If Christians confess that God is personal, both capable and desirous of real relationship with his creatures, then to talk to him should be as natural as it is necessary.
What exactly is prayer? The simplest and most straightforward way to define prayer is as a person talking to God. The English Reformer Thomas Becon (1512–1567), whom scholars have identified as having authored the very first English Protestant treatise devoted exclusively to prayer, published a catechism in 1548 in which he defined prayer as “an earnest talk with God.”1 If Christians confess that God is personal, both capable and desirous of real relationship with his creatures, then to talk to him should be as natural as it is necessary.
As Campegius Vitringa helpfully noted, “It is a characteristic of God to ‘hear prayer’ (Ps. 65:2).2 We read in Genesis 4:26 that shortly after the fall, “people began to call upon the name of the Lord,” and throughout Scripture the faithful are described as both hearing from God and speaking to him in return. The Psalms overflow with cries to God such as “Give ear to the words of my mouth” (Ps. 54:2) and corresponding praises such as “On the day I called, you answered me” (Ps. 138:3). Scripture assures us that “when the righteous cry for help, the Lord hears” (Ps. 34:17). The connection between inclusion among God’s people and confidence that God will hear one’s prayers is very tight: it is precisely because “the Lord has set apart the godly for himself” that David can immediately conclude, “The Lord hears when I call to him” (Ps. 4:3). Indeed, the entire Christian life itself begins with hearing God’s word and responding back with words of repentance and faith: “When they heard this they were cut to the heart, and said to Peter and the rest of the apostles, ‘Brothers, what shall we do?’ And Peter said to them, ‘Repent and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ’” (Acts 2:37–38).
God has addressed us through his word, and we respond to him through our prayers. Or as William Ames put it, “In hearing the word we receive the Will of God, but in Prayer we offer our will to God, that it may be received by him.”3 Scripture and prayer thus work together to create a conversational, or “dialogical,” dynamic that lends structure to our communion with God and growth in grace.4
As with our ordinary conversations, our conversations with God in prayer will vary in length and intensity as our changing circumstances dictate. The English Puritans thus distinguished between “two kindes of prayer”: there were times of set and focused, or “solemne,” prayer—what happens, say, during our quiet time—and then there were also short, spontaneous prayers uttered throughout the day, “the secret and sudden lifting up of the heart to God, upon the present occasion.”5 The latter sort of spontaneous praying was understood to be a necessary part of a Christian’s spiritual life and often understood as both a means to and a mark of a more general spirit of prayerfulness that would begin to permeate one’s entire life and outlook. Indeed, it is spontaneous prayer, as the Puritan John Downame (1571–1652) explained, that helps the believer “pray without ceasing” (1 Thess. 5:17):
It is not enough that we use daily these set solemn, and ordinary prayers, but we must, as our Saviour injoyneth us, Pray always, and as the Apostle speaketh, continually, and without ceasing. That is, we must be ready to pray, so often as God shall give us any occasion, . . . craving God’s blessing when we undertake any businesse, and praysing his name for his gracious assistance, . . . craving his protection at the approaching of any danger, and his helpe and strength for the overcoming of any difficulty which affronteth us in our way.6
Moreover, these two kinds of prayer were understood as mutually reinforcing. They went together, and either one would quickly wither in the absence of its counterpart. Spontaneous prayer, it was said, should supplement and enhance our settled prayer “as salt with meat.”7
God has addressed us through his word, and we respond to him through our prayers.
As we read the various definitions of prayer scattered throughout the Reformed tradition, we find elaborations on the idea of prayer as talking to God, even as we don’t find anything fundamentally at odds with it. Thus, William Bridge defined prayer as “that act and work of the soul, whereby a man doth converse with God.”8 Likewise, according to John Calvin, to enter into prayer is to “enter conversation with God,” a conversation “whereby we expound to him our desires, our joys, our sighs, in a word, all the thoughts of our hearts.”9 Such communication is not overly formal and impersonal, but rather, it is an “intimate conversation” in which believers find the living God “gently summoning us to unburden our cares into his bosom” and inviting us “to pour out our hearts before him.”10 Sometimes the metaphor was slightly tweaked, as when Matthew Henry (1662–1714) described the Bible as “a letter God has sent to us” and prayer as “a letter we send to him,” but the emphasis was always on prayer as a way for the believer to communicate and dialogue with the living, personal, and ever-present triune God.11
Such prayer, by its very nature, encompasses the entirety of the Christian life, shaping and being shaped in turn by the breadth and depth of redeemed experience. “I understand prayer in a broad way,” wrote Campegius Vitringa. “It refers to everything we communicate to God.”12 Such communication includes our praises, our petitions, and our thanksgivings. It includes expressions of joy, lament, and anger. As we communicate to God in prayer, we confess our sins, intercede on behalf of others, and cry out to God for his miraculous intervention amid trial and storm. In response to the question “For what things are we to pray?” the Westminster Larger Catechism (1647) suggests that the scope of our prayer should be as wide and deep as life itself: “We are to pray for all things tending to the glory of God, the welfare of the church, our own or others’ good.”13
Sometimes our communication with God is eloquent and profound, as when we take the lofty expressions of the Psalter as our own; at other moments we “do not know what to pray for as we ought” and must lean on those Spirit-wrought “groanings too deep for words” (Rom. 8:26). Yet in all moments, our prayers communicate the full range of our Christian experience and represent an ongoing conversation with the God in whom “we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28).
Notes:
Alec Ryrie, Being Protestant in Reformation Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 99.
Campegius Vitringa, The Spiritual Life, trans. Charles K. Telfer (Grand Rapids, MI: Reformation Heritage Books, 2018),
116.
William Ames, The Marrow of Sacred Divinity (London, 1639), 244.
This dynamic also characterizes corporate worship. For a discussion of the “dialogical principle” in worship, see D. G. Hart and John R. Muether, With Reverence and Awe: Returning to the Basics of Reformed Worship (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 2002), 95–97.
William Perkins, The Whole Treatise of the Cases of Conscience (Cambridge, 1606), 282.
John Downame, A Guide to Godlynesse(London, 1629), 209–10.
William Gouge, quoted in Ryrie, Reformation Britain, 147.
William Bridge, The Works of the Rev. William Bridge (London: Thomas Tegg, 1845),
2:102.
Calvin, Institutes, 2:853 (3.20.4); John Calvin, Instruction in Faith, trans. and ed. Paul T. Fuhrmann (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1949), 57.
Calvin, Institutes, 2:854–55 (3.20.5).
Matthew Henry, Directions for Daily Communion with God (London: William Tegg, 1866), 12.
Vitringa, Spiritual Life, 115
“Westminster Larger Catechism,” in Van Dixhoorn, Creeds, Confessions, and Catechisms, 402 (q. 184).
Matthew C. Bingham (PhD, Queen’s University Belfast) is vice president of academic affairs and associate professor of church history at Phoenix Seminary in Scottsdale, Arizona. He is the author of Orthodox Radicals: Baptist Identity in the English Revolution and has served as a pastor in the United States and Northern Ireland. Matthew is married to Shelley, and they have four children.
Those who pray in Christ’s name truly hear back from God in their most pressing need and are strengthened in hope that they will continue to hear in days to come.
A good quiet time is when the Lord is speaking to us by his word and his Spirit, and we are speaking back to him what we are hearing in his word by the Spirit.
Doug O’Donnell discusses the new Daily Liturgy Devotional, sharing how he really wrote the book for himself first and foremost, and how it has impacted his devotional life recently.
The kingdom of God is reality. It’s what is real. We often walk around as though we are the sovereign ones and as if we have the crowns on our heads. Life is self-referential. But we understand there’s one true King of heaven and earth—and it is Jesus.
When I was at seminary at Gordon-Conwell, I went on a retreat to the White Mountains in New Hampshire. You know how it goes. I was in a cabin with a bunch of guys, there was someone who snored, and I thought he was going to have a hernia. So at about five o’clock in the morning, I decided to go for a walk. I went down to the lake where we had been the night before, and I remembered the s’mores that we enjoyed eating and the worship songs. I was trying to read my Bible in the moonlight, waiting for the sun to rise—which always seems to take longer than you anticipate.
As I was mulling around and praying, at one point I looked at the mountain behind me and noticed on the treetops way up high that the sun was shining. It occurred to me that while it was still dark down below where I was standing, the sun had already risen up there.
That’s the good news. The Son has risen. Jesus is King. He’s advancing his kingdom in this world, and we have the privilege every day of bowing the knee to him, of surrendering our lives, and submitting and proclaiming his message so that others would give their lives to his reign and his rule. And that’s what Jesus means when he says, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”
Chris Castaldo (PhD, London School of Theology) is the lead pastor at New Covenant Church in Naperville, Illinois. He is the author of Talking with Catholics about the Gospel and coauthor of The Unfinished Reformation.
We often think of God's blessing as an achievement or an experience, but it actually goes far deeper. Chris Castaldo started learning this lesson at age nineteen in a hospital.
Timothy Paul Jones discusses the historical eyewitness evidence for Jesus’s resurrection and the details that distinguish it from other religious myths.
It's Not Whether You're Addicted but What You Can Do About It
In this podcast, Brett McCracken and Ivan Mesa discuss the changing world of technology, how it competes for our attention, and how Christians should engage with something that has proven to be so addictive. They address how who we are is formed by what we give our attention to and how we should think about our capacity as humans in a world of AI and overwhelming technology.
Matt Tully
Today I’m speaking with Brett McCracken and Ivan Mesa. Brett serves as a senior editor, and Ivan Mesa as editorial director for the Gospel Coalition. They co-edited the new book Scrolling Ourselves to Death: Reclaiming Life in a Digital Age from Crossway. Brett, Ivan, thanks so much for joining me today on The Crossway Podcast.
Brett McCracken
Thanks for having us.
Ivan Mesa
Good to see you.
Matt Tully
In 1985 Neil Postman famously published a book called Amusing Ourselves to Death. And that book is pretty foundational to the book that you two served as editors on (you worked with a number of contributors on different chapters), and it even was the inspiration for the title of your books, Scrolling Ourselves to Death. So I wonder, Brett, could you summarize what Postman was saying? What was his main thesis in that book, and how did some of his ideas influence what you two are trying to do with this new book?
Brett McCracken
Neil Postman was, broadly, just a critic of media and technology, kind of one of the leading voices in that genre in the twentieth century. In Amusing Ourselves to Death, Postman is really sounding the alarm in terms of what he was observing as some pretty significant changes in the way that we were talking to one another, the way that we were thinking, about ideas, the way discourse was happening because of changes in technology. Primarily, he had television in view, so he was basically saying we had shifted from being a print-based culture or literate culture—reading things in newspapers and talking about that—to being a TV-centric culture. And the medium of TV does certain things and prioritizes certain things, namely, entertainment—keeping people amused and hooked to their TVs by any means necessary.
Matt Tully
He was already seeing this back in the mid-eighties.
Brett McCracken
He was writing in the mid-eighties, yes. He published in 1985, so long before anything we have today—the internet, etc. or smartphones—were even a thing. So he was very prophetic at that time, in the eighties, in terms of calling out how the technologies of that time were changing the way we were communicating, the way we were thinking, the way discourse was structured. And that book has really stood the test of time and proved to be prescient and prophetic in terms of where we are today. Because if we were “amusing ourselves to death” in the eighties, how much more so are we scrolling ourselves to death today in similar ways to what he was talking about, but obviously with slightly different technologies. So we wanted to put together a book that took some of his best insights from that book forty years ago and apply that wisdom to the changing technologies of today.
Matt Tully
Ivan, I’d imagine some people could hear this and hear that his focus was on television, and it almost sounds a little quaint. We think of television as, compared to the internet and compared to the media landscape that we live in today, as just so much more tame and so much less compulsive or addicting. Do you resonate with that? Is there something just categorically different about even the nature of the issue that we’re facing today than what Postman was referring to?
Ivan Mesa
Yeah. He was speaking prophetically about something. He was sounding the alarm for the culture at large. In these kind of conversations, figures like that tend to be viewed as Puddleglums, a voice in the wilderness sounding an alarm, maybe overreacting to something.
And so in a sense, he was speaking really prophetically about something that would only get worse in the coming years. So you fast forward forty years later and of course you see that in contrast, yeah, it seems quaint, what was happening in 1985 versus what’s happening in 2025. A sea change has happened even in the last decade or two in terms of the acceleration of some of these trends that were happening over decades in Postman’s time. Now it’s every year or every few months. The pace of change is happening a lot more quickly. And so you’re just having to catch up with what’s going on to think critically about that.
Matt Tully
Do you think he understood the extent to which these new media technologies, not just television, but maybe things that would come after television, the power that they would really have? Because, again, we look at some of the newer technologies that are in our smartphones today and the way that even some of these have been gamified by companies to make them more addictive. Is that something that he predicted too? Did he have a sense that we might be heading in that kind of a direction?
Ivan Mesa
Brett might know a bit more about that, but I would say the fundamental things that have not changed is in Neil Postman’s day, you have TV, you have commercials, you have these advertisers who are paying for spots on TVs in the middle of a news broadcast. So his whole argument is saying you have here a news report, that 100,000 people have died in some sort of battlefield out there, and then you cut to a break with a commercial for jeans. And so the contrast there, again, companies are trying to make money. You are the product. Your attention is being devoted. You want to make the news entertaining to get your eyes glued to that so that you can watch the commercial. So the business model there in Postman’s day, there’s a perverse incentive. And so in similar ways, fast forward forty years later, you’re seeing the same dynamics. So I don’t know if Postman would’ve predicted the exact nature of a TikTok generation and six second videos, but I think the fundamental thing that has not changed is companies that want to use you to advertise and to make money off of you with your attention.
Brett McCracken
Just to add to that, I think central to his argument in Amusing Ourselves to Death was the profit motive and the commercial structure of media. And he talked about television as the point of television is not to get people to think critically. The point of television is to gather an audience for corporations. When you have an audience gathered, you can earn more money with advertisements. So the more eyeballs that are there, the more money there is to be made. And the way that you get eyeballs is a different thing than the way you get people to think critically. So amusements and diversions and trivial things, that’s what gathers an audience. And that’s what he was bemoaning. So that aspect hasn’t changed and it’s only gotten worse, as Ivan was saying. The profit incentives are still very strong in terms of the name of the game in media is gathering an audience. It’s a more crowded atmosphere than ever before. There are more people vying for limited attention, and so the incentives to have lurid, extreme, heightened rhetoric and all these wild clickbaity things are greater incentives than ever, because the attention economy is so fiercely competitive. And so I think what he was onto in the eighties, his thesis is proving to be vindicated and correct forty years later.
