in the system that produces the service or product. People within the organization become convinced that their service or product – what they see as “The Best Way” – is the best or right solution to getting the mission done. Bureaucracy grows around its delivery and a self-perpetuating loop reinforces the value of The Best Way. New people join the team. Some are specialized and only participate in one aspect of the system that has developed. They do not have the perspectives of the whole, but they are very good at doing what they know how to do.
In the business world, the innovator’s dilemma reaches its peak when a new competitor enters the market. There is often an innovative improvement, and the incumbent organization, focused on delivering The Best Way, cannot adapt. They are experts at doing what they do best, not this new and novel solution. Their success has doomed them because they have become so good at what they do. The organizational culture affords no other means of delivery.
Do ministries suffer from the innovator’s dilemma? Yes, they do. It is hard for us in leadership to see it, though, because often we are living inside the system that is suffering from it. Another reason it is difficult to identify is that our competitors are different. We are competing against worldview and cultural change. We may have developed culturally relevant ministries, but rapid change has now made our Best Way, whatever it might be, irrelevant because the people it was designed to serve are growing old, the next generation is always different from the former generation, and culture has changed.
The classic example from business is Seagate, a company that once dominated the hard disk industry. As customers moved from larger drives to smaller ones, they squeezed more and more profit from the factories creating hard drives. They got really good at creating 5.25-inch hard drives. Then the industry shifted to smaller drives using different materials. Seagate could not innovate fast enough. Smaller players, not invested in the same production facilities, took over and Seagate faded.
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The Psalms make clear that the life of the true believer is inevitably full of conflict, adversity, trouble, danger, and sorrow. The Psalms show us that, for the true believer, life is difficult, indeed, life is a fight. There are external enemies in this fallen world who hate God and His people; our own sinful natures that still reside in us, inclining us to disbelieve and disobey God’s Word; and Satan and his demonic minions who tempt us to sin, pester us with worldly distractions, accuse our consciences, and mock us for our feeble faith. Read the Psalms, and you will see that not all of them are beautiful words of comfort such as Psalm 23 or songs of praise such as Psalm 100. There are many psalms that are expressions of agony, doubt, and fear in the face of spiritual warfare.
Psalm 13 is a good example. How many of us, in one way or another, at one time or another, have felt like crying out with the words of Psalm 13, “How long, O LORD? Will you forget me forever?” (Ps. 13:1)? This is one of those prayers—a lament —that, at first, we might be hesitant to pray. We might think that it sounds irreverent or even borderline blasphemous. Since God has said in His Word that He will never leave us or forsake us, it might seem as though we were accusing God of breaking His Word. Should we really cry out to God, “How long, O LORD? Will you forget me forever?”
Yes. By the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, God has given us Psalm 13 so that we can be assured that God accepts the honest outpourings of our souls. Most of us, if we live long enough, at some time or in some season, will feel so overwhelmed by adversity or grief that we will simply want to fall face down and cry out, “How long, O LORD? Will you forget me forever?” At such a time, Psalm 13 can serve as your personal prayer.
Those circumstances might involve prolonged suffering or hardship; chronic illness or physical pain; caring for a loved one who suffers physically or mentally; a continuing problem that just won’t go away or cannot get resolved; a series of circumstantial hardships, trouble upon trouble disturbing your life; or an injustice, a wrong done to you by a malicious person that has continuing negative consequences in your life; or the replaying of those “old tapes” from long ago—hurts, regrets, failures—that just keeping on playing and playing in your mind. In any of these cases, we might cry out: “Why do I have to keep dealing with this and going through this? Why doesn’t God deliver me from this?”
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Matthes argues for the power of the pulpit—or what she labels “sermonic influence” on political and cultural life. Such an influence, she demonstrates, has proven especially notable during times of national crisis: it is here that Protestant sermons have resonated with the greatest force.

In her new book, When Sorrow Comes: The Power of Sermons from Pearl Harbor to Black Lives Matter, Melissa M. Matthes argues for two claims. First and most fundamentally, that Protestant ministers should assume a more active public role addressing political and legal affairs, and that, in doing so, they should be met with greater acceptance as national and community leaders whose guidance truly matters. Second, that Protestant clergy espousing theological liberalism provide the greatest opportunity to enlighten public discourse and strengthen the common good.
