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

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

I have often talked about the utter brilliance of the cross, God’s method of upholding perfect righteousness and justice while at the same time securing grace—“so that He would be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus,” as Romans 3:26 says. Because of the cross, Christianity is the only religion where no evil is swept under the rug yet anyone can be forgiven, where God is both a good judge who doesn’t compromise justice and a forgiving Father who gave his Son to save us—while we were his enemies, no less!
In Ephesians 3:11, Paul refers to the gospel as “the eternal purpose which [God] carried out in Christ Jesus our Lord.” Why was the work of Christ on the cross God’s “eternal purpose”? Because it reveals crucial truths about him that we wouldn’t have seen any other way, and because God’s ultimate goal is for his people, whom he adopts “to the praise of the glory of His grace” (Eph. 1:6), to know him deeply “so that in the ages to come He might show the surpassing riches of His grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus” (Eph. 2:7). This is why knowing truths about God is not just an academic exercise but is central to the Christian life.
In Authentic Ministry, Michael Reeves describes what the cross reveals about God and how seeing those truths changes us and fuels our lives as Christians.
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It was in this moment of intense agony—the worst of her life—that she, being mystified at her husband’s composure, told him to curse God and die.  This was clearly the darkest day of her life.  Therefore, her words came out of intense grief.  Such struggles with God amidst intense grief are natural and to be expected, but becomes sinful when it turns into accusations against God. In exhorting Job to curse God, she was telling him to complain of God not to God, so her expression of grief crossed the line into sin.  

Then his wife said to him, “Do you still hold fast your integrity? Curse God and die.” But he said to her, “You speak as one of the foolish women would speak. Shall we receive good from God, and shall we not receive evil?” In all this Job did not sin with his lips.
-Job 2:9-10, ESV

Why do bad things happen to good people?  That question has been asked since time immemorial and is so central to our understanding of the world that an entire book of the Bible explores it: Job.  In wrestling with this question, Job stands alone as his friends accuse rather than comfort him.  Even his wife turns against him…or does she?  All we see from her is this short statement: “Do you still hold fast your integrity? Curse God and die” (Job 2:9), which has caused many Christians to view her in a negative light.  This post will examine what that statement, Job’s response, and the context really say about her, which will give us all great reason to hope.
Satan’s 4D Chess?
Why did Job’s wife tell him to curse God?  Some claim it was because she was crucial to Satan’s strategy against Job: “Previously he had pursued his aim by battering Job, but now he insinuates a question into his mind and follows it up by a proposed action—all put into the mouth of Job’s wife!”.[1]  While it is quite possible that Satan tempted her to make this statement, some have taken this to mean that Satan had kept her alive for the purpose of tormenting Job—as if she was a wicked nag who would cause Job more pain alive than dead.  In this view, she is nothing more than a pawn in Satan’s game of 4D chess, but from context it is clear that nothing could be further from the truth.  The first two chapters of Job do not depict Satan as a master strategist playing 4D chess.  Instead, he is revealed to be short-sighted, arrogant, and self-centered.  Since we have previously seen that arrogant self-centeredness is the enemy of God’s people, it should not surprise us to find these traits exemplified by the Enemy himself—and that is exactly what we see in Job.  The only one in Job with a grand strategy is God.  It was God who drew Satan’s attention to Job and then by praising him essentially used Satan’s arrogance to goad him into making a bold claim that Job would curse God if he saw calamity.  When God gave Satan permission to take away all Job had, He was essentially saying “I’ll take that bet”.  At this point, a wise person would see this as a trap—or at the very least a foolish bet—and backtrack.  But since the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom (Proverbs 9:10), it should be unsurprising that Satan who does not fear God in a way that would lead to wisdom would arrogantly and foolishly stick to a plan doomed to failure.  When that inevitable failure came, Satan repeated the error by again making another bold statement against Job that elicited the same response from God—and the same failure when Job was afflicted with sores.  God proved Himself true and omnipotent while Satan only proved to be a fool blinded by arrogance who had no choice but to fulfill God’s Will.  His game could barely qualify as checkers, much less 4D chess.  Satan may be incredibly intelligent and cunning, but he had no grand strategy for Job.  Therefore it is preposterous to think that Satan had the wherewithal to keep Job’s wife alive for the purpose of tormenting him.  The most we can say is that in his shortsightedness, Satan tempted Job’s wife as a target of opportunity, but that is a far cry from her being part of some grand plan of his.  We can therefore rule out any thought that Job’s wife remained alive to add to his suffering, as that would be unsupported by the text.
