1. Don’t miss the party. Matthew 25:1-13

2. Don’t waste your life. Matthew 25:14-30

3. Don’t fool yourself. Matthew 25:31-46

The Bishop of Liverpool, J.C. Ryle sums it up well:

“The practical lesson of each parable is the main point of difference: vigilance is the keynote of the first parable, diligence that of the second. The story of the virgins calls on the church to watch; the story of the talents calls on the church to work.”

• J.C. Ryle

Two Sundays ago, we focused on the theme of how to steward the talents that Jesus gives us. The parable in the middle of the chapter teaches us how to do this in a few brief points…

1. Jesus is the master who went away on a journey and left us here as stewards.

The master refered to in this parable is Jesus Christ. He identifies with the bridggroom in the previous parable and the king in the next parable so it makes the most sense that he identifies with the master in this middle parable. Jesus is the man who gives talents to his servants. Jesus is the one who ascends into heaven and after some time returns to evaluate the management and level the accounts. Remarkably, it’s “his own property” that Jesus hands over to us to manage. These talents are money but there’s an elasticity to what he entrusts. He entrusts to each according to his own ability.

2. Jesus loans us opportunity and expects a return.

Jesus loans us talents that we can invest however we can. They are money but the symbolize more than money. Back in the Garden of Eden, God gave his image bearers a job to do: “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea…”. This cultural mandate is what God has always been about for his people. It’s as if He is saying to us, “You know me, look like me, and worship me - now spread out over the whole earth and create people and culture that does the same.” God is an interested and excited parent who wants to see what we’ll get up to with his stuff.

Two things strike me about how Jesus tells this short-story in Matthew 25. First, he commended the first two servants for taking a risk with his money. There’s no scolding or rebuking - only blessed commendations. Second, and much more starling, Jesus called the one who did not take risks “wicked.” Which leads to the third point…

3. Jesus says that failure to multiply is wicked and lazy.

This should startle us. According to Jesus, there’s more than one way to be wicked. Everything in us wants this to be wrong. What did this servant do to disappoint Jesus? There’s not a hint of stealing, immorality, or even reckless irresponsibility involved. He didn’t blow the master’s money on partying, prostitutes, gambling, or on first class accomodations. In fact, he did not spend a single penny on himself. He returned 100%, unspent and uninvested. For Jesus, that’s wicked.

This passage of Scripture challenges our understanding of sin. Most of us think wickedness is what we do wrong. In this passage of Scripture, the label of wicked extends to what we don’t do. Jesus is bringing an upside down kingdom. The judgement question is not just whether you have done bad things; it’s whether you have done the right things with the good things God has given you.

This means that risk is often right. Not risking everything on every moment, but that the Christian life does involve calculated risks where we give it a genuine go. Not taking certain risks actually ensures our decline. The servant who refused to risk had the one talent taken away. Numbers 13:26-33 tells the story of the unbelieving spies that God had to call “evil” for their lack of faith. John Piper was right to talk about the Christian life being a call to risk - you either live with risk or waste your life. Jim Elliot even taught that he is no fool who gives up what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose. He lost his earthly life in missionary sacrifice and gained immortality with God forever.

4. Jesus rewards faithfulness by assigning more work to do.

The first two servants present their work and they are rewarded the same. Praise filled approval, “Well done, my good and faithful servant.” More responsibility, “I will set you over much.” And everlasting blessing, “Enter into the joy of your master.”

Followers of Jesus steward the talent that God has given them in a few ways…

First, we remember that Christianity is about what the Master gives you, not what you do for him. 1 Corinthians 4:7 is a potent reminder: What do you have that you did not recieve? It’s all gift. God goes first then we respond in willing faith.

Second, we emrace our individual and collective “response ability.” We ask am I taking responsibility for my life? This is important because someones irresponsibility is soon to become someone else’s responsibility. Benjamin Franklin was right to quip, “He that is good at making excuses is seldom good at anything else.” The issue is not whether life is fair or not but how we are going to make the most of the opportunity of this one life that God has entrusted to us.

Third, we focus on being satisfied with God, not this world. We want to be servants of the Lord who cultivate confidence in the goodness and trustworthiness of God. The woman who touched the edge of Jesus’ garment received healing from him because she believed in his goodness. Our God is so good, gracious, and powerful that we can never ask or assume too much of him. We don’t offend him with large requests, only the small ones! We do need to be satisfied with him and not the world. When we are satisfied with the world its like a grown man sitting in a kitty pool. God has so much more for us to explore and get up to with him. Also, it looks weird when we’re content with such a small situation.

Finally, we embrace this truth: What you do with your talents tells the truth about what you really think about Jesus. The only hard person in the story Jesus tells us the servant who had the wrong ideas about God. Our theology will reveal itself. “I knew you to be a hard man…” is the confession of someone who did not really know God. The third servant did not trust his master’s goodness. The other two servants knew the graciousness, goodness, and gladness of their master. It’s as if they were so wrapped up in the trustworthiness of their master that they knew he would honor their hard effort + mistakes instead of playing it foolishly safe. Your investments reveal your theology.

We should be watching, witnessing, working, and waiting for the second coming of Jesus. We may not be succesful in the eyes of men, or even popular with others. But if we are faithful and profitable we shall receive our reward.

The key to living all of this out is to know: Jesus Christ took responsibility for you. He who did not spare His Son will graciously give us all things (Romans 8:32). Jesus invested all things well. Jesus is the grain of wheat that fell into the earth and died so He could bear much fruit in our lives (John 12:24).

So, let’s seek to be productive. Only in this way will we have the inestimable blessing of hearing Him say, “Well done, good and faithful servant.”

Yet leading family worship can be a trial. Some of our most discouraging moments parenting our children are tied to our most sincere attempts to love and serve them by gathering for family worship. When our plans and expectations meet our children’s squirminess and silliness (which they’re accustomed to do), we lose heart. Then there are those times when we’re tired of trying and coming up short, or we’re exhausted at the end of a long day, and the thought of getting organized for family worship time on a Thursday night feels like a burden, not a blessing.

In my experience, family worship tends to get stuck in two equal and opposite ditches, both of which were familiar to Moses. If we’re able to recognize them, we can find perspective and strength to persevere in this worthwhile task.

I recently wrote an article about the two ditches we typically get stuck in, wisdom from a tired parent, and how to start conversations with our children.

Keep reading my latest at The Gospel Coalition.

Psalm 24:1 - God owns everything. God has creator-rights over all he has made. Anything we have - time, talent, treasure, God’s truth, and a testimony to report - all belongs to God.

AND…

Matthew 25:14-30 - One day, we will all stand before God and give an account for how we invested what he entrusted to us. Blessings and curses will be rendered, and the difference will be as wide as heaven and hell. All we have received is sheer grace, and what we do with what we have received will be judged by God.

There’s a lot more to this season of study than this, but there’s certainly not less. And we’re intentionally engaging in this season of study when there isn't a major new work outstanding to take on. What we have is clear: we are still paying down some debt on our Broadway Building we enjoy every week, and we have budgets that need our sacrificial generosity. But outside of those, there’s nothing new or distinct going on. Which makes talking about Stewardship the right message at the right time. This is about our money, of course, but it’s bigger than that: it’s about our whole selves and everything we possess.

TIME

We’re beginning this season studying the important concept of time. This past Sunday we encountered five big ideas about time, according to the Bible…

1. God made time, and he is not bound by it. Genesis 1:1; Psalm 90:2, 4; 2 Peter 3:8

2. God gave us days with no deadline. Genesis 1:26-28; 2:15; Psalm 90:1

3. God numbered the days of grasping hands. Genesis 3:6, 19; Psalm 90:3, 7-10; Romans 5:12

4. God appoints the seasons, and wisdom learns to tell his time. Ecclesiastes 3:1, 11; Psalm 90:5-6, 12; Ecclesiastes 8:5; 1 Chronicles 12:32

5. God has fixed a Day, and every day will answer to it. Psalm 90:11; Acts 17:26, 31; Hebrews 9:27; Matthew 25:19

There’s much more to say about each of these. You could watch the sermon here and get a fuller picture of what we talked about.

With all of that being true, our question is simply:

How do stewards spend numbered days?

