http://rss.desiringgod.org/link/10732/16189980/entrusted-with-agony
Recently, a friend asked me to share some advice for how to be a caring presence for people experiencing deep emotional pain. He didn’t ask this because I’m a trained counselor or therapist — I’m not. He asked because, even from my high school days, people have sought my help in dealing with all manner of difficult, complex, and sensitive afflictions.
As I thought back over decades, dear faces and names came to mind — most of them remarkable, loving, spiritually earnest, bright, kind Christians — who at some point found themselves facing the kinds of tribulations that afflict and sometimes overwhelm us as fallen humans. I’ve had the painful privilege of walking alongside them as they endured debilitating depression, suicidal despair, tormenting mental illnesses, deep inner wounds from past sexual abuse, various kinds of undesired and dismaying sexual dysphoria, spiritually dark and disorienting faith crises, and more.
I mean it when I say it’s been a privilege. It is no small thing when others entrust us with some of the most tender, vulnerable parts of their souls.
None of this, however, qualifies me to speak as some kind of expert soul physician — because I’m not one. This is something I think I can speak to not because I’m an expert, but because I have some extensive experience. And since we’re all called at times to the ministry of being a caring presence for someone in pain (as well as receiving such care when we’re in pain), we can share lessons we’ve learned with each other. So, what might I say to my 20-year-old self if I had ten minutes to counsel him on how to be a caring presence for sufferers?
Caring Presence
In the Christian sense, a caring presence is someone who listens carefully and sympathetically to troubled souls in order to accurately understand the nature of their affliction and struggle, and then eventually seeks to help them put it in biblical perspective and see (or remember) how their suffering fits into God’s redemptive, providential purposes. In other words, the primary care we’re called to offer a suffering saint is hope.
“The primary care we’re called to offer a suffering saint is hope.”
When our souls are in turmoil, we all crave peace. And the peace we crave doesn’t come from having all our why questions answered, but it’s a peace that surpasses understanding, a peace that comes only from the God of peace (Philippians 4:7). This peace comes from the hope that God is working all things, even (especially!) our suffering, together for our ultimate good (Romans 8:28) — a hope that comes only from the God of hope (Romans 15:13). Good Christian soul care always aims to help a hurting person “hope in God” (Psalm 42:11).
In such a short space, I can’t give much specific advice on how to counsel a suffering soul, because so much depends on what someone is suffering and why. I can share some brief reflections about being the kind of caring presence a hurting person can turn to in dark moments. And to do that, I’ll use Micah 6:8 as a framework:
He has told you, O man, what is good;
and what does the Lord require of you
but to do justice, and to love kindness,
and to walk humbly with your God?
A deeply just, kind, and humble person has the fundamental qualities required to be the caring presence a suffering person needs. But for reasons that will become clear in a few moments, I will address these requirements in reverse order: humility, kindness, and justice.
Discernible Humility
I’m beginning with humility because of these words from Jesus:
Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. (Matthew 11:28–29)
Weary, burdened souls didn’t come to Jesus just because he proclaimed himself “gentle and lowly.” They were already coming to him because they could discern, from observing and listening to him, that he was someone who offered them the rest and safety they craved. Jesus had a gentleness about him that sprung out of a fundamental lowliness that made him approachable — a safe person to come to for those longing to escape the burdens they bore from external oppression and internal sin and disorders.
A fundamental humility is also what makes a disciple of Jesus approachable. A disciple who walks humbly with God shares with Jesus a high view of God’s holiness (Psalm 130:3–4; Hebrews 12:28–29), the doctrine of sin (Romans 3:23), the fallen nature of the world (Romans 8:20–21), and God’s fathomless mercy in the gospel (Romans 5:6–11). This disciple “can deal gently” with other struggling souls “since he himself is beset with weakness” (Hebrews 5:2). Having a clear-eyed grasp of our own depravity and desperate need for God’s mercy means we won’t be shocked when we’re confronted with someone else’s.
If weary souls burdened by false teaching, disorders, and sin discern in us, as many did in Jesus, an authentic humility that manifests in the ways we gently deal with others, they are likely to come to us for the help — the hope — they need.
Loving Kindness
In 1 Corinthians 13, what were the first words Paul chose when describing the nature of Christlike love? “Love is patient and kind” (1 Corinthians 13:4). Scripture, of course, teaches that love is far more than patience and kindness, but it’s worth keeping in mind that these were foremost on the apostle’s mind as he, under the Spirit’s inspiration, wrote his profound, beautiful description of what it looks like when we love one another.
Such descriptions of Christian love are laced through Paul’s writings. For instance, Colossians 3:12 says, “Put on then, as God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassionate hearts, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience.” It’s clear that God’s children are to love kindness.
That’s because God loves kindness. Not only do we see this in Jesus, but we see it in God’s most famous Old Testament self-description: “The Lord, the Lord God, compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in lovingkindness and truth” (Exodus 34:6 NASB 1995). It is, after all, the kindness of God that leads us to repentance (Romans 2:4).
