What’s the last thing you think about before going to sleep? Do you number sheep? Do you count in reverse starting at 100? Do you think about your schedule for the morning? Or do you drift off with your phone in your hands?
Probably you have some kind of routine. And at the risk of disrupting that routine, I wonder if you might take that chance as your eyes are starting to close to do something else. Take those last few moments to pray. But pray about what?
Though the substance of your prayers might be anything, let me suggest that those moments before you sleep are a wonderful chance to pray through some specific promises from God’s Word. So tonight, why not remind yourself of something other than the number of sheep in the pen and your 8 am meeting agenda?
Here are three truths to form your prayers as you fall asleep tonight:
1. Thank you, Lord, that you do not sleep.
In a way, every single night we are reminded of our own weakness because we actually have to go to sleep. Whilst some find that Sleep Statistics can help them learn more about their patterns, for others it isn’t so easy. It’s the way we were made. God hard-wired our physical bodies to not only desire but to need, rest. That in and of itself is a lasting testimony of our own frailty. But when you consider just how vulnerable we are when we are asleep, you get a double sense of our own weakness.
Now that might send you spiraling into a paralysis of anxiety. Or, you can take the opportunity to thank the Lord that even though you are drifting off to sleep, He never does. He is awake. Wide awake. Just as He has been and will be for all eternity.
What better comfort is there in the midst of our own weakness than confessing that though we are weak, He is strong. Though we are dependent, He is self-sustaining. Though we might slumber, God is ever alert:

I lift my eyes toward the mountains.Where will my help come from?My help comes from the Lord,the Maker of heaven and earth.
He will not allow your foot to slip;your Protector will not slumber.Indeed, the Protector of Israeldoes not slumber or sleep (Ps. 121:1-4).

Written by Ben C. Dunson |
Tuesday, February 6, 2024
At the founding, and for most of America’s history, the moral formation at America’s schools and universities included instruction in religion. George Washington warned, for example, in his Farewell Address that we must not “indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion.” Massachusetts’ Constitution speaks similarly: “The happiness of a people, and the good order and preservation of civil government, essentially depends upon piety, religion, and morality.” John Adams’ comments on the necessity of religion for true virtue show that it was Christianity, not some nebulous sense of the divine, that must be promoted. Christians recognize, or should do so, that education independent of moral formation is not only impossible, it is undesirable.

Every day or so I encounter a conservative (sometimes even an exasperated moderate on the left) bemoaning the capture of America’s educational system by woke zealots; 2+2=5 and related nonsense. I bemoan the capture of this system too. Although my children are home-schooled I know how bad it is going to be when today’s publicly-schooled children grow up and land in positions of power and influence in government, business, and culture. We’ve got plenty of signs already for what that will mean. However, what I can’t do is join in the refrain of well-meaning conservatives: “Just teach the facts. Education, not indoctrination. Etc.” Such slogans are not only impossible; they are undesirable, even if attainable. They arise out of the same mentality that has left conservatives unable to respond adequately to transgenderism and other social maladies. Instead of addressing the root problem, they address a symptom. We get opposition to men in women’s sports and locker rooms, when the real problem is that transgenderism is a perverse rebellion against the created order that must be opposed in its totality. Likewise, timid conservatives think that the only way to remove harmful ideologies from the nation’s schools is to require schools to teach nothing but supposedly neutral facts, the basics of math, grammar, writing, and so on.
But education cannot avoid moral formation. That is the point of education. Schools exist (they should anyway) to form hearts and minds, to provide students with facts and the moral framework in which to understand those facts. “Education, not indoctrination,” if pressed to its logical conclusion, would produce mindless repositories of random facts, perhaps capable of performing tasks in the marketplace and making money, but little more.
No subject can be adequately taught in a moral vacuum. Consider history. Is the study of history simply the memorization of names, places, and dates? I suppose one could attempt to approach it in that way. In addition to being intensely boring, however, such a study would be utterly pointless. The reason we study history is to learn from the past, not in a superficial “history repeats itself” way in which we think we can predict the future based on historical parallels, but in the sense that we see in our study that people, despite many technological advances, tend to act in certain ways. We learn that certain kinds of situations tend to produce certain kinds of outcomes; “Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom,” Benjamin Franklin warned; “As nations become corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters.” And so on (all quotations in this column are from Thomas West, The Political Theory of the American Founding, chapters 8-9). What about literature? Is literature of value only as a diversion and time-waster? Or is it not beneficial because it enables us to peer into the human soul in its manifold diversity? Can math facts, or physics facts, or grammar facts, be learned without considering the use to which those facts should be put?
With a little reflection I think most people can see that an amoral approach is not only impossible, it is undesirable. While I share the dismay of my fellow citizens as they watch leftist ideologies destroy America’s schools, what is needed is moral formation in what is good, true, and beautiful, rather than an attempt to reject moral formation completely. American conservatives would do well to return to the founders of our nation to see what they thought about education. Doing so would reveal how thoroughly out of step the “neutral” approach to education is with the founding spirit.
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Instead of rejecting gender essentialism to embrace an ideology that leads to the overthrow of the very foundations of nature in God’s good design, we should hold fast to everything that is good, true, and beautiful, which includes complementary humanity created male and female in God’s image for his glory.