Psalm 90 does better than offering life hacks and optimizations; it gives us three prayers to pray…

1. “Teach us to number our days.” Psalm 90:12

The key to stewarding our time is twofold: asking God for help + also realizing the horizon of eternity. This is helpful for all of us, especially those who often get stuck in one of two ditches…

Some of us cannot get started - we know this through the snooze, the scroll, and the morning that never opens into the rest of the day. We need God to help us number our days because we need help getting up and getting going.

and at the same time…

Some of us cannot stop - the laptop is open at the dinner table, we always promise ourselves we just need to get through one more busy stretch, our family and friends abhor our attachment to the phone, and the Sabbath never comes.

We need to ask God for his wisdom, his direction, and his help for how we spend our days. Timely words for parents feeling overwhelmed with the rapid import on the school calendar. We need to begin by appreciating that we only have so many Monday mornings and Saturday evenings. “Lord, what are these for?”

2. “Satisfy us in the morning.” Psalm 90:14

Moses was probably thinking about the daily bread that God provided for his people in the wilderness wanderings. God provided manna for his people. They would have received just enough for the day, and the only way it would be ruined is if they hoarded and tried to keep more for themselves and tomorrow. God was teaching his people the importance of daily bread.

There are a lot of ways we try to find satisfaction in the mornings…the five a.m. club is running record enrollment numbers, runs, cold plunges, intense routines, and the rest of it is increasingly popular. And it’s a perfectly wise use of time and resources to take care of our physical bodies and prioritize the best parts of the day for doing well and keeping well. But none of that can save a soul.

We must turn to God as soon as he wakes us from another night of sleep. We do well to abide with God before we access our phones every morning. The idea is that we would train ourselves to practice reception before production.

and finally…

3. “Establish our work.” Psalm 90:17

Moses repeats himself on purpose at the end. He’s giving the stutter of a man who wants and waits for one thing. It’s the cry of someone who is building his life on the hope that his work will outlast him.

Failure to pray this prayer first thing is sure to land us in that sorry script from Genesis 11:4. God had urged his people to spread out all over the earth and to reproduce people who would worship Him through the way they created culture (Genesis 1:26-28). They stubbornly refused. Instead, they aspired, “Let us make a name for ourselves” (Genesis 11:4). It’s the cry of the self-obsessed.

Moses points to a better way. We must turn to God and ask him not only what our days are for and for daily bread, but that he would be the one to make the work matter. Paul reminds the church that “in the Lord your labor is not in vain” (1 Corinthians 15:58) and Jesus himself promised that he is the one builder whose work cannot fail: “I will build my church” (Matthew 16:18).

so…

What time is it?

In your life?

And: In God’s house?

What season is it? What is the wise use of energy and resources to flow with the needed work in that season? For context, even consider: what season are you coming out of + what season is God leading you into?

What If You’ve Wasted Time?

God’s people have not always invested their time wisely. I find it strikingly beautiful that God promised to redeem the time in the same chapter of Scripture he promised to send the Holy Spirit. Joel 2:25 is where God promises, “I will restore to you the years that the swarming locust has eaten.” Ecclesiastes 3:11 promises that God will make everything beautiful in its time, and Romans 8:28-29 promises that God will cause everything to work together for the good of those who love him and are called according to his purposes.

All of this is possible because God keeps good time.

Galatians 4:4 declares, “At just the right time, God sent forth his Son…”

Jesus was born of a woman: he entered our time.

Jesus was born under the law: he entered into our sentence of death.

No one ever kept time like him. Herod hunted him as a young boy, and the star’s timetable helped the child stay ahead of the genocide of the wicked king. Thirty years of his life were hidden in Nazareth, and not one of them was wasted. “The time is fulfilled,” he announced, and the demons started checking their own clocks: “Have you come here to torment us before the time?” Lazarus died, and Jesus waited two days, on purpose, for the sake of love. He couldn’t be arrested ahead of schedule because his time had not yet come. Then, when the celebration of the Passover came, only then, he said, “My time is at hand.” “It is finished” is a phrase about the culmination of more than time.

You might be reading this and realize you have not kept God’s time well. Good news: “Behold, now is the favorable time; behold, now is the day of salvation” (2 Corinthians 6:2). Turn to God. Return to God. Tell him you’re sorry. Ask him what your remaining time is for. Ask him to help you through this day. Ask him to establish your life so it won’t be wasted.

If you’re still reading, then it seems like there’s still time on the clock. Let’s live the days we have left to hear with these words pinned as the cry of our hearts:

Grab a copy for your family and a family you love.

Here’s a sample of the beautiful artwork…

Today, I’m meditating on a quote by Charles Spurgeon.

Spurgeon preached a sermon just days before Christmas called “The Great Birthday of Our Coming Age.” His words from 1884 still carry punch, prophetic power, and pizazz in a way that only Spurgeon could do.

(As an aside, I love to imagine the two-things-happening-at-once nature of Spurgeon preaching up a storm in the Metropolitan Tabernacle in London while the congregation of Nashville First was in its 64th year of life together, some 4,197 miles away.)

His text was Galatians 4:3-6:

Tomorrow, we’ll study Psalm 90 and seek to understand what it means to be “stewards of time” who rightly number our days and embody a heart of wisdom.

Today, this quote from Spurgeon is good for my own soul. For anyone who struggles to trust God’s timing in our own lives, for anyone who wonders if God is running late, for anyone who fears they might have missed their time, enjoy this quote, and consider investing some time this weekend to read the entire sermon in the context of Christmas:

There are no loose threads in the providence of God, no stitches are dropped, no events are left to chance. The great clock of the universe keeps good time, and the whole machinery of providence moves with unerring punctuality.

Join us tomorrow in the heart of Nashville where we ask two questions of the Bible:

1. What does the Bible say about “time”?

2. How do stewards spend numbered days?

Worship Services at 8:30 and 11:00

Fellowship with Coffee and Donuts at 9:30

Bible Study Groups at 9:45

7th Avenue and Broadway

God Has Owner’s Rights

“The earth is the LORD’s and the fullness thereof” (Psalm 24:1). That settles the title deed forever. What remains is the trust: God places real things in real hands. Hours. Gifts. Dollars. Truth. God is sovereign, and he has given us actual responsibility. He gives real authority and keeps total ownership. He calls this arrangement stewardship. A steward holds everything and owns nothing.

There are three words that get tangled in the church, and this month unties and unites them.

Stewardship is the office — who you are before what God owns.

Generosity is the affection — how the hand learns to sit open.

Giving is the act — the moments the open hand releases.

The world runs that stack upward: perform the act, fake the affection, and claim the office. It is exhausting, because it is backward. Grace straightens things out and makes it run smoothly: the Father makes sons; sons grow open hands; open hands give.

The Bible’s whole plot turns on two verbs: God gives, and we grasp. In the garden, God hands the man and the woman a world — every tree but one — and the woman “took of its fruit and ate” (Genesis 3:6). In the wilderness, the devil offers the second Adam all the kingdoms without a cross, and Christ refuses the shortcut the first Adam took; he “did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped” (Philippians 2:6). In the vineyard, Jesus tells of tenants who forgot they were tenants and killed the son to seize the inheritance (Luke 20). God is the great giver. We are supposed to be people who gratefully receive and steward. In our worst way, we grasp after what belongs to God. Grace can enter in and rewrite the story of our lives. Every human heart lives somewhere in that story.

The Stewards Are The Sons

In the ancient world, a steward managed an estate another man’s son would inherit. In the Father’s house, the stewards are the sons. We’ll unpack this idea across the next four weeks together.

This principle is illustrated in the story Jesus told in Luke 15 of a gracious father with two prodigal sons.

The younger brother’s “lostness” is familiar: running far from God, dismissing the father's love with wild living and no regard.

The elder brother’s lostness is just as bad: always around the house, keeping the record clean and appearances up, and furiously angry with the father.

In that story, Jesus tells us how the father responded to the frustrated older brother, “Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours” (Luke 15:31). That is why the failed stewards of Scripture all share one root — not laziness, but a false portrait of the Master. “I knew you to be a hard man,” said the servant who buried his trust, “so I was afraid” (Matthew 25:24–25).

The Goal of Stewardship

What’s my angle?

I’m aiming for the joy of God’s people. Really.