So, if distressed souls discern that we, like God, love kindness, that we have a disposition to extend mercy, grace, and patience to those who need them, they are likely to come to us for the help — the hope — they need.
Judicious Counsel
What does it mean “to do justice” to a person experiencing significant emotional pain? One crucial thing it means is to be as judicious — as wise, prudent, honest — as possible with any counsel we give. What does this look like?
A judicious counselor is careful. Whenever we are ministering to another soul, especially a suffering soul, we must remember that “death and life are in the power of the tongue” (Proverbs 18:21). Our words can heal or wound, reveal truth or obscure it. Therefore, it’s imperative that we be “quick to hear [and] slow to speak” (James 1:19). I’ve learned from experience that there is often more going on in a person than I initially perceive. To adequately understand the nature of someone’s struggle and situation requires patient listening and good clarifying questions.
A judicious counselor is truthful. There are many dimensions to truthfulness, but I’m going to focus on one common pitfall for counselors: the temptation to speak more than we actually know or to claim that we identify with the sufferer’s experience more than we actually do.
“When others come to us for help, that doesn’t necessarily mean we’re the best person to help them.”
When others come to us for help, that doesn’t necessarily mean we’re the best person to help them. Perhaps God has equipped us to provide them some helpful insight, or perhaps our calling is to guide them toward someone better equipped to help them. Either way, we must be honest and forthright about the limits of our knowledge and experience and not speak authoritatively about topics of which we have little understanding. This is why I addressed the qualities of humility and kindness first. Humility helps guard us from the pride of presuming we are wiser than we are or of desiring the admiration of suffering people more than we desire their well-being. And kindness helps us keep the well-being of sufferers — their finding hope in God — our foremost priority.
Lastly, a judicious counselor is trustworthy. As I said earlier, it is no small thing when others entrust us with tender, vulnerable parts of their souls. Therefore, we must vigilantly guard what they share with us in confidence, even if it requires us to “swear to [our] own hurt” (Psalm 15:4). For “a gossip betrays a confidence, but a trustworthy person keeps a secret” (Proverbs 11:13 NIV). Only in the most extreme and rare cases, when someone’s safety is at stake, do integrity and love demand that we share necessary information with the appropriate parties and authorities.
If souls in anguish over sensitive kinds of suffering discern that we are a judicious counselor and will handle what they confide in us carefully, truthfully, and in a trustworthy way, they are likely to come to us for the help and hope they need.
Where Care Begins
Obviously, volumes more could be (and have been) written about how to care well for those suffering significant emotional pain, but it all begins with being the kind of person that others can trust with their suffering. That kind of person hopes in God, is discernibly humble, loves kindness, and is judicious in the ways he or she treats suffering saints. That kind of person is very likely to be a caring presence for weary, burdened souls and to help them find the peace and hope that only God can provide.
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God Is: The Life-Altering Reality of Sheer Divine Existence
Four hundred years before the events of the book of Exodus, God said to Abram,
Know for certain that your offspring will be sojourners in a land that is not theirs and will be servants there, and they will be afflicted for four hundred years. But I will bring judgment on the nation that they serve, and afterward they shall come out with great possessions. . . . To your offspring I give this land, from the river of Egypt to the great river, the river Euphrates. (Genesis 15:13–14, 18)
And the cricket chirps up to the Lion, “You are God! This is your people. You mean for them to have this land? Then give it to them. Now! Not after four hundred years of affliction.” To which the Lion, with his ten thousand reasons for doing everything he does, 99.9 percent of which this God-counseling cricket knows nothing, says, “They shall come back here in the fourth generation, for the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet complete” (Genesis 15:16).
“So, yes,” the Lion essentially replies, “I will bring them back. And I will drive out the nations, and I will give my people this land. But I will make it clear that it will not be because of their righteousness, as if they deserve anything good from me, but it will be because of the wickedness of these nations (see Deuteronomy 9:4).
“You see, my dear little cricket, I am zealous for the justice of my punishments, and I am zealous for the freeness of my mercy. When I destroy, it is because wickedness is full, and I am just (Deuteronomy 9:5; 18:12). When I bless, it is because, though stubbornness abounds, my mercy is free (Deuteronomy 9:6–7). Don’t begrudge me several hundred years to teach these things. They are not quickly learned.”
So, for the next almost five centuries, God shows that he is God, and that the nations are wicked, and that his people too are rebellious and stubborn, and that his covenant blessings are free and undeserved — that they are grace.
He brings into being Isaac, as it were, out of two old people, as good as dead, Abraham and Sarah (Romans 4:19). He chooses Jacob over Esau that his purposes of election might stand (Romans 9:11–12). He summons a famine on the land (Psalm 105:16). He sends Joseph into slavery by the hands of his sinful brothers (Psalm 105:17). He makes a despised Hebrew prisoner the lord of all Egypt (Psalm 105:21).