Matt Tully
It’s like this arms race of vying for our attention. And you’re right, as these technologies have evolved and as just even our own consumption habits as humans have changed over time, it takes more and more strategic thinking on the part of these advertisers or companies to hold our attention and get us stuck on it. Brett, another question on this. Postman had this concept that you talk about in the book of the technopoly. And that was a really helpful way to think about the ways that these technologies change and the ways that they affect us and can lead to certain undesirable outcomes. What did he mean by technopoly, and how does that relate to this conversation?
Brett McCracken Technopoly is actually the name of another one of Postman’s most famous and influential books, and actually, I think it was the first Postman book I read before I read Amusing Ourselves to Death. And his idea with Technopoly is that the tools of technology that we initially use as tools end up using us. They become a more powerful thing in terms of we lose our agency and our power over time, and we become unable to resist their power. We don’t have the power anymore to just use them on and off, turn them off, put them in the right place. Our lives are now subservient to the technopoly, the authority of technology. And if you’re not careful with technology, he argues that always happens with technology. Something that initially starts as this practical tool that we think we’ll be able to control as we need it ends up becoming this all-consuming thing in society where you can’t live without it. We can see how that’s happening with so much of digital technology. Something like Wi-Fi. If you’re in a place without Wi-Fi, you might as well not have oxygen. We can’t live without Wi-Fi anymore. If you go somewhere and you forget your smartphone, think about the panic that you have in your mind. For ten minutes I went on an errand and I don’t have my phone! That shows you the extent to which these aren’t just optional tools anymore. They’re these all-important apparatuses that are extensions of our very being that we feel like we’ve had a appendage severed if we are separated from it. So that’s the technopoly idea.
Matt Tully
So someone could hear that and maybe their response would be, “Well, is it really that different from other technologies that we’re used to that we’ve built our lives or built our society around?” I think of electricity in our homes or running water or a car. Those don’t strike us as it being a problem to rely on those things or to even have fundamentally assumed those things being present for the operation of our lives. So maybe the question is, Is the situation actually different today when it comes to digital technologies like smartphones? Or is this really just the same thing that’s always happened with new technologies?
Brett McCracken
I would say that one difference is certain technologies are addictive. You get to a point where you have addictive behavior, in terms of you can’t not use it. So with something like electricity, I wouldn’t characterize our relationship to electricity as one of addiction. If the lights go out, that’s unfortunate, but I’m not going to go into withdrawal. Whereas with smartphones and certain digital technologies, I think you’re starting to see some like legitimate addict-like behavior being on display throughout culture. So I think that’s one thing that’s changed. There’s psychological dynamics at work with certain digital technologies that are unique among other technologies. And in fact, they were designed that way. If you look into the history of social media platforms and smartphone interfaces and whatnot, a lot of times they hired behavioral psychologists to help tweak the interfaces and the dings and the lights and the sounds so that they could be as addictive as possible. So they’re intentionally created to create addicts, and it’s connected to the profit motive, again, because the more time people spend on these platforms and the more unable they are to resist grabbing for their phone all day, every day, that is more money for these companies. That’s more advertising revenue. So there’s a lot that’s working against us in terms of our ability to resist these technologies, because there are so many incentives to make us as hooked as possible.
Matt Tully
Ivan, in one of the chapters in the book, Patrick Miller, one of the contributors, describes our phones as “digital syringes.” He likens this compulsive use of our phones to a drug addiction, and he uses that kind of language. In keeping with that metaphor, Ivan, how did we get so hooked on these devices? What’s the mechanism in our brains that’s leading to that? And to keep with that metaphor of drug addiction, what might a detox look like for us as we think about our lives as Christians?
Ivan Mesa
I picked up the iPhone a little late. I was a little late to the party. I think it might have been 2010 or 2011. And at that point, I mean it was just amazing. It’s hard to think about this in this manner, but back when we were younger, we had SMS texts and you had to click on certain buttons to get certain letters to appear on your phone.
Matt Tully
And you only had so many you could send a month. You had to pay for each message.
Ivan Mesa
Limitations.
Brett McCracken
Oh my goodness. I forgot about that.
Matt Tully
You could run up that bill real quick.
Ivan Mesa
And so in the beginning, you start seeing these new features of texting and calling and then listen to your music. And none of us are Luddites in the sense that we don’t benefit. We both have iPhones. We both are on social media. So we’re not saying here that this is all bad, but there is a point where you start seeing, like the proverbial frog in the kettle, you’re just getting warmed up over time, and then you realize you’re checking your phone every six seconds. You pick up your phone, you feel the sensation of notifications when there’s none on your phone—that that’s an actual thing.
Bret McCracken:
Ghost notifications.
Ivan Mesa
Yes, exactly.
Matt Tully
It feels like it’s buzzing in your pocket, but it didn’t.
Ivan Mesa
I feel like it’s buzzing right now, and I don’t even have it on me. So I think over time you start seeing—back to the profit motive here with companies—just the way that these are created to be addictive. And you asked about ways to detox from that. Addiction, personally, I’ve had seasons where I just take a break from all social media, take a break from different notifications. I turn that all that off. I think Cal Newport, his whole stuff on deep work, has been so helpful for me, and his book Digital Minimalism. He’s a productivity guru, and I just appreciate that so much, and he advocates for that pulling back on media. Another thing is just, personally, one thing that I do is on Sundays I just take a break from all things on my phone. And that’s just a weekly thing, where it’s not this emergency situation where you’re just over your head with social media or technology in general, and it’s a good way to just hit the reset button on a weekly basis.
Matt Tully
So you’re just not using your phone all day long? Is that how it works?
Ivan Mesa
Yeah. My job requires me to be on my phone, be present, making phone calls.
Brett McCracken
I can attest to that as his colleague at TGC. He doesn’t text or bug me. As my supervisor at TGC, it’s nice to know I’m never going to be bugged on a Sunday, because Ivan doesn’t use his phone.
Ivan Mesa
And some people just maybe should not be on social media, or have a dumb phone. And this is all a matter of prudent and wisdom. There’s not a one right way approach to doing this, but I think what we’re trying to do in this book is bring these people together to have words of wisdom for this generation that are so addicted that we are scrolling ourselves to death. And when you think about just attention, we have limited attention in our lifetime. Our lives are finite. We have a certain amount of time. And when you think about just over the course of a day, a week, a month, years, a decade, when you think of that attention being given over to some other company to make money off of you (for a company) it just puts things in perspective. And so Tony Reinke’s book on technology has been so helpful here—12 Ways Your Phone Is Changing You—even non-Christians are talking about this. There’s a book called Attention Merchants by Tim Wu, and it’s just super helpful. Attention is the currency of our age, and we want, as Christians, we think our attention matters. Where are we putting the main focus of our attention? Is it ultimate things? Is it the Lord? Is it the church? Is it God’s word? Is it people? And sometimes I think some of these technologies distract us from what ultimately we should be putting our attention on.
Matt Tully
Brett, in Christian circles, it’s not uncommon to speak of the finite resources that God has given us and wanting to use those resources wisely, whether that’s our money or our time. But why attention? Why is attention distinct from just time? And why would you want to focus on that right now?
Brett McCracken
I think because attention has a spiritual formation component. Where you give your attention, it matters for how you’re being formed. What you attend to in life is what is feeding your soul. That’s what my book The Wisdom Pyramid was all about. We need to be careful about what is feeding our souls, where we are giving our attention, our limited amounts of attention. Because if you give your attention mostly to TikTok and mostly to Netflix and mostly to this kind of digital junk food out there, you are going to be formed in a certain way. But if you give your attention to the more transcendental sources of wisdom and truth, if you give your attention chiefly, of course, to God. And that’s one of the things that’s so critical for Christians in this whole conversation is what we’re really talking about here is a world where there is less and less attention being given to our creator, to God. One of the major side effects, practically, for Christian life in the digital age is that we just have less and less time in our lives to be quiet, to be still, and know that he is God, to be devotionally quiet with the Lord, with Scripture, just in prayer. I feel like we probably don’t pray much anymore because we fill all the gaps in our day which we might have used to use those opportunities to pray or just to be still and reflect with gratitude on the gifts of God. Now we just fill all those gaps with something on our phone, anything on our phone—text messages, notifications, social media. And so I think the degradation of our attention, the depletion of our attention, has huge spiritual consequences, because you are not going to have a vibrant spiritual life without that relationship with God. And any relationship, whether you’re talking about a marriage relationship or a friendship, you need time. Time is an essential ingredient. Time together is an essential ingredient to a healthy relationship. And that’s true of our spiritual relationship with God. We need time with him, and we need to give our attention to him and to listen to his word and to pray and to seek him. And that’s why in an attention economy, it’s a spiritual economy as well.
Ivan Mesa
I would also add that’s the vertical dynamic at play; there’s also the horizontal. And so my worst moments as a father is when I am on my phone and not paying attention to my kids. I care about far-flung issues and the outrage of the day on social media or what’s going on in this part of the world, and the ironic part is that I cannot affect change in some of these areas that are way above my pay grade. But when it comes to the children right in front of me—diapers to change, a book to read, a discipline conversation, like all these things—I am tempted to care more about things that I cannot change than the things that are staring me right in the face. And those are moments that I’ve had to repent. So, yes, the vertical dynamic of attention toward the Lord, but also at the horizontal level—just attention to where the Lord has placed me and called me as a father, husband, church member, as a neighbor—what are the things there in front of me that I can do by God’s grace? And I think that conversation on attention has immediate implications for our day-to-day experience.
Matt Tully
Ivan, keeping with that horizontal dimension that you just brought up, another thing that is highlighted throughout the book is just the effect of these disembodied interactions and relationships that we tend to have online, mostly in social media, but there are probably other forms of that disembodied dynamic that we experience. Ivan, how would you describe the effect that the very common experience that we have of doing a FaceTime call with somebody, or even worse, just sending someone messages online without ever even seeing the person, how does that affect us and how we think about each other, for both other Christians and other believers but even non-Christians? How would you boil that down?
Ivan Mesa
All these tools are great. With my parents and our children seeing their grandfather, it is great to FaceTime when you are separated by distance. So I think these technologies are great in insofar as it allows you to see people that you wouldn’t see otherwise. I have coworkers at TGC that I get to text with, Zoom with, be on the phone with. With my children, for seeing their grandfather, it’s great to FaceTime. So those are all good things. At the same time, these technologies can give you an illusion of intimacy when it’s not there. So much of our day-to-day experience with friendships with people that we know, like neighbors, there are things that can happen only when you see someone face to face. And so sometimes, like I was just saying earlier, you can be tempted to think these digital friendships, these connections you have, are the most important things in your life when they’re not. Those are good to have, those are blessings, you wanna steward them well. But at times they can pull you away from the embodied relationships that we were created for by the Lord himself. So I think it is just growing in the awareness of that and allowing you to be focused in on what the Lord has called you to right there in front of you.
Matt Tully
Brett, let’s talk about another big issue, a very hot-button issue in the digital world today. That would have to be AI, artificial intelligence. It’s one of these things that over the last couple of years has just been thrust into the forefront of the public consciousness in a way that maybe wasn’t the case before. Obviously, there have been especially filmmakers thinking about AI and the effect of AI on our culture on society for many, many decades. But it’s only recently that we’ve begun to see the fulfillment of some of these fantasies actually coming to fruition right in front of us. And I think it’s been a shocking but also exciting, exhilarating, confusing kind of thing for many Christians. And I think in particular for Christians, we can sometimes have a little bit of a sense of unease, because we have a certain view of humanity and what it means to be a human. We have a view of life and what the good life is in God’s economy. But we also don’t know of any Bible verses that talk about AI. And maybe it feels like very few even come close to addressing something as novel as artificial intelligence. So help us start to think about that. What would be some basic principles that Christians should hold onto when it comes to trying to engage this AI conversation?
Brett McCracken
This is the new frontier of technology. I think we’re just beginning the discourse and the critical evaluation of AI, and I think in another decade it’ll be interesting to see how the conversation shifts and how culture is changed. I think it’s probably going to be the next internet in terms of think about how radically our world has been reshaped in the last thirty years by the internet. That’s what AI is going to do for every aspect of society and culture. So it’s definitely good for Christians to start thinking about it. To go back to Postman and just this whole conversation about how every technology is not innocuous and neutral. There are things that it allows us to do that we couldn’t do before that are maybe good and helpful, and there are ways that it changes things in perhaps negative ways that we need to be alert to and on guard to. So obviously with AI we can already see some very helpful, practical ways that it can help, just with efficiency in every industry. Even as a writer, sometimes I’m writing an email now, and the AI finishes my sentence and I’m like, That’s actually what I was going to say. Thank you for saving me two seconds. And that sort of thing is happening in every industry, the way that AI can kind of supplement in an administrative assistance sort of way. And that’s helpful. At the same time, I think we have to start asking questions about where is the line in terms of what we’re going to be okay with robots and AI replacing in terms of human capacities? When it starts getting into mimicking human creativity—like, I’m a writer, and I’m a little disturbed by how good AI writing already is, and we’re in kind of the dial-up era of AI technology. It’s a very rudimentary.
Matt Tully
Yeah. We’re still just at the very beginning.
Brett McCracken
We’re still at the beginning. So if it’s this good already, we’re going to have a William Faulkner AI soon and a Shakespeare in terms of quality of writing.
Matt Tully
I just actually saw some talking about Shakespeare and poetry. I just saw some study that was done recently where they actually showed different, I think to college students, different poetry samples, and they didn’t tell them where they were from. And consistently, the AI-generated poetry scored better among these students than the actual real poetry by a human.
