The eyes of man were made for glory. His soul hungers for something worth seeing. This world is a war of spectacles.

Man is a watching creature, a born admirer, a natural worshiper. It is why he gazes at the stars, climbs to the top of mountains, explores underwater worlds, travels to new and untamed lands — he craves vistas. It explains why he pays good money to pack into sports arenas, stares for hours at television screens, pays homage to the flaming horizon, and sings with Adam at the naked frame of Eve — he was made to see wonders.

Human eyes have had an appetite from the beginning. Consider Eve’s fall: “When the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes . . . she took of its fruit and ate” (Genesis 3:6). Eyes delighted; sin committed. The pattern holds with her and Adam’s children. When man exchanges the glory of God, he does so for images (Romans 1:23) — for that which intrigues the eye, something seen, a glory exchanged.

Ravenous, then, are the eyes of man. Like the belly, they hunger. Like the throat, they thirst. Like the feet, they wander, searching after something — anything — worth beholding. But in a world of images, he still hasn’t found what he is looking for. One wonder will be replaced by another and another. “Sheol and Abaddon are never satisfied, and never satisfied are the eyes of man” (Proverbs 27:20).

But oh, how often humanity conceives its happiness backward. We think to achieve, to be somebody celebrated and revered — this fills the golden chalice with lasting happiness. But man is no dog to live for pats on the head. Just the opposite. Man is a creature who looks out the window through the rain, searching for something to enthrall him. To first see, not be seen; to chiefly admire, not be admired; to fix one’s gaze beyond earth’s horizons — this is the happiness so few ever find.

Back of Glory

Scripture testifies that some famished eyes looked above and found the true object of their desire.

Such ones climbed mountains to exclaim at the heavens, “Please show me your glory!” (Exodus 33:18). Such souls, when surrounded by danger and violence, wrote, “One thing have I asked of the Lord, that will I seek after . . . to gaze upon the beauty of the Lord” (Psalm 27:4). These eyes faced east and begged to see what would soothe their reason for being — in this world and the next. “As for me, I shall behold your face in righteousness,” sang David. “When I awake, I shall be satisfied with your likeness” (Psalm 17:15).

“Show me your glory! Satisfy me with your beauty! Show me your face — even beyond the grave — and it is well with me.”

But Old Testament saints, at best, viewed only the backside of divine glory. God tells Moses, “You cannot see my face, for man shall not see me and live” (Exodus 33:20). The only glory that can satisfy man’s insatiable craving is the glory that would kill him to behold. So Moses hid in the cleft, seeing his back and hearing his name, but God’s face he did not see.

Face of Glory

Yet the story was not done. The glory that Moses could not see the face of, the beauty too fatal for fallen eyes, was born at Christmas. Wonder of wonders.

“The glory that Moses could not see the face of, the beauty too fatal for fallen eyes, was born at Christmas.”

To a little town named Bethlehem arrived the God no one had ever seen. The only God, who was eternally at the Father’s side — he has made him known (John 1:18). Christ — “the image of the invisible God,” the blinding light of God’s glory, “the exact imprint of his nature,” the very face of God’s beauty — became flesh and dwelt among us (Colossians 1:15; Hebrews 1:3; 2 Corinthians 4:4–6). “And we have seen his glory,” the astonished apostle writes, “glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth” (John 1:14).

Now, this all-Glorious One came down to us, as Moses came down from the mountain to Israel, veiled. His glory during his incarnation and humiliation was beheld not as much by sight as by faith. It stood as the marvel of angels that the thrice-holy one on the throne, possessor of all riches and glory, should grow up in the world of men “like a young plant, and like a root out of dry ground; he had no form or majesty that we should look at him, and no beauty that we should desire him” (Isaiah 53:2). The King veiled his majesty in human flesh, disguised his splendor, hid his name, and dwelled among the poor, diseased, and condemned.

But the eyes of faith came to see more than just a Jewish man. “Blessed are you, Simon Bar-Jonah!” Jesus exclaims after Peter identifies him as the Christ. “For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father who is in heaven” (Matthew 16:17).

Yet even his disciples were slow to see him. Philip requests of Jesus, “Show us the Father, and it is enough for us.” “Have I been with you so long,” Jesus replies, “and you still do not know me, Philip?” (John 14:8–9). Then, with weight enough to break the world’s back, he utters, “Whoever has seen me has seen the Father.” When Philip heard the words and saw the works and beheld the Person born in Bethlehem, he should have seen the face of the one who dwells in “unapproachable light, whom no one has ever seen or can see” (1 Timothy 6:16).

Seeing Heaven Himself

The sight of Jesus in all his glory alone can satisfy the eyes of men. Overhear Jesus’s prayer hours before the cross. He bends to ask that his disciples be given heaven’s crown jewel. What is that?

Father, I desire that they also, whom you have given me, may be with me where I am, to see my glory that you have given me because you loved me before the foundation of the world. (John 17:24)

“The sight of Jesus in all his glory alone can satisfy the eyes of men.”

Jesus wants his people to enjoy the sight their soul was made to see: the glory of God, shining forth in his glory, forever. He desires it — so much so that nails through the hands, the feet, the soul will not stop him from obtaining it. Here is the ultimate something worth seeing. Here is glory beyond hyperbole, said Thomas Watson.

Here is why redeemed beings have eyes: to see and savor Jesus Christ in his uncloaked glory. This is why we have mouths: to sing back to him praise unending. In his presence, faith will flee at that face whose intensity retires the sun: “The city has no need of sun or moon to shine on it, for the glory of God gives it light, and its lamp is the Lamb” (Revelation 21:23).

Sight That Makes Us Happy

The ache of men’s eyes sends them many places. The eyes of man rove the beauties of this world, restless. Only here, beholding Jesus — now by faith, soon by sight — do we find the beatific vision, the sight that makes eternally happy. Where are you looking, this Christmas, to satisfy your soul?

“Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God” (Matthew 5:8) — can you imagine anything better? In the closing chapter, we read, “They will see his face” (Revelation 22:4) — is there a better happily-ever-after? This is not the only joy heaven holds, but it is the best. His kingly countenance, concealed no longer, is heaven’s consummation for both unfallen angel and redeemed man.

“Your eyes will behold the king in his beauty” (Isaiah 33:17). We will not see him as he was in Bethlehem or in the streets of Jerusalem; we will see him as he is in royal beauty (1 John 3:2). There is a great deal of difference, Jeremiah Burroughs comments, “between seeing the King at an ordinary time, and seeing of him when he is in his Robes, with his Crown upon his head, and his Scepter in his hand, and set upon his Throne, with all his Nobles about him in all his glory” (Moses His Choice, with His Eye Fixed upon Heaven, 537).

And this sight of him transfigured will not merely satisfy but transform. “Beloved, we are God’s children now, and what we will be has not yet appeared; but we know that when he appears we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is” (1 John 3:2). Burroughs again: “A deformed man may see a beautiful object, and that sight shall not make him like that beautiful object; but the sight of God shall make the soul glorious, as God is glorious” (581–82).

Seeing him as he is, we will join the seraphim in wonder, shouting holy! and worthy! until we threaten to burst with happiness. Available to us is the Face of glory, not the back; an eternal gaze at his beauty, not a passing glimpse. Now we may see in a mirror dimly, “but then face to face.” Now we know in part; then we shall know fully, even as we have been fully known (1 Corinthians 13:12).

This is the glory whispered at Christmas, sung at Easter, shouted in eternity — the glory profound enough to satiate our souls and make us happy forever.

They bought jeans already torn at the knees. The ambassadors from the great city left in haste to make peace with Joshua and his coming armies. But first, locals reported seeing them rummage through clothes at the local thrift store. Their pretend shabbiness served a vital purpose: survival.

Gibeon lay in the direct path of Joshua’s conquest. He, his men, and their God would be there within days. When the citizens of Gibeon heard what Israel’s God had done to Pharoah, to Jericho, and to Ai, they trembled. Though “greater than Ai,” they shuddered. Who could overcome a plague-punishing, wall-crumbling, city-engulfing Israel and her invisible God?

Their ragtag ambassadors — armed with worn-out sacks, patched sandals, tattered clothes, torn and mended wineskins, and “dry and crumbly” provisions (Joshua 9:4–5) — served as Gibeon’s salvation army. They intercepted Joshua at Gilgal saying in strained voice, “We have come from a distant country, so now make a covenant with us” (Joshua 9:6). Would their lie be discovered?

“Who are you? And where do you come from?” Joshua replies.

They reiterate their deception and add more drama to their performance:

“Here is our bread. It was still warm when we took it from our houses as our food for the journey on the day we set out to come to you, but now, behold it is dry and crumbly.”

“These wineskins were new when we filled them, and behold, they have burst.”

“And these garments and sandals of ours are worn out from the very long journey.” (Joshua 9:12–13)

Joshua looks at the bread, the wineskins, the sandals, the garments, and decides to make a covenant with them. The text interprets that decision for us: “So the men took some of their provisions, but did not ask counsel from the Lord” (Joshua 9:14).

Failure of Good Leaders

Joshua, the son of Nun, was an excellent leader. If you were to write a book on leadership, you could hardly improve upon his example.

From the start, he had large sandals to fill. Moses, the sea-splitting shepherd, the mountain-climbing mediator, the law-providing prophet, now lay dead. Millions of eyes turned Joshua’s way — eyes of a people too given to squint in deadly disapproval. Would he be able to lead them into the Promised Land? Would they be led into the Promised Land?

In the face of vast armies, fortified cities, and fatal chariots, God’s commission to Joshua required force and bravery — which his very presence supplied, if Joshua would trust him. And Joshua did. He routinely risked life and limb venturing upon God’s word. In the end, he seizes and divides the Promised Land among God’s people.

Until now, just one potential blemish stood on his resumé: an early defeat at Ai. Although the rout might have besmeared Joshua, the punishment rightfully fell to covetous Achan. But now, in giving a forbidden covenant to Israel’s enemies, a caveat must be given concerning Joshua’s leadership. Seeing the ragtag group of ambassadors before him, he made the reasonable deduction that they must have traveled a far distance. He trusted what he saw.

“Joshua commits the fault of especially successful leaders over time: He forgets to consult his God.”

He did not make that mistake when overlooking the land with the spies. He trembled not at giants. But here, he believed his eyes, went with his ears, depended on his cohort of rulers who all did the same — he did not ask counsel from the Lord. The matter seemed straightforward enough; they could handle it themselves. Here, Joshua commits the common fault of many successful leaders over time: He forgets to consult his God.

