How Then Should Men Live?

Our culture won’t say what a man should be. The church can.

Johnny Manziel doesn’t mention the gun until the third act of Untold: Johnny Football, the Netflix documentary, released this month, about his brief career as an NFL quarterback. But when he does, he’s aiming it at himself. By that point, his career had flamed out, and all bridges to family, friends, teammates, and coaches had been burned.

“I had planned to do everything that I wanted to do at that point in my life,” Manziel says, as images flash by of Johnny Football waving stacks of cash and partying in Vegas. “And then my plan was to take my life,” he continues. “I still to this day don’t know what happened, but the gun just clicked.”

Untold is an anthology, focused on sports past and present. But the series title is almost too on the nose for the Manziel chapter: It’s more revelatory in what it doesn’t say than what it does, coming right to the edge of an uncomfortable reality at the heart of the story but flinching every time.

The documentary has plenty of space for Manziel’s dissolution and plenty of furrowed brows lamenting his collapse. But it doesn’t reckon with how people who should have cared for him enabled his “$5 million bender.” Nor does it present an alternative vision, even at the end, of who Johnny Football could have been. Johnny survived, and thank God—but what now? What kind of man will he become?

Untold isn’t alone in its unwillingness to face that question. What a man is, what he should be, what roles men may fill—these all seem to be beyond the scope of our culture’s current conversations about masculinity. We increasingly know how to recognize and condemn “toxic masculinity,” and rightly so. But what about nontoxic ways to be a man? Better yet, what about going beyond merely avoiding toxicity to bring a constructive vision of masculine virtue to men in crisis?

Because we are in crisis, even if not so visibly as Manziel. The gap in his story is reflective of a larger gap in our cultural imagination. Richard Reeves, author of Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do about It, describes it in terms of “social scripts.” In decades past, he says, the social script for men was fairly straightforward: Be a breadwinner, be a protector and guardian, and instill the values in your family that were handed down to you from your own father. It’s a script loaded with responsibility and purpose, and that was a burden most men felt eager to carry.

But the accompanying social script for women had serious flaws. The mid-century ideal gave women no sense of agency to choose a vocation outside the home, and women lacked the economic freedom to leave abusive and unfaithful marriages.

As women won economic independence, they not only rose to the challenge of equality but blew right past it. By almost every conceivable measure, women and girls are outperforming men and boys in education. And while the pay gap has been slower to close, evidence suggests it is indeed closing. (According to Reeves, when you adjust the numbers to account for women taking unpaid leave to care for children, men and women are paid about equally.)

The new social script for women is at once purposeful and libertarian. Girls can do anything, as the slogan goes, including—if they want—pursuing a traditional model of marriage and family. Meanwhile, Reeves says, men have yet to find our new social script. The old role of breadwinner, protector, and spiritual head of the household isn’t merely viewed as quaint; it’s often seen as paternalistic or worse.

For some progressives, the best social script for men seems to be the role of ally—someone who uses his privilege to lift up others. Director Greta Gerwig envisions this role in Barbie with the character of Allan. Played by Michael Cera, Allan is the remarkably forgettable friend of Ken, deliberately—as with many of Cera’s best roles—a bland nonentity.

Allan isn’t really a hero. He’s not a love interest for Barbie, and we don’t know what happens to him in the end. Barbie herself embraces embodied, gendered humanity as the gift that it was meant to be. Ken recognizes the failure of his own “Kendom” and the absurdity of his utopia, but we’re left wondering what he’ll do next. With Allan, we don’t really care—but that’s the point. He’s just Allan the ally, and his only job is to support Barbie.

Forgive me if this sounds harsh, but no man wants to be Allan. No man wants to go to war to help Barbie reclaim her kingdom and end up forgotten in the friend zone. Allyship alone is simply not a compelling vision of masculinity.

But good luck finding an acceptable alternative in progressive spaces. Describe other attributes men long embraced as marks of masculinity—desire for competition, aggression, or strength—and you’ll discover that they’re often treated as pathologies, indistinguishable from a toxic desire for sexual conquest. It seems the only acceptable masculinity is one that historically would not be recognized as masculine at all.

The problem is different on the right, especially the very online right, where transgression against progressive pieties is sometimes half the fun (and most of the clicks). But here, the social script doesn’t look like the old one either.