Brett McCracken
That’s disturbing. So that’s the sort of thing that I think we have to think about carefully. What is it going to mean for culture when some of the most beautiful written, visually created things are no longer the product of humans? How do we then think about our capacity as humans who have the image of a Creator God? We are creators by our nature, but AI doesn’t bear the image of God, and yet they are creating in a way that kind of glorifies a Creator God. And so it’s just weird to think about that, and I think there’s a lot of theological questions that we’re going to have to wrestle with when it comes to anthropology and the nature of humanity and the image of God. And precisely how does AI mimic certain human capacities that we used to think were the unique domain of humans? One thing that I’ve been thinking about recently that I find problematic about AI has to do with the instancy of results with AI. Like on ChatGPT, you can ask a fairly complex question, and you get an instant, fairly good in-depth answer. You can give it a prompt, like compose a symphony in the style of Beethoven about this theme. And in like in five seconds it will produce something. There’s something obviously really cool about that in a shiny-new-object-toy sort of sense, but there’s something disturbing about that, because patience and time and creation is part of the joy of it. As a writer and as a creator myself, the way that I glorify God as a writer—or as a painter glorifies God, if you’re a Christian painter, or whatever your vocation—is not just the result; it’s the process. It’s the painstaking work and consideration and attention. To go back to the precious value of our attention, when you attend to your task, it takes time. So it demeans that when you can snap your fingers in two seconds and AI produces something that would take you a year to produce.
Matt Tully
It seems to cheapen it in some way.
Brett McCracken
It cheapens it. And so I think that that’s a question that we’re going to have to wrestle with is just the cheapening of content and ideas and art and culture. I could go on with that because this is, as someone who cares about the arts and beauty, this is pretty concerning to me, but that’s a conversation probably for another day. But there’s a lot that we need to be thinking about with AI.
Matt Tully
Ivan, when it comes to AI and the future, as Brett said, there’s a good chance, probably very likely, that we are still just in the very early stages and that there are developments to come and applications to come that we’ve maybe not even imagined yet. Would you say you’re more on the optimistic side about all the good that it’s going to do, that on balance it’s going to be a really positive development? Or would you be more pessimistic about the effects of AI on our culture?
Ivan Mesa
I’m naturally pessimistic, as Brett knows, and so even hearing debates with Elon Musk and OpenAI controversy, I tend to be more on the Elon Musk side of I think this presents potentially an existential threat to humanity. But take it with a grain of salt. I’m naturally a Puddleglum. But I think on the whole, my contrarian take on AI stuff at times is not building new stuff per se; it’s building off a pool of data that humanity has created. So, yes, in some ways it’s new content—derivations of what we’ve created—but it’s based on what humanity has created.
Matt Tully
So it’s fundamentally not possible of being original, truly original.
Ivan Mesa
Yeah, I think so.
Brett McCracken
Just to push back on that, though, because I’ve thought about that. Every human created work of art is the same thing. Every human creation is building off of what has come before. And every artist will say so. The most original musician who created the most original sounding music came from the influences that they heard growing up with music. The Beatles were not wholly original. Elvis was not wholly original. He was building on all these influences of music. So that’s what human creation already is. It’s a remixing of existing raw materials of culture. So it isn’t clear to me how what AI is doing is all that different from what humans actually do as artists.
Ivan Mesa
And we’re still in the beginning of this conversation. So I think while this book is not specifically on AI, we might need a book ten years from now called AI’ing ourselves to death. We just need more wisdom.
Brett McCracken
Just five years from now.
Ivan Mesa
Yeah, the acceleration of change and the pace here is just so quickly happening that Christians tend to be a few steps behind the culture and new technologies. And so we’re just trying to catch up with where the culture is at right now and bring the best thinkers, the ethicists, to really wrestle with this. And so I think this conversation is, in microcosm, what a lot of Christians are discussing and debating about—the role of AI within art, creating, even spiritual wisdom. That’s a whole different category, but AI cannot create wisdom. It can create content, but there are certain things about the church, about God’s word, about the Christian experience, the Holy Spirit in dwelling believers that AI cannot replicate. And we’re just going to have to wrestle through a lot of those things in the future.
Matt Tully
And that’s one of the things I love about this book and what you guys are doing is assembling this team of thinkers to help us process this. As you said, things are changing so quickly. It can feel so hard to keep up, as a normal Christian. I think of people listening right now. Maybe it’s a pastor who’s just working away on his sermon every week, or there’s a stay-at-home mom who’s just enmeshed in the life of diapers and lunches and taking kids to different events, and it can be really hard to keep up with the constant stream of developments that we read about. And so having a resource like this book just helps to distill some of that down and help us to think very carefully along with others who have spent more time than we can spend on some of these things. Another quick question. Digital platforms, in general, whether it’s a streaming video or podcasts or social media sites, they have been such a powerful vehicle for ministry over the past twenty years or so. And there’s probably no better example of that than the organization that you two work for, the Gospel Coalition, which arguably wouldn’t really be what it is today without the advent of the internet and digital technologies and digital content that we all can get on our phone anytime we want. How should we think about this as individual Christians, as people in leadership in a local church, or even as Christian organizations, just balancing the incredible ministry potential of these tools versus the dangers and the pitfalls that can also come with these tools? Brett, let’s start with you.
Brett McCracken
This is a question that I’ve thought about and wrestled with a lot, because I tend to be a techno-skeptical borderline Luddite when it comes to these things, and yet I work for an online digital ministry known as the Gospel Coalition. And so even in my own vocation, I sometimes wrestle with this question of am I just adding to the problem, or am I just contributing to the glut of content that people are just consuming and scrolling through on their phones? And what I say and where I’ve come to is just this idea that technology can be redeemed. Even technologies which in the sum total are probably a net negative for culture, there are still ways that they can be deployed for redemptive ends. And that you see that with almost any technology in history. And so I think the key for Christians is first to go slow when it comes to adopting and deploying technologies, to not just rush and whatever new technology comes along, you’re just like instantly, “How can we use this for our ministry and our mission?” But you just think carefully about it and consider the costs and consider not only the things that it affords for you to do but also the things that it changes for the worse. So go slow in how you do it, but also be hopeful that the Holy Spirit can use even deeply broken platforms and compromised spaces like the internet. And of course, if you think more broadly about Christian mission throughout time, it’s always been true that Christians don’t shy away from the places in the world geographically that are hostile or dangerous or disease ridden. You still go there as Christians, because you have to bring the gospel there. You have to bring the redemption of Jesus to these lost spaces. And so we might look at the internet like we look at Ebola-stricken West Africa. Christians still go there. Christians are still present. We are faithfully present in the spaces of the internet and social media, because we believe that there are people dying. There’s a spiritual sickness that is endemic on the internet, and if we’re not there, if Christians aren’t there, if for our own piety and the purity of our spiritual lives we run for the analog hills, so to speak, and live offline, then we’re just abandoning this space. We’re abandoning these people that we really believe are being malformed in powerful ways. And so I view what we do at the Gospel Coalition as trying to be a light in the darkness, bringing health to a generally unhealthy space. And hopefully, if people are scrolling through their devices anyway and maybe consuming a lot of junk food, they come across some healthy items from places like the Gospel Coalition and many other Christians who are providing healthy things online.
Ivan Mesa
That’s a great missionary perspective. I would also add a discipleship component here. The reality is Christians are going to be engaged online. They’re going to be on platforms. They’re going to be on social media accounts. Some may not, and that’s fine, but we want to create a culture in which we use and leverage these tools to get people back in their context in their churches, in their small groups. We want to use content online to help encourage Christians to be faithful in their lives. So the end goal was never to create content so that they can live on that content. We create and leverage the content to turn around and say, “This is how you be a faithful husband, as a church member, as a faithful member serving the needs in your community.” So we want to create content in that way to basically be faithful to God’s word so the church can be the church. That’s really our goal at the end of the day.
Brett McCracken
We often talk at the Gospel Coalition internally about how we never want to be a replacement for the local church. Nothing on your phone can ever be a replacement for the local church. So if you pay attention to our output in terms of our resources, they’re mostly actually sending people to offline realities, whether it’s the local church or Christian community or their families or various things. So I think that’s one redemptive use of technology is to remind people of the health and the beauty and the wonder of the physical world that God created.
Matt Tully
So maybe that’s the main application after someone finishes listening to this conversation is put your phone down, stop listening to podcasts for a little while, and go do something outside.
Matt Tully
Maybe a couple of lightning round questions for you both. I’d love to hear both of your answers to each of these. If you had to delete all of your social media apps on your phone, Ivan, except for one, which one would you keep and why?
Ivan Mesa
Well, I have none on my phone right now. So I’m living my best Neil Postman life. I would say I think X, formerly Twitter, would probably be it. I like a text-based app with words mostly. I know it has other things, but the short-form conversations, little chatter conversations and updates, I enjoy that.
Matt Tully
But you’ve chosen not to have that on your phone?
Ivan Mesa
Nope.
Matt Tully
Is that just because you didn’t find it helpful? Was it becoming too all consuming for you? What was behind that decision?
Ivan Mesa
I’m an editor of a book called Scrolling Ourselves to Death, so I think I would be living hypocritically if I was just endlessly notified, scrolling everything. I mentioned Cal Newport earlier. I’ve been so helped by Cal Newport in terms of just productivity, and If I’m trying to be faithful in my calling and my nine to five job at TGC, as a husband, as a church member, creating curriculum for teaching on a Sunday morning, if I am continually bombarded by this platform and that platform, it would just make my life really difficult to be faithful in all those areas. So it’s one practical way that I just try to be faithfully present in what the Lord has called me to in my life.
Matt Tully
Brett, how about you? If you had to delete all of them except for one, what would you keep?
Ivan Mesa
Instagram.
Brett McCracken
Yeah, you’re right. I probably would keep Instagram, and it’s because I think as much as there’s lots of problems with Instagram, I actually like seeing photos of my friends and family who live in other places of the world and just getting little glimpses of their lives and their kids. As a parent of three cute little kids, I’m biased, but I think they’re really cute. There’s something that’s not terrible about our impulse to want to share photos of children. Children are gifts from God, and they’re precious, and it blesses people. I know it blesses my parents, who live far away from me, to see photos of them. And I like to text people directly more photos than I post publicly on Instagram, but it’s still a way that you can keep in touch with people. And I find it to be a generally more edifying social media platform than some of the other ones.
Matt Tully
Brett, my next question for you: Do you use ChatGPT? And if so, how do you use it?
Brett McCracken
No, I don’t use it. So that’s my answer. I’ve played with it here and there, but yeah ’m a little bit just scared, honestly, about the potential, as a creative, connecting to what I was saying earlier about just creativity and the threat that AI poses.
Matt Tully
Are you scared that it would sap you of your creativity? Like you would become too dependent on it, or something else?
Brett McCracken
No, I can’t see myself ever relying on it for my own process, but just something about it weirds me out in terms of that idea that a complex question or a fairly complex human prompt that I take years to process and think through can be so rapidly mimicked in a decent way. So just for my own mental health, I’ve avoided even being aware of those potentials.
Matt Tully
How about you, Ivan?
Ivan Mesa
I taught a Sunday school, and I created an outline for a passage. I think it was 1 Samuel 18 or 19. I love alliteration, and I could not find the one word that had alliteration with the two other points. I put it in ChatGPT, and it gave me the right word. I forget the outline now.
Brett McCracken
That’s a practical usage of ChatGPT.
Ivan Mesa
Desperation, deception, deliverance. I had my three points for my class.
Matt Tully
You just needed one more D word.
Ivan Mesa
Exactly. It was like every word was "de," and ChatGPT gave me the one word that I was missing. One other time I helped my wife. She has a business that she runs, and it was a complex mathematical formulation for a product—how much it cost her to buy that product, how much she was selling it for, what she needs to sell it for to make a margin. So I just put that in ChatGPT, and it gave me the correct answer. And you can probably Google that maybe, but ChatGPT just took all that information and gave me the answer in a matter of seconds.
Matt Tully
My favorite use case for ChatGPT relates to Excel formulas, where you can go in and, in natural human language, explain what I’m trying to do, and it will create this complex formula that almost always works perfectly. It is amazing. Those are examples, I think, of augmenting things that we’re doing, simplifying things that we’re trying to do, without really replacing us in the driver’s seat of that role.
Brett McCracken
Yeah, I think the way that AI augments search has already proven to be helpful for me. Now, when you Google a question, it gives you that AI summary at the top, and I find that to be helpful a lot of times. Recently, I’ve been Googling things like “best examples of revisionist westerns,” because I’m teaching this faith in film cohort with TGC, and I’m doing genre studies on different genres. And the AI summaries have been really helpful, and it’s reminded me of, Oh, I didn’t remember that film, and I didn’t remember that one. And so I think as an augmenting tool to the natural algorithms of search, it’s super helpful.
Matt Tully
Maybe a final question. And Ivan, you’ve already given us a little glimpse into something that you do along these lines, but maybe there’s something else that you’d mentioned. What’s one screen-free habit that’s had the biggest impact on your own spiritual life, your own family life, and your own church’s life, as you think about being intentional with these technologies?
Ivan Mesa
Oh, that’s an easy answer. I think books in general. I cannot summarize and tell the story of my conversion apart from books. I cannot tell the story of my discipleship and growth in Christ apart from books. I’m an editor of books. I work for an organization, the Gospel coalition, that produces books. I work with Crossway as well. I did this book. So I think books in general have been kind of my secret sauce to work against and mitigate against the onslaught of social media and technology. It’s sit down with a book that’s not beeping at me, notifying me of emails and crises and a text message. So I think the book itself, the artifact of beginning a book, seeing the argument from beginning to end, chapter to chapter, page to page, has helped me in this age of social media, technology, and AI to just focus in on those things that matter most. So whether it’s Christian books or even non-Christian books, in terms of common grace and benefiting from a good book of fiction or poetry, those have all been a means of grace that the Lord has used to help me to be a better human and a more faithful Christian.
Matt Tully
That’s helpful. Brett, how about you?
Brett McCracken
I would say two (I think maybe that’s cheating): the church and nature. And if you’ve read The Wisdom Pyramid, you know that those are two of the prominent, foundational things that I advocate. But in terms of a non-screen moment of my week that I look forward to, it’s going to church and being in the embodied presence of the saints and singing in an embodied way and hearing actual voices, and shaking hands in a physical way. And all of that is just so recalibrating for me, because I spend so much of my week working on a device for the digital ministry of the Gospel Coalition.
