Written by Amy K. Hall |
Friday, August 9, 2024

Don’t wander endlessly in subjective feelings and fears. Whatever suffering, confusion, doubt, or anxiety you’re dealing with in a life that feels out of control or separated from God’s love, the cross is an objective historical event you can look to for solid proof of who God is and his unshakable relationship with you through Christ.

I have often talked about the utter brilliance of the cross, God’s method of upholding perfect righteousness and justice while at the same time securing grace—“so that He would be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus,” as Romans 3:26 says. Because of the cross, Christianity is the only religion where no evil is swept under the rug yet anyone can be forgiven, where God is both a good judge who doesn’t compromise justice and a forgiving Father who gave his Son to save us—while we were his enemies, no less!
In Ephesians 3:11, Paul refers to the gospel as “the eternal purpose which [God] carried out in Christ Jesus our Lord.” Why was the work of Christ on the cross God’s “eternal purpose”? Because it reveals crucial truths about him that we wouldn’t have seen any other way, and because God’s ultimate goal is for his people, whom he adopts “to the praise of the glory of His grace” (Eph. 1:6), to know him deeply “so that in the ages to come He might show the surpassing riches of His grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus” (Eph. 2:7). This is why knowing truths about God is not just an academic exercise but is central to the Christian life.
In Authentic Ministry, Michael Reeves describes what the cross reveals about God and how seeing those truths changes us and fuels our lives as Christians.
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Written by Amy K. Hall |
Friday, June 14, 2024
Love 2.0 now means acceptance and celebration, and if one of God’s moral laws seems to oppose acceptance and celebration, then obviously the second great commandment to love-2.0 your neighbor should trump that law. In other words, now love 2.0 trumps actual love. The sad truth is that anyone who rejects God’s moral commands in order to love has missed love altogether.

Ms Rachel, a YouTuber who posts learning videos for toddlers, made waves this week when she posted a video celebrating Pride Month on TikTok. After receiving some backlash, she explained her position this way:
My faith is really important to me, and it’s also one reason why I love every neighbor. In Matthew 22, a religious teacher asked Jesus, “What’s the most important commandment?” And Jesus says to love God and to love your neighbor as yourself. All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments. There’s no greater commandments than these. I believe it’s mentioned eight times: Love your neighbor.
So, yes, everyone belongs, everyone’s welcome, everyone is treated with empathy and respect. It doesn’t say, “Love every neighbor except….” There are so many reasons I stand strong in love. I stand with everyone. That’s who I am.
It’s not unusual for people to cite the second great commandment as if it trumps God’s other moral commands: “See? What God wants most is for us to love. That’s what’s most important, so that’s all we should worry about.” But this is simply a misreading of the text.
When Jesus said, “On these two commandments depend the whole Law and the Prophets,” he didn’t mean that love for God and neighbor should somehow trump the Law and the Prophets; he meant the Law and the Prophets exist for the very purpose of teaching us what love for God and neighbor looks like.
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Written by Amy K. Hall |
Thursday, June 6, 2024
God’s grace is freely given—not to those who are owed it, but to those who aren’t. No one can say that justice demands they be given something they didn’t earn; and if someone gives an undeserved gift to one, in no way is he required to give the same gift to all. As Sproul concludes, this is the beauty and wonder of grace. 

What about those who never hear of Jesus? This is one of the most common questions I receive, and as with most of those common questions, it has to do with a challenge to the character of God. Is God acting unfairly if his salvation depends on trusting in Jesus and some never hear of him? Does justice require that God reveal himself to everyone?
In God’s Love, R.C. Sproul responds to the even stronger objection leveled at Calvinists that God would be unjust if he chose some for salvation but not others, but you don’t have to be a Calvinist to appreciate the quote. His concise explanation of why election by grace is consistent with the character of a good and just God applies equally to the objection about those who never hear of Jesus:
Somehow it is widely assumed that God owes all people either the gift of salvation or at least a chance of salvation. Since they cannot be saved apart from His grace, He owes it to everyone to grant them that grace.
This kind of thinking results from a fundamental confusion between God’s justice and His mercy or grace.
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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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Written by Amy K. Hall |
Friday, March 1, 2024
As with the exodus, the cross is proof that God is real and powerful. He moved history in exactly the way he promised (see Isaiah 53). He raised Jesus from the dead! More than that, if he was willing to give his own Son for our good, we can trust that he is for us. He loves us. The objective evidence of his love is right there on the cross, and we can argue for the cross with objective evidence.