Boast of Businessmen

How tempting is this for Christian leaders today?

You’ve given sermons or taught Sunday school or written articles in the past, and your Lord stood with you. You have made decisions for family, for your company, for your children, and God has blessed them. This time feels no different than then. So, without thinking much about it, you switch to autopilot, lean on your wisdom and strength, and grow more forgetful in prayer. Success is taken for granted, gratitude shrinks, presumption ascends.

I imagine something like this happened to the Christian businessmen in the first century. James confronts them this way,

Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go into such and such a town and spend a year there and trade and make a profit”— yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes. Instead you ought to say, “If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that.” As it is, you boast in your arrogance. All such boasting is evil. (James 4:13–16)

I imagine these CEOs of the early church trusted their Lord at first. They did not presume success in financial endeavors, but humbly prayed, “Lord, give us this day our daily bread.” But assets began to pile. Their net worth took eagle’s wings. Steady profit seemed “the way of things,” the result of shrewd investment and hard work. Their mouths soon betrayed the evil boasting of their hearts about their future exploits. They beheld an elegantly dressed Gibeon of financial gain, and too forgot to consult their Lord and his will, as if theirs alone mattered.

As at Other Times

Oh how long this prayerless pride can grow undetected. Few sit down and decide not to consult Christ; none barricade the door to their prayer closets. They just become too busy; their felt-need no longer pushes them over the threshold. They begin to handle things on their own.

Charles Spurgeon knew the pull of prayerlessness — and how devastating pastoral prayerlessness could be to a congregation. He warns his seminary students,

When your soul becomes lean, your hearers, without knowing how or why, will find that your prayers in public have little savor for them; they will feel your barrenness, perhaps before you perceive it yourself. Your discourses will next betray your declension. You may utter as well-chosen words, and as fitly-ordered sentences, as aforetime; but there will be a perceptible loss of spiritual force. (Lectures to My Students)

Good Christian leaders, especially pastors, will tremble at this spiritual Samsonhood. After Delilah’s barbarous treachery, he awoke from his sleep saying to himself, “I will go out as at other times and shake myself free” (Judges 16:20). Unbeknownst to him, he went forth alone.

How regrettable are those prayerless actions and petitionless seasons? We go out as before, expecting God to be with us as before, not knowing that he has withdrawn his aid, his blessing. Temptation overcomes us; we’re left with the dry and crumbly bread of our disobedience. God may let us take a few steps on our own and draw up this treaty or that. Before long, we’re barreling forth in own wisdom and energy to the injury of ourselves and others. God gives more grace, but as any pastor can testify, the cuts and bruises still hurt.

Eyes on You

Joshua and the elders of Israel trusted their eyes, forgetting to look to God in prayer for help with what their eyes could not see. Will we learn from them? Will we live and serve looking to our Father in even seemingly small matters?

Strong trials often slap us awake. Jehoshaphat, pressed by bloodthirsty enemies, couldn’t help but pray: “We do not know what to do, but our eyes are on you” (2 Chronicles 20:12). Extreme circumstances leave our strength in the dust, tuning the heart to pray. But how many of us pray like this over the repetitive, seemingly common tasks involved in Christian life and leadership? “Lord, our eyes are on you” — even though we have successfully preached and taught and prayed and led many times before.

Taller than Jehoshaphat stood Jesus. If anyone could judge with his eyes, if anyone could charge out as before, if anyone could say, “Next year I will go into such and such a town,” it was the God-man.

“Jesus’s gracious throne of help is as near as a single Godward thought, a bowed knee, a desperate glance.”

Yet follow the gaze of the Son in all its wonder and mystery: “Truly, truly, I say to you, the Son can do nothing of his own accord, but only what he sees the Father doing. For whatever the Father does, that the Son does likewise” (John 5:19). When Jesus chose disciples, or reclined at table, or answered the scribes, or taught in the synagogue, or went forth from a city, or stopped along the road — his eyes never left his Father. He acted from a rhythm of consciously consulting above. He inquired of his Father at every step — particularly the bloody ones that led up Golgotha’s hill. His was not simply the resolve of a moment but the willing trajectory of a lifetime: “Not my will, but yours, be done.”

Would you want life any other way than “looking to Jesus” in all matters, big and seemingly small? Will you not joyfully, speedily, constantly bring every request to him? In childlikeness, will we not rush in with every small request, even as an excuse to go to him? Jesus’s gracious throne of help is as near as a single Godward thought, a bowed knee, a desperate glance.

His death secured this grand privilege. Our King of love smiles, beckons us near to give communion and counsel. Godly leaders, go to him increasingly, happily, with every and all sizes of request.

Moses, in the classic movie The Ten Commandments (1956), goes down to oversee the work of the Hebrew slaves. He does not yet know that he too is Hebrew by birth; Egypt’s golden chalice rests comfortably in hand. He arrives after the taskmasters have seized Joshua (his future assistant and successor), who just rescued an old Hebrew woman nearly crushed under a large stone.

Deaf to pleas to spare the old woman, the taskmasters had refused to halt the workforce to free her. The woman couldn’t escape. So Joshua went down and struck an Egyptian overseer, halting the work immediately, sparing her life and forfeiting his own.

Moses, prince of Egypt, arrives at the behest of a Hebrew woman. Hearing what happened, he asks Joshua, “Do you know it is death to strike an Egyptian?”

“I know it,” he responds.

“Yet you struck him. Why?”

“To save the old woman.”

“What is she to you?”

“An old woman.”

Moses took less time to recover from the slap than I did. Because she is an old woman. I realized how much more Moses I was, than Joshua, in this exchange. Joshua had a clear moral category I lacked: that of saving an old woman simply because she is an endangered old woman. His heroism needed no further explanation or incentive. She did not need to be his mother, his aunt, or his queen. For Joshua to forfeit his own life for hers, all she needed to be was an old woman, desperate for help.

Inner Calculus

This exchange left a mark because I imagined my own inner calculus in the crisis:

Do what you can — chide the taskmasters for their insensitivity and murder; receive a lashing for it even — but don’t be so foolish as to lay down your own life for hers.

To do otherwise seemed bad math.

She already stood with one foot in the grave. Her best days of productivity, of house and community building, faded in the rearview. The way of women had ceased with her (Genesis 18:11). Weak and frail, she had mere days and months ahead of her; I gripped years and decades by the throat. Her sun was setting; I was rising. How could her remaining life outweigh mine?

And yet, in a flash of glory Joshua strikes the oppressors, venturing to substitute his life for hers.

Death of Honor

Do you know such calculations on a smaller scale? Are we today a people known for honoring our elderly with our time, resources, and attention? Or is it not the case that if a friend should proverbially walk an old lady across the street, we would instinctively ask, “Who is she to you?” The youthful, the innovative, the beautiful, the YouTube sensations, the celebrities and professional athletes receive our admiration. The enfeebled, the mostly spent, the hard of hearing and seeing and walking do not.

Is it not true that the elderly mostly live in the background of our attention, cast as the extra pecking away at an iPhone, trying to send a text? Youth are rarely taught to honor grandma and grandpa, let alone the aged in general.

The scene of this endangered old woman comes closer to God’s timeless expectations than our assumptions today. The real Moses would soon write a law that read, “You shall stand up before the gray head and honor the face of an old man, and you shall fear your God: I am the Lord” (Leviticus 19:32). A special respect and care were due to the elderly of Israel.

Why don’t we stand before the elderly man in our midst? Why so little honor paid to the weathered face of the old woman? Why so little fear of God? Of the many options, I contribute two that have discipled me to give less regard to the elderly than is fitting.

1. Information Age

Throughout time, the elderly have served as sages of the community. They have experienced and lived, lost and learned lessons lacking among the untested thoughts and ideals of youth.

So Job spoke, “Wisdom is with the aged, and understanding in length of days” (Job 12:12). So Elihu explained his deference in saying, “Let days speak, and many years teach wisdom” (Job 32:7). And so Paul exhorts that the older women are to “teach what is good, and so train the young women to love their husbands and children, to be self-controlled, pure, working at home, kind, and submissive to their own husbands” (Titus 2:3–5). Generally, the elderly ought not only to be the wisest among us, but also regarded as so.

But what is abuelo and abuela compared with all-wise Google? What can they tell me that a quick search can’t? Expertise on anything under the sun lies at my fingertips. What good is one old chief, viewing life from his narrow, dated lens, compared with a million sages with advanced degrees, anticipating the next trends and offering unsleeping counsel on anything I care to know?

Jesus taught that Christians who lose family for his sake receive back a hundredfold in the church. We seem to believe that those who lose wisdom from the elderly receive back a millionfold on the Internet.

2. Cosmetic Age

Our society does not like to look at death. Our funerals are short; our grieving brief. When the signs of the end begin, we cover it. We dye our hair. We get fake teeth. We iron wrinkles and use liposuction. We diet and make-up and teeth-whiten to preserve the appearance that we will live forever. While living, we embalm.

We all dread the infirmities old age brings. Solomon, in Ecclesiastes 12:1–8, captures the “evil days” of aging in poetic terms. These are days when one says, “I have no pleasure in them” (verse 1). Days when the sun and moon and stars darken, and you live under perpetual cloud (verse 2). Days when hands and arms shake violently, strong men hunch, and your grinders — your teeth — cease because they are few (verse 3). Days lived indoors with light sleeping and little hearing (verse 4). Days afraid of heights, days of graying hair and shriveled appetite (verse 5). Days when the golden bowl begins cracking, the silver chord begins fraying, and the body prepares to return to dust and the spirit to God (verse 6–7). Vanity of vanities, the Preacher concludes (verse 8).

And so what are we to do with these weathered boats with tattered masts sailing among us, these reminders of what the crash of time and sin is doing to us all? Honor them or ignore them? See glory in their worn faces or our own inevitable defeat? In the halls of honor, we do not keep dying flowers.

Testimonies and Silver Crowns

Our God would have us stand up before the gray head and honor the old face.

What can the aged teach us (a question already lacking humility)? Well, while any elderly person can speak of the scars and successes of human experience, the old saints in the church can tell you about a lifetime of God’s faithfulness, his kindness, his steadfast love.

