As Christians, we follow the Lord Jesus Christ, who, for the joy set before Him, endured the most wanton and senseless violence in order to bring about the most tremendous peace. As soldiers of the Living Christ, let us shine as lights in this dark and decaying world.

To the Church
Dear Christian,
As I write to you this day, my heart is filled with tremendous grief and sadness over the events that have transpired in Nashville, Tennessee. On Monday morning, a mentally ill biological woman, who identified as a transgender male, shot her way inside The Covenant School, a Presbyterian school in East Tennessee, firing indiscriminate rounds at both helpless children and adults before being gunned down by local police officers. In fourteen horrifying minutes, 6 innocent people were brutally killed, including three little ones aged nine and 3 adults in their sixties. One of the children who tragically perished was the daughter of Chad Scruggs, who serves as lead pastor over Covenant Presbyterian Church, the church that founded the school.
During such awful instances of darkness, we must remember we are children of the light. We are living examples of Christ to all who are perishing. How we respond to tragedies like this will say much about how we think, believe, and cherish the Gospel. Thus, as we pray for the victims, let us also pray for the victimizers. As we pray for affected families, let us diligently pray for the shooter’s family. And as we are bombarded with all sorts of opinions on this subject, let us be slow to speak, quick to listen, and ready to pattern our response in accordance with Scripture.
With that, I would like to consider how a Christian is supposed to respond to awful tragedies such as this.
This Memes War
Whether you like it or not, you will be inundated in the coming days with a cacophony of “hot-takes” from trolls on Twitter, rants by activists and personalities on social media, biased coverage by the news, and shots fired from both sides of the Left / Right culture war. You will also see this situation entirely weaponized by gun control activists, the news trying to play up the perpetrator’s victim status, and the trans community crying out for justice and days of vengeance, as we have seen in Virginia. Yesterday and today, instead of seeing an empathetic president consoling a wounded nation or addressing the victims, we saw a depraved dottering dolt making inappropriate jokes about what flavor of ice cream he stacks in his fridge before blaming republicans for this incident of gun violence. (Sadly, this was not the only occasion our dunderhead-in-chief quipped sardonically when doing so was both vile and inappropriate). Perhaps you also saw the despicable and insensitive meme posted by Arizona press secretary, Jocelyn Berry, depicting a woman holding two handguns in a threatening pose, captioned: “Us when we see transphobes.” Or maybe you saw any number of shameless responses on the vast interwebs, such as I have found here.
This Means War
From such a smattering of debased opinions, I believe it is obvious that we are in a war. But let me be unequivocally clear here, we are not in the Left / Right “culture war” that has captivated this nation for decades. We are not on the left; we are not on the right; we are on the side of Christ. When the pundits, politicians, and the ideological left blame Christians and gun laws for this attack, we must not respond with the equal and opposite fury displayed among activists on the right. As Christians, we must respond as Christians and not as activists! We are citizens of heaven, not paupers, in this pitiful and polarized political war game.
We have been called to war, but not that one. Instead, the battle that we have been called into is a war – first and foremost – against the flesh (Romans 8:13). We are to be killing that which is wicked and depraved in us, mortifying it by the Spirit so that we may live. As Christians, we do not begin a plank-eyed campaign against a horde of sawdusty sinners without first pointing the lens of Biblical truth upon our own hearts and our own soul. We must make war through repentance, not hollow pharisaism.
But, this does not mean we have nothing to say. In fact, the Bible does call us to a kind of warfare with the world. According to Scripture, for the love of God and the redemption of the planet, we are called to expose the damnable misdeeds of darkness (Ephesians 5:5-13) and to call out pagan philosophies such as transgenderism with the light of the Gospel of Christ (Colossians 2:8; Jude 3). We are to be salt, which preserves the decaying world. We are to be light in the midst of a crooked people, which means exposing and chasing away the darkness (Matthew 5:13-16; Philippians 2:14-15) And if we do that work faithfully, meeting mistruth with love (Ephesians 4:15), we fully understand that the world will still hate us because it first hated Christ (John 15:18). No matter how the world views us, we labor on until every nation has been discipled according to the vision and Biblical standards of Christ (Matthew 28:18-20).
It is also a battle fought against the demonic principalities and satanic powers who wage war against the plain truth of God (Ephesians 6:12). We must remember that the transgender community is not our enemy. Likewise, the LGBTQLMNOP activists are not our foe. We do not wage our warfare against them but for them! We wage a spiritual war against spiritual opponents with unique non-violent weapons that will advance the Gospel of Jesus Christ and take back dominion for our King in a world that is hopelessly lost and dead (Ephesians 6:13-17).
The Christians’ warfare brings life and light to the world, not death and hot-takes, which brings us to an apropos passage for such a time as this. In light of the events that occurred in Nashville, and whenever the next grisly evil is unleashed upon the world, may the words of Romans 12:14-21 become our guide on how to respond to the world, the flesh, and the devil, with uniquely and poignantly Christian warfare. This is our battle guide:
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In 1983, John Scully was the President of Pepsi. He had poured his life into that company and built it into one of America’s most iconic brands. By all accounts, he was on top of the world. But, in 1983, his life would dramatically change with a few simple words. Insert Steve Jobs.
Steve Jobs was the genius upstart entrepreneur who founded Apple. He had a brand new company and visionary ideas. But, he was untested, unproven, and frankly a little unstable. Yet, in 1983, he delivered one of the most incredible sales pitches ever recorded. When courting John Scully to leave Pepsi and come to Apple, this is what Jobs said:

John, do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life, or do you want to come with me and change the world?—Steve Jobs