Describing Job’s Wife Biblically
What then can we say about Job’s wife?  All we have is that single statement from her, but there is much we can deduce from the rest of the text.  First, Job is described as blameless, upright, and having an appropriate fear of God (Job 1:1).  He also had seven righteous sons who were old enough to live on their own and three daughters who were mature enough to feast with them (Job 1:2,4-5).  It is illogical to think that those ten righteous children were not born and raised by a righteous mother—and equally illogical to think that righteous Job would have married an unrighteous woman.  Furthermore, at the end of the book we see Job blessed with seven more sons and three more daughters (Job 42:13).  There is no indication that his wife died or left him, so we must assume that she bore and raised them as well.  Therefore, from the text we can easily deduce that Job’s wife was righteous just as he was.
What then do we make of her comment?  How could a righteous woman exhort her husband to curse God and die?  The answer is that we are seeing a righteous woman in her darkest moment.  Everything that was Job’s was also hers, so she had just become destitute as he had.  More importantly, she had lost all ten of her children just as he had.  The pain of losing even one child is unparalleled, so the pain of losing ten at once would be unimaginable.  Additionally, we have previously seen that a godly wife’s primary focus is on the home and that the greatest impact most people will have on the Kingdom is their children.  This means that her life’s work for at least two decades was all gone in an instant.  Additionally, she had to watch the man she loved, whom she had been with through thick and thin, suffering while she was powerless to intervene.  Therefore, it is no stretch of the imagination to say that Job’s wife was suffering just as much as he was.
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Often it is with great difficulty that Christians hold different consciences on issues in the church. Sometimes how one holds conviction is as important as the conviction one holds. One must hold Christian convictions Christianly.

Jeremiah Burroughs gives four important points concerning holding a different conscience than those with whom you worship. How one holds a conviction is also important, whether it be a minority or majority position. Here are four takeaways:
1. If one has a minority position, hold it with humility.2. If one is proud and contentious about a minority position, one will not be heard.3. If the majority position holder holds his position in a tender way, he may be justified before God.4. If “scorn, pride, conceit, turbulence.” etc. is seen in the minority position holder, he is not demonstrating the Spirit of Christ.
Often it is with great difficulty that Christians hold different consciences on issues in the church. Sometimes how one holds conviction is as important as the conviction one holds. One must hold Christian convictions Christianly.
Here’s what Burroughs said:
When a man by reason of his conscience… differs from his brethren, he had need carry himself with all humility, and meekness, and self-denial in all other things.
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The major theme in these five chapters, which can be observed by the sheer force of repetition. In 35:1, Moses said, These are the things that the LORD has commanded you to do. In 35:4, he says, This is the thing that the LORD has commanded, and in 35:10, let every skillful craftsman among you come and make all that the LORD has commanded. In 35:29, the men and women bring anything for the work that the LORD had commanded. In 36:1, Bezalel and Oholiab are given skill to work in accordance with all that the LORD has commanded. Then in chapter 39, after each item of the priestly garments is made, we are told that it was as the LORD commanded (vv. 1, 5, 7, 21, 26, 29, 31). 

When reading through the book of Exodus, most find the second half much less exciting than the first half because of laws and because of these chapters and the previous chapters that they mirror, 25-31. Yet the structure of Exodus wants us to see that this what all the marvelous works that God did to bring Israel out of Egypt and through the wilderness has been building toward. Yahweh redeemed His people from their slavery in Egypt so that they could know Him and be His covenantal people.
The tabernacle was the physical expression of that covenant. The LORD appeared to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob at certain moments throughout their lives, but He would now dwell in the midst of their descendants. Indeed, the tabernacle is also called the tent of meeting because it marked the place where Israel would always be able to meet with God. If they desired to seek Him, they knew that He would be found at the tabernacle.
The importance of the tabernacle explains why even more space is devoted to it in these chapters. The previous three chapters have recounted Israel’s breaking of the covenant through their worshiping of the golden calf, Moses’ continual intercession for them before the face of Yahweh, and the LORD’s pardoning of their sin. Now with the covenant reestablished, Israel is commanded to build the tabernacle according to the designs that Moses was given upon the mountain. Although the text before us is large, there are two large points that we will observe in them: first, the great giving of all Israel toward building the tabernacle and second, the obedience of the people in building the various elements of the tabernacle exactly as Yahweh commanded.