Her work succeeds admirably on the first score, but is open to a more ambivalent assessment on the second.
The Public Power of the Pulpit
Matthes centers her work on American Protestantism and justifies her limited purview on the “cultural dominance” of Protestantism in the United States—a position of demographic preeminence still evidenced by how the majority of the religiously self-identified are some form of Protestant, and that over 80 percent of African Americans number themselves as Protestant Christians.
From this Protestant-centered perspective, Matthes argues for the power of the pulpit—or what she labels “sermonic influence” on political and cultural life. Such an influence, she demonstrates, has proven especially notable during times of national crisis: it is here that Protestant sermons have resonated with the greatest force. This is so because, despite the secularization of American culture, many Americans still look to the country’s most prominent confession, especially for consolation in moments of collective crisis and in the aftershocks of largescale national tragedies.
In defending the public role of Protestant ministers, Matthes makes her stand against the claims of some strict separationists like Andras Sajo, who argues that “social, political, and legal arrangement[s]” must “not allow considerations based on the transcendental or the sacred.” Matthes argues that when the nation wrestles with tragedy, ministers should be listened to by citizens and policymakers alike, with their messages taken as sources of politically relevant insight. This follows, she argues, from the first principles of democratic legitimacy. If the people wish religious inspiration to guide their personal and public response to collective tragedy, the people have every right to have just this; to deny it would be to reject in Richard Parker’s lofty words that “here, the people rule.”
We can add to her arguments the recognition that, in times of crisis and grieving, there would be something coldly indifferent about a strong separation of church and state in the way Sajo recommends. If people seek comfort and guidance from religion in times of tragedy, to demand that they have only an aesthetic comfort, without any cognitive guidance—to say that they may lose themselves in dirges and requiems but take no heed of the sermons accompanying them—is to give cold comfort, indeed.
Having shown that religion still plays a powerful role in the limited arena of collective sorrow, Matthes argues that an opening is forged for seeing Protestant religiosity in a more positive light outside times of national tragedy. This positive influence is disclosed, she maintains, in the way the faith engenders a concern for those in need and on the margins of social and economic life. Specifically, she says religion can promote the common good apart from crises because it can speak so helpfully to just what Sajo and others say must remain the province of secular political advocacy: human rights and human progress.
In taking this stand, Matthes responds to the counterargument that, once re-affirmed in the public square, public religion with its diversity of sects might exacerbate existing social tensions. Theological disagreement, she contends, does not negate the positive contributions of religion to the common good. A diversity of ministerial voices can actually serve to stimulate the American people to greater reflection. Her point seems to be that serious debate about the implications of the transcendent truths religion advances witnesses to the seriousness of truth and transcendence in a way that can provoke our increasingly “apatheistic” age—an age indifferent to the claims of religious transcendence—to concern itself with the truth of the matters these ministers debate. Even when expounding differing theologies, therefore, the Protestant pulpit proves its value by stimulating us to enter into a state of mind “where seeking the Truth is a lifelong project.”
A Genealogy of Political Religion
Notwithstanding this recognition of the value of pluralism, Matthes’s work argues that a particular kind of theology should exercise the greatest influence on public life. The liberal theology that underwrote the homilies delivered by mid-century liberal Protestants following the tragedy of the Pearl Harbor attack should be recovered, deepened, and deployed as a religious witness in the United States today.
Matthes develops this claim by providing a fascinating survey of American Protestant sermons delivered in the wake of nationally salient crises: not only the Pearl Harbor attack, but also the assassination of JFK, the assassination of MLK, the 9/11 attacks, and the Newtown massacre. She appears to present this review as a social science exercise, but that approach seems inconsistent with the logic of her project. The samples of sermons she reviews are far too few to serve the purpose of a positivist social science exercise. Instead, the project appears much more to be a selective culling of sermons that advance what she sees as distinct theological types—and an argument for the superiority of one such theological position.