Why? Joseph puts it like this, in one of the most important sentences in the Bible: “As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good, to bring it about that many people should be kept alive” (Genesis 50:20). Yes, kept alive to serve four hundred years in bondage in Egypt.
Unassailably, Unhurriedly Sovereign
As the book of Exodus begins, at the end of those four hundred years, God is about to do something astonishing. “The people of Israel . . . multiplied and grew exceedingly strong, so that the land was filled with them. . . . The more they were oppressed, the more they multiplied. . . . And the Egyptians were in dread of the people of Israel” (Exodus 1:7, 12).
And in the midst of government-sponsored mass infanticide of all the baby Hebrew boys, God rescues one with a jaw-dropping turn of affairs. Pharaoh’s daughter, instead of killing the baby Moses as he floats in the river, pities him, and then unwittingly hires his own mother as a nurse and raises the boy in the very court that he would ruin.
“God is not in a hurry. He has purposes for his deeds, and he has purposes for his pace.”
In eighty years! As you can see, God is not in a hurry. He has purposes for his deeds, and he has purposes for his pace. Eighty years later, God calls Moses to be the deliverer (Exodus 7:7). A bush burns without being consumed (Exodus 3:2). A rod turns into a snake and back again. A hand turns leprous and back. And if needed, a cup of Nile water will become blood (Exodus 4:1–9). “So go, Moses, in my sovereign power. Go deliver my people.”
After all of which Moses replies, “Lord, I am not eloquent . . . but I am slow of speech and of tongue” (Exodus 4:10). That was not a good response. But as so often happens, a foolish response from us gets a glorious statement of God’s sovereignty: “Then the Lord said to him, ‘Who has made man’s mouth? Who makes him mute, or deaf, or seeing, or blind? Is it not I, the Lord?’” (Exodus 4:11). “Don’t give me excuses about your mouth, Moses. I’m God! I made your mouth!”
Eventually, the reluctant prophet goes. And by his hand, God brings ten plagues upon Egypt, followed by a spectacular deliverance through the Red Sea — and all of it according to God’s inviolable plan. We know it was according to plan because before Moses ever approaches Pharaoh, God says to him,
I know that the king of Egypt will not let you go unless compelled by a mighty hand. . . . I will harden Pharaoh’s heart, and though I multiply my signs and wonders in the land of Egypt, Pharaoh will not listen to you. Then I will . . . bring my hosts, my people the children of Israel, out of the land of Egypt by great acts of judgment. (Exodus 3:19; 7:3–4)
And in the midst of these God-planned wonders, God states his purpose to Pharaoh:
For this purpose I have raised you up, to show you my power, so that my name may be proclaimed in all the earth. . . . I will get glory over Pharaoh. . . . And the Egyptians shall know that I am [Yahweh]. (Exodus 9:16; 14:4, 18)
Which brings us now to the main text of the message, and I invite you to turn to it, to Exodus 3:13–15.
All to Proclaim God’s Name
Up until now, the point of the message has been this: from the first prediction of the bondage in Egypt in Genesis 15:13 to the deliverance itself in Exodus 14, God’s ultimate purpose has been to show that he is God, absolute, sovereign, so that his mercies are free and his judgments are just.
Which is what we just heard in Exodus 9:16: “For this purpose I have raised you up, to show you my power, so that my name may be proclaimed in all the earth.” Or, to use the language of glory in Exodus 14:4, his purpose is that “I will be glorified over Pharaoh.” Then, back to his name: “And the Egyptians shall know that I am [Yahweh]” (Exodus 14:18). “That is my name.”
What does that mean? Exodus 3:13–15 is the most important text in the Hebrew Scriptures for understanding the personal name of God. That name is translated “LORD,” and it occurs about 6,800 times in the Old Testament (compared to 2,600 times for the word for “God,” Elohim). God chose to reveal the meaning of his personal name on the brink of the greatest deliverance of Israel, a deliverance whose purpose, he says, is to show his power, his glory, his name, so that all the nations would know it.
Three Steps to ‘Yahweh’
Here’s how he does it. Exodus 3:13–15:
Then Moses said to God, “If I come to the people of Israel and say to them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ what shall I say to them?” God said to Moses, “I Am Who I Am.” And he said, “Say this to the people of Israel: ‘I Am has sent me to you.’” God also said to Moses, “Say this to the people of Israel: ‘[Yahweh], the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, has sent me to you.’ This is my name forever, and thus I am to be remembered throughout all generations.”
In three steps, God reveals his name to Moses, and to us.
First, Exodus 3:14a: “God said to Moses, ‘I Am Who I Am.’” He did not say that was his name. He said, in effect, “Before you worry about my name, where I line up among the many gods of Egypt or Babylon or Philistia, and before you wonder about conjuring me with my name, and even before you wonder if I am the God of Abraham, be stunned by this: ‘I Am Who I Am.’” In other words: “I absolutely am. Before you get my name, get my being. That I am who I am — that I absolutely am — is first, foundational, and of infinite importance.” God is.