That proposal pushed Scully over the edge. At that moment, John Scully left everything he had built to follow Jobs and change the world.
I appreciate this story because it perfectly articulates how frivolous it would be to build a life on sugar water. But I also don’t like this story because Steve’s alternative is no better. To build a life on gadgets and tech would be just as meaningless as an empire of liquid sugar. It most certainly has been.
Most recently, this has become all the more clear. Tech stocks are plummeting, tech-friendly banks are going insolvent, and the entire industry is gearing up for a massive recession. If that were not enough, Big Tech hasn’t delivered on any of its promises.
Case in point, Facebook’s mission statement is: “to give people the power to build community and to bring the world closer together.” That sounds great, except that it hasn’t. Instead, in the Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok world, people have become more divided, isolated, and less able to have meaningful dialog, conflict, or relationships than ever.
All you have to do is look at the world around us, and you can see it. No one seems happy. People are polarized and angry at one another. Activism is fracturing people into increasingly smaller and smaller victim classes. Law and order is eroding, and the fabric of our society is unraveling as we speak. We are no better in the Steve Jobs era than we were in the Pepsi era. Any person who is being objective can see this.
With that, it is time for a new pitch.
If you want to change the world, limit investing in the limited and maximize your investment in the infinite. How do we do that? First, invest in a faithful church. Invest in a community that believes the Gospel and preaches it as their lives depend on it. Invest in a church that understands the disease of sin and liberally offers Christ as the only cure. Invest in a church that does not bend its knee to the world and woke culture but stands on God’s eternal and immutable truth!
How can you invest in this? I offer you three ways and one reminder.
Invest Your Time
One of the best ways to change the world is to get married, have lots of children, raise them up in the fear and admonition of the Lord, and teach them to invest their time in a local and faithful church. To fight to be there when the doors open and to value participation in the community. To help that church accomplish its mission. Listen intently to the sermon and walk away chewing on the truth of the Gospel throughout the week.
It involves teaching them to be present and active in the community and to give their lives for the very thing Jesus died for; His bride. It also involves teaching them how to go to work to the glory of God, how not to place their hope in their career, and how to build Jesus’ Kingdom through God-glorifying labor in their vocation (1 Cor. 10:31).
Paul says in Colossians 3:23:
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Your greatest enemy, undoubtedly, are you. That internal chatterbox that is always running its trap, speaking lies about you, discouraging you, and clouding your judgment, must not be allowed the freedom to go on talking. Instead, you must repent of your sin, remain steadfast until your experience improves, remind God of who He is and who you are, and then reign over yourself! Instead of listening to yourself, begin speaking to yourself! Command yourself to hope in God and believe that your experience of His presence will improve.

Why does God sometimes feel distant? Why are there times and seasons when it seems like God is either aloof or further away from us than at others? As a pastor, I have received various versions of this question over the years.
Questions like:

“Why does God feel distant from me? I know I am saved. I have assurance of that from Scripture. But, why do I go through periods of deadness and dryness? How is this true and why does it happen? I am really not changing anything about my routine. I have the same Bible plan. I dedicate the same time every morning to prayer. I am repenting and doing everything I know to do, pastor… And yet, sometimes God feels nearer to me while other time I feel like He has left me and I am all alone… Why is that?”

There are undoubtedly many reasons why this phenomenon may occur, such as our own sinfulness and rebellion, the quenching of His Spirit, or God’s chastening His children. When that happens, God will often withdraw the experience of His presence from us, which is meant to lead us to repentance. He does not, however, remove His presence entirely since there is “now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus” (Ro 8:1). Yet. At the same time, God is fully present with us through the Spirit’s indwelling and fully present in all places through His own omnipresence; there are times when He veils our capacity to comprehend His presence, allowing us to experience distance, darkness, and shadows.
As said above, this often occurs because of habitual, indwelling, and unrepented sin. But what happens when this is not the case? How do we explain other occasions when we are in the Word, repenting of our sin, praying, fasting, singing, mortifying, and doing everything we know to do, or when we feel like the absence of God is more palpable than His presence? How do we explain that?
These are questions that I have asked myself countless times before. Unfortunately, I was not given a Biblical reason from Scripture to account for these occasions. Instead, I was taught that my relationship with God was based on quid pro quo rules, which means If I repented of my sins and did the right things, then He would give me the joy of His presence.
This not only encouraged a performance-oriented faith where I believed my experience of God was wholly dependent upon me, but it also was not in accord with the men I saw in Scripture. Take Job as an example. The Bible tells us that he was a righteous man, exemplary among the men at that time. Yet, God allowed him to experience awful suffering and the diminishing of His presence. Take David, whose Psalms are riddled with pleadings that God would draw nigh to him, allowing Him to experience the joy of God’s nearness again. Finally, consider Jesus, who never sinned, but in the garden felt the agony of future distance from God.
How do we account for these things? To answer that question, I would like to share thirteen things I wish someone had shared with me that I have now learned. I will not be diving too deeply into “why God is distant” but discussing more about how to think about it and what to do about it. Sometimes, the why belongs to God and remains a mystery to us.
In the rest of this article, I offer 6 reflections to consider when you feel distant from God. I would also like to provide 7 Biblical remedies for you to employ should you ever experience this.
Part 1: Reflect on This
Reflect on His Rights:
The principle: God has every right and ability to give and take away the experience of His presence as He deems appropriate.
One of the grandest doctrines we often recoil from is the sovereignty of God. Sovereignty entails God has every right, ability, and power to accomplish whatever He wills. And since everything that occurs is what He has willed (Dan 4:35), then every pain, displeasure, and discomfort came about first by divine knowledge and permittance. Therefore, nothing happens outside of God’s will.
Job says this poignantly:

“It is God who has made my heart faint, And the Almighty who has dismayed me, – Job 23:16

Jeremiah, a man also acquainted with grief, heartily concurs. He said:

“He has driven me and made me walk In darkness and not in light… Even when I cry out and call for help, He shuts out my prayer.” – Lam 3:2, 8

While these verses may rub the inner drama queen inside us the wrong way, do we really have cause to be angry? All of us, at some point, have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. That includes Job and Jeremiah, and it also includes us. As such, God said that the punishment for our sins would be death. And yet look at how long we live. The very fact we are alive today means that God has been exceedingly generous to us. It means He has not given us what we are owed but has offered us unmerited mercies far beyond what we deserve.
Beyond this, if you are a Christian, you have received unfathomable grace! Grace is not only being spared from the punishment you earned but also receiving blessings, comforts, and joys that did not belong to you! In your sin, you and I should have suffered eternal torments and terrors forever. And yet, God sacrificed His Son to rescue you. Instead of us suffering, He watched His only Son undergo emotional, spiritual, and physical anguish to offer us grace. Our salvation, even if it were the only good thing that ever happened to us, would be infinitely more than we could ever ask for or expect.
But it is not the only good thing that has happened to you. Tell me, can you count all of the blessings and graces the Lord God has given you? All of the joys He has imparted through families, friends, children, or through a lineage and heritage. Has He given you wealth, food, wine, safety, or security? Has He answered any of your prayers? Has He given you oxygen to breathe or organs that work without your direct involvement or management? Has He given you a physical copy of the Bible? What about all the other blessings stacked on top of blessings that we forget to acknowledge?
When we add up the mountain of blessings we have received and compare it to the eternal torments and sufferings we deserve, it is shocking that we complain as much as we do. Think about this clearly, if we received nothing but our salvation from God, and if our temporal lives were filled with nothing but heartache, miseries, and unimaginable sufferings, and if we never once felt the comfort and nearness of His presence, we would still be inconceivably and unreservedly blessed.
Remembering this, we should not be surprised whenever God feels distant from us. We should actually be surprised that so frequently, He doesn’t. Instead, we should be shocked that such an immense and pure being would persist for so long with such petulant peasants. And if we should ever walk through a period like this, where God feels to us distant, our first reaction should not be that we have been slighted. Instead, we should remember that this same God, who is working out our salvation, is also working out this situation for good. Since He is sovereign over all things and perfectly good in all things, we can trust Him in all things. We can rest knowing we are more blessed than our minds can conceive, which will help us patiently wait for our experience to improve.
Reflect on Our Righteousness:
The principle: Our righteousness, obedience, and sanctification do not obligate God to give us experiences of His nearness.
The book of Job is predicated upon the fact that Job is a righteous man (Job 1:1). Throughout its pages, Job himself announces that he is blameless, guiltless, and righteous (see Job 27:6 as an example). Furthermore, God Himself agrees with this assessment, even saying it Himself at the beginning of the book (Job 1:8). The book is a fascinating thought experiment and a case study on how and why the righteous suffer and experience distance from God. And according to the book of Job, sometimes they experience this phenomenon, not because they lack righteousness, but because of it, which was a concept entirely foreign to that time and place.
At that time, the prevailing wisdom, especially among Job’s shoddy friends, was that good people obtain favor and blessings because of their goodness. At the same time, the wicked will suffer because of their wickedness. To that culture, the world operated along strict rules of reciprocity. Good people were rewarded; bad people were punished. The obvious conclusion from such a philosophy was: “If you are suffering, then you must be wicked,” which contradicts God’s own words about His servant, Job.
With that, the book invites us to explore why someone blameless, righteous, and even commended by God could undergo such a loss of intimacy with His creator. Notice how Job recounts his suffering. He does not describe it entirely as the loss of material wealth or physical health decline. Instead, he says:

“Oh that I knew where I might find Him, that I might come to His seat!… “Behold, I go forward but He is not there, And backward, but I cannot perceive Him; when He acts on the left, I cannot behold Him; He turns on the right, I cannot see Him.” – Job 23:3, 8-9

In addition to Job’s constant declarations of rightness and fairness, he also describes what he considers the brunt of his affliction. His righteousness did not secure for him the intimacy and fellowship with God he thought it would. Job is far less vexed over the loss of physical and material blessings. Instead, he is far more broken that God seemed like a million miles away from him. Job cannot conceive of a world where a man actively pursues righteous living, and God, who knows everything, would still withhold His presence from him. That was inconceivable to him, and that same complaint comprises the lion’s share of the book.
Just as Job had to learn at the end of the book, we, too, must expand our view of God. Like Job, we must understand that works of personal righteousness, individual obedience, and dedicated work in holiness cannot guarantee the experience of feeling near unto God. God does not operate in a quid pro quo, vending machine spirituality. He grants the awareness of nearness as He deems fit. This is not based on our schemes. There will be times when God will graciously allow us to experience an abundance of His presence. But there will also be times when He doesn’t, and we need to become acquainted with that.
Remember, God is sovereign over all these things. Recall that our sanctification and growth in righteous living do not render God indebted to us. Rest in the fact that God is using everything, even periods of perceived distance, for our good and for His glory!

“Though He slay me, yet I will hope in Him. – Job 13:15

Reflect on Past Records:
The principle: Just because God gave tremendous experiences of His presence in the past does not mean He is obligated to repeat them in the present.
Psalm 44 begins this way:

O God, we have heard with our ears, our fathers have told us the work that You did in their days, In the days of old… For by their own sword they did not possess the land, and their own arm did not save them, but Your right hand, and Your arm, and the light of Your presence, for You favored them. – Ps 44:1

The Psalmist is seeking to remind God of the days of old. Those were days when His presence went powerfully ahead of the people and delivered them safely into the land He had promised.
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Until the Lord Jesus Christ returns, the church has been called to live out our Gospel redemption together. Ethnocentrism has no place among our ranks, as we are perfectly united in Jesus Christ. It does not matter what color, culture, or country we hail from; we serve a more excellent King who has made us one in Christ! We now see all people, from all strata, as being created in the image of God.