Instead, you’ll find arguments about prepping for economic apocalypse, avoiding seed oils, and determining whether a new father should ever change a single diaper. (He should change thousands, and if he’s a Christian, he almost certainly will.)

Unlike that of our grandfathers and great-grandfathers, this masculinity is performative and reactionary, interested in aesthetics and display on social media more than the serious, lifelong work of being a good and faithful man. To the extent that it’s meant to be taken seriously (and mostly it’s not), it doesn’t seem interested in the formation of virtues that would make masculinity distinctly Christlike—such as gentleness, self-control, sobriety, compassion, and generosity.

Evangelicals have sometimes tried to provide an alternative script, with varying degrees of success. While silly examples of hypermasculinity abound, movements like Promise Keepers or the work of writers like John Eldredge struck a chord with a broad group of men—particularly when they spoke biblically about the attributes of masculinity that relate to fatherhood and the Fatherhood of God.

These movements come and go, and I suspect that has as much to do with consumer cycles as any deeper cultural shift. But the core idea of a biblical, fatherhood-based vision of masculine virtue could resonate regardless of the cultural milieu. While not all of us will be fathers, and far too many of us grew up without fathers, we all share a universal longing for a father—and even the shape of that absence can inform a vision of masculinity. We long for a presence who watches over us, providing and protecting when we feel weak or vulnerable, blessing and filling us with courage when we face conflict or obstacles. The doctrine of adoption informs that vision too, wherein we find ourselves claimed as sons and daughters by God our Father (Rom. 8:14-17).

Evangelicals could articulate a social script for our moment that accounts for the economic realities of a post-feminist world without ceding ground on our theological commitments about the meaning of marriage, the nature of men and women, and the goodness of being made in the image of God. We could celebrate the mysterious ways men and women are similar and different without indulging in stereotypes or enshrining a single, midcentury household economic arrangement as a supposedly divine ideal.

We could tell a story about men’s unique responsibility to shape Christians’ understanding of God as Father. We could recognize that men’s strength is a gift meant to be used in service and protection of others and that gender differences—seen in our contrast with the feminine attributes of our wives and daughters—are likewise a means of grace to be dignified, not belittled or diminished in either direction.

This kind of masculinity could empower men without authorizing us to become tyrants. It could honor our strength while recognizing that it exists to serve others. It could inspire hard work and ambition without fostering the illusion that a man must always fit shallow ideals of productivity and success.

Johnny Manziel achieved that success as very few men do, but he still found himself facing a gun. And his story is hardly unique. In the absence of a meaningful script for our lives, men are in crisis. In the past 30 years, men have dramatically outpaced women in deaths of despair. Last year, nearly 40,000 men committed suicide in the US, four times the number of women who did so. A growing portion of them were in midlife, a season when many men are especially starved for purpose.

These deaths aren’t solely attributable to a missing social script, of course. But it should be no surprise that men starved for a constructive vision of masculinity would come to despair. Like preaching the message of the gospel, communicating a vision of embodied Christlikeness as men is necessary and regularly requires renewal. We need fresh language and new metaphors that are resonant with the longings of our moment and communicate to men not only who we can be but also who we are as bearers of God’s image.

Our culture is flinching away from this question. The church must not.

by Mike Cosper August 31, 2023

Mike Cosper is the director of Christianity Today Media

 

Friendship with God

Contrary to what John Eldridge (author of Wild at Heart) and others have said, Jesus is not “wild at heart” because he tells us in Matthew 11:29, “I am gentle and lowly in heart.”

Moreover, Eldridge portrays God as “a person who takes immense risks” for “it’s not the nature of God to limit His risks and cover His bases…As with every relationship, there’s a certain amount of unpredictability…. God’s willingness to risk is just astounding…”

For us risk is possible because we don’t know how things will turn out. We are finite, ignorant unlike God. John Piper reminds us, “God can take no risks. He knows the outcome of all his choices before they happen. And since he knows the outcome of all his actions before they happen, he plans accordingly. His omniscience rules out the very possibility of taking risks.”

God therefore takes no risk in his love, because he knows everything about me, and you who are in Christ. John 21:17 confesses, “…Lord, you know everything.”

He knows all we’ve done, all we’re doing, all we’ll ever will do. He will never receive new knowledge about us that may cause him to question his determination to call us his friends (John 15:15). And for that reason, no relationship we have will ever be more secure than our relationship with him.