Second, Exodus 3:14b: “And he said, ‘Say this to the people of Israel: “I Am has sent me to you.”’” Here he has not yet given Moses his name. He is building a bridge between his being and his name. Here he simply puts the statement of his being in the place of his name: “Say . . . ‘I Am has sent me to you.’” He’s saying, “The one who is — who absolutely is — sent me to you.”
Third, Exodus 3:15: “God also said to Moses, ‘Say this to the people of Israel: “The Lord [in Hebrew, “Yahweh”], the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, has sent me to you.” This is my name forever [the Lord, Yahweh].’”
In those three steps, God has finally given us his name. It’s translated “LORD” (all caps) in the English Bible. But the Hebrew would be pronounced something like “Yahweh” and is built on the word for “I am.”
“God is not becoming anything. He is who he is. Absolute perfection cannot be improved.”
Every time you hear the word “Yahweh” (or the short form “Yah,” which you hear every time you sing “hallelu-jah,” meaning “praise Yahweh”), or every time you see “LORD” in the English Bible, you should think, “This is a proper name, like Peter or James or John, built from the word for ‘I am’” — reminding us each time that God absolutely is.
That All Would Know
Writing the book of Exodus, Moses leaves us no doubt about the aim:
Exodus 7:5: “The Egyptians shall know that I am [Yahweh].”
Exodus 7:17: “By this you shall know that I am [Yahweh].”
Exodus 8:22: “That you may know that I am [Yahweh] in the midst of the earth.”
Exodus 10:2: “That you may know that I am [Yahweh].”
Exodus 14:4: “The Egyptians shall know that I am [Yahweh].”If I repeated over and over in this message, “That you may know that I am John,” it would mean nothing. But if my name were John Power, and I said (as Ezekiel does with “Yahweh” 72 times), “That you may know that I am Power!” you would understand that this is more than a personal name. It has meaning. It is not just a name — it is reality. So it is with Yahweh. “Say to the people, ‘I Am sent me to you.’” That is, “Say to the people, ‘[Yahweh] sent me to you.’” Because Yahweh means “I am who I am. I am absolute being.”
And what does it mean for God, the God of Israel, our God, to be absolute being — to be “I Am Who I Am”?
1. God has no beginning.
I Am Who I Am means he never had a beginning. This staggers the mind. Every child asks, “Who made God?” and every wise parent says, “Nobody made God. God simply is and always was. No beginning.”
2. God has no end.
I Am Who I Am means God will never end. If he did not come into being; he cannot go out of being, because he is being. There is no place to go outside of being. There is only he. Before he creates, that’s all that is: God.
3. God is absolute reality.
I Am Who I Am means God is absolute reality. There is no reality before him. There is no reality outside of him unless he wills it and makes it. He is not one of many realities before he creates. He is simply there as absolute reality. He is all that was eternally. No space, no universe, no emptiness. Only God, absolutely there, absolutely all.
4. God is entirely independent.
I Am Who I Am means that God is utterly independent. He depends on nothing to bring him into being or support him or counsel him or make him what he is.
5. All else is entirely dependent on God.
I Am Who I Am means, rather, that everything that is not God depends totally on God. All that is not God is secondary and dependent. The entire universe is utterly secondary — not primary. It came into being by God and stays in being moment by moment because of God’s decision to keep it in being.
6. All else is as nothing compared to God.
I Am Who I Am means all the universe is by comparison to God as nothing. Contingent, dependent reality is to absolute, independent reality as a shadow to substance, as an echo to a thunderclap, as a bubble to the ocean. All that we see, all that we are amazed by in the world and in the galaxies, is, compared to God, as nothing. “All the nations are as nothing before him, they are accounted by him as less than nothing and emptiness” (Isaiah 40:17).
7. God is constant.
I Am Who I Am means that God is constant. He is the same yesterday, today, and forever. He cannot be improved. He is not becoming anything. He is who he is. There is no development in God. No progress. Absolute perfection cannot be improved.
8. God is the absolute standard.
I Am Who I Am means that he is the absolute standard of truth, goodness, and beauty. There is no lawbook to which he looks to know what is right. No almanac to establish facts. No guild to determine what is excellent or beautiful. He himself is the standard of what is right, what is true, what is beautiful.
9. God does whatever he pleases.
I Am Who I Am means God does whatever he pleases. There are no constraints on him from outside him that could hinder him in doing anything he pleases. All reality that is outside of him he created and designed and governs. So, he is utterly free from any constraints that don’t originate from the counsel of his own will.
10. God is the most valuable reality.
I Am Who I Am means that he is the most important and most valuable being in the universe. He is more worthy of interest and attention and admiration and enjoyment than all other realities, including the entire universe.
11. Jesus Christ is absolute being.
I Am Who I Am, God’s absolute being, means that Jesus Christ is absolute being, because Jesus said to the Pharisees, “Your father Abraham rejoiced that he would see my day. He saw it and was glad” (John 8:56).
