No one understands the relationship between joy and suffering better than the Son of Man. My God became human, his love insisting that I not be alone in my struggles. When I hurt, he knows.

Note from Randy [Alcorn]:  I have the greatest appreciation and respect for Joni Eareckson Tada. With her warm-hearted exaltation of God’s sovereign love, she has profoundly impacted my life and Nanci’s life, along with that of countless others. She’s a living example of Psalm 119:71, which says: “My suffering was good for me, for it taught me to pay attention to your decrees.”
In this touching article, Joni writes, “Resilient joy makes hope come alive, so much so that we can be ‘sorrowful, yet always rejoicing’ (2 Corinthians 6:10).” This sister is pure gold. She lives what she writes. As you read her words, sit at her feet and learn what it means to trust in Jesus and find great joy, even when life is hard and painful.
(Joni was recently on Alisa Childers’s podcast, talking about her new book Practicing the Presence of Jesus and the nearness of Christ in 50 years of suffering. It’s a touching interview.)
I Sing My Way Through Pain: Three Lessons in Resilient Joy
Joy is found in the strangest places. Take this parable: “The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field, which a man found and covered up. Then in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field” (Matthew 13:44). When we read this, we may assume the field is attractive, something we would love to purchase anyway: a sun-drenched meadow dappled with wildflowers, or a garden plot with rich soil ready for tilling.
But life is not like that. We can see the field in this parable as representing what God would have us embrace for the sake of our joy. His lot for you may not be attractive; it may resemble a sandlot with broken bottles, rusty oil cans, and old tires scattered around. It may be a bleak field, with nothing about it even hinting of wealth.
Until you discover it hides a treasure. Then the scrap of hard dirt and weeds suddenly brims with possibilities. Once you know great riches are concealed there, you’re ready to sell everything to buy it. It’s what happened to me.
Striking Gold
Early on in my paralysis—and almost by accident—I unearthed an unexpected treasure. I opened the word of God and discovered a mine shaft. I dug my paralyzed fingers into a weight of incomprehensible glory, a sweetness with Jesus that made my paralysis pale in comparison.
In my great joy, I went out and sold everything, trading in my resentment and self-pity to buy the ugly field nobody else would want. And I struck gold.
After decades of using the pick and shovel of prayer and Scripture, my field has yielded the riches of the kingdom of heaven. I have found a God who is thunderous, full-throttled joy spilling over. His Son swims in his own bottomless ocean of elation, and he is positively, absolutely driven to share it with us. Why? As he puts it, “[so] that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be full” (John 15:11). Jesus is after nothing less than our full joy.
But deep in the bedrock of Scripture, my shovel hit something hard and unyielding. God is nobody’s water boy. As the solemn Monarch of everything and everyone, he shares his joy on his own terms. And those terms call for us to suffer—and to suffer, in some measure, as his beloved Son did when he walked on earth (2 Timothy 2:12).
Rejoice in Hope
No one understands the relationship between joy and suffering better than the Son of Man. My God became human, his love insisting that I not be alone in my struggles. When I hurt, he knows. But Jesus does not merely sympathize with me; he’s done something about it. Through his death and resurrection, he has freed me from sin’s power and, in part, from the suffering that results from it. And he will free me fully in the age to come.
That coming age is my joyous hope! It’s hope that sees Jesus on his throne with his kingdom filling every corner of the cosmos. Hope that envisions sorrow and sighing erased from the face of the universe. Hope that eagerly awaits the moment when pain and tears will be banished and evil punished.
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Written by Aaron M. Renn |
Tuesday, November 7, 2023
Many influencers offer teenage boys an aspirational vision of manhood. Some, like Mr. Peterson, say men are important for the sake of others, but present it as part of a heroic vision of masculinity in which men flourish as well. “You have some vital role to play in the unfolding destiny of the world,” he writes in “12 Rules for Life,” his 2018 bestseller. “You are, therefore, morally obliged to take care of yourself.” Traditional authorities, especially in Protestant churches, talk about men being “servant leaders” but reduce that primarily to self-sacrifice and serving others. Pastors preach sermons wondering why men have so much energy left at the end of the day, or saying men shouldn’t have time for hobbies. No wonder young men tune them out.