Her work, if not fully described as such, is more akin to a genealogy in the Nietzschean sense. As Allan Parson remarks, for Nietzsche, genealogy is “arrived through processes of exclusion and inclusion” by which our pressing contemporary needs shape our conceptualizations of past events. Genealogy, for Nietzsche, is “not to be thought of as purely historical,” but as the construction of a stage on which values are placed in contention, even as we make use of selected specimens from the “long hieroglyphic record” to build our accounts.
Matthes’s genealogy starts in the Alpine heights of mid-century liberal theological promise. Protestant theology by the early 1940s had liberated itself from the Fundamentalists—a bruising battle quite truculently fought throughout the 1920s and 1930s, and from which liberalism clearly emerged triumphant, as large numbers of traditionalists were driven out of the mainline denominations. This triumphant theology still remained vigorously Christian in self-identification, but gone were notions of special divine providence, or of God working through the course of human events.
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Indeed, when a Christian’s best testimony to his neighbors is found in waiting patiently for governing officials to permit churches to gather again, thus denying Christ’s command to gather, we have a new instance of Corban—replacing the law of God with human traditions.

In January, a few members of our church put on our masks, boarded planes, and traveled to the Founders Conference, where we heard from the likes of Voddie Baucham, James Dolezal, Tom Ascol, and the leaders of Just Thinking, Virgil Walker and Darrell Harrison. In short, the trip, drenched in warm Florida sun, was encouraging, and the messages, saturated with biblical truth, were edifying—especially with respect to the subject of standing for Christ in an age that has become increasingly hostile towards Christians.

Addressing that subject and the new religion of universal autonomy and equality, Tom Ascol and Jared Longshore have released a new book called Strong and Courageous: Following Jesus Amid the Rise of America’s New Religion. Falling in line with newer books like Glenn Sunshine’s Slaying Leviathan and Rod Dreher’s Live Not by Lies, as well as older books like Francis Schaeffer’s A Christian Manifesto, and even older books like Samuel Rutherford’s Lex Rex: The Law and the King and Junius Brutus’s Vindiciae Tyrannos: A Defense of Liberty Against Tyrants, this new volume promises to bolster the church at a time when public silence and civil cowardice are spreading faster than COVID.
In other words, this book comes at a time when Christians and especially pastors need courage. And this will be a book I hand to many pastors, as it provides bold and biblical arguments that stand against the online pablum that undercuts biblical courage with Christian civility (read: niceness). Indeed, when a Christian’s best testimony to his neighbors is found in waiting patiently for governing officials to permit churches to gather again, thus denying Christ’s command to gather, we have a new instance of Corban—replacing the law of God with human traditions. But thankfully, some are seeing through this misguided application of Scripture and are providing solid food for God’s flock. And in Strong and Courageous, Ascol and Longshore do just that.
In particular, they observe how Christians have been lulled into a secular idea of love that says, “If you love me, you will affirm me, no questions asked.” Whether Christians recognize the connection or not, too many have been led to believe that loving neighbor means affirming and embracing the edicts of the government, no questions asked. Sure, many want to believe that their governors are doing what is in their best interest, but this gets to a fundamental question about what governors are for and how far governments can reach—do they really have the God-given authority to prescribe how your church worships? The answer is ‘No.’ Strong and Courageous gets into this subject and shows how governors have overreached—both with respect to America’s Constitution (as well as the constitutions of various states) and with respect to God’s appointed design for human rulers. For this reason, I highly commend the book.
Still, government overreach is not the point I want to highlight here. Instead, I want to stem the tide of defining Christian love in worldly ways (i.e., making moral commitments that are based on modern sentiments, rather than inspired Scripture). I fear that many Christians are attempting to bind the consciences of others in the name of Christian love with practices and priorities that do not come from Scripture itself. Rather, love has been (re)defined by a cultural catechesis delivered in public schools, by governing officials, and through an endless stream of social media influencers. Not to mention the fact that churches have done little to teach what Scripture says about church and state.
