If you go and read Paul’s letters to Thessalonica (and other places) there is more spoken about the way their mutual love for him had encouraged him than any other thing they had done. For the Apostle there was always a desire to be physically present with the men and women of the local church. He is constantly hoping to go to places and see believers he had never met before. A kind of spiritual wanderlust motivated much of Paul’s missionary labors. It is worth asking the question about where this came from. Why did he think it so important, and needed, for his own well-being?

Of all people Christians should be the most concerned about personal piety. That word can be defined in many ways, but it simply means our interest in Jesus, and how we go about cultivating that faith. Lots of folks are involved in spiritual programs designed to make them better people. Yet, the follower of Christ’s way should look different both in the why we seek to be holy, and how we go about it. Our desire is not for an ever-changing scheme, but being grounded in the simplicity of the Christian faith. We should always be hopeful in answering any questions about what we believe, especially about why we do what we do. How we put that belief into practice in real life, not in our false conceptions of reality, but as things really are should be a straight-forward thing. However, that isn’t always the case for many. A false conception of their place in the Kingdom is belied by their lack of focus on a proper answer. That comes from a lack of interest in developing a right relationship with the Redeemer. Being a “God-fearer” is not sufficient, as James notes even the Devil is aware the Lord exists, that Jesus came to save sinners, and in that he still trembles. For a lively faith there needs to be some fruitful proof to our spiritual pudding. Nominal belief is a damnable offense against Jehovah God.
The Puritan Jonathan Dickinson says this:
Christianity consists not merely in speculation, but in practice. We must not only give our assent to the truth of the gospel, but give up our hearts to Christ. The faith which He requires is not a slight superficial belief that He is the Redeemer of mankind, but such a faith as will form us into subjection and obedience to Himself. 
In our worship and prayer help today we are going to think more deeply about our walk with Christ and how we can improve our desire to seek holiness. The reason this matters in the eyes of the Lord is that the goal of sanctification which begins in the regenerating work of the Holy Spirit is a non-negotiable in the Christian life. We are to be consistently and regularly dying to self and living to Jesus. A soul who regards the process of being made more like our Redeemer with a nonchalance gives rise to a concern that there is something seriously wrong, eternally so.
In our sermon this past Lord’s Day we heard this from Moses, “This day the Lord your God commands you to observe these statutes and judgments; therefore you shall be careful to observe them with all your heart and with all your soul.” There I highlighted that word “careful”. We’re watchful over the things that matter to us. If you are moved by this question then I have good news for you. God has granted a way to help in the fight.
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Christian pro-life activist Lila Rose appeared on the dating talk podcast Whatever, which boasts over 4 million subscribers on YouTube. Lila did what every Christian should do in a culture captivated by false dichotomies. She painted a better vision of anything currently on offer. She pointed to an alternative in which men and women are not at war with one another but in harmony, an alternative characterized by self-giving and life-affirming love, not lust or an attempt to eliminate sexual difference.  

In his recent and remarkable book, Biblical Critical Theory, theologian Christopher Watkin points out how often our thinking falls into false dichotomies. Humans are either animals or gods; the planet is either progressing toward utopia or doomed to catastrophe; sex is either no big deal or our whole identity. Back and forth the cultural pendulum swings, never considering that there may be another option: a story that transcends these dichotomies and makes better sense of the way the world is.  
Sex in particular has been subject to ideological extremes. For most of my lifetime, pop culture has followed the maxim that “sex sells.” So, scantily clad women have been used to market everything from cars and football to movies and music. Beer companies often took the lead, featuring provocative models in swimsuits unabashedly pandering to the lust of their predominantly male customers.  
The pendulum seems to have swung the other direction, though the undisguised profit motive remains. For example, Miller Lite’s messaging has done a 180. In a new ad, the beer company chose to appeal to faddish feminist sensibilities. In it, actress Ilana Glazer indignantly tears down beer ads featuring women in bikinis while announcing that Miller Lite is now a champion of women’s dignity and women brewers. The company is doing the right thing and, to quote David Spade from Tommy Boy, “in just a shade under a decade, too … Alright!”  
If it weren’t laced with profanity, I could get behind this new direction. I fully support any move away from cynically exploiting women for marketing, whatever the motive. Unlike Bud Light’s recent, disastrous choice to feature transgender actor Dylan Mulvaney (a man) on its cans, Miller is at least gesturing toward an ideal that companies should sell products, not objectify people.  
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Written by Matthew M. Kennedy |
Monday, March 20, 2023
The contrast between this ethic and the Christian understanding of human nature and God’s law could not be greater. Because we are fallen creatures, we must not look within to find the truth about ourselves. The human heart is darkened. God revealed His law so that, in its light, we might see ourselves clearly. And “through the law,” Paul writes, “comes knowledge of sin” (Rom. 3:20). The law of God serves as a measure against which the human being is shown to be wanting. We are not good, and we cannot do the good that God requires.

