Jon Bloom's Blog, page 37

Loving the Neighbor We Didn’t Choose

“Who is my neighbor?” a lawyer asked Jesus (Luke 10:29).

The lawyer had made the mistake of trying to catch the law’s author contradicting the law by asking how he should inherit eternal life. The author turned the tables by asking the lawyer what he thought the law said.

The lawyer then summarized the law in these two commands: We must love God with all we are (Deuteronomy 6:5) and love our neighbor as ourselves (Leviticus 19:18). The author agreed and said, “Do this, and you will live” (Luke 10:28).

But the author’s agreement pricked the lawyer’s conscience. So the lawyer sought to “justify himself” by asking, “Who is my neighbor?” (Luke 10:29). The author answered with the Parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:30–37).

The Neighbor We Wouldn’t Choose

One observation from this application-rich parable is this: The neighbor we’re called to love is often not one we choose but one God chooses for us. In fact, this neighbor is often not one we would have chosen had not God done the choosing.

The Jew and the Samaritan wouldn’t have chosen the other as his neighbor. What made them neighbors was one man’s unchosen calamity and another man’s chosen compassion, but only in response to an unchosen, inconvenient, time-consuming, work-delaying, expensive need of another.

The shock of the parable is that God expects us to love needy strangers, even foreigners, as neighbors. But if this is true, how much more does he want us to love our actual, immediate neighbors, the ones we have to put up with regularly? Sometimes it is these neighbors we find most difficult to love. As G.K. Chesterton said,

We make our friends; we make our enemies; but God makes our next-door neighbor. . . . [T]he old scriptural language showed so sharp a wisdom when [it] spoke, not of one’s duty towards humanity, but one’s duty towards one’s neighbor. The duty towards humanity may often take the form of some choice which is personal or even pleasurable. . . . But we have to love our neighbor because he is there — a much more alarming reason for a much more serious operation. He is the sample of humanity which is actually given us. (Heretics, chapter 14)

The idea of loving our neighbor is beautiful to think about so long as it remains an idealized, abstract concept. But the concrete reality of loving our neighbor, that all-too-real, exasperating person that we would not have chosen and might prefer to escape, strips the beauty away — or so we’re tempted to think. In truth, the beauty of idealized love is imaginary and the beauty of real love is revealed in the self-dying, unchosen call to love the sinner who “is actually given us.”

The Family We Didn’t Choose

Our very first neighbors are in our family. We don’t choose them; they are given to us. We are thrown together with them, warts and all, and called to love them, often with the kind of neighbor-love Jesus had in mind. Chesterton again:

It is exactly because our brother George is not interested in our religious difficulties, but is interested in the Trocadero Restaurant . . . [and] precisely because our uncle Henry does not approve of the theatrical ambitions of our sister Sarah that the family is like humanity. . . . Aunt Elizabeth is unreasonable, like mankind. Papa is excitable, like mankind. Our youngest brother is mischievous, like mankind. Grandpapa is stupid, like the world. (Ibid)

Many wouldn’t have chosen their families if the choice had been theirs. That’s why families are laboratories of neighbor-love, because families are a microcosm of the world.

The Community We’d Like to Un-Choose

If we are old enough and live in a region where we have options, we do choose our church community. But we don’t get to choose who else joins that community.

Invariably, after some time, our church community takes on similarities to our family. We must live with leaders who disappoint us and fellow members who see the world differently. Besides their irritating temperamental idiosyncrasies, they have different interests, ministry priorities, educational philosophies, and musical preferences than we do.

“Doing life” with them doesn’t end up looking or feeling like the community of our dreams — our idealized abstract concept. Perhaps we need a change, to find a different church where we can really thrive.

Perhaps. If the defects of the church community include things like ethical or doctrinal unfaithfulness, a change may be exactly what is needed for us to thrive.

But if our restlessness is due to the disillusionment of having to dealing with difficult, different people and defective programs, then perhaps the change we need is not in church community but in our willingness to love our neighbors, the ones God has given us to love.

This has always been God’s call on Christians. The early church was not all Acts 2:42–47. It was also Acts 6:1 and 1 Corinthians 11:17–22. Those first-generation churches were comprised of Jews and Gentiles, masters and slaves, rich and poor, people who preferred different leaders, people who strongly disagreed over nonessentials — people very much like the people in our church. It was hard doing life together then, like it is now (most likely it was harder then). That’s why we have 1 Corinthians 13 and Romans 12.

The distinguishing mark of the church has never been its utopic society but its members’ love for each other (John 13:35). And according to the Parable of the Good Samaritan, the glory of this love shines when it is costly and inconvenient.

“Go and Do Likewise”

If we ask with the lawyer, “Who is my neighbor?” we may not like Jesus’s answer. It may explode our dreams of love and community. Because instead of loving the neighbor we wanted, the soul-mate we would have chosen, Jesus may point us to the needy, different mess of a person in front of us — the one we feel like passing by — and say, “There is your neighbor.”

Perhaps he or she will be a stranger. But most likely he or she lives in our house, or on our street, or is a member of our church.

The parabolic Samaritan loved the wounded Jew as himself. And Jesus says to us what he said to the lawyer: “You go, and do likewise” (Luke 10:37).