All told, Christians need to go back to Scripture and ask: What does it mean to love my neighbor? Romans 12 would be a good place to start. But outside of Scripture, Strong and Courageous provides a good counter-argument that the most loving thing we can do is to do all that our governors are saying. Actually, as they argue, the most loving thing we can do is call governors back from tyranny and fellow citizens to know the true love of God.
(N.B. If defying tyrants is an uncommon phrase, or if you are uncertain about what a tyrant looks like, go back to the list of books at the top, starting with Slaying Leviathan, and pick one up. Church history has much to offer in recognizing tyranny and understanding what Christians must do in response. American Christians have lived in relative freedom for so long, our “defying tyrants” muscles are flaccid. Some don’t know we even have them, or need them. But we do. For without that biblical duty, we cannot properly love God or our neighbor.)
Now, here is the quote in full.
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Written by A.W. Workman |
Wednesday, August 25, 2021
Whatever our cooperative situation with other believers—be it church membership, ministry, the workplace, the family—let’s strive to more often view others through the lenses of sovereign gifts that might at some point save the day.

We recently had a mini team retreat where we looked into the spiritual gifting and personality wiring of the different members on our team. At one point, one of my teammates quoted me as once telling him, “You have the strengths you do for a good reason. Sooner or later, they will save the day. We need your gifts, honestly, so that we won’t die!”
While we had a good laugh together about this particular melodramatic wording, I honestly stand by these words. Not only do I recognize the goodness of the diverse natural and spiritual gifts on my team, I need them. Even if we weren’t engaged in church planting somewhere like Central Asia. My belief in the sovereignty of God is such that I know that he has brought these particular teammates, for this particular season, because their gifts and strengths will be the key to making it through tricky and terrible situations. When I will not know how to thread the needle, when I simply won’t know what to do or what to say—somehow, one of them will. And it will make all the difference.
Consider this quote by Corrie Ten Boom: “This is what the past is for! Every experience God gives us, every person He puts in our lives is the perfect preparation for the future that only He can see.”
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Those who pray for no more than they can handle will find joy and comfort in even modest achievements, for they will know and trust that God has given them what is for their best and withheld from them what would be to their harm. 

I know many who long to make a mark in their field. I know writers who long to get that first contract and publish that first great novel. I know musicians who yearn to get noticed and get signed and get recorded. I know speakers who are convinced they could make their mark if only they could be invited to that first conference, deliver that first keynote, inspire that first audience. I know and admire many such people and often find myself rooting for them.
Yet even as I cheer them on from the sidelines of their lives, even as I attempt to encourage them as much as I’m able, there is one prayer I encourage them to pray amidst all their longing: “God, give me only as much success as I can handle.”
It has long been my observation that most people can handle failure better than success. If failure tends to spur innovation, success tends to breed stagnation. If failure tends to occasion humility, success tends to engender pride. If failure tends to stimulate dependence, success tends to generate self-reliance. I have seen people who seemed to be making great strides in godliness, great advances in upright and holy living, until they achieved success and gained acclaim. It was then that their progress seemed to screech to a near halt or even to reverse itself. When they gained the thing they had longed for, they lost the progress they had labored for. I have seen far more people ruined by success than by failure.
The reason is simple enough: Their success outpaced their sanctification. The level of their accomplishments rose faster than the growth of their character. Their vocational achievements came at the cost of spiritual achievements. They gained more success than they could handle and it led to great harm.
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The deep irony of DiAngelo’s work is that she demands exquisite sensitivity from everyone in all social interactions, but her own gross insensitivity is displayed on virtually every page.

For many people, 2020 was a nightmare that refused to end. For Robin DiAngelo, it was a very good year. In the aftermath of the George Floyd riots, her book White Fragility, surged to the top of the bestseller list. It sold more than 100,000 copies, making her a wealthy woman. This summer, DiAngelo released her newest work, Nice Racism. The most interesting feature of this book can be summarized in three words: It didn’t sell.
On the face of it, there is nothing extraordinary in the collapse of a mediocre book. Bad books drop from the printing press into obscurity every day. Normally, though, the author’s previous work is not still listed by the New York Times. How did DiAngelo’s bright moment pass so quickly? What does this mean for the ongoing debate over Critical Race Theory?