They responded, “You are not yet fifty years old, and have you seen Abraham?” (John 8:57).
Jesus said to them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, before Abraham was, I am” (John 8:58). He could have said, “Before Abraham was, I was.” But he didn’t. He said, “Before Abraham was, I am.” Because he is the I Am. Very God of very God. Absolute being. “He is before all things, and in him all things hold together” (Colossians 1:17).
12. Absolute being dwelt among us.
I Am Who I Am “became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth” (John 1:14). Absolute Being united with humanity in such a way that we can say, when Jesus died, God purchased us by his own blood (Acts 20:28).
Enthralled with Who He Is
It is an electrifying truth that God simply is. Explosive. Wild. Untamable. Changing absolutely everything.
And that this God, this Yahweh, this absolute I Am Who I Am, came to us in the man Jesus Christ, and made a second Exodus (Luke 9:31) to bring us out of the misery of condemnation into the promised land of God’s happy presence — that is thrilling beyond imagination.
O Lord, make us a God-besotted people. To know you, and admire you, and love you, and treasure you, and make you known, as Yahweh. I Am Who I Am. Jesus Christ. Savior. Friend.
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Test, Seek, Pray, Fight: The Pursuit of Holy Affections
Early morning hours are precious. The house is still, quiet. The aroma of coffee wafts from the steaming mug. A single lamp illuminates the chair and table. Here is a sanctuary, a peaceful place of communion between a man and his God.
And yet on many days, it is anything but peaceful. Rather than quiet contemplation, I find myself battling on my knees against a persistent and pernicious straying of the heart. The prayer is not that of the demonized boy’s father: Lord, “I believe; help my unbelief” (though I too have prayed such words). Instead, I pray, “Lord, I desire; help my erring desires.”
While striving to meditate on the steadfast love and faithfulness and eternal goodness of God, I find that other concerns arrest my attention: anxious thoughts about how my work will be received, a nagging fear that somehow I’m just not doing enough, questions about what my coworkers think of me, jealousy over the success of others. A long list of anxious thoughts grip my mind and lead me away from the one offering rest and peace, satisfaction and joy. Here lies the battle. The straying thoughts reveal what’s driving my heart this morning: desire for the fleeting approval of man, not the eternal good.
One misaligned desire would be a significant battle by itself; this is a wide and diverse war. Fears about parenting failures reveal desires to be self-sufficient. Worry about a medical condition (whether minor or life-threatening) may indicate a greater love for this present life than the never-ending one to come. Pride fails to acknowledge that our plans are in the hand of the Lord, and reveals an arrogant boasting rooted in the desire to order life according to our own design. My sanctuary, it turns out, is also a battlefield.
Disordered Hearts
The struggle to rightly order our desires lies at the heart of each Christian’s daily walk. Our redeemed hearts, still twisted by sin, simply do not function as they ought. In general, we have no problem desiring. We do have serious problems desiring rightly. Our hearts are disordered, and so we frequently spin out days chasing small and fleeting ends that fail to satisfy. We grow weary and despondent in our Sisyphean pursuits, and we wonder where our first love has gone.
In a meditation on Psalm 119:97–104, the late John Webster (1955–2016) describes the reordering of affections as “one of the most weighty claims [of] the Christian gospel” (Christ Our Salvation, 6). He argues that the affections are “the fundamental loves which govern us and determine the shape of our lives . . . [the] part of us through which we attach ourselves to things outside of ourselves. . . . [They are] the engines of our attitudes and actions” (7). In other words, each and every day, what we love and desire determines what we set ourselves to pursue.
‘Nature Abhors a Vacuum’
God made us, each and every one of us, to pursue. He gave us hearts that desire. Our pursuits — what we desire and strive toward — reveal our hearts because behind our pursuits lie affections. Imagine a string tied between the desire in your heart and each object you run after. If you pause long enough to tug on the strings, you will unearth what lies (and pulls) in the hidden recesses of your heart. And far too often, those hidden recesses are not filled with pure love for God; they contain the kind of covetousness that leads to strife (see James 4:1–4).
Sometimes, in the battle with such wayward affections, the temptation to quell desire rises to the forefront. “If only I could put the desire for X to death, then I would walk in freedom.” Erasing that disorderly affection seems like the key to holiness. And so we aim (rightfully, I should say) to put sin to death (Romans 8:13). We fight the battle with X and, by God’s grace, win. Then we stop.
Consider a knight on the warpath. He has heard of a dragon who reigns over a castle and keeps a king’s daughter locked up as a prisoner in the tallest tower. With great courage, he risks life and limb to face the dragon in open combat. Eventually he emerges from the battle victorious (though certainly wounded and a bit more well-done). What does he do next? He mounts his warhorse and returns home. No, good stories don’t end that way — and for good reason.
