The Lord’s ordinary way is to bless conscientious diligence in a lawful calling with such a measure of success as the person may have whereby to sustain himself and to be helpful unto others. 

A recent worldwide study of attitudes to work shows that UK citizens are least likely to say that work is important in their life, and among the least likely to say that work should always come first, even if it means less leisure time. Compared with other nations, the UK is also relatively less likely to agree that work is a duty towards society. While the Bible condemns grasping ambition and earthly-mindedness, it also commends diligence, productivity, and generosity. This is an application of the eighth commandment, “Thou shalt not steal.” In his commentary on Ephesians, James Fergusson looks at how Paul explores the transformation that takes place in every area of life when someone comes to know Christ savingly, including a radically changed attitude to work. In the following updated extract, Fergusson identifies the eighth commandment as informing Paul’s exhortation in Ephesians 4:28, “Let him that stole steal no more, but rather let him labour, working with his hands the thing which is good, that he may have to give to him that needeth.”
Knowing Christ Transforms Everything
The knowledge which the Ephesians had of Christ was inconsistent with a licentious life. “Ye have not so learned Christ” (Eph. 4:20) It is not every sort of learning Christ, or knowledge that may be had of Christ, which excludes profaneness.
We rightly and savingly learn truth, when the knowledge of truth attained by our learning is such as Christ’s knowledge was, i.e., not merely theoretical and speculative, but practical and operative.
Three things are required from, and effectually produced in, the person who learns and knows Christ in this effectual way.
The first is a daily striving to “put off” (or “mortify”) “the old man” (v.22). This doesn’t mean the substance of our soul and body, or even the natural and essential faculties of the soul, but the natural and inbred corruption which has infected and polluted all these, and which we give way to in its “deceitful lusts.” The right order to go about the duties of sanctification is to begin with mortification in the first place, and then proceed to the duties of a new life, for the plants of righteousness do not thrive in an unhumbled, proud, impenitent heart.
The second thing is a serious endeavour to have your mind and understanding more and more renewed, or made new, by getting a new quality of divine and supernatural light implanted in it (v.23). It is not sufficient that we cease to do evil, and labour to mortify our inbred corruption, but we must also learn to do well, and endeavour to have the whole man adorned with the various graces of God’s Spirit, making conscience of all the positive duties of a holy life.
The third thing is the daily task of putting on the new man (v.24), that is, being more and more endued and adorned with new and spiritual qualities, by which not only is our mind renewed, but also our will, affections and actions.
Christians Observe Each of the Ten Commandments
The apostle then presses on them the exercise of some particular virtues. These belong to all Christians of whatsoever rank or station equally, and they are all enjoined in the second table of the law. He exhorts them, first, to lay aside and mortify the sin of lying (v.25), forbidden in the ninth commandment (where someone speaks what they know or conceive to be untruth, with an intention and purpose to deceive), and to “speak the truth, every man with his neighbour,” that is, to speak as they think, and to think of what they speak as it really is, so that our speech would conform both to the thing itself, and to our conceptions of the thing.
He exhorts them, next, to restrain and moderate their anger (v.26–27), for anger is forbidden in the sixth commandment. Anger is a natural affection, planted in our first parents at the first creation, and it was indeed also found in Christ Himself, who was without sin. So anger is not in itself a sin, nor always sinful. Instead, it is in its own nature indifferent, and becomes either good or evil according to the grounds, causes, objects and ends of it.
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The Gospel writers communicate the providential ordering and pattern, as John stays in the wilderness (so to speak), while Jesus will emerge with the fullness of the Spirit from the wilderness to conduct His mission in the land of Israel. John as Jesus’ forerunner begins and ends his ministry in a way that shows how the kingdom he has preached will come: by defeat in the eyes of the world, but victory in the plan of God. Having set the stage for the coming King, John is then removed from that stage. Or is he?

The relationship between John the Baptist and the Lord Jesus is one of the most fascinating in the Gospels. They are blood relatives through their mothers Elizabeth and Mary, and in a very memorable family reunion between the miraculously pregnant women, John in the womb recognizes and rejoices in the presence of Christ (Luke 1:39–45). Later in their lives, they are each misidentified and mistaken for one another: early in his ministry, John is thought to be the Messiah (John 1:19–20), and then in the middle of His kingdom activity Jesus is feared to be John raised from the dead (Mark 6:14). In his preaching, John points to Jesus as the preeminent Lord and “coming one” (John 1:26–29); Jesus in His public proclamation points back, saying, “Among those born of women there has arisen no one greater” than John (Matt. 11:11).