“For I am not ashamed of the gospel,for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes,to the Jew first and also to the Greek.” Romans 1:16
Despite what secular woke artists, race baiters, and critical race grifters may tell you, ethnicity is not primary to our identity. The world is not divided into systemic oppressors and marginalized victims. And your melanin count is not the most important thing about you. It just isn’t.
In this article, I want to reject every godless notion that racism can be fought with more racism. Instead, I want to embrace the commonsense notion that increased divisiveness does not lead to increased unity. And I want to stand upon the only truth that can bring healing to our land. To do that, I will entirely ignore every pagan secular philosophy that has an opinion on this issue, and instead, I will joyfully share the Gospel! That message is what we need to hear, now more than ever.
WHAT IS THE GOSPEL?
In its most basic form, the Gospel is the four-part story of how God is bringing redemption to sinful man. Part 1 is the story of how God created humans to be perfect. Part 2 is about how those same humans chose rebellion and fell into sin and ruin. Part 3 is about how God sent His only Son to rescue and redeem those fallen men. And Part 4 is about how God will totally and finally bring total redemption to full completion in eternity. That is the general and good old Gospel message.
HOW DOES THE GOSPEL SPEAK ABOUT RACE?
But, what I find so fascinating about the Gospel, is how robust it truly is. It not only provides the general answer to the question of redemption, but it also communicates redemption in more particular and concrete ways. For instance, the Gospel not only recounts how God created us (a general truth); it also shows how we were created as sexual, emotional, biological, rational, relational, and vocational beings (particular truths). Moreover, the Gospel not only argues that we have fallen into sin (A general statement), but it also defines what that sin is and how it has infected every facet of our being (a particular appeal).
With that, I believe the Gospel can and should be told from various angles to show how God redeems us from all various and sundry sins. So with that, this article is about how the four-part general story of the Gospel can be told through the particular lens of race, and how only Jesus can heal the sin of racism.
PART 1: CREATION (One Unique Race)
After 5 dramatic days filled with the most incredible displays of God’s creational power, God made the animals, and then He fashioned the man. He personally knelt down in the dust and intimately formed a human in His own image (Gn. 2:7). Then, He made a suitable helper for him in the woman, Eve (Gn 2:18). And finally, He commanded both of them, male and female, to be fruitful and multiply, rule and have dominion, and to spread out to the ends of the earth (Gn. 1:28). This was what it meant to be human in a general sense.
More specifically, we may understand that humans were designed as a single ethnic people. Eve was made to be the flesh of Adam’s flesh and the bone of Adam’s bone (Gn. 2:23), which meant that Adam and Eve were members of a single race; the human race. Their melanin content did not matter at all in God’s perfect design. However light or dark they were, they were human. And their mandate was to fill the world full of people so that a worldwide community would all worship the same God, living in perfect harmony with one another, without even a hint of division.
Then enters the serpent.
PART 2: FALL (A World In Ethnic Division)
When Adam and Eve rejected the Word of God and followed the serpent’s trickery, humanity fell into sin. That sin not only affected their relationship with God but also had a profound impact upon human race relations as well. For instance, the first intraracial crime in human history occurred when Adam’s son Cain killed his other son Abel. These boys were members of the same human race, both descended from the same bloodline, and yet one of them decided to perpetrate a hideous act of violence upon the other. This set a terrible precedent that still exists today, but it does not stop there.
Humans not only murdered themselves interracially (meaning members of the human race killing other humans), but soon ethnocentric discrimination, hatred, and murder began as well. After humans were judged through a global flood, the rebooted race of Noah gathered in a valley called Shinar, also known as Babel. The goal was not to be fruitful, multiply, or for man to spread out to the ends of the earth in obedience to God’s covenant commission (Gen 1:28; 9:1). Instead, their goal was to cloister together in a valley of disobedience, and in pure hubris, attempt to build a tower that reached up to the heavens; making themselves equal to God.
God, of course, vetoed their foolish plans, but He also introduced a new facet into the human race. That was ethnicity. Up to this point, all humans spoke the same language and looked the same color. Again, there is only one race of human beings. But, after the curse of Babel, humans naturally segregated into ethnolinguistic tribes who scattered all across the earth in search of places to call their own. Thus, after Babel, one human race was divided into a myriad of ethnicities. This was not the problem.
The problem was sin. And since sin affects every facet of the human condition, humans began acting out their dysfunction, discrimination, judgment, and violence along ethnic lines as well. It was not enough to perpetuate violence against another human. Sin, instead, caused humans to group and stratify themselves according to color, tribe, language, and culture. This way, evil could be inflicted upon groups and not just individuals.
While one race of people still existed (the human race), a deep distrust for other ethnic peoples settled upon the human psyche so that human genetically similar persons were never more divided. Wars and prejudices were now being enacted over skin color and complexion. Slavery became an early institutional norm in the ancient world, where one tribe would act shamefully against another, believing the other group to be subhuman.
And while examples could abound in history and in the modern world of this kind of hatred, it is essential to note that sin produces ethnocentrism among all peoples. I do not use the word “racism” here because there is only one human race. Sin does not produce fear, prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism among various races (i.e., racism); sin produces fear, prejudice, discrimination, and opposition among the many competing ethnicities that exist as one broken, fractured race of people (i.e., ethnocentrism).
This distinction is critical because racism does not really get at the problem. People hating one another inside the human race is not specific enough to account for the intentional sins that ethnically dissimilar people enact upon one another. And, racism as a term, is not robust enough to describe any meaningful cure. This is because humans will not be cured and made whole through more division; humans will be cured and made whole when they come together as one human race as God intended. That can only come about through the Gospel.
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Transgenderism is a philosophy that aims too low and accomplishes too little. Our identity is not in our genitals. Our salvation does not come from cutting off working organs. Our identity comes from the Lord Jesus Christ, who is transforming us into new creations! 

