Awareness and expression are important. I am the last person who would rob anyone of their voice. That said, mere awareness and expression are not always helpful. What I have found to be helpful is discipline in the mental and emotional areas of life. I list them together because it is very hard to separate them from one another. Our thinking tends to be colored by our emotions and vice versa.

After living as long as I have, walking through incredibly painful situations, and rising up again after life kicked my teeth in several times, I know this much to be true: how we think and how we control our emotions are foundational to a stable life.

It takes a great deal of discipline to separate our feelings from our thoughts.

If we want a stable life, generally speaking, we want to avoid two pitfalls in this area like we would avoid slipping into a ditch while driving down the road.

The first ditch is thinking with our feelings. One of the most disturbing language trends in America today is the phrase “I feel like…” I recognize that for many people it is just a common turn of phrase in our culture yet it betrays a much deeper issue. That phrase’s almost exclusive use today relates to what one actually thinks about a particular subject. People who use this phrase use it in debate about issues to express their opinion. Frankly, in that context, no one should care how anyone feels. Debate is a place for objectivity not subjectivity.

There has been a history of “swings” throughout our time as a country and even more broadly in the larger western world. We went through times where reason was the only thing that mattered and times when feelings were dramatically more important than anything else. We are now in the time when feelings are everything. Every time in our history when we have swung too far in the direction of feelings ruling our thinking, civil unrest (and all that comes with it) follows.

The second ditch is too much reason. We are human beings not automatons. We can never be robots. If we swing too far in the direction of pure logic, we become Vulcans harboring emotions so repressed that they come out in unexpectedly violent ways. Eventually we swing back incredibly hard toward feelings and the cycle continues.

Reason has its place and emotions do as well. Reason’s place is conversations about truth and morality. We can be passionate about these subjects. I honestly hope everyone is. Emotion is for understanding and connection. It is a horrible tool for seeking the truth. Stating that doesn’t make anyone dispassionate, mean, insensitive, or lacking in empathy.

In the area of mental and emotional discipline, we are all looking for one thing: peace of mind. Personally, I have learned that no one can put a price tag on that. In my experience, you can’t get there without disciplining your thinking and emotions.

I look at it this way. Our minds are muscles much like our bodies. They require exercise and control. The only way we learn that control is through exercise. So what kinds of things can exercise the mind and the emotions to give us a grounded life? I have a few ideas that have helped me.

Reading

Reading is to the mind what weightlifting and calisthenics are to the body. What is horribly sad about this habit is that far too many neglect it. Don’t believe me? Here are a few stats that may help us understand the problem we are facing. We don’t just have flabby bodies in the US. We have flabby minds.

• 70% of Americans never read another book after high school.

• 21% of American adults are functionally illiterate (2 out of 10 cannot read)

• 54% of American adults read at a level below 6th grade

• Low literacy costs the US BILLIONS of dollars a year in lost economic productivity

My recommendation for fixing this: read.

I know… genius right?

Let me get more specific. Knowing how to read and actually doing it for your benefit are two different things. Just read for 15 minutes a day. Anyone can do that. Set a timer if you have to. Pick a book about something you really want to learn or need to learn. This comment might aggravate some but I would limit your fifteen minutes to non-fiction for the purposes of strengthening your mind.

This one habit alone will put you ahead of almost everyone else in society. I call this the reading gap. The average American employee reads no books in one year. The average CEO reads 54 and they have way less time on their hands to accomplish it. Which one gets paid more? The good news is that it isn’t hard to close the reading gap if you are consistent (we are talking about discipline after all). Since there is such a huge gap between those who read and those who don’t, you will be an expert in whatever area you choose to read by the time you have consumed seven books on the subject.

Just so we’re clear, we’re talking about hard copies here, not audiobooks. I’m not opposed to audiobooks after one has completed the habit of fifteen minutes with an actual book. The studies on how a brain grows differently from holding a hard copy are many and irrefutable. If you’re going to do a mental push up, do one. Don’t substitute it for laying on your back and pressing up the air.

By the way, if you don’t read, you are no different than someone who can’t read. Just sayin’.

Journaling

Some of us avoided this like the plague in school. We even procrastinated to the last day in English class to complete all our journal entries for the month by backdating and switching up pens and pencils… yes I am including myself in this.

Truthfully, I didn’t understand the value of this habit until my forties. Now I do it every day and have for several years.

One of my seminary professors once said, “Reading makes a full man. Writing makes a precise man.” Maybe I am all by myself in this… but sometimes I have a hard time clarifying my thoughts. When that happens, I have found one of the best tools for clarifying my thinking is to write it out. Clarity brings peace. Peace of mind is something that we buy with discipline.

One of the great benefits of writing on a consistent basis is that you quickly get tired of using the same words over and over again. It forces you to develop a better vocabulary, particularly around your emotions. Are you just mad or are you more frustrated? Or is it just irritation? Frustration might cause less of a fit than outright anger and irritation even less than frustration all of which might bring you closer to peace.

Gratitude

This is a really important practice if you are a Christian. I say that because Scripture is really clear that we are to focus on the positive things in this world. If you don’t believe that, take another read of Philippians 4:8. I’ll wait.

The truth is that life is beautiful. I believe that because I know that God created life and He called it very good when He wrote His signature at the end of the process.

I’m not saying any of this in an attempt to minimize anyone’s pain or trauma. I have definitely had my share in this life. I wouldn’t try to downgrade anyone else’s. We live in a world that is corrupted as well.

That said, there is always something for which we can be grateful, even if it’s just that we have been granted another day or another breath. So… I have made it a practice to write down three things for which I am grateful to God on a daily basis.

If you’re married to an incredible person like I am, I want to challenge you on this one a little. Of course you can write down that you are grateful for your spouse on a daily basis. That’s a good thing. The better thing is to write down something really specific for you are grateful about her or him. The best thing is to tell them what you wrote down without being mechanical or repetitious about it.

I’ll challenge you in another way too: try to take something that is very hard about your life and find something for which you are grateful even about that hard or horrible thing. It’s possible to do that without excusing the horrible or hard thing.

Put daily gratitude into practice and see how it changes your life through changing your perspective.

Input

One of the unintended consequences of the 24-7 information onslaught of the digital age is its massive impact on the health of the mind. Simply put, our brains used to take in information by the glass. Now we drink from a firehose daily. We get the sense that if we don’t keep up we will be behind permanently without an opportunity to catch up. That’s hard enough at work. Most Americans make a full time job outside of their jobs of keeping up on media sources. The average American spends 7-12 hours a day in front of a screen. It would behoove us to pay attention to what that screen is pushing into our brains.

There is a very old saying from the tech world that applies here: garbage in; garbage out. Fair warning, I might sound a little like your Dad here again. There is no escaping the fact that what we take in (music, reading, podcasts, social media feeds, doomscrolling, etc.) has a profound impact on our thinking and our emotional stability. The facts are overwhelming. Studies show the following effects from negative intake sources:

• Increased sense of helplessness over distant, uncontrollable events

• Increased anxiety

• Increased depression and hopelessness

• Increased cognitive fatigue

• Hypervigilance: a state of constant readiness with a strong sense of impending danger. That leaves the toggle for our fight/flight/freeze reflex in the constant on position. Physically, our bodies can’t manage that much adrenaline all the time.

• Trouble falling asleep or staying asleep

• Digestive issues

• Muscle tension, aches, or physical exhaustion

If these are things with which you have struggled in the last few years, it may be time to set some boundaries around your intake.

What might those boundaries look like? I’m glad you asked. Here’s a few ideas:

• Curate your notifications: only pay attention to those that have a direct impact on you or your family

• Set time limits

• Avoid late night scrolling. There is an old proverb about that as well that I have found to be true: nothing good happens after 11 PM.

The great crisis we have (in our younger generation especially) with all these outcomes is a direct result of a lack of discipline in our inputs. If we want to be healthier mentally, we are going to have to get tough in this area. That’s going to require some courage and resolve on each of our parts. I hope the ideas I have presented here will be helpful to you.

Much love to you readers and God bless richly!

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If there is an area of discipline that I see people despise the most and neglect the most, it’s physical discipline. I firmly believe that 99.9% of people know what they need to do to take care of themselves physically. Before we get into it though, I want to start with a few reminders.

Healthy physical habits are some of the hardest to establish and the easiest to break. It’s because the consequences of not establishing them or breaking them are not immediate. They take their toll over time so they don’t instantly materialize. For that matter, when you establish healthy habits or make them hard to break, the same is also true. The results we are looking for don’t come to us overnight. They come over time. Therefore, physical discipline requires patience. The good news is that, if you are a Christian, the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience… so all you have to do is stand in the strength of the Spirit for it.

That said, collectively as a nation in the US, I think technology has done us one grand disservice. It has made us dramatically less patient. We live in a microwave society. Press a button and we get what we’re looking for. As a full time school teacher, I can tell you that it’s only getting worse. My students frequently complain over having to pay attention to a whole two and a half minute video on a particular subject because, in their minds, it’s too long.

This extreme convenience mindset has almost completely destroyed a necessary component to success in life: delayed gratification. I think the easiest place to see this is in the area of physical discipline. We would rather look for a short cut (like a shot or a pill) before we would consider a lifestyle change.

Another reason this area is particularly difficult is that it has more to do with a subtly negative mindset. What I mean by subtle is this: we tend to think in negative terms when we want to make a change in this area. No I will not eat that. No I will not skip my workout. No I will not skip my water. No I will not lose sleep. No I will not neglect my check up.

From my experience, the more effective mindset is positive. It works because it multiplies outcomes. Yes I will eat healthy. Yes I will workout. Yes I will drink water consistently. Yes I will make sure I get good sleep. Yes I look forward to my yearly check up. Flipping the mindset to positive keeps us out of complaint mode and keeps us on the road to positive results.

Eliminate

OK… there’s at least one subtraction part that we need to embrace because it’s important: there are some things we all need to eliminate as regular practices.

If the following things are habits (and we all know which ones we have), they need to go: alcohol, tobacco, elicit drugs, and junk food. If it’s only on occasion, no problem; except it will delay your results. If it’s a habit, it has to go if you want to change.

Admittedly, there are some on that list I have never struggled with at all. I’m not being judgmental here. I’m not giving medical advice either. We all know these things are bad for us. They don’t just hurt our bodies. They can hurt our minds and relationships as well.

If you need help getting these things out of your life, get the help you need. If you would like my help on that, feel free to message me privately. I can help you develop and navigate a plan.

Eat

When I introduced this section, I wrote about my former eating habits when I was burning nearly two thousand calories a day in cardio. Frankly, at that point in my life, I could eat whatever I wanted and as much as I wanted without consequences.

Now I’m 58. At some point, I had to grow up around my relationship to food. In short, the older you get, the less you can eat like you’re single and 20 years old.

Eating more than everyone else at the table isn’t a ‘flex’ (as my students would put it). Visiting 7-11 on your commute because you got a hankering for a ten-hour-old burrito is not something you need to indulge in beyond the age of 15 (if at all). Killing a whole bag of Doritos in one sitting just to prove you can do it is definitely something that shouldn’t become a habit. Proving to your kids that you’re muy macho because you can still down Takis like the next guy is a bad idea post high school. These are not alpha challenges.

In short, anything processed is a bad idea.

Whole foods are the way to go.

“But they’re too expensive Pat!”

We’ll get into this more in the financial discipline section but I would encourage you to go through your bank statements for the last three months. Print them out and highlight how much money you have spent eating out. Everyone I have ever seen do that with a shred of honesty found that they were spending anywhere from $800-$1500 a month eating out (also a bad idea nutritionally). You know what’s really expensive around food? Paying someone else to cook for you and do your dishes.

Again, whole foods are the way to go. This is your nutritional foundation. I’m not going to recommend any particular diet. I’ll save you some time though: I have tried every one of them except vegan. I think they all have their place. People need to find what works for them. In any case there are certain things you should be getting daily.

First, you should be getting one gram of protein for every one pound of your ideal body weight. I can almost guarantee that you aren’t getting that unless you are supplementing with some form of protein. Without this, your hormones will be out of balance and your weight will frustratingly fluctuate. I highly recommend getting a food scale, weighing your portions, and using the Chronometer app to track your food for at least a month. I was dramatically unaware of what I was doing to myself nutritionally before I started doing that. It’s hard to change something if you aren’t even aware of what you’re doing.

Second, you need a multi-vitamin. The whole foods we have today have a quarter of the nutritional value of the whole foods your grandparents cooked and ate. Supplementing is a necessity. A multi-vitamin is important because it fills in nutritional gaps.

Third, you can then add targeted supplements. If you use targeted supplements without a multi-vitamin, the targeted supplements will fill in the nutritional gaps rather than perform their targeted function.

Finally, the brand you use matters. I implore you not to find the cheapest supplements on Amazon or at Costco. Because of the way the industry operates, not all supplements are equal. The most expensive product is the one that doesn’t work. If you are looking, you can ask me about what I use.

Hydrate

This one is simple but few people do it. It’s at least a gallon of water a day.

“But I will be peeing all day long!”

You’ll figure it out. I’m sure you have noticed that when you really want to do something you tend to figure out a way to do it. This is no different.

I would highly suggest getting most of that in the morning. Hydrating early activates so many great bodily functions, especially your metabolism. That will limit your trips to the bathroom later on. Please make sure it’s quality water too. Tap water is a bad option.

Exercise

You knew it was coming. I have to give a shout out to my secondary coaches and PE teachers. They really emphasized the importance of making this a lifelong habit. Strength and endurance training are both important.

Here’s what I am going to recommend. Either work up to or do 30 minutes of vigorous exercise of some kind at least three days a week, especially if you are in one of the ‘sedentary’ professions. If you haven’t been doing any at all, start somewhere and work up to it. Check your age and gender for an appropriate working heart rate that you should be achieving during that workout. That way you won’t be able to lie to yourself about something non-athletic that you think qualifies.

Sleep

The standard is eight hours. I’m still working on getting there myself. However, my CPAP app says 7 hours gives me a 100% score. Some have argued that our need for sleep reduces as we age. All I can say is that I tend to do better with anything above six and a half hours a night.

Some people really struggle with this. In my case, it’s not a case of insomnia. It’s just a case of a to-do list. Once I’m in bed, I’m out and I don’t wake up until my alarm goes off. I just have things to get done. So I get up.

By the way, the previous sections help significantly with this one.

Yearly Checks

Men… listen up.

It’s not your wife’s job to make sure you go to the doctor.

Honestly, I view it as part of my protector role in my family. If I’m not healthy but I don’t know it, how am I going to protect them?

So I go every year for a full physical.

The last one was unique. I went in for a colonoscopy. Shout out to the fifty year old readers! Good times.

Anyway, the nurse was asking me questions about my health for obvious reasons. She concluded the interview by calling me a unicorn. I said, “What does that mean?” She continued, “You’re a 58 year old man with no medical issues, no bad habits, and a healthy lifestyle. That’s a unicorn.”

In my opinion, anyone can achieve the last two in that list. Genetics may have an impact on the first but honestly it doesn’t have to because you can mitigate that through the first two. If my genetics were at play, I could be staring cancer, heart disease, lung disease, high blood pressure, arteriosclerosis, and a high stroke risk in the face. My dad had his first heart attack at 55. I have no signs of anything on the horizon per a 12 lead EKG.

Conclusion

God tells us that we are to be good stewards of the body we have been given. We all know that we can’t run that body contrary to its design and expect it to function the way that we want it to. We only get one. There isn’t another one waiting in the closet for us to put on when this one breaks. So let’s honor God by taking proper care of the body with which He gifted us.

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Let’s start discipline categories with a few reminders then zoom in on what spiritual discipline looks like.

If this is your first time diving into this subject or you are a new believer wondering about how to get started in this area, you should know that I am only one in a long line of people who has written and practiced on this subject. Donald Whitney, Dallas Willard, and Richard Foster are the most prominent modern authors in the area of spiritual discipline. I would highly encourage you to read their works. They have been a great benefit to me.

All of us should always remember that it is the finished work of Christ that has saved us, not our consistency or lack thereof in the habits we will discuss here. That is wonderful news because we are all human. So these are dead works if not accompanied by truth faith. They will not save you in and of themselves. If salvation can be earned in any other way than faith in Him alone, then Jesus died for nothing.

That said, it is hard to say that anyone has a healthy relationship with someone else apart from certain kinds of actions to grow in that relationship. A relationship with God is no different. The love you have is there and it must be expressed in word and deed in some way or no one would know it was real.

So let’s put these disciplines in perspective. What are we doing when we practice discipline in our spiritual lives? We are growing spiritually. It doesn’t happen overnight just like benching 400 lbs doesn’t just “happen” for someone. It takes time and intentional effort in a singular direction. Donald Whitney put it in a way that has been very helpful to me: when we engage in spiritual activity, we are standing in the God-ordained streams of His presence. He created these streams for our nourishment. In Psalm 1, David reminds us of this:

1 Blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the wicked, nor stands in the way of sinners, nor sits in the seat of scoffers;

2 but his delight is in the law of the Lord, and on His law he meditates day and night.

3 He is like a tree planted by streams of water that yields its fruit in its season, and its leaf does not wither.

In all that he does, he prospers.

4 The wicked are not so, but are like chaff that the wind drives away.

5 Therefore the wicked will not stand in the judgment, nor sinners in the congregation of the righteous;

6 for the Lord knows the way of the righteous, but the way of the wicked will perish.

If I have a life verse, this is it.

From where does the tree get its strength? From the stream. What is the stream? It is the law of God in contrast to all the other voices out there. In Him is life and that life is the light of humanity. When we drink from the stream of His Word, we grow strong in Him.

The contrast between the stability of the rooted and nourished tree and the chaff that breaks free from the wheat in the wind could not be more stark. It goes back to something I learned the hard way, have reiterated throughout my posts, and would encourage everyone with now: there is one way to live a life. That way is in line with the way the Author of life designed it. Everything else out of line with that produces misery. David says that we simply perish apart from Him. This is particularly true in the spiritual realm of our lives.

So what are those streams that nourish us in this area?

I’m so glad you asked.

Bible Reading

Let’s be honest. There are many things about discipline that a lot of human beings just don’t like. They don’t like eating right. They don’t like exercise. They don’t like ___________. I cannot tell you how many Christians I have seen having a sour or embarrassed reaction when I ask them about their Bible reading. It’s like I’m talking to a 5 year old just having asked him or her to eat their vegetables.

If you’re a Christian you have probably heard this already more times than you can count. If you want to know God, you need to know who He is, what He did, and what He said. Thankfully, He wrote it all down for us so we don’t have to guess or wait for some mysterious revelation of His Spirit.

If you want to grow in your relationship with God, you need to read your Bible. Find a plan that works for you. Some people do the One Year Bible. Some people do 5 Psalms, 1 chapter of Proverbs, and one other chapter in order. Some people do one chapter a day. Some people read one chapter from the Old Testament and one from the New. I use the Professor Horner System and have for years. I do not recommend sticking with one verse a day (especially if it’s just an introduction to a devotional) because it is far too easy to pull one verse out of context and believe that it says or promises something that it doesn’t.

If you don’t know your Bible, you will not know God or His Truth as you should. This will only and always lead to missteps and uncomfortable consequences. I have watched many fall into thinking with their feelings because they refused to develop this discipline. The Bible is clear about this as well: my people perish for lack of knowledge. The knowledge spoken of in this passage is knowledge of God. There is no substitute.

Now let me add: I’m not talking about reading what someone said the Bible said. I’m talking about reading the Bible itself. In the same way that I would highly recommend reading what the founding fathers of the US wrote rather than what a textbook said they said or reading the Constitution itself rather than what someone else said it says.

If you read the Bible consistently, you will develop a strong understanding of God, who He is, what He did, what He said, and you will have a strong conscience. You will know the difference between right and wrong. But if you are going to develop that, you are going to have to go to the gym of Bible reading… every… single… day.

Prayer

Prayer is nothing more than an ongoing conversation with God. It is communion with Him. It is about seeking Him.

If you have received a card or an email from me that isn’t public education related, right under my name you will see Matthew 6:33: seek first the Kingdom and His righteousness and all these things will be added to you. Seeking the Kingdom means seeking the King.

I feel a great need to emphasize this because, for many, prayer has become the preferred to-do list to the genie in a bottle. We often plead with God for the things we want. There’s nothing wrong with that. However, if that’s all that we’re doing, we’re missing the point. The point of prayer is to seek Him first. Some have phrased that as seeking His face (who He is) rather His hand (what you can ask Him to do).

Can we say we really have a relationship with someone if we don’t talk with them regularly? Is it really a healthy relationship if all we do is ask for things from the other person without truly wanting to know them? How do you build a strong relationship? Interaction! God gave us that means in prayer but it’s not the only means.

Worship

Here’s the thing that a lot of people miss. When we say we were made in the image of our Creator, it means we were created for a purpose: worship. Because we were created for that purpose, if we aren’t worshipping God, we will worship something else that isn’t Him. That will erode our soul and rob us of life.

When the Bible references worship, it is almost exclusively corporate; i.e. with a group of fellow believers. I know there are many out there today who say that isn’t something they need or are interested in pursuing. They have either been hurt by a church, they are content with worshipping God in nature by themselves, and/or they just don’t like people. I will only say this: if that is what you are telling yourself, you are not arguing with pastors or anyone else. You are arguing with God and you should stop. He is undefeated in debate.

Find a Bible believing, Bible centered, Gospel preaching congregation near you and make going a weekly habit. If you are the husband in your home, be the one who leads the charge out the door on Sunday morning.

