Written by T. M. Suffield |
Monday, August 5, 2024
It doesn’t really matter whether you think the day starts as your head hits the pillow or when you wake but recognising that we start with sleep and that joy comes in the morning can profoundly reshape the way you visualise your weeks and years. This is the view of life of the Bible: hope comes after and far more can be mended than you know. What does matter is that we start to see the world with open eyes. Everything teaches you the way of the Lord, or the way of death.

Have you ever noticed that in Genesis chapter one, the days are the wrong way around?
When I say the wrong way around, I mean backwards to what we expect, and before you rush off to compare the order of creation and question whether it means anything meaningful that the sun and moon come so late (it does, but that’s not our topic today), look at each day.
They’re backwards.
“And there was evening and there was morning, the first day” and each day thereafter. Evening, then morning. That’s backwards. We all know that days start in the morning, unless we’re pedantic enough to insist that they start in the middle of night. If we are that pedant, we are a prime example of what happens when you give a scientist a writer’s job, or when we let people learn the natural sciences before they’re thoroughly grounded in real subjects, like poetry.
But the destructive results of carving the day into twenty-four sections and thinking we’ve done something clever aside, the days in the Old Testament seem to be backwards.
Of course, I’m sure we can all grasp that they count time differently, so it’s not wrong but different. Except, I would like to contend that the Old Testament’s way of counting days is instructive to us. Honestly, it’s also better.
The day starts in the evening as the Sun sets and then continues into the daytime after the night, ending at sunset the subsequent evening. Think, perhaps, of the Jewish observation of the Sabbath to see this in practice: beginning on Friday evening and following through to Saturday evening.
Ok, they count days differently, so what?
Little things like this shape the way we see the world. They subconsciously tell us stories. Day, followed by night tells us a story: we have limited time to work, then our death will come. Make the most of your days in the sun while you can, for they are brief. The best comes at the beginning, the worst at the end: or in other words, youth is better than old age.
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Written by T. M. Suffield |
Friday, July 26, 2024
 Most of the Christian life is about the quiet ordinariness of your domestic life. Your Christian duty is to love your spouse if you’re married, to raise your children in the faith if you’re a parent, to be a good friend and neighbour, to look after the poor, and to see the kingdom of God invade your locality. Most of this ‘whole life’ discipleship is ordinary. It’s not exciting. It’s a walk forwards into a new way of living, but it’s also very mundane.

What does our discipleship crisis look like? Our lives look the same as our neighbours and they shouldn’t. We don’t all have to be radical, but we do need a small number of radicals among us to help us see that our lives could be different.
I do think ordinary faithfulness is the goal for most, even then our lives should still be recognisably different to our peers. When I first moved away from home to University, I was struck by the radical nature of the faith I met. I hadn’t encountered this before.
Other students were aware that their faith was their life: I remember spontaneous all night prayer sessions, evangelising on campus, long conversations about the Bible (that were probably more heat than light, honestly). A lot of that was youthful enthusiasm and it is good and right for it to be tempered as life moves into a more typical rhythm.
Yet, the adults I knew were radical too. Most of the families in the church didn’t have a TV. They gave their lives to Jesus and raised their children into the faith in ways that caught me as a fresh-eyed older teenager.
I’m not sure that not having a TV is the thing we all need to do, I feel no impulse to get rid of mine—though Rhys Laverty’s recent description of giving up the TV for the sake of their kids and the transformative effect it’s had on their children is inspiring—but I don’t encounter many people who don’t have one at all. People are shocked we don’t pay for a streaming service (which is about cost rather than ideology, we watch plenty) and we watch plenty of TV. It feels like the bar has shifted.
I’m not sure this example is a universal one. I suspect those families were being deeply counter-cultural in the early 00s. I was impacted by this example because it was shocking. Yet as culture has pulled in entirely the opposite direction, you’d think we’d see more pulling against the tide. If we turned to what should be an easy one, not giving smartphones to children, you’d hope Christians were there but we’re not.
Even if you disagree with my opinion on that, I can’t think of a common against the culture stand that we do see amongst Christians in terms of what we do with our lives. We sometimes talk a good talk but when it comes down to it, we don’t live differently.
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Written by T. M. Suffield |
Saturday, July 13, 2024
We should be expecting our faith to touch and change every aspect of our lives. We should expect the Bible to provide wisdom for every decision we’re making, even if this is often more about developing wise lives and minds so that we can make godly decisions. Which means that our Christian formation should touch all of life. 