A great accounting is on the way. One day, either we will appear for the Master or the Master will appear before us suddenly and unexpectedly. The goal is to take what the Master has entrusted and invested and multiply it well. That testimony sounds something like this, “Master, you delivered to me five talents; here, I have made five talents more” (Matthew 25:20). The model investor. How does the Master respond? Jesus tells us, “His master said to him, ‘Well done, good and faithful servant. You have been faithful over a little; I will set you over much’” (Matthew 25:21).

Well done = these are the words every heart longs to hear. Not the verdict or a declaration we pronounce over our own lives but a claim that is declared over us.

Enter into the joy of your master = this is what we’re aiming for. Wonderfully, we don’t have to churn up or create the joy on our own. Our Master has joy, and it’s plenty enough for us to be able to enter into.

Time, Talent, Treasure, Truth-Testimony

So, how well are you investing what God has put in your hands?

God owns everything. One day we will all stand before him and report on what we made of the time, talent, treasure, and testimony he gave us. Will we shrink back in fear? Or will we embrace a risk-taking faith that expects great things from God and attempts great things for God?

Join us on this journey. We gather at 8:30 and 11:00 on Sunday mornings and offer Bible Study groups in between the two worship services. If you’re not local to Nashville, then tune in to our livestream or keep up on one of our content platforms.

It’s All His. We want to be a community of people who are All In.

Andrew and I took our PhD seminars together. It’s a joy to look back on that season and celebrate all the Lord has done in our lives, families, and ministries.

Thank you for your support of The Gospel Way.

Here’s to kingdom friendships. May they increase among us!

The context is in 1 Samuel 4:1: Israel camped at Ebenezer, and lost. It was a huge loss: the lost the battle but most importantly they lost the ark, the symbol of God’s presence carried off by a foreign army. The chapter ends with a widow naming her newborn Ichabod which means the glory has departed. On a map, Ebenezer was the coordinates of their worst day, the name on their most catastrophic failure. In chapter four, the word Ebenezer would have stung.

Twenty years later, Samuel takes that name from the site of the defeat and carves it into a memorial of grace, “Thus far the LORD has helped us.” God does that with maps and the mess of our own lives. He writes help over the coordinates of failure. What does all of this mean for us? Namely, wherever you are reading this, whatever place-name in your own story still carries the weight of what happened there, that is precisely the kind of coordinate God is in the habit of renaming.

“Thus far“ means real progress. The distance is actual. It counts. We have genuinely come from there to here. “The LORD has helped us” means real dependence. We did not come this distance alone, and we could not have.

What Samuel refuses is the usual rhetoric that celebrations and anniversaries default to: the triumphalist summary that says we made it, as though the journey were complete and the making were ours. That reading erases both the LORD and the thus-far. It turns a stone of help into a trophy of our own achievement.

What Kind of Community?

This last Sunday we celebrated the 206 birthday of our church. Nashville First was once a church planted on July 22, 1820. We celebrated that great anniversary with Vision Sunday where we took time to consider where we’ve been, where we are, and where we’re going. Isaiah 58:6-12 is the map we viewed. It helps us think about the important questions: What kind of church prepares the way for the coming of the Lord? What kind of church takes responsibility for it’s neighbors and stewards well the favor of God?

Isaiah 58 runs in if-then waves, and the structure is worth sitting with because it is not what we expect from a prophet. We expect either indictment or promise. Isaiah gives us both in the same sentence, stitched together with a small conditional word: if you pour yourself out for the hungry, then shall your light rise in the darkness. The chapter does this twice, in parallel waves, each one moving from the outward fast — bread shared, yokes broken, the house opened, the naked covered — to the inward one: if you take away the yoke from your midst, the pointing of the finger, and speaking wickedness.

The second wave lands closest to home. The first yoke is out on the street — hunger, oppression, homelessness. Isaiah addresses that squarely. But the second yoke is in the house of God itself. In the institution and the organism of the church the same. Among the people who already gather, already pray, already consider themselves the ones doing the fasting. The words are inescapable: From your midst. The pointing finger. The wicked word. The pernicious gossip.

Charles Taylor’s diagnosis of the modern condition is that we have lost any shared account of what we owe each other across lines of difference. Robert Putnam’s phrase for our cultural moment is that we bowl alone, not just socially but morally. The church was supposed to be the counterexample: a community whose belonging runs deeper than affinity, whose table is set wide enough to be interesting, whose unity is purchased not by proximity of taste but by the blood of Christ. Isaiah’s second wave is a word to every community that has gotten good at the external fast and neglected the internal one. It is much easier to share bread with a stranger than to take the pointing finger off your brother.

And to the community that does both — that pours itself out on the street and cleans its own house — hear what the prophet promises: You shall be like a watered garden, like a spring of water whose waters do not fail. God does not airlift his people out of scorched seasons. He makes springs in them. The waters do not fail — not because they come from you, but precisely because they don’t.

The Passive Name

Here is the detail in verse twelve that most readers skim: you shall be called the repairer of the breach, the restorer of streets to dwell in. “Called” is given in the passive voice. Nobody in Isaiah 58 names themselves. The name comes down, conferred by someone else, received rather than achieved. There is no sentence in Isaiah 58 that says call yourselves the repairers. The community does the work — the bread, the yoke, the open house, the clean interior — and then God names what they have become. The title is consequential, not causal. It follows from the life; it is not the strategy for it.

Alan Noble writes in Disruptive Witness about the peculiar failure of communities that lead with their identity rather than their practice: that announce what they are before they have become it, that treat the name as the program. Isaiah runs the sequence the other direction. The name is what happens to people who were too busy doing the thing to be distracted by what they would be called for it.

Tim Keller used to say that the community most persuasive to the watching city is the one that does not need the city’s approval to love it. That is a paraphrase of Isaiah’s passive voice. The name comes from God, not from Nashville. Which is the only reason it is worth having.

The Stone Goes Up in the Middle of the Field

First Samuel is careful to tell us that after Mizpah, the Philistines were subdued, but not gone. Verse thirteen: subdued, not extinct. The enemies were still in the land when Samuel lifted the stone. Which means he raised his Ebenezer in the middle of the field, not at the finish line. The memorial goes up while the work continues. The thanksgiving is real; the incompleteness is also real. It’s not one or the other but very much a both-and. This is where every honest retrospective has to land. The stone does not go up when the job is done. We raise stones of rememberance to mark how far we’ve come so once we keep journeying we can look back and see how far we’ve made it.

Here is the theological anchor for that confidence. Isaiah, the same prophet who drew the map in chapter 58, spoke seven hundred years early about a different kind of stone: Behold, I am the one who has laid as a foundation in Zion, a stone, a tested stone, a precious cornerstone (28:16). Peter looked at Jesus of Nazareth — tested in the wilderness, tested in the garden, tested on the cross, never cracked — and said: that’s Him. The stone the builders rejected became the cornerstone. Every Ebenezer, every stone of help raised anywhere across history, is a satellite of that one.

At Mizpah, God sent help from heaven. At the cross, he came himself. This is why thus-far holds. Not because the community has been faithful, it has not, not fully, not consistently, not without its Ichabod seasons when the glory seemed to have departed. But because the cornerstone cannot be moved. Whoever believes in Jesus, Peter says, will not be put to shame. The help that began at the cross does not run out before the work is done.

What the Stone Is For

The person reading this in the lament years — in the hard marriage, the long diagnosis, the ministry that has not borne the fruit you expected by now, the prayer you have been praying for a decade — needs to hear what 1 Samuel actually says about those twenty years Israel spent lamenting. They lamented after the LORD, 1 Samuel 7:2. In his direction, not away from him. Toward him, not out the door.

There are two ways to complain, biblical and unbiblical. One form of complaint is complaing of God or about God. This is a form of speach and a posture of the heart that works against God. There is another form of complaint that is thoroughly biblical. It is the lamenting complaint that turns to God in prayer, expresses pain, chooses to trust, and waits on the Lord. The first turns away from God in the pain, the second turns to God and chooses trust. Stones of rememberance are for people struggling to trust in God, not simply for the happy and celebratory sorts. One day, in this life or the life to come, people who spent their lives hearing, trusting, and obeying God will be able to say: Thus far, the Lord has helped us. Gloriously, we’ll also recite with Psalm 23, “Surely goodness and mercy chased after me all the days of my life and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.”