Sufficient to do all the Work
Chapter 35 begins with one final command for Israel to keep the Sabbath. While these verses again feature some unique wording, they appear to be rather out of place in relation to the remainder of the text. Yet I believe that the reason for placing this command at the beginning of the building of the tabernacle is similar to the reason for commanding the Sabbath to be observed at the end of the instructions for the tabernacle. Although Israel was about to begin one of the most important building projects in all of history, the LORD is preemptively reminding them that it was no excuse for breaking the Sabbath. As glorious as the work on the tabernacle was, whoever does any work on [the Sabbath] shall be put to death. Douglas Stuart gives a great explanation for why the Sabbath was so important:
In a certain sense Israel’s formal starting point for keeping Yahweh’s covenant was keeping the Sabbath, that is, the fourth word/commandment, not because doing so was more important than fulfilling the first three words/commandments but because obedience to the Sabbath requirement was the most obviously measurable of them—either in the keeping or in the disobeying. By the fact that he kept (or did not keep) the Sabbath each week, an Israelite showed without ambiguity whether or not he was committed to keep the covenant. Merely keeping the Sabbath did not confer righteousness if other commandments were violated, but it was an openly visible essential—a sine qua non—of covenant loyalty. Not to keep it would be to say publicly to the world “I am not in covenant relationship with the Lord of the Sabbath.” (748)
In verses 4-9, Moses again speaks to the entire congregation of Israel and commands them to make their contribution for the building of the tabernacle. They were to bring gold, silver, bronze, blue and purple and scarlet yarns and linen, goats’ hair, tanned rams’ skins, goatskins, acacia wood, lamp oil, spices, and gems. These were the materials that would be used to build the tent of meeting. As we noted when Moses first received this command upon Sinai, this nation of former slaves was able to offer such valuable materials because the LORD caused them to plunder the Egyptians as they left.
But lest we think that the LORD gave Israel their treasures simply for the purpose of using them for the tabernacle, notice the emphasis on how the contribution was to be given in verse 5: whoever is of a generous heart. In other words, there was no particular demand made to anyone. Giving was commanded generally to the entire nation, but the particulars of gifts were left to the conscience of each individual. God enriched Israel out of His love for His people and to further humble the Egyptians, and those gifts were really given. The Israelites could have refused to make their contributions, foolish as that decision would have been. Of course, there is a sense in which all that we have properly belongs to God, meaning that we are stewards of our possessions rather than owners. Yet that reality should be balanced with God’s gracious giving of gifts, particularly to His people but even upon the wicked as well. Indeed, the fact that the contributions will be stopped in 36:6-7 shows that God had no intention of taking all of Israel’s riches for use in the tabernacle.
Verses 20-29 then show all the people doing what Yahweh commanded of them.
Then all the congregation of the people of Israel departed from the presence of Moses. And they came, everyone whose heart stirred him, and everyone whose spirit moved him, and brought the LORD’s contribution to be used for the tent of meeting, and for all its service, and for the holy garments. So they came, both men and women. All who were of a willing heart brought brooches and earrings and signet rings and armlets, all sorts of gold objects, every man dedicating an offering of gold to the LORD. And every one who possessed blue or purple or scarlet yarns or fine linen or goats’ hair or tanned rams’ skins or goatskins brought them. Everyone who could make a contribution of silver or bronze brought it as the LORD’s contribution. And every one who possessed acacia wood of any use in the work brought it. And every skillful woman spun with her hands, and they all brought what they had spun in blue and purple and scarlet yarns and fine twined linen. All the women whose hearts stirred them to use their skill spun the goats’ hair. And the leaders brought onyx stones and stones to be set, for the ephod and for the breastpiece, and spices and oil for the light, and for the anointing oil, and for the fragrant incense. All the men and women, the people of Israel, whose heart moved them to bring anything for the work that the LORD had commanded by Moses to be done brought it as a freewill offering to the LORD.
Again, notice the great emphasis upon everyone who heart stirred him, and everyone whose spirit moved him, as well as all who were of a willing heart. This is, of course, the pattern for Christian that we are under today. Although giving a tenth of one’s income (a tithe) is generally a fine enough principle, the New Testament does not give us a particular amount or percentage or even formula for governing our giving. Instead, 2 Corinthians 9:7 tells us plainly: “Each one must give as he has decided in his heart, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver.” That is the principle that must rule over our hearts.
We should also take that all of Israel participated in these contributions. The leaders who possessed gemstones and spices brought them freely. Both men and women are emphasized as giving, and the text specifically spotlights skillful women bringing their weavings. Whenever we couple this with the call for all skillful craftsmen in verse 10, we find a beautiful picture of how Yahweh used the various gifts and skills of His people to build His dwelling place.
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Written by Aaron M. Renn |
Friday, August 9, 2024
Conservative elites and their institutions are concentrated in New York and Washington. Even some of the ones that are outside of the Acela corridor are in blue areas, like the Hoover Institution, which is at Stanford University. Most conservative intellectual leaders don’t live in red states or redder areas of blue states. This shows a couple of things. The first is that elites are drawn to elite cities. If you want to be part of the elite, then you need to be around other elites and where the institutions of elite society are located. That’s the top tier cities, especially the big four of NYC, DC, LA, and SF. If you want to influence the federal government, for example, you basically have to be in Washington.