Matt Tully
Would you then advocate for or do you tend to bring a physical Bible with you so you don’t have to be looking at your phone?
Brett McCracken
Yes. As often as I can remember to bring my physical Bible, I do. Sometimes I forget, and I have to use the ESV app for my Bible reading. So the church and then nature. Living in Southern California helps, because it’s nice all year round, but going on walks in the middle of my day has been really helpful for me just to have screen-free time to process. I’m a big believer in the importance of space to think, which is an increasingly rare thing in a hyper-productive, optimize-every-moment mode of living that technology allows us to do. But when you try to optimize every moment—every five minutes, every sixty seconds of gaps in your day—you end up having no space to think and to critically connect dots and make connections of what’s happened in your life in the recent history. So going on solo walks in my neighborhood or family walks with my kids has been so helpful just to not only have that space to think and to reflect but also just to appreciate the beauty of God’s creation in a way that cultivates gratitude and worship.
Matt Tully
Ivan and Brett, thank you so much for taking some time today to help us think through these complex issues. But they’re ever present. They’re all around us, and we can’t really escape some of the challenges that we discussed today. And I think this book in particular is going to be such a helpful resource for so many Christians as we try to be faithful in the midst of an increasingly tricky world to navigate on these fronts.
Jim Hamilton discusses what to do when you hate your job, offering encouragement for those frustrated in their work and explaining the difference between a job and a vocation.
Rosaria Butterfield encourages us to engage our LGBTQ neighbors for Christ, highlighting how God used the radically ordinary hospitality of Christians to draw her to himself.
Justice is such an important issue today, and the cross speaks volumes to this. In fact, for followers of Jesus, you can’t have a biblical understanding of justice apart from the cross of Christ. And at the cross, we see the greatest demonstration of justice in human history: God pouring out his judgment on our sin.
It’s at the cross where we learn, ultimately, that God is a just God. So we have a vision of justice from the cross, but then what we have to learn is that the cross makes us a just people. We are justified by the blood of Christ, and as a justified people, we are then called to seek justice for every image-bearer on the planet.
For us as Christians, I really believe the cross makes us a people of mercy and justice. The cross levels the playing field. You can’t look down on anyone else when you’re at the foot of the cross, because we recognize that we’ve all sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. And yet it’s the grace of God that motivates us to go and serve, to show mercy, to seek justice for all. We really need the cross to understand this today.
Jeremy Treat (PhD, Wheaton College) is a pastor for preaching and vision at Reality LA, a church in Los Angeles, California. He is also an adjunct professor of theology at Biola University and is the author of Seek First: How the Kingdom of God Changes Everything and The Crucified King: Atonement and Kingdom in Biblical and Systematic Theology.
Sharon James makes the case that despite the many failings of many Christians over the centuries, Christianity has indeed been very good for the world.
Jeremy Treat talks about how the doctrine of atonement is often misunderstood by believers and unbelievers alike and about the impact that it should make on our day to day lives as followers of Christ.
True salvation does not depend on how well you obey but on what Jesus has already accomplished. All these other roads are about “doing.” Christianity is about “done.” Jesus is the only road to God.
Sometimes people say, “You can believe what you want, and I’ll believe what I want. We just need to be good and treat people nice.” If you told them that you disagreed, they might get upset and say, “How dare you think that only Christianity leads to God! Don’t you know that all roads lead to God?”
But think about what they just said. How do they know that? If they say that “all roads lead to God,” where did they get this information? Answer: It’s what they believe. So they are simply sharing their faith, just like you are.
And there’s another problem: All these “roads to heaven” can’t all be true at the same time. Islam says that you have to faithfully obey Allah. Buddhism says that you achieve their version of heaven through meditation and good living. Hinduism requires the right kind of knowledge and life choices. And Judaism requires obedience to the law of Moses.
But Christianity is different. True salvation does not depend on how well you obey but on what Jesus has already accomplished. All these other roads are about “doing.” Christianity is about “done.” Jesus is the only road to God.
Jesus said to him, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” (John 14:6)
Why is this true? Why is salvation only through Jesus?
Because only Jesus is both God and man. He’s not half God and half man. Jesus is truly human: he had a real body (Acts 2:31), grew up (Luke 2:52), and got hungry and tired (Matt. 21:18; John 4:6). And Jesus is truly God: he receives worship (Matt. 14:33), forgives sins (Mark 2:5), and is eternal (John 1:1). He is God incarnate, which means he is God come in the flesh (1 John 4:2).
But why is it important that Jesus is both God and man? Because only a true God-man could save humans from God’s judgment against sin (1 Pet. 3:18).
Because Jesus is human, he can take our place. He can die taking the punishment for sinful humans (Isa. 53:4–6; 1 Pet. 2:24). (And think about it, if he weren’t human, how could he have died at all?)
And because Jesus is God, he was able to live a sinless life (Heb. 4:15; 1 Pet. 2:22), something we sinners would never have been able to do.
If he weren’t God, he would have been a bad substitute. And if he weren’t human, he couldn’t have been a substitute at all.
Instead, we have the perfect substitute. Because Jesus is both God and man, he is the only true way to salvation.
Mission Accomplished
You may say, “I believe that Jesus is truly God and truly man. I know that he lived and died as a substitute for sinners.”
But how do we know that what Jesus did actually achieved salvation? And does it really rescue people from sin?
First, you can be confident in his salvation because every detail happened according to plan. Jesus explained—in advance—exactly what he planned to do: “For even the Son of Man came . . . to give his life as a ransom for many” (Mark 10:45).
But, second, did Jesus’s plan actually work? Did his death really pay for sins? The Bible says, “Yes!”
Being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name. (Phil. 2:8–9)
The key is thinking through the word “therefore.”
The death Jesus died was for the sins of other people (Rom. 5:6–8). The sins Jesus was carrying on the cross deserved death (Rom. 6:23). And that’s exactly what happened—Jesus died.
But Jesus didn’t stay dead. The Father raised him from the dead. Why? Because those sins were gone. The penalty for every single one had been fully paid!
When he raised Jesus, the Father was telling the whole world that there was no more sin on Jesus at all. The resurrection declared that he was righteous, the sinless Son of God (Rom. 1:4; 4:25; 1 Tim. 3:16). So the resurrection was proof that he had accepted Jesus’s payment for sin. (And here’s where we get to that key word.) The death of the Son of God paid for every sin he carried; therefore, the Father raised him from the dead (see Phil. 2:9 on the previous page). Jesus’s salvation plan had succeeded!
The resurrection shows that Jesus—as both God and man—is the only true way to salvation.
And this means that you can be confident in Jesus’s salvation. Acts 17:31 says that God “has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead.” So, if you’re a Christian, all your sin has been placed on Jesus. And when he died, Jesus paid the full penalty for all your sin (Isa. 53:4–6). When God the Father saw that all those sins had been paid for, he (“therefore”) raised sinless Jesus from the dead. And since he was declared righteous, if you belong to him, you are too.
Salvation through Jesus is the real deal; the only true way to God. Through his death and resurrection your sins were truly, completely, and eternally paid for. There’s nothing left to pay. The resurrection proves it.
The resurrection shows that Jesus—as both God and man—is the only true way to salvation.
Truly Alive
But are we sure that the resurrection really happened? Some people think it’s all pretend. Yet here are some facts showing that God truly raised Jesus from the dead.
The tomb was empty. If you read the New Testament, you’ll see that no one said, “You thought Jesus was raised, but look: here’s his body!” Instead, there was no body; the tomb was empty (Matt. 28:11–15). However, someone could’ve asked, “What if someone stole the body?” And that’s exactly what some Roman soldiers claimed.
The guards were lying. The Roman soldiers who guarded Jesus’s tomb said they had fallen asleep. And they claimed that’s when Jesus’s disciples snuck up and took the body (see Matt. 28:13). But that’s not a convincing story. If the guards were sleeping—as they claimed—how could they have seen anybody steal the body? The soldiers’ report is obviously a lie. But what about other witnesses? Is there reliable evidence that Jesus rose from the dead?
The eyewitnesses were authentic. In New Testament times, women were not allowed to give eyewitness testimony in a court case. Sadly, men thought that their words were unreliable. But in the Bible, who is it that gives firsthand testimony about Jesus being alive? Women! (See Matt. 28:1–8; Mark 16:1–8; Luke 24:1–11; John 20:1–2.)
So just for a moment, pretend you wanted to spread a lie in New Testament times. Would you get women to tell everyone, “Yes, this really happened!”? In that time and culture, this wouldn’t help you spread a lie. So why would the disciples claim that women were eyewitnesses of the resurrection in all four Gospels? Because that’s what truly happened. (And also because they and Jesus think that the testimony of women is wonderful and trustworthy!)
There’s other evidence too. Over five hundred people saw the risen Jesus (1 Cor. 15:6). And almost all the apostles were eventually killed for their faith. Would they really die for something they knew was a lie?
So is Jesus the only way of salvation? Yes.
Only someone who is fully God and fully human could provide salvation. Jesus is truly God and truly man. And how do we know that God accepted his payment for our sins? Because God raised him from the dead. And how do we know that Jesus was raised? The evidence from history and from the Bible is incredibly strong!
Since the God-man, Jesus Christ, was really raised from the dead, his resurrection shows that he is the only true way to salvation.
Champ Thornton (PhD, Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary) is the director of children and family resources at Crossway and the author of numerous books for kids and families. He and his wife, Robben, live in Newark, Delaware, and have three children. You can learn more about Champ at champthornton.com.
The work of the Holy Spirit is the means by which all that Christ accomplished comes to benefit the elect. The Holy Spirit does (at least) seven things in and for our salvation.
Through his death on the cross Jesus accomplishes reconciliation, victory, removal of shame, justification, adoption, propitiation, glorification, healing—and much more!
Sam Allberry makes a case for why our union with Christ stands at the heart of the Christian faith and is the doctrine that has been the single biggest blessing to him since his conversion.
Every doctor knows that healing begins with careful listening. Without truly hearing a patient, there can be no accurate diagnosis, and without a diagnosis, there can be no effective remedy.
You look at the calendar and begin counting down the days to Easter—not with anticipation, but with angst. What should be a grateful celebration of the greatest event in history, Christ’s resurrection, is instead a time of stress as you think about getting together again with troublesome friends or family members.
Writing for Psychology Today, Joe Navarro, a twenty-five-year veteran of the FBI and member of the National Security Division’s elite Behavioral Analysis Program, notes the unavoidable presence at many family holiday gatherings of “socially toxic individuals” who “don’t care whom they inconvenience, irritate, or hurt. They are not mindful of others. If their disruptions ruin a long-awaited, carefully planned family reunion, in their eyes, so be it—and it is never their fault.”1
So, what’s a Christian to do? When we’re tempted to fire back, to finally put Uncle Louie in his place with a perfectly timed zinger? We must remember that Jesus came to redeem people like Louie—and like us: wounded, wandering, and more desperate for grace than we realize. That’s why I want to suggest a different path: peacemaking. It’s harder and often less satisfying in the moment. But in the long run, it just might soften hearts, open doors, and make room for the gospel to take root.
The first step is to recognize others as made in the image of God. In today’s polarized culture, this can be surprisingly difficult. We’re constantly encouraged to reduce people to categories—to sort them by political affiliation, ideology, or social identity. Once labeled, those on the “other side” are no longer merely mistaken, but we view them as morally corrupt or even dangerous. Sometimes the conflict isn’t ideological but deeply personal—rooted in personality clashes, old wounds, or unresolved family tension. Whatever the source, these divisions can feel insurmountable.
The cost of such reduction is not just social—it’s deeply personal. It warps the way we see those closest to us, especially high-maintenance relatives who, if we’re honest, know how to get under our skin. But they are not opponents. They are beloved image-bearers—men and women for whom Christ died. As John Stackhouse insightfully puts it in Humble Apologetics, learning to see others through the eyes of God reshapes everything:
. . . we should sound like we really do respect the intelligence and spiritual interest and moral integrity of our neighbors. We should act as if we do see the very image of God in them. . . . It is a voice that speaks authentically out of Christian convictions about our own very real limitations and our neighbor’s very real dignity, not cynical expediency.2
In addition to seeing who they are, we must learn to recognize how their hearts ache. This means listening—not just for facts but for patterns. For underlying wounds. For quiet regrets. We listen to discern the particular malady to which the good news of Jesus can speak healing. But make no mistake: listening well is no small task. It requires intention, patience, and focus. A story from medical history illustrates the point.
Where Healing Begins
In the early 1800s, French physician René Laennec was examining a young woman suspected of having heart disease. Because of her considerable size, he couldn’t hear her heartbeat using the standard method of the day—placing his ear directly to her chest. Then, he recalled a principle from acoustics: sound travels well through hollow cylinders. Acting on a hunch, he rolled a piece of paper into a tube, placed one end on the patient’s chest, and listened through the other side. For the first time, he could easily hear the rhythm of her heart. The stethoscope was born.
Every doctor knows that healing begins with careful listening. Without truly hearing a patient, there can be no accurate diagnosis, and without a diagnosis, there can be no effective remedy. Jesus, the great physician, demonstrated this same attentiveness. When he looked upon the crowds, harassed and helpless, he didn’t rush past their pain. He saw them. He listened with his heart. And out of that attentiveness came compassion.
There’s a lesson in this for us. Healing begins with presence—and presence begins with listening.
Healing begins with presence—and presence begins with listening.
As you would expect, Jesus was an expert at identifying such cues. Whether it was at a well in Samaria or around those hated tax collectors (including the little one who climbed the tree), human hearts lay open before Christ’s compassionate gaze. For instance, Matthew says of Jesus:
When he saw the crowds, he had compassion for them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd. Then he said to his disciples, “The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few; therefore pray earnestly to the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest.” (Matthew 9:36–38)
Notice the order. Jesus was moved to compassion when he saw the crowds. Such compassion was instigated by a particular observation: “they were harassed and helpless.” First Peter 3:15 reminds us of the importance of paying attention, “always being prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you; yet do it with gentleness and respect.” Listening, coupled with a readiness to share the hope we have in Christ, is powerful and attractive.
