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if you are interested in the grace of God transforming individuals, families, neighborhoods, churches, communities, cities, cultures, nations, and the world, then you are interested in reformation.
Reformation of culture is either a species of salvation or sanctification, and you can’t have either one of those without Jesus.
Secular conservatism is like trying to use your pocket handkerchief to slow you down after the main chute has failed. This is why individual heart transformation, not legislation, is fundamental to national reformation. The person and work of Jesus is not optional.
The simple need leadership; they can make great foot soldiers, but don’t ever make them generals. The partisans need a peculiar kind of leadership, but you have to be careful—they are the ones who are already a tad too gung ho about your leadership. And they think you are as gummed up about particular methods as they are.
The goal is to preserve and defend everything the Spirit has done in history in such a way as to carry it forward into what the Spirit is going to do.
Build an actual school for your children, and do not love the notion of educational “great concepts” in some Euclidean eschaton.
The besetting sin of ostensible reformers is the sin of shrillness and officious forms of uplift. We need reformers, not another round of bossy-pantses. We also need someone who knows how to form the plural of bossy-pants.
Not only that, but because this is a battle between good and evil, and you are fighting for the good (right?), the other side gets to cheat, and you don’t. You have to fight, and you have to fight clean, and you have to fight fair. When you enlist in the army, you cannot feign surprise when you find yourself in battles.
If we have Christ, we have all things future, and so we can leave the outcome of our present labors to Him. We don’t have to see the larger end to perform our part in that larger end. And our part is now.
Expecting our faith to affect the larger polis when it has not yet changed the average shelf at the local Christian book store is expecting something that is not going to happen. With the weird exception of baseball, where the ball is handled entirely by the defense, you can’t score points until you have the ball. And reformers will not have the ball until they have a culture.
Joab was a thorough-going man of the world, out for number one, but he was extremely shrewd and he often saw the world more accurately than others who ought to have known better.
A reformer does not walk onto the stage to polite applause.
When you are attacked by the powers that be, this is not a sign that something has gone dangerously wrong. There is no distinction to be made between working for reformation and picking a fight.
Those who comprehend the principles involved are effective leaders. I would go so far as to say that this is one of the fundamental characteristics of effective leadership. Who is competent to see the dividing line between leaders and would-be leaders? Both kinds of people think they are leaders, but only one truly knows.
Principles do not apply themselves. They must be studied, understood, grasped, and applied.
It is not for nothing that Sun Tzu’s book was called The Art of War. The necessary artistry is never found by applying principles in a clunkity-clunkity way.
One of the first things a reformer has got to get used to is the experience of being despised and unpopular. Societies do awful things (that which needs to be reformed) because they want to, and the reformer is the one beckoning them to a state of affairs that they don’t much want.
The man of integrity decides according to the law, and not according to whether the plaintiff has had a hard life.
A reformer has to be the kind of man who can stand up to the clamor of the mob. This is the vertebrate mentality exhibited by Athanasius when he was informed that “the world” was against him. Well, then, he replied, let it be known that Athanasius is contra mundum, against the world. A true reformer gives the PR department fits.
One kind of non-conformity requires courage, while the other kind requires nothing more than vanity and a five dollar cup of fair trade coffee.
In short, the reformer cannot expect anything worthwhile to happen if all he hears is polite golf applause floating toward him from the establishment.
In Luke 6:22–23, Jesus tells us to rejoice and leap for joy when we are reviled, excluded, shunned, and held in contempt. In Lattimore’s translation of that passage, Jesus tells us that we are “to frolic” when this happens.
Devils make better accusers, always, and we are not in this to create right-wing devils. No, we have a better game to play than that.
When they cheat, and we get angry, this is nothing less than us enabling their cheating to work, to have its intended effect. The appropriate response is for them to cheat, and for us to grin.
To identify and go after a decisive point is the way to have a disproportionate impact.
We have a limited number of troops, and so we have to decide where to put them. Joab was not a very good man, but he was a good general—and he divided his troops wisely for the battle (2 Sam. 10:10–12).