A Pseudo-Identity
One of the most damaging aspects of sin upon the soul of fallen man is that it will lead a person on a never-ending goose chase to find their “true self” or “true identity.” Unfortunately, this quest bears about as much fruit as a group of first-year boy scouts going snipe hunting in the dark. Yet sin propels humanity onward like a hungry beast chasing the elusive carrot.
Instead of looking outside of ourselves to the one true God, who is blessed forever, sin will coax men and cajole women to search for their identity within their gender, sexual preferences, body size, wealth, status, children, careers, emotions, diseases, and virtually everything else. This is the very picture of idolatry: finding yourself defined by and controlled by the creaturely instead of the creator (Romans 1:25), which lead nowhere but hell.
Today, the most pervasive and pernicious campaign to derail human identity, in my humble opinion, is the transgender movement. Like all idolatrous movements before it, it has its own myth concerning its version of the fall, redemption, and future glory that it shamelessly puts forward to unsuspecting victims.
Instead of seeing the fall as separation from the one true God, transgender ideology sees that they have been separated from the correct set of genitals, which becomes fuel for their version of salvation. Instead of repenting, accepting who God designed them to be, turning to Christ for regeneration and hope, and then living in the Spirit for their sanctification, the transgender community promises that salvation can only come if you will surgically remove your breasts, chemically castrate your penises, take dangerous hormone therapy, and make your innies into outies. If you submit to Dr. Waldman’s madness, becoming a modern-day Frankenstein, you can have a mirage of hope. You will be promised freedom and salvation from the sin of being born in the wrong body, but that salvation is only skin deep.
Tragically, this has led to disastrous outcomes for many people, who, instead of finding heaven on the other side of a scalpel, have found only hellish depression, phantom pains, and the despair of unmet expectations leading many to commit suicide in their hopelessness. So clearly, the trans myth of salvation is just that, a myth.
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You will need to learn the timely habit of casting every negative emotion, thought, feeling, or desire on Him. The plain and simple truth is that you are not sufficient to carry such things. That is not how you were made. So take those aberrant cares and cast them onto the only one who truly loves you, and watch your depression melt away.

The Call to War
Depression is like an unassailable fog that settles upon the harbor of the soul. It is a leach upon the fledgling emotions and a disease upon formerly vibrant desires. It is a thickly clouded midnight sky that chokes out distant starlight. It’s a bandit that comes upon you and grabs hold of you like a barnacle on the underside of a merchant ship. And when you are a Christian, depression is about as welcome in your life as a fox would be at a hen convention.
As a pastor, I have seen the soul-paralyzing effects that depression can wrangle upon the heart of countless men and women. As a man, I have felt my mangled heart periodically strangled by the silent thief lurking in the melancholy shadows. From my earliest memories to this very week, depression and anxiety have been a feature of my life. Yet, I am not a victim, and neither are you.
For a few moments, I would like to sketch out a three-step guide found in 1 Peter 5:6-7 on how to slay the tyrant called depression. This blog will not discuss clinical depression, medication, therapy, or counseling. Instead, I aim to describe the spiritual warfare that has aided my heart and soul, and I pray it will comfort you.
The Text

6 Therefore humble yourselves under the mighty hand of God, that He may exalt you at the proper time, 7 casting all your anxiety on Him, because He cares for you.

Step 1: Reject Human Pride
Everything in this verse hinges upon killing pride because if depression were an engine, then pride would be its gasoline. It is the fuel that propels major depressive episodes into spiraling tailspins. Thus, if you want to sever the shoots of depression, you must first cut off the bitter roots of pride in both its mange forms.
The most apparent form of pride is self-love, which leads to an eventual credibility crisis. When humans become infatuated with themselves, the ego inflates beyond rational possibility. The propaganda and hype quickly outpace common sense, and soon the person will have to work increasingly harder to believe how incredible they know that they are not. This disparity between perception and reality can lead to various forms of depression and must be repented of.
And yet, the most damaging form of pride is not self-love; it is self-hatred. Instead of spending hours fantasizing about how incredible you are, this manifestation of pride leads its victims to recall how awful they are. And whether that self-loathing comes from destructive addictions, poor body image, failed relationships, or the sorrow from self-induced consequences, the effect of perpetual harmful self-consumption will give way to the same toxic narcissism as self-love.
Biblically speaking, the human heart will become septic if the self is all you feed it. We may hate various aspects of who we are. We may have abiding bitterness over how things have turned out or based on how we have been treated. We may ache over feelings of abandonment. We may shake our heads at how stupid we were that one time (or many times). And we may carry a duffle bag full of self-blame over this or that scenario. But, feeding yourself more of you is like adopting a diet of pure lard and hoping to get healthy.
The only way to kill your depression is to stop making everything about you. Sure, you probably have failed a million times. You are also the common denominator in all of your ruined circumstances. And yet, you do not belong to you. If you are a Christian, Christ has purchased your life and hidden it in Him so that He is where your hope comes from.
Instead of punishing yourself with more self-hatred, give yourself permission to stop focusing on yourself and start focusing on Him. When the chatterbox inside of you screams, “why do people treat me this way” you cry back: “Look how kind my savior has treated me!”. When the accusations begin to gurgle, “you are one pathetic loser,” from the tar pits of depression, you resist the urge to grovel alone in destructive pity and speak to your flesh, saying: “Look at who Christ has made me. I am no loser; I am a son.
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As Christians, we understand that the Gospel is not violence, at least not in the way that the world accuses it. For, while the Gospel does attack the parts of us which are deader than dead, it also brings never-ending life that replaces our death and can never be taken away. The Gospel damaging our sinful flesh brings life in the same way the surgeon’s scalpel cuts away the cancer to preserve the patient. Therefore, to withhold the Gospel, which is the only cure for the malady of man, would be the only actual violence we could ever perpetrate against humanity.
 