Related Resources

Community Conquers Culture (article)

Loving Difficult People (article)

As I Have Loved You, Love One Another (sermon)

Life’s Knots Need Jesus

Phrygia was an ancient kingdom in what is now central Turkey. According to legend, once upon a time Phrygia was without a king. One day, a pagan oracle declared that the next man to drive an ox-cart into Phrygia’s capital city, Telmissus, would be the new king. That man was a farmer named Gordias.

Gordias’s son, Midas (who later became the king with the golden touch), decided to honor his newly exalted father by dedicating the ox-cart to the Phrygian god, Sabazios, and he tied it to a pole using a knot so complex that it was considered impossible to untie — the Gordian Knot. Another oracle pronounced that the one who would solve the riddle of the knot would rule Asia.

Centuries went by and the ox-cart remained securely tied to the pole. Then Alexander the Great came, conquered, and happened upon the knot. Being the decisive warrior-leader he was, he dispensed with the inscrutable knot by slicing through it with his sword. And he went on to conquer Asia.

The Gordian Knot has become a parabolic symbol of intractable complex problems and Alexander’s sword has been a parabolic symbol for decisive, out-of-the box leadership solutions.

Our Gordian Knots

In the kingdom of our souls, we each have our Gordian Knots, don’t we? Some of them are impenetrable intellectual quandaries over God’s sovereignty and human responsibility, the nature of suffering, the origin of evil, God’s eternality, the Trinity, and so on. We press on these and discover our limits and hopefully learn to exult with Paul in saying,

Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways! (Romans 11:33)

The more painful knots are the complex spiritual, emotional, and psychological entanglements of indwelling sin or the temperamental weakness, disability, circumstantial adversity, and traumatic past experiences. Combined together, these often shape how we think and what we do in ways that confound us.

We try to untangle them. We try to figure them out. But the more we work at them, the more complex we find the knots to be. Counseling and certain kinds of therapies can certainly help us the same way teachers, discussions, and books can help with intellectual struggles.

Counseling will only help us to a point. Therapy doesn’t possess the power to cure us. We discover our limits. And we cry out with Paul,

“Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?” (Romans 7:24). Who can untie these sin-permeated, hopelessly intertwined knots of pain?

None of us can. The most gifted human pastor, counselor, or psychological expert is unable to fully untie the knots that entangle us. Nor can any of us make a sword ourselves that will cut through them.

Our Conqueror Has the Sword

The answer to our cry is the same answer Paul declares in the next verse:

Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord! (Romans 7:25)

There is one who can solve the riddle of our Gordian Knots. He is the conqueror. “He is called . . . The Word of God” and “from his mouth comes a sharp sword” (Revelation 19:13, 15). And with that sword, all that is sinful in us and all that is part of the futility of this age (Romans 8:20) will be cut away.

On Cavalry, Jesus the Great dealt the decisive blow upon every sinful knot of every saint who would ever belong to him. In this age, every promise of God is yes in Christ and has power to cut through our knots with truths and set us free, if we will believe them (2 Corinthians 1:20, John 8:32). And in the age to come, every Eden-induced Gordian Knot will have been destroyed.

Loose the Sword on Your Knots

Some knots you will never be able to untie on your own. But there is one who can undo them. Jesus, the Creator of our bodies and psyche, the Maker of our souls, the One who really knows how we’re wired and what we need, essentially counsels one primary thing for our troubled hearts: “Believe in God; believe also in me” (John 14:1). Jesus wants us to look to him, listen to him, and trust in him.

The key to dealing with our Gordian Knots is not ultimately introspection and analysis. Effective counseling and therapies will aim to help us see more clearly what lies are interfering with our believing in Jesus so we can counter them. But the key to freedom, the sword of the Spirit (Ephesians 6:17) that will cut through the knots of lies, is believing Jesus’s words (John 8:32, John 15:7).

The words of Christ are living and active and the sharpest sword (Hebrews 4:12) and in him every promise of God is yes for us. He alone will set us free (John 8:32).

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Strategies for Fighting Lust (article)

The Promise in Pastoral Weakness (sermon)

Identity and Desire (sermon)

What God Gives When He Takes Away

What we really love and trust aren’t truly seen until we are tested by loss.

This is essentially the point that Satan made when talking to God about Job. In that odd scene in the first chapter of Job, when Satan presented himself before God, God said to him, “Have you considered my servant Job, that there is none like him on the earth, a blameless and upright man, who fears God and turns away from evil?” (Job 1:8).

Satan’s response was,

Does Job fear God for no reason? Have you not put a hedge around him and his house and all that he has, on every side? You have blessed the work of his hands, and his possessions have increased in the land. But stretch out your hand and touch all that he has, and he will curse you to your face. (Job 1:9–11)

Yeah, God, of course Job “fears” you when his life is full of blessings. But take away the blessings and his trust will turn to cursing.

Note the irony here. In this manipulative moment, Satan inadvertently pointed out the core error of Prosperity theology: prosperity obscures, rather than reveals, how much fallen humans love God. “Blessings” easily turn into curses as sinners subtly (or not so subtly) come to love and trust the blessings more than the Bless-er.

Satan knew this by experience. He was so confident that Job would curse God if the blessings were removed because he had seen it occur thousands and thousands of times in others.

Satan knew that the “take away” more than the “giving” would reveal the truth — what Job really trusted and loved. So did God. So God gave Satan permission to take away Job’s children, wealth, health, and reputation — all that most men place their hope in during life.

And the result?

Then Job arose and tore his robe and shaved his head and fell on the ground and worshiped. And he said, “Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return. The LORD gave, and the LORD has taken away; blessed be the name of the LORD.” (Job 1:20–21)

Satan was proven wrong about Job.