Siri will not answer how good God has been to her. Google cannot testify that even to old age, God has carried him through countless trials (Isaiah 46:4). The wrinkled face of the saint with a wrinkled Bible is a treasure to all who love God and want to know him more. And the elderly saint, “full of sap and green,” has a testimony and wisdom that the young and beautiful and strong need to hear (Psalm 92:12–15). David wanted to age for this very purpose: “Even to old age and gray hairs, O God, do not forsake me, until I proclaim your might to another generation, your power to all those to come” (Psalms 71:18).

“Gray hair crowns an old and well-lived life, a life that should be celebrated, not ignored.”

And what of the challenges of growing frail? How do we commend that? The Bible also speaks of fullness of days as a splendor. “The glory of young men is their strength, but the splendor of old men is their gray hair” (Proverbs 20:29). We see the glory, but not the splendor. And, “Gray hair is a crown of glory; it is gained in a righteous life” (Proverbs 16:31). Gray hair crowns an old and well-lived life, one that should be celebrated, not overlooked.

We miss much of the wisdom and glory of old age when the elderly dwell apart. Ancient times did not have government-run nursing homes, social-security programs, or retirement centers. All three converged in one place: the household. With multigenerational living now mostly a thing of the past in the West, we pick and choose to see our elderly family or not, affording them little influence in our lives. And without multigenerational representation, we can miss it in the church as well.

Lost Message

Of course, some elderly people have not lived wisely or well. Yet, John Piper observes, “There are tokens of respect and demonstrations of honor that belong to older people, simply because they are older. God has granted them to live long, and you shall fear your God by honoring the men and women who have borne his image to old age.”

The fear of God presides over this honor. Piper again says of Psalm 71,

This text commands the younger ones among us not to stride presumptuously and carelessly into the presence of an older person as though we were crossing no gap — as though we and they were simply peers with no special respect and honor to be shown to them. “You shall rise up before the gray head; you shall show honor to face of an old person.” . . .

And the loss of these manners of respect from baby boomers and teenagers is directly related to their small view of God and the contemporary foreignness of the idea of the fear of God. If God has become a buddy, you can hardly expect people to stand when an old man enters the room.

“The old saints in the church can tell you about a lifetime of God’s faithfulness, his kindness, his steadfast love.”

Some elderly among us forfeit degrees of honor because of how they lived. Yet old age is still to be acknowledged. We take the customs of our culture and communicate to our elders, “You are venerable.”

Honor the Old Face

Technological advances, state-run nursing homes, the worship of innovation and progress, and Western individualism may make it seem unnatural to show special honor to the elderly. Society little incentivizes my generation to look to old heads for wisdom or show deference or respect. The old is passing away; the new has come.

But while we smirk at the old man struggling with his iPhone, or shake our head as the old woman drives 30 miles per hour under the speed limit, God calls for honor. While we size up the gray hair and wrinkled faces for what we think they contribute to the progress of society, God might have us stand when they enter the room.

Do you honor the gray head in your family, neighborhood, church? When the world observes how we behave among the elderly — especially the elderly in the church — and they wonder aloud, “What is she to you?”

In the fear of the Lord, reply, “An old woman.”

Like a viper from the bushes, the Amalek attacked Israel. The shores had not yet washed clean of Pharoah’s army, nor had the people reached Sinai, before new enemies emerged: “Then Amalek came and fought with Israel at Rephidim” (Exodus 17:8).

Desperate circumstance made soldiers of slaves. Moses, their commander and chief, instructed Joshua to gather men and march into battle. Moses would take a different route, fight on a different front: “Tomorrow I will stand on the top of the hill with the staff of God in my hand” (Exodus 17:9).

So it happened. “Whenever Moses held up his hand, Israel prevailed, and whenever he lowered his hand, Amalek prevailed” (Exodus 17:10–11). A strange way to win or lose a battle. The lives of men suspended in midair with Moses’s staff. Held high, Israel aggressed. As hands drooped, Amalek played havoc. The prophet learned that gravity is an unrelenting foe: “Moses’ hands grew weary” (Exodus 17:12).

Pastors too know such weariness — this burn of holding their arms up in intercession for God’s people. Almost tireless, see them upon the hill, day in day out, month in month out, year in year out. Seasons change, but there they are upon the peak. Sometimes it all seems useless. Sometimes it is thankless. The sunbeams of complaints beat upon the brow; the sorrows of their people wear on the spirit. Gravity, in ministry, is an unrelenting foe.

Years pass. Arms droop. Just a few years, and some pastors have dropped them altogether. Blessed then, is the pastor who has Aaron and Hur with him:

Moses’s hands grew weary, so they took a stone and put it under him, and he sat on it, while Aaron and Hur held up his hands, one on one side, and the other on the other side. So his hands were steady until the going down of the sun. And Joshua overwhelmed Amalek and his people with the sword. (Exodus 17:12–13)

The proverb is here embodied: “Though a man might prevail against one who is alone, two will withstand him — a threefold cord is not quickly broken” (Ecclesiastes 4:12). Blessed is the man who stands with brother elders at his side, but abundantly blessed is he who has a whole church holding up his arms.

How to Love Your Pastor

Before becoming one, I rarely asked, How do I best care for my pastors? How can I be a blessing to them, refresh them, uphold their arms? My pastors always seemed to have it together. I needed their help, it seemed, on a one-way street. But Scripture does not show it to be so. Drawing from John Owen’s short but excellent little book Duties of Christian Fellowship, consider a few ways a flock cares well for their shepherd.

1. Esteem Them

Some families find it easy to spend the car ride home from church doing little more than criticizing the pastor and his sermon. I stand convicted overhearing Charles Spurgeon,

Filled with the same spirit of contrariety, the men of this world still depreciate the ministers whom God sends them and profess that they would gladly listen if different preachers could be found. Nothing can please them, their cavils are dealt out with heedless universality. Cephas is too blunt, Apollos is too flowery, Paul is too argumentative, Timothy is too young, James is too severe, John is too gentle. (Eclectic Preachers)

How important, then, to have the primary description of a flock’s relationship to its pastors be one of esteem.

Overhear the apostle enjoin what many a humble pastor might blush to mention: “We ask you, brothers, to respect those who labor among you and are over you in the Lord and admonish you, and to esteem them very highly in love because of their work” (1 Thessalonians 5:12–13). Esteem them very highly in love because of their work. Does this describe you? Or for that to happen, does the pastor need to have generational giftings and fit your preferences?

2. Imitate Them

Consider one way the author of Hebrews calls us to esteem them: “Remember your leaders, those who spoke to you the word of God. Consider the outcome of their way of life, and imitate their faith” (Hebrews 13:7). Imitation is the sincerest form of esteem.

Are your pastors especially humble, careful with their words, fearless in adversity, tender to the wayward, deeply knowledgeable of the Scriptures, happy in Christ, constant in prayer, God-fearing fathers, husbands, leaders, evangelists? What in their lives of faith do you imitate in yours? Consider the outcome of their lives and imitate them. And tell them you are doing so.

John Owen calls Christians to cover their pastor’s weaknesses in love, recognizing that their teachers’ lives are “a means of grace from God provided as a relief for them when under temptation, and an encouragement to holiness, zeal, meekness and self-denial” (19). Are you neglecting this example for your faith — the pastors’ lives — whose feet, though made of clay, support a life above reproach? In a hero-less world, are your pastors a model you look to regularly?

3. Pray for Them

How much do you pray for your pastors?

If some spent as much time praying for their pastors as they did spotlighting their weaknesses, they might not have them anymore. The question stands, “Is it realized that any perceived weakness in the pastor’s ministry may be due to the prayerlessness of the church?” (Duties, 22).

Heaven will reveal how much a pastor was upheld by the prayers of his people (or not). You may be down on the field of battle with Joshua, but if you really care to uphold his arms upon the hill — pray for him. May your prayers be stones for him to sit upon.

It has been said of Spurgeon that when asked about his great success in ministry, he remarked simply, “My people pray for me.” And on another occasion, he brought visitors down to the “boiler room” of the church, the place that gave it power and heat. He opened the door, and the visitors beheld hundreds praying before the service started.

“Do you pray for your pastor to be kept by Jesus, to be upheld and satisfied in Jesus?”

Do you pray for your pastors to be kept by Jesus, to be upheld and satisfied in Jesus? And do you pray with your pastors, that souls be saved to Jesus and the church matured for Jesus?

4. Stand by Them

May it never be the anxious thought of your pastors’ minds: Where are they?

Paul was left to ask this question, sending the sad report to Timothy: “At my first defense no one came to stand by me, but all deserted me. May it not be charged against them!” (2 Timothy 4:16).

Do you leave your pastors to charge in alone? Owen remarks, “When a captain, advancing against danger, looks back expecting to see his soldiers with him but finds that they have run away, he is greatly betrayed and forced into an impossible position by his enemies” (28).

How different is it to have or be a church full of Onesiphoruses? Paul reports,

May the Lord grant mercy to the household of Onesiphorus, for he often refreshed me and was not ashamed of my chains, but when he arrived in Rome he searched for me earnestly and found me — may the Lord grant him to find mercy from the Lord on that day! — and you well know all the service he rendered at Ephesus. (2 Timothy 1:16–18)

We can hear the gratitude spattering from Paul’s pen. Pastors are men who grow weary like the rest of us — even young pastors run and grow tired. They receive more opposition, criticism, and slander than the normal churchman. Beyond this, shepherds accept invitations into all the bitter things of the church — adulteries, betrayals, deaths, and divisions. Pastoring is a good and hard work. They stand and contest with demonic bears and lions for their sheep’s sake — will the church not stand with them?

How might you support your pastors, help them, encourage them, defend them? Resist the world’s consumer mindset and take responsibility to help nurture the flock — disciple, serve, volunteer. Remember, they equip you for the work of ministry and will be mightily encouraged to see you doing it (Ephesians 4:13).

5. Help Them Love You

A final way to care for your pastors is to help them care for your soul.

Obey your leaders and submit to them, for they are keeping watch over your souls, as those who will have to give an account. Let them do this with joy and not with groaning, for that would be of no advantage to you. (Hebrews 13:17)

“Following your shepherd’s lead is to your own advantage. Happy pastors pastor better.”

A wise flock wants its shepherds to lead with joy. As they seek to shepherd you, follow their lead to Jesus, be ready to be persuaded by their teaching, submit to their guidance as far as Scripture allows. Do so readily, eagerly, thankfully that they might cheerfully discharge their eternal duty of caring for your immortal soul (for which they will give an account).