Corporate worship is important to our growth. So is private worship and family worship. These are habits that will only benefit us in our growth in Christ.

Discipling/Evangelism

When we have been given an incredible gift like God gave us in eternal life, the only way to say thank you is to pay it forward. There are two ways to do that. All of us are called to do both.

Discipleship is an investment in those who are younger or less far along in the faith than we ourselves are. There isn’t a person in the Kingdom who can say that no one did this for us. It’s our privilege to do the same for someone else. This doesn’t have to be someone younger than you are. All that is necessary is to find someone who is walking in the faith. You can support and learn from each other. It is important for every believer to pass on what they have learned or stand alongside someone who is enduring something through which Christ led you.

In a similar way, the greatest need of anyone who has yet to bow the knee to Jesus is Jesus Himself. A few years ago, Cru released a statistic that the average American hears the Gospel 27 times before they respond in faith. Some respond the first time. Others respond the 100th time. Only God knows which one we are speaking with and how many times they have heard the message. Ours is to be faithful and leave the results to Him.

I have found that the tendency of American Christians is to outsource this privilege and responsibility to so-called “professional” Christians (Pastors or Evangelists) or to church programs. That is an error that is actively depriving us of growth as disciples. Please understand that all the great commission passages are directed to every believer and not a chosen few. Jesus promises to be with all of us as we do this. If we want to grow in trust with Him, we need to be sharing our faith with others.

There are so many more spiritual disciplines that I could have shared about or added to the list. Many of these will be covered in successive posts under different categories. If you are lacking discipline in this area, I highly suggest structuring a time when you can be consistent and sustainable in your practices. For me, that time is in the morning. For some, it’s in the evening. For others, it’s over lunch. The point is: find something that you can stick to every day and get in the groove. It will change your life for the better.

Disciplines are nothing more than patterns. They are either helpful or harmful. They either help us to grow or lead us toward less. These spiritual disciplines will help us to grow. Next time, we’ll dive into the mental and emotional disciplines.

Be blessed my readers!

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Socialism is a Social Analyzing Tool

Socialism was originally developed as a more desirable economic choice to another system: capitalism. Marx was the enemy of capitalism and especially private ownership. He suggested that it created an impoverished working class (the proletariat who he also called wage slaves) through taking their resources and labor to empower a ruling class (the bourgeois). The bourgeois were necessarily few in number and owned the means of production. They were the empire builders or maintainers from which he coined the term imperialists. The imperialists had all the power. Therefore, they could exploit the working class who were oppressed and never able to rise except through revolutionary struggle.

The socialist definition of justice is wrapped up in freeing or lifting up the oppressed. What it really boils down to is a quest for power. The bourgeois had the power. In theory, Marx believed it should be in the hands of the proletariat, but his arguments betrayed his real motive. He actually believed it belonged in the hands of a few intelligent elites who exercised that power on behalf of the workers (specifically himself). Ironically, he could not see how his theory just replaced one oppressor with another.

In this worldview, those who hold to capitalist ideas of free markets or are part of the ruling class are the oppressors. Marx viewed the imperialists primarily through an economic lens. He viewed society in terms of a class war. At first, it was the obvious clash between the proletariat and the bourgeois. He went further though. He said that the middle class itself was the problem even though much of the middle class in capitalist countries did not own any means of production. He made it clear that their support of imperialist policies made them just as much an enemy of the workers as the bourgeois. He labeled them oppressors as well as the royal and wealthy classes of Europe.

In some ways, he was illuminating a European problem that many had been challenged at a number of different points from the year 1215 up to the present day. This is an over 800 year long European conversation. What is significant about 1215? It was the year of the signing of the Magna Carta which made it clear that everyone, including the King, was subject to the rule of law.

At that time, Europe had a feudal structure that had remained in place from the establishment of the royal class as far back as Merovingians in 450 AD France. The royal class owned everything, including the land. The peasant class worked the land to pay their rent, feed their families, and provide a living for the Lord of the land or the landlord. If they failed to do so, the landlord would kick the peasants off the land. Whatever anyone made on the lord’s land was not really theirs. Many different people attempted to change this system because they viewed it as unjust. Most of those people died at the hands of the lord’s personal police forces (their knights). The Magna Carta was the beginning of the end of the feudal system. It made even the King subject to the law of the land for the first time in European history.

Marx used many of the same terms to describe capitalism claiming that it was feudalism by another name. Not only was his analysis flawed (as actual history has shown), what he sought to build in its place was more like feudalism in the end than even what he vehemently opposed.

The Socialist Binary

The Marxist/socialist worldview is binary: there is always an oppressor and the oppressed. The oppressed always outnumber the oppressors who hold all the power. If the oppressed want that power, they can only gain it by taking it back through revolution. If this cannot be achieved politically, violence is an acceptable and necessary means of achieving and sustaining the desired outcome.

Marx himself focused the bulk of his energies on the economic and political aspects of his theories, hoping for nations to embrace them as he watched his vision of utopia blossom across the globe. It was very convenient that neither he nor his colleague, friend, and benefactor Friedrich Engels lived long enough to see the fruit of his theories. It is highly ironic that the vestiges of the European feudal system that made Marx’s blood boil for the oppressed would be exactly what would be established in his name in China, Vietnam, North Korea, the Eastern Bloc, the USSR, Cuba, and so many other countries who committed national suicide by adopting and implementing his ideas.

The Social Analytical Binary Tool Applied

The Family Oppressor

In the late 20th century, Marxism evolved. Their focus on class warfare was not gaining traction in the United States or Western Europe. It became clear that the political and economic principles of it were untenable in any realistic sense. They produced the exact opposite of what they promised to deliver in every country where they were applied. Marxists began to look for other ways or contexts to use their analytical binary tool.

The war shifted from the classes to the household and family in the 1960’s. To be sure Marx and Engels wrote extensively about the “ideal” view of the family much earlier. When Marxists sociologists began to apply their binary tool, the nuclear family itself was a tool of oppression. Never mind that Marx and Engels each had nuclear families of their own over which they ruled as the men of their respective houses. They still wrote and preached that the existence of a nuclear family with an authority structure was oppressive in and of itself. Obviously the husband was the oppressor and the wife and children the oppressed. The wives and children required deliverance from the oppressor husband.

Marxists then learned from another of their followers, a professor of linguistics at the University of Chicago named Noam Chomsky, that it is important to redefine or adopt new language when they seem to be either losing an argument or need new momentum to recover a political narrative. When these were combined, third wave feminism arose relabeling the imperialist husband model as the general “patriarchy” that needed to be demolished so that women and children could be liberated from their in-home oppressors.

The solution was to destroy the nuclear family in order to free the oppressed (women and children). What this accomplished was leaving the supposedly oppressed without their God ordained protectors. Domestic violence and crime skyrocketed.

Rather than focus on the negative agenda of Marx and Engels (destruction), 1960’s Marxists took a page from professor Chomsky and began to positively affirm other models of family, giving rise to the free love movement. Of course, this quickly led to the rise of the LGBTQA2+ movement. It started a “live and let live” libertarian mindset movement but increasingly became more militant as time passed. Now that acceptance has largely been embraced in our culture, any dissent is considered hate speech. This is one example of what Marx and Engels described as the long walk through the institutions of society.

The Race Oppressor

Around the same time, the battlefield shifted again from the classes, to the household, and then to race. However, this was not in the same way in the beginning as it is now. Under Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., there was a decided non-Marxist vision for an America that was true to its founding promises: that all men are created equal. The USA has been striving, fighting, and even giving the blood of its sons and daughters for 250 years in an attempt to be true to that promise. As Dr. King put it, he dreamed that one day his children would grow up in a United States where they would be “judged not by the color of their skin but the content of their character.” It became clear on the national mall that day that Dr. King’s dream was not just for black children in America but for all children and the nation as a whole. This is not a Marxist dream. This is an American dream in line with the vision of our founding fathers.

As usual, Marxists hijacked that dream with Chomsky’s language tactics and turned it into something it was never meant to be: a race war. In the Marxist mind there is always a binary of oppressor and oppressed. Eventually the narrative became that the white man was the oppressor and everyone else was the oppressed. This became defined even more narrowly during COVID as the cis-gendered, heterosexual, middle-aged, Christian white male oppressor.

The Faith Oppressor

Marx and Engels applied their tool to religion early on and demanded that the state should adopt atheism as its religion. They believed and taught that the Church, the synagogue, the mosque, or any other religious entity were the tools of the oppressors to subjugate the workers. Their gathering places, followers, and way of thinking needed to be found and eliminated in order for the Marxist utopia to be achieved. In every socialist country in history, one form of religious persecution or another has followed and/or endured during the ongoing revolution. It has to be this way because Marxists see the world through a binary lens. There can only be an oppressor and the oppressed. This forces them to rewrite history anywhere they gain power to frame the narrative of their new socialist country in terms of the binary.

Because Marxism is a social analytical tool with only two categories, the oppressor is always the enemy. The oppressor is not just the enemy of the people. Whoever the oppressor is becomes the enemy of the state. This is why almost every Marxist/socialist country devolves into or gets caught up in genocide. The purge and religious persecution always follow the revolution. Once the oppressor is identified, they must be eliminated. Hitler identified the Jews. Stalin identified the Jews, the Muslims, and the Ukrainians. The Yugoslavians identified the Germans. The same fate always awaits any political dissidents or opponents of the regime. The warring tribes of Africa identified each other depending on who ended up winning the power in their revolutions. For some reason, there is always a strong anti-semitic strain that takes root wherever socialism spreads, a fact that Nazi Germany and Socialist Russia used to justify their oppression of the Jews.

How Marxists Apply the Binary Tool Today

Socialism is clearly on the rise in urban areas in the United States. What is coming and has come with it?

We need not look far for an answer. Marxists in our day are intent on replacing the nuclear family, destroying “the patriarchy,” and labeling cis-gendered, heterosexual, white, Christian men the oppressors. They are intent on the destruction of the Christian faith by their own admission. They have been in the process of rewriting our history in binary terms of oppressed and oppressor. They have identified their oppressor and identified everyone else as the oppressed. They have applied this binary logic to Israel as well identifying Jews as the oppressors and everyone else who lives in Israel as the oppressed but particularly the Palestinians.

Should they gain sufficient power within our nation, no one should be surprised at what will follow. Marxism has a remarkably consistent, long history in the same direction with uniformly predictable results everywhere it is tried. Because of Chomsky’s practical cautions, their leaders hope this might not look like an overnight revolution as it has been in other countries. However, there has never been a socialist takeover of any country without violence of some kind. Socialism’s goals never change. The march toward revolution never stops. There will be an eventual outcome to which we rush but few think about the endgame before it happens.

The first thing we should expect is a consolidation of power. Socialism breeds totalitarianism. Opposition in any form will be rooted out. This will happen by cancellation first, followed by dismissals or firing, and ending in violence against the opposition.

The war against the oppressors will express itself in our foreign policy. If they win and keep moving their agenda forward, we should expect that any support of Israel will be withdrawn. We should also expect that we will eventually be drawn into the attempted destruction of Israel by our own hand; the goal being to “free Palestine.” The Jews are the oppressor after all.

The war against the oppressors will express itself by class, race, and gender. We should expect to see cis-gendered, heterosexual, white Christian men cancelled, then silenced, then marginalized even further than they already are. If that does not produce the desired outcome (and it won’t) they will eventually be stripped of employment to make room for the oppressed. Those who protest or resist will eventually be rounded up by our own government, imprisoned, executed, or exiled.

The war against the oppressors will come divide our homes. We should expect to see families divided, children against parents and parents against each other. We should expect that the governmental agenda for our children will supersede any authority we think we can exercise as their parents. The children must be liberated after all.

The war against the oppressors will impact our wealth. We should not expect to own anything, our homes, our businesses, or our vehicles.

The war against the oppressors will bring totalitarianism to our government. We should expect to live a controlled existence where everyone is equally poor except for our government leaders/elites who will justify their opulence by arguing that they have to put the best face forward to the rest of the world.

Marx’s long march through the institutions will continue until it impacts every aspect of our lives. If that’s what you want, socialism is for you.

Before you decide on that though, I highly recommend that you become a citizen of a socialist country. If you want to do this, the Scandinavian countries of Europe don’t qualify. Their worldview is largely why Scandinavian countries are not socialist countries. They are more properly understood as constitutional monarchies with large social safety nets, making them look more like the UK than China. Since they are still monarchies, this might be problematic if you are a fan of the “No Kings” protests. Be that as it may, in all ways, these European countries are still very much capitalist. They have very few mindsets identical to Marxism apart from certain incursions on personal freedom which Americans recognized and objected to long ago. We would not have a country without that recognition. It’s why we left Europe in droves in the first place.

No… if you really want to test out socialism, you will have to choose somewhere like China, North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela, or Vietnam. Don’t go as a tourist. You won’t get to experience the full reality in that way at all. Emigrate there. Become a citizen. Get a passport. I believe you should assert your personal rights as well. You should try insisting that they provide for you. Demand that they translate everything into English for you. You should decry their oppression of the people. You should post on social media any corruption that you see. After you have done that, see if you like the outcome. You can write to us from your prison cell while you await your execution. Perhaps then you will understand why the US doesn’t have borders to keep people IN. Only socialist countries shoot people on sight who try to escape.

If you want to stay here, there might be a better way to gain that perspective than putting your life at risk. You could just ask some immigrants in the US who dodged bullets as they left the only home they had ever known, barely escaping with their lives from a socialist nightmare. What was your life like? Why did you leave? Why did you choose the US and not somewhere else? What concerns do you have about the US right now? I would especially encourage you to have those conversations with anyone who is now a US citizen who came here from Eastern Europe any time before 1985. You can find them. They are out there. They have some strong opinions that they are more than willing to share.

Foisting your views on the rest of us without some practical lived experience under socialism is actually more like giving us the directions you got from a broken compass while insisting that east is west. Reality is undefeated and hypocrisy is nothing more than a mask.

Socialism is not, nor will it ever be, for me.

I sincerely hope that the overwhelming majority of Americans are with me.

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When I started this, I made it clear that this work is a Kingdom building effort. I’m taking on issues that I hope are a blessing to all of us. Life is precious. It demands to be lived well. We only get one chance to make it the best that we can.

If you have found help from the principles I have outlined here, then my goal is achieved. I hope you’ll let me know if they have.

So far I have covered 3 pillars of the best possible life anyone can live. This is not some kind of reboot of Joel Osteen (honestly, not a fan… if you want more on that you can message me at the end). If anything I hope it’s a positive correction for our culture and each one of us. The three pillars we have looked at so far are 1) truth, 2) integrity, and 3) accountability. None of these exist in a vacuum. They all inform each other and are critical to the function of each other.

In short:

• If your life isn’t built on the truth, then it’s built on a lie. There’s no middle ground on this pillar. I’m not talking about your truth (whatever that means). I’m talking about the Truth.

• The truth is tenacious. It will not just disappear or leave us alone. Sooner or later, we will have to embrace it. Fighting it only produces misery. Why is that?

• The second pillar, integrity, defines our relationship to the truth. It is the lack of integrity (a misaligned relationship with the truth), that causes misery. We all know that there are areas of our lives that are out of line with the truth. The more we bring them in line, the better life gets.

• Part of that alignment includes radical accountability in multiple dimensions: to God, ourselves, our family, our friends, and our occupation. We have responsibilities. The more we embrace those and fulfill them, the better life gets. Those accountability areas are the proof that our practice is lined up with the truth.

So how does discipline fit into that as pillar number 4? Discipline is the daily, repeated pattern of practicing 1) seeking out the truth, 2) embracing it with as much integrity as possible, and 3) holding ourselves accountable to God, ourselves, and others. It is pursuing the right thing every day, day in and day out.

I often find that’s the problem. Discipline isn’t very popular. The IDEA is popular. The PRACTICE is not. Here’s what I have found though in 58 years of practice.

The disciplined life is the only life that anyone can call good.

There are many reasons for this but I’m just going to get into a few as a general overview in this section. First we’ll talk about what discipline is not, then what it is, and then what it does.

What Discipline is Not

I think the best place to start is with the word itself. There is a lot of confusion around this word. For instance, my initial reaction to this word is visceral and usually includes an adrenaline rush. I was raised in an era when corporal punishment was totally appropriate so when I hear this word in any context my first reaction is not discipline in the biblical sense. I simply have a memory of the sound of my Dad’s belt coming off or my school Principal saying, “Grab your ankles.” Please understand that I earned every one of those spankings. I also know that may bring to mind some overwhelmingly painful memories if you have ever endured abuse. If so, I’m very sorry.

We are not talking about spankings or punishments. The root word for discipline is Greek. It is a biblical word. To discipline is to disciple. It means to teach. A discipler is a teacher. A disciple is a learner.

We are also not talking about working ourselves toward perfection. Perfection is impossible in this life as every single human being still has a sin nature. We cannot escape that sin nature apart from its ultimate end: death.

We are not talking about earning God’s favor. No one can do that either. The good news is that the only One who could earn it already has through His death and resurrection. We rest in Christ’s finished work. No amount of work that we do or fail to do can add anything or take anything away from what Jesus has accomplished on our behalf.

We’re also not talking about intensity. Often people decide they need to make life changes so they employ a new level of intensity. Ordinarily, this level of intensity is impossible to sustain. It lasts for a few days or maybe a few weeks but ultimately peters out. We might call it a momentary flash of enthusiasm but it’s not discipline.

What Discipline is

“If all that is true, what is discipline and why even bother with it Pat?”

Great question… and it deserves a biblical answer. Here is the best I can do:

• Jesus calls us to a disciplined life. Discipline is consistency.

• Jesus calls us to obey His commands. Obedience requires discipline.

• Jesus calls us to be disciples. Learning requires discipline.

• Jesus has called us to be good stewards. Stewardship requires discipline.

In contrast to the above, discipline is relentless in its consistency. One of two things usually derails it: an overly enthusiastic beginning or a lack of patience with monotony.

The classic example is of someone who decides that they need to lose weight. They embark on a completely changed lifestyle with a radical reduction in caloric intake and a huge increase in exercise. After a few hours, days, or weeks, the enthusiasm wears off and the results never come. At this point some declare, “See it doesn’t work!” The reality is that the approach was all wrong. A change in lifestyle is necessary to change those things about ourselves but we can’t a) change everything overnight or b) expect results in a couple of weeks. It requires consistency over time. As John Maxwell put it, if you keep taking five swipes at the trunk of a tree with a sharpened axe every day, eventually the tree will fall… but not on day 1. Discipline requires consistency.

The second place where people typically fall out is in the monotony of discipline. Some people love their goals, want to pursue them, but the work of getting there is just plain boring to them. They want variety. Often, they find that they want variety more than they want their goal. They abandon the habits that will lead to their goal because they’re tired of doing the same things over and over. Discipline embraces monotony in important habits and calls “boredom” its friend. At the very least this is counter to a culture that is obsessed with entertaining itself to death. Discipline is definitely not entertaining.

Regardless of the excuses we produce, Jesus calls us to a disciplined life. In fact, it’s throughout the Bible in both Testaments. Why even be disciplined? It is the God ordained way to develop us. The process is called sanctification. God is responsible for our sanctification. His Spirit does it in us. At the same time, He also calls us to participate in the habits that will move us closer to Him.

When Jesus says, “If you love me, keep my commandments,” He doesn’t mean to keep them just once. He is looking for consistency. Consistency communicates love. Consistency is the hallmark of discipline. Yes Jesus saved us. Yes He did all the work. And yes our love response to Him for that is obedience out of gratitude for His finished work. We will not grow in obedience without discipline. Discipline, in this sense, is just applied, consistent communication of our love for Jesus.

It’s very much like marriage in this sense. There is an old joke about a groom who takes his vows and pledges his love to his wife at the altar in front of a roomful of witnesses. After they have been married for 30 years, she finally asks him, “How come you never tell me that you love me?!” He responds, “I told you on our wedding day. If it changes, I’ll let you know.”

That is hardly a marriage to write home about. Sadly, it is the relationship that many claim to have with Jesus. They said yes to Him at the moment of believing, pledged their lives to Him, maybe even were baptized as a public declaration of the same, and then they proceed to not say it anymore by their grateful response in obedience. Either they are convinced that since Jesus paid it all they can just go on sinning as before or they never really meant it in the first place. Either way, this can hardly be called faith or love. Obedience requires discipline.

Jesus talks about this in detail in Matthew 25. If you never have, you should read it sometime.

The second definition I gave was the call to discipleship. It simply means to learn. We all know what it takes to learn: practice. In fact, there are so many skills that we have all learned through intentional practice. There are so many more things that we can learn through practice. Practicing once doesn’t mean much. We have all experienced the feeling of being “rusty” when it comes to something we used to be very good at but haven’t done in a while. All learning requires some discipline. Of all the things that school teaches us, this is likely the most important lesson rather than the content itself. Consistent application of good practice will gain us skills that we can apply to some use. Life works best like this. If we want to be good disciples, we are going to have to be good learners. Learning requires discipline.

One of my goals has always been to be a lifelong learner. I don’t really see how we can afford to be anything less. I got that from my parents. Learning was important to both of them whether they were in school or not. So it is for anyone in life, especially for the Christian. We can never come to the end of our study of God and who He is. We will forever be learners in this life and the next.

The third definition I gave for discipline is stewardship. Having grown up in the 1970’s in an aviation family, my first reference for this was either stewards or stewardesses. Of course, now we call them flight attendants. The terms were changed because those who did the job objected that the term ‘steward’ implied that they were servants. That is a medieval meaning of the word. They were right to object given the negative context of the time.

