At the darkest moment, she ran her fingers across the grain of the wood bench. The beauty of its intricate veining and brown tones began to sing gently. He used to love working with wood and always said it was one of God’s finest creations. That is when she felt the warmth of the sun and the cool summer breeze work together to remind her of old pleasures. It caused her to breathe in deeply. 

As she sat at her desk, the thought of her husband’s death stole the air from her lungs. She wanted to carry her weight, but gravity had multiplied seven times. She might as well have been physically ill, for the bodily fatigue was overwhelming. She barely had the strength to lift her arms to the keyboard. Somehow, the shadow of death had embedded itself within her heart. It eviscerated her, left a void nothing could fill, and it swallowed everything.
Every moment lingered. Grief had delayed the minutes. It wanted to make sure she slowed down to feel every pang. Every sense was heightened except those that experience happiness. A panic of sorrow began to envelop her.
She needed to get out of there. The luxurious furnishings of the corporate office, once symbols of her success, had turned to dust. She walked out as several finely polished coworkers looked on. She avoided their gaze, trying to hide the tears.
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Looking around, we see countless people pursuing what will not last. If we look within ourselves, we see some of the same, even as believers, but the things of earth are passing away. Most people are still trying to build their Kingdom on sinking sand.

To borrow a phrase from C.S. Lewis, every worldly pleasure you are pursuing is “doomed to final frustration.” These include sinful pleasures and lawful ones. One day, they will either fail to live up to your expectations, or death will come knocking on your door and steal them from your hands.
This final frustration means two things. First, we should immediately stop pursuing sinful pleasures because not only will they fail to provide what we hope they will, but they also put our souls at risk. Second, we do not necessarily need to stop pursuing the lawful pleasures of this temporary world, but we must keep them in proper perspective because they, too, will one day let us down.
There is only one who should be our ultimate and final pursuit, and that is our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Every other temporary pursuit should serve this end.
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It throws the very concept of gender into the void, causing all genders to lose all meaning. Of course, that is precisely what a handful of critical gender theorists want. Still, many believe their gender gives them certain rights and protections under the law, but if gender goes, so do their rights associated with it. We cannot separate gender and sex without slipping into absurdity.

How many genders are there? If you Google it, you will get varying answers. Medicinenet.com says there are 74. Google’s AI says, “There are many genders, and the number is infinite. Gender is a person’s internal identification and is not determined by genetics.” What does this ultimately mean? It seems illogical to say that by separating gender from genetics, there are an infinite number of genders; instead, it seems more reasonable to say there are none.
The following analogy might help us understand why this view of gender does not multiply them but eradicates them. If I say there are a limitless number of possible ice cream flavors, therefore, there are no ice cream flavors, you would be right to point out the flaw in my logic. Even if there is no limit to the number of ice cream flavors, that does not mean that each scoop of ice cream does not have its own unique flavor. But this is not what critical gender theorists are doing. To make it fit, we need to adjust the analogy a bit.
A more accurate analogy would be to say there are a limitless number of possible ice cream flavors, but the taste of the ice cream has nothing to do with its ingredients. It is entirely psychological. One’s internal experience solely determines the flavor of the ice cream. In other words, there may be a limitless number of ingredient possibilities that would change the objective makeup of the ice cream, but since ingredients do not determine flavor, each objective recipe has an unlimited number of subjective flavors depending on who is doing the tasting.
In this analogy, the flavor of ice cream has been entirely untethered from any objectivity, which also means it becomes irrational to talk about flavors because any shared experience becomes unattainable. It is no longer possible to point to any ice cream and say it has a specific flavor, as flavor has lost all common reference points and meaning.
This freedom from objective reality is what many proponents of this view of gender find appealing.
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When your sins and those of the fallen world wear you down, turn your eyes to Jesus. He is your hope and salvation. He washes you clean, and you stand in his righteousness, not your own. Find your nourishment in Him and the fellowship of other godly people. 