When You Know You Love Her

But Satan wasn’t wrong about the concealing power of prosperity and the revealing power of loss. Even the world sometimes catches glimpses of this principle, as the band Passenger captures in the song “Let Her Go.”

Well you only need the light when it’s burning low
Only miss the sun when it starts to snow
Only know you love her when you let her go

Only know you’ve been high when you’re feeling low
Only hate the road when you’re missin’ home
Only know you love her when you let her go

You “only know you love her when you let her go.” Having concealed love, loss revealed love.

Satan gets no pleasure out of humans enjoying real pleasure. He would prefer to kill, maim, steal, destroy, and deprive, if doing so doesn’t push someone toward faith in God (John 10:10).

But he also knows that a consistently effective tool to weaken, impede, and disease the church is to let her prosper. Prosperity has a greater tendency to conceal idolatry and false faith. So like he tried with Jesus, Satan sometimes will offer us the world (Luke 4:5–7). He would rather us be faithlessly prosperous than afflicted and faithful.

Loss for the Sake of the True Prosperity Gospel

But Jesus wants us to embrace the true prosperity gospel. He wants us to have real “treasure in heaven” (Mark 10:21), the gift of “pleasures forevermore” (Psalm 16:11). So when Jesus calls us, he often asks us to leave homes, land, family, and vocations for his sake and the gospel’s (Mark 10:29). It’s why he requires us to deny ourselves and take up our crosses (Matthew 16:24). Because, like Paul described, when for Christ’s sake we are willing to abandon those things that the world considers the only gain worth having, it shows that Christ is truly gain to us (Philippians 3:8).

It is also why, as God disciplines us (Hebrews 12:5–6) and conforms us to the image of his Son (Romans 8:29), he will, like Job, take away earthly things that are precious to us. The affections of our hearts, both sinful and righteous, that were more concealed in the having are more revealed in the losing. The sin that is revealed he seeks to mortify; the righteousness of faith that is revealed he seeks to display for us and for the watching world.

Testing Is More Than Just for Us

Yes, our testing is more than just for us. We must remember that, like Job’s experience, there is often more going on in our experience than meets our eyes. Job didn’t know when the calamities hit that God was putting Satan to shame.

Peter and the disciples wouldn’t have known Satan’s involvement in their temptations during the Passion week had Jesus not told them (Luke 22:31). Likewise, we often aren’t aware of the full cosmic struggle in which we are involved. But these texts and others remind us that the struggle is occurring, and we should be careful jumping to conclusions based on our perceptions alone.

God Takes Away for Our Joy

The crucial thing for us to remember is that all that God does for us as his children is for our good. He is blessed in both the giving and the taking away because both are for the sake of our joy.

Often it is in the taking away that our true love and trust are revealed, which is a great mercy to us and usually for others. And often, in this age, the most valuable, most satisfying, most beneficial, longest lasting gifts we receive and pass along to others end up coming through the experiences of our losses.

Related Resources

Is My Suffering Meaningless? (article)

It Is Well (article and song)

Job: Five Sermons on Suffering (series)

The Way Is Hard, But He Is Strong

“The way is hard,” Jesus said (Matthew 7:14).

In our early days we thought we knew what “hard” meant. Hard would be rigorous, demanding, exhausting. Jesus said the way would be hard and with James and John we replied (if not in words, then in unspoken presumption), “We are able” (Matthew 20:22).

But like James and John, we didn’t really understand what we were getting into. Like green recruits we thought we understood what war was like. War is hard. War is hell. Especially when you war with hell.

But we didn’t really understand hell’s warfare until we really began to engage it. Then hell began to break loose and we discovered that the chaos of war is far different experienced than studied.

Devils know no chivalry. They are cruel, and conceal their cruelty in the Trojan horses of pleasure and comfort, “wisdom” and “security,” flattery and shame. Theirs is guerilla warfare and espionage. Theirs is psychological warfare and seduction. Theirs is biological warfare and blackmail.

Hell’s Primary Objective

Hell’s one primary objective is to destroy faith in God. All of its elaborate strategies and all of its diabolical energies are focused on one thing: breaking the power of the word of the Lord by undermining our trust in it. The universe was created and is upheld by the Word of God (John 1:3, Hebrews 1:3), so hell must break the power of the Word of God if it wants to win.

Therefore, we find ourselves fighting an enemy that constantly seeks to alter our perception of reality. That is why this fight is such a surreal and sometimes horrific experience.

Hell wages a war of distortion. It seeks to make the most destructive things look tantalizingly desirable. It seeks to make the most wonderful things look unbearably boring. It seeks to make the most trustworthy things look unreliable. It seeks to make the one, true fountain of joy look like a dry well, and a broken cistern look like a spring of refreshment. Hell makes even hell look entertaining.

Hell wages a war of disorientation. Through temptation, condemnation, intimidation, discouragement, disappointment, doubt, illness, weakness, weariness, and appeals to our pride and shame, the spiritual powers of evil seek to keep us off-balanced, confused, and turned around. For if we lose our focus on the truth, we lose our confidence and may lose our faith.

Hell wages a war of suspicion. One of the most painful things in this spiritual war is hell’s infiltration into our relationships. It seeks to corrupt the currency of trust in which they trade. Marriages break, families fracture, friendships rupture, churches split, movements derail as sin infects and seeds of suspicion are sowed and fertilized. And in the fray we easily lose track of who the enemy is and end up fighting against flesh and blood.