This is not what the Bible primarily means when it uses the word stewardship. The Bible’s definition is someone who has been given a great responsibility or been entrusted with something precious. The most classic example is when Jesus tells His disciples the parable of the talents. He entrusts money to three of his servants. They are to be good stewards of the money until he returns. Two double their master’s money. One buries the one coin he is given in the backyard because he is too afraid to risk losing it doing business. The one who returns what he was given without any increase is chastised severely. The others are given more because they have proven themselves to be good stewards.

So here’s the biblical truth. Whether you are a believer or not, you have been entrusted with many things by God.

You are a steward of your body.

You are a steward of your family.

You are a steward of your occupation.

You are a steward of your mind.

You are a steward of your time.

You are a steward of your livelihood.

And I could list many more as we all know. Discipline is the means by which we steward the things that God has given us. Steward requires discipline.

What Discipline Does

The Bible also says that His commands aren’t burdensome. They exist for our good. Why would discipline be necessary? God informs us by telling us what the end game of discipline is. The Bible says if we hate it or have no practice of it we will die. The Bible also says that if we die in that way, we will look back in regret saying things like, “If I had only loved discipline…” That is no way to live.

Discipline serves habits. Habits produce outcomes. In and of themselves, habits are either good or bad. I refuse a middle category for habits. I have found that those who claim a middle-ground habit are either slowing down decline in a particular area or just delaying a goal that could be accomplished more efficiently through a better habit.

I’ll use an example from my own life. In my teens, I developed a love for endurance athletics. I decided to commit to cross country, track, and swimming competitively. I had structure and accountability around those activities. As a result, I achieved more than I ever thought I could even though I was not in any way a superstar of any kind. The best things I developed through that experience were a tougher mental mindset and a higher pain tolerance. As a 15-18 year old boy with a hummingbird metabolism, I also burned insane amounts of calories so I could afford really bad eating habits at the time.

I am convinced that habits function like Newton’s Laws of Motion. They have inertia. Habits in motion tend to stay in motion. Habits at rest tend to stay at rest. When I left high school, my structured athletic endeavors ended. I didn’t have anywhere near the talent necessary to compete at the collegiate level. I poured my efforts into vocal music. My caloric output went to bare minimum. My metabolism remained high and my eating habits didn’t change: high volume and bad food choices. My habits with eating and exercise were at rest but my metabolism was still able to keep up. There were little consequences in my twenties, particularly after I spent about a year with bodybuilders learning how to lift from them.

When I hit my thirties, the consequences started to mount. My eating habits and exercise habits were still at rest (bad) but now my metabolism began to slow. Then a few years into my thirties I began to pursue ministry, an occupation that is almost entirely sedentary unless the Pastor is intentional about these habits. I wasn’t. I ballooned over a 12 year period. When I graduated from high school, I just barely tipped the scales at 175 lbs. By my 42nd birthday I was 279.

That’s the power of discipline and habit. At first the effects aren’t noticeable. Then they take a dramatic accelerated turn for the positive or the negative. That’s why so many struggle once the consequences have become a reality. Reversing course requires a lot of force, time, patience, and persistence. Someone once said in a counseling setting, “It took you years to get here. You aren’t going to get out overnight.”

I started by changing my eating habits but only a little. It turns out you can’t kill a venti caramel macchiato every day. That’s 2400 calories of fat and a ton of sugar packaged in an energy crash. Black coffee it is… sad day. Processed food, gas station food, no matter how tempting, had to go too. That got me to a huge beer-bellied, totally overweight 255. I was still eating way too much and didn’t want to change it. I also wasn’t exercising.

Then it happened. Lisa made the statement that saved my life: “You know… we’d kind of like to have you around.” She was right. She almost always is. I knew it was time to change… past time. I thought to myself, “I got this. I’ll just turn up the cardio and it will fall off me.” Turns out that when you are in your fifties, a) you can’t just “turn up” anything without nearly destroying yourself and b) nothing just “falls off you.” Those habits that had been at rest had been killing me slowly but very effectively. I had to put new ones in their place but those old ones would not go quietly into the night.

Several of you know this from personal experience but eventually you reach the age where things just hurt. At some point I just accepted that and told myself, “You are probably going to be in pain no matter what you do. It might as well be for a good reason.” So I chose the pain of progress over the pain of regret.

In your fifties, if you want to turn things around, you have to eat right, rest right, and exercise right. I’m still getting the “rest right” part in place but the other two are cooking now. I went down to 195. I had not seen the other side of 200 since college. Then I deliberately gained back up to 225, the right way in the gym. Right now, I’m more focused on functional exercise for healthy movement and flexibility while maintaining the muscle mass I gained in the gym over the last 8 years. My VO₂ max is 45. I’m 58 years old. I can get down on the floor with my grandchildren and get back up. I can bench my body weight for six reps and still squat my body weight with a bad knee that I blew out in college and never repaired. I can dead lift one and a half times my body weight. For those of you who are weightlifting folks, you know that isn’t that impressive. All I can say is that if you had thrown a million dollar challenge at me on my fiftieth birthday to do all that, your money would have been safe.

And all of that required discipline: consistent establishment, practice, and commitment to habits.

It didn’t change overnight and there were many days (there still are) when I didn’t want to do it. But I’m a better man because of it and that has had positive ripple effects throughout all other areas of my life.

The exercise of discipline always does. It’s a life principle that doesn’t change.

In the next few weeks I will be exploring disciplined habits in as many areas of life as I can. For many of these, I will be talking about my personal habits and disciplines. Please understand that I am in no way attempting to show off. There are many people out there who are way more disciplined than I am. I will be using negative examples as well just like I did above. If anything I hope what you see is that I have dug many holes for myself over long periods of my life. It took disciplined positive habits to dig my way out. I’m still at it with a worn down shovel in the areas where I need to make more progress. I’m hoping that my mistakes and small successes can serve as an example for you of what can be done in your own life in certain areas.

Just please understand that discipline by itself is never the ultimate answer. It is only one pillar of four that makes your life great. Without the other three, it will help you but only so far and only in the direction that you aim it. Aimed at the truth, your life soars. Aimed a lie, well… you know…

God bless you folks!

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All ideas have consequences. They produce inevitable outcomes. Socialism is not exempt from this rule. Since there have been several countries and even regions of the world where socialism has been accepted, practiced, and subsequently redefined since its inception in the mid-19th century, socialism does have a legacy.

The Genesis of the Legacy

Karl Marx and Freidrich Engels are the founders of socialist thought even though they are known as communists. As mentioned in my previous post, Marx used the terms communist and socialist interchangeably in his Communist Manifesto. One of his disciples, Vladimir Lenin famously said, “The goal of socialism is communism.” Technically Marx was Prussian though the land where he grew up is now in modern day Germany. Engels and Marx became friends at University in Germany.

My point is this, socialism’s roots are German. During the 19th and 20th centuries, German Universities produced many thought leaders that profoundly changed the world and are still changing the world today. Germany during this time produced Marx, Engels, Neitzche, Freud, Schopenauer, Barth, Bultmann, Heidigger, Adorno, and Horkmeier. These leaders and their ideas produced other leaders: Otto Von Bismarck, Paul Von Hindenberg, Kaiser Wilhelm, Adolf Hitler and his entourage, and Walter Ulbricht. They also produced German unification at the cost of millions of lives, World Wars I and II, Germany’s relentless pursuit to rebirth the Holy Roman Empire (the Third Reich), the division of Germany into two different countries in the aftermath of World War II (east and west), the division of Berlin into two parts, the establishment of checkpoint Charlie, the introduction of neoorthodoxy, liberal theology, liberation theology (all of which destroyed the Church from within), critical theory, and eventually post-modernity. That history of thought leaders includes three attempted conquests of Europe, millions of dead, a church in ruins, and a history so sorted that the world will never forget… but I digress.

The Communist Manifesto was published in 1848 so these ideas have been around for a long time. After its publishing, Marx attempted to lead a revolution in Prussia and France. He stoked the revolution ahead of time through journalism, spreading his ideas in his own publication out of Cologne, Germany (about 8 miles from my family’s ancestral home in Dusseldorf).

Both of his revolutionary attempts failed. He was then sent into exile in England for the remainder of his life. He was so poor that he and his family survived off of the meager income he had from writing for the New York Tribune with the rest coming from Engels. Engels came from a wealthy Christian family and was a reluctant factory owner with capital. Apparently the irony that the fully committed communist had to be funded by a communist who believed in the theory but practiced as a successful capitalist was lost on Marx and Engels. Marx died young at 65 and was buried in London. Engels continued to propagate his ideas until his death in 1884.

This pattern is important because it is a pattern that would repeat: spread of the idea, attempted revolution, establishment of dictatorship (if successful), no funding to continue the revolution after killing the economy, poverty, death, abandonment of socialism, and a return to capitalism. One could argue that the pattern could be eliminated by never starting it in the first place.

Family Legacy

Both Marx and Engels wrote about the ideal family. Their ideas included:

• A matriarchal family system that excluded any male leadership. This was because men took leadership in order to pass on wealth to successive generations, a concept that Marx and Engels found abhorrent, though Engels himself was the recipient of it.

• Engels described the first form of oppression as the monogamous marriage. He famously said that the modern family is the, “open or concealed slavery of the wife.”

• Both men recognized the necessity of the nuclear family unit as being the key to a capitalist system. This unit promotes family wealth and reproduces workers to keep the system going. They failed to recognize that this provides a society with economic stability.

• Because of the previous bullet point, Marx and Engels proposed that private property be abolished. In Engel’s theory, this would create economic independence for the husband and the wife, removing the necessity of marriage, thus eradicating the need for the nuclear family and making possible free sexual expression for all men and women. A provider would no longer be needed because the state would fill that role. Therefore both women and men would be “emancipated.”

• In order for husbands and wives to be freed, children and their raising would become the responsibility of the state since the nuclear family was no longer needed. The state would rear and educate/indoctrinate the children so that the adults were free to engage in society. Even children became the property of the state.

The founder’s and proponent’s goals are clear.

The family legacy of socialism is the deliberate destruction and abandonment of the nuclear family by turning over husbands, wives, and parental rights and responsibilities from the parents to the state.

Economic Legacy

While socialism promotes itself as equitable outcomes for everyone, it never has and never will achieve this goal. The elite ruling class in any socialist country becomes unbelievably rich and far more free than anyone else while the normal everyday citizen becomes equally poor as the rest of the citizens who have no political power.

Statistically, this is a difficult category to understand. The reason is that there are only a few nations left that operate exclusively on socialist economic principles. There are 194 countries on planet earth. Today there are only five that define themselves specifically as socialist. Like Vladimir Lenin, all of them proudly proclaim that the goal of socialism is communism. The other formerly socialist countries have abandoned socialism’s economic policies for one simple reason: they produce universal poverty rather than universal wealth. Their socialist political structures remain, unable to see that they have themselves become the oppressors they sought to remove.

That said, of those nations who have embraced socialism at some point and are either actively practicing its tenets or were experiencing these outcomes when they were practicing, the stats are as follows for average incomes in US dollars:

• China $17,000/year

• Vietnam $4,080/year

• Cuba $200/year

• Laos $2,400/year

• North Korea $640/year

• Algeria $4,960/year

• Angola $1,710/year

• Zimbabwe $2,260/year

• Tanzania $1,220/year

• Mozambique $530/year

• Guinea $1,410/year

• Bolivia $7,200/year

• Venezuela $3,600/year

Regardless of claims of “reduced cost of living” in these places, I fail to see how anyone can describe these figures as anything other than poverty… except of course for the government officials in charge of the economic policies.

Many proponents of socialism point to Scandinavia as a fully functional socialist model. They would be correct if these countries were actually socialist. They are not. Nations in Scandinavia function largely without socialist political structures though they have a wide spreading social safety net. Also, they have free market economies that would have made Marx and Engels nauseous. However, they may describe themselves, they cannot say that they embrace socialism even if they make limited use of some socialist principles. Further, while their average incomes may exceed $60,000 a year, these countries have the highest tax rates in the world, each in excess of 50%; so subtract 50% or more of that income right off the bat.

Every Eastern Bloc country including the Soviet Union abandoned socialist economies for free market capitalism. Even China has had to abandon socialist economic principles in recent years to save its national economy which cannot function without capitalist principles at work. All of these countries’ national and household economies rapidly and exponentially improved as a result.

This is because any incentive to produce something is removed under socialism, unless the incentive is coercion. These governments are happy and eager to provide coercion whenever necessary.

The economic legacy of socialism is universal poverty instead of its promised universal equity.

Life Legacy

One of the arguments put forth in favor of socialism is the argument that health care should be universal and treated as a basic human right. Socialist countries provide universal health care for their citizens so this must be an area where socialist countries excel.

There is little appreciable difference in the life or health spans of people across the globe except in certain blue zones which have an exceptional number of octogenarians. These do not exist exclusively in socialist countries or capitalist countries. They are small local regions that are outliers on the world stage, mostly distinguished by lifestyles.

One thing that we do know is all medical procedures are subject to government agency approval in socialist medical systems. While someone may need something medically, that doesn’t necessarily mean that it will be available to that person depending on several factors including age, probability of success, or even cost benefit analysis to the state.

What we can say about socialist countries is this: human life is not valued in socialist countries like it is in other places. How do we know this? The following socialist countries employed means such as violent revolutions, purges, mass executions, devastating man-made famines, and prison camps to account for the following death tolls under socialist rule:

• Germany-under the rule of the National Socialist Workers Party (Nazi’s for short) Germany executed or worked to death the following numbers of German citizens: over 6 million Jews, over 8 million Russians (many prisoners of war), nearly 2 million Poles, 500,000 Roma gypsies, 250,000 people with disabilities, over 300,000 Serbs, nearly 2,000 Jehovah’s Witnesses, tens of thousands of political opponents, and hundreds of thousands of homosexuals.

• East Germany (its own communist country after WW II)-lost 1,400 people though statistics vary. The East German Secret Police (Stasi) had a shoot to kill policy for any dissenters.

• Poland-30,000 to 50,000 Polish citizens were murdered by their own government over a ten year time span, most of them for protesting the government. An additional 320,000 were deported to Russian Gulags as political prisoners whose survival rates were much lower than regular criminals in those remote Siberian work camps.

• Hungary-2,000 Hungarians were executed and tens of thousands were deported to Russian Gulags. 3,000 more lost their lives in an attempt to get their country back in the 1956 revolution. Tens of thousands suffered under forced labor, imprisonment, and forced relocation.

• Romania-estimates range from 500,000 to 2,000,000 Romanians killed under socialist rule.

• Yugoslavia-estimates range from 150,000 to 500,000 Yugoslavians and an ethnic cleansing of Germans.

• Bulgaria-estimates range from 5,000 to 40,000 Bulgarians including an ethnic cleansing of Turks and Muslims.

• The USSR-records are disputed but an estimated 10-60 million Russians were either executed or worked to death by their own government. This also involved an attempted ethnic cleansing of Ukrainians.

• China-estimates range from 40-80 million. The current religious cleansing in progress involves the imprisonment, starvation, and elimination of Uyger Muslims.

• Vietnam-estimates range from several hundred thousand to over a million Vietnamese.

• Laos-estimates range from 100,000 to 300,000 Laotians

• Cambodia-1.5-3 million Cambodians estimated in a four year time span

• North Korea-1.6 to 2 million North Koreans since its founding in 1948

• Cuba-30,000 to over 100,000 since the Castro’s assumed power

• Venezuela-nearly 10,000 Venezuelans under Marxist rule

• All African Marxist or Socialist Countries combined: 1.5 to 2 million Africans, primarily Ethiopians, Angolans, and the people of Mozambique. Many of these include tribal ethnic cleanses.

• An estimated 15 plus million political refugees seeking asylum have escaped socialist countries from the former Eastern Bloc countries, Russia, Cuba, and Venezuela alone. If it’s so great for everyone, why risk your life and the lives of your family to leave with no guarantee of a new home?

As one can see, socialism not only universally kills its own citizens if they dissent. It also has a pattern of ethnic genocide of any particular group that might oppose the regime or who the regime sees as the cause of the problem. Though the numbers above do not always give a specific breakdown of those targeted groups, they do exist in nearly every case. Feel free to confirm what I am saying with a little research of your own.

These figures do not include the almost universal policy of legal abortion in these countries. China’s one child policy alone is responsible for the murder of 370 million Chinese children in their mother’s wombs according to their own Ministry of Health, the overwhelming majority of which were screened first to determine their sex. The female babies were far and away the greater share of those children aborted… so much for the matriarchal society Marx envisioned.

Regardless of what its promoters say, the legacy of socialism is death visited upon the people it claims to govern for their good.

Liberty Legacy

Marx and Engels were especially critical of what we would call basic human rights in the United States of America. To them, human rights were only so-called rights. They were designed by the wealthy to subjugate the workers. They called them “illusory protections.” They argued that any form of individualism was inherently selfish and only existed at the expense of the workers. These “rights”, they argued, were more about protecting property and a right to inequality than they were about protecting people.

But again, don’t take my word for it. Let’s look at socialism’s track record when it comes to basic human rights. Of course we could look at the trail of the blood of their own citizens from the previous section, but let’s dive a little deeper. What rights do citizens have in socialist countries?

Socialist countries guarantee basic necessities to their citizens like no-cost or low cost health care, subsidized housing, jobs, education, and retirement and maternity benefits. They also have worker protections at their jobs but in many cases no opportunity for advancement and certainly little or no pay increases with increased responsibilities.

What we should all think about though is that none of these things are free. Where does the money come from? Since all wealth is redistributed in a socialist system, there is no benefit to being rich in these countries. Often when the revolution comes, the only people capable of escaping are the wealthy… and they take their money with them. The state loses those resources. While certain mayors in our country may be able to dismiss that with a cheeky, “Bye!”, how many job creators can a state economy afford to lose before it breaks? The other solutions are widespread taxation and printing more money. No one can reasonably disagree that both of those solutions create out of control inflation, accelerating poverty.

After this, the incentive to work is removed as the only people who get to enjoy the vision of the newly constructed and continually constructing utopia are the political leaders. These factors account for historical occurrences like Mao’s famine that killed 50 million Chinese peasants, the Holodomor in Ukraine that resulted in 5 million deaths, the Soviet famine (not to mention the bread lines that persisted in the USSR) caused by grain being seized from the rural farms and distributed to the cities and the army, and the persistent famines in North Korea, though all other socialist countries have experienced similar shortages. These often are accelerated by government mismanagement. If the government moves quickly to make food production collective, pushes for industrialization, or exercises poor central planning, they can make food shortages an immediate reality or exacerbate them so much that the cause is easily seen.

Many people are enamored with this solution because they now believe that certain economic outcomes should be universal rights. Unfortunately under socialism, there is a cost: the evaporation of individual rights. Speech is not free. Political dissent is not allowed. Protests are state offenses and those who participate in them are simply arrested, tried, convicted, and never seen again if they aren’t shot on sight. There is no petitioning the government for redress. The first move in a socialist revolution is to disarm the populace and as we will see in the next section, religion is not protected either. That includes all the rights protected under the first and second amendments in the US Constitution. Stripping those paves the way for the state to take over everything. What you end up with is a lone man standing in front of a row of tanks in Tiennamen Square defying the government, demanding freedom, only to be run over by the column of tanks.

The liberty legacy of socialism is lack of ownership, famine, the end of personal rights, and all of those replaced with government tyranny.

Faith Legacy

Marx famously called religion, “The opiate of the people.” What he meant was that a classless and religionless society would be the best possible society. The state religion of socialist countries then falls into one of two categories: atheism or secularism. Both ascribe to what I would call statism, or faith in the state as the ultimate authority.

I think most people know what atheism is. This is not a problem if it’s something that a person holds to personally or even practices with a group of people as many do now in the US. Debating in the public square is something I would even defend in the US as well as debates with any other religions. Marx’s point though was this: there can be no power higher than the state.

Therefore, debate is not allowed in socialist countries. The state takes the place of ownership, the family, food, rights, even God Himself. No one can challenge or debate the state. If the state religion is atheism, as it was in the USSR, you were not allowed to speak against it. You could have your own personal beliefs (if you weren’t murdered for them during the revolution), but you were forced to keep them to yourself. I had the opportunity to visit Russia after Perastroika. Russian Christians told the truth about some of the first moves of the Bolsheviks when the Red Army swept across the nation. They had a clear saying about those who held even to the Russian Orthodox Church: the Volga River ran red with the blood of the priests. It’s very typical in socialist revolutions for the purge to begin with religious leaders.

Secularism’s primary tenet is the belief that there must be a separation of church and state. If you believe that the founding fathers of the US intended to establish a secular nation, you should really read the works of the founding fathers themselves rather than what someone else tells you they said. You would be astounded at how different the story becomes when you read their actual words instead of a textbook.

Statism is the belief that the state supersedes everything else. This system is inherent to socialism. We slide closer to it every time we look to our government to fix something that we can fix ourselves. The more power the state has, the close to socialism we go. It is amazing to me that after 250 years of freedom from a monarch (an all-powerful centralized government) Americans would even consider creating one of their own on our home soil. Our founders wrote the Constitution specifically to limit the power of the federal government to protect the rights of its people. They knew the real threat to all of our freedom was a stronger central government that gradually grew to control every aspect of the average American. Socialism is literally the opposite of this. It could be argued that its adherents are arguing for us to return to rule under a crown of their own making.