The late J.I. Packer wrote, “There is tremendous relief in knowing that his love for me is utterly realistic, based at every point on prior knowledge of the worst about me, so that no discovery now can disillusion him about me, in the way I am so often disillusioned about myself, and quench his determination to bless me.”

Packer goes on:

“There is, certainly, great cause for humility in the thought that he sees all the twisted things about me that my fellow humans do not see (and I am glad!), and that he sees more corruption in me than that which I see in myself (which, in all conscience, is enough). There is, however, equally great incentive to worship and love God in the thought that, for some unfathomable reason, he wants me as his friend, and desires to be my friend, and has given his Son to die for me in order to realize this purpose.”

“Knowing God,” [not just knowing about him], says Packer, “is a relationship calculated to thrill a man’s heart.” 

Does it thrill your heart that you, even you, are a friend of God?

 

Dave Brown
Director
Washington Area Coalition of Men's Ministries (WACMM)

 

Marriage is an ancient practice, but there are numerous misconceptions surrounding its nature and purpose. Author and pastor Timothy Keller seeks to clarify what marriage is really about in these key insights from his bestselling book The Meaning of Marriage. 

1. Self-centeredness makes you blind to your own faults and easily offended by your spouse’s.

"Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ." — Ephesians 5:21

For both husband and wife, the most important (and most challenging) object of marriage is to live for the other rather than oneself. Opportunities for a husband and wife to serve each other come up constantly throughout the day. We can either joyfully serve the other, begrudgingly serve the other, or insist on getting our own way. The first option is by far the hardest to put into practice, but it is the only way both parties will enjoy happiness and fulfillment in marriage.

In a letter to the Corinthians, Paul demonstrates that love is the opposite of "self-seeking" or self-serving. We respond to self-centeredness in kind because self-centeredness in its essence prevents you from seeing its work within you and keeps you appalled by and sensitive to the self-centeredness of others. It has a corrosive effect on the marriage, eating away at what is good until there’s nothing left but despair and bitterness.

If the goal is to serve the other—rather than to be happy—you will both end up being happiest. Both sides must have the same selfless goal.

Most problems in marriage are rooted in one or the other being selfish, seeking to have their needs met over and above the needs of the other. And we always consider the other partner's selfishness as more problematic than our own. But when we do that, we put the emphasis on their need to change. When both sides do this, resentment builds, and distance is created. Both sides will feel hurt and frustration at things the other partner does or doesn't do for them, but they'll resign themselves to just live with this new reality, and the marriage might survive, but it will never thrive. They will be "settling" for a marriage that doesn't fully satisfy.

The answer is to treat our own self-centeredness—not our spouse's—as the primary problem. No excuses or justifications. Take ownership of your own behavior. When both sides do this, marriage thrives and a deeper happiness and satisfaction are enjoyed on both sides. Think of yourself less, and of your spouse more, and the rest will fall into place. Your partner's joy should not be robbed by the crushing obligation to always meet your needs. Rather, they should be liberated to joyfully and willingly meet your needs just because you're their spouse, and you've self-sacrificially taken the initiative to meet theirs. This is biblical love in marriage.

2. Giving pleasure and happiness to your spouse—even when you aren’t in the mood—tends to increase your own satisfaction.

Biblical love is sacrificial commitment to the good of another. You can measure your love for someone by how much you’re willing to give up for them. How much are you willing to invest in them?

Love is not just an emotional feeling, but action and duty. You can’t expect to both be in the mood for sex all the time. That’s unrealistic. But a willingness to please the other when he or she is in the mood can produce the right mood in you on the spot. When it is a privilege to pleasure your spouse and bring him or her joy—rather than a mechanical, heartless obligation—the act can change your mood.

C.S. Lewis said that if you act like you love someone, you will begin to actually love him. The same principle can work in the bedroom. Act like you desire your spouse—behave as if you were in the mood—and the mood will come. What starts as a performance turns into genuine pleasure.

The good of the relationship takes precedence over the immediate needs of the individual. This is because marriage is a covenant not just with each other, but with God. Your duty and commitment to your spouse is akin to that of your duty to your children. You do not cut ties when parenting becomes difficult—the commitment is not contingent on how you feel. It isn’t merely emotional. Same with marriage. It’s much deeper than that. Sometimes you aren’t loved the way you want to be, but if you return the neglect with neglect of your own, the marriage will spiral into decay and die. Two-thirds of unhappy marriages become happy again within five years if they stay together instead of divorcing. The duty of marriage is to keep acting in love, even in the moments when you don’t feel like it. Doing so may be hard, but it will revive your marriage like nothing else can.