That Word Above All Earthly Powers

Jesus was right: The way is hard — far harder than we expected.

But Jesus was right about something else: “the gates of hell will not prevail” (Matthew 16:18). The way is hard, but the way is sure. For the Way (John 14:6) is the Word (John 1:1).

And the Word is impenetrably strong.

All the brutal forces of hell, with all the distortion it can conjure, disorientation it can cause, and suspicion it can sow, simply cannot break the Word of God. Martin Luther was right about the devil: “one little word shall fell him.” O, but that Word turns out not to be so little. For that Word is God himself (John 1:1).

And the Word came to destroy the works of the devil (1 John 3:8).

O, the paradox! The Word of God destroyed the works of the devil by being broken. Yes, all hell broke loose upon the Word of God from Gethsemane to Calvary and the Word was broken. But it was not broken in the way that hell tried to break it. Hell tried to compromise the Word, but the Word held fast by being broken. For in being broken, the Word of God kept unbroken the word of God, the great covenant, and cosmic justice was upheld as Christ became both “just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus” (Romans 3:26).

That Word stands above all earthly powers and smashes against the gates of hell.

The way may be hard for us. But the Way will be hell for hell.

The key to our clarity in the face of hell’s distortion, our focus in the face of hell’s disorientation, and our persevering, longsuffering love in the face of hell’s suspicion is to listen to the Word of God by soaking in the words of God in the Bible. The Word is our refuge (Psalm 18:30), the Word is our peace (Acts 10:36; Philippians 4:7), and the Word is our weapon (Ephesians 6:17).

We must remember that hell is after one thing: our faith. And we must remember that we will overcome hell by one thing: our faith (1 John 5:4). Jesus summarized our one and supreme defense against hell in this statement: “Believe in God; believe also in me” (John 14:1).

Therefore, today:

Be sober-minded; be watchful. Your adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour. Resist him, firm in your faith, knowing that the same kinds of suffering are being experienced by your brotherhood throughout the world. And after you have suffered a little while, the God of all grace, who has called you to his eternal glory in Christ, will himself restore, confirm, strengthen, and establish you. (1 Peter 5:8–10)

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The Way Is Hard, But He is Strong

“The way is hard,” Jesus said (Matthew 7:14).

In our early days we thought we knew what “hard” meant. Hard would be rigorous, demanding, exhausting. Jesus said the way would be hard and with James and John we replied (if not in words, then in unspoken presumption), “We are able” (Matthew 20:22).

But like James and John, we didn’t really understand what we were getting into. Like green recruits we thought we understood what war was like. War is hard. War is hell. Especially when you war with hell.

But we didn’t really understand hell’s warfare until we really began to engage it. Then hell began to break loose and we discovered that the chaos of war is far different experienced than studied.

Devils know no chivalry. They are cruel, and conceal their cruelty in the Trojan horses of pleasure and comfort, “wisdom” and “security,” flattery and shame. Theirs is guerilla warfare and espionage. Theirs is psychological warfare and seduction. Theirs is biological warfare and blackmail.

Hell’s Primary Objective

Hell’s one primary objective is to destroy faith in God. All of its elaborate strategies and all of its diabolical energies are focused on one thing: breaking the power of the word of the Lord by undermining our trust in it. The universe was created and is upheld by the Word of God (John 1:3, Hebrews 1:3), so hell must break the power of the Word of the God, if it wants to win.

Therefore, we find ourselves fighting an enemy that constantly seeks to alter our perception of reality. This is why this fight is such a surreal and sometimes horrific experience.

Hell wages a war of distortion. It seeks to make the most destructive things look tantalizingly desirable. It seeks to make the most wonderful things look unbearably boring. It seeks to make the most trustworthy things look unreliable. It seeks to make the one, true fountain of joy look like a dry well, and a broken cistern look like a spring of refreshment. Hell makes even hell look entertaining.

Hell wages a war of disorientation. Through temptation, condemnation, intimidation discouragement, disappointment, doubt, illness, weakness, weariness, and appeals to our pride and shame, the spiritual powers of evil seek to keep us off-balance, confused, and turned around. For if we lose our focus on the truth we lose our confidence and may lose our faith.

Hell wages a war of suspicion. One of the most painful things in this spiritual war is hell’s infiltration into our relationships. It seeks to corrupt the currency of trust in which they trade. Marriages break, families fracture, friendships rupture, churches split, movements derail as sin infects and seeds of suspicion are sowed and fertilized. And in the fray we easily lose track of who the enemy is and end up fighting against flesh and blood.

That Word Above All Earthly Powers

Jesus was right: the way is hard — far harder than we expected.

But Jesus was right about something else: “the gates of hell will not prevail” (Matthew 16:18). The way is hard, but the way is sure. For the Way (John 14:6) is the Word (John 1:1).

And the Word is impenetrably strong.

All the brutal forces of hell, with all the distortion it can conjure, disorientation it can cause, and suspicion it can sow, simply cannot break the Word of God. Martin Luther was right about the devil: “one little word shall fell him.” Oh, but that Word turns out not to be so little. For that Word is God himself (John 1:1).

And the Word came to destroy the works of the devil (1 John 3:8).