The name of the violent radical left group Antifa stands for “antifascist action.” On twitter you will sometimes see people say to those criticizing Antifa, “Antifa stands for anti-fascist. So if you don’t like Antifa, you must support fascism.”
The term “servant leadership” functions similarly in evangelical circles. They embue the phrase with particular, specific meanings that transform it from a self-evidently good concept into an evangelical term of art. If you criticize those meanings, you might be accused supporting selfish leadership.
Servant leadership properly understood is an almost self-evident virtue. Of course we want leaders who lead in the genuine service of others and of the institutions they direct.
But there are problems with the way evangelicals talk about servant leadership, particularly when it comes to married men. It’s part of why men turn to online influencers instead of the church. As I noted in my WSJ op-ed on that topic, online influencers provide an aspirational vision of manhood. Traditional authorities like the church provide a “servant leader” vision that is extremely unappealing, and, more importantly, wrong in important ways.
The Call to Servant Leadership
Conservative evangelicals, ones who hold to the so-called complementarian gender theology, affirm that husbands are the head of the home. This is heavily qualified, however, and one such qualification is that headship means service rather than authority. Or at least to the extent that such authority exists, it can only be used for service.
The term “servant leader” was present early in the complementarian movement, though was not especially stressed. John Piper, in his opening chapter from the complementarian ur-text Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, wrote, “The call to leadership is a call to humble oneself and take the responsibility to be a servant-leader in ways that are appropriate to every differing relationship to women.” But the world servant leader only occurs a handful of times in this long book. (I haven’t come across Wayne Grudem, the other principal architect of complementarianism, using it).
Women’s studies professor Mary Kassian, who was among the originators of complementarianism, echoed Piper when she wrote, “Men have a responsibility to exercise headship in their homes and church family, and Christ revolutionized the definition of what that means. Authority is not the right to rule—-it’s the responsibility to serve.”
British evangelical John Stott, shaped in a different tradition but who was a sort of soft complementarian, uses similar language to deny that headship means authority but does mean responsibility. He wrote, “Headship implies some degree of leadership, which, however, is expressed not in terms of ‘authority’ but of ‘responsibility.’” (From Decisive Issues Facing Christians Today).
The main popularizer of the term “servant leader” as applied to husbands today may well be Tim Keller. In their book very popular book The Meaning of Marriage, Tim and Kathy Keller write:
But an even bigger leap was required to understand that it took an equal degree of submission for for men to submit to their gender roles. They are called to be “servant leaders.” In our world, we are accustomed to seeing the perks and privileges accrue to those who have higher status…..But in the dance of the Trinity, the greatest is the one who is most self-effacing, most sacrificial, most devoted to the good of the other…Jesus redefined all authority as servant-authority. Any exercise of power can only be done in service to the Other, not to please oneself.
Nancy Pearcey’s new book The Toxic War on Masculinity has an entire chapter that expands on this topic. She’s gotten a lot of flack over it. While I think it’s fair to say she probably draws from some egalitarian (Christian feminist) leaning material, she’s basically only summing up what conservative evangelicals actually do teach. Here’s just one short passage:
For example, a man attending a nondenominational church said, “Being the head doesn’t mean that you’re a ruler or something. It’s more of a responsibility.” A middle-aged Charismatic man said, “I have learned that being the head, as you say, is really being a servant because you got to swallow hard and put somebody else first.” A Presbyterian woman said a biblical concept of headship “actually makes his burden even heavier, because he is also supposed to be the kind of man that can hear his wife’s needs, that can be there for his wife, that can respect his wife . . . and that’s a big responsibility.”
James Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family, explains that when a man gets married, he stops living for his own ambitions and instead channels his energies into supporting his family: “He discovers a sense of pride—yes, masculine pride— because he is needed by his wife and family.” Needed not only for protection and financial provision, but also for love and affection.
Because Jesus said that he came not to be served, but to serve, these people would all seem to be on solid ground. But there are some problems with the way they talk about this. I will address two of them today.
What Service Should Be Provided?
The matter of servant leadership immediately prompts certain questions:

What is the service to be provided?
To whom?
Who makes those decisions?
Who decides whether or not the man is doing a good job at serving?