Some errors are explicit and easy to spot, while others are not stated in so many words and only manifest by way of implication. Christa McKirland’s chapter falls squarely in the first category. Historically, egalitarians have attempted to draw a bright line between themselves and those who would advocate for LGBTQ identities. Christa McKirland’s essay, however, is the first I’ve seen that not only rejects gender essentialism but also embraces transgenderism. And that is what, in the end, sets this chapter apart from previous editions of Discovering Biblical Equality.
The thesis of Christa McKirland’s chapter, “Image of God and Divine Presence: A Critique of Gender Essentialism,” is nearly summed up in its title. McKirland is critical of gender essentialism, which she defines as the idea that “men and women are essentially different on the basis of being a man or a woman” (283). Instead of gender essentialism, McKirland proposes that human nature is defined quite apart from masculinity or femininity, and instead by the image of God, which includes having special status in being like God, special function through exercising dominion, and special access to and representation of God’s presence — all of which are equally shared between men and women.
McKirland is up front about the payoff of rejecting gender essentialism: “the Scriptures do not make maleness and femaleness central to being human, nor can particular understandings of masculinity and femininity be rigidly prescribed, since these are culturally conditioned” (286). If one wonders what McKirland means by critiquing “gender essentialism,” whether she means masculinity/femininity or maleness/femaleness, one has already identified a central problem with her proposal. At times, she seems to be rejecting cultural constructions of masculinity and femininity, while in the end she seems to reject as normative maleness and femaleness altogether. Importantly, this rejection is not just an entailment of her ideas, but at the very heart of her proposal as she embraces transgenderism in the concluding section of the chapter.
Rejecting Gender Essentialism
McKirland’s chapter is a veritable parade of egalitarian commitments and implications when it comes to gender. There are fundamental questions at the heart of the complementarian-egalitarian debate that McKirland’s proposal, and the broader egalitarian project of which she is a part, is hard-pressed to answer reasonably. What is a woman? What are the differences between men and women? If differences are identifiable, which matter for how we live as men and women? What is the connection between manhood and maleness, womanhood and femaleness? McKirland’s anti-gender essentialism is not only unable to answer these questions in a satisfying way, but she heaps up a pile of error on this unsure foundation at just the point where our culture is most confused today, transgenderism, because of an inability to answer these questions properly.
McKirland does not explicitly define her understanding of “essence” and “accident” in her rejection of gender essentialism. But I do think she assumes the philosophical definition: “essence” refers to a property something must have, while “accident” refers to a property something happens to have but could lack. This is why McKirland spends much of the first part of her chapter attempting to define humanity’s essence apart from maleness and femaleness. If gender is not essential to humanity, what is? For McKirland, a human’s essence is defined by the image of God — a property, importantly for McKirland’s egalitarian project, that is shared by both men and women. Here I should like to register a point of agreement: complementarians also believe that a human person’s essence should be defined in part by the image of God, in which men and women are made equally. The image of God is what sets humanity, both men and women, apart from the rest of material creation. But now a disagreement: the Bible also teaches that humans are psychosomatic units, body and soul, which means embodiment is part of a human person’s essence. Embodiment, for instance, is one aspect of what sets humanity apart from angels. And with embodiment comes a sexual distinction — human bodies are either male or female, and this according to God’s design through the presence or absence of a Y chromosome, which contributes to the formation of primary and secondary sex characteristics.
The dimorphic nature of humanity as man or woman, male or female, is established from the very first chapter of the Bible. But McKirland’s project leads her to downplay differences in Genesis 1 and 2: “The focus of the texts of Genesis 1–2 is on humanity’s unique relationship to God and their function on behalf of God.” While this may be true at face value, this statement leads McKirland to ignore other, obvious features of the text — even important features Paul himself draws on when he speaks to the church about men and women in, for example, 1 Corinthians 11 and 1 Timothy 2.
For instance, McKirland nowhere mentions that the creation mandate in Genesis 1, where she rightfully gets her understanding of dominion, also includes the command to be fruitful and multiply, which requires sexual complementarity. Neither does she mention that Genesis 2 teaches that the man was created first, from the ground, and the woman from his side. Neither does McKirland mention that Genesis 2 says the woman was created by God to be a “helper suitable” for the man. Without evidence, McKirland argues that “while maleness and femaleness do feature in these creation accounts, masculinity and femininity do not” (296). By any definition of masculinity and femininity vis a vis maleness and femaleness, this is simply not true. In the original Hebrew, God’s special creation of man is referred to in Genesis 1:27 as “male” (zakar) and “female” (neqebah) — terms that make literal reference to complementary sexual reproductive organs. Then in Genesis 2, man is referenced not by sex — maleness and femaleness — but by gender — masculinity and femininity. God first makes the man (adam) out of the ground, and then subsequently makes the woman (isha) out of his side and brings her to the man (ish) to be named.
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