The Soviet Union, the Eastern Bloc countries, China, Laos, Cuba, Mexico, and Nicaragua all have histories of religious persecution under socialism. There is a reason for this. Two of the most famous socialists/communists Marx and Lenin believed religion to be a tool of oppression that must be eradicated. Typically, this has focused on Christians of all types but it has not been limited to just Christians in many of these countries.

The faith legacy of socialism is privatization of faith, subjugation of faith communities, and violent, deadly persecution of adherents.

Conclusion

Socialism delivers the exact opposite of what it promises. It promises equity for all and delivers an oppressive ruling class, religious persecution, and genocide in its place. It promises financial security and delivers poverty and scarcity in its place. It promises freedom from oppression and provides an oppressive government in its place that makes all the previous oppressors look like lawn gnomes by comparison. It promises life and guarantees health but delivers demolished families and death instead. Historically speaking, the theories of Marx and Engels have been tested, tried, and proved wanting EVERYWHERE they have been tried. They belong on the scrap heap of disproved human ideas like the earth centered Universe or the flat earth.

This ideology is a utopian ideology that has only ever delivered dystopia for the masses it claims to serve. Everything we know the USA to be will die if this evil ideology succeeds. Some ideas are better than others and this idea is so bad that it must be destroyed completely. This is why I hope that it is talked about more and not less. It is my hope that every American will see it for the lie that it is. To do less, is to risk the success of our 250 year experiment in life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, a project far from perfect but an absolute unprecedented success in world history.

May freedom ring and tyranny fall so help us God.

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This one might be a tough one for introverts or for those who have been badly burned by other people in their lives. I have been burned by others as well. Truthfully, every human being on planet earth has at one time or another. Some of those experiences have been horrific. There is no need to sugar coat it at all.

So let’s be truthful. It’s true that we have been the victims of the sins others have committed against us. It’s also true that there are many times when we have been the offenders, aggressors, and criminals in someone else’s life.

Why are we like this to each other? It all goes back to something that we are all loath to admit: we all have a sin nature and it gets the better of all of us all the time. Any time we get close to another human being, the eventuality of getting hurt exists. Since we all know that’s true, we could just completely dispense with human interaction at all and declare the introverts or the profoundly wounded are right… if weren’t for one incontrovertible biblical truth:

It’s not good for man to be alone.

For clarification, at this point in the story, Adam already has a relationship with God. Therefore, in a spiritual sense, he is NOT alone. God means something else here and something very specific: he needs human friendship. If anyone could have said, “All I need is me and my Jesus,” it was Adam at this point in human history. So that argument was demolished just 45 verses into the Bible. Other human beings are necessary to the very good life that God wants for everyone. He is very clear that He desires that none should perish. His patience is proof that He gives everyone time to repent, embrace Him and the great life He wants for us.

That’s not the only place where God reminds us that we weren’t built to be alone. Solomon, the wisest mere man in human history, writes over and over again about principles of friendship. In Proverbs we read, “A man of many companions may come to ruin, but there is a friend that sticks closer than a brother.” If this isn’t an indictment of social media feeds and likes, I don’t know what is. We have seen this play out again and again. Ask yourself how many “friends” you have on social media who like or love your stuff and how many of those would be there in your darkest hour, drop what they are doing, cry with you, pray with you, or come to your aid with whatever you needed. We don’t just need clicks. We need friends, true friends.

In the Song of Solomon, he writes: Two are better than one, because they have a good reward for their toil. For if they fall, one will lift up his fellow. But woe to him who is alone when he falls and has not another to lift him up! Again, if two lie together, they keep warm, but how can one keep warm alone? And though a man might prevail against one who is alone, two will withstand him—a threefold cord is not quickly broken. Disaster will come in a sinful world. In those times, according to this passage (and the overwhelming bulk of human experience), lone wolves die. Those who have friends survive or, if they die, at least they do not die alone.

Both of those passages introduce an idea about friendship that is largely lost in our current culture. Solomon writes: A friend loves at all times and a brother is born for adversity. Love doesn’t mean affirmation of a lie. It doesn’t mean that we always agree. Friends tell the truth. They are there when it’s hard, especially when it’s incredibly hard, so hard that we are either going to or feel like we’re going to die.

The message is clear: we can’t do this alone. We weren’t meant to, we weren’t built to, and, every time we try to, we handicap ourselves. Friendships are essential.

Jesus is the ultimate friend

So let’s start with the best friend ever: Jesus: friend of sinners. That is really good news for us. Jesus was not afraid to be seen, eat with, travel with, talk to, hug, give a traditional greeting to (a kiss on each cheek), or even go to a wedding party with SINNERS.

You might be saying, “Of course Pat… what’s your point?”

I can think of at least two reasons why that is profoundly important. The first is that Jesus makes space for sinners. Why does He do that when He Himself is the Son of God? Even the Pharisees questioned Him about this because they couldn’t understand how He could pollute Himself with their presence. So let’s be clear. On planet earth, we are all polluted, especially the Pharisees. The only human being in the history of humanity who never sinned was Jesus Christ. He could never have come to the world at all if He kept His distance from sinners because ALL of the rest of humanity consists of sinners.

Yet He was and is our friend. Jesus was the kind of friend who would go all the way to giving His life in our place so that we could live. He said it Himself, “Greater love has no one than this; that He lay down His life for His friends.”

Our culture has changed dramatically on the question of friendships. I would venture a guess that many would now define friends as those who agree with me. Social media has conditioned us to hold our relationships at a great distance and divided us into groups through algorithms. The whole idea today seems to be that any disagreement or challenge in a relationship automatically removes the relationship. Cancel culture has taught us that unfollowing, unfriending, and ghosting are preferable to any conflict in a relationship.

Jesus shows us a better way. He is the ideal friend. He loves us AND confronts us. He teaches us and STAYS with us in our lack of understanding. He befriends us as sinners yet CALLS us to abandon our sin. Most importantly, He sees what our sin will cost us and He PAYS the price Himself. When the bullet is coming at us, He STANDS between us and the bullet. He gives up His life for His friends.

That’s the example that was set for us. That’s the high bar of friendship. Jesus didn’t just come up with this out of thin air either. The principles are there in the Old Testament. When Jesus said that He embodied the Law, He did so in all areas, even friendship. Solomon wrote faithful are the wounds of a friend and the sweetness of a friend comes from his earnest counsel. Jesus embodies all of this in ways that no mere human being ever could. Ultimately, He is the friend who never lets us down and tells us what we need to hear rather than only what we want to hear.

If you really want to understand what friendship looks like, you have to know the ideal friend first. There are really only two options on this side of heaven: friendship with God or friendship with the world. Scripture is really clear about friendship with the world: it is enmity with God. If you don’t know what that word means, it means you are either an enemy of God or a friend. If you want to be His friend and have that kind of relationship with Him like Moses did (Scripture tells us that (Moses spoke to God face to face; as he would to a friend), you need to abandon your enemy status by changing your path. Repentance means to turn away from something and toward something else. Then surrender to the only One who is truly holy. If you don’t count Him your friend, I pray today is the day when you make your new best friend: the friend of sinners.

Discernment in Friendship

There’s only one person with whom we can have the ideal friendship. We all have to remember that according to Genesis that is good but not good enough for us. Since everyone else is a sinner, we have to have some discernment in our friendships. Does the Bible have anything to say about that? Thankfully, yes!

The Bible makes a distinction between another human being with a sin nature and a person who is given over to their sin nature completely. Sadly those exist so there are cautions in the Scripture such: bad company corrupts good morals. Association is a very powerful force on earth. We tend to marinade in our friendships and come out tasting like the people with whom we spend time. We all need to be careful about our association. Solomon also reminds us: Make no friendship with a man given to anger, nor go with a wrathful man. The reason: you will become like him yourself. To sum up the Bible’s principle here, pay careful attention to the kind of people you call friends. You will become like them so examine the outcomes of their character.

While that is true, it is also critically important that we examine ourselves. What kind of a friend am I? Scripture has something to say to us on this score as well:

• Proverbs: Do not forsake your friend or your father’s friend, and do not go to your brother’s house in the day of your calamity. Better a friend nearby than a brother far away.

• There are also multiple passages, historical accounts, and parables about the ill fate of those who betray their friends: most notably Hushai the Arkite and Judas Iscariot.

We need to be the kinds of friends that our friends can rely on in hard times. It is our most important role as a friend. Betrayal is not just betrayal of a friend but of our call as a friend and thus an offense against God as well.

Community and friendship

I think that many of the problems we have as a nation are stemming from the fact that we have lost the art of friendship. How many of us know our neighbors’ names anymore? Their kids’ names? Do we have a way to reach them in case of emergency? Do we look out for them and their property when we see something that could be a problem for them?

I remember being very close to our neighbors as a kid. They were not only good to us but we did our best to be good to them as well. We didn’t agree on everything but it didn’t matter. We understood something about each other: we were essential to each other’s success.

I live in a homestead/prepper kind of culture right now. What I know is this: those who band together in groups of 150 or so end up with much higher survival rates in the event of a societal collapse. I know… it’s a weird factoid but follow me for a second. If that’s true, the solution to many of our issues as a nation may be to remember where we came from and intentionally build community right where we are. WE are the solution to our problem. The government can only get in the way on this one.

I would encourage us all to be accountable as friends and members of our community. This helps us and everyone around us that love and care about to flourish.

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As you can see from the title, I am not a socialist. I will try to define that view in the words of its own advocates so that we can get an understanding of what socialism really is and what it is not.

My hope is that Americans will see that this ideology is about as anti-American as it can get. It is the exact opposite of our national identity and an inevitable, imminent threat to our rights.

What socialism is

Socialism is an economic theory. At times in human history this theory has been more popular than others. Mostly today, it is a thought experiment for rich intellectuals or college students. It has become increasingly popular among those who are struggling to make ends meet. This appears to be because it is an economic system that promises provision to citizens.

The economic theory of socialism is tied inextricably to a political structure. Socialism as a political system is a left wing ideological phenomenon because it concentrates power in the state instead of in the people regardless of its claims to the contrary. It is a perpetually pregnant ideology that never delivers the promised baby of equity.

Socialism is based on a premise that in capitalism the workers are oppressed. In recent years this has shifted to a race-based oppression argument. Those who own the means of production are the oppressors. In capitalism, this is individuals who own businesses. Socialism’s proposed solution is a shift in ownership.

To put it in the simplest possible terms, in a socialist system the government owns the means of production. In other words, there is either no or only limited ownership in a socialist system except by the government.

To look at the outcome of their argument, the owner is the oppressor in capitalism. Now the government is the owner. Therefore, the oppressor is now the government. While the private owner can only affect the income of a worker or group of workers, a government is armed with a military and a police force so it can oppress in ways that an individual can’t. Sadly many socialists don’t see that they are trading an individual oppressor for a government that oppresses. They trust that a group of individuals will avoid the ills of a single individual.

Socialist Country Realities

You cannot own a business or if you do it is heavily regulated and taxed. Advocates would say you don’t need to own a business because the government will provide for your needs.

You cannot own your home or it can be claimed at any moment for a more collective purpose. Advocates would say that you don’t need to own a home because the government will provide you with housing.

In the most extreme cases, you cannot even own your career. Your labor is not yours nor is the fruit of it. It exists for the common good. At the very least, your income will be heavily taxed so that it can be distributed to those who are in need. Advocates would say that the government will provide you with work and determine what that work will be; tailored to your particular skills and talents.

You cannot own your church or your faith. The church in any socialist country is regulated by the state. Those who serve in pastoral roles may only speak what the government says they can. Their speech is to be kept within certain bounds, especially if they have anything to say about the government. In many cases in socialist countries, clergy are actually government employees or agents. Since it is a secular ideology focused on an end goal of atheism for all, its aim is to eventually eliminate all faith, except of course for faith in the state. In this sense is the ultimate fusion of church and state. Advocates would say that speech and religion should be controlled for the common good though the degree to which they would do so may vary.

The press is owned by the state in a socialist system. The news, being state owned, controls the flow of information to the people. In every socialist state, there is some kind of limitation placed on what one can view on the internet as well. Socialism does not allow for competing views outside of the government’s view of events.

In socialist countries, free speech, freedom of religious practice, freedom to petition the government, freedom to assemble or associate with whom you want, and freedom of the press do not exist. There is certainly nothing like the second amendment of the US Constitution or a Bill of Rights in any of these countries either. Disarming the populace is often the first move in a socialist takeover. A disarmed populace cannot fight back.

In every socialist system that exists in the world, all of these aspects of life and others are ultimately owned and/or controlled by the government.

The government manages all of this property and business to insure “equitable outcomes” for the populace. In other words, everyone’s outcome is the same. The goal was to create an ideal society where there was enough for everyone to be equally wealthy rather than some taking advantage of others. This is why socialists are obsessed with redistribution of wealth. Trillionaires, billionaires, or millionaires should not exist. They are hoarders of wealth that should be shared with the common people. In the mind of a socialist, it is morally wrong to make too much money though individually they would argue about what that dollar amount should be.

In order to accomplish these goals, a political structure must exist where all power and authority is concentrated in the state. There is a political definition for this kind of system. It is called totalitarianism. You may also know it as authoritarianism. For those who are students of history and politics, fascism is a subset of totalitarianism. Fascism is not a right wing phenomenon. It is a left wing political ideology fueled by nationalism and obsession with race.

Socialist political systems exist exclusively as national dictatorships. There are exactly ZERO countries in the world that are socialist and not led by a dictator. Their leaders may shy away from grand titles by calling themselves President, Kim Jong Un being an example of the latter. Elections may be held in those systems but they tend more toward being a tool to root out those who oppose the dictator than an accurate picture of the will of the populace.

Ultimately, the goal of socialism is that these conditions would exist for the entire global populace. Socialism is not content with local expressions because it has its own set of moral beliefs. It is always seeking to spread and proselytize.

Once some of its ideology has a foothold in a particular country, it seeks to expand its influence through progress toward its goal. Marxist leaders in the 1960’s called this, “The long march through the institutions.” What they meant was the goal was to take over the government infrastructure progressively until enough power was gained to take over the system entirely, ushering in a socialist system that would continue to progress toward a communist utopia.

Given the definition and goals of socialism, making this system work without a dictator is impossible. In the history of socialism, a charismatic leader with exceptional communication skills has been required to shift a populace toward it. There must be an all-powerful authority in place to enforce/secure equitable outcomes. Granted, no dictator can accomplish any of this single-handedly. The dictator will have to create governmental structures that will take orders from him or her to accomplish his or her vision for the country. Loyalty to the dictator and his or her agenda is paramount in a socialist system.

In socialist countries, taxes are extremely high or one’s income is simply owned by the state, upward mobility is impossible except through political office, individual freedom evaporates, and overwhelming universal poverty is extremely high except for the ruling class.

Famous socialists include: Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, Mao Tse Dong, Che Guevara, Adolf Hitler, George Orwell, Pol Pot, Ho Chi Minh, Fidel Castro, Noam Chomsky, Bernie Sanders, Zorham Mumdani, and Alexandria Osacio-Cortez.

What socialism is not

Socialism is not a democratic system. Democratic systems distribute power to the people. Socialism retains and concentrates power in the state, regardless of the claims of the Democratic Socialists. Democratic socialists would say that the masses give up their individual wills to the collective good through their vote, which is still nothing less than a surrender of personal freedom.

Socialism is not a representative system. A representative system empowers the people to choose their representatives and spokespeople while encouraging and creating platforms for robust debate around dissenting views. Socialism retains and concentrates power in an elite group of national authorities who either present themselves as the charismatic leader who will eventually become the dictator or they are chosen by the dictator. The system does not allow for dissension or debate. Their electoral goal is to only have socialist party candidates on the ticket so that there are no other options.

Socialism does not champion personal freedom. Personal freedom is less important and to be submissive to the greater goal of equitable outcomes for all. In socialism, the state knows best and the populace is to submit to it. This is what Mayor Mumdani meant when he mentioned, “The warm glow of collectivism,” in his mayoral acceptance speech. Because socialists believe this wholeheartedly, they often justify moderating their beliefs while they run for office in democratic systems in order to gain enough power to implement their agenda. In this system, the ends (their ultimate goals) justify the means… whatever those means may be.

Socialism is not the social welfare state. Within socialism, a large social welfare state is viewed as an intermediary step to a socialist society but they are not the same thing. Many Americans are confused about this. Believing in, supporting, or voting for a large social welfare system does not make one a socialist, however wise or unwise we might consider those efforts to be.

Socialism is not communism. Communism is the end goal of socialism. That is why some of the names of famous socialists above may immediately bring communist dictatorships to mind for many. Communism (as defined by communists) has never been achieved so there has never been a true communist country despite their claims. Socialism is the intermediate step, even if some socialists would vehemently disagree (especially Orwell).

While many modern socialists would say that they embrace some private ownership and redistribution of wealth (from each according to his ability to each according to his contribution) and communists reject the idea entirely (from each according to his ability to each according to his need), Marx deliberately used the terms interchangeably in The Communist Manifesto. One could say that a socialist is either a compromised or uncommitted person who still embraces some capitalist principles or that person will eventually lose patience with the speed of progress and become a fully committed communist.

I have more respect for the communists. Socialists have an agenda that they keep hidden for the purposes of advancing that agenda. Communists don’t lie about what they believe or what they intend to do. Their actions are at least in line with their beliefs. Don’t confuse that with me saying I agree with them. I don’t at all. Their actions are in line with their beliefs so at least they have integrity when they speak about what they believe. As we will see in the next post, their actions are horrific and they are beginning to play out on American soil… but more on that later.

Conclusion

If you’re a prepper in Idaho, you’re probably about to have a stroke right now.

If you’re an urban Seattlite or New Yorker, this might sound like a good idea because you can’t figure out how to find a job that pays enough to cover your rent even with five roommates. You’re thinking, “Maybe the government is the solution.” You’re willing to sacrifice your freedom, and everyone else’s, for an outcome that you hope will bring you and other economic relief. The economic crisis you are in is driving you to look for an economic solution, even if that solution comes with extreme political consequences for all of us.

Regardless, speech is still free in the United States of America… that is, unless socialism makes more progress here than it already has. In the next post, I will talk about the outcomes of socialism, intended and unintended.

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Some of what I have to say here will be outworkings of previous posts simply because I want the best life possible for everyone. Of course, you can completely disagree with me and call me crazy. I just know from personal experience that there is no best life possible without Jesus and His grace first.

That one truth impacts everything.

Now I know you all know that I am going to be writing from the perspective of a man. I have learned something about that on my journey of manhood. Perhaps you have seen what I have seen as well. I meet men who are solid and committed, who are doing everything that they can to be the best possible men they can be for their spouses, their children, and society in general. You may not agree with me but I am completely convinced that this is the majority of men regardless of what the Instagram baddies have to say.

I have also met many men who present as men but are really just boys in men’s bodies, regardless of their age. They are definitely male but life is all about them and not about others. To put it bluntly, they never grew up.

To be fair, I could say the same about women.

Based on those observations, I have come up with a definition of manhood that has been helpful to me and some others that I have used to encourage them on their own journey:

Men run TOWARD responsibility.

Boys run AWAY from it.

True men regard responsibility as a sacred privilege and trust, a stewardship from Christ, and a sobering yet joyful calling. Boys want their entertainment, their vices, and their adventures regardless of the cost to others or themselves. I have met 14 year old men, 80 year old boys, and vice versa.

My life has been spent striving to be the best possible version of the man God made me to be. I have seen dramatic failures in that endeavor. The successes I have had I cannot credit to myself but only to the grace of my Lord and Savior. All by myself I have earned hellfire. He alone has saved me from it and made me into the man I am today.

So when I write these principles for this article, please know that this comes from a heart to help others born out of the hard lessons that I have learned when the boy has come out in me rather than the man.

A family is a glorious responsibility. I hope that everyone reading this has one of their own or is on their way to building one of their own. That responsibility must include multiple angles:

Responsible to your spouse

The biblical definition of a family rubs against the grain of our society’s definition in the present day. I have heard many express the following ideas: 1) that a married couple isn’t really a family until they have children of their own, 2) that when one of their children get married they have gained a new son or daughter who is now a part of their family, 3) that family first means the generational family, 4) a family can be any collection of people committed to each other, and 5) that children are the first priority. If you hold to any of these, what I write next may be hard to read but it will be faithful to God’s design which He put in print for us.

The first family in Scripture consists of Adam and Eve. They are a family just the two of them by themselves with no children involved. God calls that (above all else that He created) very good. In fact, it’s the only thing in the creation account that He calls very good. That’s the biblical definition of a family: one husband, one wife, in covenant commitment to one another before God. Anyone who says otherwise (even the law of the land) is lying to you.

He further lays down a principle for the generations to follow these original two that will apply to every pair that follows: so a man will leave his father and mother and cleave to his wife and the two shall become one flesh (Genesis 2:24). After quoting this Jesus then reemphasizes this in Mark 10: so they are no longer two but one flesh.

This confronts many of our modern ideas right away. First, a married couple is a new family of their own. While they remain connected to their parents, they have now started a new family. Their priority has now changed from their primary responsibility as children being to their parents (more on this later) to their primary responsibility and allegiance to each other. The parents of the newly married couple become the extended family of the new unit. Therefore, according to God’s design, family first means my wife comes before anyone else, including my parents or our children. Normally, this will not present any conflict whatsoever.