Following your shepherds’ lead is to your own advantage. Happy pastors pastor better. If a plurality of pastors is met with mostly antagonism, indifference, or distrust, the flock does them no favors to pastor as God would have them — “exercising oversight, not under compulsion, but willingly, as God would have you” (1 Peter 5:2–3).

So esteem your pastors highly in the Lord, imitate them, pray for them, stand by them in trials, join them in the work of ministry, and be eager to submit to their direction. In so doing, you will sit them down upon the Rock, hold up their arms, and help them to serve your soul more of Jesus. And by God’s grace, you will defeat the Amaleks of the world, the flesh, and the devil. Persist in this, that we may all have a good report to give to the Master on that day — pastors for how they shepherded, and sheep for how they followed.

If your circumstances were changed into the physical realm, you might depict it this way.

You sit in the waiting room of the hospital, mindful that your case is not urgent. Yours is no life-threatening illness, no shrieking pain or broken bone, no bloody show. People rush in with needs more dire than yours; you gladly concede your spot and move further and further down the list. You sit — a day, a week, a season — never a calm moment granting you admission.

Finally, your name is called. You walk to the reception desk, and the nurse asks why you’ve come. It then dawns on you that you’re not entirely sure. “Any trouble breathing?” No. “Any lingering headaches or soreness of throat?” No. “Any fever or trouble sleeping?” No. “Then what brings you in today?” Well, something like a slow disorientation, an inescapable fatigue — symptoms of living as a single sock left at the back of the drawer.

You feel useless, ungifted, unneeded — in life, and even in the church.

You listen to the preacher every Sunday, and you know he is being used of God. You see the young couples raising children in your local church; you pray for more of God’s fingerprint upon their lives. You intercede for missionaries risking life and limb in foreign lands, lost in the blinding light of the Great Commission. You realize you have never lived twenty miles from your hometown.

You serve the Lord Jesus, but you can’t escape feeling like a background character — cast as “baker #3” — in the unfolding story all around you. More prominent actors live. Compared to them, you merely exist. Maybe you feel it keenest around a friend or family member who eclipses you in Christ. “Andrew, Simon Peter’s brother,” you remain. Every other puzzle piece seems to fit. If you went missing from the congregation, would any take notice? Are you just “singing and praying churchman #13”?

Unimpressive

You do not doubt that Christ has accepted you purely of grace apart from works — apart from your doings of the past, the present, or the future. But when cynicism descends, you still wonder how the church is better off with your inclusion. You’re unimpressive — okay, no problem. You know Paul reminds the church at Corinth that most were not wise in the world’s eyes, not powerful, not noble. Rather, there was a foolishness about them, a weakness and lowliness to win the world’s sneer. A church full of kids picked last at recess — to shame the strong and silence the boasting (1 Corinthians 1:26–29).

But you still wonder why you don’t feel more alive and useful. You are not the sluggard or his sophisticated brother, excusing himself from the committed life. Maybe the Master has cast you as the one-talent saint of lower ability, yet you still want to invest it the best you can — unlike the servant who buried his one talent and, in the end, lost it (Matthew 25:15–30). You want to invest all of you, however much that amounts to, even if you won’t be Adoniram Judson, George Whitefield, or Elisabeth Elliot. But on yawning days, you secretly fear that your ordinary life amounts to a wasted one.

So you sit in the waiting room. With great sins and desperate situations, you don’t want to take up the pastor’s or small group’s time droning on about the inarticulate sense of purposelessness. Thankfully, envy has not swallowed your joy toward the Hermione Grangers of Christ’s kingdom when you admit yourself to be more like Neville Longbottom. But you wonder, What’s the point?

Indispensable

Dear Christian, even timid, lackluster, unimpressive Neville plays his part, a vital part, in the end. And if you pass your days with a sigh and suspicion that even in Christ you don’t much matter, be comforted by one word: indispensable. “The eye cannot say to the hand, ‘I have no need of you,’ nor again the head to the feet, ‘I have no need of you,’” Paul writes to the church in Corinth.

On the contrary, the parts of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable, and on those parts of the body that we think less honorable we bestow the greater honor, and our unpresentable parts are treated with greater modesty, which our more presentable parts do not require. But God has so composed the body, giving greater honor to the part that lacked it, that there may be no division in the body, but that the members may have the same care for one another. If one member suffers, all suffer together; if one member is honored, all rejoice together. (1 Corinthians 12:21–26)

“Hear him proclaim over your gifts, your service, your membership in the body, ‘indispensable.’”

They, like we, were tempted to value some spiritual abilities and service as vital to the church and others as insignificant. They learned this from the kingdom of men. Most kingdoms tout the rulers and the rich and the noble horsemen and the wise as the indispensable ones. The strong and the skilled move about the board as bishops and rooks and knights, while the rest of us move forward as pawns. Expendable. But the pawns, in Christ’s economy and kingdom, are essential. He turns them by grace into kings and queens, and teaches the rest to see with his eyes, so that all the members might care equally for one another.

Empowered

So, brother or sister in Christ, you may not be able to teach like him, or share your faith like her, or show hospitality quite like them, or pray like that, or shine as brightly with good works. You may feel like the baby toe of the gathered assembly. The eye of the body beholds hidden glories, the mouth proclaims Jesus with boldness, the fingers perform great acts of service — you feel as though you rest in your shoe and darkness. You feel sweaty, stuffy, unventilated. Yet if Christ’s Spirit dwells in you, hear him proclaim over your gifts, your service, your membership in the body, indispensable. One whom we simply cannot do without. The church of Christ needs you.

“Christ did not save you with an eye toward what he might get from you.”

And although countless ways exist for you to walk more faithfully to your calling and live more boldly for the common good of the church, remember that Christ did not save you with an eye toward what he might get from you. The good shepherd has no need of any from his flock. He did not peer into the future and decide whether you were worth the bother of the cross. He does not now look upon you with indifference or wait for you to earn your keep. Treasured saint, before he works in and through you for his own good pleasure, he forgives you, and clothes you, and calls you indispensable — a member of himself already. We put on our new lives and new works of service “as God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved” (Colossians 3:12).

No one whom the Father has chosen before the foundation of the world, no one whom Christ has shed his precious blood for, no one filled by the Holy Spirit of God is dispensable or unnecessary to the body. As the Lord gives life, each is needed, each is necessary. So let that word indispensable wash over your insecurities and carry you upon its waves to greater love and works until we stand before our golden King to hear, “Well done, my good and faithful servant.”

You never imagined that it could come to this.

You have been married for years to your dear wife. You have been your beloved’s, and your beloved has been yours. Three sons and a daughter she bore you, four children that now watch you with a look you can’t describe. What an answer to prayer she has been. Your tears hold memories of life before the whispers came. Why is this happening?

You found out from your daughter. In disbelief you went to her with questions. The voice sounded the same, her hair framed her beauty as it always had, the dimple in her cheek and the birthmark on her neck remained where you left them. Yet someone else speaks as her mouth moves, telling foreign words of strange beliefs. The wife of your youth, your lovely doe, has become sick. An illness preys upon her soul. How did this happen? You resolve to reason with her quietly, surely she will snap out of it.

Time heats gentle persuasion into desperate pleading. She no longer follows Yahweh. She implores you and the kids to join her. There are gods elsewhere.

Days pass while leaving you in a nightmare from which you cannot wake. Her idolatry deepens. You would have preferred a grizzly death than see this day. You would have bid the stars crush you or the sea to swallow you before you witnessed her bowing to another than Yahweh. She is you, you are her, one flesh. Your rib has pursued death. And what is worse — you’re tempted to think — you know the Scriptures. You could turn a blind eye, but not a blind mind.

If your brother, the son of your mother, or your son or your daughter or the wife you embrace or your friend who is as your own soul entices you secretly, saying, “Let us go and serve other gods,” which neither you nor your fathers have known, some of the gods of the peoples who are around you. . . you shall not yield to him or listen to him, nor shall your eye pity him, nor shall you spare him, nor shall you conceal him. (Deuteronomy 13:6–8)

You shall not yield to her, listen to her, pity her, spare her . . . or conceal her. What then was the hardest thing you have ever done, you did: You brought your daughter and both told the elders her secret. The elders inquired and searched and asked diligently to be certain (Deuteronomy 13:14); she did not hide, did not yield. And again, you know the next lines,

But you shall kill [her]. Your hand shall be first against [her] to put [her] to death, and afterward the hand of all the people. You shall stone [her] to death with stones, because [she] sought to draw you away from the Yahweh your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. And all Israel shall hear and fear and never again do any such wickedness as this among you.

Never have you faced such a temptation to cast off Yahweh’s rule. You would give yourself to spare her. How can you sit by and watch her die, let alone be involved in her death, and even throw the first stone? Never has disobedience felt more right. Abraham brought Isaac up the mountain, and came down with him. This day would not end like that.

The community stands watching, waiting. “Your hand shall be first against her to put her to death, and afterward the hand of all the people.”

Cruelty, this is cruelty, the thought hisses into your mind. Before you can think it, she shouts, “The gods of the nations wouldn’t require you to stone your own wife!” Your eye, seeing through a flood, beholds the blurry shape of your dearest embrace, the mother of your children. And through the stillness your ear hears the word of your God, “Your eye shall not pity her, nor shall you spare her.” Your eye or your ear? Your wife or your God?

Could You Cast the Stone?

The scene is horrible even to imagine. It takes an emotional toll to consider. The rock in your hand, a mother, a daughter, a father, a husband, a best friend before you, the community surrounding you, and your God above. Moses knew this while writing,

If your brother, the son of your mother,or your son or your daughteror the wife you embrace (literally, “wife of your bosom”)or your friend who is as your own soul, entices you. . . .

Natural affection screams against the proceedings. This is not a faceless idolater but your beloved. The scene cuts the soul of all who see it; all who hear of it. It tests: to see whether we truly love Yahweh supremely or not (Deuteronomy 13:3). And it teaches. Teaches the fear of God and the proper appraisal of turning from the true God to other loves.

Have you, standing beside the solemn community, learned its lesson?

But God Isn’t Like That — Right?

The New Covenant is different from the Old. We do not execute false teachers or their apostates, do not “purge the evil from [our] midst” (Deuteronomy 13:5) by throwing stones. The closest thing we do — something just as serious — is church discipline and excommunication. When Paul tells the church at Corinth to “Purge the evil person from among you” (1 Corinthians 5:13), he means, “not to associate with anyone who bears the name of brother if he is guilty of sexual immorality or greed, or is an idolater, reviler, drunkard, or swindler — not even to eat with such a one” (1 Corinthians 5:11).