I’ve claimed the UK church is in a discipleship crisis, taking in our lives, our communities, and our minds. What does the first one of those look like?
When you stick ‘-ship’ on the end of something you end up systematising a phenomenon and developing a ‘science’ (in the sense of a body of knowledge). We see this in ‘leadership’ for example. A similar thing has happened with ‘discipleship.’
Is it good and right that some people talk about how we learn to follow Jesus? Yes. That’s what I’m doing after all, I’m sketching the contours of ‘discipleship.’ But, it isn’t a ‘thing’ we do as though we added it onto the rest of our life. It is life.
To use a less familiar term to help us think about these things together, I tend to call discipleship ‘Christian formation.’ The point is to be formed towards Jesus. The means is the question at hand.
Most of us picture discipleship in a very particular way. In a more cerebral conservative evangelical world that might look like the acquisition of knowledge about the Bible. In my charismatic evangelical world(s) it’s less likely to, even in the more conservative corners. Typically, it tends to involve exploring your heart and emotions and finding idols to rebuke and crush.
Both are good and godly, both are not the whole story. In both settings the most likely context people imagine for discipleship is one-on-one, probably in a coffee shop.
These sorts of conversations are great, they’re key to friendship as well as to receiving wisdom and direction. Though we should remember that male friendship tends to be side-by-side rather than face-to-face. It’s good to read the Bible with a friend, it’s good to talk about your heart. They are not the sum of discipleship. They aren’t really discipleship at all, they’re conversations about discipleship most of the time (this is less true if you just read the Bible together). Following Jesus is what you do the rest of the time.
Our crisis of discipleship is not helped by us thinking that following Jesus is a Christian activity that we add to a life of activities. Formation is just becoming more like Jesus as you live your life. Which is both simpler and much more all-encompassing. The faith touches everything and you can do everything Christianly.
Sometimes this sort of suggestion is mocked by accepting that you can do certain high culture jobs, especially academic ones, in explicitly Christian ways, but how can you sweep the road Christianly? A road is swept, or it isn’t.
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Written by T. M. Suffield |
Thursday, July 4, 2024
Our lives look the same as our neighbours. Our habits and the rhythms of our households look the same as everyone else of our social class who lives in our place. When we turn to more structural things, from the shape of the household to the objects we purchase and what we do for a living, we all again look pretty similar. I don’t think we’re supposed to.

We are in a discipleship crisis. Caused, perhaps, by the many other crises in the air, but here in the UK our faith is shallow.
To be more precise: our churches are not forming us into deep and rich faith.
I’ve been writing around this for a while, but I don’t think we’re talking about it enough. There are, of course, wonderful exceptions of individuals with deep and rich faith. You, dear friend, may well be among them. May Jesus continue to draw you towards himself.
There are even exceptions among churches, but in my circles less than we’d like. I don’t think this is for want of trying, and I hope most Pastors would recognise what I’m describing. I do think there are things we can do about this, though many of them aren’t ‘solutions’ because solutions are what got us here, and all of them are long-haul approaches. Perhaps we can change the face of Christianity in this nation by at best an inch or two in our lifetimes, but think of the fruit that could be borne a century or two downstream if we try. That’s a life worth living.
When I say our faith is shallow, what do I mean?
Broadly, that we have problems in three areas. Each I’ve touched on before, but I’ve not knit them together like this.
Life
Our lives look the same as our neighbours. Our habits and the rhythms of our households look the same as everyone else of our social class who lives in our place. When we turn to more structural things, from the shape of the household to the objects we purchase and what we do for a living, we all again look pretty similar.
I don’t think we’re supposed to.
Our churches don’t teach what a household or Christian life looks like in terms of real physical things. Many of us are good at habits of individual devotion—and I suspect if my neighbours knew I rose at six in the morning to read the Bible and pray that would seem strange, and I’m not unusual at all—and many of our churches have been good at teaching them. We’ve been less good at getting people to change how they live.
To take an example: churches have generally been good at teaching people to give their money away to levels that would appal our neighbours—and that explains how they can afford all those nice holidays—we need that for everything else.
Is this overstated? A little. I can name multiple ways that my rhythm of life makes no sense to my neighbours. “But why do you feed 12 people every Wednesday?” I remember when the builder questioned the need for the size of our dining-kitchen and we explained, he asked “are they family?” Sort of.
But we aren’t that radical. Well, I did once change jobs so I could go to a prayer meeting, so maybe I am that radical.
There are examples of radical living all over the place, but they aren’t that widespread. In the last week I watched a video of a church’s 50 anniversary celebration: it extolled the kindness of God to them over those five decades and was glorious.
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Written by T. M. Suffield |
Sunday, June 30, 2024
Our ignorance matters, especially in the questions where we haven’t freed ourselves to question. Our knowledge of God is limited, and acknowledging this is required in order to push further into God and the faith. This can sound like valorising doubt, as though it’s ‘stunning and brave’ to doubt key truths of Christianity. It isn’t, and it’s not. Instead, we have to acknowledge the truth of what we do and don’t know—and what we surmise and suspect—before we can keep walking towards understanding.

