Most of us, I think, are genuinely aiming to find some balance in these things. We aren’t looking to speak only about what the world will applaud us for saying. We aren’t spoiling for a fight and looking to always wade into controversial things. We aren’t necessarily seeking to keep our heads down in the hope nobody asks us anything that might get us in trouble either. We should be suspicious of those believers who are always falling into one of these camps.

All of us Christians like to think that everything we do is thoroughly biblical. We all genuinely believe we speak when and where the Bible speaks and we are more measured when and where it doesn’t. But it is telling what we are often willing to speak up about.
Some of us are very happy to speak up on matters that our culture also consider to be problems. We readily call out issues that large sections of society agree with us on – particularly those issues that garner respect for our ‘bravery’ in speaking out – and tend to major on these. I, for example, find that people are generally quite supportive when I speak on issues of mental health or racial inequality. These things can get the likes and clicks from many outside the church.
Others of us are very happy to speak up on things that our culture generally do not consider to be problems. We are quick to call out those things that we perceive our culture will largely not give us any great plaudits for mentioning. We are keen to raise issues such as abortion or sexual ethics that go against the overwhelming consensus. These are the things that tend to receive the ire of the those outside the church.
It is interesting to me when there are folks who only ever seem to be in one or other of those camps. If the former, it feels like they are keen for approval and are desperate to be applauded. If the latter, it feels like they are spoiling for a fight, all of the time and love the controversy. John speaks about the former group when he says:
Many did believe in him even among the rulers, but because of the Pharisees they did not confess him, so that they would not be banned from the synagogue. 43 For they loved human praise more than praise from God.
John 12:42-43
Jesus himself has this to say:
Woe to you when all people speak well of you, because this is the way their ancestors used to treat the false prophets.
Luke 6:26
To the latter group Paul says:
As far as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone.
Romans 12:18
And similarly:
Reject foolish and ignorant disputes, because you know that they breed quarrels. 24 The Lord’s servant must not quarrel, but must be gentle to everyone, able to teach, and patient, 25 instructing his opponents with gentleness. Perhaps God will grant them repentance leading them to the knowledge of the truth.
These things do not mean, of course, that we can’t speak on issues. Of course we can.
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Sibbes wrote this book for “bruised reeds,” for heartbroken, distressed, and discouraged Christians. He shows from God’s word that Christ will neither break them nor quench them; instead, he cherishes them. Sibbes beckons the hurting and weary Christian to look to Christ for comfort and strength, knowing that since he has finished his work for us, he will most certainly finish his work in us. By looking to Christ, “we see salvation not only strongly wrought, but sweetly dispensed by him” (Works, 1:40).

Some sentences can change your life. One written four hundred years ago changed mine: “There is more mercy in Christ than sin in us” (Works of Richard Sibbes, 1:47).
The author was one of the greatest preachers of the Puritan age, Richard Sibbes (1577–1635), and the sentence is found in his greatest book, The Bruised Reed, in which he “scatters pearls and diamonds with both hands,” as Charles Spurgeon put it (Lectures to My Students, 778). That sentence, and that book, ignited in me a passion to spend time every month reading dead pastors, like Sibbes, who point me to the living Christ. The Bruised Reed just might do the same for you.
“Sweet Dropper”
Sibbes was born in Suffolk, England, in 1577, and grew up in a Christian home. He began his studies at Cambridge at the age of 18. After he was converted to Christ in 1603, he began to faithfully minister the gospel to others. Over the next three decades, those who heard Sibbes preach in Cambridge and London often called him “The Sweet Dropper,” because of his tenderhearted gift of “unfolding and applying the great mysteries of the gospel in a sweet way” (Works, 3:4).
After receiving his doctorate of divinity from Cambridge in 1627, he was often referred to as the “heavenly Doctor Sibbes,” on account of his heavenly minded life and doctrine. A couplet was written about him upon his death on July 6, 1635, at the age of 58: “Of that good man let this high praise be given: Heaven was in him before he was in heaven” (Meet the Puritans, 535).
Sibbes regularly wrote out his sermons, leaving behind over two million words on paper. But The Bruised Reed is far and away his best-remembered and most-treasured book. It’s considered a classic of Puritan devotion, a paradigm of practical divinity. It’s easy to see why.
The book is a Christ-exalting exposition and application of Isaiah 42:3, “A bruised reed he will not break, and a faintly burning wick he will not quench; he will faithfully bring forth justice.” Following Matthew’s lead (Matthew 12:18–20), Sibbes understands this prophetic text about the servant of the Lord, the one in whom God delights, and upon whom the Spirit dwells (Isaiah 42:1), to be fulfilled in the life and ministry of Jesus Christ.
Over the course of sixteen brief chapters, Sibbes unfolds his argument in three parts: (1) Christ will not break the bruised reed; (2) Christ will not quench the smoking flax (or “burning wick”); (3) Christ will not do either of these things until he has sent forth judgment into victory.
Balm for Weary Believers
Why might Christians today read this book written by a preacher in London nearly four centuries ago?
For this reason: since its initial publication in 1630, countless weary Christians have found The Bruised Reed to be full of encouragement for the downcast and full of strength for the weak — because it is full of Jesus Christ, the merciful and mighty Savior of sinners.
In his book Preaching and Preachers, D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones wrote, “I shall never cease to be grateful to Richard Sibbes who was balm to my soul at a period in my life when I was overworked and badly overtired, and therefore subject in an unusual manner to the onslaughts of the devil. . . . The ‘Heavenly Doctor Sibbes’ was an unfailing remedy. . . . The Bruised Reed quieted, soothed, comforted, encouraged and healed me” (Preaching and Preachers, 186–87).
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The contemporary obsession with identity is really a religious impulse, the idolatrous worship of self. It is so whether it appears with reference to sexual desires or identity, or in other matters (e.g., matters of ethnicity). Refuge goes along with that false religion and seeks to import it into the Christian faith. If this be doubted, consider this statement from Refuge’s FAQs: “The Chaplain’s Office continues as a key resource for students seeking to individually or corporately develop their faith in light of their sexual attractions and gender identity.” So it is one’s faith that is to be developed in light of one’s attractions and identity, not one’s attractions and identity that are to be developed in light of one’s faith: sexual identity is really the central element, to which faith is therefore subordinate.