Yet, the difference between covenants is not the kind that some people want to make. Some imagine that the God of the Old Testament — the God who here would have idolaters and false prophets stoned — is somehow a bloodthirsty and brutal deity, while his divine Son, on the other hand, comes as the more moral, civil, and compassionate of the Godhead. They mention this Old Testament God with red face and ready-made apology. Reading this, they wonder, Why even reflect on such a text? This is not helping the gospel go forth.

“God values perfectly what we value imperfectly. He loves undyingly what we sputter to love and fail.”

Such reluctancies — in them and in ourselves — remind us of great news: God is not like you, not like me. He is more just, more holy, and more compassionate than we imagine, all at once. He is more appropriately tuned to reality than we. He values perfectly what we value imperfectly. He loves undyingly what we sputter to love and fail. He holds allegiances in perfect grasp, knows the weight of the crown upon his head, and legislates with mathematical perfection, despite our faltering algebra. That situation is horrible because sin is horrible, not God.

More Loving than God

Such texts help me (as I hope they help you) recalibrate my thinking and my feeling. They act as smelling salts to my sensibilities, confronting the weaknesses of my personality, community, and age. When I am tempted to imagine myself with a stone in hand, I feel my heart grow faint and shake its head. And when this occurs, when I let the text work on me, I begin to pray, “I believe, help my unbelief.” And I ask, Where are my loves crooked?

With my family, perhaps. I am not to lessen my love for family, but rather love God supremely, with my whole being. Christ reiterates that he will suffer no rivals (should we stand at the crossroad),

Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me, and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. (Matthew 10:37)

Or, perhaps, with my God’s glory. In my imagining, I am more devastated by the consequence of sin than the affront of sin; more offended by the wages of sin than by the sin itself. I need to overhear how God teaches angels to feel about exchanging him for anything else:

Be appalled, O heavens, at this;be shocked, be utterly desolate,declares the Lord,for my people have committed two evils:they have forsaken me,the fountain of living waters,and hewed out cisterns for themselves,broken cisterns that can hold no water. (Jeremiah 2:12–13)

Or, perhaps, with my community. God shows mercy to the community through this hard lesson: “And all Israel shall hear and fear and never again do any such wickedness as this among you.” Others’ family members would fall if I lacked nerve to obey.

My “compassion” would value the creature over the Creator, high-handed rebellion over God’s glory, my wife’s unbelieving life over the faithful she would infect with her whispers of unbelief.

Let Goods and Kindred Go

Today, we are a people quick to trust our feelings, our judgments, our sense of things, with God somewhere comfortably in the background. Difficult texts like this remind us of the towering worth of God and the high allegiance of our calling. And such texts can test us, “to know whether you love Yahweh your God with all your heart and with all your soul” (Deuteronomy 13:3).

“We must decide now, as best we can and with God helping us, to never choose kin over King.”

One of Satan’s most successful snares is to infect faith through our closest relationships. Where God means for them to give life, he means death. We feel for those caught in the crossfire of a beloved’s war with God. But neither can we ignore the rotten fruit: pastors who change their minds on homosexuality because a son comes out; a Christian mother who capitulates on abortion because her daughter secretly procured one; a wife who concedes to universalism because her husband left the faith. Satan has robbed many through this backdoor.

A text like Deuteronomy 13 bids us decide now, as best we can and with God helping us, to never choose kin over King, should that dark day ever come. Though my heart be wrung watching him or her run after other gods, I will not. Although their sin twists my soul in knots I can’t untie, though the loss of that relationship pierces to the deepest part of me, and all the while the world’s gods taunt me that Christ is too narrow, too particular, that it’s not worth it — Lord, keep me yours.

Jesus is worthy to be our great love, and no less — a love we bend or break for none. Let God be true, though every loved one is false. Resolve now to sing to the end with Psalm 73:25–26,

Whom have I in heaven but you?And there is nothing on earth that I desire besides you.My flesh and my heart may fail,but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever.

My dear Globdrop,

Excuse my prolonged absence. Works darker and more disgraceful arrived on my doorstep. The agency needed to issue a cease and desist, let’s call it — a resistless commission. I return to your misshapen mount of letters stacked upon my desk, with more vice and vitriol than ever.

From the few entreaties I survived this afternoon, it appears much has transpired — little for the better. Your man is married, is he? To a Christian, no doubt. And in my absence, he began — no, wait, here it is — he graduated from an unapproved training facility. Of all things, nephew. Am I to report you as a double agent?

Your man “aspires for ministry”; let’s begin here. As you know, several types of shepherd meet the approval of our Headquarters. Our favorite, no doubt, wins the Enemy’s protest, “You eat the fat, you clothe yourselves with the wool, you slaughter the fat ones, but you do not feed the sheep” (Ezekiel 34:3). A demon’s glory, Globdrop, winged upon undying sneers of howls: to create a shepherd who enjoys lambchop and wool socks.

But given your archery of late, you must aim at a bigger target. If not feasting on the flock, then he at least must be unarmed and unwilling to guide or protect her. Softer than ewe’s fleece, he must think it amiss that he would be required to confront anyone — whether other shepherds or sheep or wolves or robbers. He must never goad straying sheep or strike at bears, never raise his tone or lift the rod. Paint him in green pastures with warm colors and carefree expressions — no wanderers or predators or violence.

But I’m guessing you have already enrolled him in N.I.C.E.?

N.I.C.E.

It appears not.

Honestly, Globdrop, you will not last the century if you can’t manage your wits at the front line. You should have enrolled him in the N.I.C.E. program years ago. This is for all of the Enemy’s cows, but especially the males.

Commit the fourfold essentials of N.I.C.E. to your quaking mind immediately.

Nestle

Smooth shepherds stand in high demand, fitting especially well with this generation’s chief end: the self. Liberated from the chains of “objective truth,” they are self-made and self-making. No objective “me” — vulnerable to the opinions of others — exists. To disapprove of or contradict someone’s self or chosen path is a high offense — how can anyone else know what’s best for me? Disagreement, dear nephew, is dead. Assert your truth on anyone else, and you declare war on a sovereign state.

Do you fault an Enemy’s man, then, for being susceptible to speak that singular message of our favorite wartime pastors of old: “Peace, peace”? Why Paul would warn of ravenous wolves from without and perverse teachers from within, he cannot tell. Compelling speech — beat it into his head — is never confrontational speech. His staff is a mere walking stick. Let the straying or snarling or sleeping damned lie, undisturbed.

Impress

Once his speech is sanded, smooth it further. If your man becomes “helpful” because of his soft words and silken tone (even to a few), let him hear the good news immediately. This, in turn, tenders him to criticism and reinforces his own reluctance to offer anything else. Let him leave his neighbor with spinach in his teeth or a log in his eye or idols in his heart.

At first, he may resist the temptation, it is true. But how quietly do we turn the rudder of crude words like “godliness” into “the appearance of godliness”? “The Enemy’s ministry” into “my ministry”? He may think he asks, What does the Enemy say? But under all this, the quiet and fragile purr: Will everyone be happy with me? Will they be impressed?

Confess

What surgeon refuses his scalpel, what demon his darts — and will your man really lay down the Enemy’s blade or his staff? He will. For to do so is humility, after all. Behold the puppet show.

The rule runs thus: he must never operate on sins that haven’t scarred him. Nathan told David, “You are the man!” — without having stolen any poor man’s sheep. He spent no time confessing his many faults to keep he and the sinner on level plane. Not so with modern Nathans. Hear him, after blurting his many sins, bashfully suggest, “And maybe . . . I’m not certain, but just possibly — and don’t take this the wrong way — but you could be the man . . . well, a man, really. . . . But of course, we all are . . . I especially.”

It must remain the height of arrogance to help someone out of a pit one hasn’t first lived in. Reproving uncommitted sin is worse than the sin committed. Seriously, nephew, how can any man tell a woman what she cannot “do with her own body”? This is the kind of lowliness we support.

Emasculate

In summary, desex his teaching. We have worked tirelessly to train this generation to despise language associated with the male sex . . . gender . . . thing. Direct speech, forceful speech is always naughty speech. Shave the chest, blunt the blade. Think apes in the circus: cap his head and teach him to juggle.

Make the general’s cry, the trumpet blast, the call to arms seem excessive, aggressive, impolite. Such naked conversation is most irregular, improper, and ungentlemanly. Not to mention proud. He may share but never preach. “Thus saith the Lord” reeks of ancient bigotries and that old sock of patriarchy. Concerning their tongues, we still remember, and agree with, Paul’s exclamation: “I wish those who unsettle you would emasculate themselves!” (Galatians 5:12) — though we would never speak this crudely, of course.

Brunch with the Queen

Visualize his Christian life and “ministry” as a sunny afternoon sipping tea with the queen. Remind him to keep good posture, mind his manners, and not talk warfare at the table — pinky finger out. Oh, he is still a soldier — no denying that. Look at that clean, creased uniform, that sharp, pointy sword tucked neatly at his side. Those sewn-on badges nearly blind us in the sun! This polite man requests our admiration — and fear, even — we must render honor its due.

But what of the prophets, apostles, and the Enemy himself, you wonder? So few today seem to ask. Rascals of the old guard threw spears at our training. Rabid tongues of men like Paul, John the Baptist, Peter, Elijah, and the Enemy himself lashed out against our rules of decorum — so we silenced them.

Style him our kind of N.I.C.E. — more the smiling mannequin than man or minister. Make him shrink back before the bleat of the sheep’s and goat’s displeasure and refuse the unpleasant work of warning, correcting, or laying down his own life. There exists a broader, kinder, easier way. If he ever suspects cowardice, let him censure the dead.

Your returned savior,

Grimgod

Roman Catholic, Cheap Grace, and Reformed Christian sit in a small country pub, discussing justification. To the surprise of each, “It is of grace” they assert, one by one.

Seeing the suspicions written across the faces of the other two, the Catholic begins, “My catechism reads, ‘Justification comes from the grace of God.’ And by grace we mean generally, ‘favor, the free and underserved help that God gives to us to respond to his call to become children of God, partakers of the divine nature and of eternal life’ (Roman Catholic, 418). We all affirm we are ‘justified by his grace as a gift’” (Romans 3:24).

To undermine any misgivings, he quickly adds, “It also states as bright as the sun, ‘[N]o one can merit the initial grace of forgiveness and justification, at the beginning of conversion’ (Roman Catholic, 420). Or, to put it more strongly, ‘If any one shall say, that man may be justified before God by his own works, whether done through the strength of human nature, or through the teaching of the law, without the divine grace through Jesus Christ; let him be anathema’” (Counsel of Trent, Canon I).