The great movement from prophecy to fulfillment is realized as the Lord sends the trailblazing messenger and then the triumphant King. John sums up the “Law and the Prophets,” and Christ fulfills them (Matt. 11:13; 5:17). Taken together, they represent the very climax of God’s redemptive revelation in terms of the “old and the new”—Augustine’s lovely phrase is thus applicable not only to two testaments, but to two men: “The new is in the old concealed, the old is in the new revealed.”
This symbiotic interplay between John the baptizer and Jesus the baptized (“anointed”) opens up a very significant theme in the gospels: to recognize the identity of the one means to realize the identity of the other. It is no accident then that when the temple authorities present an inherently skeptical question: “By what authority are you doing these things, or who gave you this authority to do them?” Jesus responds with a question of His own: “Was the baptism of John from heaven or from man? Answer me” (Mark 11:27–33). The assumption is that if John’s ministry is accepted as carrying the authority of God Himself, Jesus’ also bears this same authority in consummate form. If one rejects John’s prophetic word, however, such recalcitrance will only be magnified when confronted by the word and presence of Jesus.
One of the most memorable summaries of John’s ministry comes from his own lips when he says, “He must increase, but I must decrease” (John 3:30). Before universalizing this statement to apply to all ministers of the gospel, it is important first to particularize it in the character of John himself. Remarkably, this utterance concerning the necessity of his own diminishment for the sake of the enhancement of Christ is fulfilled in the very pattern of John’s life and death. For instance, Jesus commences His public preaching of the kingdom only after John is first arrested and imprisoned (Matt. 4:12; Mark 1:14).
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Losing Our Religion is an autobiography disguised as an indictment of evangelicalism, and not a very ecumenical one at that. Moore is not interested in convincing the reader. He does not make arguments but rather opts for emotive reflections, flippant diagnostics. It is a self-indulgent project and others of Moore’s sentiment and experience indicate the accuracy of this characterization. 

Russell Moore is not quite an ex-vangelical, at least not yet. He has not lost his faith, he assures us, but he has lost his religion. Put another way, he has not left evangelicalism. Evangelicalism, he thinks, has left him. Given that evangelicalism initiated the divorce, it is she, not Moore, in need of repentance. An altar call, a come to Jesus moment, is overdue.  
Moore’s new book, Losing Our Religion: An Altar Call for Evangelical America (LOR) is first and foremost autobiographical. As a species of “nonvert,” Moore’s story is a personal, emotive, experiential, internalized journey with external events providing only the occasion for expression, or post hoc justification, thereof.
The book is nearly always polemical in tone but hardly ever polemical in substance. Moore does not seem all that interested in convincing the reader of anything other than the worthiness of the author’s own cause—his personal credibility apparently meant to bear the load of otherwise rarely corroborated claims and analysis. Rather, Moore offers a cathartic experience for other not-quite-ex-vangelicals who have exited Southern Baptist institutions, or the Convention itself, over the past few years. Victimhood is the currency of choice in Moore’s story, and those who share his story—all one-time Big Eva members—are now positioning themselves as a sort of evangelical ex-pat cadre possessing a unique ability to critique their former country because of the trauma endured there.
At the outset, Moore’s insistence that 1) he hasn’t changed his “theology” (6), but that 2) it is the “religion” of evangelicalism that has morphed into a “cold, lifeless dogma or tribal belonging,” is difficult to accept (19). In 2004, Moore was expending his energies at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood warring against the feminization of God, warning of the revolt against natural gender and concomitant gender roles, and cautioning against evangelical accommodation of post-Lawrence v. Texas (2003) cultural norms on marriage and family. In other words, his primary concern was leftward drift in evangelical political sensibilities and ethics.
Fast forward to today and, as editor-in-chief of Christianity Today, Moore is calling for new line drawing in the “gender wars” between egalitarians and complementarians. As Aaron Renn has expertly observed, Moore’s call for a realignment, a reset, of evangelicalism should be read as an expression and application of the late Tim Keller’s strategy to “redraw the boundaries of the movement by eliminating complementarianism and replacing it with anti-fundamentalism.”