They see the problems with the house, and the inequities that have developed (some people have cleaned up their own rooms quite nicely, which naturally makes them the envy of all the others), and so they want to do something about the problem of “the house” as a whole. Because they are revolutionaries, it is an article of faith with them (held with a religious fervor) that the only thing we can do is burn it down and start over. This idea is not simple arson—it is eschatological paganism. Without a Creator God, the father of any order that happens is chaos. And since the process is random, and
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They are after one thing only, and that is power. When they get real power of the sort they want, it will be the power to destroy—and destroy they will. In the meantime, they raise many different “issues,” to confuse those who think they might be sincere, but as their godfather Saul Alinsky taught them, the issue is never the issue. The real issue is power, as measured by them in gasoline and matches.
But the only reason we fight to save the house from burning is so that we might, led by the Spirit of God over the course of generations, subject the house to a different kind of extreme makeover. The only reason we fight those who want to preserve the house just the way it currently droops is because we want to preserve it in restored glory.
If we were to be saved by works, everybody is hosed.
Now some of us don’t want to give the commies the time of day—they slaughtered over 100 million people over the course of the last century, and, looking ahead to the next century, they would be happy to do it all over again. Some don’t think we should be the ones with the hangdog expression.
Objective Takeaway Point: The objective needs to be clear, and rightly nested within other, larger objectives. When the bugle blows indistinctly, no one gets ready for battle.
And David is the descendant of Perez, so named because he “breached” before Zarah, who had been marked and identified by a scarlet cord tied to his wrist (Gen. 38:28–30). Achan, who died for his treachery at Jericho, was descended from Zarah. Rahab, who was the mother of David’s great-grandfather Boaz (descended from Perez), completed the breach when she let down a scarlet cord from her window at Jericho. Here is the line of blood-red redemption, found always in the unlikely places! This is the line of the Lord Jesus Christ, and this is the way of the Lord Jesus Christ. What was His death and
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Evil authorities are first to have the word preached to them, and every lawful means of appeal and resistance should be applied.
However, if ethical considerations do not prevent one from taking the offensive, all thought and energy should be employed either in taking the offensive, or planning on how to move from defense to offense. Survival should never be the goal, stalemate is not the goal, absence of collision is not the goal.
We should look for a way to stop responding to initiatives of the adversary and start behaving in such a way that they have to figure out how to respond to us. Take the initiative.
Concentration is the tip of the spear.
Concentration will be most effective when applied to a decisive point—a place where it is likely that your concentration will work, and where it will matter a great deal to the enemy if it does work.
Concentration means taking coordinated aim—applying an artificial and additional force to create an “outnumbered” situation in one place along the line.
The Reformer John Calvin concentrated his efforts in the (relatively) unimportant city of Geneva, and the fact that the city was “taken” permitted hosts of refugees from other places to concentrate there, and from there to influence the continent of Europe. Preachers, books, general mayhem, and trouble were all exported from that place.
When concentration happens, our gatherings will be a hissing and a byword to the unbelievers. They don’t mind our ghettos. They do mind it when we gather in the way we were commanded to.
Concentration is not to be pursued for the sake of a respite; it is a concentration of force, applied in ways the adversary wants you to stop. So don’t stop.
David was a giant-killer, and he comes into this story as a glorious type of Christ. Goliath was a giant, but he was also a serpent, a dragon. The Hebrew word for his armor means scales, which made him a gigantic reptile, like a dragon, and David topples him with a wound to the head (Gen. 3:15). David fights him with the same weapons that he would use in fighting wild beasts. When he is done, he takes Goliath’s armor and places it in his tent (v. 54).
Mobility, as far as we are concerned, is a state of mind.
Mobility is exercised when the right amount of force gets to the right place quickly. A bullet fired in the wrong direction goes just as fast.
Like the lieutenant in Ambrose Bierce’s small story in The Devil’s Dictionary, we are concerned that any further display of valor on the part of our troops might bring us into contact with the enemy.
Take flash mobs as an example of mobility. With an adroit use of the new media, it is possible to gather a large group of people on short notice. Say that the city council tagged something onto the agenda at the last minute, in the hopes that they would be able to sneak it through without a bunch of public comment. The chambers are nearly empty, but one man in the back row with a smartphone noticed the move. He has the capacity to have the chambers full of peasants with pitchforks in about fifteen minutes. That’s mobility.
Mobility remembers that an army is supposed to fight, and it is supposed to fight as quickly as effectively possible.
A war in which there is no possibility of things going wrong is not really a war.
as Sun Tzu put it, “The good fighters of old first put themselves beyond the possibility of defeat and then waited for an opportunity of defeating the enemy.”