This resurrection Sunday, let’s resolve to view our relatives not as ideological opponents to be outwitted, or irritating people to be merely tolerated; instead, let’s view them with the eyes of Christ. In other words, let’s be peacemakers—ready to notice and attentively listen, embodying the one who came not to win arguments but to save sinners—even the ones seated across the table.
Notes:
Joe Navarro, "Ten Ways to Keep Family Members From Ruining Your Holidays," Psychology Today, https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/spycatcher/201411/ten-ways-to-keep-family-members-from-ruining-your-holidays.
John G. Stackhouse, Jr., Humble Apologetics: Defending the Faith Today (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 134.
Chris Castaldo (PhD, London School of Theology) is the lead pastor at New Covenant Church in Naperville, Illinois. He is the author of Talking with Catholics about the Gospel and coauthor of The Unfinished Reformation.
That there is such a thing as Holy Saturday in the gospel is remarkable, if oft overlooked. Why wouldn’t a simple movement from death one day to resurrection the next be sufficient?
Hope sometimes doesn’t feel like power; it feels like foolishness. High hopes can lead to horrible hopelessness. The Bible has something to say about that feeling.
Why do evangelicals become ex-evangelicals? The answers vary: some leave because they have been wounded by unwise or even abusive leaders, or maybe there is just a long, slow drifting away.
Why do evangelicals become ex-evangelicals? The answers vary: some leave because they have been wounded by unwise or even abusive leaders; others depart because they come to doubt the truthfulness of Scripture; for still many more, there is no one obvious reason, just a long, slow drifting away. But for a significant number of ex-evangelicals, their disillusionment is not about religious apathy or aversion but, rather, quite the opposite. The ex-evangelicals I am thinking of here are those who hunger for something more in their religious experience—more depth, more seriousness, more spiritual engagement—and become convinced that such things are not to be found within the evangelical tradition. They want genuine spiritual formation but fear that the evangelical cupboard is bare. So instead of becoming agnostics or joining liberal mainline Protestant churches, they turn to other traditions—notably Roman Catholicism or Eastern Orthodoxy—convinced that these traditions foster the sort of spiritual growth that had eluded them as evangelicals.
This phenomenon was recently highlighted in a widely shared article in the New York Post, which profiled converts to Eastern Orthodoxy. One such individual is Elijah Wee Sit, who was raised as an evangelical but now dismisses “modern Christianity” as unacceptably “watered down.” Reflecting, presumably, on the evangelicalism that he experienced growing up, he describes this “watered down” faith as follows: “People go to church on Sunday, they sing a few songs, they listen to an hour-long sermon that seems more like a TED talk, and then they go home, and they just go on with their lives.”1
Similarly, in his recent book Living in Wonder, bestselling Eastern Orthodox author Rod Dreher muses on the experience of American Christians who become dissatisfied with a felt lack of spiritual depth and begin wondering whether the ancient and medieval traditions of Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy might point toward a more excellent way:
On summer vacations, Americans sometimes venture to Europe, visit the great medieval cathedrals, and wonder about the kind of faith that could raise such temples to God's glory from societies that were poorer than our own. We read old tales of miracles, visions, pilgrimages, and religious feasts and feel the poverty of our own religious experience. We dutifully drag ourselves to church on Sunday, we read our Bibles, we follow the law, we work to serve our nation or our community, we stay current with our reading, but we still may wonder, Is this all there is?2
That last question captures the sense among some evangelicals that there is something lacking, paltry, and underdeveloped within the evangelical spiritual tradition: Is this all there is? Does evangelicalism actually possess the resources and tools to support a robust and sustained experience of spiritual formation and Christian growth?
And whatever one makes of the varied answers given in response, one cannot dismiss the significance of the question itself. One of the most basic biblical assumptions about the Christian life is that it will be a growing life. Whether depicting the blessed life as that of “a tree planted by streams of water that yields its fruit in its season” (Ps. 1:3) or portraying believers as “newborn infants” who “long for the pure spiritual milk” of God’s word so “so that by it” they “may grow up into salvation” (1 Pet. 2:2), the Bible assumes throughout that authentic spiritual life is marked by development, maturation, and growth.
The How Question
But as clear as that might be, what sometimes feels less clear is the how question: How do I nurture and sustain the sort of spiritual formation that the Bible clearly calls me to? Among evangelical Christians, answering such questions about personal spiritual growth has sometimes been complicated by the movement’s frequent emphasis on growth of other kinds, namely numerical growth and geographic spread. Rooted in the Great Awakening of the eighteenth century, evangelical Christianity has always prioritized a zeal to see the gospel spread to more people and more places. Innovative evangelists like John Wesley (1703–1791) and George Whitefield (1714–1770) took their sermons outside the church walls to reach constituencies that their more traditional contemporaries were neglecting. And in our own day, evangelicals continue to work tirelessly and creatively to reach ever-wider circles with the gospel.
This, of course, is a good thing. The risen Jesus told his disciples, “You will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth” (Acts 1:8). Evangelical Christians have taken that mandate seriously, and we should thank God for their witness. And yet, as is so often the case in a fallen world, even insights that are good and right and true can fog up our windows when they are emphasized to the exclusion of other insights that are likewise good and right and true. In the case of evangelicalism, the movement’s zeal for expansion and outward growth has sometimes come at the expense of discipleship and inward depth.
One of the most basic biblical assumptions about the Christian life is that it will be a growing life.
The famed evangelist Dwight L. Moody (1837–1899) captured an important aspect of evangelicalism’s historic DNA when he declared, “It makes no difference how you get a man to God, provided you get him there.”3 Surely one can applaud the evangelistic passion in that statement while still recognizing that an unrestrained and ultimately counterproductive pragmatism lies close at hand. When pragmatism pushes out principle, the result is a Christianity long on excitement and short on spiritual maturity. As evangelical theologian and author David Wells has put it, “What results, all too often, beneath all the smiling crowds, the packed auditoria, is a faith so cramped, limited, and minuscule as to be entirely unable to command our life, our energies, or, as a matter of fact, even much of our attention.”4 If that description accurately reflects the evangelical experience of the ex-evangelicals who now seek spiritual depth through Eastern Orthodoxy or Roman Catholicism, then one can’t help but sympathize with their decision to leave, even if we ultimately disagree.
I don’t question that some expressions of evangelical Christianity lack depth. But what I do question is the assumption that such shallowness is in any way intrinsic to the logic of the evangelical tradition itself. My confidence on this point comes not from surveying current practices among contemporary evangelicals but, rather, from looking backward to the Protestant Reformation tradition out of which evangelicalism arose and to which evangelicalism is theologically indebted.
The Reformers and their heirs were committed to reforming not just theology but also their approach to the practice of the Christian life. They sought an approach to spiritual formation that was deeply rooted in Scripture, understanding both that any God-honoring spiritual practices must be derived from Scripture and that God’s word itself is the primary means through which the Lord shapes his people. Over and against a medieval tradition that effectively sidelined personal engagement with the Bible in favor of pilgrimages, relics, and a host of practices that were, at best, extrabiblical, the Reformers understood that living, growing faith was a word-based affair: “Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom” (Col. 3:16).
In support of this end, Reformers like John Calvin (1509–1564), post-Reformation pastor-theologians like the English Puritans, and later exemplars like the eighteenth-century theologian Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758) all wrote extensively on the how question that sometimes feels so elusive. Our problem, then, as evangelicals is not that we lack a tradition of spiritual formation but, rather, that we often have failed to notice that it was there. As the secular culture becomes increasingly hostile to the historic Christian faith, believers who wish to stand firm will need to become more intentional than ever in their pursuit of authentic spiritual formation. For some evangelicals, this desire for depth will sadly lead them away from Protestantism and towards religious practices that find no basis in Scripture. But for those who wish to find it, there is a rich heritage of word-based spirituality right here at home.
Matthew C. Bingham (PhD, Queen’s University Belfast) is vice president of academic affairs and associate professor of church history at Phoenix Seminary in Scottsdale, Arizona. He is the author of Orthodox Radicals: Baptist Identity in the English Revolution and has served as a pastor in the United States and Northern Ireland. Matthew is married to Shelley, and they have four children.
There is a lot of overlap in the convictions that Protestants and Catholics have on a lot of deeply controversial moral and ethical issues in our society.
I’m a parent of three young children (ages 6, 4, and 3) who are growing up in an age of ubiquitous screens. Like most parents in today’s world, I worry about how they’re being shaped by today’s technologies. Here are a few suggestions for practical ways Christian parents can encourage healthy spiritual formation in a scrolling age.
1. Mind what you’re modeling.
So much of how kids learn is caught, not taught. And it’s mostly caught by parents—a child’s primary models for life, from birth to adulthood. Parents in the scrolling age need to be mindful that it won’t work to tell your kids, “Get off your phone!” if you are constantly on your phone yourself. Do as you say. Let your words be reinforced by your own discipline. Ask yourself: Are you frequently filling every gap moment in your day with scrolling? At family meal times, are you on your device? Do you and your spouse put your phones away and engage one another in front of the kids, modeling relational presence rather than distracted half-attention? If your kids see mom and dad always tethered to their smartphone, they’ll naturally grow up assuming devices like this will be critically important for them too.
So work on your own habits, and let your actions speak as loudly as your words.
2. Place boundaries around devices.
Limits are not legalistic or cruel. They’re loving. If you put boundaries around your kids regarding how far away from home they can ride their bikes, or how many cookies they can eat for dessert, do you also put boundaries around the when, where, and what, and how long of screen usage? Arguably, the hazards of screens pose greater risks to your kids than bike-riding or cookie-eating. In his book, The Anxious Generation, Jonathan Haidt’s big point is that we tend to overprotect our kids in the “real world” and under protect them in the virtual world.
Consider these practical ideas for putting guardrails around your kids’ scrolling time:
Designate times during the day when screen time is allowed and when it isn’t. We let our kids watch a little TV while they have breakfast, and then usually after school for a bit while they have a snack. But in both cases, it’s a limited period and then it goes off.
Limit your kids’ media or scrolling activities to common rooms or areas where they can be closely monitored. Especially once they get older (but increasingly, even at very young ages), the things they are tempted to do on screens in bedrooms or private spaces are very dark and damaging.
If your kids have their own devices, consider device lockers or secure storage where they must be kept at certain times of the day.
3. Vet the voices.
So much of spiritual formation has to do with where we’re giving our attention. What feeds our minds feeds our souls, and what we give our limited attention to has profound power to shape us. Are you aware of the voices, podcasts, YouTube channels, and influencers your kids give their online attention to? Be proactive in vetting the media they consume, knowing it’s usually not a one-and-done but an ongoing process of being tuned in to what their watching and who they’re listening to.
4. Suggest alternative activities.
It’s a mistake to focus only on the “what you can’t do” aspect of digital habits. Parents need to creatively suggest “what to do instead” alternatives that are fun, compelling, and healthy for kids. We created a list that we put on our fridge, detailing about twenty ideas for activities not involving screens: reading books, doing puzzles, building a fort, playing with sensory bins, painting, board games, practicing Scripture memory, singing worship songs, hide and seek, etc. Yes, these activities can often lead to messes requiring cleanup. But protecting your kids is more important than protecting the house’s cleanliness. And part of protecting kids is helping them grow in analog wonder, boredom-fueled imagination, and tactile creativity. As Read Mercer Schuchardt argues in his chapter in Scrolling Ourselves to Death, we need to encourage young people to be tangible participants in life, not just scrolling spectators of it.
5. Get them outside!
Kids today need to know that the real world has always been, and will always be, more awesome than any virtual world. What they can see in the sky, and touch in the dirt, and smell in the garden will always be more interesting than what they can scroll through on their screens. Most kids have an ingrained curiosity that leads them to explore nature, climb trees, catch grasshoppers, and make mud pies. Let them. Encourage it.
Work on your own habits, and let your actions speak as loudly as your words.
God’s creation is an underrated source of Christian wisdom1, and time outside is something many experts note is crucial to childhood development2. So send your kids into the backyard for unsupervised play. Let them run around in local parks. Hike mountains as a family. Trek through forests. Go often to lakes, rivers, oceans. Look for wildlife. Plant whatever fruit trees, herbs, and vegetables that grow where you live. Be attuned to the seasons. Geek out over the weather. Encourage your kids to notice the real world around them, and teach them from a young age that this isn’t just random evolutionary happenstance; it’s our Father’s world. He created it intentionally, for his glory and our good.
6. Don’t beat yourself up.
I often feel guilty that I’m not doing any of the above things enough. Even as I write books about the importance of healthy habits in the digital age, my own family can sometimes be inconsistent. I’m sure most parents can relate. We realize we’re scrolling on Instagram while our kids shout, “Come play catch with me outside!” Or one of them gets to the point where they have to yell, “Daddy, get off your phone!” These are ouch moments. And they can be helpful, convicting wake-up calls.
But parents today shouldn’t expect perfection. And when you’re on a plane or long road trip, in a quiet public place, or at a nice restaurant, don’t stress if you temporarily ease up on screen time to keep the chaos contained. We’ve all been there. You’re not a bad parent if you break your own “rules” from time to time. In most cases, the norm matters more for our spiritual formation than the exceptions. Missing church once in a while isn’t a big deal if our long-term norm is weekly attendance. Going a few days without praying or reading your Bible isn’t detrimental if the norm of those habits is consistency.
The same is true for digital habits: aim for consistency, but don’t expect perfection. And above all, seek God’s guidance in the process. Pray for wisdom and discipline, but rest in his grace.
Brett McCracken is a senior editor for the Gospel Coalition and the author of The Wisdom Pyramid: Feeding Your Soul in a Post-Truth World and Uncomfortable: The Awkward and Essential Challenge of Christian Community. He lives with his family in Southern California.
When you’re looking out into the realm of social media, it's easy to base your theological reflection not on what Scripture emphasizes, but on what social media wants to talk about.
You Can’t Have a Grandmaster Plan for Life (Or Even Tomorrow)
In this episode, David Gibson discusses the intent, message, and way of life that Ecclesiastes has to teach us. He addresses the negative connotations associated with this book and how Ecclesiastes teaches us how we can know God, love him, and accept the gifts we receive from him.