Everyone recognizes that the knight has won only half the battle. The princess still needs rescuing. If he leaves her locked up and the castle vacant, another winged, fire-breathing worm will soon take the place of the first. So too, the man who cleaned the house after the unclean spirit left suddenly finds himself fighting the original spirit again, plus seven more (Matthew 12:44–45). The man needs to fill up the house, not leave it empty; the knight needs to actually rescue the princess.
Scottish minister Thomas Chalmers (1780–1847) wrote, “Nature abhors a vacuum” (The Expulsive Power of a New Affection, 41). What did he mean? It does no good to merely take away a man’s sinful affection. By God’s design, man cannot be affectionless. To attempt to remove all that stirs his heart, in the name of pure and holy living, would be an “unnatural violence” to his soul (44).
Let’s apply Chalmers’s insight to my early-morning battle. As I analyze the internal struggle, I see how my worry over how I might be received reveals a desire to please men. Behind my desire is an unhealthy craving for the kind of recognition, applause, and affirmation I might receive from my coworkers. I might pray in that moment for God to remove that desire from my heart — but the struggle doesn’t stop there. Affection cannot merely be put to death; it must be remade.
‘Seek the Things Above’
Paul wrote to the Colossian believers about the emptiness of merely negative commands. Seemingly powerful and wise in the fight against sin (at least initially), “they are of no value in stopping the indulgence of the flesh” (Colossians 2:23). We cannot stop at mere negation. For this reason, Paul gives the Colossians a positive command: “Seek the things that are above. . . . Set your minds on things that are above” (Colossians 3:1–2). Do not expect denial, by itself, to lead to holiness. We need redirection.
God created us with the capacity for affections, and it’s a good design. To attempt to merely get rid of sinful desires (and not redirect the heart) is to deny our very nature. Chalmers understood this, which is why his little sermon continues to resonate with readers. “We have already affirmed,” he wrote, “how impossible it were for the heart . . . to cast the world away from it and thus reduce it to a wilderness. The heart is not so constituted, and the only way to dispossess it of an old affection is by the expulsive power of a new one” (49).
The pursuit of holiness has to be just that: a pursuit. And to pursue something means that we desire it, we want it, we set our minds and order our days to have it. Left to ourselves, such a task is hopeless. Twisted and corrupt trees do not produce good fruit. But we haven’t been left to ourselves. The Lord has raised us up to new life (Colossians 3:1). He has given us his Spirit. And he is at work to detach our affections from their empty, death-producing objects and reattach them to their proper treasures. We do not enter the fray alone or without hope.
Test, Seek, Pray, Fight
What might this good battle look like each day? We can sketch the fight in four steps: test, seek, pray, fight.
TEST
What captures your heart today? What do you find yourself aiming for? What do your recent actions and decisions reveal about what you love? Start pulling on those strings. Try to unearth the loves behind and beneath those strings. Before you engage the enemy, you have to know who the enemy is. What do you find yourself repeatedly struggling against? Unfortunately, the desire for others’ approval didn’t simply go away that morning. I still find myself seeking to put it to death (and quite frequently).
Honest self-reflection, while important, can’t be the only means to putting twisted desires to death. We need communities of brothers and sisters around us who know us well. Because we’ve cultivated strong relationships of trust, these fellow soldiers have the freedom to tell us when a path we’re pursuing leads to death.
SEEK
“If then you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above” (Colossians 3:1). The apostle’s command requires us to actively set our hearts on other, heavenly objects. We must come to see them as more worthy of pursuit than the ones that tempt us.
Early-morning meditation has been the single best practice I have learned over the years (and one that countless believers have practiced throughout history). Psalm 90:14 sets the agenda: “Satisfy us in the morning with your steadfast love, that we may rejoice and be glad all our days.” Finding our delight in the Lord orients and redirects our hearts. When we have tasted and seen the goodness of God, the fool’s gold of worldly pursuits grows tarnished in our eyes (1 Peter 2:1–3). Where do we see his goodness displayed? In the word as we open it with fresh eyes of faith.
PRAY
While prayer accompanies every step in this battle, concerted effort comes during and after time in the word. “Lord, you’ve shown me your goodness and character this morning; grant belief and desire for more. By your Spirit, mold my desires to conform to your goodness, your holiness, your majestic worth.” These steps of prayer and seeking, like testing, can (and arguably should) also take place with our local church. The Lord uses fellow saints to help us see more of him in the word. And God will use the prayers of other saints to strengthen and encourage right thinking and feeling in our hearts and minds.
FIGHT
“Put to death,” writes Paul. Them’s fightin’ words. Just because we taste and see the goodness of God doesn’t mean our battle is over. Sinful desires remain, and they reveal themselves throughout the day in our attitudes, actions, and words. Paul calls us to the strenuous life, actively working to kill corrupt desires in the hope that God himself works within us to cause conformity to the image of Christ (Philippians 2:12–13).
So, test and seek, praying at all times, and then fight. And fight alongside friends, because wars like these are lost alone.
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United States of Abortion: A Grave History in Five Threads
For nearly four centuries, the frequency of abortion in America has depended on how citizens and residents answered five questions:
Anatomy: Is the being in the womb human?