However, there will likely be times when one must choose. What I tell husbands is: you have already made the choice. You made it the day you committed yourself to your wife in front of God and a roomful of people. What I have often reminded wives is: you committed to your spouse before you committed to your children. Your spouse will be there long after your children have left the home for their own lives. They are a priority to be sure but our marriages are the first priority. We get these priorities out of whack at our peril.

Failure to recognize these foundational biblical principles has been the root cause of a significant portion of the problems I have seen in counseling married couples in conflict.

Responsible to your children

Some may take what I have written above as saying that children aren’t important. Nothing could be further from the truth. God’s first command to Adam and Eve is to be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth. Those little image bearers are the fulfillment of God’s command even in their worst moments. If you don’t think they have bad moments, you aren’t a parent yet.

So let’s be honest: children are a sacred trust. We are to raise them in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. We are to provide for them and their needs. That includes their emotional and spiritual needs. Fathers especially are not to exasperate them.

Then there is simultaneously the hardest and the most important role that a parent must perform. Frankly, as a teacher, I can say that this is the one that is most needed right now in our world: we are to set an example of what it means to be a responsible human being who is out for the good of our family and our community. A good mother sets the best possible example of Godly womanhood that she can wherever she is. A good father sets the best possible example of Godly manhood that he can wherever he is. Please note that I’m not saying we are responsible to set the perfect example. Only Jesus could do that. We do have to do the best we can do in His strength. In order for that to happen, we each have to fulfill our own roles and confess, apologize, and repent when we fail. Husbands lead out a deep sense of humility and responsibility. Wives come under our mantle of protection and provision as an act of worship to Christ.

Our culture today tells us that one parent is enough. If you look back through some of my previous posts you can find an article on the societal impacts of an absent father. They are staggering. Frankly, if the dad is MIA in any way, it is far worse for his children than if their mother is MIA in any way. The statistics on this subject are irrefutable. Our culture would never admit this regardless of the clear statistics to the contrary but that doesn’t make it any less true.

Responsible to your extended generations

Originally I wrote grandchildren here but I revised it. I plan to see my great-grandchildren and perhaps my great-great grandchildren if Jesus tarries in His return. What does Scripture say that I owe them?

An inheritance.

Proverbs says that a Godly man leaves an inheritance to his children’s children. Surely this means some kind of generational wealth. I believe what the Lord has in mind is more than just money or property. It definitely means at least that but if we think that is the only inheritance we are passing on we are missing the point.

We are to leave the inheritance of the Gospel to the generations after us. They should know deep in their souls that only God can save through the finished work of His one and only Son Jesus Christ. They should know that they are sinners in need of Him just like everyone else. What they choose to do with that knowledge is between God and them.

We are to leave the inheritance of Godly character. Our generations after us should see our life habits and their outcomes. They are always watching whether we think so or not! We should endeavor to pass on the fruit of the Spirit by living it out in the power of the Spirit right in front of them. That Spirit empowered example is more impactful than we know.

Responsible to your parents

I wrote earlier that when a child marries they leave their parents and start a new family of their own. This is true and taught in Scripture.

Something else is taught there as well: honor your father and mother so that it may go with you and you may live long on the earth. In the New Testament it even says that if the parents have children who are living, they are to care for their parents rather than have them come under the care of the church or the government so that the kids can make a return for their parents’ investment in them as children.

Too often in our culture, we pass this responsibility off to institutions. In some cases, this may be absolutely necessary. However much it may be required of us to outsource the care of our parents, we must remain engaged in our care for them as much as we can. The disturbing current trend of “no contact” in regard to parents cannot be squared with this command to believers except in the most extreme cases of breach of trust and unrepentance. If that rubs you the wrong way and you are a Jesus follower, think of all the things of which He has forgiven you. Then reread Matthew 18:21-35 otherwise known as the Parable of the Unforgiving Servant.

I am acknowledging that there are extreme cases where it simply is not safe for anyone to be in the presence of someone who not only will not admit that they have committed horrible wrongs against another but have also refused to stop doing so. We can forgive from a distance but that is not the first command to a believer in Christ. Restoration of trust is another matter. The number of parents who have committed those kinds of crimes is a small minority and God willing will remain so.

Generally speaking, the rule applies to us all.

If we are to live responsibly, it will be reflected in the ways that we relate to our family. May we all be the kinds of men and women who do so with humility and urgency for His glory.

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A Special Edition

It’s a provocative title to be sure… intentionally so. It’s also truthful but maybe not in the way that some readers might think.

I realize what I’m about to write here may be profoundly alienating to some. Often, the truth wounds before it heals. I’m going to do my best to speak the truth in love so if I err on either side of that, please be patient with me and consider affording me the same kind of grace that you might wish from others when you are addressing a difficult subject.

I have a unique perspective from which to speak to this senate race. It’s not because I live in Texas, though I have plenty of family that do. As Americans we all have a stake in the outcome of this important senate race in Texas as a shift in the leadership could have a profound impact on the state of the whole US. For that reason alone, I think anyone should be paying attention. That said, I don’t have a Texas citizen’s stake in the outcome.

It’s not because I know the man personally. I don’t.

What I do know is the context of his upbringing from a religious perspective. This is a religious conversation rather than a political one. When I use the word liberal in reference to him, I mean it theologically even though he is a self-described liberal politician.

I began my journey in ministry in the PC (USA). At the time, I was called and under the care of Chapel Hill Presbyterian Church in Gig Harbor, WA and the Presbytery of Olympia. The process began for me in the winter of 1998. The PC (USA) was already fracturing from fundamental disagreements about the Christian faith and had been for some time. However, the conflict’s seeds are much older than the late 1990s.

American Church history in the 1900s was dominated by one controversy: the fundamentalist/modernist controversy. There were two main public figures in that fight. The fundamentalists had a hero in J. Gresham Machen, a Princeton Theological Seminary professor who championed the historic truths of Christianity and eventually parted from Princeton to form Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia as well as being a key organizer of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. The modernists had Harry Emerson Fosdick, the Senior Pastor of First Presbyterian Church in Manhattan’s West Village, New York City. Fosdick and the modernists believed in the rising tide of so-called “liberal christianity” from the German schools of theology; that the miracles and resurrection of Jesus were spiritual but mythical rather than historical, that Jesus wasn’t truly divine, and the Bible contained the word of God which the reader had to discern from the “errors” in the Bible on their own. Machen and his colleagues held to a classical understanding of the Bible being the Word of God written (inerrancy in the original autographs), that Jesus’ miracles were real, that He was and is fully human and fully God, and that His resurrection was a bodily resurrection. The term “fundamentalist” back then did not have the pejorative connotations that it has today.

This controversy piqued in the 1920s and 30s. Near the end of the initial fight, one of the greatest voices in the controversy, Rheinhold Niebuhr, accurately described this new religion (liberal christianity) in this way in his book the Kingdom of God in America in 1937: “A God without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross.” Everything about this so-called christianity (which is why I refuse to capitalize the word) is a counterfeit, straight from the father of lies.

As WWII commenced, many thought the controversy was over as we focused on other profoundly important global issues. Once the great war was resolved though, the conflict revived as Billy Graham and Charles Templeton sparred over the same issues in a very public feud. I am sure Dr. Graham would never have described it as such. He loved Templeton, prayed for him, preached to him, and sought his friendship and reconciliation as long as they were both alive even after Templeton publicly renounced the Christian faith. Billy Graham (whose wife Ruth Bell Graham had been raised in a precursor denomination to the PC (USA)) championed the fundamentalist cause rebranding it as “evangelical,” a term that many Presbyterians embraced. Charles Templeton faded into obscurity after becoming an atheist as the “evangelist” and sarcastic critic of his friend Graham’s cause. He is said to have returned to the faith on his deathbed.

When the PC (USA) formed as a union of several previous denominations coalescing into the largest Presbyterian denomination in the United States in 1967, its membership was over 4 million at its largest. By the time I entered the ordination process, the denomination’s membership had dramatically shrunk to just over 2 million. As of the end of 2024, the PC (USA)’s membership has shrunk to just over 1 million. Given my experience with mainline churches and their obsession with the size of their membership, I doubt very seriously that those numbers are accurate. In fact, I would guess that they are wildly inflated.

For my part, when it became clear that the battle for the denomination itself was lost in the late 2000’s, I departed for ordination in the Evangelical Presbyterian Church and then, after heartbreaking personal circumstances, much later for the National Association of Christian Ministers. I retain my reformed theological convictions. Through commitment to Jesus after long-term careful examination of the Word of God written, I have jettisoned several other Presbyterian distinctives that were tangential at best and anti-biblical at worst. Personal convictions aside, Presbyterians have had a profound impact for the good on my life and the United States in so many different arenas.

The founders of our nation looked to Presbyterians for the structure of our Constitutional Republic; specifically the balance of powers and representation in Congress. Presbyterians were largely responsible for the Great Awakenings in American history. They were also responsible for the theological arguments that led to the founding of the US, the end of the slave trade, and those who opposed ending the slave trade. American Church history has been dominated by Presbyterians from its outset. King George even blamed the loss of the colonies on what he called, “Scottish Presbyterian pastors.” So… what was the question on everyone’s mind about this once great institution that had so much influence? Simple: Why the dramatic decline?

My answer may be unpopular but it’s hard to avoid: the PC (USA) as an entity has abandoned the Christian faith. That’s why I referred to it as an entity, an organization, or an institution rather than a church. Like an already dead star millions of miles away whose light is still seen from earth, so the denomination still sheds some faint Gospel light on the world (thanks to Josh Howerton for that illuminating illustration). The aged remain, largely out of loyalty, and the youth have left looking for authentic faith in other places. Their steeples and buildings once ringing with the truth of the Gospel now have been conquered by pride flags, an overwhelming leadership who support abortion on demand and embrace euthanasia, and an approach to ecumenism that allows them to embrace animism at their General Assembly worship services, wiccan priestesses at their seminary chapel services, drag queens leading children’s time in their local worship services, and a faculty member of the once great Princeton Theological Seminary (the PCUSA’s flagship denominational seminary) arrested as a member of the New Jersey Antifa cell (a terrorist organization). Essentially, this organization has become the spiritual arm of the extreme left wing of the Democratic party; a destination that was inevitable given its consistent trajectory over the last 100 years.

As in all movements, there was an agenda and a strategy for this new religion called liberal christianity. The PC (USA) was not the only target. Every “old mainline” denomination in the western world was the target. The modernist liberal theologians began their take over within the denominational seminaries, replacing aging evangelical faculty and administration with those made in their own image. This eventually filtered down to the local church pulpits and then to the congregations. Whatever Christian faith remains in the PC (USA) or any of the other old mainline denominations is resident only in a few local congregations who have bravely and faithfully refused to give up the fight for the truth. I want anyone to know who happens to be a member of one of these churches that is standing tall for the Gospel that I fully support you in your stand.

In the PC (USA) and a number of other old mainline congregations, their properties, assets, and even their bank accounts are now held hostage by their presbyteries, bishops, or regions. If they wish to leave they must do so with nothing but their people and rebuild from the ground up with no assets. Dissent from the woke mob in charge now simply involves removal from the Church for anyone who dares to stand against queer ideology, ordaining anyone who seeks the office, or suggesting that separation may be in order now that division over essentials is a present reality.

Though it was a longer history lesson, it was a necessary one. Now, let’s return to the senate race in Texas.

James Talarico has been raised in the PC (USA) at St. Andrews Presbyterian Church in Austin, TX. This congregation is a flagship theologically liberal congregation standing proudly in the modernist tradition, whose Pastor of thirty years rarely uses the Bible and leads his congregation to hate the Apostle Paul who wrote over a third of the New Testament. Mr. Talarico is attending Austin Presbyterian Seminary. This PC (USA) seminary was at one time one of the only remaining classical bastions of Christianity in the PC (USA) seminary system but has long since abandoned those moorings for liberal theology. It is no surprise that Mr. Talarico speaks, believes, and stands where he does publicly. He is a product of his environment and history. He stands with Harry Emerson Fosdick, Charles Templeton, and the liberal theologians of today. I believe if confronted he would call them heroes of his faith. He stands against the J. Gresham Machens, Billy Grahams, and heroes of the faith once and forever handed down to the saints today.

Machen wrote a book during this long fought controversy that still speaks clearly to us with regard to Mr. Talarico. Its title is Christianity and Liberalism. Prophetically, he wrote it in 1923 and it is just as relevant today. In it, he successfully argued that liberal theology is not Christian in any sense but its own separate religion with its own belief system. He argued that the two were not compatible since they had competing truth claims. He was right then. He is right now. Over the last 100 years plus since its publishing, the trajectory of so-called liberal christianity has progressively (a word they love) moved from its confusingly close semi-resemblance to authentic Christianity at its inception at the turn of the 20th Century, to a clear and present abomination today. As Machen explained back then, there was only one place for this journey to end: apostasy.

Based on his clear and abundant theological statements, whatever James Talarico may be, he is not a Christian, regardless of his proclamations to the contrary. He does not believe in the Godhead. He does not believe in the Scriptures. His exegetical skills (the ability to read the Bible and interpret it) are reckless at best. He deliberately misinterprets the Scriptures to fit his narratives and beliefs, rather than having the Bible shape his beliefs. This makes him a false teacher and an impostor. If he were uneducated, one could argue that he was propagating his brand because of his own personal ignorance. He is not. His deceptions are deliberate and willful. He does not serve the actual Jesus but unapologetically serves a Jesus of his own making who bears scant resemblance to the Jesus of the Scriptures and history. He is attempting to disguise himself as a believer. There may be many reasons for this but principally among them must be an attempt to make himself look electable as a decent Christian man in a predominantly evangelical state like Texas. To his credit, he is erudite, well-spoken, and polished but none of that excuses or outweighs the above.

Then why am I grateful for him? I’m glad you asked.

There is nothing new under the sun

Americans tend to have short memories historically speaking. As a school teacher, and an older man, I am amazed at how little history present day Americans know. Maybe it’s because the longer I live, the more history I have personally experienced. But I also know that is only part of the story. The reality is there is a lot of history that we are supposed to know, especially our own, and our knowledge has fallen like a rock off a cliff (if interviews on college campuses about their lack of historical knowledge with students are any indicator).

For that reason, I deliberately kept the history lesson to the last 100 years and in the United States. The truth is, the veins of so-called liberal christianity run further back than that; much further. The beliefs, the agenda, and the strategy are always the same.

Impersonation is the first step. In order for impersonation to be effective, one must walk, talk, and present as if one is what one is trying to be seen as a Christian. Talarico wants to present as a tolerant, moderate, Christian who speaks reasonably in order to appear as an electable candidate. This is convenient given that the man he will run against, Ken Paxton, has made some very concerning life choices that are giving Texas Christian voters pause.

Every American Christian should remember that we live in a fallen world. Every time we vote we are deciding between two sinners. Every single person we vote for is a liar and a hypocrite in some form or fashion. The sooner we all figure out that we are never going to have the opportunity to vote for Jesus Himself, the better off we will be. The only opportunity we have to honor Jesus with our vote is to look carefully at the policies they advocate and the outcomes they will inevitably produce. Will those outcomes honor Jesus or not? And how can we tell the difference?

If we’re going to talk about character, then let’s talk about it. We are talking about two men here; two sinners. In the case of Talarico, we have an impersonator with an agenda. In the case of Paxton, we at least have a man who isn’t trying to present himself as anything other than what he actually is and his agenda is also plain rather than thinly veiled. Paxton is in the middle of a divorce and there have been allegations in his personal life for sure. Those things should at least give us pause as believers.

However, there is a very disturbing trend in Democratic strategy circles recently. The script goes something like this: run as a moderate to win the election and then legislate like a leftist once the election is won. The strategy appears to be to deceive in order to win so the agenda can continue. The philosophy behind that agenda appears to be that the ends justify the means. If you don’t think this is true, ask the residents of Virginia what they thought they were getting with their new Governor. Even Zorham Mamdani ran on a more moderate platform despite his open declaration as a socialist (which he also tried to moderate during the campaign).

Let’s be clear about the Democratic party’s agenda as well. In the 1960s, there was very little difference between the Republican party and the Democratic Party or their platforms. Sixty years later, both have moved left but one much further than the other. The Republican platform of today is almost identical to the Democratic party platform of Bill Clinton in the 90s. If you don’t believe that, place the two documents side by side and compare them. They are available online. I’ll wait…

The Democratic party leadership has now been almost completely taken over by the radical left with a clear and open turn toward socialism. Defections from their ranks to the Republican party is just one indicator of this reality.

Let’s be honest about socialism as well. That philosophical agenda and its proponents have been responsible for the murder of over 200 million people that can be accounted for since it became popular in a few countries at the beginning of the 20th century. As if that number were not staggering enough, when one includes the recent admission of the Chinese Ministry of Health that 370 million babies were killed by the Chinese government in the womb (the overwhelming majority of them female) we are over half a billion. For perspective, only five countries in the whole world have a population greater than 200 million. There are only two countries with populations over 340 million (China and India) so the Chinese “one child policy” alone is responsible for wiping out the population of any other country in the world PLUS millions more. Their policy would have wiped out the entire population of the world’s third largest country (the United States) at 340 million and then wiped out 75% of Canada as well with the remaining 30 million. Whatever anyone may think of socialism as an academic thought experiment, it is DEADLY when played out in reality every single time. There is no single governmental system in the history of the world that is responsible for more murders of its own citizens and greater poverty for its citizens as well.

There is nothing new under the sun. There have been many Talaricos and there will be many more. There have been many leftists for a long time and there will be many more. There have been many advocates for socialism and communism as well and there will be many more. We just have to recognize them for who they are when they show up. Mr. Talarico has openly, verbally, and unapologetically identified himself as a leftist and a socialist. He is now attempting to put on a mask to make himself electable. We must see him as he is and believe his many recorded words from the past despite his present day glosses on his clearly espoused beliefs that he is attempting to keep hidden.

We were born for such a time as this

I meet many who lament that these times are ours. We shouldn’t. All adversity presents an opportunity. In fact, one of the most important character traits any human being can have is courage, which can only be displayed and developed in adversity.

What kind of an opportunity is this for us? It is an opportunity to live out our calling. What is our calling in the culture around us? It is always to preach the Gospel especially to those who have yet to receive the gift of eternal life. It amazes me how many Christians don’t understand how offensive the Gospel is and should be when it is rightly preached. Why is it offensive? The Gospel a confrontation… always. That should surprise no one who has a relationship with Jesus.

So what is our purpose? We are to be all about the Great Commandment and the Great Commission. We are to love God and love people. We are to share the Gospel wherever we go. Included in that is teaching everyone to obey what Jesus taught. One very clear command that He gave us was to be salt and light in the world. It’s right there in the Sermon on the Mount.

Unfortunately, Christians in our nation in recent years have been derelict in our duty to be salt and light. I think everyone understands the idea of being a light in the world. We are to shed His light wherever we go. It’s His light; not ours. That light will shine on the good, the bad, and the ugly. We are called to call balls and strikes as we see them. It is part of our role in the world. Admittedly, the cost of doing so has increased in the last few years above what it was when I was younger. Canceling is now commonplace as is deplatforming, firing, and litigation. These are all legitimate fears. However, Jesus did tell us all that in this world we will have trouble. We should expect it.

Now that is just the light shedding function of a Christian. In my experience, most American Christians are completely lost on Jesus’s meaning regarding the function of salt in this famous portion of the Sermon on the Mount. It’s not really their fault. In our culture, salt is merely a seasoning so they interpret it as such in this passage. That was not the function of salt in the ancient world. Salt was used to preserve meat from decay. Since it was much more than mere sodium chloride (it wasn’t made in a lab like Morton salt is today), once the ‘salt’ molecules were absorbed into the meat what remained was a useless chalk-like combination of the other substances that was only fit for throwing on the road to make it like pavement. Jesus’s message to us was that if we lost our ability to preserve the world against the rot and decay of a sinless world’s constant slide, we were then worthless to this world.

In our political system in the United States, we have a unique opportunity to obey that command. We can vote like Christians who express God’s policy values at the voting booth.

This is where I will give you one statistic to prove that we have abandoned our salt role in our culture. 40 million Christians failed to vote in the 2024 election. Most of those were in so-called “blue state strongholds.” One can only assume that they stayed home because “my vote doesn’t matter anyway,” a lame excuse I have heard from many in Washington State particularly on the East side of the Cascades. 1.2 million Washington State Christians didn’t vote in the 2024 election. Governor Bob Ferguson won the office and immediately implemented and led one of the most aggressive and radical leftist agendas in the United States. People and businesses are fleeing that state like rats off a sinking ship because of it. Want to know how many votes Ferguson won the Governor’s race by? 480,000. If every Christian in the State saw it as their duty to God and country to vote, the outcome could have been a landslide in the other direction; but now we’ll never know.

There’s another issue as well. Many of those who did vote claimed to be Christians and voted like they never knew Him. When you look at the two platforms in our two party system in 2026, neither one is perfectly faithful to Jesus but one is dramatically anti-Jesus. The Democratic party is pro-abortion, pro-euthanasia, pro-child mutilation, pro-excessive taxation, anti-human, and, therefore, pro-death. There are a lot of things I don’t like about the Republican platform. I could even offer some scathing criticism of some leaders with whom I fundamentally disagree. But I am not going to pretend that their agendas are the same or that one does not reflect the values of Jesus more than the other.

We have a choice. Our faith impacts all areas of our lives; even which box we mark in November. If Christians vote faithfully, we might just get our country back. If Christians vote faithfully, we could prevent the advance of evil in the whole country.