“In order to arrive at what you do not know, you must go by a way … of ignorance” says Eliot in East Coker.

Commenting on this, Matthew Lee Anderson says,

“It is a truth that is easy to write, but difficult to live out. Yet we can only learn when we are free to not know.”
Called into Questions, 26.
Anderson argues that it’s the art of questioning that takes us from the known to the unknown and gives us the opportunity for understanding.
In one sense it’s not revolutionary to say that to learn something new requires us to first not know. It doesn’t sound difficult, we’re all pretty good at not knowing stuff.
Except, we aren’t philosophically or emotionally good at this.
Imagine the scene, and let’s make it a church one:
The church is considering a tendentious theological question. Perhaps there’s a push to change their opinion on the subject in question. Inevitably there will people in the room who would welcome a shift and people who wouldn’t. The group that’s discussing the question will include a number of people who’s livelihood is tied up with the church, giving them financial incentives to go along with whatever the final decision is.
Both ‘sides’ in the room are anticipating that if the position is the opposite, this might have profound financial implications for them. Most in the room will have deep emotional ties to the church even if there are no financial ones, they will be are aware that a decision that they are opposed to is going to give them difficult decisions about whether they ride it out or not.
There are other angles to this but suffice to say that most people in the room have skin in the game. It makes clear thinking difficult. Christian thinking doesn’t need to be dispassionate, but it is difficult to think something through with others when the decision can have burdensome effects on your life that you’re already considering. It prevents you from asking the questions that put everything out on the table and let you start thinking things through from each required angle.
In the church so many decisions can be like this, or feel like they are this even when they aren’t objectively. It makes the freedom of not knowing very hard.
Free inquiry requires spaces where we can be free to be ignorant on the way to understanding. This is not ‘ignorance is bliss’—
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Written by T.M. Suffield |
Wednesday, June 19, 2024
Hard won wisdom engenders humility. The wise aren’t naïve about what they’ve gained, but some of what they’ve gained will be a healthy sense of the limits of their own wisdom. This is similar to the way that those who truly understand a topic are much more aware of the limits of their knowledge, but with the ability to chose good from bad.

How do you tell what’s good and what’s bad? How do you tell the difference between wisdom and folly? It’s not like it’s just intrinsic to all of us, or we would make fewer bad decisions.
I think it’s tempting to suggest that our difficulty here is because our minds are blinded by sin. There’s something to that, but we have to remember that Adam and Eve were told to not eat of the tree of wisdom—presumably they didn’t find it naturally easy either—because they still needed to grow up.
To learn to be wise is work. It requires training. The writer to the Hebrews reminds us:
But solid food is for the mature, for those who have their powers of discernment trained by constant practice to distinguish good from evil.Hebrews 5.14
The mature are those who have powers of discernment, trained. The wisdom to tell the difference between true and false, right and wrong, wise and foolish, requires training.
What kind of training? Training through constant practice. We aren’t talking about going on a course to be wise, we’re talking about wisdom developing over time by using it. It takes time.
We live in a moment where we’re surrounded by ‘disinformation,’ (some of it coming from those who are so keen to tell us about disinformation) it’s becoming increasingly difficult to tell if something you see on the internet is true. It’s likely that this trend will only accelerate; the ability of generative AI to produce images and video that look real at a casual glance is already advanced and it’s only getting better and quicker. Realistically, our shared public understanding of what constitutes truth is withering on the vine; if it’s not already dead. You might think this makes it uniquely important that we learn to determine truth from error; while it’s an unfortunate headwind, it’s not our biggest problem.
Wisdom is not about telling if the video was true or not, wisdom has been vital to successful human life since the Garden. The biggest opponent to the work of wisdom in our culture is not the sudden plethora of tools that make it easier for the average Joe to lie as convincingly as nations already can, though these tools are of concern for our public discourse. Rather the biggest opponent to the work of wisdom in our culture is its speed. Wisdom is work, it doesn’t come overnight, and it rarely comes to the young.
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Written by T. M. Suffield |
Sunday, June 16, 2024
With our souls fogged by sin we are natural hypocrites; knowing ourselves is like trying to drive in a steamed-up car. Knowing the world is about as difficult. We see what we expect to see. Matthew Lee Anderson puts it like this: “We will not see if we do not want to see—and we will only see what we want to see.”