Oh, the paradox! The Word of God destroyed the works of the devil by being broken. Yes, all hell broke loose upon the Word of God from Gethsemane to Calvary and the Word was broken. But it was not broken in the way that hell tried to break it. Hell tried to compromise the Word, but the Word held fast by being broken. For in being broken, the Word of God kept unbroken the word of God, the great covenant, and cosmic justice was upheld as Christ became both “just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus” (Romans 3:26).

That Word stands above all earthly powers and smashes against the gates of hell.

The way may be hard for us. But the Way will be hell for hell.

The key to our clarity in the face of hell’s distortion, focus in the face of hell’s disorientation, and our persevering, longsuffering love in the face of hell’s suspicion is to listen to the Word of God by soaking in the words of God in the Bible. The Word is our refuge (Psalm 18:30), the Word is our peace (Acts 10:36, Philippians 4:7), and the Word is our weapon (Ephesians 6:17).

We must remember that hell is after one thing: our faith. And we must remember that we will overcome hell by one thing: our faith (1 John 5:4). Jesus summarized our one and supreme defense against hell is this statement: “believe in God; believe also in me” (John 14:1).

Therefore, today:

Be sober-minded; be watchful. Your adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour. Resist him, firm in your faith, knowing that the same kinds of suffering are being experienced by your brotherhood throughout the world. And after you have suffered a little while, the God of all grace, who has called you to his eternal glory in Christ, will himself restore, confirm, strengthen, and establish you. (1 Peter 5:8-10)

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Keep Speaking

This is not the time for Christian timidity. This is not the time for Christian silence. This is not the time for Christian retreat. This is a time for Christian boldness. It is a time to speak.

Into a world that considers any exclusive truth claim to be the height of bigotry, we must lovingly speak that Jesus is “the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through [him]” (John 14:6).

Into a world that has rejected God’s objective meaning for marriage, opening the door to a wide range of perversities, we must lovingly speak that it was God who said, “a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh” (Genesis 2:24; Matthew 19:5).

Into a world that has embraced the horrific lie that to kill a child is an act of compassion to his mother, we must lovingly speak that God alone has the right to give and take life and that we shall not murder (Job 1:21; Exodus 20:13).

Speak Sanity Into the Madman’s World

Into a world that has repressed the truth and asserted the glorious order and fine tuning of the universe, the biological richness of earth, and the rational mind of man to comprehend quasars and quarks are the products of eons of chaos, unintelligent macroevolution, and unimaginable odds, we must lovingly speak that “what can be known about God is plain to [us], because God has shown it to [us]. For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So [we] are without excuse” (Romans 1:19–20).

A world that embraces the rejection of truth, the destruction of marriage, the extermination of the innocents, and the veneration of a mindless, value-less “creator” is the world of a madman. It is the devil’s playground (1 John 5:19). It is an insane nightmare.

But on “those who dwelt in a land of deep darkness, on them has light shone” (Isaiah 9:2). The return to sanity, the end of the nightmare, is Jesus Christ, “the light of the world” (John 8:12).

And it is precisely when the dark descends that the light is most needed. We must shine the light.

Our Dishonor May Be God’s Answer to Our Prayers

We have prayed for Jesus to shine in this world. We have prayed for the completion of world evangelization. And now we in the West are seeing our societies grow increasingly hostile toward the gospel. Some of us are bewildered. Some are discouraged.

But we must bear in mind that God often answers our prayers in unexpected ways.

For what do we see in the New Testament? We see that human beings perceive the love of God in the gospel of Christ most clearly in this dark world, not through the prosperity of his servants, but through their suffering.

First, it was our Lord himself. The cross was the most evil and most righteous, most hateful and most loving, most profane and most holy event in all of human, indeed cosmic, history. Then the gospel began to spread to Samaria and all Judea and to other regions following the death of Stephen. Then the gospel spread through Asia Minor and into Europe through Paul and his band who suffered more than most of us can imagine (2 Corinthians 11:23–28).

Testifying and suffering — it is the motif of all of redemptive history. It is God’s chosen method to display his love and spread his gospel. The earliest Christians even rejoiced “that they were counted worthy to suffer dishonor for the name” (Acts 5:41).

That might seem strange to us Westerners. But that’s because we’re strange in redemptive history. Most of us have not had to endure dishonor for bearing the name Christian.

But we have prayed for the gospel to spread through our nations and the world. Looking at redemptive history, should we be surprised if God answers our prayers by counting us worthy to suffer dishonor for his name? What if the cross of our dishonor is a means to the salvation of millions?

Jesus did say, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me” (Matthew 16:24). And he told us, “You will be hated by all nations for my name’s sake. . . . [A]nd because lawlessness will be increased, the love of many will grow cold (Matthew 24:9, 12).

And Paul prepared us too: “Indeed, all who desire to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted, while evil people and impostors will go on from bad to worse, deceiving and being deceived” (2 Timothy 3:12–13).

If It’s Costly to Speak, It Must Be Valuable

So what are we to do as increasing dishonor comes to us? We are to do just what the early disciples did: keep speaking. When the governing authorities charged them to stop preaching the gospel, the apostles replied, “Whether it is right in the sight of God to listen to you rather than to God, you must judge, for we cannot but speak of what we have seen and heard” (Acts 4:19–20).

It is precisely when it is personally costly to speak, and we still speak, that people listen to what we have to say. When it’s costly to deliver a message, the message must be costly. For people only pay dearly for what is valuable. Paying dearly glorifies the valuable thing. And no message is more valuable than the gospel of Jesus.