Confused, Cheap Grace turns to Reformed Christian, “Wasn’t one of the pillars of the Reformation Sola gratia — justification by grace alone? But this fellow says he too believes in justification as undeserved favor, free and initiated by God. What exactly did our forefathers mean if Catholics also acknowledge God’s grace justifies?”

How might you answer this question?

By Grace Alone

Talking together at this quaint countryside, the differences at the surface between Cheap Grace, Roman Catholic, and Reformed Christian might seem surprisingly thin. Each uses the same words. Each mentions something about the grace of justification being underserved, the result of divine — not human — initiative. Each will speak of Jesus and his cross at some point and stand aligned in condemning human works apart from grace.

In other words, each will say that God redeems and restores into right relationship with himself by the work of his decisive grace. Each will say, in their own ways, salvation is of the Lord, and join to sing “Amazing Grace.” So what is the difference?

To show the relevance of Sola Gratia, a doctrine rediscovered in the Reformation, consider the contrast between Reformed Christian’s understanding of by grace alone contrasted first with the Roman Catholic’s, and then with that of Cheap Grace.

Catholic Versus Reformed

Over the course of their discussion, Roman Catholic and Reformed Christian discovered they use identical terms but with significantly different meanings.

Justification

The first impasse is the meaning of justification itself. When the Catholic catechism states that justification is of grace, he understands it as “not only the remissions of sins, but also the sanctification and renewal of the interior man” (1989, emphasis added). Justification, in other words, includes sanctification and regeneration. Indeed, to the Catholic, justification embraces “the whole scope of the Christian life” (The Doctrine on Which the Church Stands of Falls, 744).

Justification, in the Roman conception, is an ongoing process, rising and falling, being attained by the grace of the sacraments and possibly lost through a failure of the sinner to persevere in faith and works and the sacraments of the church. Justification, for the Catholic, concerns what God continually does in man.

“Justification, for the Protestant, concerns what God declares over him before he does anything in him.”

Opposed, the Reformed Christian insists that justification is a “legal act, the declaration of the forgiveness of sin and the imputation of righteousness.” In fact, the Catholic counsel of Trent, in response to the Reformation, declared them damned who taught that “men are justified either by the sole imputation of the righteousness of Christ, or by the sole remission of sins, to the exclusion of the grace and the charity which is shed abroad in their hearts by the Holy Ghost [Romans 5:5], and is inherent in them; or even that the grace, by which we are justified, is only the favor of God” (Canon xi). Justification, for the Protestant, concerns what God declares over him, by faith, while the justified is still ungodly (Romans 4:5).

Righteousness

Second, and related, the two disagree about “righteousness.” For the Catholic, justifying righteousness is not Christ’s perfection accredited (that is, imputed) to the sinner’s account. Rather the Catholic means “the rectitude of divine love.” With justification, he says, “faith, hope, and charity are poured into our hearts, and obedience to the divine will is granted to us” (catechism, 1991). And this infusion comes through the sacrament of Baptism: “Justification is conferred in Baptism, the sacrament of faith” (1992).

For the Reformers, a different notion of righteousness was reclaimed — a righteousness revealed in the gospel (Romans 1:17). The good news is that sinners — dead in their trespasses, sins, and unrighteousness — can, through faith in Jesus’s perfect life, substitutionary death, and validating resurrection, have their sins forgiven and Jesus’s own perfect righteousness counted as theirs by union with him. As was long prophesied, the Suffering Servant would “make many to be accounted righteous, and he shall bear their iniquities” (Isaiah 53:11).

Luther distinguished alien righteousness — Christ’s perfections, outside of us, applied to us legally in justification — and proper righteousness — our own righteousness worked out as a result. Catholic teaching combines the two. Paul, however, makes the contrast clear: “Now to the one who works, his wages are not counted as a gift but as his due. And to the one who does not work but believes in him who justifies the ungodly, his faith is counted as righteousness” (Romans 4:4–5). Paul staked his life and eternity on “the righteousness from God that depends on faith” (Philippians 3:8–9) — a righteousness that doesn’t foremost make us just but accounts us just in Christ.

Grace ‘Alone’

All this leads to the fact that for Roman Catholic, justification cannot be by grace alone as Reformed Christians understand it. Catholicism teaches, “Justification establishes cooperation between God’s grace and man’s freedom” (catechism, 1993). Since justification includes the inherent, lived-out righteousness of the believer to keep it, “the formal cause of justification refers both to God and to man” (Doctrine, 743). God enlists humans as partners in justification. “In the end, eternal life is both a grace promised and a reward given for good works and merits” (Doctrine, 744).

Lutherans and Catholics of modern times created a Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification in which they write,

By grace alone, in faith in Christ’s saving work and not because of any merit on our part, we are accepted by God and receive the Holy Spirit, who renews our hearts while equipping and calling us to good works. (article 15)

“For Roman Catholic, justification cannot be by grace alone as Reformed Christians understand it.”

But what is meant “by grace alone”? Leonardo De Chirco writes, “For the Catholic Church, ‘by grace alone’ means that grace is intrinsically, constitutionally, and necessarily linked to the sacrament, to the church that administers it, and then to the works implemented by it.” Still in line with Trent, “grace is necessarily sacramental and seen inside a synergistic, dynamic process of salvation” (Doctrine, 752–753).

This is not “by grace alone” as Luther understood it. Justification, as Carl Trueman summarizes, places “the believer’s salvation outside himself, in the action of God. The very fact that justification for Luther is a declaration of God, a word that comes from the outside, underscores and intensifies the idea that salvation is all of grace” (Grace Alone, 124).

Reformed Christians, then and now, insist that justification by grace alone allows no talk of merit. Christ allows no sidekicks. The Catholic view entails divine grace that is undeserved assistance to get those “capable of God” going, and stands by through the sacraments of the church to help collaborate in salvation. The Reformed understands it as the decisive gifting of perfect righteousness once and for all to those hopelessly condemned in sin. God becomes 100% for us on the sole basis of Christ’s righteousness. Then, once he is for us (fully justified), we grow, by the Spirit, in our own lived-out righteousness. The Catholic view necessitates the undeserved help of God in salvation; the Reformed view, the unilateral acquittal and divine pronouncement of “Righteous!” at the first instant of being joined to Christ by faith.

Reformed Versus Cheap Grace

“I knew it,” Cheap Grace interrupts, relieved. “Justification is all of grace — grace alone — now until the end! No matter how I live, no matter what sins I still fall into, the good news of the gospel states that God sees Jesus when he looks at me. Justified by grace alone!”

“This is the problem with Protestant theology,” complains Roman Catholic. “It does not take obedience and sin seriously. Does Paul not charge us to ‘work out your own salvation with fear and trembling’ (Philippians 2:12)? Justification is no license to continue sinning without consequence.”

It was in response to this that Reformed Christian and Cheap Grace began to realize deep distinctions between them. After some time, Reformed Christian began calling him “Cheap Grace,” a name first coined by Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

“Cheap grace,” Bonhoeffer said, “means the justification of sin without justification of the sinner. . . [it is] grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate” (Cost of Discipleship, 43, 45). Cheap Grace plans to have heaven without holiness, the salvation without sanctification, forgiveness of sin without forsaking of sin. He speaks of justification ‘by grace alone’ as a deer’s head mounts motionless upon the wall. It is but the carcass of orthodoxy.

Reformed Christian understood the grace of justification always brings the Holy Spirit and transformation. The same grace that redeems us, also “trains us to say ‘no’ to ungodliness and worldly passions, and to live self-controlled, upright and godly lives in the present age” (Titus 2:12). The grace that justifies — manifest in and inseparable from the Person of God’s grace, Jesus Christ — also sanctifies us. It is grace to be acquitted and reckoned as holy, and grace also to grow in holiness.

To Luther, as the other Reformers, justifying grace was costly grace.

It was grace, for it was like water on parched ground, comfort in tribulation, freedom from the bondage of a self-chosen way, and forgiveness of all [Luther’s] sins. And it was costly, for, so far from dispensing him from good works, it meant that he must take the call to discipleship more seriously than ever before. It was grace because it cost so much, and it cost so much because it was grace. That was the secret of the gospel of the Reformation — the justification of the sinner. (Cost of Discipleship, 49)

Costly grace, Reformed Christian insisted to Cheap Grace, is “costly because it calls us to follow, and it is grace because it calls us to follow Jesus Christ. It is costly because it costs a man his life, and it is grace because it gives a man the only true life. It is costly because it condemns sin, and grace because it justifies the sinner” (Ibid., 45).

Amazing Grace

Threats to God’s grace in justifying sinners arrive from two fronts.

On the Roman side, we have a new Galatian heresy; the unmaking of grace through accompanied meritorious good works. But the masterpiece of Golgotha has as its caption: Do Not Touch. “For by a single offering he has perfected for all time those who are being sanctified” (Hebrews 10:14). Ours it is only to receive the blood-painted frame as it is — by grace alone, as a gift.

On the other side, Cheap Grace brings us to the broken elevator of presumption. “This mighty lifter named Grace,” we are told, “is mighty enough to bring us to heaven.” Yet, it is not strong enough to lift us one floor above the world, the flesh, and the devil. James calls the contraption The Grace and Faith of Demons. It might borrow language of alien righteousness, but it applies it as cheap perfume to mask a still rotting corpse.

The Reformers knew the grace of God in justification to be costly, purchased by Christ on the cross, and arriving as first a justifying proclamation, and then consequently as a transforming power, through the Spirit, in sanctification.

For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast. For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them. (Ephesians 2:8–10)

The grace of justification — received by the instrument of faith alone — never remains alone in the person justified. This grace of our Lord Jesus Christ acquits us in heaven’s court, and trains us to live holy lives on earth. Grace loves living for Jesus — for Jesus is the perfect manifestation of the grace of God. This gospel grace of God — the kind that washes over us divine commendation and divine life — as opposed to its perversions, is worthy of the name, “Amazing.”

ABSTRACT: In the mid-nineteenth century, a growing number of Christians looked at the church and noticed a distinct lack of both men and masculinity. Women outnumbered the men in seemingly all quarters, and many of the men who remained seemed feminine, emasculated by an industrialized society and a church that catered to the female sex. In response, some Protestant leaders began a movement that would come to be called Muscular Christianity. Muscular Christians sought to reach and reclaim men with a focus on practical religion and physical strength. The movement dwindled in the years after World War I, but its secularized legacy remains today, and the questions it asked still look for answers from churches facing many of the same problems.