Where to live is one of the most critical choices we will make in life. My readership skews conservative. Since I moved from New York City to Carmel, Indiana, you might think that I think all conservatives should leave the cities or move to red states.
But that’s far from the case. For many people, especially those who aspire to succeed at the elite levels, it makes sense to live in big, progressive elite cities – even if you are a conservative.
Vanity Fair just ran a nice and largely favorable profile of the startup community in El Segundo, a suburb of Los Angeles near LAX Airport. I’ve highlighted the scene in “the Gundo” before. It’s a collection of heavily conservative, pro-America, Gen Z, male founders looking to work on defense and other hard tech businesses.
For over two years, in the small, unassuming beach town of El Segundo, dozens of young men have gathered with a singular mission: to save America. They will do this, they say, by building the next generation of great tech companies. They call what they are building real s—t, not like what the software engineers make up north, writing code on shiny MacBooks. Instead, these men have a taste for the tangible: They spend their workdays toiling in labs and manufacturing lines, their nights sleeping on couches and bunk beds….When it comes to “The Gundo,” the technological zeitgeist is, like all of these places, fueled by venture capitalists, who have invested more than $100 billion in defense tech companies since 2021, many of which are located in El Segundo.
…
The founders in El Segundo have settled on an expansive terrain in which to express sentiments that might chafe otherwise progressive sensibilities. They have an outsize respect for their country and men in uniform. They love fast cars, tobacco products, and their Lord and savior Jesus Christ. They are aspirationally blue collar, often wearing blue jeans, clean leather work boots, and dark T-shirts with company emblems embroidered on their breast pockets. By day, the founders often trek to the Central Valley to launch drones into the airspace. By night, they can be found drinking Singapore slings at the Purple Orchid tiki lounge, or burning pallets at Dockweiler Beach, chewing nicotine pouches, and chugging energy drinks.
…
During the three days that I visited companies in The Gundo, I saw three women and spoke to one: the wife of an employee at Valar Atomics who attended the Bible study along with her two young children. She had moved to a house near the beach with her husband three weeks earlier. When I asked if she was meeting many nice people, she laughed and said that she was too busy taking care of her children to leave the house.
…
Sometimes it seems that the El Segundo founders are acting out a studied caricature of nostalgic Americana, especially on Twitter, where they frequently post about smoking cigarettes, bench-pressing, and loving their country. At least some part of the scene is pure performance. “It’s totally intentional. You have to make it cool,” says Cameron Schiller, the cofounder and CEO of the aerospace manufacturer Rangeview. “We’re trying to bring more young people into manufacturing.”
Click over to read the whole thing. It’s a fun article.
As I’ve said many times before, I’m bullish on Generation Z. They have a new kind of positive, can-do, let’s start building attitude that you just don’t see in the older generations. The Gundo is a good example of that.
This article is suggestive of a lot of things.
First, I’m seeing these sorts of lifestyle pieces about the Gundo scene. This is important, because people are drawn to a “scene.” So creating and maintaining the idea that you have a scene is important in catalyzing something real.
At the same time, your scene actually has to produce something of real value, whether that’s music or military drones. The Gundo needs to actually produce real companies with real products and real exits. It’s the nature of scenes to be ephemeral, so they don’t have forever to make this to happen.
Secondly, I’m very struck that the epicenter of the young, high talent, conservative, pro-America, pro-Jesus startup community is…..Los Angeles. That is, they are in what’s effectively a neighborhood of an extremely progressive elite coastal city in one of America’s bluest states.
Essentially all cities are blue cities politically and culturally, so to the extent that you are located in one then you are located in a blue area. But Los Angeles is actually an elite center of progressive wealth and culture creation. It’s one of the elite citadels of progressivism.
Now, Los Angeles is a long time hub of aerospace and defense. That’s why SpaceX was based there. So it makes sense for defense oriented companies to choose Los Angeles. But it’s still notable that these conservatives didn’t even choose a red state, much less a less aggressively progressive city.
The Gundo is hardly the only example of this. There’s the “Dimes Square” reactionary culture and politics scene in New York City. To be sure, these folks are not exactly conservative as has been conventionally understood. But it’s still an interesting dissident phenomenon. And again, it’s in New York City, a citadel of the left.
