Written by T. M. Suffield |
Sunday, June 12, 2022
When we choose to worship, we fight our own sin. When we choose to believe that God knows what he’s doing and declare so in song, we help to bolster our soul’s conviction that to fight temptation and embrace holiness is worth is. We fight the lie that all the ways we’ve fallen short disqualify us in any way from the embrace of the Father who loves us.

Jericho falls after a band march around it (Joshua 6)—perhaps leading us to imagine they finally after seven days figured out the modular frequency of mortar so their trumpets tumble stones from atop one another. Jehoshaphat places the choir on the frontline (2 Chronicles 20)—perhaps making us wonder just how bad their last performance was that the King ‘rewarded’ them with a position in the vanguard.
We could find many more examples. Music, and more broadly the worship of God, play a decisive role in the warfare of Israel. Is it the same for us as New Testament believers?
I think it is—we usually need a reason to think something isn’t continuing as a principle from the Old to the New Covenants, but when things do continue, they are usually transformed.
Think of it like this: as I write the most prominent war in the world is Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The current invasion has been going on for about six weeks (as I write—as this is published over three months), though we tend to forget that this war between Russia and Ukraine has been waging quietly on the frontiers of Europe for over eight years. Here’s the question, can our worship stop Russian aggression? Can we intervene in this conflict through what we might do as a gathered church directed towards God in heaven?
It’s pretty obvious that the answer is “no.” Our worship cannot stop the war. Though, let us never forget, our prayers can.
That being said, if the principle works the same way for us, what is our warfare against? As is so often the case, what is physical in the Old Testament is spiritual for us.
So, we’re waging war ‘spiritually’ as we worship God. But who, or what, are we actually fighting?
Or to frame the question a different way: I’ve been reading the Psalms a lot recently. I’m trying to learn how to pray them. One of the challenges I’ve encountered, especially in Books 1 & 2, is the proliferation of enemies. I’m always coming up against them. It’s easy enough to see who David’s enemies were, but if I’m supposed to then appropriate these prayers as my own, I need to know who mine are.
And, tempting though it is, I don’t think other humans who have upset or hurt me personally fit the bill very well—especially not that other guy in your church who upset you. There’s a different remedy here than asking God to smash the teeth in his mouth (Psalm 58).
Not that some people who’ve wounded me personally haven’t made themselves my enemies—I’m quite comfortable thinking that the cowboy builder who ran away with my savings and left me with a home on the verge of burning down is my enemy, but my warfare against him has to at least begin with forgiving him (Matthew 5).
We struggle with this, in part because we’ve drunk of niceness until we’re sick, but mostly because our lives are comfortable. The church has enemies. But, we are told, our real fight is not against flesh and blood (1 Corinthians 10). So, what are we fighting? Here are five initial suggestions.
1. To believe the church is the bride
Sometimes getting to church on a Sunday to worship God is an absolute mission. I don’t mean the challenges of getting everyone you need to out of the house in vaguely appropriate clothing on time to make it before the meeting actually starts.
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The notion that white evangelicals as a group are more desirous of political power than other religious groups is simply a myth. So why all the attention to white evangelicals instead of other politically active religious and non-religious groups? The shock of Trump’s victory in 2016 sent much of the media and academia looking for a scapegoat to explain that electoral win. The high percentage of white evangelicals who supported Trump made them a natural candidate.

Once again, the topic of Christian nationalism is all the rage. It has become on the left what woke is on the right—a way to tar one’s ideological opponents. “Christian nationalism” can mean just about anything negative one wants it to mean. However, before I deconstruct this controversy let me be up front. I think it was a mistake, and not a small amount of hypocrisy, for Christians to support Donald Trump. That mistake is compounded by an almost blind loyalty that many Christians continue to give him. My criticism of how Christian nationalism is used should not be confused with a feeble attempt to defend Christian activism in all its forms.
Furthermore, let me assert that Christian nationalism does exist. I do not know the extent of the problem, but I have seen disturbing comments on social media advocating for a Christian state that treats those of other religions as second-class citizens. Often such individuals also make arguments supporting notions of a white ethnostate. I do not know the extent of such sentiment, and that is part of the problem, but it is a mistake to assume that Christian nationalism is a total myth.
I recently learned that the term Christian nationalism may have emerged in 2006 in a book titled Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism. But it did not get much attention until 2016.
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Counseling in a world of relational brokenness is about walking with people who have sinned in their relationships, assisting them in seeing where they have wronged another person, and helping them to take responsibility through confession of sin and satisfaction of any restitution that may be required (Matt. 7:3–5). It is also about helping them to know what forgiveness and reconciliation look like when others have sinned against them (Matt. 18:15–35).

Every counseling practitioner does his or her work out of the overflow of a worldview that answers who we are, what is wrong with us, and what it would take to fix it. Counseling people means the counselor has an understanding of who people are. Counseling people also means having an understanding of what is wrong with people, since the work of giving counsel assumes the existence of a problem. Counseling people also means understanding what it takes to fix those problems, since counseling moves toward solutions. Each of these three elements in the required counseling worldview is crucial, but our focus here is the second element: an understanding of what is wrong with us.
Every counseling practitioner has an understanding of what is wrong with the people who seek out counseling services. Things get complicated at this point because there are nearly as many different understandings of what is wrong with people as there are counseling practitioners. There are a variety of explanations for why people have problems that require counseling, including parental influences from early childhood, genetic influences, chemical influences in the brain, habituated behaviors, negative responses to traumatic experiences, unmet needs, and many, many others. Very thick books have been written engaging the corpus of explanations for what is wrong with people who seek counseling help.
The examples that I have listed, like the many I have not listed, are not wrong but are incomplete. Counseling systems that seek to answer what is wrong with people are often correct as far as they go. The problem is that they address only a narrow slice of human difficulties; they fail to account for other manifestations of difficulty outside of the specific area they address, and they fail to understand the genesis of the problem in the first place. One of the ongoing problems in the counseling world is that there is no grand unifying theory that explains what is ultimately wrong with people.
This is not a problem for Christians. As believers we have God’s authoritative word, the Bible, that tells us what is wrong with us. In the Bible God reveals the master category for all counseling problems. More than that, he describes the various manifestations of that master category. In Scripture God makes clear that what explains every counseling dilemma, every problem in living, is the tragedy of sin.
Sin as the root of all counseling problems is one of the most important contributions to the counseling field from counseling practitioners who are committed to the authority and sufficiency of Scripture. The biblical doctrine of total depravity teaches that, while God’s common grace protects human beings from performing the maximum amount of sinful acts (cf. Gen. 4:15; 11:6–9; 20:6; 2 Thess. 2:7), sin has completely corrupted each person. Human beings are not just touched by sin. They are not merely tainted. They are ruined.
This sinful ruin devastates our standing before God.
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