Your intentions are often not transparent, even to you. Sin’s dark shadow means we must always think that there’s an iceberg of ourselves we haven’t fathomed, with much unseen and looming beneath the surface. The motivations for our actions, our thoughts, our feelings, even for the questions we grapple with, are more opaque than we like to think they are.
I know myself much better than I did a decade ago. It would be foolish to think that I know myself. We are very skilled at hiding ourselves from ourselves. It’s instinctive, like grabbing figs leaves to cover up something we don’t want seen, even by ourselves. Fig leaf sap is a nasty irritant, which says about everything you need to know about the human condition.
We give ourselves the benefit of the doubt over and over in ways we wouldn’t for anyone else. We allow behaviour in ourselves that deeply frustrates us in others; sometimes that’s why it frustrates us in others. With our souls fogged by sin we are natural hypocrites; knowing ourselves is like trying to drive in a steamed-up car.
Knowing the world is about as difficult. We see what we expect to see. Matthew Lee Anderson puts it like this:
“We will not see if we do not want to see—and we will only see what we want to see.”
Called into Questions, 98.
I think he’s right. Since I first read these words a year ago, they’ve been bouncing around my head. I only see what I want to see. I can’t see what I don’t want to. And, presumably, my sense of my self is blinded by sin enough that I have little awareness of this process or what it is that I wanted to see in the first place.
It’s hard to know yourself. It’s hard to know the world.
Are we stuck between a rock and a hard place? Or, perhaps better, a fuzzy indistinct thingy and a something-or-other?
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Written by T. M. Suffield |
Thursday, June 13, 2024
The Christ has conquered death! Hallelujah. Death is dead in the death of the living one. He has wrested the keys of Hades from the Enemy’s cold hand and now rules over death. Satan, Sin & Death ‘died’ on the Cross and Jesus won. Satan was defeated in the way described in Zechariah 3.1-4: the true accusations of the accuser are made to be false because Jesus stood in our place on the cross. Therefore, Satan, Sin & Death are defeated. Christ has won.

A few weeks ago, I taught a session that I called ‘Understanding the Cross’ at my church. We went through some of what sin is and what crucifixion was like and the Old Testament sacrificial system. In the second half we looked at passages of the Bible to find out what happened theologically on or because of the Cross.
I think it’s common that we emphasise one or two of these, but all 12 happened. It is true that the Bible emphasises some more than others and that these are not all of equal weight in our understanding, but together they form a tapestry.
Sometimes we can be so cross (!) about people who minimise penal substitution (that Jesus stood in the place of our punishment on the cross) that we make it the only thing the Bible talks about. Substitution is a main theme, but there are others.
Sometimes these are called ‘theories’ of atonement as though they are competing with one another. That isn’t the right way of thinking, as they’re all mentioned in the Bible. Instead they are facets of the atonement and the question is about how they fit together.
1. Substitution.
Isaiah 53.6, 1 Peter 2.24, 2 Corinthians 5.21
Jesus stands in our place, so that in the ‘Great Exchange’ as Martin Luther called it, we gain his righteousness while he takes our sin. This is our cross, our rightful death, and he takes it instead of us.
Therefore, I don’t have to die, even though sin causes death.
2. Propitiation
Romans 3.35, 1 John 4.10
This is often lumped with the former but it’s a distinctly different thing. It means the turning aside of wrath. Jesus’ death turns aside the wrath of God so that his anger is not levelled at those who trust in Jesus’ death.
Therefore, God’s wrath is not levelled against me, even though he is just and I deserve it.
3. Expiation
1 John 1.7, Leviticus 16
Jesus cleanses our filth so that our sin is taken far away from us. Think of the second goat on the Day of Atonement, who is sent out into the wilderness to be eaten by goat demons. He is identified with the people’s sin and then cast out the camp with their uncleaness on him. Jesus cleanses us not just from the penalty of sin but from its pollution, sending it far away.
Therefore, even though sin made me filthy, I have been cleaned.
4. Ransom
Matthew 20.28, Colossians 2.14
Jesus paid the price of our sin.
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Written by T. M. Suffield |
Sunday, June 2, 2024
Think Christianly, friends. When you do, you’ll find that the world is not just an arrow pointing to the heavens but a gift from the hand of the God who loves you. Delight in it, explore it, discover it, conquer it, and exercise dominion over it. When you know how to look you’ll find that written through the core of everything is Jesus’ smile, beckoning you in love to die and rise again.