Samuel’s cordinance marking stone was not a manument of arrival but a marker of trajectory. This is where we are. This is who brought us here. This is the direction we are moving in.

Thus far.

The LORD.

Has helped.

There is a condition most people have mistaken for contentment, and Paul has a name for it. It presents as maturity. It feels like peace. It arrives after the dream keeps not arriving, after the season keeps disappointing, after you have lowered your expectations one careful notch at a time until disappointment has nothing left to hit. You tell yourself you never really wanted it that badly. You stop reaching.

The name for that is resignation. And it handles the problem of desire the way a surgeon handles infection with amputation, by removing the part that hurts. No appetite, no hunger. No longing, no loss. What Paul describes in Philippians 4 is not that; not even close.

A Learned Skill

The word he uses in verse 11 is emathon — learned, the way you learn a craft. By repetition. By getting it wrong and returning to the shop in the morning. Not downloaded in a moment of enlightenment. Not granted in a crisis that burned the wanting out of him. Pressed into him across seasons — “whether well fed or hungry, whether living in plenty or in want” — until it settled somewhere his circumstances could not reach.

Which means: nobody is born content. Paul says it twice in three verses, and the repetition is the point. He learned it. He learned the secret. There are no native speakers of contentment. Everyone who has it acquired it the hard way, through a classroom that, as Paul describes it, runs in two directions.

Here is the part we usually miss: contentment is a school with different courses in the disciplines of abundance and scarcity.

We preach the lean years. The empty table, the prison cell, the season of want — these we understand as formative. We are less comfortable saying what Paul says plainly, that abundance is a classroom too. “I know how to be brought low, and I know how to abound.” The second clause sits there, unexplored and unexplained. Spurgeon looked at it and said that if you are not content with what you have, you would not be satisfied if it were doubled — that we simply lengthen the bed of our desires without ever stretching out in it.

Ask yourself honestly which season has done more damage to your soul: the lean years or the fat ones. The biggest obstacle between you and God may not be your failings, it may be your successes.

Paul is not resigned. This is crucial. Read the letter — the man is chained to a Roman soldier and still planning journeys, still deploying co-workers, still writing with urgency about faces he is burning to see. He has not killed the appetite. He has found something underneath the wanting that holds. Contentment is not the absence of desire. It is being so genuinely satisfied that you do not grasp after what God and others hold. The opposite of contentment is not suffering. It is coveting — the inner grasping that says I will be empty until I have that.

Resignation kills the appetite. Contentment finds the food that feeds.

The Secret of Contentment

But learned from whom? And how?

Go back to verse 12, because there is a second word hiding under the English. “I have learned the secret” — Paul’s word is the word the mystery religions of his day used for initiation. It means: someone let me in. Contentment was not only pressed into him through accumulated experience. It was disclosed. Someone took him inside.

This matters because Paul is writing in a world that already had a word for contentment. The Stoics called it autarkeia: self-sufficiency. Inner independence from all external conditions. You find peace by needing nothing and no one. Paul picks up their exact word in verse 11, and then verse 13 breaks it open:

“I can do all this through him who gives me strength.”

His sufficiency has a source. And the source is not himself.

Verse 13 has been printed on more locker-room walls than anything else Paul ever wrote, and it was never about the game. Read it the way Paul wrote it: as the final line of its paragraph, not the first line of a poster. “All this” refers to the things he just listed — brought low and abounding, hungry and full, the full range of conditions he has learned to inhabit with the same soul. The strength he is describing is not the strength to achieve any ambition. It is the strength to endure any condition. There is a difference, and the difference is not small.

The secret is a person. And the person, Paul is suggesting, is not a stranger to the curriculum of abundance or scarcity.

Hebrews 5 uses the same verb of Christ: emathen, the Son learned obedience through what he suffered. Emathon, says Paul of himself. Emathen, says Hebrews of the Son. The same word. He was rich and for our sake became poor. He feasted at a wedding in Cana and starved forty days in the wilderness. He knew the full table and the empty one, abundance and need, the brought-low and the abounding — and he learned it in a body, all the way to a cross.

Paul learned contentment because his Teacher had learned it first. Which is why he could say in verse 13 not “I have mastered this” but “I can do this” — present tense, ongoing, strength continuously received.

The Secret Gets Out

This is what every secret eventually does: it leaks.

Watch what happens to Paul’s contentment in the closing verses, because it does not stay interior. It gets into his friendships, his theology of giving, and — most improbably — the imperial household of Nero.

On the friendship: in the ancient world, a gift came with a hook. Accept a patron’s money and you became a client — indebted, obligated, subtly owned. Paul refuses this. He stamps the word paid in full across their gift — apecho, the very word ancient clerks wrote across a settled bill — and then adds two words no clerk ever wrote: “and more.” The receipt overflows. Then he does something extraordinary: he removes himself from the ledger entirely. He never says I will repay you. He says my God will supply every need of yours. He redirects the debt upward and off himself.

Only a man who has learned contentment can receive money without becoming its debtor. He didn’t need their gift, which is exactly why he could take it freely. Contentment set the friendship free.

On generosity: “not that I seek the gift, but I seek the fruit that increases to your credit.” The kingdom ledger runs backward. Their giving does not deplete them; it deposits into their account. And verse 19, the promise this entire passage has been climbing toward, measures the supply not by the size of the need but by the wealth of God. According to his riches in glory. The filled man promises a filling God.

And then, verse 22, do not skim it: especially those of Caesar’s household. Palace servants. Imperial staff. Employees of the machine that put Paul in irons. Chapter 1 tells you how it happened: it had become known throughout the whole Praetorian Guard that his chains were for Christ. He ran no strategy. He booked no venue. He was chained to a soldier, and the shift changed every few hours, and the next man got clipped to the prisoner who would not stop talking about Jesus. The gospel walked into the empire on a guard rotation.

Grace Upon Grace

The letter opened with a word: grace to you and peace. It closes with the same word: the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ be with your spirit. Everything in between — the joy, the chains, the humility, the pressing on, the contentment, even the money — everything lives inside those two bookends.

Grace, Paul has spent four chapters arguing, is what you receive rather than achieve. And contentment, it turns out, is the same thing. Not a temperament you were born with. Not a discipline you complete. Not a season of suffering that burns the appetite out of you until you stop reaching. A disclosure. Someone let you in.

The secret has a name.

Postscript: This essay grew out of a sermon preached on the last Sunday of a summer series through Philippians at Nashville First Baptist Church. The congregation came to the Lord’s Table afterward — which felt like the right place to land. Paul’s word for “full-fed” in verse 12, the satisfied table word, is the same word the Gospels use when five thousand people on a hillside had eaten enough. The next day Jesus told them what the bread had been pointing at: I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me shall not hunger. Contentment is a fed soul. Which means the table is not just an illustration. It is, in some sense, the school itself.

Please join us in praying for our school neighbors across the street from our church (also, what was God doing with this sky??). Please pray for Adam and Kendall, our leaders, and our youth ministry as they launch into a new season this Sunday. ❤️ 🚀

Scene 2 / Our staff prayer walked the Sanctuary. We prayed over the different parts of our liturgy, the seats, and the seasons of the year. We want the Sanctuary to be just that: a consecrated space to encounter God in the midst of our busy and dynamic city. We prayed for the congregation, new season, and our city.

We are especially excited for “Vision Sunday & 206 Birthday Celebration” this Sunday! We are stewards a tremendous story of God’s faithfulness that’ll well celebrate on Sunday.

We have prayed for you and the special day. Bring a friend, we’d love to have you join us!

Scene 3 / We had a fellowship lunch with the preschool staff and the church staff. In case you haven’t heard: we have a phenomenal preschool that exists to help serve the families of Nashville led by a brilliant team. We had the best time talking, laughing, praying, and getting to know each other.

We talked about some very exciting developments for our school and families we serve.

Great people + great days.

Defiant Delight is a two-in-one: brief book on the theme of Grumbling or Grateful? and then a practical forty-day devotional + evening prayer practice, and the whole thing hangs on Deuteronomy 28:47: where Israel is judged not for having too little, but for having everything and still not being glad. It’s a book about how to form the habits to recover rest, contentment, and gratitude in our cynical age

Honest word about the writing of it. I need the themes of this book as much now as when I started the research and writing. I’m enjoyed tracing the themes of restlessness, discontent, and grumbling throughout the Bible and western culture alike and I can see so much of it all in me! I greatly need all God graciously gives through Jesus Christ. So the people praying were praying for a man writing about joy who was not doing well at joy. That’s why most of the book exists.