In a society that’s hostile towards Christian morality, how should we go about teaching our children God’s commands so that they’ll desire to follow him rather than the culture surrounding and pressuring them?
Not a God of Blind Faith
The first thing to remember is this: Our God is not a God of blind faith. As our Creator, he knows we are beings who need reasons for what we do, beings who are rational and who love, beings who are motivated by a desire to seek our good and the good of our loved ones. Of course, our sin distorts these qualities, even at the best of times, and we can be deceived about what actually is good for us (see Eve). But at root, our rationality and our desire to pursue what’s good for us are both good aspects of our humanity that God repeatedly appealed to when revealing his commands to his people.
We see a clear example of this approach in Deuteronomy 6:20–25, where God instructs the Israelites as to what they should emphasize when teaching their children his commands:
When your son asks you in time to come, saying, “What do the testimonies and the statutes and the judgments mean which the Lord our God commanded you?” then you shall say to your son, “We were slaves to Pharaoh in Egypt, and the Lord brought us from Egypt with a mighty hand. Moreover, the Lord showed great and distressing signs and wonders before our eyes against Egypt, Pharaoh and all his household; He brought us out from there in order to bring us in, to give us the land which He had sworn to our fathers. So the Lord commanded us to observe all these statutes, to fear the Lord our God for our good always and for our survival, as it is today. It will be righteousness for us if we are careful to observe all this commandment before the Lord our God, just as He commanded us.”
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Written by Amy K. Hall |
Saturday, July 29, 2023
There are two related principles in Challies’s illustration and Habermas’s story for us to grasp and learn to live by. Don’t try to bear all the griefs and sufferings ahead of you all at once—especially not the imagined ones. Trust that God will give you what you need to bear your grief and suffering on the day when you need it.

I don’t need to tell you that life is hard. The older you are, the better you know this. The heavy burdens of past grief, present suffering, and anxiety about the future can easily overwhelm us, but they don’t have to. There’s wisdom about handling suffering to be learned from those who have gone through it before us.
Tim Challies, who wrote about the unexpected loss of his only son in Seasons of Sorrow: The Pain of Loss and the Comfort of God, had this to say about how to bear crippling grief:
My father was a landscaper, and he used to take me to work with him from time to time. I remember one day when he brought me with him to be an unskilled but low-cost source of manual labor. He showed me a skid of bricks that had been delivered to the end of a client’s driveway and then a walkway he was building to the front door. My job was to get the bricks from the first spot to the second. I remember gazing at that giant pile with despair. How could I, at twelve or thirteen years of age, possibly move what looked like a literal ton of bricks? I realized I would have to do it in the only way I could. Piece by piece, brick by brick, step by step, I carried each one to my father. He laid them as quickly as I could bring them to him until a perfect path led to the entrance of that beautiful home.
And just so, while God has called me to bear my grief for a lifetime, and to do so faithfully, he has not called me to bear the entire weight of it all at once. As the pile is made up of many bricks, a lifetime is made up of many days.
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Written by Amy K. Hall |
Thursday, June 1, 2023
Nothing that’s happening now is surprising to Christians who argued for keeping the opposite-sex definition of marriage. We had principled reasons for opposing same-sex marriage that had nothing to do with hate and everything to do with truth and the good of our society. This will become more and more clear over time, but that’s cold comfort in light of all the suffering queer theory will cause before it’s finally crushed under the weight of reality.

Andrew Sullivan has an article titled “The Queers Versus the Homosexuals” that’s insightful about the destructive danger of queer ideology but blind to the role he and other same-sex marriage advocates played in its rise to power.
Here’s what he says about his earlier advocacy for homosexuality and same-sex marriage:
Its case for equality was simple and clear: including us in existing institutions needn’t change anything in heterosexual life.
But of course it changed everything. It denied the objective truths our bodies speak about sexuality and marriage, and it denied the existence of a grounded standard we ought to conform ourselves to. Queer theory simply takes those ideas to the next level, as we can see from Sullivan’s description in the article:
The core belief of critical queer theorists is that homosexuality is not a part of human nature because there is no such thing as human nature; and that everything is socially constructed, even the body. Because heterosexuality is the overwhelming norm, and homosexuality the exception, and because society is nothing but a complex of oppression, homosexuals are defined by their rejection of heteronormativity. To be queer is inherently to exist on the margins; to be odd, peculiar, weird, queer, hated, oppressed, and in revolt and rebellion. To be queer is to be dedicated to subversion, to mock conventions, to deconstruct language, to dismantle the human body, to defy “nature” and, above all, to liberate humankind from the prison of gender.
Sullivan doesn’t like where his advocacy ultimately led.
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Written by Amy K. Hall |
Friday, May 19, 2023
First, if you are in a similar situation, please know you’re not alone. There are many others who are putting their jobs on the line for the sake of truth, the good of their neighbor, and the glory of God. Take courage from their courage. Second, speaking the truth might not be as scary and/or as final as you think. It could be that a simple explanation of why you’re declining to display your pronouns or use pronouns that don’t match a person’s sex will be accepted by your employer. Third, I think this man’s response could serve as an excellent outline for you as you plan your response to an employer’s pronoun request.