Why am I grateful for James Talarico? His candidacy presents us another opportunity to clarify who we are as Christians and Americans. It gives us a chance to remember that our great nation will always be in need of defending. There is nothing new under the sun. We have been born for such a time as this.

Texas Christians, you have faithfully stood in the gap to preserve our nation more times than can be counted. We need you again.

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Two weeks ago I started with a definition of marriage. Since this is such an important subject, I couldn’t leave it responsibly without just a definition. In fact, it may take a few posts to get this subject properly addressed. Honestly, if I can manage to add value to your life on this subject in a few posts, that will be miraculous given the volumes of books and research on this subject alone.

Marriage is a covenant relationship. It is a blood oath to God and each other that you will remain loyal to each other and Him until your last breath. Serious business.

But to what end?

What’s the goal?

In a word: oneness.

One in heart, mind, soul, and body.

And even that has a purpose in God’s design. So let’s look at that purpose and what oneness looks like. It might help explain why so many rebel against the concept itself.

God created a system to support His vision

When God created marriage (remember we would never have thought of this idea ourselves), He created a system. It was to be a relationship of three people rather than two. The covenant is not just between two people. He is the third man in the fire of your relationship. Trust me. I know that some of you see it as a fire. In some important ways that we will get to in this post, it is meant to be.

God’s role in this relationship is to bring us closer to Him and closer to each other. Many of you have already heard of a triangle illustration for marriage. As each partner grows closer to God, like moving upward along the legs of a triangle toward the point at the top, they necessarily grow closer to each other.

This is an important illustration particularly given what I have already said about oneness. Though those two legs will continually grow together over time, they will never truly touch, one being absorbed into the other. Why is that important? Of all the arguments feminists have ever made against marriage, the most significant may be that a woman is “giving up her identity” or “giving up her identity to his.” She is not. Neither is her husband. By agreeing to this covenant as it was designed to function, they are only committing to become more like God, growing in Him throughout their lifetimes together.

This results in a relationship where there are orders of submission. The husband is submitted to Christ. The wife is submitted to her husband and to Christ. If there are children, they are submitted to their parents and thus to Christ as well. When this structure is maintained, the whole family exists under the protective covering of the Godhead. When any one of the family members steps out from under that structure, that person is now out from under the pattern that God designed and invites the chaos that comes with it into the family, the home, and their lives.

God created roles for the sake of His goals

God also designed roles in that relationship to aid this goal. He placed the husband as the federal head over the relationship and the wife as the helper within the relationship. Here again, we encounter modern objections to the structure itself. So let me say a few things about headship. This does not mean that the man is ultimately in charge. If the man is properly following God and submitted to God himself, it means that God is in charge. Sadly, this is not always the case for any of us husbands. Therefore when our wives see that we fail in this area (as we inevitably will) some feel justified in saying, “See he can’t be trusted. I won’t be led. I will lead.”

Ladies, if your husband is characterized by submission to his Lord and Savior, he is worth submitting to. You can also count on God intervening when you rise up against Him in those moments. This will not contribute to your oneness with him or the Lord. In fact it will actively work against it. This may be what Solomon means when he says that, “The wisest of women builds her house; but folly with her own hands tears it down.” (Proverbs 14:1

Men, your headship is not a crown. It is a responsibility to serve. Men function better under a heavy load of responsibility. If you are married, you should feel the weight of that responsibility daily. We were built to handle that weight. Our wives are not. What specifically is that weight? The weight of being the physical representation of Christ in our homes. We are to be the example of His life, character, and conduct that shines in such a way that it leads our families to Him. It is an incredible burden that cannot be born apart from a relationship with Him so please don’t try without it.

As many have said before, our role, men, is that of priest, provider, and protector. As priests, we lead the charge in all spiritual matters: prayer, other spiritual disciplines, and the priority of family public worship. This starts with our commitment to Christ and involves us leading our wives and children to Him whenever necessary. As providers, we need a full orbed vision of what that means. Ladies, we are not just an inadequate paycheck or an ATM. Provision is financial, a work ethic example, emotional stability, calming presence, good parenting, and problem solving while serving all the needs of our families. As protectors, we not only protect our families from physical harm. We protect them spiritually and emotionally as well. We do not do these things for applause and we rarely draw attention to them because Christian men understand that, no matter how good or effective we may be at these roles and responsibilities, we are in the end inadequate servants who at best can do what we have been told.

Ladies, your role is helper and it is a wonderful Godly role. It is not demeaning nor is it subservient. God is described as a helpmate in Scripture so you can see already that to fill that role leads you closer to Him. Someone once said that she viewed submission as keeping her head just under her husband’s enough that when God swung at him with a holy 2x4, she didn’t get hit in the process. That is a pretty good illustration.

So, my sisters in Christ, if you have a man who understands these things and is seeking to grow in living them out on a daily basis, he will flourish more under your acknowledgement of his strengths than he will under the notifications of his failures. He is likely already painfully aware of all the ways that he falls short and if you had one opportunity to hear how he speaks to himself about those things in his quietest moments you would not want to contribute anything more to the conversation. I can promise you that.

To my brothers in Christ, if you have a woman who encourages and supports you in all things, you have an excellent and precious gift (that’s what Solomon says in Proverbs). She does not need your approbations. She needs your listening ears and a heart that is always for her. We tend toward solutions when often what she needs is to just be heard and seen.

God’s goal for us is holiness

This is the real rub in the marriage conversation. The goal God has in mind for every follower is holiness. The Apostle Paul reminds us that without it no one will see the Lord. Thankfully, any holiness that we have and need for salvation has been secured on our behalf by the finished work of Christ. At the same time, God grows this holiness in us and commands us to be holy as He is holy. Marriage is a crucible for the development of holiness.

To be holy simply means to be set apart for a sacred use. I know that this term has been redefined in recent years and has a negative connotation in most circles today. That doesn’t change its usage in the proper meaning. We are not talking about developing self righteousness or becoming holier in an effort to out perform others. If you want to try to outperform someone in this area, your competition is Jesus Himself. Good luck! This is what the Scripture refers to as the development of Christ-likeness (becoming more and more like Jesus) from one degree of glory to another from the moment we bow the knee to Him the first time until the day when our resurrected souls are reunited to our glorified bodies. It is a lifelong process for the believer.

In this process, the most common method I have seen God use involves us being around other people who see things we don’t always notice or need some intervention to change. Since no one really knows us better than our spouse, marriage becomes the refining fire for those who engage in it. Nothing will expose your weaknesses like a marriage. In fact, many people don’t even realize the level of their own selfishness until they get married. After having been married for a while, many think they have a good appreciation for it. Then they have children and a whole new level of understanding of their own challenges rises to the surface.

When we forget that purpose for marriage in western culture, it is often because of our romantic expectations in marriage. We can begin to think that anything in our marriage that somehow makes us unhappy is wrong. Or we begin to think that “the spark is gone.” Don’t get me wrong on this point: I am all for happiness and romance. In fact, I believe marriage to be the most fulfilling earthly relationship anyone can ever have. That said, if it is the basis of our happiness, we are building on sand. The foundation of our fulfillment must be on Christ because all else will eventually fall.

All of this leads me to a simple truth: God will never support your happiness if it costs you your holiness. He is far more interested in that outcome for each of us than He is our earthly happiness.

So if you find yourself unhappy in your marriage but still progressing in your walk with Christ and with your spouse, just remember that the happiness in your relationship will ebb and flow. The important thing is to be on purpose and on mission together for Him. Trust that the happiness will return. That is too often a function of our circumstances. We all know that circumstances change, often extremely quickly. This is why happiness or the lack of it requires patience. It is in shorter and shorter supply in our world but there is an unlimited supply in one place: the Holy Spirit. We find this in a list of character qualities that are called the fruit of the Spirit. If we ask, we will receive.

Holiness outranks happiness. Wait for the circumstances to change. Hold fast to your covenant and endure in Him together through the hard times. Celebrate the great times and build more of them as you pursue Christ together. Stay within His structure and honor your responsibilities within it rather than taking advantage of what you think are the privileges of your role. Watch as your relationship grows in Him and intimacy with each other in the process.

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I recognize at a very visceral and even personal level that there are a few folks who will be reading this who are 1) single and never been married, 2) widowed, 3) divorced, or 4) in a very challenging marriage or relationship. These might be characterized by anything up to and including abuse of any type, physical suffering because of a serious medical issue for one or both partners, or any number of other challenges. I am hopeful that what is discussed here will also be a benefit to you even though it addresses an issue that has become far more controversial over the course of my lifetime than I ever anticipated. For that reason, it’s possible that some of the things that I have to say here may deeply offend some readers. Regardless of the risks, I am hopeful that what I write here may be of benefit to every reader.

I also want the reader to know that I will only be discussing marriage as the Bible defines it: according to the Genesis norm, a pattern that is affirmed and reaffirmed from the opening chapter of the Bible to its conclusion. It is my sincere conviction that we can either live life the way God intended it or we can do it our way. Our way brings suffering and pain. His way brings life, the major theme of this book. Therefore I am not going to address other forms of relationships that the Bible would not call marriage, regardless of any government definitions of the term. This includes discussions of polygamy which, though it is acknowledged to have happened in the Bible, is never endorsed or encouraged even as severe consequences are incurred by those who have participated in it.

It is not my intention to offend or to sensationalize for effect in any way. I am going to do all of us the benefit of being direct with verifiable statistics and claims that can be easily validated through even casual social media or Google searches that speak to trends about attitudes about marriage and the institution itself. I think it’s important and necessary to begin there so we can see where and what we need to recover, not just for our own and our spouses’ sake but also for our society’s sake. There is little chance of a healthy society apart from healthy marriages within that society. God established that relationship as the first cornerstone of human society.

In today’s United States, marriage as an institution is recovering slowly and slightly after cratering at an all time low. Two thirds of American homes belonged to married spouses fifty years ago. Now that number stands at 47%, a twenty percentage point drop. While divorce rates have fallen recently, the estimated “risk” of a marriage ending in divorce or separation is still between 41% and 50% on average. The median age of those getting married has increased as well from 21 to 32 years old.

The increase in age of a first marriage and abortion rates are the most statistically significant driving factors in the shrinking size of American families and a dramatically declining birth rate that is now below our population’s replacement level. That low birth rate alone will have an inevitable negative impact on our economic prosperity.

The number of women who have never been married has increased from 20% in 1950 to 31.2% in 2025. There are many contributing phenomena to this trend. Feminism has convinced a significant segment of women that men are not needed or useless and many have been very vocal about this. In addition, social programs and legal apparatuses such as child support, social security, SNAP, and MedicAid have enabled and even encouraged many women to remain independent rather than to marry.

A very large segment of men have responded as well by withdrawing from the effort entirely, in some cases vocally making arguments that peace is better than living with contention or disrespect. The rise of pornography on demand, other internet addictions, fear of commitment, prenuptial agreements, and fear of financial ruin have contributed significantly as well. The percentage of men who have never been married has risen from 26.4% in 1950 to 36.9% in 2025. There is a glimmer of hope that has emerged for men in the last three years, though not as much for young women. Statistically, for the first time in the history of our nation, there are now more men who desire to be married with a family than there are women.

Many Americans are convincing themselves that marriage is an old fashioned idea, laden with too much risk, however one may choose to measure that risk.

Since the long time result of marriage has implied children, attitudes around them have changed as well. Many Americans have convinced themselves that children will be too great a financial burden, too great a strain on the environment, or that the world their children would inherit will be so dystopian that it would be irresponsible to bring them into it. For all the previously mentioned reasons and rising infertility rates (largely from women waiting to have children or to get married), the birth rate in our nation is at an all time low.

It’s very hard to trace the exact origins of the issues related to how we, as a nation, have arrived at this point. While there are many causes we could all debate, I believe they can all be traced back to one underlying issue: the erosion of a prevailing Christian worldview which has given way to a fuller expression of our sin nature. If you’re looking for my hot take on either of the extreme positions above, here it is. I believe their reasons are the same and all come down to one significant character flaw: an epidemic explosion of selfishness.

I know. You may profoundly disagree or maybe you think I’m spot on.

All I can say is that I believe firmly that life was meant to be lived the way God designed it, fighting our sin nature inclinations. Fighting that design and giving in to our natural inclinations is what brings us misery in dramatically practical ways.

So if we examine marriage from a Christian worldview as an institution, there are several things we seem to have forgotten about marriage. I think we can agree that these truths about marriage have fallen out of popular favor:

• Marriage is God’s institution

• Marriage is a covenant

• Marriage is primarily for the multiplication of God’s image and glory

I’ll take each of these in order simply because I think the foundation of marriage has become so unrecognizable that it must be rebuilt if we’re to be successful at all in that relationship.

Marriage is God’s Institution

I’m fairly certain that human beings would not have created marriage nor conceived of it as an idea… ever….

“Honestly, Pat! How can you even say that?”

It’s pretty simple. It’s right there in the text of Genesis. There is only one thing in the created order that God said wasn’t good: the man was alone. Now knowing men (because I am one) and knowing our nature (because I both maximize and fight mine every day), I can assure everyone reading this that Adam probably was unaware that he had an “alone problem” at all. He might have even been content to stay that way. I can say that with a lot of confidence because Adam doesn’t even recognize that there is no “suitable mate” for him to even be sad about until after God parades all the animals in front of him for naming. Though it takes him a bit, he begins to recognize that they are all in gendered pairs. Only after that does he say, “Wait a minute… where’s mine???”

Eve is perfectly designed for this purpose. Many have pointed this out but it bears repeating here. God did not make her from Adam’s foot to suggest that she is beneath him. God did not make her from Adam’s head to suggest that she would be lord over him either. She was taken from his rib, as a companion beside him, bone of his bones and flesh of his flesh. The declaration of God was that together they are image bearers of God, equal in dignity and (after the fall) equally in need of grace.

God doesn’t proclaim that everything is very good until after Adam and Eve are together in the Garden. It is His idea, His concept, and His laws govern it. This was His design, a harmonious home where husband and wife were at peace with God, each other, and their environment for the length of their whole lives. The Fall shattered all that peace in a catastrophic way that broke the created order.

Even at the moment of the creation of marriage, it still meant that there were differences in roles. Adam came first and then Eve. Eve didn’t name anything. Adam did. Adam did not sin first. Eve did. The New Testament reminds us of all of these truths. Adam’s leadership (and his dramatic failure in that leadership) is so critical to the Gospel itself that there can be no understanding of the victory of the second Adam (Jesus Christ) apart from the cataclysmic failure of the first. Marriage is God’s idea. In fact, it is so central to His Gospel story that He knit together Adam with His Only Begotten Son. The Apostle Paul even reminds us that a marriage is a picture of the relationship between Christ and His Church and a practical picture of the Gospel. No wonder it is the first institution that satan, the adversary, attacks.

Marriage is a Covenant

Biblically defined and strictly speaking, marriage does have a definition. This is where we get lost in post-Christian western culture. Flailing violently at all the foundations of what was our prevailing worldview, we have been so busy deconstructing everything we once knew that we haven’t bothered much to look harder at what we were tearing down in the process. I’m not going to even try to bring some kind of critique of all the competing definitions out there. I think the best way to understand something is to become incredibly familiar with the subject at hand, so familiar that a fraud immediately presents itself as just that.

If you want a brief and excellent exposition of what I’m about to say here, I doubt I can do better than directing you to Josh Howerton’s podcast following up on Lakepointe Church’s marriage conference. By my estimation at least, he is currently the most faithful and clear Bible teacher out there today.

There are still many echoes of biblical norms that remain in western culture. We see them often in the metaphors we use to describe things like marriage. It used to be called “walking the aisle” and still is by some today. What has been lost in our culture is the origin and meaning of two people, hand in hand, walking down an aisle together. Previous generations understood this far better than we do and the statistics above reflect this reality. The origin of this ceremony that we use for marriage goes back to my personal favorite story from Abraham’s life in Genesis 15.

God has promised Abraham that he will have a son but that promise has been a long time in fulfillment, so long that Abraham is now asking God if it was real since his only heir is his servant from Damascus. God has Abraham prepare some animals for sacrifice. He kills them and cuts them all in half, placing half of each sacrificed animal on either side of an aisle. It is a VERY bloody scene, so bloody that scavenger birds descend to peck at the dead. Abraham has to run them off. Of course in Abraham’s story, he is put into a deep sleep and God alone walks between the pieces to symbolize His clear commitment to His promise regardless of Abraham’s doubts, which He ultimately keeps in the sacrifice of Jesus.

Why all the blood and why the sacrifices? This is an ancient ceremony where a vow was made. If two parties were making a lifelong pack (what we might even call a blood oath), they would do exactly what Abraham did and then walk side by side down the aisle between the sacrificed halves. What was being communicated was very clear to the participants: “If I should break my vow to you, may I become like this animal which has been killed, ripped in half, and bleeding out.” For this reason, ancient Jewish and Christian marriage ceremonies included walking down an aisle with vows to one another. Previous generations would have remembered the sacrifices though socially it was more acceptable (and far less gruesome) to include the bride’s family on one side and the groom’s on the other.

I am convinced that this is exactly the reason why the most common description that I have ever heard from anyone who is divorced, separated, or whose spouse dies is the same metaphor in almost every case regardless of gender: “I feel like I have been ripped in half.” According to God’s description in the ceremony above, that is exactly how anyone should feel under those circumstances. Granted some feel a rush of freedom, but I have counseled many on the other side of a broken union and even experienced one myself. Immediately or eventually, the overwhelming majority express what I have written above.

Not exactly how we think of marriage anymore is it? When viewed in this light, we can see how and why adultery is such a horrible sin.

As God, the Author of marriage, constructed it, marriage is a blood vow. It’s an oath, a covenant in blood, a deep and abiding lifelong promise to another person before God in front of a roomful of witnesses to that promise. If more premarital counseling included a clear description of this, I think that 1) more people might think more seriously about their decision to marry and 2) more people might remember that covenant more clearly when they are frustrated in their marriage.

Marriage is far less about romance and far more about commitment, integrity, and keeping one’s word. All the more reason to make that relationship great by increasing our skill level within it.

Marriage is for the Multiplication of God’s Image and Glory

After God institutes marriage, He makes one very clear command: “be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth.” Many have referred to this as the Genesis mandate. The purpose of this command is clearly implied. Adam and Eve are the ONLY bearers of His image in all of creation. That doesn’t mean that the rest of the created order doesn’t reflect the Maker’s hand. I have already argued at length that it does. However, there is no other part of the created order over which God says, “In the image of God, He created them.”

Therefore, if God’s image is to be throughout all of creation and fill the earth, it can only happen through the multiplication of human beings. This glorifies God.

I know there are some who would say, “That sounds like the Handmaid’s Tale.” Let’s just be clear: a fictional TV program written specifically by an outspoken anti-Christian for the purpose of expanding the abortion industrial complex is hardly a basis for a moral worldview argument. That said, given the prevailing worldview expressed within this blasphemous show, I think I can say with confidence that if you are a young person who is convinced that you should not have children I doubt very seriously that you will ever have any resistance from the government to your position at all. If you are a Christian and you don’t want to ever have children, you don’t have an issue with me or anyone else… except for your Lord and Savior who gave you the command to be fruitful and multiply. Both parties in a marriage enter into a covenant voluntarily giving their word to God and each other. That should be enough to answer the coercion fallacy.

We are accountable to our spouses by God’s design and our own blood oath for the glory of God. If you don’t have one, remember that before you get one. If you do have one, let’s honor them together. We are accountable to our spouses because we promised to be so.

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Today, I’m going to focus on our accountability to those we don’t know.

Now I know that this whole subject may rub a few people the wrong way so I want to make an important qualifier here. This topic is only for those who want to live a great life to the best of their ability. If that’s not your concern, you don’t need to be worried about being accountable to others. That said, if that’s where you are, you are likely to suffer some uncomfortable consequences for ignoring this principle. I know I have and others have many more times than once.

“How about you give us an example Pat? This all seems very vague.”

OK. I’ll give you three: two active and one passive.

The active example is lying. I think everyone should have a reasonable expectation of others that we are telling the truth. Lying presents a problem for anyone whether we know them or not. Failing to tell the truth can get us into a lot of trouble even if it is with others that we don’t know.

Let’s just take a list of synonyms for lying from what used to be the Oxford Dictionary (now reduced to nothing more than a website). Here they are: an intentional false statement, fabrication, deception, fiction, falsification, half-truth, exaggeration, sham, misinformation, disinformation, perjury, propaganda, delude, mislead, hoax, lead astray, or con. Imagine what the world would be like if no one had an obligation to anyone else to tell the truth.

But I guess we don’t have to think about it that hard in order to imagine what that would be like. We have lived through an unprecedented era in the history of our world where it appears that more and more people feel free to only speak their opinion regardless of whether or not it is based in fact. They may even qualify it by saying they are simply speaking “their truth”, as if the truth were something that they can personally own. There are many today who believe that they can justify their falsehoods in this way. One look at any social media platform or news outlet provides us with enough evidence to know this is true.

I am an absolute believer in and advocate for free speech. I am also an absolute believer in and advocate for truth telling. Everyone has the right to say whatever they want. That comes with a great responsibility to not deceive others. We have laws against this for a reason.

I could have picked any other number of things that the Bible calls sin. Lying is one we have all perpetrated and endured so it’s easy for all of us to relate. I am accountable to my fellow human beings to tell the truth and not deceive. I must be or everything in this world devolves into chaos. Harming another whom I have never met with a lie harms our whole world.

Now for the second example. Laziness is a passive form of sin.

“Wait a minute Pat! How is laziness some kind of sin? Isn’t that just my own choice?”