Even within a red state like Texas, we see that a lot of the higher wattage and leading edge conservatives are moving to Austin, the bluest and most progressive city in the state. The most famous is Elon Musk, who just announced he was moving the headquarters of X to that city. Joe Lonsdale, venture capitalist and founder of Palantir, also moved to Austin.
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As we watch the Western world burn down around itself with leader after leader who demands obedience, refuses to heed wise counsel that refutes their shibboleths, and who punishes those who call out the problems early, we need a church leadership that lives differently. A church leadership whose vision of Jesus is so big and so all encompassing, that the baubles of approval from bad leadership are not enticing enough to take it off track. 

Untrustworthy Leaders
We’ve been around long enough now to know that bad leadership is everywhere. Untrustworthy leadership.  The church, it seems, is often – sadly – just as culpable as the world.  In fact more culpable. Equipped with the very tools to deal with toxicity, bullying, private ungodliness masked with public piety, we pull our punches.
We are proving to be just as untrustworthy as the world when it comes to calling out bad leadership.
And with the very person of Jesus – who time and time again had to call out his disciples for having a worldly view of leadership – we seem stuck in the rut of bad, untrustworthy leadership. Or at least we seem unable to call it out early .
And the church is getting sick of it. And more to the point, getting sick of having to open an email or read a Christian journal that calls it out for the church. My own experience is that it isn’t until the sheep are bleating loud enough to the point of embarrassment that anything is ever done.
And even then. Even then. I’ve spent a lot of hours recently on Zoom with a group that is looking at taking on a leader who has been publicly shown to be unqualified to lead God’s people time and time again. Three hours to be exact on Zoom. Three hours across the world at a time of the morning I’d rather be chilling in the early quiet with a hot brew.
And no matter what evidence I presented, I’ve been implored for more. Several times. I’ve been asked to show evidence from other people’s private emails (which I won’t do). At the end I simply said “Even if someone were to rise from the dead, you wouldn’t believe.” Cheeky I know, but come on people!
How Bad Leadership Thrives
Journalist Bari Weiss, – once of The New York Times, but who left due to its had leadership that failed to call out the personal abuse and anti-Semitism she was experiencing from other staff -, nails it in an article republished in The Times.
Speaking about how she was hounded at a dinner party earlier this year when she mentioned that Joe Biden might be losing it and not fit for the role of president, she states that she was publicly called out for it. But privately? That was a different matter.
Privately everyone was acknowledging what they could not – would not – acknowledge publicly. Why? She states:
A Democratic insider put it more bluntly when I asked him what had taken so long: “Proximity to power, privilege, prestige. That’s the currency. And people fiercely protect their access. They put self-preservation over principle.”
That’s it right there. And sadly I’ve seen it in church leadership way too often. Which seems incredible, yes? Here we are as the people of God with the absolutely mind-blowing privilege of proximity everyday to the most powerful person – the Lord Jesus – access to the throne of grace as Hebrews reminds us
Clear that tells us that we don’t believe our own theology as much as we say we do. When God is big in our eyes other people are not too big, nor are they too small. They are human-sized. And that means for their sake and the sake of others you should tell the truth.
In two significant occasions in which I have called out poor leadership – and it cost me my job on one of those occasions – the leadership found every way they could to excuse the sinful behaviour of the person at the top, and in both cases the story was “But he gets things done”, and “We need to show that person more grace”.
So there’s a pattern to these conversations and an armoury of theological reasons that the world is not equipped with. Which means – ironically – the church can keep hold of poor leaders longer than the world can! And – sadly – so often does.
What does this leave us like? It leaves us craven and submitting to poor leadership for the sake of a few glittering baubles of approval. Approval from someone who we actually fear would step all over us if we were to demur.
We can say from the stage all we like about grace-renewal leadership, but if behind the scenes we are formed by fear and insecurities, then no amount of public declarations will atone for it.
And why do followers of such leaders allow this to happen? Knowingly? Because after you have watched him (and it’s most often a him), do over the people you once worked with who called it out, why would he not do it to you?
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 He looks to the fractured relationship between two men we hold in high esteem: John Owen and Richard Baxter. Owen is, of course, the author of such enduring works as The Mortification of Sin and Communion with God. Baxter, meanwhile, wrote The Saint’s Everlasting Rest and The Reformed Pastor. Each of these books continues to bless, equip, and encourage God’s people hundreds of years later. Each of these men continues to influence the church for good. Yet each of them was hostile to the other and together they got locked into a long and ugly battle they never resolved.

Wouldn’t it be nice if Christians only ever got along? Wouldn’t it be grand if all the discord we see in the world around us was completely foreign to the church? Wouldn’t it be heavenly if believers ever only experienced peace? I suppose it would be heavenly and, therefore, more than we can realistically hope for in this life. That being the case, we need to learn to deal with conflict—conflict within both the local church and the wider church.
