So we must have a category of Jesus that doesn’t mean you’ll never be tempted or you’ll never have imperfect motives, but you can live a life of ordinary faithful obedience. One of the problems when we don’t have that category is when we think, You know what? I never really obey. Everything in my life is just polluted, sinful, filthy rags. That is when we need to hear the alarm bells going off. We don’t hear it like we should.

Good Works vs. Obedience
There’s a really important but simple distinction we need to make in thinking about our good works or our obedience. And that is that our good works can be truly good even though they’re not perfectly good. They’re never without some imperfections. They’re always tinged with some kind of selfishness.
I remember a pastoral intern asking me years ago, “Pastor Kevin, how do you know that when you’re stepping up into the pulpit there’s not some part of you that’s doing this to be seen and to be heard or to draw attention to yourself?”
And I said, “That’s a really good question. I’ll let you know when I’m certain there’s no part of that in my heart.”
It’s not to excuse sin, but it’s to say, Yeah, there are layers to the onion of the human heart. So there’s always that presence of indwelling sin. It’s imperfect, and yet the best theologians have said that it can be truly obedient. I think that’s a new concept for some people, though it shouldn’t be, because Paul often praises the churches for their obedience. Jesus, in the Great Commission, said, “Teach them to obey everything I have commanded you.” And there’s no escape hatch that says, Oh, by the way, of course, you can’t really be obedient to anything.
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Were there doctrinal problems? More than you could shake a stick at. But there was also an unvarnished devotion to the two Great Commandments. And such love covers a multitude of catechetical misfires. The Bible Belt Christians who raised me could not always give you chapter and verse, but they were always ready with a cup of cold water. At the end of the day, it is the one who offers a cool drink that receives the prophet’s reward, not the one who remembers all the names of the prophets. 

There are almost as many churches as there are people in the small southern town where I live. You will scarcely meet a person who isn’t a member of one (or more) of them, though few have faithfully attended Sunday services since at least the Clinton administration. But even the local dope dealers and bootleggers can quote long passages from the Bible with scribal accuracy. While they may not, on the advice of counsel, admit to committing any crimes, they would be quick to confess many particular sins. And that is no small thing.
Some time ago, one leading evangelical influencer rejoiced over the decline of “Bible Belt Religion,” commenting that it “made bad people worse.” More recently, another Christian pundit took another swing at the cultural Christianity of the South, one of his favorite punching bags, calling it a form of “toxic religion” that is, at best, an expression of the Faith to be “survived.”

While I would agree with them that wholehearted, full-throated devotion to Jesus Christ would be preferable, I can’t find such dedication even among our Lord’s hand-picked Apostles or in a single congregation since the strange winds began blowing at Pentecost. These critics of the faith of my kin seem to be stricken by a virulent strain of perfectionism. Such perfectionism is little more than the Holiness doctrine of entire sanctification applied to culture, or at least to certain cultures. Hence, one of the problems with their disdain for the Bible Belt stems from an over-realized eschatology; a transformationalism that expects seeds to yield a hundred-fold overnight. Nevertheless, we are praying for lasting fruit, not Morning Glories.

One can imagine fewer complaints from the South if her critics held everyone over the fiery pit like one of Edwards’s unfortunate spiders, and did so with equal contempt. But there seems to be a bit of socio-theological dissonance at play. On the one hand, cultures that are overtly pagan, unbelieving, or outright anti-god are viewed through the starry eye of Pelagian optimism. While on the other hand, the imperfect religious expressions of the Bible Belt are met with the clenched fist of an Augustinianism gone to seed. The latter is denounced as utterly depraved with all of the fervor of a tent-revivalist, while the former are patted on the head like some tame race of noble savages.
Just so, barring a faulty eschatology or kind of theological schizophrenia, one is left to draw the conclusion that those who dislike “Bible Belt Religion” really just dislike the Bible Belt. But for my part, I thank God for the Bible Belt people who introduced me to Jesus.
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Written by T.M. Suffield |
Wednesday, June 19, 2024
Hard won wisdom engenders humility. The wise aren’t naïve about what they’ve gained, but some of what they’ve gained will be a healthy sense of the limits of their own wisdom. This is similar to the way that those who truly understand a topic are much more aware of the limits of their knowledge, but with the ability to chose good from bad.

How do you tell what’s good and what’s bad? How do you tell the difference between wisdom and folly? It’s not like it’s just intrinsic to all of us, or we would make fewer bad decisions.
I think it’s tempting to suggest that our difficulty here is because our minds are blinded by sin. There’s something to that, but we have to remember that Adam and Eve were told to not eat of the tree of wisdom—presumably they didn’t find it naturally easy either—because they still needed to grow up.
To learn to be wise is work. It requires training. The writer to the Hebrews reminds us:
But solid food is for the mature, for those who have their powers of discernment trained by constant practice to distinguish good from evil.Hebrews 5.14
The mature are those who have powers of discernment, trained. The wisdom to tell the difference between true and false, right and wrong, wise and foolish, requires training.
What kind of training? Training through constant practice. We aren’t talking about going on a course to be wise, we’re talking about wisdom developing over time by using it. It takes time.
We live in a moment where we’re surrounded by ‘disinformation,’ (some of it coming from those who are so keen to tell us about disinformation) it’s becoming increasingly difficult to tell if something you see on the internet is true. It’s likely that this trend will only accelerate; the ability of generative AI to produce images and video that look real at a casual glance is already advanced and it’s only getting better and quicker. Realistically, our shared public understanding of what constitutes truth is withering on the vine; if it’s not already dead. You might think this makes it uniquely important that we learn to determine truth from error; while it’s an unfortunate headwind, it’s not our biggest problem.
Wisdom is not about telling if the video was true or not, wisdom has been vital to successful human life since the Garden. The biggest opponent to the work of wisdom in our culture is not the sudden plethora of tools that make it easier for the average Joe to lie as convincingly as nations already can, though these tools are of concern for our public discourse. Rather the biggest opponent to the work of wisdom in our culture is its speed. Wisdom is work, it doesn’t come overnight, and it rarely comes to the young.
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