For our ongoing series of feature articles for pastors, leaders, and teachers, Greg Morse draws lessons from the history of the Muscular Christianity movement.

This is the story of a time when Christianity wanted more muscle and more men. The ancient and true religion had, in the eyes of more than a few, grown flabby and soft. One prescription in the nineteenth century read, “More discipline, more mission, more muscle.” The Muscular Christianity movement, finding its peak physique in America from 1880 to 1920, concerned masculinity. As proponents saw it, “masculinity” (a term they coined to describe the rugged side of maleness) roamed the church as an increasingly endangered species.

The movement, originating in England, originally among liberal Protestants, gained momentum in America and sought to pump more testosterone into Western Christendom. Proponents attempted to treat with one cure both men’s glaring absence from the church and the thin virility of the few lads who remained.

To understand the XY-mindset of Muscular Christianity, we must first view the state of manhood as they saw it. Then we can explore the movement’s response, analyze its legacy and downfall, and finally glean a few lessons for manhood within the church today.

Feminizing Fertilizer

Before we look at the perceived deficiencies in the Victorian man, consider him first in his context. His detractors cited one major accelerant to his downfall.

Accelerant, because the crisis of masculinity in the Western church, both in its disproportion of women to men and in the quality of men it produced, predates the nineteenth century.1 Yet something significant hastened Western Christianity’s man-problem in the 1800s. “If the seeds of Christianity’s feminization were planted in the Middle Ages,” posit Brett and Kate McKay, “those seeds came to full fruition in the 19th century. The fertilizer? The Industrial Revolution.”2

Several significant shifts occurred as the West mechanized. Men left their homesteads and the untilled fields of an agrarian society for the hustle and bustle of the city. This fractured the home base, introducing the splintered modern household we know as the norm today.

Yet this move also “sapped white-collar virility.” One writer illustrates the shift, contrasting his day in 1889 to just one hundred years prior:

There was more done to make our men and women hale and vigorous than there is today. Over eighty percent of all our men then were farming, hunting, or fishing, rising early, out all day in the pure, bracing air, giving many muscles very active work, eating wholesome food, retiring early, and so laying in a good stock of vitality and health. But now hardly forty percent are farmers, and nearly all the rest are at callings — mercantile, mechanical, or professional — which do almost nothing to make one sturdy and enduring.3

“The race,” one man lamented, “was dying; dying of its own stupidity; dying from in-doorness.”4 The new professional and managerial revolution fluffed the spirit of masculinity in particular and atrophied its body. This shift away from the hard-working farmer’s ethic to urban life — with its factories, specialties, and inert office spaces — corrupted, in many minds, what came to be known as the Victorian gentleman.5

Victorian Gentleman

The common complaint of those top hats glancing down at pocket watches held in gloves covering trimmed nails is summarized nicely in one word: overcivilized.

“Overcivilization,” writes historian Clifford Putney, “meant excessive, body-denying intellectualism, the fruit of which was emasculation — physical and cultural.”6 Overcivilization dried the sweat and smoothed the callouses of men, leaving refined tastes, sensibilities, and decorum in their stead.

Future president, muscular Christian, and author of The Strenuous Life (1901), Teddy Roosevelt (1858–1919), a man “who transformed himself via boxing and barbells from a sickly house-bound teenager into the rough-riding, safari-going, big-stick-wielding Bull Moose of legend,”7 noted a “general tendency among people of culture and education . . . to neglect and even look down on the rougher and manlier virtues, so that an advanced state of intellectual development is too often associated with a certain effeminacy of character.”8

Putney cites Henry James’s critique in his 1886 novel The Bostonians as giving a voice to many detractors:

The whole generation is womanized; the masculine tone is passing out of the world; it’s a feminine, a nervous, hysterical, chattering, canting age, an age of hollow phrases and fake delicacy and exaggerated solicitudes and coddled sensibilities, which, if we don’t look out, will usher in a reign of mediocrity, of the feeblest and flattest and the most pretentious that has ever been.9

The Victorian ideal of gentility, from this view, proposed that a man become the finely manicured lawn in front of the well-kept home called society — a cheap substitute for the more rugged and productive field of former times. And over time, this single development toward modernity began to wobble the perception that men belonged within Western Protestantism.

Not Your Father’s Religion

The disproportion of females to males in church has always existed on American shores. Beginning in the seventeenth century, New England church rolls record more female attendance than male — even though men outnumbered women three to two.10 Puritan preacher Cotton Mather (1663–1728) added his testimony to the fact:

There are far more Godly Women in the world than Godly Men. . . . I have seen it without going a mile from home, that in a Church of three or four hundred Communicants, there are but a few more than one hundred Men, all the rest are Women.11

Into the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, the trend persisted. During the Second Great Awakening of the 1830s, the revivalist strategy was said to “approach the men through their wives.”12 Editorialists asked pertinent questions: “Why Do Men Not Go to Church?” and “Have We a Religion for Men?” The former claimed to observe that nearly three-fourths of church members were women, while the latter wondered aloud, “Is the genius of Christianity foreign to the masculine make-up?”13 Men for centuries have drawn the conclusion that “the church of God is, to a very great extent, an army of women.”14

The dawn of the industrial world did little to correct the sentiment. Men left the home to work in Babylon, exposed and infected by the dirt and grime of the secular world, while at the same time the home transformed into an Edenic realm of unpolluted mothers and children in comparison. As the public sphere grew more masculine, the home blossomed more feminine. Men left the religious instruction of children to mothers. The business world became the man’s; the Christian world was left to women, children, and soft-sounding clergy.

Effeminate Clergy

“Unhappily for exponents of a virile ministry,” Putney writes, “people’s reigning image of the clergyman was of someone sensitive and refined, someone more comfortable at women’s teas than at men’s sporting competitions.” Historian Ann Douglas concurs in her treatment on the time period, frankly identifying many liberal ministers as “‘mama’s boys’ whose health was fragile and whose friendships were with women.”15 While some of the most influential churches of the day escaped the critique, “the dominant churches of nineteenth-century New England had long been feminized.”16

This, to its critics, was a generational reality. Those destined for ministerial ranks were “weak, sickly boys with indoor tastes who stayed at home with their mothers and came to identify with the feminine world of religion.”17 Unitarian minister Thomas Higginson griped of Protestant churches, “They were filling the ministry with men who lacked ‘a vigorous, manly life,’ and they were encouraging parents to say of their pallid, puny, sedentary, lifeless, joyless little offspring, ‘He was born for a minister,’ while the ruddy, the brave, and the strong are as promptly assigned to a secular career!”18

“Namby-pamby” seemed one of Charles Spurgeon’s favorite criticisms in his sermons. The manly Victorian preacher, whom Andrew Bradstock connects to the Muscular movement,19 balked at the “vicious refinement” of the day.20 He preferred the so-called vulgarities of good old Saxon words, calling things by their right names, to “the namby-pamby style of modern times, in which sacred things are spoken of as if they were only meant to be whispered in drawing-rooms, and not to be uttered where men meet in everyday life.” “A man of God,” Bradstock quotes Spurgeon in his chapter by the name, “is a manly man.”21

Weekly Mother’s Day Service

As career-minded men largely chose business over leadership in churches, leadership fell to less “manly” men and, with the Sunday school movement, to women.22 Sermons bent toward females. Calvinist theology was displaced. Christ’s gentler characteristics became emphasized, along with women’s spiritual leadership in the home and the church.23

“The more feminine services became, the more men stayed away; and the more women outnumbered men in the congregation, the more ministers catered to their needs.”24 Ann Douglas describes this “symbiotic relationship” that developed between these lighter ministers and their mostly female flocks: “The ministers were caught in a vicious paradox. The women were their principal supporters. Accepting feminine help meant in part prolonging their own exile from masculine concerns; refusing it hardly guaranteed new and different adherents.”25

With this relationship intact, Douglas describes that “the Sabbath came to be heralded as a sort of weekly Mother’s Day.”26 One onlooker remarked of this trend, “There will not be men enough in heaven to sing bass, when ‘The Song of Moses and the Lamb’ is rendered by the redeemed before the Great White Throne.”27

Pushups and Practical Religion

Enter the Muscular Christianity movement — a movement focused on the practical, focused on the body, focused on the world, and focused on making boys into men.

Muscular Christianity had two main aims: to increase men’s commitment to their health and to their faith.28 That is, to take men out of a Jane Austen novel and put them into the gym and onto the battlefield for Christ. But what did this entail? The movement emphasized what they considered a brawny Christianity — manlier ministers, punchier sermons, manlier songs, a more masculine Jesus, and an emphasis on doing good in the world through the social gospel.29 “For many in Victorian England muscular Christianity meant macho,”30 writes David Rosen — though the movement had a less-than-macho origin.

Beginning Pages

Muscular Christianity did not have its birthplace in the pews or on the battleground, but rather in the pages of literature. Thomas Hughes and Charles Kingsley, two Englishmen fed up with the effeminacy and physical weakness tolerated in the Anglican church, began writing novels, the likes of which their derogators called “Muscular Christianity.”31

Christian Socialists, critics of a disembodied evangelicalism, and disapprovers of industrialism’s effect on English society and its men, Hughes and Kingsley promoted an athletic, patriotic, and missional manhood32 alongside “a virile, strong-armed Christianity, a man’s religion, so to speak, that melded courage and faith, spirit and body.”33

Hughes’s Tom Brown Schooldays (1857) was arguably the most successful of the novels. Filled with rugby, footraces, positive male role models and nearly an all-male cast, the book promoted an example for schoolboys of “principled strength.”34

In his book Tom Brown at Oxford (1861), Hughes gives an instructive look behind the scenes into the creed he sought to narrate in his books, as well as one key criticism of the movement he aimed to undermine:

The least of the muscular Christians has hold of the old chivalrous and Christian belief, that a man’s body is given him to be trained and brought into subjection, and then used for the protection of the weak, the advancement of all righteous causes, and the subduing of the earth which God has given to the children of men. He does not hold that mere strength or activity are in themselves worthy of any respect or worship, or that one man is a bit better than another because he can knock him down, or carry a bigger sack of potatoes than he.35

Kingsley and Hughes, with many similarities and dissimilarities, took the pen to sketch out what they believed young men needed: faith, goodness, and physical strength.