I suppose we are prone to think that the battles that rage in the church today are unusual or unique, but the sad fact is that Christians have disagreed with one another in every age of church history. The sadder fact is that they have often done so in ways that are concerning, shocking, or even downright horrific. This is sometimes true even of people we count as heroes of the faith, people who have influenced us in such meaningful ways.
In When Christians Disagree, historian Tim Cooper goes back in time to draw lessons from a sad episode from days past. He looks to the fractured relationship between two men we hold in high esteem: John Owen and Richard Baxter. Owen is, of course, the author of such enduring works as The Mortification of Sin and Communion with God. Baxter, meanwhile, wrote The Saint’s Everlasting Rest and The Reformed Pastor. Each of these books continues to bless, equip, and encourage God’s people hundreds of years later. Each of these men continues to influence the church for good. Yet each of them was hostile to the other and together they got locked into a long and ugly battle they never resolved.
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When a man and a wife try to outdo one another in showing honor, the amazing thing is that both end up honored. And this is what the gospel does. The gospel transforms us. It causes us to think less of ourselves and more of others. Jesus says, “the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve.” (Matt 20:28). Even so, those who have come to know and love the Lord also seek to serve.

My wife and I have a competition. We are not normally competitive people, but we’ve been trying to outdo one another ever since we’ve been married. I’ll be honest; sometimes I win, and sometimes she wins. We find ourselves competing in the morning, in the evening, and even at night. I’m trying to outdo her while I’m at work, and she’s trying to outdo me when I’m at home. Honestly, we are always trying to win this competition. Even on holidays you can find my wife and I steadily trying to outdo one another. Now, before you tell me to cool my jets, let me tell you about the competition.
We got into this competition by reading the book of Romans, and when we got married, this became our marriage verse. Right after Paul spent 11 chapters really digging into the glorious gospel, he begins to unpack how we can live in light of that good news. God through Paul begins to show His people what it is to be a living sacrifice in light of the mercies of God. And in this list of instructions we are given a holy competition to participate in. He tells his people to, “outdo one another in showing honor” (Rom 12:10).
That’s right.
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In textbooks, sermons, and classrooms, salvation is often conceived of as the reception of something Christ has acquired for us rather than as the reception of the living Christ. In other words, salvation is described as a gift to be apprehended rather than the apprehension of the Giver himself. To put it yet another way, the gospel is portrayed as the offer of a depersonalized benefit (e.g., grace, justification, or eternal life) rather than the offer of the very person of Christ (who is himself the grace of God, our justification, and our eternal life).4

Personal Union with Christ
In far too many evangelical expressions of the gospel, the saving work of Christ has been so distanced from his person that the notion of a saving personal union with the incarnate, crucified, resurrected, living Jesus strikes us as rather outlandish. We are content, more often than not, to refer to the “atoning work of Christ” or the “work of Christ on the cross” as the basis for our salvation. Yet, as important as such expressions are for a robust evangelical soteriology (the study of salvation), we are in dire need of the reminder that Christ’s saving work is of no benefit to us unless we are joined to the living Savior whose work it is. When we entertain the notion—consciously or not, intentionally or not—that we can be saved by the work of Christ apart from being joined to him personally, we are deepening a fissure that, left unrepaired, will continue to move us away from our biblically faithful theological heritage.
The sixteenth-century Protestant Reformer John Calvin insisted that we must never separate the work of Christ from his person if we wish to understand the nature of salvation. However much we may rightly extol and magnify the saving work of Christ on our behalf, however highly we may esteem what he accomplished in his life, death, resurrection, and ascension, we will have missed what is utterly essential to this good news if we fail to understand that our salvation has to do with his very person. The saving work of Christ is not to be thought of as abstracted from the living person of Christ.
Calvin’s way of expressing this is striking and emphatic:
First, we must understand that as long as Christ remains outside of us, and we are separated from him, all that he has suffered and done for the salvation of the human race remains useless and of no value to us. Therefore, to share in what he has received from the Father, he had to become ours and to dwell within us . . . for, as I have said, all that he possesses is nothing to us until we grow into one body with him.1
If Calvin’s insistence on the intensely relational aspect of salvation—the personal indwelling of Christ—seems somewhat foreign to us, it may be because contemporary evangelical soteriology2 has largely lost sight of a profound mystery that lies at the heart of the gospel, a mystery that the apostle Paul describes as “Christ in you, the hope of glory” (Col. 1:27). The mysterious reality of our union with Jesus Christ, by which he dwells in us and we in him, is so utterly essential to the gospel that to obscure it inevitably leads to an obscuring of the gospel itself. For a number of reasons, contemporary evangelical theology has routinely failed to incorporate this mystery into the heart of its soteriological understanding.