Off to the publisher this morning. There’s editing ahead and a long wait after that. But it’s coming, and I can’t wait to put it in your hands.

Thank you for carrying me through it. Keep praying. The part I need help with now is the part where I actually live it.

Now, on to celebrating The Gospel Way Catechism for Kids launching tomorrow!

Take that objection seriously, because it comes from love. Most of us know someone who grew up reciting all the right answers and now wants nothing to do with the God behind them. Nobody wants to raise a parrot.

But somewhere between the backpack aisle and the new carpool line, it is worth admitting: make up your own mind is not neutral ground. That itself is a creed about right and wrong and the process of how it should be discovered. It comes with a complete set of answers to the deepest questions your child will ever ask.

Ask the questions and audit the typical answers our children are probably already hearing. The cultural catechism is probably going something like this…

Who am I? Whoever you decide to be. Identity is a project, and you are in charge of it.

What makes me valuable? Performance. Appearance. An audience.

What will make me happy? The next thing. Every ad your child sees this week was built by talented adults to turn contentment into craving.

What do I do with my failure? Hide it. Curate it. Post the version of you that didn’t fail.

Who decides what’s true? You do. “Your truth” is the one answer no one is allowed to question.

What am I living for? Making an identity and expressing that identity to the world.

Nobody hands a nine-year-old this curriculum in a workbook. It arrives the way the best catechesis always has: repetition, story, song, liturgy. Thirty seconds at a time, autoplay on, all year long.

Lesslie Newbigin came home after decades in India and saw what a missionary is trained to see: the West is not neutral territory. It is a mission field with a creed of its own. Our children are its youngest converts.

And the longing of our hearts underneath that creed is real. See it with compassion before you say a word against it. A kid scrolling for one more video is looking for wonder. A teenager building a following is looking for what every human heart wants: to be known and delighted in. The desire is not the problem. The problem is not that our desires are too big and ambitious but that they are too small. We often settle for being satisfied by counterfeit stories when the epic story of the Bible awaits us. A story that tells a child to invent herself has handed her a job no child can do. The self is a heavy thing to manufacture. Authenticity keeps score. The algorithm never absolves. There’s a better way: The Gospel Way.

I wish I could tell you the church answered all this with something weighty and substantial. The church has historically answered the challenges of the cultural moment with something big, bold, ambitious, and daring. Yet, the recent decades of discipleship in Western culture settled for the faith dumbed down instead of handed down, and we are now reaping what we’ve sown. In the last decade of church in America, we often met the most sophisticated formation machine in history with snacks and a skit: Bible-flavored entertainment, graded by decibels and headcount. And pastors’ houses are not exempt. My own family faces the same stresses, strains, and so-tired-in-the-evening-I-can barely-muster sort of energy that makes the idea of leading out feel like more of a burden than a blessing. I get it. And that’s part of the reason behind this resource for families.

What if the answer isn’t doing less, but doing more?
What if there was a resource designed to help you do just that?

The church has an older practice, and it was never a trivia program. Catechesis takes the sprawling, beautiful story of Scripture and gives a child handles for holding it. Question and answer, repeated at the table over months, until truth settles beneath memory into imagination. Moses commanded exactly this rhythm: God’s words on your heart, talked over when you sit at home and when you walk down the road, when you lie down and when you get up (Deuteronomy 6:6–7). Catechesis is Deuteronomy 6 with handles.

The answers a catechized child carries are not exam answers. They are survival equipment.

A child who learns her worth is received from the God who made her has something to say when the world insists her value must be achieved.

A child who learns that sin is real but grace is greater has somewhere to go with his guilt besides hiding it.

A child who learns that Jesus is King can recognize the smaller kingdoms bidding for his allegiance.

A child who learns his life belongs inside God’s story never has to invent an identity from scratch.

The goal was never kids who win Bible trivia. The goal is disciples: truth traveling from memory into imagination, from imagination into affection, from affection into a life of following Jesus. Which is why catechesis works best exactly where Moses put it: at home, on the road, at bedtime, at breakfast. The question and answer start the conversation. It should never have to end it. The back-and-forth questions with children is where it get works out along the way:

Why do you think that matters?

Where did you see that today?

What does that tell us about Jesus?

Anything you want to pray about?

Those conversations feel remarkably ordinary. Most Christian spiritual formation does. The kingdom of God has always done some of its best work through ordinary faithfulness repeated over a long time.

That conviction is why Trevin Wax and I wrote The Gospel Way Catechism for Kids, which releases Tuesday: fifty questions and answers that walk children through the whole Christian story, from creation to all things made new, built to move truth into conversation, prayer, and everyday discipleship.

I made a short video walking through what’s inside.

Three groups I hope will put it to work.

Families with kids around eight to twelve: the new school year is a natural moment for a new rhythm. You don’t need a seminary at the breakfast table. One question. One answer. One conversation. Let the truth accumulate across the school year.

Grandparents: you may be the church’s most underused discipleship resource, because you have something parents rarely do. A different kind of time. A car ride, a sleepover, a slow Saturday breakfast. Keep a catechism at your house and make talking about God normal. Your grandchildren will remember more than you imagine. Make sure gospel conversations are part of the legacy you’re leaving them to remember you by.

Children’s ministries and Christian schools: we are forming disciples, and disciples need a coherent Christian account of reality — creation, fall, redemption, the church, and the hope of all things made new. Fifty questions cannot say everything. They can give a child a frame that a lifetime of learning gets built on.

Many of you have followed along this year as I worked through the catechism question by question, and I want to say thank you. In a noisy year, it is no small encouragement to find how many people still hunger for clear, beautiful, gospel-centered truth.

Now comes the part I have been waiting for. We received this faith as a gift. We learned to live inside its story. Now we place the treasure into the hands coming behind us. Psalm 145:4 says one generation shall commend your works to another and parents: this is our time.

The world’s catechism is already running.

Let’s make sure our children know the better and truer story.

Let’s put good theology into little hands.

The Gospel Way Catechism for Kids releases Tuesday, August 4.

That is why the final question of The Gospel Way Catechism is about hope:

Question 50: What does it mean to live in light of the end?

We walk by faith, not in secular progress and technological advance, but in the promise of God to reclaim this world and make everything right. With hope, we await the return of the King we love.

I cannot think of a better place to finish. Our age has placed remarkable confidence in progress, and much of that confidence celebrates real gifts of God’s common grace. Yet every generation eventually discovers the same hard truth: our deepest problems are not technological. They are theological. They are matters of the heart, and the deepest human need cannot be coded, engineered, legislated, or purchased. History is not an endless cycle, and it is not humanity’s slow march toward utopia. History is moving toward a Person. The future has already been secured by the resurrection of Jesus, and so the church lives today with tomorrow’s certainty. A catechism that ended anywhere else would have ended too soon.

More Than Fifty Questions

When this journey began, my prayer was never simply to publish fifty videos or walk through fifty questions. My prayer was that homes would begin talking about God again. That parents would find fresh confidence to disciple their children. That churches would recover the old, simple practice of asking good questions and giving rich, biblical answers.

You have let me watch it happen. Along the way I have heard from pastors, youth ministers, campus bible study leaders reading the catechism with their congregations and groups, and individuals who simply wanted a steadier grasp of the faith they already loved. Those stories have been among the great encouragements of my year.

So let me say it plainly. If you have watched, shared, commented, prayed, or worked through these questions with someone you love: thank you. You were never an audience. You were part of a recovery project, and the thing being recovered is family-table theology, and it is working.

The Journey Is Just Beginning

Although this is the final question, it is not the end of the road. In one sense it is the trailhead.

Next week, on August 4, families will be able to put these same truths into the hands of their children through The Gospel Way Catechism for Kids, written with Trevin Wax and beautifully illustrated by Jessica Blanchard. My prayer is that it becomes a trusted companion for bedtime conversations, family worship, and the holy chaos of everyday discipleship. If you preorder before release, there is a small gift in it for you as well, and your copy will arrive in time for the first week of school-year rhythms.