Primitive Bodies, Civilized Ideals

To modern ears, the last of these three may strike us as odd. What do push-ups have to do with eternal life and faithful Christian living? The McKays helpfully summarize several lines of reasoning built within Muscular Christianity’s framework:

Physical training builds the stamina necessary to perform service for others.
Physical strength leads to moral strength and good character.
Sports provided a platform to evangelize the unchurched.
Physical sports and exercise connect boys and men with masculinity.36

And recall the backdrop of “overcivilization” nagging at the Muscular Christian’s mind. Sitting, typing, and managing did not properly steward the strength given from God to men for worldwide good.

In the best of the movement, power did not serve as an end in itself, as voiced by Hughes. The Muscular Christian did not want to simply travel back in time “to do preindustrial chores such as hunting and farming; [the body] had a higher purpose. Instead of just being a tool for labor, the body was viewed by muscular Christians as a tool for good, an agent to be used on behalf of social progress in world uplift.” The goal was “primitive bodies to further civilized ideals.”37

The creed that upheld this? The social gospel, which emphasized practicing the social ethic of Christianity, but to the minimizing of orthodox belief. “Convinced that the archetypal buttoned-down Victorian gentleman was ill-equipped to handle the challenges posed by modernity, many Progressives proposed a new model for manhood, one that stressed action rather than reflection and aggression rather than gentility.” Given this world uplift, and the chiseled arms of Christian men holding it up, all attainable health became a duty; all avoidable sickness, a sin.38

Legacy

To highlight a few more specifics of the movement, we look to the legacy. What came of this predominantly liberal Protestant movement that peaked in America from the 1880s to the 1920s?

YMCA

David slayed a giant, Jacob wrestled the angel, Jesus and his disciples walked miles, and Muscular Christians prepared their bodies for good works in places still in operation today. The foremost being the YMCA.

Many modern readers will be surprised to realize that the YMCA, the Young Men’s Christian Association, was originally just that: a Christian organization. And many more will be surprised that the first iterations in England and the U.S. did not have what many consider their trademark today: gyms.

At first its purpose was simply the evangelization of young men in the cities through traditional means: tent meetings, street corner preaching, and pamphleteering. But once the New York City “Y” pioneered the use of gymnasia as a means of Christian outreach in 1869, English YMCAs generally followed suit.39

The YMCA used gyms to attract the interest of boys not interested in Bible studies and teas, and sought to give them purpose: committed souls to Christ and fit bodies for social service. Muscular Christianity even aggressively promoted mission work, in conjunction with the acclaimed Student Volunteer Movement, as hard work, heroic work — manly work.

But as we can see from modern-day YMCAs, the focus grew more and more secular, less about souls and more about “character building” and fitness for its own sake.40 Factions deepened between religious instructors and the ex-circus men who typically led the gymnastics instruction. The weaker brother complained about the “physical department being unmanageable and a disgrace to the Association,” and the stronger about the “spider-legged, namby-pamby hypocrites in management who want them to play girls’ games.”41 The latter eventually unseated for former, serving as a parable for the whole movement.

Boy Scouts

The Muscular movement did not just focus on the brawn of its current men, but gave attention to its future men — a future many in the movement considered bleak. The schools they considered too bookish, too sanitized, too domestic under its “army of women teachers” who were unfit to impart a masculine education.42 The church, with its Sunday schools also “manned by women,” could not give the “hero-worshiper” a suitable champion to imitate.43 Therefore, they created youth “gangs” such as the Boys Brigade, Knights of King Arthur, and the most successful, the Boy Scouts.

The Boy Scouts took spirited boys and taught them to hone the inner (and sometimes buried) primitive inclinations on camping trips away from their mothers. It “took ‘sissified’ boys from the suburbs and sent them on rigorous trips into the forest . . . to endow white boys with ‘brute strength’ and basic survival skills.”44 Going the way of the Y, character building and wholesome values eventually outstripped its initial spiritual component, transforming it into the secular-humanist project we know today.

Sport Culture

“By far the biggest impact of Muscular Christianity,” write the McKays, “has to do with the way it shifted societal perceptions of physicality.”45 Our sports and fitness culture today, detached as it is from faith, is Muscular Christianity’s greatest legacy.

Prior to the movement, Protestant America frowned upon sport. Historian Richard Swanson adduces four reasons:

The belief that recreation distracted from spiritual devotion.
The belief that recreation wasted time.
The belief that recreation stood as a gateway to taverns and gambling.
The belief that recreation would prove too addictive for fallen human nature.46

The movement helped breach these assumptions, storming the shores of American culture and making way for the all-too-addictive fitness and sport culture common today — a culture that neo-muscular Christian movements today try to utilize for better purposes.47

Atrophy of a Movement

The peak, at least in its more successful American iteration, came to a close in the 1920s. After 1920, Putney writes, “pacifism, cynicism, church decline, and the devaluation of male friendships combined to undercut muscular Christianity — at least within the mainline Protestant churches.”48

The Great War dealt a mighty blow to muscular rhetoric. The aftermath of WWI

extinguished much of the energetic idealism of the previous decades, and replaced it with disillusionment and cynicism. There wasn’t much societal appetite for talk of keeping one’s body in fighting shape, nor of the celebration of masculine, battle-related virtues like courage or honor. Notions of Christian chivalry got significantly muddied in the trenches.49

The end of WWI dampened the nationalistic zeal and clouded the nation in cynicism concerning the need for fit, soldier-ready bodies.

Along with this cynicism came a devaluation of the church and religion in general. Alternative answers to life’s hard questions arose. A new religion survived, less interested in saving the world as it was “being good to yourself.”50 Radios and cars, a new era of entertainment, and golf on Sundays took hacks at religious commitment. Pastoral authority also waned, giving way to the psychologist.51 The soothing tones of the therapist drowned out the muscular sergeant’s voice calling for fit bodies and world uplift.

O Men, Where Art Thou?

This has been the story of a time when Christianity wanted more muscle and more men. And it is a story relevant for today.

While we may chafe at some of the theology behind Muscular Christianity, many ask the same questions that prompted the movement. In his book Why Men Hate Going to Church, David Murrow cites a Barna study that found women to be

57 percent more likely to participate in adult Sunday school,
54 percent more likely to participate in a small group,
46 percent more likely to disciple others, and
39 percent more likely to have a devotional time or quiet time.52

With all of its flaws (many left unmentioned above), what can we learn from the Muscular Christian movement just beginning to decline one century ago?

Reclaim the Body

God’s design for man is as assaulted today as it is underappreciated. Muscular Christianity is an enigma to modern ears, in part, because we have an anemic theology of the body.

We too fail to celebrate raw masculine strength. Anthony Esolen gives us one example, casting men as world-builders:

Every road you see was laid by men. Every house, church, every school, every factory, every public building was raised by the hands of men. You eat with a stainless-steel fork; the iron was mined and the carbon was quarried by men. . . . The whole of your civilization rests upon the shoulders of men who have done work that most people will not do — and that the physically weaker sex could not have done.53

“Dominion over the world, even in the postindustrial West, still needs the strength of men. Good men. Christ’s men.”

Men, despite what our silence on the topic may suggest, are embodied creatures. Our souls remain framed in strength given to cultivate and construct civilization. Dominion over the world, even in the postindustrial West, still needs the strength of men. Good men. Christ’s men.

So while Paul says bodily training is of some value (1 Timothy 4:8), and Muscular Christianity may have posited too much value, we must not think it is of no value. Though the eternal soul takes precedence over the temporal body, the man is never just his soul. Can we wonder long why the world stands confused as to what a man or a woman even is anymore?

Reclaim the Heroic

How many men, especially within the church, view the Christian life as heroic? How many feel the adrenaline pump, the stiff wind of purpose greeting the face and animating them to the helm of life, steering for the harder way?

It may sound counterintuitive, but men retreat instead of rally when trumpets do not sound alarms of war. They grow bored and listless, and they will not easily forfeit their strength on unworthy pursuits. Is what Josiah Strong observed in 1901 untrue?

There is not enough of effort, of struggle, in the typical church life of today to win young men to the church. A flowery bed of ease does not appeal to a fellow who has any manhood in him. The prevailing religion is too comfortable to attract young men who love the heroic.54

“Jesus looks at young men and promises them discomfort, sacrifice, and death. Minimize this call and you forfeit men.”

Jesus looks at young men and promises them discomfort, sacrifice, and death. Minimize this call and you forfeit men. God made me for this. Muscular Christianity attempted to awaken the daring in men. They knew that if you “promise young men battles instead of feasts, swords instead of prizes, campaigns instead of comforts . . . the heroic which lies deep in every man will leap in response.”55

Without losing the gospel or the focus on Jesus Christ and the immortal soul, the Christian religion must never lose its genre as epic. We live in a greater story than we find in Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter or Star Wars or Gladiator. “To those who by patience in well-doing seek for glory and honor and immortality, he will give eternal life” (Romans 2:7).

Reclaim the Hero

Muscular Christianity worked tirelessly to rescue the one-sided image of Christ. The gentle Lamb often brings little resistance, but what of the “lion . . . marked by traits like justice, boldness, power, and self-mastery . . . Jesus the carpenter, the desert camper, the whip-cracker”?56

Many men today have refused to follow Jesus not because they have seen “the man Christ Jesus” himself (1 Timothy 2:5) and turned away from his summons. They have turned from the soft-to-touch, cuddle-up-in-green-pastures, silky-hair-and-whispering parody. True — he does lay his sheep down in green pastures; he does lead them beside still waters. But he can do both because his rod and his staff comfort us (Psalm 23:4). Sheep do not feel safe to lie down where their shepherd cannot defend them from wolves. Jesus is worshiped as Lamb because he ever lives as Lion.

“Men must see the Jesus of the Scriptures, not the sentimentalized substitute.”

Men must see the Jesus of the Scriptures, not the sentimentalized substitute. They must see the Commander of the Lord’s armies, the Lord of lords, the Master, the Ruler of the kings on earth, the Son of Man, the Alpha and Omega, the man of war, the Son of the Most High God. The one who did not have his life taken from him but lays it down of his own accord; the one who wields the scepter and wears the crown; the one to whom all must swear fealty, bowing and kissing his ring; the Hero of the story who commands all men everywhere to repentance and faith, for he has fixed a day to judge the world (Acts 17:30–31).

This is the King of kings, who invites us, even men, to follow him and reign with him, forever.