INTRO
A kind of fragile despair has crept into the modern mind so that it can no longer be safely challenged. To question the thoughts, or the lifestyle, of another person or group has become the moral equivalent of executing violence against them. Or so we are told. To say that this or that thing is morally wrong, and needs to be repented from, is to become culpable for their suicide. This was the ugly goblet of shame recently dumped on my unsuspecting head.
In a private message on Facebook, I was asked the following questions by a random user:
“Do you think my friend deserved all the abuse and pain that she took? Are you happy that she’s dead? Do you hate my friend? Pastor, did you want transgender people to kill themselves? Is that what you wanted?”
These questions were shocking to me. Not only does my very existence (and Biblical beliefs) threaten the life of another human being, but the only acceptable recourse offered is for me to no longer call transgenderism a sin. As a Christian, I cannot comply here. According to this logic, either I will disobey God by turning a blind eye toward sin or become a serial killer with bloodstains on my hands. This is the highly polarized perspective I was invited into.
But, as I was thinking about this exchange, I realized that this is precisely what persecution will look like in the modern world. When a Christian shares truth from Scripture, even in the most gentle and loving ways, we will not be beaten, beheaded, or thrown in prison. At least not yet. More likely, we will be accused of murdering people with ideas. We will be endlessly boycotted and ever hated by people who do not have the love of Christ and, as a result, have an endless supply of fury to spew in our direction for a thousand lifetimes.
The message continues:
“You’ve made an enemy. Until you stop your vendetta, die, or move away, I guess I’m just going to have to fight you forever.”
As Christians, how are we to think about messages such as this?
REMEMBER, WHO WE ARE
Before we move on to strategy, we need to remember who we are in Christ. We are people who have been ransomed out of the kingdom of darkness and brought into God’s marvelous Kingdom of dazzling Light (Col. 1:13). Before Jesus rescued us, we were enslaved by our aberrant passions (Ti 3:3) and consumed by all malice and disgusting rebellions (Ro. 1:29-32; Gal. 5:19-21; 1 Co. 6:9-10). There was nothing at all different between the most flagrant sinners on earth and us, which is, in fact, where God stepped in (1 Cor. 6:11). From that wicked and lowly estate, the Lord Jesus Christ set His electing affections upon us and purchased us out of the thralls of sin to become His slaves of righteousness (Ro. 6:17-18). Now, as people who belong to Him, we declare our allegiance and adorations, our loyalty and love, by no longer gratifying our former lusts (Gal 5:16; Eph. 2:1-8), but by killing the flesh (Ro. 8:13), so that we can be obedient to Him (John 14:15; Eph 2:10). That loving and loyal obedience requires that we will go, do, and say whatever He commands (Luke 6:46), which involves nothing less than discipling the pagan nations to know what Jesus thinks concerning all things (Mt. 28:18-20). Essentially, being a Christian means joining Jesus’ campaign to conform the world (the world we once belonged to) into His beautifying redemptive vision. That work requires sharing the Gospel (Mk 16:15).
REMEMBER, WHAT WE ARE CALLED TO SHARE
Now, to share something, we must first know what that thing is. We can only speak intelligently about a thing if we fully comprehend what that thing is. For that reason, a brief sketch of the Gospel is in order, followed by some common lies that the world will accuse us of when we are vigilant in sharing God’s truth.
The Gospel is God’s loving offer of reconciliation and compassion to seedy rebels (Ro. 5:8). It is an offer executed by Christ alone (Jn 14:6), applied by His Spirit alone (1 Pt. 3:18) for the salvation of those He predestined alone (Eph. 1:5; Ro. 8:28-30). It is a message meant to be communicated by the very ones it saves (Ac. 1:9). It is a message we are called to become increasingly familiar with and effective at sharing (Phm 9). And it is a message that has certain essential elements that must be included if it is to be considered a “Gospel message.” Those elements are as follows.
The Gospel begins with the bad news that we deserve death for our rebellion against God (Gen 3:19; Ro.1:32) and that we cannot repair the relationship by our own fickle virtue (Eph 2:8-9). The Gospel tells us that our sin is the poison that is killing us slowly (Ja. 1:15), and it is the toxic venom that will ensure our everlasting death in agony forever (Rev. 21:8). Because we are utterly helpless to rescue ourselves salvation must come from God alone (Jnh 2:9), which is why God sent the Lord Jesus Christ to save His people from their sin (Jn. 3:16).
That rescue plan required Christ perfectly obeying the law that you and I had perfectly transgressed (Heb. 4:15). It would involve God crediting us with the righteous status of Jesus Christ (Phil 3:9) while pouring our sin and our rebellions onto Him (2 Co. 5:21). Christ would trade places with us, giving us His life and freedom, taking our misery and shame down into the grave (Gal 3:13-14) and bringing us new life in His resurrection (Ro. 6:6). For Christ Jesus on the third day, rose from the dead, being exalted above all things (Phil 2:9), securing redemption for all His lowly people (1 Co. 1:16-17), and making Christ the author and perfecter of our salvation (Heb 12:2). Then, after ascending into heaven, to reign at the right hand of God (Ro. 8:34), He is now pouring out His Spirit onto all whom He chooses (Jn. 6:63; Ac. 2:33), so that they will have faith in Christ alone (Ro. 15:13), and so that the Spirit will help them declare His Gospel alone (Jn 16:13; Ac. 4:12; Ro. 10:14).
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Whether it is Pastor Story Hour or something else, we want our children to see us active in the world. We do not want them to grow up hiding from culture. We do not want them to believe that our faith is private, quiet, and secretive. We do not want them to grow up afraid to engage. We want them to feel encouraged to labor for Christendom. Excited and eager to see King Jesus reclaim territory for His Kingdom in their lifetime. And we want them to see themselves in that work, encouraged that God might use them to do something extraordinary for Jesus. When we model it to them, they will catch a vision of doing it themselves.