Keep Speaking!

So keep speaking. Relentlessly keep speaking. Relentlessly keep speaking, not to win a culture war, but to win souls. Relentlessly keep speaking to win souls because you love souls.

And as we keep speaking, we should not expect to measure our success by immediate circumstantial improvement. In our short-term context, the gospel may appear to lose ground and evil appear to have the momentum. That is often how circumstances appeared to saints throughout history. But in fact, the gospel has only ever continually spread through the world, despite the mad devil’s best attempts to stamp it out.

So keep speaking the gospel. It is going to win. Jesus promised it would: “The one who endures to the end will be saved. And this gospel of the kingdom will be proclaimed throughout the whole world as a testimony to all nations, and then the end will come” (Matthew 24:13–14).

Note this, we will have to endure. That means suffering and dishonor. But the gospel will be preached to the whole world.

God will answer our prayers, first by causing us to endure, and then bringing the end. Then Jesus will deliver the kingdom to the Father (1 Corinthians 15:24). And then, pleasures forevermore (Psalm 16:11).

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Let Good Things Run Wild

Everything God creates is good (Genesis 1:31). But we must take this in large measure on faith because under the curse of the fall, our fallen perceptions often don’t see it. And our fallen natures often don’t believe it. We are disordered and pathologically self-centered. We are out of sync.

The only things fallen humans tend to believe are good are those that sate our appetites, increase our personal prestige, align with our preferences, pleasantly interest us, operate within our desired timetable, and are convenient and comfortable. In the scope of the created universe, these add up to only a very few things.

From infancy through our elder years, we so often feel frustrated. We don’t like to be told what to do, what to eat, what to wear, when to go to bed, when to get up, what to study, when to study, where to study, what to clean, when to clean, and on and on. We don’t like limits imposed on us by parents, teachers, bosses, spouses, children, neighborhood associations, government, or God. We buck against the constraints of morality, ethics, law, and even biology.

My point here is not that we shouldn’t challenge the evil that infects any authority or structure. We should. My point is that we have an indwelling evil propensity to challenge what is good. We have a bent to not believe God, that his design for us — which implies limits for us — are best for us (Genesis 3:4–6). We have a fallen desire to be autonomous, self-determining, sovereign gods.

God’s Design Lets Good Run Wild

We must keep this sinful desire in us in mind as we evaluate how we feel about God’s good design for manhood and womanhood. Remember, we buck and chafe against a host of structures, feeling them to be a constraint, a confine, even when they are put in place for our greatest joy.

God designed men and women. He made them complementary. When we as men and women trust what God says about what it means to be a man or woman and obey his instructions, the result is harmony. When we disregard him, the result is dissonance.

G.K. Chesterton said, “The more I considered Christianity, the more I found that while it had established a rule and order, the chief aim of that order was to give room for good things to run wild.”

That’s what the new book Designed for Joy is about: the beautiful order of God’s design that frees all that is good about manhood, and all that is good about womanhood, to run gloriously wild. Fourteen young leaders cast a unified vision for Christian manhood and womanhood and how the gospel affects both men and women, as well as identity and practice.

Read it for the sake of your wild joy. And trust God’s promises more than your perceptions.

Designed for Joy is now available in paperback, as well as free of charge in three electronic formats (PDF, MOBI, and EPUB).

Be a Human Infusion of Hope

Encourage one another and build one another up. (1 Thessalonians 5:11)

His name was Joseph. But he “was also called by the apostles Barnabas (which means son of encouragement)” (Acts 4:36). Joseph. Barnabas. I guess that would make him “Joe Encouragement.” Wouldn’t it be wonderful to be such an encouraging person that your friends simply call you Encouragement?

Courage is the resolve to face a fearful threat. And courage is fueled by hope — a hope in something stronger than what we fear.

Discouragement sets in when our hope leaks. We begin to cower before our fear. When this happens, and it happens often, we need an infusion of hope. That’s what encouragement is. Barnabas went around giving people hope-infusions, which helped them keep fighting the fight of faith (1 Timothy 6:12).

We need Barnabas people. We need to be a Barnabas.

A Deluge of Discouragement

We live in a deluge of discouragement. Criticism, contempt, critique, and correction. It’s the native language of our fallen world. These things roll easily off the human tongue far more than affirmation and encouragement, because the fallen human heart has an abundance of pride (Matthew 12:34).

We human beings are by sinful nature viciously critical of one another. We’ve even made “critic” a profession. The vast majority of the analyses of people, ideas, organizations, movements, and governments we hear, whether in the press, on blogs, or at the table next to us, are negative. (Brace yourself for another presidential election cycle.) There are, of course, things that legitimately need critique and correction. But the over-abundance of negativity is largely due to the fact that the prideful eye of the fallen human heart is trained to see others’ weaknesses, foibles, mistakes, and sins. It looks for them and relishes in them. It even sees ones that aren’t there. Why are we like this?

Ironically, one reason is that we are all looking for hope for ourselves. Courage comes from hope. Discouragement sets in when hope leaks. So we sinful humans are on the lookout for any reason to lighten our own discouragement and the guilt of our own failings and sins. When faith in the gospel of the grace of the God of encouragement (Romans 15:4) is absent or deficient in our hearts, we look to others’ failings and sins to make ourselves feel better.

We should not be surprised that this is the case. What else would we expect from a culture in a world under the governance of the evil one (1 John 5:19)?

