Rules for Reformers

by Douglas Wilson

There is no way to do any of this without involving yourself in the rough stuff. This means that courage is required. The adversary fights back, and they know how to fight back. 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.

There is no distinction to be made between working for reformation and picking a fight.

One of the first things a reformer has got to get used to is the experience of being despised and unpopular.

The man of integrity decides according to the law, and not according to whether the plaintiff has had a hard life.

There are two kinds of non-conformity, and only one of them wears hipster glasses. The kind that does wear them is a very popular form of pretending to be out of the mainstream, in order to be the envy of it, and the other is a radical form of unpopularity, calculated to get you slandered and viciously attacked, on the way to changing the direction of the mainstream. 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.

We are able to do this, Jesus teaches, because we know the outcome of the story. We have the big picture. We know that great is our reward in Heaven. But being heavenly-minded is not an opiate—being heavenly-minded brings real earthly perspective.

Conservative activists who are surprised or indignant at the gross lopsidedness of the whole system are being foolish because they are expecting the devil to be a gentleman. They are expecting him to fight clean, and to avoid every form of fighting dirty.

A decisive point is a place that is significant enough to matter to the enemy if you successfully take it, and insignificant enough to actually take. This means that the selected target is both strategic and feasible.

To identify and go after a decisive point is the way to have a disproportionate impact.

We don’t have infinite resources at our disposal—we do serve an infinite God, but He loves to supply our needs on a day-to-day basis. That keeps us trusting Him. That means we must be the stewards of the resources He has already given, and this means we have to be selective. We have a limited number of troops, and so we have to decide where to put them.

When we lose the appropriate measurement of victory, one of the first things that happens is that false measurements appear almost immediately.

Without a Creator God, the father of any order that happens is chaos. And since the process is random, and there are times when chaos throws off some abortion of a world—which has apparently happened in our case—this means there is nothing for it but to destroy it all down to chaos again and let chaos have another throw. Two out of three? Baby needs a new pair of shoes . . .

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.

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.

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.

This is how we are to fight giants in the valley of giants. We pray for the Lord to make a breach, like a dam bursting. We pray for the Lord to rush before us, like the wind in the top of the trees.

Offensive Takeaway Point: 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 means taking coordinated aim—applying an artificial and additional force to create an “outnumbered” situation in one place along the line.

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.