Matt Tully
David Gibson serves as minister of Trinity Church in Aberdeen, Scotland and is the author of several books, including Living Life Backward: How Ecclesiastes Teaches Us to Live in Light of the End from Crossway. David, thanks so much for joining me today on The Crossway Podcast.
David Gibson
Such a pleasure, Matt. It’s lovely to get to chat with you again.
Matt Tully
Today we’re going to talk about the book of Ecclesiastes, this really incredible yet somewhat perplexing book in the Bible. And one of the big themes in Ecclesiastes that I want to focus on today is just the uncertainty of life that we all experience. Life doesn’t always go the way that we expect it to go. I think that’s something that we’ve all experienced in our own lives in different ways. Sometimes in really distressing ways, perhaps. So I wonder if we can just start with the big picture. As someone who spent a lot of time in the book of Ecclesiastes, how has it shaped your perspective on those moments in our lives when life does feel random or even out of control?
David Gibson
Yeah, thanks. I think you touch straight away there on probably one of the biggest takeaways from the book, that I think it’s there to help us make sense of those moments. I think it’s part of the wisdom literature that is given to us to help us get our heads around the order that God has put into the world that you see really clearly in the book of Proverbs. Ecclesiastes comes at that order from a different angle and says, yes, the order is there, but what happens when it doesn’t look like it’s there and nothing seems to make sense? I think a lot of where people connect with the book Ecclesiastes is necessarily bound up with our own individual life story. So I’m the eldest child. I'm a typical eldest child. You see these Instagram accounts about this. I follow these guys on Instagram that always do these reels about the different type of kids: the eldest, the middle, and the littlest. And I’m one of three boys, so I see that in my two brothers. Eldest children love order, neatness, tidiness in everything. We work by a schedule. We’re where we’re meant to be. Randomness and things out of control are very infuriating in a way that they’re not for my two other brothers. They’re like, "You’re there to take care of all that stuff. What’s the problem?" So depending on your type of personality and where you are in the world, the book will resonate in different ways. For me, as someone who loves order and tidiness and control, I think I’ve learned, through the book of Ecclesiastes, that God is teaching me that I make an idol out of those things. It’s not just my personality (although it is that); it’s that when my desk is tidy, and my calendar is tidy, and my relationships are neat, and the kids are where I want them to be, and the dog is well behaved, and church is looking good, it’s very possible that I have risen up above my creaturely station and tried to take control of the universe and say that because everything is where I want it to be, God is good. And actually, I’m not really saying that God is good; I’m saying that I am good, and my world is good, and therefore God is good. And the book of Ecclesiastes is there to ask is it possible that love of control is an idol that God is smashing very gently—well, it doesn’t feel gentle—very lovingly, by showing you that you cannot control everything in life? And whether you’re an eldest child or a youngest child, it’s still the same message, that we are creatures who do not run the universe. And the randomness of life, and the things that you can’t control, and your best laid plans that all unravel unexpectedly, and the medical diagnosis you didn’t see coming—all of these things are tools in God’s hand to wake us up to the fact that he is the one running the world, not us. So that’s a long answer to your question, that Ecclesiastes has helped me see more and more that I am a creature. God is the creator, not me.
Matt Tully
You mentioned the book of Proverbs a minute ago, and I think that is one thing that I’ve wrestled with at times is that portions of the book of Proverbs seem to portray a world that is very you do this, and then this will happen. It’s very straightforward math almost. So you kind of know if I give this input, if I act in this way, if I live a wise life or a godly life in this way, then this thing should happen every time. And that feels very much at odds with the message of the book of Ecclesiastes, which seems to say I can live life as wisely as I possibly could, and yet sometimes things will still not turn out for me. So how do you reconcile those two? I think to some it could feel like those are contradictory messages.
David Gibson
Well, you need them both. The second one only feels contradictory because you have the first proverb says, "Do this, and you will live. Do this, and things go better than if you do the opposite." And that’s all completely true. But along comes Ecclesiastes to say—and Proverbs says this, too, but Ecclesiastes says it in a little bit more of a stark form—that yes, you’ve got all those given things about what makes life work well, but don’t forget two things. Don’t forget that you’re doing them in a broken world. Sin has fractured everything. And don’t forget that you’re doing it in a world where you will soon be dead. You are dying, and your lifespan is not very long. You are only here for a short time. Those are the two main angles, I think, and particularly that first one that God has made the world. A friend of mine who did a PhD here at Aberdeen partly on Proverbs said that God has made the world hospitable to wisdom. The world works best the wiser you are. The more of God you have in your life, the more you’ve imbibed the law and the gospel, the wiser you will live and, therefore, the better life will go. And at the same time, Ecclesiastes says, yes, but disaster can overtake you in a moment, because this is a broken and fallen world. So it’s a case of holding both together, Matt, that yes, this will be better if I live this way, and I might be dead tomorrow, because this world is broken and I don’t have any guarantee for the future.
Matt Tully
As you describe it like that, it makes me think of how the book of Ecclesiastes is almost like the asterisk on the book of Proverbs. This is true, generally speaking, but just don’t miss that asterisk. Don’t forget that there are these other two factors, these X factors: we live in a broken world, and we ourselves are going to die. Those impact our experience of our lives.
David Gibson
There’s an Australian Anglican theologian called Graham Goldsworthy, who many of your listeners may know. He has a wonderful book called Gospel and Wisdom, where he talks about how you find and read and know the gospel through the Bible’s wisdom literature. And he breaks the books, and he says Proverbs is about the perception of order, Ecclesiastes is about the confusion of order, and the book of Job is about the hiddenness of order. In some of my teaching I’ve done recently in the wisdom literature, I’ve added in Song of Songs into that and say that Song of Songs is about the ecstasy of order. The really interesting thing in all of that is the word order. Order recurs in all of Goldsworthy’s headings—perception of order, confusion of order, hiddenness of order. And the order comes from the doctrine of creation. To anybody listening, the key to understanding the Bible’s wisdom literature is the doctrine of creation. You cannot get Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Job, Song of Songs right unless you believe God has made the world in a certain way. And it’s because there is a Creator that there is order in the world. It’s because sin has ruined creation that there is confusion of the order. I’ve always just found that a really helpful thing, that the doctrine of creation is the unspoken screen saver. It’s the backdrop to the whole of the wisdom literature.
Matt Tully
You write in this book, "The message of the book of Ecclesiastes is mirrored in the effect of the book." I just found that a very fascinating statement. I wonder if you could unpack a little bit more what you mean by that.
David Gibson
I think the best storytellers—I was trying to think of an example of this, and I couldn’t think of one. It’ll come to me as soon as we click end recording. The best storytellers and the best filmmakers make you feel what they’re trying to tell you on the screen. So Harry Potter, when it’s Voldemort in the woods or whatever, it’s not light and bright and happy music on the screen. It’s dark, it’s foreboding, and it’s matching. The effect is mirroring the message at that particular point. So I think the message of the book of Ecclesiastes is life is really bewildering and perplexing and will leave you scratching your head and you don’t know where you are. You don’t know which way is up. So if that’s the message of the book, what an incredibly skillful teacher the teacher of the book is to write a book that leaves you scratching your head. How many people have you spoken to who say, "I steer clear of Ecclesiastes. I don’t know how to make sense of Ecclesiastes." What an amazing effect, if the point of the book is that we don't easily know how to make sense of life. So I think that that’s what I’m getting at in that sentence. It’s a very skillful thing to write a book that leaves you scratching your head to teach you that life leaves you scratching your head.
Matt Tully
That’s such a helpful encouragement to us as we approach a book that, yeah, does sometimes feel hard to understand. It feels a little bit inscrutable in certain points. And I hear you saying that that is part of the point, that the book was actually intentionally designed to be a little bit difficult to penetrate, because that reflects the way that life often is difficult for us to penetrate.
David Gibson
Yeah, exactly. And this is controversial, but I think that’s reflected in a lot of the scholarship of Ecclesiastes, that a lot of Christian scholars feel they have to compensate for the perplexity. And there are all sorts of different theories, most of them that I disagree with, about bits of the book that are unorthodox—"no believer would say this." And I don’t think that’s right, and I think that’s the shock of the book. It’s meant to make you stop in your tracks and say, "Hang on. I thought this was the Bible I’m reading." Anthony Thistelton, who was a New Testament scholar, he says that wisdom literature, and I think this is particularly Ecclesiastes, wisdom literature wounds from behind. It’s the sucker punch, the punch in the back that you didn’t see coming that leaves you blinking in the sunlight, thinking hHang on, what is this? That’s part of the unique contribution that Ecclesiastes makes in the canon.
Matt Tully
There are many different ways that we experience this uncertainty of life, these unexpected turns in our lives that leave us feeling sucker punched. There are a lot of different angles on that that we could explore, but I wanted to pick maybe three broad categories of these and see if you can help us understand what this book can help us learn about these ways that we experience life’s uncertainty. The first one is just that understanding that we don’t have control over the things that happen to us. This is going to come in all different ways. I know for me, I can look back on my life and I can just see so many small moments that happen, things that I either had very little control over or maybe had literally no control over, that then had really big repercussions for me that maybe made a huge impact on my life. And there’s obviously lots of good examples of that in our lives, lots of wonderful happen-stances, so to speak, that then led to good things. But I think we can all probably think of small moments that led to really difficult, hard things in our lives. As you think about your own life, can you think of examples of that—these small moments that you had no control over that then ended up having a big impact on the rest of your life?
David Gibson
One hundred percent. I can think of loads and loads of different things. I’m married to the most amazing woman in the world, who I messed around at university, who I treated badly. And we met on a summer evening in our college days. She was cycling home, and I happened to be walking back a particular way that evening that led to a conversation that began my humble pie journey of saying to her, "Have I missed the boat?" And we didn’t plan to be there. Then all of a sudden, our whole lives are now meshed together, and we have four kids and a church, and we’re living in this part of the world and not another part. I think Ecclesiastes is just all about that. But here’s how it does it. Ecclesiastes has a beautiful doctrine of God. We can talk about that. It’s actually very rich in the way that it describes God. But it helps you see who God is mostly, I think, by showing us who we are. We are creatures, not the Creator. That, I think, is the main message of Ecclesiastes. It has one of the richest anthropologies in the Bible. It’s got a doctrine of man that sheds light on who God is. Because the fundamental human condition ever since the garden is that we think we are God. That’s what the serpent offered our first parents, wasn’t it? That if you do this, you will be like God. I say this in my book, that my wife will tell you I’m pretty keen on that idea of being God. It surfaces in all sorts of ways, and Ecclesiastes is there to say just take a minute to look at your life—those happen-stances and everything that you mentioned. If you stop and unpack your life, most of the really, really significant decisions and things about you, you didn’t decide and you had no control over. Or even if you did decide, you didn’t realize what you were contributing to. It led to this that you didn’t see coming and all the unintended consequences. Stop thinking that you’re like Garry Kasparov, or whoever those Chess players are, that you’re sitting there with a grand map of your life and the universe and everything. We’re not. We’re small bit-part players who barely know what we’re doing tomorrow, nevermind how we’re going to shape the universe in the future. And Ecclesiastes is just a beautifully humbling book to say, What do most of us think we’re like? We think we’re like castles. We think we’re like granite. We think we’re skyscrapers. We think we are individual Babel towers, going to reach up to the heavens, change the world, and live forever. And Ecclesiastes says, no, I’ve seen people like you before. You’re like the mist that was there on my grass in the morning. And it’s now two o’clock in the day, and you’re like the dew, and it’s gone. It’s just evaporated. That’s what you’re like. You’ll be here for seventy years. Tomorrow no one will remember you were there. That’s what I mean by it being a book about God by teaching us who we are. It puts us in our proper place.
Matt Tully
I love how at the beginning of each chapter of the book you often include little quotes from different figures. And one of the quotes that stood out to me that just is so at odds with, obviously, broader secular culture, perhaps, but even some Christian culture. It’s a Nicholas von Zinzendorf quote: "Preach the gospel, die, and be forgotten." That is the true trajectory for most of us. And yet even just the starkness of that, especially the idea of being forgotten, can really cut against the sense of purpose or significance that we all want to feel.
David Gibson
I think it’s when the wisdom literature has wounded you from behind and you catch your breath and you think, What the heck just happened there?—it’s realizing that what the punch in the back has done is put a whole different way of looking at life into your system. So the idea that in 100 years probably no one will know I existed, if you don’t know why that’s a beautiful, beautiful, liberating thing for you, you’re going to struggle with the book of Ecclesiastes, or at least it’s written to teach you why that’s a beautiful thing. Because if you imagine really taking that on board, that in 100, 200, or 300 years no one will know I was even here, well, think about the difference that makes to what I’m trying to achieve today. What am I trying to do? Am I trying to build a legacy today that will last forever? There are occasional people like that. There’s Winston Churchill. There’s US presidents. There are people that God puts in the world who leave an indelible trace. What are they? Maybe five, ten, fifteen, twenty people out of billions. If you’re striving to be one of those people, you’re probably not going to be. And that’s God’s way of saying stop overreaching. Stop trying to do more with your life than you were ever meant to do. And if no one’s going to remember you in 100 years, the fact that I have made you, God is saying, that I’ve made you, you’re still worth something. You’re worth an awful lot. But you don’t need to be remembered for your life to have value and meaning. So maybe the value and meaning is not where we think it is.
Matt Tully
Going back to the broad struggle that we have with feeling so powerless to control our lives, to control the future of our lives and just the experience of all the unpredictability that can come our way, you’re talking about it as being almost a comforting thing, as we realize what that tells us about God in contrast to ourselves. But I think the reality is that for many of us, that can feel very unsettling. As we think about that, we think about just my lack of control over what might be coming tomorrow, much less five years from now, it can just feel really scary to think that there’s nothing I really can do, ultimately, to control that. So how would you counsel or encourage or help someone who is saying, "Honestly, that makes me feel very scared"?