Bible: Is Scripture’s teaching on the sacredness of human life binding on us?
Community: What kind of advice and support do vulnerable women receive from boyfriends or husbands, parents or friends, employers, or anyone to whom a woman might look for emotional and financial help?
Danger to women: What is the likelihood of an abortion ending with not just one victim but two?
Enforcement: In what informal and formal ways do those with influence and resources protect the most vulnerable?
How do we answer these questions today? One article does not provide enough space to spin out each of these threads historically (if you want to read more, Leah Savas and I have done that in our book, The Story of Abortion in America). But some changes are evident: Americans now have more awareness than ever before of what unborn children look like, and less knowledge of what the Bible teaches. The influence of community and the possibility of enforcement have fluctuated over the years. The danger to women has sharply declined. Let’s unpack these changes one by one.
‘A’ Is for Anatomy
The most popular seventeenth-century guide to pregnancy and fetal anatomy, The Midwives Book, echoed ancient and medieval contentions that unborn children have “first the life of a Plant, then of a Beast, and lastly of a Man.” But in 1839 Dr. Hugh Hodge, brother of theologian Charles Hodge, spoke of the unborn child’s continuous development from conception.
Other doctors conveyed Hodge’s teaching to their patients, who without seeing an unborn child were proceeding on faith. A breakthrough in popular understanding came at the 1939 World’s Fair in New York City, where more than two million people waited in line to view twenty-four sculptures that showed human development in the womb. The next mass education came in 1965 when a Life magazine cover showed Lennart Nilsson’s photograph of an unborn child floating within an amniotic sac. This issue was Life’s all-time fastest seller at checkout counters. And now, 3D and 4D ultrasound lets a woman see not a baby but her baby.
‘B’ Is for Bible
In an era of frequent Bible reading that lasted until early in the twentieth century, it was hard to miss God’s creative involvement in human life from its beginning. Colonists read in the Psalms, Job, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Luke, Galatians, and other books, not only that we are made in God’s image, but that he “knitted me together in my mother’s womb” (Psalm 139:13).
Bible readers and hearers also imbibed sensational detail about what evildoers do to unborn children. When an Israelite town did not surrender to an evil king, “he ripped open all the women in it who were pregnant” (2 Kings 15:16). Hosea prophesied that “Samaria shall bear her guilt . . . their pregnant women [shall be] ripped open” (Hosea 13:16). The Ammonites were guilty because “they have ripped open pregnant women in Gilead, that they might enlarge their border” (Amos 1:13).
Volumes other than the Bible, like The Midwives Book, featured the sacred and secular overlapping seamlessly. Jane Sharp quoted from or alluded to the Bible at least thirty times. She twice referred to Psalm 139’s “knitted me together,” but also noted Genesis 1, 2, 3, 4, 17, 29, and 30, as well as other passages from Exodus, Leviticus, Deuteronomy, 1 and 2 Samuel, 1 Chronicles, Psalms 113 and 127, Matthew, John, Acts, and Hebrews. Sharp frequently referred to “the law of God,” “the laws of God,” and “the blessings of God.”
Pastors in early America cited the Bible in speaking out against abortion. In 1869 the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America declared that it viewed “the destruction by parents of their own offspring before birth with abhorrence.” But in 1908 Dr. Walter Dorsett at an American Medical Association convention complained that “Few sermons are preached from the pulpit for fear of shocking the delicate feelings of a fashionably dressed congregation.”
Some pastors were bold, but avoiding any mention of abortion was common in churches during the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. WORLD surveyed pastors in the 1990s and the 2010s. While some such as John Piper spoke out, I could accurately headline the articles “Silence of the Shepherds” I and II. The A and B trends — more anatomical knowledge, less Bible knowledge — pretty much canceled each other out.
In early America, as the delightfully named book Sex in Middlesex (the Massachusetts county I grew up in) showed, community pressure on young men meant that pregnant, unmarried women could generally count on marriage before going into labor. If young men hesitated, old men intervened. They rarely needed shotguns, but every father had one.
The growth of large cities beginning in the 1830s broke down community protection and left more women and children at risk. Pastor Isaac Ferris in the Mercer St. Presbyterian Church spoke to three hundred young New Yorkers in 1852 and said an apprentice or clerk a generation earlier lived with his employer’s family, “but now it is sadly altered. The lad is left on the wide world — he is surrounded by the mercenary and the callous.” Self-indulgence with no supervision left young men in a moral maelstrom.
Ferris jump-started the YMCA movement as a way to form new communities, and YWCAs soon followed. Unmarried women surprised by pregnancy often went to homes away from home. Some had non-euphemistic names like the Erring Women’s Refuge. Starting in the 1970s crisis pregnancy centers tried to create supportive communities. Many pastors, even if they did not speak about abortion, prodded their congregations to support compassionate alternatives to abortion.