3. You will be a better parent if you prioritize your marriage over your relationship with your children.

While it's important to understand what marriage is, it's equally important to understand what marriage is for. Marriage is the most profound relationship possible. It is the union of two people as best friends and lovers. Rather than being alone, a married person has a built-in partner for life, someone who will be there every step of the way, supporting and loving you as you are molded and shaped into the person God wants you to become. The importance of friendship and companionship in marriage cannot be overstated. If sexual attraction or financial standing are what bind you together, your relationship will always be vulnerable; it is on a weak foundation. Friendship must underlie everything else as the bedrock for the relationship.

The marriage relationship is the most important relationship, even more so than the parent-child relationship. God did not put a parent and a child in the garden of Eden—rather, he put a husband and a wife together. As the most important relationship you'll ever have, it must get more investment and energy from you than anything else. Nothing in your life is more important or deserving of your attention and care. Of course, if your marriage is your focus, you'll be an even better parent as a result. Focus on your spouse, and the relationship with your children will thrive. Focus on the children to the neglect of your spouse, and your family will crumble.

When a man complains that he feels secondary to the kids, the schedule, the dishes, the chores, the busyness of life, the marriage is in danger. His wife has failed to prioritize him. When a woman complains that she feels secondary to the kids, the career, the clients, and so on, the marriage is in danger. Her husband has failed to prioritize her. Counseling is often needed in these scenarios to get the couple focused on what's most important: each other.

4. Neither marriage nor your spouse created flaws in you—they merely exposed what was already there.

We are all flawed and imperfect. While you may be somewhat blind to each other's flaws when you first meet and fall in love, you cannot stay blind to them once married. Think of a bridge that has some cracks and fissures in it, then imagine a heavy truck driving across it. The truck's weight causes the cracks to widen and deepen. It does not cause the cracks in the first place; rather, it exposes them and makes them more obvious. In the same way, marriage applies pressure on individuals in ways that cause their pre-existing flaws and weaknesses to be exposed. We may blame our spouse for making us behave a certain way, but the spouse is no more to blame than the truck.

In truth, the fact that our spouses expose our character flaws is one of the benefits of marriage. It allows us to identify the areas where we need to do the most work on ourselves. Thus we can see that marriage has the power of truth; it has the power to make us confront our shortcomings and character flaws, and grow into better people as we deal with them. The healthiest marriages are the ones where both spouses welcome the truth from each other. They welcome their own exposure and the gentle criticisms of their lovers so they can grow into better life partners over time. One of the ways of loving your spouse is to speak truth to them)—not to tear them down, but to help them grow.

Don't blame your spouse for your unhappiness. Don't withdraw when you encounter their flaws. Don't downgrade your expectations. Don't settle for just "getting along." Don't, upon becoming frustrated with your partner's shortcomings, seek another partner who doesn't have the same flaws. Rather, speak the truth to each other in love, and be willing to act on what you hear. If you already have the desire to work on your problems, rather than run away from them, then you're well on your way to a healthy, happy marriage.

Love comes in different currencies. Give love in the currency that your spouse values. If your spouse values acts of service, giving her flowers will be nice, but it won't be as powerful and effective as helping with the household chores. If you're out of sync with each other—that is, speaking different love languages or using different currencies—you'll find yourself feeling depleted. You'll be giving of yourself in ways that aren't appreciated, and your own emotional and physical needs won't be satisfied. It is also important to recognize and appreciate the love being offered, even if it isn't coming through in your preferred language. Your spouse is trying, in such cases, even if they aren't perfectly in tune with you.

Never abuse the primary love language of your spouse. Never withhold it to hurt them, or hold it over their head as a manipulative tool. For example, a man who deeply values respect will be wounded to the core if his wife mocks him publicly with intent to hurt him.

Telling the truth to your spouse is important, but equally important is the need to forgive and exercise grace when your spouse sins or fails you in some way. Just as Christ forgave us, we must be willing to forgive each other without holding onto resentment.

5. Submission in Christian marriage is a two-way street.

Terms like “headship” and “submission” are controversial until you understand them in their proper context, with Christ as the model. If God himself could become a servant for others without damaging his dignity, so can we. A wife’s submission to her husband is not degrading or demeaning; it is God’s design. There is nothing greater than aligning one’s life and purpose with God’s original intent and design for you. Christ showed greatness, not weakness, when he came to submit and serve. The same can be said of the submissive wife.

