Paul wanted to know his Lord. He wanted to know the power of Christ’s resurrection. And he wanted to share in his sufferings. He strives to become like him in his death and so attain to the resurrection. And it seems clear that he did not simply acquire this knowledge as a result of his conversion. It was his hungry pursuit at the time of his writing. Paul was quite explicit that he is still acquiring this knowledge.

Can we ever be confident of God’s specific will for our lives? It is always amazing how confidently Paul expresses his thoughts on God’s specific will for his own life and that of others as well. Talking from prison where he was awaiting an imperial decision as to whether to execute him or not, Paul had this to say:
For me to live is Christ, and to die is gain. If I am to live in the flesh, that means fruitful labour for me. Yet which I shall choose I cannot tell. I am hard pressed between the two. My desire is to depart and be with Christ, for that is far better. But to remain in the flesh is more necessary on your account. Convinced of this, I know that I will remain and continue with you all, for your progress in and joy in the faith, so that in me you may have ample cause to glory in Christ Jesus, because of my coming to you again.
Philippians 1:21-26 ESV
There are a number of startling aspects to his mindset that deserve further attention.
Origins of the Word Confidence that Paul Uses
In verse 25, given above, Paul uses a word that the English Standard Version of the Bible translates as “convinced”. That word is peitho is defined as:
“…to persuade, to have confidence …”
Strong’s Concordance
The HELPS Word-studies has this to say:
“The Lord persuades the yielded believer to be confident in His preferred-will”
HELPS Word-studies
This is not an unusual word in Scripture. In fact, we find this small word and its derivatives 53 times in the New Testament and 22 times in Paul’s writings. Paul has already used it twice in this letter:
And I am sure of this, that he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ … And most of the brothers, having become confident in the Lord by my imprisonment, are much more bold to speak the word without fear.
Philippians 1:6,14 ESV italics mine
It was obviously a favourite word of Paul’s and amongst the believers of his day. The idea of confidence, of assurance, and growing in confidence was central to their understanding of their Christian walk. But the question remains. We can grow in assurance or certainty as to our eternal destiny. But can we ever be confident as to God’s specific will for our lives? In order to answer that question we need to grasp Paul’s full understanding of this term.
Confident in God’s Sovereignty
The authorities of the day were weighing up the decision as to whether Paul should live or die. But here in his personal account on the subject, he does not refer to any of the factors that would have been decisive in their decision-making.
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Written by Matthew H. Lee |
Thursday, December 7, 2023

For Machen, the great benefit of these school choice reforms was that they would empower parents to oversee their children’s education. As he stated to the Sentinels, the hope is that “we may return to the principle of freedom for individual parents in the education of their children in accordance with their conscience.” School choice policies enacted and expanded this year promote this noble end and serve as an unexpected tribute to Machen on the hundredth anniversary of Christianity and Liberalism.

This year is the centennial of J. Gresham Machen’s magnum opus, Christianity and Liberalism.
Originally published in 1923, Machen wrote the book in response to a rising tide of theological liberalism and modernism in the United States. Machen’s views ultimately led him out of his denomination and out of Princeton Seminary, both of which accepted more liberal and modernist tendencies, and led him to help found two enduring institutions—Westminster Theological Seminary (1929) and the Orthodox Presbyterian Church (1936).
While Machen’s achievements are chiefly theological, he wrote and spoke extensively about education, where he observed some of the deteriorating effects of liberalism. One hundred years of policy and research have proven Machen prescient in his views on education policy, which can largely be grouped into three themes: resistance against standardization, opposition to centralization, and insistence on parental choice.
Resistance Against Standardization
First, Machen resisted trends to standardize both the teaching profession and student learning. The Lusk Laws in New York, for example, required teachers to obtain certification from the commissioner of education and made them subject to state visitation. Though repealed in 1923, less than two years after they passed, the spirit of the Lusk Laws endures. Nearly every state requires teachers to obtain some certification, often in addition to holding a degree in the field of education, despite the fact that research fails to document evidence of a meaningful link between certification and teacher quality.
Machen believed the modernist trend of training teachers in the science of education, rather than with content in their disciplines, marked a fundamental shift in the understanding of what teaching is. He lamented that the primary preparation of modern teachers was not “to study the subject that he is going to teach. Instead of studying the subject that he is going to teach, he studies ‘education.’”
In Machen’s view, the great danger in standardization and in emphasizing methodology over content is that it would place the child “under the control of psychological experts, themselves without the slightest acquaintance with the higher realms of human life, who proceed to prevent any such acquaintance being gained by those who come under their care.”
Treating education as a mechanistic process would result in “intellectual as well as moral decline” because in such a context, morality is based “upon experience, instead of upon an absolute distinction between right and wrong,” Machen said in a 1926 address to the Sentinels of the Republic, a libertarian organization dedicated to resisting federal overreach.
To compensate for the meagerness of character formation in modern education, psychological experts instead try to inject civic and moral values into a standardized, secularized curriculum. Machen wrote about such “morality codes” in a 1925 essay titled “Reforming the Government Schools.” He observed that these codes were “making the situation tenfold worse; far from checking the ravages of immorality, they are for the most part themselves non-moral at the root.” Today, morality codes have many faces, but the same empty core. Social and emotional learning (SEL), for example, provides analogs for cardinal virtues promoted by classical and Christian education, but absent the thick moral context of religion.
Opposition to Centralization
Machen was also opposed to the centralization of oversight of education in the federal government, a natural extension of his resistance to standardization. In February 1926, a month after his Sentinels address, Machen provided expert testimony on behalf of the Sentinels for a Congressional hearing dealing with several issues, including the formation of a federal Department of Education, which he predicted that if enacted, would be “the worst fate into which any country can fall.” While he helped defeat the proposal for a federal department, his victory was merely temporary, as a federal department of education would eventually be formed as a cabinet-level department in 1980.
Machen was not being hyperbolic in his assessment. Since the establishment of the first federal agency in 1867, which started with only a commissioner and a staff of three, the federal role in education has ballooned. For 2023–24, the Department of Education budgeted over $270 billion in spending—all the more alarming when one considers that the Department of Education accounts for only three-fifths of all federal spending on education. Again, Machen has been vindicated by research, which has failed to document a reliable link between spending and student outcomes.
A common argument for centralized control over education, both in Machen’s day and today, is easily addressed.
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