In the past, we’ve talked about why a request for pronouns is not a neutral request. It reflects a false and damaging worldview—one that’s contrary to Christianity—and we’ve encouraged Christians to decline to engage in exchanges of pronouns for this reason. But of course, it’s easy to give that advice. It’s much more challenging to live it out, which is why I pray for courage and wisdom for all those who suddenly find themselves in a situation where choosing to speak the truth could possibly cost them their job.
I recently spoke to a Stand to Reason supporter who received a company-wide email saying leaders were expected to display their pronouns. After considering the cost and thinking carefully through his response, this is what he told his employers:
I appreciate the goal of mutual respect and creating a welcoming environment for everyone. My desire is to be respectful of everyone. The expectation to display my pronouns asks me to accept a premise that I can’t accept—namely, that my pronouns could be different than he/him. It’s an ontological claim about the nature of reality, and I hold a different view. I’m not asking those that are transgender to accept my view of reality, but I’m being asked to accept theirs.
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Written by Amy K. Hall |
Friday, March 17, 2023
Don’t confuse grace for others with inaction. Don’t confuse treating people with dignity with avoiding loving confrontations. Be strong in your convictions, be open about the truth, and be faithful in your work, knowing that the reason you’re responding to others with grace rather than hatred is not so that people won’t hate you. Even Jesus was hated. That can’t be avoided. Rather, you’re responding like Jesus because you’re called to “proclaim his excellencies” by reflecting his character to others.

This is a difficult time. Evil is called good, while good is called evil. Objective truth is disdained. Feelings are divinized. God is mocked.
If you’re feeling outraged, you’re in good company. Lot “felt his righteous soul tormented day after day by their lawless deeds.” Jeremiah, who watched his beloved, unrepentant nation crumble under God’s judgment, is known as “the weeping prophet.” Elijah begged God to take his life when he thought all had forsaken God. Paul cried out when he was unjustly struck, “God is going to strike you, you whitewashed wall!” And who can forget the prophet Micaiah’s angry words towards those who would not listen: “Mark my words, all you people!”
It’s not wrong to be outraged by evil. Our desire for justice flows directly from our love for God and our knowledge of his magnificent, righteous, beautiful character. Because he is the standard of all justice, we likewise love justice. Because he is the Creator, all truth is valuable. And because we love the truth, lies are maddening. Because he has explained what it means to love, we know how to truly help people. And because we love people, injustices infuriate. God himself is angry at evil because evil destroys human beings, who are created in his image, so our outrage is understandable.
But how should we handle these feelings of outrage? Should we act on them, and if so, how?
Fortunately, the Bible doesn’t just say, “Be angry, and yet do not sin” (Eph. 4:26); it actually 1) describes what life in an unjust world should look like for Christians, and 2) explains the reason why we can respond to a fallen world as Jesus did without betraying justice.
What Should Living in an Unjust World Look Like for Christians?
First Peter is the go-to book for figuring out how to behave in an unjust world where you are “slandered as an evildoer,” where “they malign you,” where “you do what is right and suffer for it.” Peter tells us that even when we suffer under unreasonable people, we are to 1) patiently endure it, 2) continue to do what is right, and 3) respond as Jesus responded to those who maligned him.
God called us “out of darkness into his marvelous light” so that we might “proclaim the excellencies of him who has called us,” and, in part, we proclaim his excellencies by reflecting his character to the world—speaking the truth, being honest, treating human beings made in the image of God with dignity, “putting aside all malice and all deceit and hypocrisy and envy and all slander.” No matter how we’re treated as we work for the good of the people around us, we are to continue to act in the ways God has called us to act.
More specifically, we are to imitate Christ:
If when you do what is right and suffer for it you patiently endure it, this finds favor with God. For you have been called for this purpose, since Christ also suffered for you, leaving you an example for you to follow in his steps, who committed no sin, nor was any deceit found in his mouth; and while being reviled, he did not revile in return; while suffering, he uttered no threats, but kept entrusting himself to him who judges righteously. (1 Pet. 20–23)
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Written by Amy K. Hall |
Saturday, February 18, 2023

Nothing God does can be rightly understood apart from his being, character, and authority. We have to start there, interpreting his actions in light of who he is, not interpreting his character in light of how we would perceive a fallen human being who illegitimately took those same actions.

Many people misinterpret God’s character when looking at his demands and actions in history because they imagine what they would think of a fallen human being who did the things God has done, and they recoil. Failing to picture God as he is, they picture instead what they’re familiar with—a sinful, human tyrant imposing his preferred laws on people by force, destroying nations, or demanding worship.
But a fallen human being who has illegitimately grabbed power over others in order to use them for his own selfish purposes and vain ego is simply not analogous to a perfectly good being—a perfectly just and righteous Creator and Judge with legitimate authority over all, a God who sought the good of his enemies at his own expense, a loving Father of his people.
God, as the perfectly good and just Creator—the very standard of morality—has the kind of authority no fallen human being could ever rightly have, and so he can rightly do things no fallen human being could ever rightly do. That might sound odd to you at first, but the idea that a particular action can be wrong for one person but right for another is not a foreign concept to us. In our everyday life, we all live according to the understanding that the acceptability of a person’s actions can depend on his authority and role. For example, if I were to lock you in a building for a decade, my action would be morally wrong—even if you were, in fact, guilty of something. But if the government were to rightly convict you of a crime and lock you in a building for a decade, its action would be good and just. The difference in the morality of our actions—though it’s the same action in both cases—is determined by the authority and role of the government and my lack of those things.
Now apply that principle to God. Just as there are ways the government can act that are good and just that would not be good and just if I were to act in those ways, so there are things the ultimate being in the universe can rightly do such that if any fallen, finite human being did those things, we would rightly recoil.
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