And, Lord willing, this is only the beginning of the resources still to come: books, devotionals, study guides, tools to help ordinary Christians see the beauty of the gospel and learn to inhabit its story more faithfully. One of them is nearly finished on my desk right now. I will have more to say about that soon.

Until the King Returns

Every catechism eventually reaches its final answer. The Christian never does. We keep learning. We keep repenting. We keep worshiping, witnessing, waiting. Not anxiously, but expectantly, because our hope never rested in ourselves or in the progress of our age. It rests in the promise of God and the return of the King we love.

Until that day, may we walk by faith. And may the gospel keep shaping our hearts, our homes, and our world, one question at a time.

I was wrong, and the essay is the account of how two cities taught me why.

Read the full essay at The Gospel Coalition.

Which is harder to reach: the city that rejects the gospel, or the city that assumes it? I have lived in both. My answer is at the link, and I would genuinely love to hear yours.

The problem is not that we hope too much. It is that we hope in things too small. We pin our confidence to careers that vanish, relationships that disappoint, markets that lurch, and leaders who cannot carry the weight we hand them, and then we wonder why the anxiety underneath never leaves. Fragile hopes make fragile people. What we are searching for is something sturdy enough to hold the hopes of an entire human life.

The Christian faith begins somewhere entirely different. It does not ask us to manufacture optimism. It anchors us to a person. And so, Question 49 of The Gospel Way Catechism, the second-to-last word of the whole project, asks:

What is the ultimate hope for the Christian?

Our hope is Jesus Christ. We believe he will come again to reign over and restore the world, delighting to dwell with us and grant life everlasting, forever filling us with wonder, love, and praise.

A Hope with an Address

The dissident playwright Václav Havel, writing from inside a police state, distinguished hope from optimism: hope, he said, is not the conviction that things will turn out well but an orientation of the spirit, a commitment to what is meaningful regardless of outcome. It is a noble definition, and it is not enough. An orientation can steady you; it cannot save you. Havel’s hope has a posture but no address, a direction but no arrival.

Christian hope has both.

God causes us to be born again to a living hope. Not a living optimism. A living hope, alive because its object is alive, anchored not in the odds improving but in a tomb standing empty. This is what distinguishes Christianity from every worldview built on human progress. Christians labor for justice, pursue beauty, and seek the good of their neighbors, but none of those is our ultimate confidence, because every human achievement remains unfinished until Christ himself returns. History is not wandering. It is not even merely improving. It is moving toward a King, and we “wait for our blessed hope, the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ” (Titus 2:13).

Restoration, Not Escape

From Genesis onward, God’s purpose has been to dwell with his people in a restored creation. Sin fractured that fellowship, the cross secured its repair, the resurrection announced that new creation has begun, and the return of Christ will finish the work. The Bible’s final vision is not souls floating away from earth but heaven coming down, and a voice from the throne declaring, “Behold, I am making all things new” (Rev. 21:5). Which means every longing you carry, for justice, for beauty, for peace, for belonging, for permanence, is at bottom a longing for the world Jesus has promised to make new. Your homesickness is a pointer and a prophecy.

Strong Enough for Suffering

This is why biblical hope has sustained believers through persecution, grief, illness, and death for two thousand years. The apostles did not deny suffering; they buried friends, endured prisons, and faced executioners. Yet they spoke constantly of hope, not because life was easy but because Christ was risen. And the resurrection changed the way they read every hardship. If death itself has been defeated, nothing else can claim the final word. Every funeral became temporary, every injustice became limited, and every sorrow acquired an expiration date.

That remains true when the worst news arrives in our own lives: when the diagnosis comes, when the job disappears, when the relationship fractures, when prayers seem to land unanswered. The Christian grieves honestly but never hopelessly, because our confidence never rested on changing circumstances. It rests on the unchanging promise of a returning Christ.

The Better Story

The popular stories in our world today will lead us to hope in the next breakthrough, the next election, the next promotion, the next version of ourselves, and every one of those hopes eventually asks more than it can deliver. The gospel offers a better story. A story in which history is not cycling but moving. A story in which evil does not win, and in which death is not ultimate. A story in which Jesus Christ returns to reign over and restore the world, delighting to dwell with his people forever.

Notice what that future does to the present, because it is the opposite of what critics predict. Hope in Christ’s return does not make Christians passive. It makes them free. We forgive, because justice is coming and does not depend on our vengeance. We endure, because glory is coming and outweighs the wait. We labor, because “in the Lord your labor is not in vain” (1 Cor. 15:58). Hope does not pull us out of the world. It sends us back into it with steady hands.

Lost in Wonder, Love, and Praise

Read the catechism’s penultimate answer one more time, and catch what it does at the very end. “Forever filling us with wonder, love, and praise.” It is the last line of Charles Wesley’s “Love Divine, All Loves Excelling,” where the redeemed are changed from glory into glory until they cast their crowns before him, “lost in wonder, love, and praise.” The catechism closes by breaking into song, because that is where all true doctrine has always been headed. The end of theology is doxology. The second-to-last answer is a hint at a great hymn.

So here is the hope the world cannot manufacture, suffering cannot extinguish, and death cannot silence. Our hope was never really in a better tomorrow.

Our hope is in the One who is coming again soon. And when he comes, every promise will become sight, and every fragile hope you ever misplaced will be swallowed up in the sturdy one, and the song will finally have all of us in it.

Lost in wonder, love, and praise.

That is the whole reason this book exists. Trevin Wax and I wrote The Gospel Way Catechism for Kids for the ordinary moments where faith actually gets passed down: the dinner table, the car line, the last five minutes before lights out. Deuteronomy 6 never pictured discipleship as a classroom. It pictured a conversation on the way.

Jessica Blanchard illustrated every page you are about to scroll.

Below are ten of the book’s fifty questions. Scroll slowly. Then try one out at dinner tonight. See what your kids say.

The book releases August 4, right as school starts back and family rhythms reset.

Buy one for your family. Buy another for a family you love.

The world did not wince. It exhaled. The clip ran everywhere, the editorials called it justice, and nobody, including the many commentators who consider the doctrine of hell barbaric, wrote the column arguing that the judge had been too judgmental. For one week our society was aligned in agreement that some things must be condemned in public, by someone with the authority to condemn them.

That week said something we prefer not to say aloud: We never stopped believing in judgment. We did, however, relocate it.

Say “grace” at a dinner party, and people lean in. Say “the judgment of God” and the temperature drops, because the idea sounds cruel, a leftover from an angrier religion. But watch what we do instead of what we say. We have built new liturgies of judgment: victim impact statements read into the record, documentary series that end at a sentencing. The appetite for a verdict survived the death of Christendom. What died was the belief in anyone qualified to deliver one. That is why our new judgments never close: no sentence is ever fully served, and no case is ever finally dismissed. A culture that keeps the trial but loses the Judge gets a courtroom that never adjourns.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn watched the human capacity for evil at closer range than any of us, and the camps did not teach him to divide the world into monsters and victims. They taught him that the line separating good and evil runs:

“right through every human heart.”

Scripture had said it first: there is no one righteous, not even one (Rom. 3:10). The Bible never draws the line where our outrage draws it, between them and us. It draws the line through the middle of the reader.

Here the honest objector deserves the floor, and his real complaint is stronger than the one preachers usually answer.

I know the sinister laugh outside a Friday night pub when people heard that I’m an evangelical Christian pastor. I also know the stunned realization on people’s faces when they say, “I’ve never met a Christian minister - ‘interesting’.” I’ve had people schedule meetings to tell me they’re leaving the church, concerned for preaching the cross of Christ and the fact of judgment.

This kind of talk runs deeper than “a loving God wouldn’t judge.” The people who preached judgment enjoyed it too much and aimed it away from themselves. Hell for the outsiders; attorneys and settlements for the insiders. Such complaints against the character of God are quoting our record.