And we should not even be surprised when the church falls into a disproportionate amount of discouraging negativity. Our remaining indwelling sin is bent in this way and Christians are under constant assault by spiritual forces of evil (Ephesians 6:12). Critical discernment is necessary for spiritual survival.

But in the chaos of the battle we can easily wound each other with critical friendly fire, and forget that encouragement is also necessary for spiritual survival.

Encouragement Is Spiritual Warfare

Encouragement is spiritual warfare. If we’re going to encourage anyone, we will have to fight Satan and our own sin to do it.

The devil is constantly trying to discourage us. He’s the “the accuser of [the] brothers . . . who accuses them day and night before our God” (Revelation 12:10). And his minions are frequently throwing “flaming darts” of condemnation and jealousy and resentment at us (Ephesians 6:16). Resist them (1 Peter 5:9)!

And our sin nature wants to discourage others. It desires self-exaltation more than anything. So it relishes focusing on others’ weaknesses and sins out of arrogance or envy. Pride is why so much of what we think or say or interpret or hear about others is negative and uncharitably critical.

But the “God of encouragement” (Romans 15:5) has given us the weapon that is designed to defeat these enemies: “the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God” (Ephesians 6:17). The Bible was “written for our instruction, that . . . through the encouragement of the Scriptures we might have hope” (Romans 15:4). And when we have hope, we will have courage.

A Call for Barnabas People

Joseph was called Barnabas most likely because he had an eye trained to see the grace of God in whatever happened. No matter what theological controversy or persecution or financial crisis or criticism or failure, Barnabas had a resilient hope in God. When some threat discouraged his friends, he would consistently remind them of God’s promises in such a contagiously hopeful way that their courage would revive.

And that’s what we want to be like. We need to be Barnabas people.

Barnabas people are those who soak in and store up God’s word (Psalm 119:11), and by doing so are able to walk and talk by the Spirit (Galatians 5:16). And when they talk they tend to only speak what “is good for building up, as fits the occasion, that it may give grace to those who hear” (Ephesians 4:29).

This is not a simplistic call to stop thinking critically and be nice to each other. After all, Barnabas, the paragon of encouragement, clearly had a backbone. He went toe-to-toe with Paul over Mark (Acts 15:36–39). But he was characterized by encouragement, not combativeness or critique.

So this is a call for us to cultivate a culture of encouragement wherever we are. It’s a call for us to become Barnabas people, odd people who are so characterized by being encouraging that it becomes part of our identity. Barnabas people give grace to those who hear them. They are at-large hope-infusers to the discouraged.

If you, like me, need help in becoming a Barnabas person, one of the best, most practical things I’ve ever read on encouraging others is Practicing Affirmation by Sam Crabtree. Sam is a Barnabas, and a maker of Barnabas people.

But becoming a Barnabas person really begins by asking the God of encouragement to transform us into sons of encouragement who have Spirit-empowered discernment so that we leave whomever we interact with today more encouraged than we found them.

“Therefore encourage one another with these words” (1 Thessalonians 4:18).

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Your Bible Is a Mine, Not a Museum

The more we wonder over the Bible, the more wonder-full we discover it is. That’s why we must think of the Bible more as a mine than a museum.

Museums Are Interesting

A museum is a very interesting place — assuming you’re interested in what’s on exhibit. All sorts of fascinating things are on display. You move from one artifact to another and read the plaques. It can be a beneficial, knowledge-broadening experience.

But for most people, a museum visit provides mainly a superficial understanding of history, science, technology, art, athletics, or whatever else. Even if they enlist a tour guide, the increased understanding is still relatively modest, as understanding goes. The amount of time spent at each exhibit is limited. Most visitors view a display for a short time and for the most part are content taking what they see and read at face value.

Repeat visits help. Regular museum visitors can become quite familiar with exhibits and even be able to converse fairly intelligently about the displays. To those less familiar with the subjects, veteran museumgoers might seem to be lay experts in the field. They may even consider themselves to be such. And yet, really, the knowledge base remains for the most part superficial.

Mines Are Enriching

Miners observe and gather with a different mindset than a museumgoer. To miners, the knowledge they acquire is not merely interesting; it’s vital. They aren’t merely enhancing their education; they are hunting for treasure. When they seek out expert knowledge, it is for a focused reason: Such knowledge leads to fortune.

Miners are trying to unearth wealth. They dig. They probe. They poke around. They pick up rocks and turn them over, looking intently. Mining isn’t a leisurely afternoon’s recreation. Mining is a diligent, persistent, and even tedious examination. Hours are spent carefully combing through a small area, because if looking is not done carefully, a gem might be missed.

Treasures for Those Who Dig

The Bible is as fascinating as the best museum. There is a lot to glean from it at face value. But it is enriching as a mine. Begin to dig, poke around, and examine, and it yields wonderful things that you didn’t notice at first.

Take the narrative portions, for instance. Why does the Bible contain so many stories? And why do they contain, and leave out, the details they do?

In the story of Joseph and his brothers and their father, Jacob, in Genesis, why is there so much family conflict in the story? What does God want us to see in their sinful dysfunction?

Why was Moses’s leadership experience so consistently hard and painful for almost his entire tenure?

When Nehemiah and his crew were rebuilding the walls of Jerusalem, why did God allow that process to be so inefficient and fraught with opposition?