David Gibson
It’s a really good question. I think I would say all of life—and I think this as a pastor increasingly—that all of life is the doctrine of God. My fears, my anxieties, my sins, my hopes, my dreams, my struggles—all of them locate me somewhere in relation to who God is and to my understanding of who God is. So I would say that the adult—and I’m fifty this year in December—the adult (that’s someone in my position)—I remember reading John Piper saying that when you’re in your mid forties or fifties, you’ve got the most responsibilities on your shoulders that you’ll ever have. You’re probably a sandwich carer—you’ve got dependents beneath you and you’re starting to get dependents above you. You’re at a point in your career, probably, in work where pressures are increasing. You’ve got increasing responsibilities. And I feel that exactly right, all those things for me personally at the minute. if you’re that kind of person and you don’t locate yourself in relation to God properly, you begin to think, I really am carrying the weight of the world on my shoulders. I’ve got to make all these decisions. I’ve got a plan the future and all the rest of it. And what that person forgets—what I forget—is, well, imagine looking at your dog. I’ll give you two examples. Look at your dog, and if your dog said back to you, "Do you know what I’ve got to do today? Have you any idea how busy I am? Have you any idea what responsibilities I’ve got? Where’s my next walk coming from? Where’s my next meal coming from?" If your dog could speak, you’d look at it and say, "You have no idea how good you’ve got it." What you say is, "I’m in charge of that. I take care of all that, not you. You’ve forgotten who you are, dog. You’re getting above your station." That’s not a totally weird example. I think large parts of Job, using the animal kingdom, are to teach Job that if God were to tell him why he does what he does, Job wouldn’t understand. There are categories that God works in that human beings are just not built to understand. My knowledge of God is the same as my dog’s knowledge of me. We think God is just a bigger version of me when, actually, God is a different being altogether than me. So I’m taking a long time to give you hopefully a helpful, simple answer, which is when I feel anxious about tomorrow and anxious about what’s coming and anxious about the future, it’s like a dog saying to a human being, "You don’t know what you’re doing. Have I really got to run the world, dog walker? Have I got to sort it out?" We really don’t. We’re forgetting, in all the stress and worry and anxiety about tomorrow and about what’s coming, we’re forgetting that we are creatures who God has placed in this world for a short time to simply know him, love him, obey him, trust him, to accept—and this is another beautiful part of Ecclesiastes—to accept the good things in the world that he’s given us as gifts—food, drink, relationships, work—to enjoy them for what they are. The dog that buries a bone thinking, The entire future of the universe depends on me burying this bone, it is as silly as the president thinking the entire future of the universe depends on which button I press here. Of course it’s monumental. But it’s nothing like the grandness of what God is orchestrating and God is controlling. And the other image I’d use, not just dog and human, but parent and child. That’s the main thing, pastorally, I want to say to people who are really anxious about the future and anxious about control over their life. Your four-year-old child who says to you, "I’m really anxious about school tomorrow, mom, and what my friend is doing." That’s how life works, isn’t it? The parent looks at the child’s fears and knows how small they are compared to the parent’s fears. The parent can navigate the world in a way that the child can’t. And the parent says, "Look, don’t worry. I’m here, I’ve got this, put your hand in mine. I’ll walk with you through that." We’re so quick to forget that, aren’t we? I don’t know what you’re like, Matt. Me, myself as a pastor, my wife, my kids, our church family, if only I could get the doctrine of God deeper into my bones and into my heart, that a) he’s a different being from me, and secondly, he’s a father, not just a chess player. He’s not an orchestrator of events. He’s a loving father who loves me the same way that I love my kids and say to them at nighttime, "Let’s pray. God’s got this. I’ve got this." Does that make sense? That’s a very long-winded answer. You’ve probably even forgotten what the question was.
Matt Tully
No, absolutely. It makes me think of a subset of the broad category in just the uncertainty of life. We can look at our lives and see things happen to us that are out of our control, but one subset that is also maybe a focal point of our anxiety at times is decision making that we have to do. So every day we don’t have the option to not make decisions. It’s not as if this doctrine of God and the doctrine of humanity means that we just sit passively and let things happen. And sometimes it can just feel hard to know what decision to make. And I think especially of the situations where we are trying to make good, wise decisions, and yet things still don’t go as planned. We do what we’re called to do, we feel like faithfully, and yet the results just still go wrong. So how do you think about that? How should we as Christians understand our responsibility to make good decisions, to think carefully about the future, with our tendency to want to have control over the future?
David Gibson
I think what Ecclesiastes does is it injects into our decision making the unexpected decision-making help of death. The message of Ecclesiastes is life is a breath. The recurring phrase, "Vanity, vanity, all is vanity. Vanity of vanities." In the English Standard Version or the NIV, "Meaningless, meaningless. Everything is meaningless." The way to understand that, I think, the Hebrew word hevel is breath, mist, vapor, breath, breath, vapor, vapor. Everything is a vapor. Everything is misty. Everything is momentary. Everything is passing. Everything is fleeting. And Ecclesiastes says, if I could put it this way, Ecclesiastes says stick that in your decision making pipe and smoke it. Here I sit wrestling over this decision, and Ecclesiastes stands over my shoulder and says, "Come on, make up your mind. You don’t have long." And by that it means you’ve only got seventy years or eighty years. If you really know you’re here for a short time and you’re going to die, does that make any difference to the decision making? We never really think that, but you get the unexpected diagnosis that gives you six months to live. Very few people are cloudy in their decision making then. Things become incredibly clear very quickly about what matters most, about who you want to speak to, about what you want to put right, about where you want to go, what you’re going to do with your money. In Ecclesiastes, the whole point of the book is to say you don’t need that six-months-left diagnosis. I’m giving it to you now. You’ve got seventy years max, and look how quickly it’s going. I’m fifty, Matt, and yet in my head I’m twenty. It’s just passing like a Formula One race car. Life is flying by. So the whole point of the book, I think, is to say can you just stop and think about the fact that your grandparents are gone, and they were like you? And you don’t even know then names of your great-great grandparents. They’re here and they’re gone. So take it down deep, really deep, into your bones that when you go to that funeral and you look at the coffin, one day that will be you. And when someone stands to give the eulogy, what are they going to say about you? Today is your chance to change that. That’s one main thing, I think. Inject the reality of your death into your decision making. And then if I could just say one other thing, which is I think the book of Ecclesiastes says once you do that, once you pump your death into your veins and into your bloodstream and your mindset and everything, the very last thing it does is make you morbid. Death has that effect, doesn’t it? When people lose someone tragically, often what does the family do? They start running marathons, they climb mountains. The loss accelerates life, in some ways, and adds more life. If you can do that yourself for your own death in advance of your death, instead of becoming morbid, people like this become the most alive people that you can meet. They become incredibly generous with their money, with their time. That’s the second main thing I would say, that once you inject death into your mindset to help you make decisions, it won’t automatically tell you which fork in the road to go down, but it might help you think, Is one of these forks in the road more generous than the other? Is one going to serve others more than it serves me? It’s that kind of thing. That’s the difference that I think Ecclesiastes makes on our decision making.
Matt Tully
Another area of uncertainty that we face, another subcategory, is uncertainty in the midst of suffering. And Ecclesiastes does address this. It presents what I would say is a pretty brutally honest picture of suffering in a broken world that is oftentimes unavoidable for us. We live in the modern world where we have technology now that helps us to push some of this away. But ultimately, suffering, which culminates in death, is unavoidable for us. And sometimes it barges into our lives in very intense ways. So what comfort does this book offer to somebody who is experiencing deep suffering?
David Gibson
I think it operates on a few different levels. On the one hand, some people I know just simply find the sheer presence of Ecclesiastes comforting. Psalm 23 is, "Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me." Ecclesiastes just takes time to describe that valley of the shadow of death. It’s quite comforting to read the Bible and to realize that the Bible is not fairytale land. It’s not make believe. It really knows the world that we live in. That in itself is comforting.
Matt Tully
We should take a moment, David, here just to briefly mention your book. You said Psalm 23, and you have another book that you’ve written with Crossway called The Lord of Psalm 23, where you walk through that incredible Psalm in a way that I’ve never heard anyone else do. And you really helped to explain both what that valley is but also the Lord who meets us there. Can you just share very briefly what you see in that psalm and even how it connects to Ecclesiastes?
David Gibson
I think the psalm, again, some people say that the comfort—Charles Spurgeon said this really famously—that the comfort of the psalm is realizing that in the valley of the shadow of death, the reason it’s only a shadow is because there must be light somewhere. So the Lord is there as light, and so the shadows aren’t really dangerous. And I don’t think that’s right. I think the point of the psalm, and David who wrote it, his own life experience is that valleys can be very, very dangerous, dark, bleak, crushing places. The psalm doesn’t try and deny that or pretend that that’s not like that. And, in fact, that’s what makes the psalm so beautiful, that the Lord is with us. Not to then, because he’s with us, that the valley of the shadow of death disappears. No, he’s with us in that valley, right there in the midst of it and in the thickest darkness. And I think Ecclesiastes is just like that. It doesn’t sugarcoat life. It doesn’t pretend and say, "Come to Jesus, and everything will be okay." That there are many people in many parts of the world that their life was fine until they came to Jesus, until they came to Christ, and then the suffering began, then the persecution began. So that’s that’s one level of comfort, to go back to your original question. Ecclesiastes is real, and there’s comfort in it being real. I think a second thing is that Ecclesiastes says that suffering comes to us in seasons. There are just times when these things roll into our lives that are unexpected. But because there is a time for these things, Ecclesiastes is very good at saying they’re not forever, they’re not always. Just like the four seasons of the year roll around, just like days and weeks and months roll around, so times of suffering that we think are going to go on forever, in God’s hands probably are simply a season that we’re going through, a rhythm that we’re in at the minute. The most important thing, though, where I get that from in chapter 3, the most important help that I have about suffering from Ecclesiastes is that even in that time of suffering, God is going to use it in some way to tell a bigger story than I can see in this particular time. So in Ecclesiastes chapter 3, we have "a time to be born, a time to die, a time to mourn, a time to dance." There is a season of suffering, in other words, that comes into all our lives. But then chapter 3, verse 11, "He has made everything beautiful in its time. Also, he has put eternity into man’s heart, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end." That, I think, is the most incredible verse in the whole book. Everybody thinks of "meaningless, meaningless, vanity, vanities," but that verse is the most incredible verse, to think that God has made everything beautiful in its time. And I shudder at that. How can some things—Gaza, 9/11, Northern Ireland (where I grew up)—take your pick at what’s unfolding in the world. How on earth can it be beautiful? And the answer is, of course, it’s not beautiful to us, but it’s not beautiful to us because we don’t see it in its time. God is the one controlling all the times of the universe. My suffering, your suffering at this particular moment is no more meaningful or beautiful than opening Lord of the Rings halfway through and reading one particular sentence and saying, "This doesn’t make sense." It doesn’t make sense on its own there in that moment, but the whole story put together is beautiful. And I think that’s probably, ultimately, the most ultimate help in suffering, that my suffering is one moment in this unfolding story that has God taking care of sin, dealing with it once and for all in the death and resurrection of Christ his Son, the promise of a new world to come. Then we will see everything beautiful in its time.
Matt Tully
You titled this book Walking Through the Book of Ecclesiastes: Living Life Backward. I wonder if you could just, as a final question, help us understand what you’re getting at with that title.
David Gibson
I need to say what Crossway is getting out of that title. The funny thing with that title, Matt, is that I didn’t like it. I didn’t want it. The book was called, in the United Kingdom, Destiny: Learning to Live by Preparing to Die. And you guys, folks at Crossway, are brilliant at titling books, and that title came back to me and I fought it and said no. And Crossway said, "No, trust us. It really is the right one." And I now agree completely. It’s an excellent distillation of the message of Ecclesiastes. And so the reason for it, I think, is this: we live life forwards, don’t we? That’s the normal thing. I sat on my calendar, and this morning my wife said, "What’s happening this week? What are we doing this evening?" The kids say what they’re doing. We’re plotting our life forward all the time. And if you just carry on like that, you just plot your life forward all the time and then bang, you’re dead. In some way, death comes. Ecclesiastes says how about we switch that around? Start with death, the fact that one day you’re going to die. That’s definitely coming. It really, really will happen. If you believe it and start to take that on board now, live backwards from that point. It’s the thing I mentioned earlier. Imagine the terminal diagnosis. You’ve got six months left to live. You’re going to live backwards from that. That cold, hard reality is going to shape everything you do in the next six months. And so Ecclesiastes says, "Well, I don’t know whether it’s six months or six years or sixteen years, but it’s coming. So take that point and work backwards into your life, and you’ll find that you live completely differently."
Matt Tully
And to be fair to you, even if we insisted on that title, we got that from your introduction where you talk about our tendency to live life forward, to want to live life forward, and yet the need to actually think backwards. Maybe actually as a final question, one other quick quote from the book. You say this perspective, starting with death and the end, "can teach us the meaning of mirth." I wonder if you could just close us with explaining what you mean by that.
David Gibson
Don’t you think that some of the most interesting people you’ve ever met, or some of the most delightful people to be around, are the people who don’t take themselves so seriously? In my work, I’ve had the privilege of meeting some really powerful people. I’ve met some incredibly powerful people—powerful in the world’s terms, in terms of politics, money, influence, capability. The world-at-their-feet kind of people. And there are some of those people that you just—I anyway—just didn’t really want to be around too long. These are big hitters, and, boy, do they know they’re big hitters in the world. But you see when you meet a person with immense power and immense reach and they just are so self-deprecating and they don’t take themselves seriously. They put you at ease. It is tremendous fun to be around people like that. So people who don’t take themselves seriously know how to laugh at themselves. When you realize you are a mist and that you’re only here for a short time and that the future of the world does not depend on the David Gibson project and my legacy. I’m a pastor, and I could go under a bus tomorrow and Trinity Church in Aberdeen will carry on just fine, because it’s God’s church not mine. You become someone who just relaxes and lets go of needing to be in charge of everything, needing to be in control of everything. And that’s the message of Ecclesiastes. Chapter 9: go enjoy your life with your wife, whom you love. Open a bottle of wine. Look after your body. Dress well. Eat well. Enjoy your work. That comes from death. It’s knowing that you’re going to die that teaches you how to laugh at yourself, how to not take yourself too seriously, how to enjoy the good things in life. That’s where I think the mirth comes from. I think that’s what it means.