In a previous article I criticized Wheaton College for asserting it remains committed to historic Christian faith and practice while also doing things that bring such claims into question (e.g., employing women who are ordained as ministers as professors of theology). There is more to be said upon the matter. Wheaton’s great fault is that it attempts to meet the world on its own terms, as shown in at least two other points.
Refuge
Refuge is a group for “undergraduate students personally navigating same-sex sexuality and/or gender identity.” There is also a Refuge small group through Wheaton’s chaplain’s office. It is not clear what they purport to be a refuge from, but both groups are exclusive and secretive, limiting membership to people who identify as experiencing aberrant sexual identity or desires, requiring approval for participation from leadership, and meeting largely in secret. It is rather strange that people who profess to want to be able to live openly with full social acceptance then keep so much to themselves.
However that may be, Refuge’s mission statement is essentially that of the Revoice conference that roiled the Presbyterian Church in America: one has but to substitute ‘college’ for ‘church,’ and ‘students’ for ‘Christians’ for them to be functionally interchangeable. (Revoice also has some exclusive tendencies, restricting ‘allies’ from one of this year’s pre-conferences.) And like that conference, its participants prefer worldly terminology to describe themselves. The college’s approval of Refuge’s current iteration was contingent upon not using such terms at one point (per the Wheaton Record), but that has apparently changed, since they openly use them now.
Whatever the reasons for that, there is danger in such an approach. Christian institutions are to call people to repentance from their sin, not encourage them to faith while remaining in it; and insofar as such things have a cause in mental illness, our effort should be to encourage people to sanity. Wheaton would say that the point of Refuge is to teach such people to embrace the faith in truth, and highlights – even on Refuge’s home page – that it remains committed to scriptural notions of sexual morality. That largely misses the point. The current obsession with self-identity increasingly has little relation to behavior: I’m not sure that actual sex is more than about two percent of it even for many of the people caught up in it who do not share our faith. The key thing is that one’s self-conception or membership in a category is recognized by other people.
The Problem With This
That assertion of the preeminence of one’s self-conceived identity is where the fault lies. Granting that the people associated with Refuge and Revoice are sincere when they say they obey God’s commands against various forms of sexual immorality and respect marriage as between a man and a woman, they are still wrong. They rebel against God by openly controverting his established order by asserting a departure from it as an essential, immutable part of their persons, and encouraging others to do likewise by organizing on this account. And in some cases this means more explicit rebellion against God’s commands, as when people mutilate themselves to attempt to make themselves into a different sex than they truly are, or by acting as though they are that sex without undergoing such procedures.
If it be doubted this behavior is wrong, consider that God forbids crossdressing (Deut. 22:5). If it is an evil for a man to take upon himself a woman’s clothes, dare we think it any less egregious if he permanently alters his body by donning a woman’s physique? Is this not the ultimate rebellion, the refusal to be what one actually is in favor of what one prefers to be? God says “each one should remain in the condition in which he was called” (1 Cor. 7:20), referring primarily to socio-economic station and cultural identity as Jew or Gentile (vv. 17-24): should people not much more retain their nature as men or women?
And not only that, but God forbids lying. If a person has a Y chromosome and a man’s physique and goes about calling himself a woman, he is lying—and liars have no place in the Kingdom of God (Rev. 21:8). When he then demands others join him in his pretense, he is enticing them to sin, and Christ has strong words for those that do so (Lk. 17:1-2), especially where they do so to the vulnerable (young, mentally afflicted, etc.), as is common in these matters.
And granting that people are sometimes afflicted with a mental confusion that causes them to imagine their sex is opposite to what it actually is, we should not encourage them to embrace that fantasy when it entangles them in such sin and woe. To do so is unloving, and not at all in accord with the desire for them to abide in the truth about themselves, in which lies their only hope of health and a right relation to Christ.
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