These are pretty fundamental. But evangelicals tend not to address them explicitly. This is the first problem. Their patterns of rhetoric, however, imply that that servant leadership essentially means catering to the desires of your wife and children. And if that’s the case, they also implicitly get to be the judge of whether you are doing a good job.
Kathy Keller said in a Family Life Today interview that, “A head’s job is to use their authority to please, meet needs, and serve.  A head does not get all the perks, all the privileges—you know, choose control of the remote—all this—pick the color of the car you buy, etc.  Your headship is expressed in servant-hood, primarily.” There’s a similar line in The Meaning of Marriage. “He does not use his headship selfishly, to get his own way about the color of the car they buy, who gets to hold the remote control, and whether he has a ‘night out with the boys’ or stays home to help with the kids when his wife asks him.”
We see here that clearly the correct answer is for him to say home and help with the kids when his wife asks him. This is an example of the patterns of rhetoric used to suggests servant leadership means catering to your wife’s desires. “Please, meet needs, and serves” sounds like what a restaurant waiter does.
They are even more direct later in the book, writing, “Jesus never did anything to please himself. A servant-leader must sacrifice his wants and needs to please and build up his partner.” Note that the husband must not only sacrifice his wants but his actual needs as well to “please” his partner. Following Jesus, he’s never to do anything to please himself.
Mark Driscoll operates similarly. In newsletter #77 I quoted him saying:
There are, however, moments in the marriage where the husband and wife don’t agree. And we’re not talking here about a lesser, secondary issue. It’s date night and he wants steak and she wants fish and they can’t agree on where to go. Those are easy. Just give her what she wants. Those are easy. Just love her, just serve her, do what she wants.
Most of the time, husbands are simply to give their wives whatever they want, even if the wife is behaving selfishly.
Russell Moore said similarly in his book The Storm-Tossed Family:
A husband’s leadership is about a special accountability for sabotaging his own wants and appetites with a forward-looking plan for the best interest of his wife and children. Headship is not about having one’s laundry washed or one’s meals cooked or one’s sexual drives met, but rather about constantly evaluating how to step up first to lay one’s life down for one’s family.
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Written by Stephen J. Adams |
Sunday, December 4, 2022
In matters of serving the church body, we should first consider how the Lord has equipped us to serve others instead of what our preference might be or what such service might cost us in time or energy. This cost will look different at different times. The cost to the woman at Bethany was an expensive alabaster jar, enough to make the disciples indignant at such apparent waste. The cost to the disciples on two occasions was the apparent degradation of having to consider small children (Matt. 18:1–6; 19:13–15), who were often considered in Jesus’ day as not worth the time. Instead, Christ rebukes them and holds children out as our example, and as inheritors of the kingdom of heaven. May our service in His church be marked with the same humble estate that our Lord commends in His loving rebuke.

One of the unwavering needs of a local church is finding good people to serve. To serve in Sunday school. To serve coffee. To stack chairs. To serve in the nursery. To care for the infirm. To disciple young believers. To prepare the elements of the Lord’s Supper. To serve pizza at youth group. To prepare food for congregational gatherings. The list is nearly endless. Further complicating the task of finding willing people to serve in these roles is that these roles are not all, shall we say, equally prominent or desirable to fill.

Scripture teaches the importance of cohesion in the local church in the midst of a body made up of many and differing parts (1 Cor. 12:12–31). While some of the needs undoubtedly looked different in the first century, the challenge of taking a diverse group and assembling them to fulfill the needs of a singular body is an old one. The Apostle Paul often used illustrations from God’s created order to communicate truths concerning the Christian life, and in writing to the Corinthians, he does so with the illustration of the human body. Of course, when we consider a human body, not every part is equally prominent; nor does each receive the same outward honor. Yet the impracticality of a body of all eyes or ears requires no further explanation. Some parts are presentable and others require greater discretion, but each illustrates the complex yet organic unity of the human body and of the church body, as Paul summarizes: “Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it” (vv. 21–27).
Adding to the challenge of finding people to serve in the church today is what has been discussed as a problem of institutions’ losing their formative power, and in turn becoming just one more venue to highlight the individual: his aims, his interests, his agenda, and ultimately his own prominence. In a certain respect, this self-importance is not new; we see it, for example, in the jealousy of Miriam and Aaron toward Moses (Num. 12). It seems indisputable, however, that we now live in a time when technology has greatly enhanced our ability to promote ourselves over against any group or institution to which we might belong.

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