If only a few church members live out some or all of these suggestions—perhaps if even one does it—significant improvement will be made in the church you love.
The church is medium-sized in attendance, yet, on paper the membership roll is even larger. Its solo pastor is a frustrated man. There are some good days, and certainly some fine people who encourage him, but he’s frustrated because the job God called him to do just cannot be done. He has many people to tend to, numbers of which are missing, and even those who are present are more than any average man could possibly care for—that is, really care for.
So, this good-hearted, spiritually-minded pastor lapses into frustration over his inability to do much more than put out fires. And there are plenty of those.
He tries to project the view that he is a true shepherd of all the people. He speaks in warm terms to those attending on Sundays, and to all of the people through the church’s regular publications. The website shows him as if he were the best friend and confidant of all the members, constantly attending to their spiritual growth, mentoring, guiding, and comforting. But the blurb under his photo is only a wish and not a reality. He actually is only able to pastor an inner core on that level—perhaps twenty to thirty, at most. He sometimes thinks that his loving words are no different than those of the TV preacher who looks into the camera and acts as if he is directly speaking to the listener as his dearest friend. He has become a pastor who is not able to pastor.
Across town is the fastest growing church. They are driven by entertainment, appealing music, and a large staff. Sometimes his members visit there, just out of curiosity or perhaps out of the need to have a little relief from the sedate experience they are used to. When a special event comes to the mega-church, perhaps several of his members attend, including his own children. It often adds to his frustration, though he would not say much about it.
The pastor of the mega-church expresses his love for the people also. In fact, he may be better at saying it than the pastor of the smaller church. His website portrays him in several photos and videos as a caring, magnanimous friend of the people, who all smile and love him.
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If you do not read the Bible with the ultimate goal of seeing the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ, you don’t understand Scripture. We need to see Christ’s glory through his illumining power to truly appreciate why his Word is and what his Word does. Without illumination, Scripture is a textbook at best. With the light of Christ, the Scripture is our doorway to heaven.

The truth of Scripture is like the sun. During the day, the light from the sun is clear to anyone who can see. Not everyone can see, but blind eyes don’t dim the sun. For the blind to see it, the sun doesn’t need to shine brighter or clearer – they need to be given sight to see what’s been there the whole time.
So it is with the sun, so it is with Scripture. God has spoken clearly in the Bible for any who have ears to hear because God is good.. That some claim God’s Word is a jumbled mess of impenetrable mysteries only reveals the hardness of their hearts, not the obscurity of the text. And if those hard hearts would joyfully embrace the truth of God’s Word, nothing needs to change about the Word itself. They need to be given eyes to see what’s been plainly there the whole time.
So, how can blind men see the clear light of the truth of Scripture? “In their case the god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelievers, to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God” (2 Cor 4:4). How can the blind see? Who can give them sight?
Let me make it more personal. How is it that you have any hope of understanding Scripture? In the face of interpretive anarchy, esoteric theological debates, and the world’s ceaseless scoffing at Scripture, how could anyone be so smug as to think they have nailed down the true meaning of the eternal Word of God? Under the devil’s dark veil, how can you see the clear light of the gospel?
Christ is our clarity. The Son of God lights the Word of God. In other words, you need to know Jesus to understand the Bible.
Jesus the Light
The theological term that’s used to describe the lighting up of dark eyes, the giving of spiritual sight to the spiritually blind, is illumination. And we usually think of illumination as an action of the Holy Spirit, and it is. Paul prays for the Ephesian church that “that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give you the Spirit of wisdom and of revelation in the knowledge of him, having the eyes of your hearts enlightened” (Eph 1:17-18). To the Corinthian church, Paul explains his ministry by saying, “And we impart this in words not taught by human wisdom but taught by the Spirit, interpreting spiritual truths to those who are spiritual” (1 Cor 2:13). The Spirit opens up darkened eyes to give spiritual sight.
But while the Spirit of God is the agent of human change in illumination, Jesus Christ is the object of that illumination. He is “the light of the world” (John 8:12). It’s in Jesus’ face that we see the “light of the knowledge of the glory of God” (2 Cor 4:6). God is light (1 John 1:5), a revealer of the truth, and Christ is the one who makes him known (John 1:18).
While he was on earth, Jesus not only healed the physically blind but also the spiritually blind. In Luke 24, when Jesus appears to his disciples after his resurrection, he illumines them to rightly read the Old Testament.