And such arguments have more of the Bible on their side than we like to admit. The fiercest judgment language in Scripture does not fall on Rome or on pagans. It comes from Jesus, and it lands on religious professionals: the tithing, Scripture-quoting men of Matthew 23. Jonah sits in the canon as a permanent warning to clergy, a preacher who loved announcing judgment and sulked when mercy interrupted it. I know that appetite from the inside. It is easy to preach Amos at the culture; the room nods, and the sermon costs nobody anything, least of all the man delivering it. Romans 2:1 reads differently when the study door is closed: in passing judgment on another, you condemn yourself. The people most eager for judgment day have usually decided in advance which side of the bench they will occupy, and the Bible’s steadiest warning is addressed to exactly them. To us. To me.

So the choice was never between a judging God and a loving one. Abraham’s question still hangs over every courtroom in history: “Shall not the Judge of all the earth do what is just?” (Gen. 18:25). The psalms go further than most modern Christians are willing to. They throw a party. “Let the rivers clap their hands; let the hills sing for joy together before the LORD, for he comes to judge the earth” (Ps. 98:8–9). Creation greets the arrival of the Judge the way that Lansing courtroom exhaled, because in Scripture judgment is the beginning of restoration, the verdict that clears the ground so the world can be put right.

Question 48 of The Gospel Way Catechism asks:

What Happens to Those Who Oppose God?

Answer: God will one day purge the world of evil and establish righteousness on earth. Those who oppose God will experience eternal judgment—an everlasting fate apart from him, where life and light are no more.

Miroslav Volf wrote his great book on exclusion and embrace while his native Croatia burned, and he lost patience with Western theology’s embarrassment about divine wrath. The idea of a God who refuses to judge, he argued, could only have been born in “the quiet of a suburban home.” Nobody can believe it in a burned village. Subtract the judgment of God from the Christian story and what remains is worse than harsh: a world where the Nassars of history run out the clock, and the mass graves keep their secrets forever.

But leave judgment in, and the question turns on the one asking it. If the Judge is coming, and the line runs through my heart too, then the courtroom I cheered for has my name on the docket. This is where the gospel says what no other story dares to say. The Judge takes the judgment. Before Christ comes with justice in his hands, he came with nails in them. At the cross, the Judge of all the earth stood where the guilty stand and let the verdict fall on himself, so that mercy could arrive with justice fully done.

Christians expect to survive that day for one reason, and our record is not it: Someone stood in our place. A person who believes that cannot swagger about judgment. He has read his own case file. Whatever confidence he carries was bought for him, and he knows the price.

That is also the only register in which the church can speak of hell without disgracing herself. Jesus said more about judgment than anyone else in Scripture, and every warning on his lips was a rescue in progress. The door still stands open because the Judge himself is holding it, and he still says come.

The earliest recorded prayer of the church survives in Aramaic from before most of the New Testament was written: Maranatha. Our Lord, come (1 Cor. 16:22). Sit with what that means. The first Christians knew exactly who was coming and what he was coming to do, and they asked him to hurry. Seventeen hundred years later, Charles Wesley put the same longing on the church’s lips:

Yea, Amen! let all adore thee, high on thine eternal throne; Saviour, take the power and glory, claim the kingdom for thine own: O come quickly! O come quickly! O come quickly! Everlasting God, come down!

The world still needs judgment, and Lansing proved the world still wants it. The only question left is where you will stand when it comes: alone before that bench, or hidden in the One who has already stood there for you.

Maranatha.

It’s not in there. Genesis to maps, you can search all day; it is not in the Book. And yet when George Barna polled the country, three out of four Americans said the Bible teaches it, more than half said so strongly, and two out of three born-again Christians agreed. When Americans were surveyed on the Bible verses they knew best, this one topped the list. The best-known Bible verse in America is not a Bible verse.

So where did it come from? Benjamin Franklin printed it in Poor Richard’s Almanack. Franklin borrowed it from the English politician Algernon Sidney. And behind Sidney it runs all the way back to one of Aesop’s fables: a waggoner whose cart is stuck in the mud cries out to the gods for rescue, and Hercules calls back, get up and put your shoulder to the wheel; the gods help them that help themselves. Hear that clearly. The most quoted Bible verse in America was first spoken by Hercules. It is Greek mythology in a Sunday suit.

And the counterfeit verse smuggles in a whole counterfeit religion. You move first; God matches. You climb; heaven applauds. Effort up front, grace as the payout. Underneath the proverb sits the oldest question believers have ever wrestled over: when it comes to your soul, who does the doing? The Bible’s actual answer runs in exactly the opposite direction: “while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly” (Rom. 5:6). Write that over the whole gospel. God saves those who cannot help themselves, which, at the point of the soul, is every last one of us.

But this raises a real question, and Philippians 3 exists to answer it. If God does the doing, why does the Christian life look so much like running?

One Conjunction Holds the Whole Gospel

Fresh off writing away his entire résumé, Paul breaks into a sprint: “Not that I have already obtained this or am already perfect, but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own” (Phil. 3:12). The same man who just declared his credentials are a loss is now out-running everyone in the letter. The counting words are gone; now it is press on, straining, goal, prize. Paul traded the ledger for the track.

Read the verse again and watch one small word carry the whole weight of Christianity: because. Not so that. “I press on so that Christ will make me his own” — that is Hercules, that is the almanac, that is every religion on earth. “I press on because Christ Jesus has made me his own” — that is the gospel. One conjunction is the entire difference between Christianity and legalism.

There is even a hidden autobiography in Paul’s vocabulary. His old résumé boasted, “as to zeal, persecuting the church,” and the verb is diōkō: chasing down, hunting. Now look at what he says twice in this passage: “I press on.” Same verb. Diōkō. Paul did not get a new verb when he met Jesus; he got a new prize for the old one. The chaser got chased. The hunter got caught, seized mid-stride with the arrest warrants still in his bag. And the seizure did not put out the fire in the man. It turned the fire around.

Picture a father walking a three-year-old across a parking lot. The boy has one of his daddy’s fingers wrapped in his whole fist, white-knuckled, certain his grip is what keeps him safe. It isn’t. What keeps him safe is the hand wrapped all the way around his. There are two grips in that parking lot, and only one of them is load-bearing. Now read the verse and find the load-bearing grip: I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own. Your pursuit of Christ is powered by Christ’s pursuit of you. Grasped people grasp.

Effort Is Not Earning

At this point somebody gets nervous. If the résumé burned last week, isn’t all this straining just a new treadmill? No, and the difference is direction: the treadmill runs to earn the grip; the runner runs from it. Paul builds the same grammar earlier in this very letter: “work out your own salvation... for it is God who works in you” (Phil. 2:12–13). We work out what God works in. Never the reverse.

Dallas Willard said it in one line worth a shelf of books: “Grace is not opposed to effort; it is opposed to earning.” Earning is an attitude. Effort is an action. Franklin’s proverb got the order backward, and in the gospel the order is everything. The Reformation went to war over that order, and Calvin settled it in a sentence: it is faith alone which justifies, and yet the faith which justifies is not alone. Then he handed us the picture. The heat of the sun alone warms the earth, yet in the sun, the heat never travels without the light. Faith alone saves. Saving faith never travels alone.

Tim Keller pressed the logic to its root: my pressing on is caused by his pressing on; I take hold because I was taken hold of. So the counterfeit verse gets its final answer. Who does the doing? God does the saving. And saved people run.

The Finish Line Comes to You

Here is where Paul’s racing metaphor breaks every rule of racing, and where the passage becomes the best news in the letter. Every race you have ever run, you ran toward the finish line. The deal, the degree, the down payment: you closed the distance, you broke the tape, and by Thursday the restlessness was back, because every finish line on earth dissolves on contact.

Then Paul writes to a proud Roman colony: “our citizenship is in heaven, and from it we await a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, who will transform our lowly body to be like his glorious body” (Phil. 3:20–21). Do not miss the direction of travel. In this race, you do not reach the line. The line is coming to you. He is coming, from the capital, for you.

The writer of Hebrews saw the whole race and sang it: run with endurance, “looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross” (Heb. 12:1–2). And what was the joy set before him? You. His one thing was you. Look at his hands: he let them be nailed open so they could close around you and never let go. There are scars in the grip.

So run. Not to grasp something from God, but because you have already been grasped by God. Not toward a tape, but toward a face. And on the day your legs give out, the finish line will cross the distance to you, and the hands with the scars will carry you over.

In every religion on earth, you chase the finish line. In this gospel, the finish line came to you. His name is Jesus.

Which conjunction are you running on?