Matt Tully
David, thank you so much for helping us take a book that I think can sometimes fill us with a little bit of anxiety, can feel unsettling to us and confusing, and hopefully helping each of us to understand a little bit better the freedom, the relief even, that comes from understanding not just who we are but ultimately who God is. We appreciate it.
David Gibson
You’re very welcome. It’s been a real pleasure. Lovely. Thank you.
Jim Hamilton discusses what to do when you hate your job, offering encouragement for those frustrated in their work and explaining the difference between a job and a vocation.
Rosaria Butterfield encourages us to engage our LGBTQ neighbors for Christ, highlighting how God used the radically ordinary hospitality of Christians to draw her to himself.
Does Monday morning excite you? If so, that’s great, but that’s not how many of us feel. Our jobs challenge us, exhaust us, and sometimes threaten to consume us.
Does Monday morning excite you? If so, that’s great, but that’s not how many of us feel. Our jobs challenge us, exhaust us, and sometimes threaten to consume us. So what does devotion to Jesus Christ look like in our workplace environments—whether they be cutthroat or mundane?
From small-town Virginia to the hustle of New York City, Tim Keller spent his life ministering to believers struggling with work. As he discovered and taught, how we work (and why) reveals our deepest values and dearest treasures.
According to Keller, work is not merely a way to earn money or a strategy for self-advancement or a necessary evil to fund truly important things like ministry. Work is a divine calling through which we honor our heavenly Master and love our neighbor in tangible ways.
Not long after Keller planted Redeemer, a soap-opera actor got converted and came to his new pastor asking, “What roles should—and shouldn’t—I take? I assume stories don’t have to be religious to be good for people, but how do I know which stories are good and which are bad?” He also wondered, “How should I think about method acting? This is where you don’t just act angry; you get angry. You tap into something within yourself and really live it. What’s your advice?” Though Keller had the wherewithal to reply to the second question by saying, “That doesn’t sound like a good idea,” he knew he was out of his depth. Despite years of formal theological training and ministry experience, he sensed a gap in his ability to form Christians for daily work. He knew how to encourage deeper involvement in church activities, but here was a young Christian wanting to be discipled for his public life. Years later, Keller would point to this interaction as an “epiphany” that propelled him to think more seriously about the integration of faith and work.1
Situating Your Job in a Story
Your vocation will make little sense to you unless you’ve situated it in a significantly larger story. What’s the purpose of my job? is too small a question to start with. We must first ask, What’s the purpose of my life? and, more fundamentally, What’s the purpose of the universe? Only when we’ve surveyed God’s ultimate plan for the world, as revealed in his word, will we duly grasp the implications for our work. This sweeping story unfolds in the major plot points of creation, fall, redemption, and restoration. Or, Keller notes, we can distill it in four chapters:2
Chapter 1
Where did we come from?
From God: the One and the relational
Chapter 2
Why did things go so wrong?
Because of sin: bondage and condemnation
Chapter 3
What will put things right?
Christ: incarnation, substitution, restoration
Chapter 4
How can I be put right?
Through faith: grace and trust
The Bible’s storyline presents an unfolding drama that powerfully resonates with our jobs:
Work was created good.
Work became corrupted by sin.
Work is being partly redeemed through the Holy Spirit.
Work will be fully redeemed when Jesus Christ makes all things new.
Work Is Created
The Bible begins with the most productive workweek of all time.3 That’s how we’re meant to think of it. Note the repetition:
And on the seventh day God finished his work that he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all his work that he had done. So God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it God rested from all his work that he had done in creation. (Gen. 2:2–3)
The narrative then rewinds to focus on the sixth day. Though God was exceedingly pleased with his universe (Gen. 1:31), something was lacking: “There was no man to work the ground” (Gen. 2:5). So the Creator knelt down, as it were, to solve the problem:
Then the Lord God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature. And the Lord God planted a garden in Eden, in the east, and there he put the man whom he had formed. (Gen. 2:7–8)
Behold the King of glory, with his hands in the dirt.
No wonder the first image bearer was given a similar occupation: Adam was put “in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it” (Gen. 2:15). And the job was too much for Adam to handle by himself: “Then the LORD God said, ‘It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him’” (Gen. 2:18). Keller aptly contends, “We see God not only working, but commissioning workers to carry on his work. . . . Though [everything] was good, it was still to a great degree undeveloped. God left creation with deep untapped potential for cultivation that people were to unlock through their labor.”4
Could the Bible begin with a more exalted view of work?
Work Is Cursed
Yet by the time we finish the next chapter in Genesis, the story has become a tragedy. Following Adam and Eve’s rebellion, God pronounces a series of curses, including this:
And to Adam he said,
“Because you have listened to the voice of your wife
and have eaten of the tree
of which I commanded you,
‘You shall not eat of it,’
cursed is the ground because of you;
in pain you shall eat of it all the days of your life;
thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you;
and you shall eat the plants of the field.
By the sweat of your face
you shall eat bread,
till you return to the ground,
for out of it you were taken;
for you are dust,
and to dust you shall return.” (Gen. 3:17–19)
Behold the King of glory, with his hands in the dirt.
Yet even after banishment from Eden—the original exile—Adam retains his vocation: “The Lord God sent him out from the garden of Eden to work the ground from which he was taken” (Gen. 3:23). But work has now become toil. As the father of Noah says, looking at his newborn son, “Out of the ground that the Lord has cursed, this one shall bring us relief from our work and from the painful toil of our hands” (Gen. 5:29).
In one sense, the whole ensuing story of the Bible is about the promise of a royal deliverer who will end the exile and heal the world, bringing relief to our toil and everlasting rest to our souls. But what about the meantime? The curse remains. The exile persists. Thorns and thistles threaten to sabotage even our best efforts. Even thoughthe kingdom of God has made a personal appearance on earth in the person of Jesus Christ, we still await the renewal and restoration of all things—including the gift of work.5
The iconic words of Isaac Watts may put you in the Christmas spirit, but they are actually about the joy to come at the King’s return:
No more let sins and sorrows grow,
Nor thorns infest the ground;
He comes to make his blessings flow
Far as the curse is found,
Far as the curse is found,
Far as, far as the curse is found.6
Dignity of All Work
On the topic of work, Keller invoked no one more often than Martin Luther. The sixteenth-century Protestant Reformer, having reclaimedm the biblical truth of the priesthood of all believers, loved to highlight the nobility of all human work—no matter how menial:
[Luther] mounted a polemic against the view of vocation prevalent in the medieval church. The church at that time understood itself as the entirety of God’s kingdom on earth, and therefore only work in and for the church could qualify as God’s work. This meant that the only way to be called by God into service was as a monk, priest, or nun. . . . [Secular labor was] akin to the demeaning necessity that the Greeks saw in manual labor. Luther attacked this idea forcefully.7
Indeed, in his expositions of the Psalms, Luther observed that God cares for his creation not directly but indirectly—through our work. Consider, for example, Psalm 145:
The eyes of all look to you,
and you give them their food in due season.
You open your hand;
you satisfy the desire of every living thing. (Ps. 145:15–16)
But how does God feed us? It is not as if heavenly manna plops onto our plates. No, he works through human workers—farmers, drivers, bakers, grocers, and countless others along the way—to provide the food that now sits in your refrigerator or pantry.8 We pray, “Give us this day our daily bread” (Matt. 6:11), and God answers by dispatching people to their jobs.
Even in the smallest tasks, the Lord Almighty is working through our work. The implications of this teaching, once they sink in, are explosive. Keller reflects,
Not only are the most modest jobs—like plowing a field or digging a ditch—the “masks” through which God cares for us, but so are the most basic social roles and tasks, such as voting, participating in public institutions, and being a father or mother. These are all God’s callings, all ways of doing God’s work in the world, all ways through which God distributes his gifts to us. Even the humblest farm girl is fulfilling God’s calling. As Luther preached, “God milks the cows through the vocation of the milkmaids.”9
In one of his first sermons at Redeemer, Keller explained it like this:
The glorious teaching of the Bible is you can be a person on an assembly line, you can be just turning a screw, you can be somebody who’s just sweeping a floor—but if you see it as part of the whole complex way God has enabled us to bring the potential out of his creation—then you can do it with joy. Paul was writing to slaves [in Ephesians 6:5–8], and if this theology can work for slaves—if he can say, “Slaves, the menial work you do, you do it for the Lord”—[then you too can] see it as part of everything God made work to be, [and] you can do it with joy.10
Though today we tend to think of vocation and job as synonyms, the former word is far richer. Based on the Latin vocare (“to call”), it means nothing less than a calling—an assignment to serve others—whether you work on one side of the political aisle or in the produce aisle.
And these assignments come ultimately from the sovereign throne of a working God. What could possibly infuse more nobility into an ordinary job? “In Genesis we see God as a gardener, and in the New Testament we see him as a carpenter. No task is too small a vessel to hold the immense dignity of work given by God.”11
Notes:
Tim Keller, “Why Tim Keller Wants You to Stay in That Job You Hate,” interviewed
by Andy Crouch, Christianity Today, April 22, 2013, https:// www .christianity today.com/ (emphasis added). The quote has been lightly edited for clarity. Keller also relates the actor anecdote in “The Dream of the Kingdom,” preached on April 30, 2000, and in a panel discussion at the 2006 Desiring God National Conference. See John Piper, Mark Driscoll, Tim Keller, and JustinTaylor, “A Conversation with the Pastors,” September 29, 2006, https:// www .desiring god .org/.
Timothy Keller, Shaped by the Gospel: Doing Balanced, Gospel-Centered Ministry in Your City (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2016), 34–43, chart on 36. Elsewhere he writes, “Without an understanding of the gospel [story], we will be either naïvely utopian or cynically disillusioned. We will be demonizing something that isn’t bad enough to explain the mess we are in; and we will be idolizing something that isn’t powerful enough to get us out of it. This is, in the end, what all other worldviews do.” Timothy Keller, Every Good Endeavor: Connecting Your Work to God’s Work, with Katherine Leary Alsdorf (New York: Penguin, 2012), 161. He then sketches some biblical implications for a few fields of work: business (164–68), journalism (169–70), higher education (171–73), the arts (173–75), and medicine (175–80).
Keller comments, “The Bible begins talking about work as soon as it begins talking about anything—that is how important and basic it is.” Keller, Every GoodEndeavor, 19.
Keller, Every Good Endeavor, 22.
Keller had little patience for a triumphalist perspective on work: “[We must settle] one sure fact: Nothing will be put perfectly right . . . until the ‘day of Christ’ at the end of history (Phil. 1:6; 3:12). Until then all creation ‘groans’ (Rom. 8:22) and is subject to decay and weakness. So work will be put completely right only when heaven is reunited with earth and we find ourselves in our ‘true country.’ To talk about fully redeeming work is sometimes naïvete, sometimes hubris.” Keller, Every Good Endeavor, 150–51 (emphasis original).
Isaac Watts (1674–1748), “Joy to the World” (1719), Hymnary.org.
Keller,Every Good Endeavor, 58. He also remarks, “While the Greek thinkers saw ordinary work, especially manual labor, as relegating human beings to the animal level, the Bible sees all work as distinguishing human beings from animals and elevating them to a place of dignity. Old Testament scholar Victor Hamilton notes that in surrounding cultures such as Egypt and Mesopotamia, the king or others of royal blood might be called the ‘image of God’; but, he notes, that rarefied term ‘was not applied to the canal digger or to the mason who worked on the ziggurat. . . . [But Genesis 1 uses] royal language to describe simply ‘man.’ In God’s eyes all of mankind is royal. The Bible democratizes the royalistic and exclusivistic concepts of the nations that surrounded Israel.” Keller, Every Good Endeavor, 36. Keller cites V. P. Hamilton, The Book of Genesis: Chapters 1–17 (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1990), 135.
One implication of this, of course, is that we should appreciate many contributions from nonbelievers. Since culture is a complex cocktail of “brilliant truth, marred half-truths, and overt resistance to the truth,” in our workplaces we should expect to see real darkness punctuated by flashes of God’s common grace. Keller, Every Good Endeavor, 198. Moreover, “The doctrine of sin means that believers are never as good as our true worldview should make us. Similarly, the doctrine of grace means that unbelievers are never as messed up as their false worldview should make them. . . . Ultimately, a grasp of the gospel and of biblical teaching on cultural engagement should lead Christians to be the most appreciative of the hands of God behind the work of our colleagues and neighbors.” Keller, Every Good Endeavor, 195, 197. He also suggests, “Christians who understand biblical doctrine ought to be the ones who appreciate the work of non-Christians the most. We know we are saved by grace alone, and therefore we are not [necessarily] better fathers or mothers, better artists and businesspersons, than those who do not believe as we do. Our gospel-trained eyes can see the world ablaze with the glory of God’s work through the people he has created and called—in everything from the simplest actions, such as milking a cow, to the most brilliant artistic or historic achievements.” Keller, Every Good Endeavor, 64.
Keller, Every Good Endeavor, 61. The Luther quote is paraphrased from Martin Luther, Luther’s Works, vol. 21, Sermon on the Mount and the Magnificat, ed. J. Pelikan (St. Louis, MO: Concordia, 1958), 237. According to Psalm 147, God “strengthens the bars of your gates” (147:13) and “makes peace in your borders” (147:14). In other words, he provides safety and security for a city through lawmakers, law enforcement, military personnel, those working in government and politics, and so on.
Tim Keller, “Feeling His Pleasure,” preached on October 22, 1989. Keller clarifies, “Slavery in the Greco-Roman world was not the same as the New World institution that developed in the wake of the African slave trade. Slavery in Paul’s time was not race-based and was seldom lifelong. It was more like what we would call Tim indentured servitude. But for our purposes . . . consider this: If slave owners are told they must not manage workers in pride and through fear, how much more should this be true of employers today? And if slaves are told it is possible to find satisfaction and meaning in their work, how much more should this be true of
workers today?” Keller, Every Good Endeavor, 219 (emphasis original).
Matt Smethurst is lead pastor of River City Baptist Church in Richmond, Virginia. He is the author of several books, including Tim Keller on the Christian Life; Before You Open Your Bible; Before You Share Your Faith; and Deacons. He also cohosts, with Ligon Duncan, The Everyday Pastor podcast from the Gospel Coalition. Matt and his wife, Maghan, have five children.
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