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Pastors need to remember that while evangelism is important, it’s not their first responsibility. Their first responsibility is to feed the sheep, to equip the saints. For too many pastors, concern for showing compassion to the lost means they’re not protecting the sheep from false teaching. They are, in fact, starving the sheep to appease goats.

In September 2019, in Mesa, Arizona, pastor Ryan Visconti was thrilled to find himself at a private dinner with Andy Stanley, pastor of what was then the largest church in the United States.
On any given weekend, Stanley’s North Point church has roughly 31,000 attendees across eight campuses in Atlanta, Georgia. Stanley is also the author of dozens of books, and his sermons are distributed through a vast digital ministry that includes not only podcasts and YouTube videos, but also traditional broadcasts on NBC, CBS, and radio stations across the country. Little wonder, then, that Preaching Magazine ranked him number eight on its list of the twenty-five most influential preachers of the last twenty-five years.
But perhaps over no group does Stanley hold more sway than other pastors. Stanley was in Arizona for his “Irresistible” tour, a conference that promised to teach church leaders how to “expand [their] influence.” Visconti was excited for the opportunity to pick Stanley’s brain, though, at thirty-four, he would be the youngest at a table of about fifteen men and expected to spend the majority of the meal quietly soaking up wisdom from Stanley and the more seasoned leaders. That plan went off the rails when the discussion turned toward homosexuality and how the men’s ministries were confronting increasing cultural pressure to compromise on clear biblical teaching. Stanley shocked the room by arguing that they shouldn’t so much confront it as accommodate it. “He said he would encourage any gay couples in his congregation to commit to each other,” Visconti recalled.
For the next hour and a half, he listened as Stanley went on to contend that modern pastors must make allowances for gay and lesbian couples to be married in their churches because “that’s as close as they can get to a New Testament framework of marriage.” Visconti remembered Stanley likening same-sex attraction to a disability, something that can’t be helped. An expectation of celibacy, he argued, would be unfair.
Finally, Stanley revealed that while he had never officiated a same-sex wedding, he could see himself doing so eventually, especially for a family member. “I know I shouldn’t let experience dictate my theology, but I have. Maybe I’m wrong.”
Visconti was dumbstruck: “I remember thinking to myself, if his church knew what he was saying right now, half of them would probably leave over-night.” He joined several pastors in arguing with Stanley as others “squirmed in their chairs, muttering, ‘That’s not right.’” Host Joel Thomas, then pastor of Mission Community Church, had gotten his start in ministry under Stanley’s tutelage. When the dinner was over, he moved swiftly to protect his former boss’s reputation. Thomas asked the pastors to “honor” Stanley for being willing to “be vulnerable” in front of them. By this he meant they were not to speak of Stanley’s views to anyone else.
Visconti felt torn. It had been a private event, which meant there was an expectation of confidentiality. But another part of him felt plagued by the knowledge that a man with so much influence on his fellow teachers was encouraging them in error. He prayed and pressed several of his mentors about it, trying to decide how to address someone as famous as Stanley.
The mentors didn’t think confrontation was the right approach, even though two weren’t surprised by what Visconti had told them. Stanley had already preached messages about needing to “unhitch from the Old Testament,” seeming to suggest he was laying the groundwork for more liberal theology. And a sermon illustration in which he reproved a husband in his church for committing adultery with another man but not for the homosexual acts involved had raised eyebrows as far back as 2012.
In short, Visconti, who wasn’t very familiar with Stanley’s ministry, discovered that the fact that he might have heretical views had been whispered about for years. Yet this had not prompted the doctrinally sound pastors in Stanley’s circle to warn churches not to host his conferences or to caution Christians not to buy his books or entertain his teaching.
Visconti held out hope that those witnesses who were on more equal footing with Stanley might be the ones to call him to account. He also hoped the famous pastor might just have been processing his ideas out loud.
Yet, as the months went by, there was no evidence that any of the more senior pastors who knew Stanley better had addressed the issue with him. Then, in 2022, clips of Stanley from his biennial Drive Conference—another event specifically targeted at pastors and ministry leaders—made the rounds on social media. In one, he heaped praise on LGBTQ individuals, saying their desire to come to church despite receiving judgment from Christians showed they had more faith than heterosexual church members. He went on to call 1 Corinthians 6, Leviticus 18, and Romans 1 “clobber passages,” echoing a phrase common among gay activists when referencing Bible verses that address homosexuality. At no point did he indicate that homosexual acts or desires were sinful.