“Then he said to them, ‘These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you, that everything written about me in the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms must be fulfilled.’ Then he opened their minds to understand the Scriptures, and said to them, ‘Thus it is written, that the Christ should suffer and on the third day rise from the dead, and that repentance for the forgiveness of sins should be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem.’”
Luke 24:44-47
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Each cell in every boy declares his masculinity, “I am male!”  And each cell in every girl of her femininity, “I am woman!”  And no amount of medical mutilation and diplomatic manipulation from without can muffle these voices within our society’s collective conscience while our children’s blood always will be crying out about our mutually inherent and lovely differentiated binary sexual biology.

On the April 15 airing of SNL’s “Weekend Update,” the show’s first openly nonbinary cast member, Ms. Molly Kearney, though still using her singular female name yet celebrated being referred to by obliging backstage staff with the neuter pronouns “they” and “them” (reflecting “their” references to her elsewhere).[1] In so doing she not only defies her God-given and biologically determined female identity but also denies the obvious reality that she is not plural—exposing the arbitrarily ludicrous LGBTQ+ agenda being pushed to new schizophrenic heights.
While there is no mistaking Kearney’s unoriginal attempts at being the female version of Chris Farley in the segment, there also is no missing her intention to exit with the air of angelic authority being lifted up with ropes as she declared,
If you don’t care about trans-kids’ lives, it means you don’t care about…kids’ lives.
… They got my pronouns right [nonbinary “them” instead of “her”]! Let’s go!
What’s happening kids is wrong and you don’t need to be scared. Our job is to protect you and your job is to focus on being a kid…There’s a bunch of dudes asking you about your crotch and controlling when and where you’re allowed to pee. But if you just hang on you’ll look up and realize, you’re flying kid!
Trans rocks!
First of all, let’s hope parents in fact care enough about their precious boys and girls to guard their vulnerable worlds from being rocked by viewing SNL, let alone not to permit them to be confused and brainwashed into risking psychological harm and physical abuse in bathrooms and locker rooms or mutilation on operating floors.
The damage could go beyond corporal and emotional repair (see firstthings.com/article/2004/11/surgical-sex and firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2022/07/mutilating-our-bodies). And the truth is that rather than seeking to protect children, societal predators like Ms. Kearney are grabbing at their underaged zippers and pulling them by their immature ears to turn our minors into suicide bombers of political warfare and cultural launchpads for rocketing queer careers.
My wife, who is very thankful to be liberated from what she laments as her native land’s more deeply and widely infested culture of sexual degradation and transgender disfigurement, recently shared an Instagram video with me of a Brazilian woman whom I would have otherwise never questioned to be a man by all outward appearances. I couldn’t help but admit it was impressive how much mankind, made in God’s image, can so convincingly disguise sexual identity with modern technology. A mastectomy and hormonal manipulation had flattened her chest; broadened her face, neck, torso, and appendages; grown dark bristly hair on her tattoo-graffitied arms and shoulders; deepened her voice; and even topped her off with a receding hairline. (My understanding is that other methods were used to demolish and erect new pretend anatomy underneath her unmentionables.) It was shocking to see pictures of her feminine beauty before her deformation; she had even been a professional model. (One wonders if she tired of being objectified in a fallen man’s world, especially in her country.)
But with all the rejections of binary biological classification, a person’s maleness or femaleness can never be modified inwardly. Crossdressing homosexuals and spayed and neutered transgendered folk will never be able to reproduce themselves other than by Pied Piper child trafficking that deceptively coerces adoption of their dogmatists while stealing away unadulterated childhoods.[2]
Not only does one’s soul truly know what his or her body and organs and hormones testify outwardly, a man or woman’s DNA cannot be denied by his or her heart of hearts. What may be manipulated crudely from without can never be actually altered within. Every one of our estimated 60 to 100 trillion cells (amidst 200 cell types) would need to have an X or Y chromosome replaced; yet this utter impossibility would still not recreate functional physiology opposite from how one was born.
Rev. Terry Johnson appeals to our reason:
Follow the science…The culture is willing to do anything but follow the science…how about the normalizing of transgenderism and that you can be a woman trapped in the body of a man and a man trapped in the body of a woman? What does the science tell ya? The science tells ya that every single cell in every single body is either male or female. Your genes are either male genes…or they’re female genes. The science would say you are in terms of gender what you are in biology and that’s all anybody in the human race in all of recorded history has ever understood until the recent, like five minutes ago…[3]
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