We have an intellectual problem in the modern West. We’ve forgotten the intellectual underpinnings of all knowledge.
That’s Jesus by the way.
The resurrection of Jesus is the central beating fact of all existence. Our response to it is the core of our lives. Christians whose lives look the same as their neighbours are a deep sadness, a withered tree.
Anderson, who my writing has been meandering with for a little while now, states it like this:

God’s love in Jesus Christ is the open secret of the cosmos.
Called into Questions, 111
Our intellectual inquiry is supposed to start here. All our thinking is to start here. All our lives are to start here. Whatever you do for a living is dramatically shifted and changed by Jesus, as is everything else in your life.
This is what it is to think Christianly: to start with the revelation of God in Christ and then move outwards towards other disciplines.
How is Mathematics different? Or tax law? Or plumbing?
I suspect most of us want to say that I’m over-spiritualising things and that honestly most of life continues on unabated. I simply don’t think that can be true. The way we view the world has to start with Jesus.
There is no such thing as being ‘unbiased.’ You cannot start your thinking, or your doing, from a neutral place. That standpoint doesn’t exist. This all sounds very critical theory, but that isn’t what I mean. What I mean is that we are never formless and void, we are given as children a way of looking at the world. We are, as Anderson puts it, ‘indoctrinated into a way of seeing things.’
Everyone is. We all have it. This is what some people call ‘worldview.’ I’m not sure that’s the best framing, but the lens that we look at everything through is what we mean. You see life through lenses you’ve been given. I’m saying we should see life through Jesus lenses. We should also think through Jesus lenses.
This all sounds very academic, I appreciate. That is my propensity. What difference does it make to the average person? Well, everyone is thinking about their lives all the time. Everyone needs to learn to think Christianly.
How do you decide who to marry? Or what house to rent or buy?
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Written by T. M. Suffield |
Tuesday, May 7, 2024
The typical question immediately after you’ve preached is a good starting point, it’s good that people have them, but the questions I really love are the ones that have nothing to do with what I was talking about. That means it’s sat with someone as they’ve thought about it over some time. Last Sunday (as I write) a young woman asked me a series of deep questions about reading the Bible that showed she’s been considering things carefully for a long time. In our short conversation I wasn’t able to do much more than give her a gentle steer and then offer her a lifeline of “here’s what to do if you want to look into this more.” Time will tell, but may the Lord bless her mind. Time will tell. Because there’s no rush.

You can apply this in so many directions in our hurried world, but I’d like to think about our questions (again!). Questions require time. Fast answers are usually trite ones. Some intellectual curiosities can be settled quickly by a swift Google, but real questions can’t be.
The very biggest questions—Why did they die? Why did I have to live through that? And so many more—can’t be answered by glib answers fired from the hip. Or, mores the pity, sometimes they are answered like that in the evangelical world; they mustn’t be.
The wrestling with these questions is an important part of our Christian pilgrimage. Coming to an ‘answer’ is something we need to do. I use the scare quotes advisedly. It’s my experience that the most truly awful of human suffering isn’t ‘answered’ so much as that we come to a place of trust in God despite that. The Lord’s answers to Job are answers but the argument wouldn’t pass muster in an academic environment: it’s not that sort of answer.
Because it’s not that sort of question.
Which means that we should take our time in helping people answer them. I don’t mean be deliberately obscurantist: “Nope! Too soon to tell you that! Keep crying!” Rather, I mean that we need to walk along with people, giving what we have and giving them time to sit in the question for a while.
Afterall, if we’re talking about suffering, the theodicies we can offer are helpful but they don’t work in the face of pain. Instead, you have to grapple with the reality of your disaster and God’s providence and wander in the wondering of it all. There are answers but we come by them through mourning, through death and resurrection.
The Church has to have time. Which is convenient, for she does: time belongs to her and she marks it for us (if you’ve got questions about that just reflect on the date for a bit). This is true for these questions of the heart but it’s also true for the knotty ones of the head too. Does God have passions? The faith says “No.” So we confess, “no,” but there are some passages of scripture that might complicate that for us.
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