A while back in Church history, the Roman Catholic Church came up with a list of what they called the seven deadly sins. For the record, I am not a Catholic. I am a fully committed Protestant because I still believe there is a lot to protest. There is a reason that one of those seven deadly sins is sloth. The book of Proverbs is particularly filled with passages about the sluggard (or the sloth). This is the person who refuses to work or believes that they should not have to work… at all… in any capacity. We get confused about that word work so let me clarify what is meant in the Scriptures. Solomon is not just referring to work for a paycheck. He is referring to any kind of productive work that would benefit the family and society in general.

The New Testament reinforces this principle in many places. The Apostle Paul says that if a man is not willing to work he should not be allowed to eat with the family of God. As we can see, this is not just an Old Testament principle.

What makes sloth a sin and how does that even relate to the pillar of accountability to those who we do not know?

Sloth is depriving the world of our effort, talent, and investment. It requires our fellow human beings to carry the burden of the work that is rightfully ours PLUS the burden of their own work. It is also a sin against oneself. A human being who is slothful (lazy) is denying the image of God in them. God created every human being for work of some kind so that He would be glorified in and through that work. Sloth robs God of His glory and also rob others of their time, talent, and treasure. However, it isn’t active robbery. It’s passive robbery. All we have to do to commit this kind of robbery is not do our part while everyone else around us suffers whether we know them or not.

When sloth takes over, we become the servant who Jesus talked about who received a talent from his Lord and buried it in the backyard because he was afraid he would fail. Jesus called that man a “wicked and lazy servant” and took his talent away. He gave it to someone who would use it and multiply it for the good of everyone.

Now for the second active example: murder. I wasn’t going to include this one but on the heels of another incident of political violence here in the United States I couldn’t responsibly keep silent. Murder isn’t the first sin in the Bible. It’s the second. Right after Adam and Eve’s failure in the Garden, one of their sons (out of jealousy) kills the other. Why is murder a sin? The Bible’s logic is simple on this subject. Every human being is made in the image of God. To murder another human being is murdering another image bearer, which is the same as saying that the sinner wishes that God were dead also.

The default setting for anyone who wants a great life is to protect life, even our own life or protecting someone else’s with our own life.

That doesn’t mean that taking the life of another is forever forbidden in the Bible. It is required in cases of justice and just war. The bar is high for something to qualify under either of those conditions. It would be hard to make a case as to why political violence qualifies at this stage of American History on either side of our differences.

We can say one thing for certain though: assassination is murder, political or otherwise. Batman and the Punisher may have mainstreamed vigilantism but we need to remember that those characters are fictional. The ideology espoused by their writers and artists is a “what if” philosophical experiment in print and on film. One cannot simply take that and copy and paste it into real life. We are all seeing how disastrous those consequences can be in real time.

We are accountable to one another to preserve our lives, to tell each other the truth, and to work with all the energy and gifting that we have been given. If we just committed wholeheartedly to those three things, we would be a better people and a better nation.

So let’s be honest with ourselves. We have these expectations of others that we have never met.

We expect our sales people who we interact with once to be truthful.

We expect our politicians to be truthful and hardworking or we wouldn’t rage when they are otherwise.

We expect our neighbors to mow their grass so the whole neighborhood looks like everyone cares.

We expect children to tell their parents and teachers the truth and we make sure they suffer consequences when they are caught in a lie.

We expect other people to look out for one another, to protect each other.

We are accountable to those we have never even met in some capacity. Our world doesn’t function without it.

So if you want to live the great life, figure out how you can personally be accountable to your neighborhood, your city or town, your county, your state, and your nation. We will all be better for it and you will too.

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Since we are all accountable to God for everything we do, we are accountable to Him for His commands. Obeying them will not save us or earn us any favor with Him. Jesus Himself said, “So you also, when you have done all that you were commanded, say, ‘We are unworthy servants; we have only done what was our duty.’” (Luke 17:10) Only the shed blood of Christ will save us.

At the same time, Jesus does go on to say that if we love Him we will keep His commandments. Which ones? Short answer: all of them. However, when Jesus was asked which one was the greatest commandment, He shortened the list to two because they summarized all the rest: 1) love God and 2) love people. Having already talked about the first, I’m going to turn my attention in this post to the second.

Before I do that though, let me clarify a misconception that I see out there a lot from people who aren’t believers and pretend to know something about the Bible. It seems to be really common that many people out there in the United States today want to reduce the commandments of God down to “love your neighbor as yourself.” I think it’s important to address this.

Like many modern day Bible quoters, there is a shred of truth in what they say. We are to love our neighbor as ourselves. This does not mean that this is 1) more important than loving God first. Jesus expressly says loving God is the first and greatest commandment. Nor does it even imply 2) that loving our neighbor means never challenging anything our neighbor says, affirms, or does. That is not love. It is only affirmation. Lies can be and have been affirmed which is the exact opposite of love.

In short, since God Himself is the One who gave the command, He gets to define what it means and how it is to be obeyed. The good news is: He spells that out for us. While the final six commandments of the big ten spell out for us what not to do to love our neighbor, much of the rest of the Bible spells out positively what that looks like. Even someone who isn’t a Christian understands these dynamics, knows some of those commands, and is more than happy to point out all the ways in which many of us fall short.

Personally… guilty… just like everyone else Christian or not.

So if we can all concede that there are commands we are all called to honor and which we all fail to obey, then we have to acknowledge something important that follows logically: we are accountable to one another. I’m going to get specific about those to whom we are accountable here on earth in the posts to come but I want to stick to the general principle for this one. It’s too important to skip. There are some general principles around the broader concept that I have found helpful in everyday life.

We are accountable to our neighbors; whether we know them or not

I’ll use an illustration that nearly every American can understand from personal experience: driving. Maybe you’re like me as a driver. I love it. I love the freedom of it. I love the flexibility of it.

I also find it incredibly frustrating sometimes. Usually that revolves around my lack of patience with other drivers. Honestly though Washingtonians, why in God’s great Name do you insist on driving the speed limit in the left lane and staying there for miles of uninterrupted travel being passed by people on your right as they give you the side eye after they cut in front of you????

But I digress.

Think about it. Does driving even work in this country if we aren’t accountable to everyone else on the road? I can answer that from personal experience: NO. All you have to do is travel to another country to see how it works there, particularly somewhere other than western Europe or influenced/colonized countries. One day of travel in Brazil taught me what happens when there is no “social contract” to follow the rules of the road. The lane lines become suggestions. Distance from car to car is whatever you can personally tolerate. Speed limits are just signs and stop lights are ignored if you have to get somewhere. Ask an immigrant here in the US. One of their first indicators that they are definitely in a different country is the orderliness of our roads. It’s weird to them.

We all expect everyone else to follow the traffic laws that we all learned because that’s the only way the system works. I can’t just get on I-90 and drive eastbound in the westbound lanes. I’m accountable for what I do on the road. Further I can almost guarantee that I neither know nor am likely to ever meet in person anyone that I happen to pass or drive with on the road. It doesn’t matter whether I know them or not. I have an obligation to them to follow the rules of the road for their safety and mine.

All other aspects of life are no different.

We are accountable to our neighbors; especially those we do know

If you have even a passing understanding of the Bible, you know that accountability to those we do know is incredibly important. There are commands regarding our relationships with our parents, spouses, children, friends, fellow church members, and acquaintances. There is no escaping it.

If we understand that we have at least a general accountability to the rest of the human race that we don’t even know, then how much more those whom we do? That’s the witness of the Bible and it proves to be incredibly practical as well.

Even the equity crowd acknowledges that relationships exist in a hierarchy. Primary relationships (like immediate family relationships) supersede our obligations to other relationships. This is as it should be and life gets easier when we acknowledge and live out this truth. Everyone has some kind of a hierarchy or prioritization in their worldview. This one is almost universally acknowledged within human relationships.

Since each of these has a huge impact on our lives (after all we are discussing the great life), I’m going to do separate posts for each of those categories.

So expect a separate post for how and when we are accountable to those separate groups of people we don’t know and separate posts for each of those types of people that we do know.

Accountability is important. Our world doesn’t function without it because God designed it that way.

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“What in the world is this Pat??? Accountability? Seriously?”

Yes. I had to reach that logical conclusion after long reflection.

I recognize that most of the world we live in today has a very low regard for accountability. I understand the recoil. However, I have also lived long enough to know that life really gets hard without it, particularly if you are at all embracing the first two foundational life pillars: truth and integrity. Accountability is a natural outgrowth of the first two.

During my 58 years of personal experience and a study of history, I have noticed that there are prevailing philosophical patterns in societies. These ideologies can become temporarily popular for a season. This may seem unrelated to the subject but they’re intimately connected. Sometimes those seasons are decades long. Sometimes they have brief introductions and get squashed by the larger culture as it recognizes an alien idea as a virus. When the cultural immune system kicks in, a shift back can occur. What we have seen in recent years is mutated viruses of a deadly original bad idea returning with renewed vigor; a vengeance even. This has been particularly true over the course of my lifetime with political ideologies.

Strictly speaking, the United States was created as a reaction to extreme authoritarianism under a very powerful monarchy. It amazes me that so many Americans don’t see the extreme authoritarian corollary to communist and socialist dictatorships (under which ALL communist or socialist governments exist. Side note: this is the very definition of fascism). It is further astonishing to me that so many Americans who are legitimately leftists (even self-proclaimed) fail to recognize that this is them advocating for a more authoritarian government despite their insistence to the contrary.

The opposite end of the spectrum is anarchy where there is no government at all. Each human being is on their own recognisance to do the right thing. It sounds like a great idea until we factor in the sin nature of all humanity. This results in only a different kind of tyranny where we are all forced to live under the whims of the stronger or more powerful who can assert said whims against the weaker and/or defenseless.

Authoritarianism and anarchy each embrace a rose colored vision of a utopian society where either all are equal (in communism) or all are free (with no government at all). For these reasons, each of these options dramatically lacks the necessary realism of any practical solutions. Each embraces a utopian ideal that can never be achieved until Jesus returns as the only perfect monarch because the power structures in each of those societies is left (as always) in the hands of sinners.

Christians like myself are far too familiar with our own sin and that of others to ever believe that concentration of power in the hands of too few or a power vacuum filled by any individual sinner’s whims would result in anything good or pleasing to God. Scripture speaks to the corruption of both extremes whether it is in the detailed corruption of powerful Kings or the damning repeated chorus of Judges “everyone did what was right in his own eyes.” That may not be your worldview, but history bears out what I am attempting to highlight here. Communist and socialist governments and other types of dictatorships are responsible for the deaths of hundreds of millions of people all over the world. On the other end of the spectrum, anarchy always results in a progressively downward spiraling chaos.

The founders of the United States understood these dynamics. They had lived through the consequences of both ends of the spectrum, whether in the wildly decentralized Anabaptist governments of central Europe or the highly authoritarian monarchies of England and France. At the same time, they learned from the pitfalls of the pure democracy of Ancient Greece. They recognized pure democracy as the tyranny of the mob; a tyranny that could be even more deadly than the tyranny of any one monarch as the French revolution proved in blood.

This is why they conceived of a government that was limited in its powers but still maintained some authority over its citizens in an effort to preserve their freedom and protect them from the government that they knew was necessary for their survival and prosperity. Thus the representative republic and balance of powers was born. Admittedly, a representative republic is a middle position between two undesirable extremes, but it remains the only truly practical solution for the preservation of both personal freedom and the rule of law.

I have often told my students that their problems largely revolve around the issue of freedom. They all want more of it. I think we all do. What many people either don’t or refuse to see is that an increase in freedom REQUIRES a dramatic increase in responsibility.

Freedom is like fire. It has incredible utility when it is kept within certain boundaries. Left unchecked, it can quickly destroy everything. I am one of the greatest freedom loving advocates that you will likely ever meet. At the same time, I recognize that human beings are prone to abuse freedom for their own selfish desires. The rule of law exists for such reasons. Without it, we have no society at all. At the same time, if we have too much authority, we also have no society at all.

God did not create human beings to be completely autonomous. History and our practical experiences bear this out. We were created to exist in a community. In a community, there will always be accountability of some kind. God even created governmental authorities for that purpose. In order to understand this pillar, I believe the most important question is: TO WHOM are we accountable?

While these answers will be specific to the Christian faith, I can say categorically after 58 years of life experience that they work in the real world. They work because this is how God designed us. We can buck that design but nothing will await us on the other side of the bucking except heartache.

So, here is where we start. We are all accountable to God. Accountability begins here and could easily end here. Of course, I will be more specific about what God has to say about this subject but the conversation must begin here.

Our lack of accountability as the human race began when we refused God’s accountability to His one rule in the Garden of Eden. He reinforced our obligation to Him later in the shema: “you shall love the Lord Your God with all your heart, all your mind, all your soul, and all your strength.” Just a little later in the 10 commandments, the first word out of the Lord’s mouth is: “I am the Lord Your God who brought you out of Egypt. You shall have no other gods before Me.” In the prophets, there is a repeated refrain: “I am God. There is no other.” No matter where you may turn in the Bible, you will find this One True God giving commands, calling for repentance, dealing out judgment and consequences, extending amazing grace, and promising deliverance for His children.

The message is clear: we owe Him our allegiance. Allegiance at the very least, implies accountability.

Here’s the kicker on that one though: since God holds exclusive claim over everything in the Universe, including the Universe itself, everything is accountable to Him whether we recognize His authority or not.

That’s right. I just said it. Whether you believe in God or not, everyone is still accountable to Him.

“That’s ridiculous Pat! How in the world is an atheist accountable to a God in Whom he doesn’t even believe exists!”

Set aside the fact that this person is an atheist or anything else. Every human being is accountable to Him.

“But I reject His authority!”

So did all but eight human beings in Noah’s day. So did all the inhabitants of Sodom and Gomorrah except for Lot and his daughters. So did the Canaanite tribes of the Ancient Levant. So did the Babylonians, the Persians, the Greeks, and the Romans. There is not a civilization or a single human being in the history of the world that has not fallen under God’s judgment whether they recognized His authority over them or not. Even the sinless Son of God bowed to His Father’s authority and bore the judgment of God when He who knew no sin became sin so that we might become the righteousness of God.

All are accountable to Him.

The sooner we embrace that reality, the better our lives will become.

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Immovable

It stands alone

Unchanged

Unchangeable

Perfect

Umarred

Tools flayed against it

Strength applied to move it

Defiance screamed about it

Nuance tried to shade it

Yet it remains

Firm

Immovable

It stands alone

Unchanged

Unchangeable

Perfect

Unmarred

Not a spot

Not a blemish

Not a change in shade

Solidified

Breaking every tool

Every foe

Attempt after attempt

To move it

To chip it

To scar it

To change it

Lay in dust and ashes around its base

Infuriating the defiant

Frustrating the destructive

Annoying the nuanced

Antagonizing the revolutionaries

Dismantling the incrementalists

Its mere unflinching presence

A loving

Firm

Resolved

Foundation

Scream all you like

Wail through the night

Pound your fists

Swing your hammers

Carve delicately

Bring your paint

Lever its base

It remains

Firm

Immovable

It stands alone

Unchanged

Unchangeable

Perfect

Unmarred

Solidified

Tested

Tried

True

It is old

New shatters upon it

A wave upon a beach

It retreats

Tries again

The old remains

Firm

Immovable

It stands alone

Unchanged

Unchangeable

Perfect

Unmarred

Solidified

Tested

Tried

True

One either rests in the shelter of its strength

More than enough room for the surrendered

Or breaks upon it, shattered

Evidence all around

For anyone who remains

Two choices

Fight

Or

Surrender

There is only one victory

The truth remains

The obelisk stands

Fighting guarantees loss

Only in surrender

Is victory assured

“The stone the builders rejected has become the Cornerstone.”

Reference passages: Psalm 118:22, Matthew 21:42, Mark 12:10-11, Luke 20”17, Acts 4:11-12, Romans 9:33, Ephesians 2:20, 1 Peter 2:6-7

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“The Bible says…”

They told us in no uncertain terms that if we said nothing more than this, God would work mightily because His Word never returns empty. I will never forget an exchange in a Hebrew class with Dr. Dennis Magary. One of my classmates asked him how he could make the text “relevant.” We knew what he meant. His question was sincere but he didn’t realize what he was asking. Dr. Magary’s face turned a shade of deep purple as he roared over our class:

“I DON’T MAKE THE TEXT RELEVANT! IT ALREADY IS!!!! ALL I CAN DO IS MESS IT UP!!”

It was a stingy rebuke for sure and a warning to all of us, one I will always remember. I was, and continue to be, so very grateful that I was in that room at that moment.

It’s no less a warning to the everyday believer who will never preach a message in his or her life from a pulpit in front of a room full of people.

I am including this in the pillar of integrity because I have witnessed a radical shift in my lifetime. Not only is biblical literacy among American Christians now better measured as biblical illiteracy, there has also been a profound move in our approach to the Bible. In most circles in the US, I see people using the Bible as a buffet. I hear people say things like, “I’m a red letter Christian.” They then follow that up with how they dismiss all the rest of the text except for those passages in red; despite Jesus’ clear teaching from His own mouth that the rest of the Scriptures all point to Him. I further hear people say things like, “I know that’s what it says but that’s not what I believe,” despite calling themselves a Christian just not “one of those kinds of Christians” (as if one can actually claim the title while denying the teachings of Christ at the same time).

I believe the buffet approach, and its kin the “proof text” approach, have their roots in the teaching of many churches in the US. Yes I believe we need to look in the mirror, particularly in mainline church circles. If you are unfamiliar with that term or the term “the old mainline,” it may be because you are like 75% of all Americans who have no connection to a local church so that world is just not something to which you have paid attention. So… I’ll explain.

The mainline churches of the United States include the Presbyterian Church in the USA, the United Methodist Church, the Episcopal Church USA, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, the United Church of Christ, and some other much smaller denominations that follow their lead. These denominations used to represent the overwhelming majority of American Christians as far back as the 1960s and 70s. Since then, their numbers have been in free fall, particularly in the 2000s. The reason for this is obvious: these institutions have abandoned the Christian faith. That wasn’t what it looked like in the beginning though. In the beginning, it looked like an attempt at compassionate tolerance. In the end, they failed to defend Christianity to such an extent that their tolerance of anything other than the Christian faith made their institutions a free for all of any belief system being welcome. By the 2000s, one could not see anything that one could call distinct Christianity in the wreckage that once was a home for so many believers. Some of what I have just said is even challenged by many Christians here in America.

The important question is: how could this have happened?

The answer is that it started in the early 1900s with a new approach to the Bible. For centuries, the Bible was taken in “its plain sense meaning.” This changed when German scholars from Tubingen began to say that the Bible itself was not the Word of God. It merely CONTAINED the Word of God. The job of the interpreter was to figure out where that was in any particular passage of Scripture. That nugget, whatever it may be, became the Word of God to the reader.

Those who embraced this view were called “modernists.” They coined this name themselves to claim what they saw as the intellectual high ground. They were the intelligent ones in their own eyes. In reality, they were just the latest in a long line of what we call liberal theologians. That doesn’t mean they were liberal in their political beliefs. It means they were liberal in their approach to the faith and the Bible. In a twist of fate, one can see this same reading approach in liberal political circles with regard to the text of the Constitution of the United States. The principal advocates of this approach included Karl Barth and Harry Emerson Fosdick. Barth was a giant in intellectual circles who eventually heroically stood for the Confessing Church against Adolf Hitler and the Nazis. Fosdick was the Pastor of the largest and most influential congregation in the Presbyterian world: First Presbyterian Church of Manhattan in New York City.

Those who stood opposed to this view chose a label for their opponents. They called them “fundamentalists.” The principal defenders of this position were men like BB Warfield and J. Grescham Machen. The modernists’ nickname for them was designed to be an insult. It was meant to make others think that they lacked intelligence and sophistication. Warfield was a Princeton professor of Systematic Theology, hardly a lightweight. Machen was a professor as well who eventually left Princeton to become the founder of Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia.

They both had the audacity to say that if someone was going to serve as a Pastor that they should fully believe and speak some basic tenets of the Christian faith like: the Bible IS the Word of God, that Jesus was fully human and fully Divine, that He performed real miracles, and physically rose from the dead… you know… crazy stuff like that that EVERY Christian believes. They would say, “How can one even call himself a Christian if he does not affirm the fundamental doctrines of the faith?” And thus their nickname was born… they were in the eyes of the modernists intellectual simpletons.

Princeton abandoned its commitment to require basic affirmations of the Christian faith in the mid 1920s and the PC USA did so with it. Many devout believers remained in that denomination in an effort to right the ship. They failed. I know. I was one of them. Some still remain, carrying on the fight and losing.

The buffet eaters of Scripture are their spiritual progeny. They are effectively saying to God that they know better than He does on certain subjects; finding in the Scriptures the parts that they believe are the Word of God and pitching the rest. In effect, they are arguing with God. To them I would quote an old Rich Mullins song, “You can argue with Your Maker, but only ‘till you’re saying, ‘Yes,’ to Him.” I don’t say that to be snarky. I say that as a warning to us all. Any argument with God can only end one way: Yes Lord. You are right and I am wrong.

If we are ever to have integrity in this world, it must be grounded in truth. That truth has been given to us in print; a consistent message written over a 1500 year period, on three different continents, through multiple human authors, from many different countries, and breathed into being by one Divine Author. For those who are stark critics and embrace a horrible, anti-biblical, contemporary, pro-intersectional worldview, I will also add that not one of those writers was white or European so please stop calling the Bible a book about white supremacy.

