Rules for Reformers

by Douglas Wilson

Worship God every Lord’s Day. Confess your sins. Sing psalms. Listen to sermons that are preached out of the Bible. Confess your faith. Take the Lord’s Supper. Between worship services, read your Bible daily. Pray without ceasing. Read books. Prepare for next Sunday.

Provide your children with the best Christian education you can find. There is no excuse for Christians giving their children over to the enemy for their education. There is no sense in giving them over for education in “the neutral parts,” for there are no neutral parts. Christian children must have a Christian education.

Love and encourage your wife and children constantly. What the world needs first is gospel, and your family is the best place to showcase the gospel to a lost and wandering culture. The gospel must be preached by anointed evangelists, but what we desperately need is a chorus of amens coming from families that live out this gospel.

Cultivate a robust sense of humor. Use irony, satire, and ridicule, as appropriate. Whether or not it is appropriate should not be determined by the target. The target never likes it.

Make your adversary live up to his own rules. Turn in papers that act on the assumption of absolute relativism taught in the class. Apply for affirmative action scholarships because of your Scottish descent. Your clan was persecuted in the 14th century, and you are still dealing with it. Have your son try out for the girl’s shot put event. Make them say, “No, girls are different.”

Enjoy yourself. God is in control. Jesus is on the throne.

Keep your weapons sharp. Read. Study. Reflect. Grow.

They figured out (a long time ago) how to use the tender consciences of Christians against them. It is time that we got wise to that game.

the point is to win the man, not the argument. If you win the man, the argument follows. And if you have won the man’s attention and respect, you will have the opportunity to present an argument that will be heard.

the theory of evolution is such a big issue—the theory of evolution is a jurisdictional claim that the devil is making. If we were not created in the image of God, then this means that we have no jurisdictional appeal beyond Caesar. If there is no God above Caesar, then Caesar is God. If there is a God in Heaven, and He has placed His image on us, then this absolutely requires the biblical concept of limited government.

Because we confess that Jesus is the God/man, the only one who is equally at home both in Heaven and on earth, this liberates us from every pretender and poser down here who wants to be the final anything. There are quite a few of those guys, incidentally. Apart from Christ, all sorts of people, in black robes and white lab coats, want to be the final word.

What we must pursue is cultural engagement, not cultural surrender parading itself as engagement. In order to keep our bearings, and in order to keep our heads, we have to reject every attempt to get us to compromise our fundamental allegiance to Scripture as God’s infallible Word to us.

The radical thinks that human sexuality is up for grabs. The reformer knows what God’s intention from the beginning was.

the issue is never the issue. Keep your eye on the ball. What is the stated purpose of the law, and what is the real purpose of the law? The stated purpose of such laws is to keep devastating weapons out of the hands of criminals. The real purpose of the law is to grow the power of the idol-state, and to shrink the power of those capable of resisting it. This sleight of hand matters because what genuine Christian wants criminals to have devastating weapons? And what genuine Christian wants a bigger and more powerful idol-state? There are two different questions on the table, and so it matters which one is the real one.

never to apologize for the truth. Never. When Scripture requires us to seek forgiveness or put something right, what we are putting right is our complicity in some lie or other. Lies must always be repudiated, and while it is certainly humbling, it is never strategically stupid.

No matter what happens in the next election, God is on His throne, and we should still be in the process of gathering before it.

We must do two things simultaneously—we must fight today’s battles, and we must recruit and train tomorrow’s warriors.

Believing the universe is governed by absolute goodness is the only possible basis for thinking anything could be wrong with it now.

Humility is not pretending to be smaller than you are. Humility is understanding what you are.

It is not what you are doing when reading Scripture. It is what Scripture is doing when you are reading Scripture.

When fighting principalities and powers in high places, the preacher should take care to aim low . . . where the sin is.

Conservatives discourage easily because without a robust eschatology every battle is the entire war.

If you are not content where you are, there is no reason to believe you will be content when you get where you would rather be.

one of the real problems with natural revelation (for those retreating, that is) is that it doesn’t allow for a coherent retreat, and that is because natural revelation is what it is, and it is that way all the way out to the edges of the universe, provided the universe has edges. If it doesn’t have edges, the lordship of Christ extends as far as the universe does.

But the God who passes judgment on that day is the same God who inspired the Scriptures to be written, and He is also the same God who governs the fall of sparrows, the motion of atoms in all of Neptune’s moons, the number of hairs on every head that will come up before Him at the judgment, the intricate mathematical patterns found in the waving grass in every field on earth, and the guttural praise of all the frogs in springtime. But this means that God’s revelation of Himself goes all the way out to the edges. We can’t get away from it. God wrote two books—the Word and the world. His name is on the spine of both of them. They each can be read apart from the other, but neither can be read fully without some working knowledge of the other.

He is there and He is not silent. Got that? Not silent. Find me one place in the universe that is silent about Him. The stars sing about Him. The oceans provide the bass line. The mountain ranges skip like a calf, and the trees reach yearningly toward the Heaven that they so wonderfully represent to us.

a classical Christian education is a tactical non-negotiable. If we want to graduate students who have a chronological map in their heads, with an x on it that says, “You are here,” then classical education is a necessity.

only a healthy soul can see how remarkable every unremarkable thing actually is.

The way before us is full of choices and decisions. And every choice we make will have the effect of either making us duller and more like a tedium drill, or brighter and more like the Spirit of God who dwells in us.

If we are going to be engaged in true cultural reformation, we need a gospel that kicks the devil in the teeth. And that means it must be a message of penal, substitutionary, vicarious, blood-bought atonement. When it comes to this substitute, we must accept no substitute.

When it comes to revivals, the reason why it always comes as such a surprise to us is simple. God—in order to keep the glory where it needs to be kept—makes sure that we are in such a bad way, in such a condition of death and hopelessness, that nobody expects a resurrection.

All hope is lost? Good. That means the conditions for a black swan revival are improving by the day. The stone-cold deader we get, the more God is hastening the day. Nothing is dying but what has needed to die for a long time.

Because Jesus died on the cross as a sin-substitute—and only because of that—we have a basis for rejecting the endless envious gnawing of the left and the self-sufficient hippie-punching of the right. There is no solution to our cultural or political troubles apart from the blood that Jesus shed.