David Gushee, a professor of Christian ethics at Mercer University, once held the classical Christian view that homosexual relationships are sinful. But after his younger sister came out as a lesbian in 2008, he changed his mind.1 The sequence is important. Gushee did not change his mind because of careful biblical exegesis and reflection. His sister came out and then he changed his mind. Gushee later wrote a book about the process, Changing Our Mind (David Crum Media, 2014). As George Guthrie writes in his review of Gushee’s book,
The book constitutes [Gushee’s] own story of encounter, compassion, cognitive dissonance, and existential change of perspective. As he met LGBT couples, sat with children who’d been traumatized at home or church, processed his relationship with his sister who came out as a lesbian, heard from a student who’d been pained by David’s past teaching, he seems to have been backed into an existential corner….The way he’d been reading Scripture seemed increasingly implausible….At the end of the day, then, Changing Our Mind isn’t so much about David’s reasoned abandonment of 2,500 years of Judeo-Christian teaching on sexuality as it is a telling of his story, a story of seeking to pull together the disparate stories in his world.2
“We Know What the Text Says”
In an even more telling transformation, New Testament scholar Luke Timothy Johnson, an able defender of the historicity of the Gospels,3 whose daughter has identified as gay, wrote in Commonweal,
I have little patience with efforts to make Scripture say something other than what it says, through appeals to linguistic or cultural subtleties. The exegetical situation is straightforward: we know what the text says. But what are we to do with what the text says?….I think it important to state clearly that we do, in fact, reject the straightforward commands of Scripture, and appeal instead to another authority when we declare that same-sex unions can be holy and good. And what exactly is that authority? We appeal explicitly to the weight of our own experience…which tells us that to claim our own sexual orientation is in fact to accept the way in which God has created us. (emphasis added)4
It is difficult to find a professing Christian leader who has relinquished the classical Christian position on sexuality on purely exegetical grounds. The most popular voices in the less academic evangelical realm who claim to have changed their minds — Matthew Vines, Justin Lee, and Jen Hatmaker — are either gay or are very close to someone who is.5 The readiness with which these high profile Christians abandon their former convictions in light of personal experiences suggests that they had, perhaps unknowingly, already adopted a worldview that undermines the classical Christian understanding of human nature and the relationship between God’s law and the human heart.
Establishing a Righteousness of Their Own
God made human beings in His own image and declared everything He had created “very good” (Gen. 1:31).6 Then Adam took the forbidden fruit from his wife and ate, and sin rooted itself in the human soul. Consequently, the apostle Paul writes, “No one is righteous, no, not one” (Rom. 3:10). Jesus, approached by a young man seeking to gain eternal life by his good deeds, declared that “no one is good except God alone” (Mark 10:18). The gospel itself — the good news that God became man, lived, died, and rose again to save sinners — is predicated on the truth that human beings are incapable of self-redemption.7
Yet we strive to establish our own essential goodness. The Pharisees sought to do this by following the “tradition of the elders,”8 a system of practices rendering the law of God, which God gave as the chief means to reveal humanity’s sinfulness and need for His mercy,9 doable.10 Referring to this attempt, Paul writes, “seeking to establish their own [righteousness], they did not submit to the righteousness of God” (Rom. 10:3). Their unwillingness to acknowledge their sinfulness blinded them to the good news that Jesus came to save sinners.
The Luminous Self?
The same self-delusion today takes center stage in what might be described as the Gospel of Self. Look within, its apostles urge. Peel back the layers of socially imposed norms to find your authentic self — the true, inherently good, you —and live in accordance with what you find.
The paradigm has become so culturally predominant that in June 2020 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled an employer must affirm an employee’s gender self-identification without regard to his or her biological sex.11 The employee’s inner sense of the core self must be permitted to determine the workplace environment.
One of the clearest expressions of the Gospel of Self can be found in Ian Morgan Cron and Suzanne Stabile’s best-selling book, The Road Back to You: An Enneagram Journey to Self-Discovery. They write, “Buried in the deepest precincts of being, I sense there is a truer, more luminous expression of myself and that as long as I remain estranged from it I will never feel fully alive or whole.”12 The human person is not merely good, but a being of luminous light. One may have to dig past culturally imposed norms to find oneself, but once found, the true you is a thing of unspeakable beauty.
While the idea of the luminous self directly contradicts the biblical doctrine of original sin, it gains a foothold in Christian circles when its advocates associate it with the imago Dei.13 The shiny self is the self that has been made in God’s image. The imago Dei is not, as Irenaeus described it, a shattered mosaic, but rather a buried treasure waiting to be unearthed. And once found, any refusal to affirm and celebrate the discovery constitutes a wholesale rejection of the person and God’s image in her.
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Jonathan Merritt, “Leading Evangelical Ethicist David Gushee Is Now Pro-LGBT. Here’s Why It Matters,” Religion News Service, October 24, 2014, https://religionnews.com/2014/10/24/david-gushee-lgbthomosexuality-matters/.
George H. Guthrie, “Changing Our Mind,” The Gospel Coalition, January 9, 2015, https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/reviews/changing-mind/.
Luke Timothy Johnson, The Real Jesus (San Francisco: HarperOne,1997)
Luke Timothy Johnson, “Homosexuality and the Church,” Commonweal, June 11, 2007, https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/homosexualitychurch-0.
Matthew Vines and Justin Lee are both quite publicly gay and have been out for some time. Jen Hatmaker’s daughter came out publicly in June 2020, but her family had known “for some time.” “Jen Hatmaker Reveals Her Daughter Is Gay,” Christian Today, June 30, 2020, https://www.christiantoday.com/article/jen.hatmaker.reveals.her.daughter.is.gay/135119.htm.
All Scripture quotations are from the English Standard Version.
“Those who are in the flesh cannot please God” (Rom. 8:8).
See Mark 7:1–13.
Romans 3:20; see discussion below.
Following this system, Paul once considered himself “blameless” (see Phil. 3:6).
Bostock v. Clayton County, Georgia, 590 U.S. ___ (2020). See Melissa Legault, “Landmark U.S. Supreme Court Ruling Prohibits Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity-Based Discrimination in Employment (US),” National Law Review, June 15, 2020, https://www.natlawreview.com/article/landmark-us-supreme-court-ruling-prohibits-sexualorientation-and-gender-identity.
Ian Morgan Cron and Suzanne Stabile, The Road Back to You: An Enneagram Journey to Self-Discovery (Downers Grove, IL: Intervarsity Press Books, 2017), 23.
The image of God.

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