Men are not exempt from the challenge of submission. They are called to be servant-leaders—to love their wives self-sacrificially, as Christ loved the church. The world's understanding of leadership looks down on those who are submissive, but Christ provides the proper model for what true leadership is meant to look like. In biblical marriage, wives submit to their husbands, and husbands love their wives self-sacrificially, even to the point of death. While the roles differ, neither is greater than the other, and neither spouse should put their own interests first. Conformity to God's design confounds the world, but it is the way things were meant to be, and it is the best thing for us.

What if you aren't on the same page? Ultimately, you can only control your own behavior. You can't make your spouse love and serve you the way you love and serve them. You can only do your part, and nothing is more likely than that to motivate your spouse to reciprocate.

6. Despite common caricatures of Christian prudishness, Scripture has a high view of sex and sexuality.

While many think the Bible has a low view of sex—treating it as dirty or degrading—nothing could be further from the truth. The Bible refutes that misconception at every turn, offering a positive view of sex and sexuality. It also limits sexual activity to the confines of marriage between one man and one woman.

Marriage is the union of a man and woman in every way—legally, financially, socially, emotionally, and physically. Sex deepens and maintains that union. It is the most powerful way to give yourself to another, to communicate to them that you are theirs. It isn't just about personal satisfaction or gratification; it's about self-giving, and reinforcing the marriage covenant. It unites two people "as one flesh," and that is why it must be confined to marriage. If you use a prostitute for your own pleasure, you're divorcing sex from its purpose as a uniting feature of marriage commitment. Like chewing food without swallowing, sex outside marriage robs you of the actual benefits (and purpose) of the act.

Married couples are instructed to enjoy sex on a regular basis. Paul reminds married couples that their bodies are not their own; in the marriage union, the husband's body belongs to his wife, and vice versa. Each spouse has an obligation—one that should be joyfully met—to sexually satisfy the other according to their needs. Denying each other is prohibited, except by mutual consent.

Your primary purpose in sex should not be your own gratification, but that of your spouse. Nothing should bring you greater pleasure than pleasuring your spouse. Commit yourself to being aroused by producing arousal in your spouse and your sex life will flourish. This is an important principle, especially for the spouse with a lower sex drive. If your purpose in sex is to give pleasure, rather than receive it, you'll give it joyfully as a gift to your spouse who wants and needs it more than you. With the right heart and mentality in place, their satisfaction will bring you satisfaction.

If you think of your marriage as an engine, sex is the oil that keeps it running smoothly. A healthy, joyful sex life keeps the engine lubricated, reducing friction. Never stop working on improving your sex life.

Sex is glorious. God meant for it to be rapturous for us, but he also intended it as a foreshadowing of the glorious union we'll one day share with Christ.

Lies About Christian Men and Marriages: What the Data Really Say!

The problem accusations against Christian men and marriages is that accusers ignore the data from the social sciences. Sociologists have examined these accusations and asked, ‘What was the evidence?’ So they went back and did the studies.

And now it’s very clear that husbands and fathers who attend church regularly are the most loving husbands and engaged fathers. Unlike the average American family, evangelical men are the most loving to their wives. These wives report feeling the most loved and appreciated by their husbands. They’re the most engaged with their children in terms of shared activities like sports and church youth group and discipline like setting screen time and bedtime. They have the lowest level of divorce of any group in America. They have the lowest rates of domestic violence of any major group in America. Even Christians don’t know this.

Brad Wilcox wrote an article in The New York Times, saying that the happiest of all wives in America are religious conservatives. 73% of wives who hold conservative gender values and attend religious services regularly with their husbands have high-quality marriages. Then he says, ‘You academics need to cast aside your prejudices against evangelicals, and religious conservatives in general and realize that evangelical, protestant men have the best marriages, are the most loving husbands and the most engaged fathers.’

The reason that the statistics show something else is that we hear that Christians divorce at the same rate as others. Those researchers returned to the data and separated truly committed authentic Christian men who regularly attended from nominal Christian men. These men might check the Baptist box, but whose Christianity is mostly cultural, they don’t attend church regularly. The differences between these two groups are shocking. Nominal Christian men have the worst marriages and report the lowest level of happiness. They’re the least engaged with their children and have the highest divorce rate and domestic violence, even above secular men.  