‘D’ Is for Danger
Until the 1830s abortion was often fatal for the mother as well as the child. Ingesting an abortifacient was playing Russian roulette: Place a bullet in a revolver, spin the cylinder, point the muzzle at your head, pull the trigger. Letting an abortionist invade a uterus was the equivalent of two bullets in the cylinder. Only utter desperation, or unrelenting pressure from an unloving lover, would lead a woman to accept a one-third risk of death.
At that time surgical abortion hadn’t changed much in two millennia. Around the year AD 200, the theologian Tertullian described how an abortionist inserted into the uterus “an annular blade, by means of which the limbs within the womb are dissected,” along with a blunt gripper “wherewith the entire fetus is extracted by a violent delivery.”
The surgical trauma was bad enough, but then infection arrived. Abortion became a little less dangerous for mothers when specialists with steady hands and extensive experience began doing more abortions than neighborhood hacks. In the late nineteenth century, knowledge of antisepsis spread: Cleanliness in abortion was not next to godliness, but the Maryland Court of Appeals in 1901 recognized the difference antiseptic procedure made when it declared, with some tunnel vision, that “death is not now the usual . . . consequence of an abortion.”
As use of antibiotics spread after World War II, the concerns about personal danger that had kept some women from obtaining abortions dropped steadily. New York City went from 144 abortion deaths in 1921 to 15 in 1951. The number kept declining: Although abortion propagandists in the 1960s claimed “thousands” of women were dying in abortions, Planned Parenthood medical director Mary Calderone acknowledged in 1960 that for women, “Abortion is no longer a dangerous procedure.”
‘E’ Is for Enforcement
In the late nineteenth century newspapers regularly reported that abortion was arousing “intense feeling.” The Wisconsin State Journal reported an arrest “on the charge of seduction and abortion made by the parents of a girl 14 years old. . . . The arrest causes intense feeling.” But with all the intensity, it was still hard to lock up abortionists.
In 1904, Dr. Rudolph Holmes successfully urged the Chicago Medical Society to create a Committee on Criminal Abortion. Holmes became chairman and pushed his colleagues to try “influencing the daily press to discontinue criminal advertisements.” Abortion was illegal in Illinois and every other state, but the Chicago Tribune and other newspapers still ran thinly veiled ads for it. Holmes visited editors who dropped the ads, particularly when postal authorities issued a stop order against mail delivery of publications sustaining abortion.
By 1910, though, Holmes was despairing. He noted in a medical journal that abortionists, denied newspaper advertising space, printed business cards and distributed them through brothels and rooming-house landlords. He said Chicago abortionists had their own legal department, with witnesses on tap and ready to swear that “the young woman had an operation elsewhere and the doctor was merely performing a life-saving operation.” He said the coroner’s office investigated not more than one percent of abortion deaths in Chicago: “The persons who perform the operations find it easy to cover up their tracks, and it is difficult to get witnesses to testify in cases of this kind.”
Doctors in other cities shared Holmes’s pessimism about enforcement. In 1912 Dr. M.S. Iseman offered an acidic city-by-city tour of how laws were not working at street level. During five years in Washington, D.C., thousands of abortions led to “only nine indictments for abortion and three convictions — not enough to do more than to slow down slightly the traffic to abort.” In New York City, abortion was rampant but “in some years not a single indictment follows. . . . It is difficult to say which is the stronger attraction for the lady visitors to the metropolis — the horseshow, the opera, or the gynecologist.” In Atlanta, “After years of suspended animation, the police made a solitary arrest for the crime of abortion.”
The Heart-Changer
Moving forward a century to a time when more people call themselves pro-choice than pro-life, we should be aware of the limitations of enforcement in red states, particularly in their blue cities. It’s hard for me to believe that a jury of twelve randomly chosen people in my city would ever imprison an abortionist. With danger to the mother no longer a deterrent, and wherever enforcement is unlikely, the ABCs — anatomy, Bible, community — are the bulwarks for life against death.
That realization is especially important now that American society suffers from structural abortionism. The frequent corporate response to Dobbs — paying travel costs to legal-abortion states for employees in pro-life states — shows abortion’s economic role. Many organizations structure their workforce on the assumption that young female employees will always be available to show up in the office for full-time work. Corporate and government offices, instead of pretending that differences between men and women of childbearing age don’t exist, should and could be more creative in promoting shared jobs, flextime, on-site infant care including feeding times, work from home, and other pro-life scheduling.
Beyond economics, we should also recognize that an underlying cause for many abortions, like much of homelessness, is the catastrophic loss of relationships. Churches can and should be gospel-formed communities that communicate to unhappily pregnant women: There’s room here for you.
Pro-lifers in deep blue states may despair, but in one respect they may have an advantage. To be successful, laws restricting abortion need to pedal in tandem with lives devoted to expanding compassion. In red states the temptation will be to put politics in the front seat. In states where protective laws are so dead-on-arrival that millions of babies are likely to be dead pre-arrival, changed hearts are the only hope — and the gospel is a heart-changer.