As Children of God, we often find ourselves confronted by our own sinfulness. These falls can be disheartening experiences, but the book of Micah offers us profound encouragement. In Micah 7:8, after the sins of the nation have brought them low, the prophet declares as their spokesperson, “Rejoice not over me, O my enemy; when I fall, I shall rise; when I sit in darkness, the LORD will be a light to me.” This powerful statement highlights the resilience of the believer, even amid sin and the Lord’s discipline.
John Piper describes this as “gutsy guilt,” a state where we are broken by sin yet remain confident in God’s redemption. The enemy has no reason to boast because, despite the believer’s fall, they will rise again. A true believer, even when brought low by their own sins, retains hope, preventing any real triumph for the enemy. In the darkest moments of sin, the Lord remains a guiding light, never abandoning those who turn to Him.
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As you view the complicated situations caused by sinful hearts in this fallen world, remember that God keeps his covenant with his people, and he will bring you home to the promised land. No sin can thwart his purposes, and he will be faithful to his children.

Sometimes, our lives can get so messy that we wonder if God can redeem them. Reading through Genesis 30 and 31, we see how God’s plan proceeds even through jealousies, envy, and the strivings of our human nature. Sinfulness cannot thwart God’s plan. Though the sinner is guilty, the Lord continues in his grace to honor his covenant people.
Chapter 30 reads like a soap opera and spans many years. Jacob’s wives, Rachel and Leah, are jealous of each other and compete by trying to give Jacob more children than the other. They do this either through their wombs or the wombs of their handmaidens. The amount of sin and misguided ambition the Lord overlooked in all three of them at this time is astonishing. Despite their sins, God blesses them with children, and the twelve tribes of Israel are born. God’s plan for the nation of Israel continues.
Later, Jacob grows tired of his father-in-law Laban never keeping his word in their agreements and works a scheme to strengthen his flock and weaken Laben’s. He agrees with Laben that any sheep born with stripes or speckles would be his, and any without them would be Laben’s. In an unimaginable turn, Jacob’s strategy to get the striped sheep to be born was likely a folk custom of the time. Despite this, the Lord favors Jacob and grows his flock by giving him striped and speckled sheep.
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Scripture tells us we are to love the Lord with all our minds. Yes, we are to love God with more than the mind alone, but in our current culture, we quickly spend hours giving our minds to countless trivialities. The reason we do it is because it is easy. Everything tends toward the path of least resistance, including our mental faculties. If we allow ourselves to do so, we will continue to hand our hearts and minds to hours of TV binge-watching and social media. The more we do it, the more spiritually and mentally sluggish we will become.

In the same way our bodies can get out of shape, our minds can also grow sluggish. Our ability to concentrate can grow weaker, the level of reading we can retain can diminish, and even our ability to think quickly and logically can begin to falter. The mind is like a muscle. The more you use it, the stronger it grows, and we need to keep up our training. I am convicted of this because I have not been as diligent as I should be on this front.
This summer, I am teaching a class at the law school that will cover the core institutions and values of the Western legal system. The subject matter will include several theological and philosophical underpinnings. In preparation for this class, I must add a minimum of ten hours a week of study to my schedule. Whether or not I will succeed at this level of study remains to be seen.
To give it my best effort, I have scheduled two hours of study every Monday through Thursday evening—I lock myself in my study from 7 pm to 9 pm. I also include some weekend hours as well. This pattern will need to continue for the next 15 weeks.
The first week was difficult. Though I regularly read and write, it is usually not at this level of rigor. The first week of study is like the first week of a new workout regimen; your body is not used to it, it feels every exertion you make, and it is sore and tired afterward.
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It is good when the Word of God troubles our souls. If the depth and majesty it reveals about the Lord of all creation does not produce the fear of Him in our hearts, then the blessings it pronounces do not belong to us either. Think through your most recent encounters with the Word. How did your heart respond to it?

We often approach the Word of God as if we are above it—as if we are the judge to determine what is significant and what is not. We do this unconsciously when we give Scripture a surface-level reading and think we have given it the consideration it deserves. We regularly sit as judges over the Word of God when we attend church and listen to sermons.
Dr. Martin Lloyd Jones once asked, “When did we last go to church and expect something to happen?” We usually expect church to be the same old routine it has always been because we have conformed to this world’s pattern. We listen to a sermon and then make our worldly declarations over it. We determine what is good and what is lacking. Did we like the pastor’s voice? Were his anecdotes funny? And on and on we go. When we do this, we fail to realize that if the pastor was faithful to the text he preached, we did not encounter a preacher; we had an encounter with the Word of God. Yet our hearts were unresponsive.
Hebrews 4:12 tells us that the Word of God is living and active.
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Prayer is a powerful means of grace that God has provided to us. He has good things to give us that we do not have because we have not asked. Some may argue, but God knows what we need even if we do not ask. That is true, but refusing to pray is disobedience, and there are rewards to obedience in prayer that we will not experience any other way. 