Indeed, the last chapter (“Losing Our Stability”) of LOR, in a section labeled, “Embracing New Communities and New Friendships,” features a mea culpa for “Russell Moore, circa 2007” who criticized Beth Moore as a “gateway drug” to feminism. Presumably, the male Moore is referring to his article from the period in the Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society championing biblical patriarchy. Russell Moore circa 2023 describes the old, masculine Russell as “arrogant” and “mistaken.” (228). It was he, not Lady Moore, that was the real “theological lightweight.” (230). (Last year, he tweeted that, in fact, Beth Moore is a “gateway drug to sanity,” not feminism.) In this way, Moore admits his own shifts away from accepted, standard evangelical convictions, at least on this front. But the gender wars are not what really irked him.
What instigated Moore’s break with evangelicalism (often used by him interchangeably with the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC))? What explains his shift, at least in terms of emphasis, on key cultural and theological issues?
Moore tells us up front: “The issues—political fusion with Trumpism, Christian nationalism, white-identity backlash, the dismissing of issues such as abuse as ‘social justice’ secularism, and several others.” In Moore’s telling, these are the “issues” dividing the church and “almost every friendship I know.” (11).
This was when the “altar call”—Moore’s euphemism for the essence of evangelicalism that also signals an unrepentant evangelicalism—the “Come to Jesus” meetings, changed. “I hadn’t changed my theology, or my behavior, at all,” he writes. In Moore’s mind, “pro-life and pro-family” stances were perfectly consistent, even in the present context, with being “pro-racial justice and pro-refugee.” “What I had done, as the president of [the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission], was refuse to endorse Donald Trump.” (6).  
All his troubles began with his never-Trumpism. Moore, a self-professed adherent to the Billy Graham Rule, was simply maintaining a Biblical sexual ethic for politicians. What Moore was punished for, in his telling, is nothing but moral consistency. He is a true evangelical, a victim of reactionary evangelical tribalism.
Paradoxically, the Moore of LOR is something of a reactionary tribalist himself. It is the Christian nationalists who are “secular,” it is the Trumpsters that are cynical, it is the disaffected white middle Americans that are identitarians, and so on. Evangelicalism may be a big tent revival but not big enough for the likes of them. Moore—and all sensible people—has not changed, or at least not changed for the worse. On the contrary, he has broken free from his “Stockholm syndrome level of loyalty to my Southern Baptist identity.” (9).
The last straw was the sexual abuse report published by the Houston Chronicle (7-9). Moore claims he was chastised behind closed doors by Southern Baptist leaders for platforming Rachel Denhollander—he does not name her explicitly, as is his practice throughout the book for both friend and foe. This is anecdotal and lacks any corroboration in the book, as is the alleged resultant campaign of “psychological warfare” against him. And so, Moore’s narrative remains unassailable; the reader must accept the author’s experience and the precipitating facts cannot be debated.
What is clear is that this period of Moore’s life affected him deeply, acting as his religious crucible:
“On the other side of the reverse altar call, I started to question everything… That began a period not just of questioning all my assumptions, but also of simultaneously grieving my lost religious home and my own burdened conscience, recognizing complicity in participating for so long in something that now seemed both inane and predatory. I couldn’t help but wonder if the plot twist to the story of American conservative Christianity was that what we thought was the Shire was Mordor all along. I pretend that all of that is past me, but it lingers, in the ringing in my ears of the stress-induced tinnitus that persists to this day, and that fact that I am still waiting for one sleep without nightmares about the Southern Baptist Convention. But here I am, an accidental exile but an evangelical after all.” (10-11)
Anyway, that’s the formula, the bridge too far: Donald Trump—or rather, mass evangelical electoral support for Donald Trump—coupled with the supposed coverup of sexual abuse in SBC churches. Why could Beth Moore see the light when others—those more aligned with Russell Moore circa 2007 on the egalitarian-complementarian divide—could not? A reassessment was in order lest evangelicalism descend into a morally dubious, hyper-masculine, fundamentalist hellscape. (He calls the post-2016 era an “apocalypse.” (171)) But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.
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