In Luke 8, why did Jesus command the parents of the little girl he raised from the dead not to say anything, and yet made the hemorrhaging woman, who desperately didn’t want to say anything, announce her condition to the whole crowd?

Why in the world did the writer of Hebrews 11 list Samson, in all of his unfaithfulness, among the models of faith?

What is the crucial link between the healing of Naaman, the great Syrian general, by Elisha, the great Hebrew prophet, and a little Hebrew servant girl who had suffered the trauma of being ripped from her family by the Syrian military?

Why, in Judges 4–5, did God remove honor from Barak when all he seemingly wanted was just to have God’s prophetess close by during a crucial battle?

Why, in God’s name, did Jesus allow Judas to carry the ministry moneybag when he knew Judas was a devil?

If we read Bible stories like museum exhibits, always viewing them fairly quickly and then moving to the next display, our grasp tends to remain rather superficial. We might think that we’ve seen pretty much all that there is to see.

But when we really start sifting through them — when we mine them — we find that these stories are laced with treasures. We see that there is more than initially meets the eye. God buries riches in the Bible that a miner will find and a museumgoer will not.

Things Not Seen

Too often I’ve been a museumgoer in my Bible reading. But the gift of God-granted desperation can make a miner out of a museumgoer. And the new book Things Not Seen: A Fresh Look at Old Stories of Trusting God’s Promises is one result of my desperate mining for the treasures of God in the Bible that I need in order to live — in order to live by faith.

Like Not By Sight from two years ago, Things Not Seen is 35 brief narrative meditations — narrative diggings — seeking to unearth the gems of faith from familiar Bible stories that may have become like familiar museum exhibits — things we think we know that still may hide things we’ve not yet seen. And like Not By Sight, and most of the books at the Desiring God site, Things Not Seen is available as a free PDF, as well as for purchase.

But you don’t need this book to be a miner. You need the Bible and a desperate desire to find all the treasure that God has buried in the field of his Word (Matthew 13:44). But maybe the book will be an encouragement to get the pick and shovel out again.

I’m not knocking museums for being what they are. But when it comes to the Bible, let’s approach it more like miners than museumgoers. There is life-transforming, sin-eradicating, hope-birthing, despair-destroying, eternal life-giving, love-fueling gold there for those who dig.

Bloom’s new book Things Not Seen is now available in paperback and as a free PDF.

Wake Up to the Corrupting Effects of Compromise

When I was 22 years old, I worked at a small company where an older salesman bragged to me about how he defrauded customers. I raised serious concerns with him, and it got back to the company owner, who one day decided to give me some fatherly, sage advice. He said, “You know, when I was your age, I also saw things in black and white. But as I’ve gotten older, I’ve learned that things are mainly shades of grey.”

It was true that I was young, inexperienced, and naive in many things. I’m now close to the age that company owner was back then. I better understand the layered complexities, ambiguities, and difficulties of life. I can think of a number of things that I’m not nearly as dogmatic about as I was back then.

But fraud isn’t one of them.

The Danger of Dimmed Vision

At age fifty, it’s as clear to me as it was at 22 that the owner’s “shades of grey” spiel wasn’t sagacity; it was self-justifying, compromise-covering baloney. The fraud wasn’t grey; it was straight-up stealing and lying. If the defrauded customer had been in on our chat, the “grey” would have looked quite black to him, as it would have to a judge had legal action been pursued.

So what had happened to this man over time that greyed-out his moral vision? It is no mystery; we all know. It was one compromise, and then another, and then another until the incremental, cumulative effects of selfishness and greed had corrupted his integrity. A self-induced osteoporosis of compromise had weakened his moral backbone. His was not wisdom gained by age; his was moral conviction lost by atrophy.

To my knowledge, this owner was not a Christian, so the blinding of 2 Corinthians 4:4 was likely in play. But Christians are not immune from this sort of atrophy. Jesus rebuked the church in Laodicea for it (Revelation 3:14–22). Something like it must have happened to Demas (2 Timothy 4:10). We all know people we love whose once-clear vision has faded to grey. We have seen the effects in ourselves. It is an ever-present danger.

Jesus’s Prescription for Spiritual Cataracts

What do we do if we see the corrupting effect of compromise at work in ourselves or those we know? Jesus’s prescription is painfully, mercifully brief: “be zealous and repent” (Revelation 3:19). At a moment like this, we cannot trust how we feel. The Laodicean Christians, to whom Jesus addressed this exhortation, didn’t feel zealous. They were “lukewarm” (Revelation 3:15–16). They were worldly and self-satisfied and didn’t feel the urgency of their condition. Solution? Get urgent and repent.

The severe simplicity of this prescription is hopeful. Spiritual osteoporosis can be reversed, greyed vision can be healed, and much more quickly than we might think. The anesthetizing effects of compromise can dissipate quickly, like a man waking from a nap with the smelling salt of repentance.

As we mature and become more aware of the complexities of life, the effect this exhortation should have on us is a diminishing of immature self-righteousness and misplaced self-confidence, not the diminishing of our conviction about fundamental truths. The slow fires of aging should produce the tempering effect of a patient, gentle relentlessness, not the melting away of our moral muscle. We must lose our pride, not our nerve or our will.

Truth doesn’t grow grey with time. But our moral eyes can be dimmed by the cataracts of compromise. If we find that this darkening has happened, Jesus has good news for us: He has salve for our eyes that will help us see again (Revelation 3:18). And he will give it to the one who is zealous and repents.

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