DiAngelo’s work has already received intense criticism from writers across the political spectrum. They found it condescending, hypocritical, or just racist. These charges are probably fair, though it can be difficult to judge, because DiAngelo’s meandering narrative does not readily cohere into a cohesive argument. To a certain extent, this is probably intentional. DiAngelo (under the influence of deconstructionists like Michael Foucault) has a fraught relationship with rational discourse, which she tends to see as an instrument of oppression. She describes herself as an expert in “discourse analysis,” which in her own words is, “a method for identifying how language positions speakers in relation to social others in recognition that language is sociopolitical, not simply a neutral transmitter of a person’s core ideas or self.”
The goal of discourse analysis, in other words, is to look past the truth claims that people make, and instead assess tone, terminology, and the broader social and political context. Who speaks the most, and with whom do they agree or disagree? How do people’s claims and arguments reflect and affect their own social status, and that of their interlocutors?
Within reasonable limits, this sort of analysis can sometimes yield helpful insights. Nearly everyone has the occasional Foucauldian moment, when they notice the nefarious potentialities of narrative. For DiAngelo though, “discourse analysis” seems to have swamped all other forms. She isn’t really in the business of making arguments, or responding to other people’s. On one level, Nice Racism is clearly a follow-up to White Fragility, which was one of the most hotly discussed (and heavily critiqued) books of 2020. But DiAngelo offers almost nothing by way of direct rebuttals, or responses of any kind to identifiable public writers. A few stray paragraphs are devoted to a flyby dismissal of John McWhorter, one of her most eloquent critics, but for the most part she devotes page after weary page to shadow-boxing anonymous detractors, whom we meet through DiAngelo’s anecdotes. She seems to find ignorant, insensitive people around every corner: on airplanes, in taxi rides, and of course, in the diversity seminars that she facilitates for a living. Unsurprisingly, these faceless interlocutors are easily vanquished. One hardly needs reasoned discourse to defeat such opponents.
An Insensitive Subject
As a reviewer, it is difficult to know what to say about such a book. Even when I disagree intensely with a book’s content, I normally try to do the author the courtesy of engaging his argument directly. This book, though, just doesn’t quite rise to the level of argument. Beyond that, the author herself seems to have objections to reasoned discourse. Also, there is the issue of redundancy. I could repeat the critiques of McWhorter, Jonathan Haidt, and others who have already written articulate responses to DiAngelo’s views. Since they remain on the table unanswered, this doesn’t feel particularly worthwhile. It really is not possible to advance the dialectic, because that isn’t a game that DiAngelo plays.
With no argument worthy of the name, readers may find themselves looking back at the author herself. By the end of the book, I was indeed overwhelmed with both pity and revulsion for this wretched-seeming woman. Everywhere she goes, people seem to be shouting, crying, or storming away in disgust. The problem is not limited to her fellow whites! DiAngelo also tells stories about offending or alienating BIPOC friends and associates. One cannot but notice that there is a common denominator across all of these unhappy anecdotes. It’s not white fragility.
The deep irony of DiAngelo’s work is that she demands exquisite sensitivity from everyone in all social interactions, but her own gross insensitivity is displayed on virtually every page. She brags constantly about her “expertise” and deep insight, but this façade falls immediately whenever she starts talking about real human beings. She is astonishingly deaf to the nuances of human relationships and human feeling. She cannot understand the complexities of human motivation. A writer like Chris Arnade brings unseen people to life before our eyes; she seems to reduce everyone to a cardboard cutout. She shows no interest in understanding or learning from the people she encounters, or even in finding more effective ways to persuade them. It’s easy to understand why she is constantly offending people. Her entire perspective on the world just feels bleak and dehumanizing.
Examples are legion, but I will content myself with one. In one chapter, DiAngelo rails against white women who speak in her seminars about their marriages to black men. This, in her view, is extremely insensitive. “There is a long and painful history,” she sniffs, “surrounding white women in relationship to Black men.”
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