There is only a smallness in them. Because many of us have inherited a picture of eternity shaped more by greeting cards and movies than by Scripture, and the greeting-card version is not too good to be true. It is too thin to be true. The Christian hope is at once simpler and far more astonishing than anything our culture whispers at the graveside. We do not become angels. We do not become stars, or memories, or vague presences in the wind. We become something better.

Question 47: What Happens When We Die?

Answer: When we die, we do not cease to exist, neither do we become stars or angels. Our spirits soar to Christ our hope in life and death, and our bodies rest until the resurrection.

Made for More Than Survival

Behind our fascination with the afterlife lies a longing in our hearts. We want to know that love outlasts the grave, that justice triumphs, that death does not get the last word. That longing is not a design flaw. “He has put eternity into man’s heart” (Eccl. 3:11). We were built with the instinct that this world is not all there is.

The problem is not that we desire eternity. The problem is that we imagine it too small. Popular spirituality offers survival: a disembodied spirit floating somewhere beyond the clouds, a soul recycled into the universe, an essence living on in memory. Christianity promises resurrection: redeemed humanity, in glorified bodies, living in a renewed creation under the reign of the risen King. Those are not two versions of one hope. They are profoundly different stories, and only one of them is big enough for what your heart actually wants.

An Enemy, Not the Victor

Notice that the Bible refuses to romanticize death. Death is not “a natural part of life’s beautiful cycle.” It entered the world through sin, and Paul calls it what it is: “the last enemy” (1 Cor. 15:26). This is why Christians never celebrate death itself, never dress it up as a friend. We grieve. We mourn. Jesus himself stood outside the tomb of a man he was about to raise, and before he said a word of power, he wept (John 11:35). Christian hope has never required pretending death is not painful.

But neither does it permit despair. Because the One who wept at a grave is the same One who walked out of his own. The resurrection of Jesus is not a metaphor for springtime or a symbol of fresh starts. It is the moment the last enemy took its first mortal wound.

What Happens When a Christian Dies

So what actually happens, the moment a believer dies? Paul answers with a homecoming: to be “away from the body” is to be “at home with the Lord” (2 Cor. 5:8). Not extinction. Not reincarnation. Not absorption into a cosmic force. The believer’s spirit goes immediately to Christ, which is why Paul, weighing his own death from a prison cell, could call departing to be with Christ “far better” (Phil. 1:23). The oldest answer in the Heidelberg Catechism has carried Christians through four and a half centuries of deathbeds: my only comfort in life and in death is that I am not my own, but belong, body and soul, to my faithful Savior Jesus Christ.

And yet, wonderfully, even that is not the end of the story. We often speak as though heaven is the Christian’s final destination. It is not. It is the intermediate state, the resting place, the being-with-Christ that waits for something greater still. N. T. Wright has spent decades reminding the church that the New Testament’s hope is not life after death but life after life after death. Heaven is precious. Resurrection is the point.

The Hope Is Resurrection

From Genesis to Revelation, God is committed to redeeming his creation, not abandoning it. And that includes your body. When Christ returns, the dead will be raised: “sown in weakness... raised in power,” this mortal frame clothed with immortality (1 Cor. 15:42–54). This is why the church has always confessed, “I believe in the resurrection of the body.” Not because bodies do not matter, but because they matter so much that God refuses to leave a single one of his children’s in the grave.

The future God promises is not an endless spiritual existence detached from the world he made. It is resurrected people dwelling with the resurrected Christ in a renewed heavens and earth, where “he will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more” (Rev. 21:4). That is richer than becoming an angel. Angels, for all their glory, have never been redeemed and never been raised; the gospel is news so good that “angels long to look” into it (1 Pet. 1:12). It is richer than clouds and wings and watching from above. It is the restoration of everything sin has broken, with you in it, body and soul.

A Better Story at Every Funeral

Every funeral asks the same question: is death the end? The gospel answers with breathtaking clarity. No. For those in Christ, death is not the end of existence, not the loss of identity, not the final chapter. Our spirits go to be with Christ. Our bodies rest until the resurrection. And because Jesus rose, we will too.

That is why Christian funerals have always held tears and hope in the same hour. We grieve, but “not as others do who have no hope” (1 Thess. 4:13). The empty tomb is a promissory note written against every grave that belongs to Christ, and one day every one of them will be empty too. John Donne stared down his own death and taunted it in advance:

One short sleep past, we wake eternally, And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.

Not escape. Not extinction. Not angels.

Resurrection.

Christianity offers a better story than our culture dares to imagine.

Now walk through downtown Nashville on a Monday morning. Watch the commuters chasing another promotion, the runners logging another mile, the hustle culture cranking up once again because their identity depends on it, the influencers refreshing their feeds, the parents structuring whole calendars around youth sports, the investors checking markets before breakfast. All of these are potential acts of worship as well.

Not because any of these things are wrong in themselves. Careers matter. Families matter. Fitness, beauty, excellence, and ambition are gifts from God. The trouble begins when good things become ultimate things, when they stop being gifts to enjoy and become gods to serve. The myth of the secular age dies on a Monday morning downtown. We have not stopped worshiping. We have simply relocated the altar.

The late David Foster Wallace, hardly an evangelical preacher, saw it plainly in his famous commencement address: “Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.” He was catching up to something Scripture has declared all along. The Bible’s diagnosis is not that some people worship while others abstain. It is that everyone worships something.

That is where The Gospel Way Catechism begins its answer:

What is worship?

Worship is the devotion we offer up to whatever we love most. Everyone worships. Christian worship is a lifelong outpouring of love to God, in humble adoration. Entranced by his beauty, we exalt him through praise and obedience.

We Become What We Behold

The Bible consistently presents worship as far more than an activity. It is orientation, allegiance, love. When Jesus summarized the greatest commandment, he did not say merely obey: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind” (Matt. 22:37). Worship always flows toward what we treasure most.

This is why the prophets spoke so fiercely against idols, and why their warnings have not aged a day. An idol was never merely a carved statue. Tim Keller defined an idol as anything more important to you than God, anything that absorbs your heart and imagination more than God does. That definition lands uncomfortably close to home, because our idols rarely stand in temples anymore. They sit in boardrooms, smartphones, mirrors, bank accounts, and calendars.

And whatever we worship begins to shape us. If success becomes your god, failure becomes unbearable. If approval becomes your god, criticism becomes devastating. If comfort becomes your god, suffering becomes meaningless. False gods run the same con in every generation: they over-promise, under-deliver, and demand everything while possessing no power to save. Much of what we call anxiety is simply the job description of serving a god who cannot carry us.

The Better Story

Christianity does not begin by commanding us to worship harder. It begins by showing us someone worthy of worship.

The gospel tells of the God who does not wait for worshipers to climb toward him but comes down to rescue rebels. The Son of God entered the world, bore our sin, defeated death, and welcomed us into the Father’s family by sheer grace. That reverses the entire direction of worship. Christian worship is not an anxious attempt to earn God’s approval; it is the grateful response of people who have already received it. We sing because he first loved us. We obey because he first rescued us. We gather because Christ first gathered us.

The order is everything. Religion says worship so that God might accept you. The gospel says Christ has accepted you by grace; now worship him with joy. One is achievement. The other is astonishment.

Worship Beyond Sunday

This also frees worship from its Sunday cage. “Present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship” (Rom. 12:1). Every conversation, every meeting, every meal, every act of generosity, every faithful decision made when no one is watching: all of life becomes an offering. The church gathers each week not because worship begins there but because worship continues from there. Sunday is the rehearsal that tunes us for Monday.

Notice, too, where the catechism’s answer ends. Not with obligation. With beauty. Entranced by his beauty, we exalt him. The deepest engine of worship is not guilt but glory. We do not grit our teeth into obedience; we are captivated by the beauty of Christ until praise and obedience become the overflow of a heart that has seen something better than its old gods.

The Altar Is Already Built

John Calvin called the human heart a perpetual factory of idols, and five centuries of new technology have only increased the factory’s output. You will worship this week. So will I. The heart does not have an off switch; it only has a throne, and something will sit on it, and whatever sits there will shape you into its image.

So the question is not whether you will worship. There is only one King who will never disappoint you, one Savior who gives rather than takes, one Lord whose glory enlarges your humanity instead of devouring it.