When Stanley’s remarks had given rise to similar questions in 2012, a North Point spokesperson claimed he was being taken out of context, though the representative did not clarify Stanley’s views. Now that Stanley was being asked again to explain whether he believed, as the Bible teaches, that homosexuality is a sin, his church declined to respond entirely.
Amid all the speculation about Stanley’s meaning, another clip from the Drive Conference especially pricked Visconti’s conscience. In it, Stanley seemed to encourage pastors to lead their congregations carefully and strategically toward acceptance of homosexuality.
Visconti feared that further silence would allow Stanley to use his platform to sow error and confusion in many churches across the country. Fifteen pastors knew in which direction Stanley was trying to nudge evangelical churches. And for more than three years, none of them had said anything. Visconti decided enough was enough. He posted an explosive thread on Twitter revealing what Stanley had said and naming his views “overtly heretical.”
Two other pastors who had been at the dinner that night confirmed that Visconti’s account was accurate. But that was as far as they were willing to go.
One told me he didn’t feel comfortable providing details because the dinner had been private. The other shared this concern about confidentiality but added, “[I’m] not sure I want to get into a political battle on this.” The most unsettling thing about my exchange with this man was the implication that because Stanley’s unbiblical stance centered on homosexuality, raising any alarm about it would have been “political.” A highly influential pastor was compromising the Word of God and encouraging other church leaders to do likewise. If any matter could be classified as ecclesiastical rather than civil in nature, this was it. Especially as it turned out there was a lot more going on at North Point to spread LGBTQ ideology through America’s churches than just Stanley’s pastors’ conferences.
In 2000, Jon Stryker, gay heir to a one-hundred-billion-dollar surgical supply conglomerate, launched the Arcus Foundation, a grant-making institution that soon became the largest funder of LGBTQ initiatives in the United States. But after legislative defeats like the passage of a 2008 California law banning gay marriage, Stryker’s foundation began devoting tens of millions of dollars to, in its words, “challenging the promotion of narrow or hateful interpretations of religious doctrine” within every major Christian denomination. Between 2013 and 2018, for instance, it gave over two million dollars to the Reconciling Ministries Network to “secure the full participation of people of all sexual orientations and gender identities in the United Methodist Church,” the last mainline denomination still resistant to full affirmation of the entire rainbow panoply. Given that the UMC went through a schism in 2022 over LGBTQ ordination and gay marriage, it seems Stryker’s money was well spent.
While evangelicalism’s decentralized and independent nature makes any wholesale attempt at reshaping doctrine unfeasible, it, too, came in for the Arcus treatment, albeit with more scattered outlays of cash. One particular expenditure proved strategic, as it managed to harness the influence of both North Point on the Eastern Seaboard and another internationally famous megachurch in the West, Rick Warren’s Saddleback.
Between 2014 and 2018, the Reformation Project, a brand-new organization led by twenty-three-year-old Harvard dropout Matthew Vines, received $550,000 in grants. The purpose of the funding, according to Arcus, was to “reform church teaching on sexual orientation and gender identity among conservative and evangelical communities.” On the surface, the Reformation Project would have seemed an unlikely vehicle for making inroads with the most resistant strain of American Christianity. Anyone watching the viral 2012 YouTube talk in which Vines argues that God does not condemn loving, gay relationships, only same-sex rape and orgies, might have guessed he was a nervous high-schooler. But youth and inexperience were lesser obstacles than his overt branding as a gay-affirming evangelical. Vines has even called affirmation of homosexual unions “a requirement of Christian faithfulness.” For Vines and the Reformation Project to have any hope of fulfilling their mission, they needed partners who looked and sounded like the conservative Christians they were trying to convince but whose teaching was equally committed to the project of undermining Scripture.
Enter Greg and Lynn McDonald. In 2015, they founded Embracing the Journey, an organization for Christian parents of LGBTQ children, at the urging of North Point’s executive director, Bill Willits. They had recently relocated to the Atlanta area and had begun attending services at the church. Over a breakfast meeting with Willits early in the year, Greg happened to share that his son had come out as gay in 2001, and he described how his and Lynn’s process of acceptance eventually led them to become informal counselors to other parents of gay and transgender kids. Willits was “captivated” by their story and revealed that North Point had already begun exploring new ministries in that vein. He urged them to film a video for Stanley’s Drive Conference that May.
As Stanley introduced the McDonalds’ video to approximately two thousand church leaders from all over the country, he urged those leaders not to view homosexuality through a “political” lens. Instead of suggesting that ministers use the Bible as their foremost frame of reference, he urged the audience to approach the issue through a “relational lens.” His example for relational was the McDonalds’ story.
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