As people across the nation have been hearing about our Pastor Story Hour, I thought it would be helpful to sketch out some of my thoughts on why we are doing an event such as this. And while I prefer to sit and talk about this over a dark roast coffee, I would like to be brief enough here to be truly helpful. Of course, considering that I am a preacher, my goal may already be in jeopardy. Nevertheless, I would like to provide a few significant thoughts on why we believe this event is so helpful, useful, and necessary.
1) GOSPEL – The doctrine behind every conversion and the heartbeat fueling every Christian is the Gospel. It is the power of almighty God, and it is not only the MOST ESSENTIAL doctrine that we could ever learn as individuals, but it is the most essential doctrine that our children could ever learn as well! The Gospel is the doctrine that will guard their hearts and minds should they find themselves in a secular university. The Gospel is the balm for their weary soul when they walk through the pain and suffering life will inevitably throw at them. The Gospel is the life raft for their doubts, the comfort in their sadness, and the fuel for all their joy and gladness. As parents, we are responsible for preparing them for life without us. But, to do that well, we must actively, deliberately, and passionately teach them the Gospel.
As elders and pastors, we take that work seriously (1 Ti 4:1-2). We want to be a resource for our parents in helping you understand the Gospel so that you can also train your children to know God’s glorious Gospel!
2) PASTORAL LEADERSHIP – We believe pastors have been called to bring the truth of the Scriptures to bear on every facet of God’s people’s lives. We do not want to produce people who can behave like Christians during a Sunday morning service. Instead, we want to develop people who are impacted by the Gospel at every level, in every nook and cranny of their lives, so that all of their life looks like Christ. To do that, we must not take for granted that people are leaving the safety of our churches on Sunday to enter the battlefield on Monday. While we are reading commentaries and preparing messages throughout the week, our people are inundated with the enemy’s lies, saturated with every wind of cultural dogmatism, and pressured to compromise. Frankly, if we are not actively seeking to help our people develop a Biblical worldview, then we are preparing them for failure.
As pastors, we stand with one foot in the Biblical world of truth and theology and the other foot in the world of liberal and secular ideology. We stand on the wall and see the trends coming, the pagan philosophies forming, the secular ideologies gathering steam, and we are the exact people God called to help. We are the ones who help equip God’s people to think about things from a Biblical worldview, and that duty must never be abandoned. For this reason, an event like Pastor Story Hour is so helpful because we can pick and choose topics to teach that do not usually come up on a Sunday morning. Further, we can take those topics and use them as an opportunity to train our children and equip our parents. That is pastoral leadership.
3) FAMILY WORSHIP – The more we become acquainted with the Gospel, the more we realize that it is not just a Sunday doctrine and not the kind of thing that can be contained in a one-hour church service each week. The Gospel finds its way into every aspect of our life, which means we must also teach the Gospel in every area that our children live. This is why the Gospel must be read in books, sung in songs, prayed at dinner tables, tucked in with them when they go to bed, and the aroma of the home they will awaken into.
For this reason, Pastor Story Hour is not only for the children to learn the Gospel, but it is also an intentional environment for parents to come and watch us teaching their children and to observe how we do it. We want moms and dads to see how we do it and get ideas and inspiration on how to do the same thing for their children in their own homes. We want you to feel comfortable, competent, and confident in knowing how to instruct your children in the Gospel. We believe Pastor Story Hour can be a wonderful part of that! Our goal is that Pastor Story Hour will be a blessing to every member of the family and that it will invigorate family worship in our community and beyond!
4) CHRISTIAN EDUCATION – Along with family worship, we believe the Church has a God-ordained responsibility to educate all of our people in the Gospel and to help equip them for service in His Kingdom.
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Sins must not be minimized or trivialized. Sin caused our world to fall into the depths of depravity and violence. Sin caused our precious and spotless savior to undergo the wrath of God. And sin, while promising pleasure, becomes the bane of intimacy between us and God. Knowing this, let us be vigilant in fighting, making war, and mortifying our flesh so that we can experience more joy, more intimacy, and more pleasure in knowing God.