Integrity in our confessed beliefs demands allegiance to those beliefs. That doesn’t eliminate conflict by any means. In one sense, it creates conflict. That said, I would defy any human being to tell me of a week in their life that was conflict free. As Christians, at least we are choosing our conflict in an attempt to align our lives with the truth as God gives it. That necessarily means aligning ourselves with the truth of God’s Word; all of it, even, and especially, the parts we don’t like.

In my experience, everyone desires to make some kind of a loophole for the parts that they don’t like (myself included). Unfortunately, they all involve deceptive intellectual gymnastics with demands for nuance or the proclamation, “That’s just your interpretation.” That tactic is ultimately deceit and deception in order to press an agenda. I have had many agenda. My main agenda now is to line mine up with His. Life works better that way. The opposite produces death.

I mean this next part as a word of caution to anyone who may be tempted to follow the example of those who called themselves modernists. Once one says that the Scriptures can mean what they say I mean, it is only a matter of time before that person finds themselves with a Thomas Jefferson approach leaving his or her Bible looking like a child’s snowflake project with all the bad verses removed or personal interpretations affirming their own opinions. Just so everyone is clear, there is no chapter entitled “2nd Opinions” in the Bible. To anyone who twists the Scriptures to try to make them mean something they have never meant, there can only be one role model that you are following for your handling of the text and he isn’t a good one. In the Bible, only the adversary is ultimately responsible for handling God’s Word that way and those whom he influences. If this is you, this is not good company. If this is you, I would strongly urge you to reconsider your approach and your positions before you meet God face to face.

I have encountered many people who aren’t believers, even atheists, who know the Bible and can accurately state what it says. They then flatly say, “I agree that’s what it says but I don’t believe it.” This is actually a position I respect. At least they acknowledge what the Bible actually says.

I firmly believe the best thing that can happen in the Church and the general population in the US is to say what the Bible actually says rather than trying to massage it into saying something it doesn’t or cherry picking the verses we like while simultaneously ignoring their context or other passages that we don’t like. Let’s just say what it says.

How we treat the Bible has real consequences. There is no integrity in denial. Our lives here on earth and after this world are both at stake.

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Integrity starts with agreement. This goes directly to first principles. If we agree with God about who He is, who we are, our need for Him, and His solution to our problem, our life will blossom even in the midst of unbearable circumstances. If we disagree, we are at odds with the One who created us and the entire system that sustains our lives. The stakes are high.

I would like to raise something else though. Agreement can be a merely intellectual exercise. Sure, one has to agree first. However, in order for it to be truly integrity, we must progress beyond agreement to alignment.

I have seen many people miss this step and I have missed it myself on a number of occasions. Here’s a pretty typical example:

I agree that this is the right thing to do… but…

In my experience everything that comes after the “but” is always a lame excuse, regardless of the speaker and especially if it’s I.

But:

• In this set of circumstances…

• My situation is different because…

• I’m old enough to do what I want…

• I can make my own decisions…

• I don’t care about right and wrong right now…

• If I don’t do this, I won’t be able to do this later…

Then we typically go off and do whatever we wanted to do in the first place. Just so we’re clear, that’s disagreement in practice. Jesus put it this way: who is the obedient son? Is it the one who said he would go to the field and work but never went or the son who flatly said he wouldn’t go but went anyway? The obvious answer is the latter.

We’ve all been there. We’ve either been in the place where we voiced our intention to do the right thing yet failed to do so or obstinately refused to do what we knew we should yet (after examining reality a little closer) decided to do the right thing anyway.

We all know that any excuse to misalign our lives with truth will do. I have heard many and used many. Bottom line: the more we make these kinds of explanations/excuses, we are rationalizing our deviations from what we say we believe.

There is no life in those deviations. In fact, every time we engage in these kinds of departures from our own values we pay a terrible price with cascading consequences. That price is self-respect. We know what we’re doing. We are failing to act in line with what we say we believe. We are proving to ourselves that we cannot trust ourselves. We are not keeping the promises we have made to ourselves.

And what of the cascade from that? Well…

When we lose respect for ourselves, we lose respect in the eyes of others, regardless of whether they see the indiscretion or not. They don’t have to see it (even though they often do). Even if we think we have effectively hidden the transgression, it shows in our demeanor.

They can see it in our eyes. They can hear it in our voice. They can observe it in our facial expressions and body language.

In the loss of self-respect, we lose the respect of others. That loss usually starts with those closest to us; specifically, our spouses if we are married. It quickly spreads outward from there in my experience. That spread is very difficult to stop, much less reverse.

Whether one is seeking to build respect inwardly or outwardly, to stop the spread, or to reverse the spread, the solution is the same in every case.

It starts with the individual. We either know we can trust ourselves to live in line with what we believe or we do not. We either keep the promises we have made to ourselves or we don’t. As we have already said, that means we need to clearly know and understand our convictions. Once that is done, we have to live them out in real time regardless of place or circumstances.

Admittedly, this is the greatest challenge in life. There is not a human being on earth who has ever gotten this right with one dramatic exception: the Lord Jesus Christ. As a Christian, I believe that this is what it means to grow in the likeness of Christ. It means that our lives will come more and more aligned with what we know to be true.

I often tell my students that I am striving to be the same man no matter where I am or what I am doing. If they run into me at the grocery store, I want them to encounter the same guy that they know in front of the classroom. I would want my wife to see the same man she married when she visits my classroom as well. She should not be surprised by who she sees doing his job or vice versa.

Again, no one does this perfectly. No one can do it in their own strength either. The empowering presence of the Holy Spirit is our only hope of ever improving in this area; and we must. The world we serve is counting on it.

Many have used this illustration before but I think it is important to our conversation here. A compass points to magnetic north, not true north. If you are at the same latitude where I live, true north is 10-16 degrees east of our location, depending on how close you are to the Canadian Border. If you are aiming for true north and fail to adjust your compass for what is called the “magnetic declination”, you are going to be at least ten degrees off. This isn’t that big of a deal if you are only traveling half a mile. However, if you are trying to reach the North Pole, you are going to be thousands of miles off.

Actions that deviate from our beliefs set us off course from our destination.

They break trust with ourselves.

They grow distrust and disrespect in others.

Alignment accomplishes the exact opposite.

It keeps us on course.

It grows our trust in ourselves.

It grows the trust of others in us and the respect of others for us.

May our Lord and Savior who lived the only life in perfect alignment with the truth, grant us His power to progress toward aligning our lives to His.

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I’m so grateful for each one of you. It brings me a great deal of joy to bring any kind of value to your life.

Given how many posts I have made, I thought it would be good to briefly review what I have come to call the four pillars of life: truth, integrity, accountability, and discipline.

If your life is not based in truth, it is based in a lie. That is a foundation that will certainly crack and collapse, regardless of how long or under what circumstances it does so. If this foundation is not in place, your life WILL fall apart, often dramatically.

Integrity is the function of living in the truth rather than living in the lie. It is bringing your life systematically into line with the truth.

Accountability is a recognition that we are all accountable, no matter our stage, experience, or position. If we are accountable to no one else (which is nearly an impossibility on this side of heaven), we are accountable to God.

Discipline is the key to pillars 2 and 3. We cannot expect to live a life in line with the truth or be responsible enough to embrace accountability without living a disciplined life.

Which leads me to another important recap: the most important truth upon which we must all build our lives to live them to the fullest as they were designed is to embrace the truth that there is one God who:

1) has revealed Himself through Jesus Christ His only Son

2) has through His Son given the Spirit of adoption (the Holy Spirit) to all who call on His Name and trust Him fully for the redemption of our souls

3) whose glory is revealed in His creation from one end of the universe to the other.

4) has codified His principles and directions for life in His written Word, the Bible.

If you build the foundation of your life on those truths and the truths springing from them (the clear teachings of the Bible), other parts of your life will come into line. That doesn’t mean there won’t be conflict and all will be peace. As we explored in another post, as soon as we sincerely engage in the war of building our lives God’s way, the enemies of life will begin some of their wildest and most outrageous assaults. The world, the flesh, and the devil will come after us with reckless abandon. To be honest, they will assault us no matter what we do. We will just be keenly aware of it once we engage because we will finally be on God’s side of the war and in active opposition to them.

For those of you who might have been wondering when I would ever write about something else, here’s your answer: to build a solid foundation, you have to dig deep. Truth is the foundation so I spent a lot of time there; specifically because everything else in life is built on that foundation.

Now we come to the real work. Jesus does all the work on the truth pillar. We just come to the point where we accept what He has already done. The Spirit then works in us to build our lives in line with the truth.

Some of you may be thinking, “Great! I can’t wait for that!” Honestly, it’s every true believer’s dream. Like many great tasks, we may walk into it with great enthusiasm expecting amazing results in short order. Those of us who have walked with the Lord for a long time know that this is a lifelong process; a journey that is only complete when we meet Him face to face.

Christians have always understood this as a lifelong journey. From the Apostle Paul who urged us all to keep striving toward greater than what we had already attained to John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress to Oswald Chamber’s My Utmost for His Highest, I don’t believe there has ever been a Christian who didn’t understand that our dual citizenship in the world and in heaven was always going to be a process. Our justification and adoption happened the moment we believed. Our sanctification is a lifelong process.

What the heck do you mean by sanctification Pat? Ugh… big words… again!

Here’s the most basic definition I can give: a life that is growing closer and closer to looking like, thinking like, feeling like, and acting like Jesus wherever you are.

Maybe even more basic: a life that is growing in integrity.

Here’s a couple of important things to keep in mind:

1. NO ONE can do this without the indwelling power of the Holy Spirit. A Christian is one in whom the Holy Spirit dwells. If that’s not you, receive Jesus before you embark on foolishness in your own strength.

2. You are only responsible for growing as much as you know. God will give you more and more revelation as your journey progresses. Don’t concern yourself with what you don’t know yet. Part of the journey is committing to learning.

3. Oppose the temptation to compare your progress or what you think is the lack of it with someone else who appears to be further down that road than you are. Things are not always as they seem in others and envy/jealousy is not a sin any of us can afford to carry.

4. You will need others to help you grow. We are at best inaccurate coaches of ourselves. We need others to help us see our blind spots.

5. Remember that if you are helping someone else on their journey that yours hasn’t been perfect either. As Jesus said, if we are going to be good brothers and sisters to one another we are going to have to remove the logs from our own eyes before we try to help our sisters and brothers remove their specks.

So where does integrity start?

Here’s my suggestion from a few years of experience and a developing knowledge of the Scriptures:

Agree with God

In my own walk and in helping others with theirs, one of the most common and clear deviations in our lives comes when we disagree with God.

Come on Pat… honestly, who would do that?

In my experience, everyone I have ever met. In fact, I am often amazed at how far people will go to justify their disagreement with God. If there is one clear manifestation of human sin nature, it is our ability to try to justify our actions (and I do mean “our”). Eve justified her actions and blamed the serpent. Adam blamed Eve and then God. Cain blamed his brother and killed him for it. Our own children blame each other, their circumstances, etc. As we grow older, we make up our own reasons. They are often quite elaborate and clever. However, I have noticed in my own life that they all usually come down to one thing.

God says one thing. We don’t agree. We want what we want so we justify our disagreement with Him and do what we want. Then we cry when the consequences come even though we might even be able to discern that they are inevitable.

The most common disagreement I see today is to say that the Bible itself is not a clear reflection of God and His clear commands for humanity. I have spent my life pointing out the grave errors of this philosophy. Nothing could be more destructive to life (even and especially as someone who claims to be a believer) than to think that any of us could know better than God’s Word revealed in the Bible.

Agree with God by knowing what He says

There are many reasons for this lame excuse in the Church and contemporary North American culture. I have found though that the biggest reason is this: ignorance.

I have noticed many times when visiting others that the average American home has at least six copies of the Bible somewhere in the household. I have also noticed that all six of those copies have a collective six layers of dust on top of them. Bible literacy in the US is better described as Bible illiteracy. If statistical reports are to be believed (and they should be), pulpits aren’t helping. Currently, 90% of all sermons preached in Christian congregations in the US are from the New Testament and the overwhelming majority of those are from the Pauline Epistles. Please don’t put words in my mouth. I firmly believe that those are vitally important messages and must be preached.

That said, 67% of the Bible is the Old Testament. Jesus said that everything in the Old Testament testified to Him. This was the only Bible that the Church had in its infancy because the New Testament was still being written. It is IMPOSSIBLE to understand the reasoning and context of the New Testament without the Old Testament.

If the preaching from the pulpit is the food of the Word, should not the people of God be getting a more balanced diet? It’s a thought. Perhaps we could curb our ignorance of what the Word actually says by regular exposure to the whole of Scripture. If American pulpits aren’t doing it right now, I suggest that individual believers diligently read and study the whole Bible. Besides, if your only exposure to the text is once a week on a Sunday morning for thirty minutes, you will likely remain ignorant of its content.

Decide to Agree with God, regardless of personal beliefs

Ignorance is just one problem with agreement. The other is just a commitment to our personal beliefs over and against God. Simply put, many of us are more committed to our own dogma than we are to what God clearly says. We could place any number of issues into the conversation here but I think the main point would be missed.

This means a sincere commitment on our part to find out what God says on any given subject and to agree with Him on everything from the first verse of Genesis to the last verse of Revelation.

It is one of the great debates of our age. We find many people who say, “I’m a Christian but I believe in _________, or I don’t believe in ______________.”

One of two things is true of us if we are departing from what God has clearly said and taught in His Word while simultaneously claiming to be a follower of Christ. We are either a) an immature believer who is still letting go of our own idols while growing closer to Christ or b) someone who thinks they are a Christian but has never really received Christ in the first place. RC Sproul once said (I think correctly) that the latter is the person who is in the most profoundly dangerous position of all. To think one is saved when one is not is a delusion that must be dispelled. To be immature but open to discussion is a learning posture that we all need to develop if we are ever going to have the life we need in Him.

If we are going to build our lives in line with the truth, we first have to agree with God. Otherwise, there is no integrity nor can there ever be.

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In life, you get the test first and it’s usually without warning or preparation. You either pass or fail. If you fail, you get to repeat the test until you pass. The lessons keep on coming through the tests.

As a kid with a lot of German blood, I LOVE tests. I know it’s a little twisted but tests have taught me a lot.

This is a story of one of those tests and the important lessons I learned through it. As usual, it involves some very funny clumsiness on my part.

Many of you readers know this about me: I don’t just love tests. I love challenges, particularly challenges of endurance or pain tolerance. That’s why I love hiking. Honestly, what most people I know consider “camping” doesn’t even qualify in my book. Camping is NOT parking your car at the site, pulling the tent out of the car, and using the well-lit facilities in the middle of the night with the bear proof garbage cans. NO. By my definition, you are not really “camping” unless you are at least five miles from a parking lot, carrying a 35-40 lb backpack, and planning on being gone for at least 3 to 7 days. There, I have revealed my bias.

It is a great joy to me to go to remote places where few people have been and see things of awe inspiring beauty. I have had so many experiences in various places, many of them with good friends of mine who were partners in ministry. This particular trip was with a small group of the leadership team from a church I pastored in Pennsylvania.

I had always wanted to hike the Northern Presidential Range in New Hampshire. I had great memories of New England from a childhood trip we took with my parents when I was 12. We were close enough to get there from Pennsylvania so we went for it. For those of you who have never been to New Hampshire, it is worth going for so many reasons. If you need only one, the state motto is: Live Free or Die. Seriously savage… and they take it that way up there.

The Northern Presidential Range is famous for a couple of things. All of its peaks are named after American Presidents. It is the highest portion of the Appalachian Trail. The highest mountain in the range (Mt. Washington) is so unique that it creates its own weather systems around it even though it is just above 6,000 feet. It’s known also for having the highest recorded wind speeds in the world. Not even kidding. You can look it up. For a kid who has hiked in Olympic and Mount Rainier National Parks extensively, this isn’t that high so I thought, “This should be a breeze,” no pun intended.

Now, mind you, when I was thinking to myself, “This should be a breeze,” I was comparing this to all the hikes I took at much higher altitudes 15-20 years before this. I wasn’t factoring any of that into the equation because, like most men, I was still convinced that my body would respond like it did when I was 25… even though I was in my 40s. Reality has since disavowed me of this foolish notion… most of the time.

Further, I did not figure that my body might not respond in the same way that it did when I was fifty pounds lighter than I was on this trip. Nor did I consider that this would be unlike many other trips I had done in that it was up and down elevation ALL THE TIME. Previously when I had summitted a particular peak, it was up to the top and back down rather than several peaks in a day. These serious miscalculations will play into the most important lessons of this story.

Because I thought this would be easy, I decided that I could afford to take a little more weight in my pack so I brought along some extra gear conveniences. The hikes appeared to be short and one could easily summit several peaks a day based on the map I saw. We arrived and started late in the afternoon after a long drive where we stayed at a camp next to the park. Then we got up the next morning and started out.

We were on our way that morning and the trail was more challenging than any of us anticipated. We were basically bouldering up the trail. For the uninitiated, that means it was a very rocky trail, huge rocks. We were going up river beds. Think lunges for 5 miles with 45 lbs of extra weight. Needless to say, we took several breaks. In addition to this, the trail map was VERY hard to read with lots of criss-crosses and detours. I am certain we took the long way a number of times.

By the time we broke the treeline and could see our goal, it was 4 pm and we were exhausted. I was the leader of this expedition so I had to make a decision. We could see the peak we wanted to climb that day and it was all up from our location, straight up a ridgeline. To reach our camp site, we would have two choices: up and over the peak, the Adams Trail, to reach the camp on the other side OR take the Parapet Trail that maintained our current elevation for the whole trail and went around the mountain rather than over it. After we had all done about 4,000 lunges a piece just getting to this point, I could see the look on their faces. I could only imagine what mine looked like. So I made an executive decision: we would take the Parapet Trail.

As you can already see, my lack of experience with the Northern Presidentials specifically had already created several issues with the trip. I had never taken the Parapet Trail or read a review. It looked like it was actual ground rather than rocks from our perspective, a simple trail where we could see everything with no trees. Easy going for the last leg. It was clearly short. We could see the end!

All the hikers know some simple truths about our pastime. When it’s the end of the day, you’re tired, you’re hungry, and you can see the goal after a very taxing day on the trail, it is a very dangerous time. This is when accidents happen. Most are prone to rush.

We rushed.

In our elation at finding a “simpler” solution, we got our move on through the first one hundred yards of the trail. At that point, it turned into boulders again, much larger than the ones we had navigated on the way up but now we were committed.

Then it happened.

I lifted my left leg but it caught under a bush root right under one of the boulders I was about to cross. The boulder was about waste high, a detail that will shortly become very important. I didn’t even have time to react. Physics took over. My muscles were so spent that I couldn’t even do anything to stop it.

I fell forward over the boulder. Since I had forty five extra pounds on my back, I did a very fast and dramatic face plant into a mostly dry puddle full of smaller rocks and the edge of a very sticker filled berry bush. Since I fell OVER the boulder, my feet were stuck in mid air and my face was stuck pinned to the ground with the sticker bush in my face. I could breathe but my full body weight and the weight of the pack were on my face and I couldn’t get up because of the extra weight. It might sound like an emergency but it wasn’t.

It was embarrassing… and hilarious… particularly to the friends I had with me. They were great friends. They were nearly falling over laughing and pointing at me.

I looked like a stranded turtle with my legs flailing in the air as I grunted, “GET THIS PACK OFF ME!”

I’m really glad that phones didn’t have cameras at this point in history.

I was rescued from my awkward position by my cackling friends who vowed to retell the story over and over again once we got back. They were true to their word.

Now remember my opinions about camping? Well… my inexperience with this region figured in again. It turns out that the Presidentials are some of the most popular hiking destinations along the Appalachian Trail, so much so that they had mini-lodges at strategic locations around the trails. When we finally emerged from the Parapet Trail, there was this lodge and it was full of 40 or so hikers who had filled the bunks and paid a few to sleep in a heated room with a hot meal cooked by staff.

I was disgusted. I thought, “How dare they? We were not eating or sleeping in there! That’s not what we came here for!”

So I begged them to let us sleep on the tables in the dining hall and they obliged.

The next day, we got smarter. We set up a base camp and took day packs (much lighter) to do the other peaks we wanted to summit. Mt. Washington was first on the list. We went up Tuckerman’s Ravine and came down Lion’s Head. The hike was amazing. The views were amazing. What was profoundly disappointing was the summit.

We had hiked for hours, part of it up the nearly vertical face of Tuckerman’s. We were feeling very satisfied and accomplished.

Then we got close to the top.

“Is that a… guardrail???”

Yes it was. We stepped right over it onto a road. I expected a small weather station at the summit. I did not expect this. At the top of the road was the marked summit alright… with a visitor’s center building, a large and very expensive cafeteria, a parking lot, a train station, and hundreds of people who just drove up for a few hours to have lunch.

I’m pretty sure I facepalmed on that one right before I gathered my backpack and headed back down.

What did I learn from all this? Thankfully these lessons stuck so I didn’t have to repeat the test.

• If you are going to live a largely sedentary lifestyle with no deliberate exercise and then hike like a maniac, expect massive leg cramps in the middle of the night at the very least.

• Sometimes, maps lie.

• Always be better prepared than you think you need to be.

• The “short cut” doesn’t always live up the name.

• Save the hard way for when it’s really needed.

• Enjoy that you really earned it when someone else may have done it easier.

And of course…

• Watch out for roots.

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