And this is why the statistics become skewed. You get a misleading statistic if you take truly committed Christian men and put them alongside nominal Christian men who are worse than secular men. That’s another reason most of us don’t realize that truly committed Christian men are doing far better than any other group in America. 

 

- Nancy Pearcey

"Pride Month" - Normalizing Sin

Pride Month was and still is obviously upon us. From the ubiquitous rainbow flags and public  drag celebrations to the quasi-aborted attempts by retailers such as Target to normalize what, just five seconds ago, every average American would have said was absurd, the message is clear: “Join us in celebrating every sexual deviancy known to man, or we will cancel you, shun you, shame you, and punish you, for your intolerable intolerance.”

In the face of such societal deconstruction, how are we to respond? More specifically, how should traditional Christians react in a market square of ideas that is so laden with antipathy for the traditions and teachings of the Gospel that just yesterday were assumed to be the cultural glue that held our country together? 

The following is intended to be an intramural discussion. This message is for those who claim to hold to a biblical worldview and the redemptive truth of the Gospel. If you’re not a follower of Christ, you can listen in if you want, but please recognize the context: This is for the church and those who say they believe in Jesus. 

So here it is.  

Dear Church:

What is wrong with you? How did you become so blind? Why did you stoop so low? Who removed your mind, and when did you darken your soul? 

If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a hundred times: When you buy the lie that your identity is nothing more than the sum total of your inclinations, there is no limit to the lengths you will go to normalize your sin. 

Surely you can see that this is the exact opposite of biblical holiness, can’t you? 

Do you no longer believe in 2 Corinthians 5:17? Are you not a new creation in Christ? Hasn’t the old passed away? Haven’t all things become new? Have you given up the blessed hope of transformation? Have you actually come to the point where you think you’re defined by your desires? Have you forgotten that Jesus himself explicitly said, “You must be born again,” and that he never affirmed anyone simply because they were “born that way”?

Your message of “love is love” is not love. It is enablement, and it is cruel. It is the opposite of sanctification. It is sinful, and it is wrong. 

Your “affirming” mantra is not only bad theology, but it is terrible ontology and anthropology. When you accept the definition of the person as being “gay, trans, bi, queer,” or even cis, for that matter, you are admitting that you think those who have a given sexual appetite are defined by that desire. You are essentially saying that you think, “That’s just who they are.” You implicitly place no value on repentance, revival, renewal, confession and self-control.   

This is the ultimate insult to God and God’s creation. We are the imago Dei; we are made in the image of God. We are not defined by our bellies or our libidos. We are not animals. We are not the imago dog. 

We (the body of Christ) should never cede any ground in Satan’s game to redefine God and redefine His people. The entire nomenclature of LGBTQ and Pride, by definition, consigns people to their own unique “communities,” i.e., gulags. This balkanization is not the way of Christ or the way of the church. We are better than this. We are more than this. We should love people enough not to label them in such a demeaning way. 

To our shame, even nonbelievers such as Gore Vidal and Michel Foucault understood this. Foucault once said, “We are creating a hermaphrodism — a false species.”

Vidal later added: “There is no more such a thing as a homosexual person than there is a heterosexual person. These are behavioral adjectives.”

A final word: It never ceases to amaze me how those of you who wave your rainbow banners of “love trumps hate” in your respective churches become so vitriolic when presented with a cogent argument that challenges the vacuity of your moral paradigm: Head pastors and parachurch leaders posting ad hominem attacks dripping with mockery and sarcasm. Youth pastors call anyone who is 10 years their senior “judgmental and old.” And all under the banner of “acceptance,” “respect” and “inclusion.”

Do you not see the irony? Are you blind to the fact that you are sawing off the very branch upon which you sit? The words of Jesus come to mind here: “Physician, heal thyself.” Or perhaps those of Isaiah: “Woe unto him who calls good evil and evil good.” And dare I add, woe unto him who calls love hate and hate love? 

Yours is not the good news of the Gospel. It is not the message of Christ. It is sin, and if Jesus were still in his grave, he’d be rolling over. But as it is, he sits upon his throne, preparing to utter some of the most frightening words known to man: “Depart from me; I never knew you.” 

by Everett Piper (dreverettpiper.com, @dreverettpiper), a columnist for The Washington Times, is a former university president and radio host.