Sometimes, to protect a passage of scripture from the abuses it receives from those who twist it, we add so many qualifications that we eliminate not only the false teaching but also the profound truth it communicates. We find one such passage in the Sermon on the Mount where Jesus says, “Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you (Matt. 7:7).
If you watch prosperity preachers, you will find several who pervert this passage of scripture. They turn it into some name it and claim it doctrine, and most of what they want to claim has more to do with worldly well-being than spiritual. Other teachers have said that God cannot work until you pray. He is hindered until you allow him to work by giving him permission in prayer, as if God is not soveriegn.
Others will say this verse has such a clear promise that if God is not answering your prayers, it must be because you lack faith. Convenient for them, you can show God you have enough faith and get your prayers answered by financially donating to their ministry. Men and women who do such things are wolves who feed on the flock instead of feeding the sheep. If they do not repent, their judgment awaits.
We are right in protecting this passage from abuse, but sometimes we go too far. For example. Someone might say, “There is power in prayer.” And a well-meaning Christian will respond, “The power is not actually in prayer, but in God. We do not trust in prayer; we trust in him.”
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Everything could fall apart. The darkest things imaginable could happen, except one: that God would lose one of us who has been saved by faith and fail to complete the work He has begun in us. We will see Jesus face to face in all of His glory. One day, all believers will inhabit a place without sickness, without tears, and without death. A place where it can no longer come undone, but this is not it.

There is something about me that always wants to be in control. If I am sick, I want to outlearn the disease and overcome it. If relationships start to fail, I want to be able to charm them back to life. We all desire control. I think this is why we buy into so many fad diets promising snake-oil results. I do not say this as a judgment on eating right; it is wise, but how much stems from the desire to bend reality to fit our ideals? If there is something I can do, then it is something I can control. “I am the master of my ship.” The desire to govern this world has even entered Christian circles. “If you can muster enough faith, all will go right. Positive thoughts create positive results.” The problem is it is not true. We could do all of this, and it could still fall apart. We are not the masters of our destinies.
With every peal of thunder, I realize that I am not the center of the universe. When it comes to orchestrating the master plan for creation, I am no more special than the other 7 billion people on the planet. We all tend to live as if we are, but it is a delusion. You and I could come into contact with something in this fallen world that could end our lives within a matter of days, and there is nothing we can do about it.
Once we are gone, our co-workers would remember us and then replace us. Sure, they may even put up a picture for a few years to commemorate our contribution, but they would continue without us. Our demise would most likely hit our family the hardest, but our children would move on with their lives just like we would want them to. Even the one we love, if the Lord wills, would find someone else to love and with whom to share the rest of their life.
I dislike thinking about these things, but it is good. It reminds me that the world is not yet how it should be, so I should not put my trust and hope in it. There is something eternal that deserves my devotion and attention. Something else should be my refuge.
Though storms swell around us, we have found salvation in the cleft of the rock: Christ Jesus. All the sins that caused us to be fearful of God have been forgiven. The great and righteous judge of the universe has reconciled us to Himself through the cross. Yes, we, sinners, are friends of God. He calls us His children.
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Jesus has selected a suitable furnace for me, not a hot and hasty one, which seems likely to harden and consume me–but one with a gentle and lingering heat, which melts my heart gradually, and lets out some of its dross. Though I cannot love the furnace, yet the longer I live, the more I see of its need and its use. A believer seldom walks steadily and brightly, unless he is well-furnaced.

The following is an excerpt from a letter from John Berridge to a fellow minister who had recently injured himself in a bad fall.
Dear Sir,
I received your letter, and dare not say that I am sorry for your fall, nor indeed for any afflictions that God lays on His children; they are tokens of His fatherly love, and needful medicine for us. Rather would I pray that while God keeps you in the furnace, you may be still, and feel your dross and tin being purged away.
The Lord Jesus gives me a dose of this medicine most days; and I am never so well as when I am taking it, though I frequently make a crooked face at it.
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