There are no such things as little sins. Every minuscule action or inaction, every microscopic thought, feeling, or the lack thereof that is tainted with even the slightest trace of sin, is eternally damaging to our relationship with God. And yet, we live in a world constantly seeking to minimize what the Bible calls sin. I do it. You do it. We all do it. We all want to reduce the gravity of our sin to the point where it no longer stings the soul.
We take things that are offensive to God and then reframe them in language that is more palatable to our egos and consciences.
For instance, how many politicians or celebrities have you heard make the claim “I made a mistake” when it is discovered that they are cheating on their spouse? They do not call it sin or adultery; they reduce it to the level of accidental carelessness. The same word I would use to describe spilling a glass of milk or tripping on a street corner – a mistake – is the word used for intentionally planning a prolonged illicit relationship of sexual and emotional infidelity. These two actions are not the same!
This is why infidelity is cast as “my needs aren’t getting met” because the perpetrator wants to become the victim. Divorce has now been recategorized as “falling out of love,” “drifting apart,” or “we just weren’t a good fit” to avoid a sin that God hates. Digitally depicted sex acts, incest, rape, and grotesque forms of violence are all rebranded under the guise of entertainment and joyfully consumed without question. Homosexuality and pedophilia are called “love,” rebranded as normative expressions of affection and sexual behavior instead of the rank perversions they are. Abortion, which is the intentional slaughtering of innocent humans, is more politely called “rights” and “healthcare.”
Yet, we not only play these games with big sins but also do that slimy dance with the sins we consider to be smaller ones. For example, many treat lying as no longer “wrong” in an absolute sense but sometimes can be situationally advantageous. Gluttony can be called words like “comfort,” “foodie,” or “boredom.” Even sins of omission, where we do not do what God commanded, can be seen as “not my gifting” or “Not qualified,” which does not Biblically work. See Matthew 28:18-20 for an explicit command that is woefully ignored today.
I am convinced that this behavior is a universal human condition. Christian or not, believer or skeptic, we all long to maximize our ego and minimize our culpability before God.
How can I say this? Because I want to minimize my sins right along with you. I cannot speak for everyone, but I know intimately how the human condition works because I am very much human. I detest that I am a guilty sinner and would gladly scuttle past that point without a moment’s reflection if I could. To do that, I either have to deal with how sinful I am and be brutally honest about it, or I will do what we all do and minimize, trivialize, and placate our sins.
And maybe you will ask, why do we do this? I think it is evident in Scripture that when we chose rebellion against God, something intrinsic to our souls was broken so that all we now do and everything we crave has been tainted by the disease of sin. Instead of honesty, we weave clever ruses to picture ourselves as the good guy. We do not want to face the music that we have failed and are deeply flawed in ways we cannot fix. We do not want to admit that we would fail a million times if we were given a million chances with God. We avoid the obvious truth, so we can keep our sin outside of us instead of dealing with the reality that it is going on within that is affecting, effecting, and infecting us all.
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As we revisit the truths that Thomas Brooks discovered in 1652, let us be reinvigorated by them today. Let us make war with our sin. Let us avoid the veneer of virtue signaling and resist the temptation to tuck them away like poison without dealing with it adequately. Let us flee to the arms of our dear savior for comfort, and let us stand in the power of the Spirit to live differently in the days ahead.

One of the most helpful books I have ever read was Precious Remedies Against Satan’s Devices by the great Puritan Thomas Brooks. In that book, which is more like a handbook on how to avoid the schemes of hell, Brooks lays out common ways the enemy so quickly entraps us, along with precious Gospel remedies we can employ to avoid the temptations he brings. Last week, we began looking more closely at the first of these devices and remedies and will continue again this week, looking at how Satan paints sin with virtuous colors.
Painting Sin with Virtue Signals
In the deepest recesses of the human psyche, like a balrog sleeping in the depths of Moria, exists an unquenchable torrent of guilt that cannot be assuaged by the putting on of virtues. And yet, the madness of the human condition is this, although we cannot succeed in doing, surely we will try, try, again. In fact, virtue signaling exists to distract from the inherent guilt we all know is festering within us, like a boil ready to unleash its murky contents.
Imprinted upon the sickly soul of man is the unavoidable knowledge that all have sinned and fallen short of our creator’s glory (Romans 3:23). But, instead of reckoning with this Holy God, the brittle soul suppresses this embarrassing knowledge in abject wickedness (Romans 1:18). Faced with the foul pollution of our contaminated character, we pretend we are virtuous because we cannot stand the terror of how sin has mangled us.
This is why Planned Parenthood when referring to the grizzly murder of a million infants per year, uses the benign phrase: women’s healthcare. The human ego cannot bear the horror and culpability of creating the most extensive serial killing ring in human history. So, with euphemisms turned into ad campaigns, they disguise their awful corruptions and attempt to convince the onlooking world that they are, in fact, the righteous ones. And if you do not join them, you are the real monster.
This is why democrats in 2020 were wearing the “I can’t breathe” t-shirts commemorating the death of George Floyd. Because, with a tattered legacy of being pro-slavery, pro-racism, pro-Jim Crow, and the perpetrator of a litany of violence against non-white races, the democrats must constantly play moral whack-a-mole, to forget who they were, and to convince everyone else they are unstained. And should you defy their clever wordsmithing? You will be thoroughly canceled, tossed into a “basket of deplorables,” doxed, and then deemed unfit for polite society. Their guilt fuels their senselessness.
But let us not puff out hollow chests while doing a little conservative jig with the Pharisees. Everyone virtue signals to some degree or another because no one wants to face the dragons hiding within. We cannot, as Christians, pretend that this is just a game the pagans play. When we lie, we paint with the strokes called: “I was only kidding.” When we foment anger, it is their stupidity that causes it. When we are cut off by a reckless driver, we deem him unfit for the road or travel, and yet, when we do the exact same thing, we are the ones who have an excellent reason. Perhaps, the most constant and revolting aspect of our sin is that it is so morbidly hideous that our souls not only scramble to hide it, cloak it, or redefine it, but it also forgoes true repentance in exchange for pitiful excuses and virtue signals. Without Christ, we are truly hopeless.
The Death of Signaling and Dawn of Virtue
Two thousand years ago, the divine author we rejected penned Himself into His own epic, taking upon Himself the weight of the tragedy, His characters deserved. And unlike us, He didn’t participate in the charades or dawn the theater masks (Thalia and Melpomene). He did not feign righteousness or masquerade with contrived or pretended holinesses. Instead, he lived authentically as the God-man before us. Instead of pacifying guilt, which He had none, He assuaged the wrath of almighty God. For His elect, He came so that all who are in Christ could be set free from the toil of shame and misery to live in the glorious freedom of serving Him.
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