Category: The Christian Life

What Is Sin?

Sinning against God has great consequences. It separates us from relationship with him and incites his righteous, eternal wrath.

March 22, 2025 by: J. Garrett Kell

The Battle with Sin

One catechism defines sin this way: “What is sin? Sin is rejecting or ignoring God in the world he created, not being or doing what he requires in his law.”1 Or as artist Shai Linne says, “What is sin? Sin is the breaking of God’s law plus our condition, which means from birth we all got flaws.”2

Sin is in us and comes out of us. We are born with a sin nature, and even after we become Christians, we still battle with ongoing sin. Sin appears in our affections and our actions, in what we desire and what we do, in what we seek and what we say. It consists in doing what we shouldn’t (sins of commission) and in not doing things we should (sins of omission).

Sin Is Personal (Prov. 51:4)

Sin is also personal. During the Last Supper, Peter assured Jesus that he would die for him (Luke 22:33). Jesus, however, knew that Peter would succumb to temptation and deny him three times. Over the next few hours, Peter did just that. While Jesus was being beaten and wrongly accused, Peter distanced himself from his master, and even said “I do not know him” (Luke 22:57). As soon as the rooster crowed, “the Lord turned and looked at Peter,” causing Peter to recognize his sin against a man he loved and had followed for three years (Luke 22:61). We then read that Peter “went out and wept bitterly” (Matt. 26:75; Luke 22:62).

In other words, sin doesn’t merely break an arbitrary rule. It rejects God, who is personal. It effectively says to him, “I do not love you. I will not follow you. I will not obey you” (see Ps. 78:40; Isa. 43:24; Eph. 4:30). When Jesus looked into Peter’s eyes, he suddenly felt the weight of his betrayal. He had denied the one who had only ever loved him.

Or think of that famous story about King David committing adultery with the wife of one of his soldiers and then arranging the man’s murder. The Lord sent the prophet Nathan to expose David (2 Sam. 12), and David’s subsequent prayer shows how personal sin is. He cries out to God, “Against you, you only, have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight” (Ps. 51:4). Sin is always against God, and it’s always personal.

Sin Is Painful (Prov. 22:5)

It’s also painful. God designed life in this world to be lived in line with his law. This means that the world is “rigged”—rigged to work best by obeying God. Sinning, however, brings painful consequences. In Jesus’s story of the prodigal son, for instance, a younger brother spends all his wealth on prostitutes, parties, and perversion. Maybe he has fun in the beginning, but soon enough the consequences catch up with him, and he finds himself sharing slop with swine (Luke 15:11–32).

I’m not saying that obedience always brings happiness and sin sadness. Yet the Bible teaches again and again that “the way of transgressors is hard” (Prov. 13:15 KJV) and “thorns and snares are in the way of the crooked” (Prov. 22:5). As a pastor, I’ve sat with hundreds of people who compromised with sin and suffered the consequences. As a believer who struggles with my own sin, I’ve compromised countless times to my shame. Sin promises to be sweet, but its aftertaste is always bitter.

Sin promises to be sweet, but its aftertaste is always bitter.

Sin Is Punishable (Rom. 6:23)

Sin is also punishable. My family was driving down a country road recently when one of my children exclaimed, “That’s a lot of tombstones!” As I looked, I saw an entire hillside lined with gravesites.

The picture of all the graves reminded me of God’s warning that sin would bring death. God had said to Adam, “In the day that you eat of [the forbidden tree] you shall surely die” (Gen. 2:17). Or as Paul later explained, “The wages of sin is death” (Rom. 6:23).

But physical death is merely the “first death.” The second death is far worse. The book of Revelation contains a harrowing vision of the day of judgment, harrowing at least for those who do not know Jesus:

Then I saw a great white throne and him who was seated on it. From his presence earth and sky fled away, and no place was found for them. And I saw the dead, great and small, standing before the throne, and books were opened. Then another book was opened, which is the book of life. And the dead were judged by what was written in the books, according to what they had done. . . . Then Death and Hades were thrown into the lake of fire. This is the second death, the lake of fire. And if anyone’s name was not found written in the book of life, he was thrown into the lake of fire. (Rev. 20:11–15)

Sinning against God has great consequences. It separates us from relationship with him and incites his righteous, eternal wrath (Isa. 59:2; 2 Thess. 1:7–9)

Sin Is Pardonable (Isa. 55:7)

Gratefully, sin remains pardonable. Though our sin is great, God’s grace is greater (Rom. 5:20). Punishment is his “strange” work (Isa. 28:21). He doesn’t want to punish. He desires none to perish but for all to “turn, and live” (Ezek. 18:32; cf. 1 Tim. 2:4). God cried out through the prophet Isaiah,

Let the wicked forsake his way, . . .
let him return to the Lord,
that He may have compassion on him, . . .
for he will abundantly pardon. (Isa. 55:7)

In pursuit of this pardon, God loved the world and sent his Son to die for our sins and then rise again so that we could be forgiven (John 3:16). The good news offered to us is that God will not only forgive us if we turn to Christ but also empower us to fight sin (Titus 2:12–13). This means that, if we are trusting in Christ, we don’t have to be dominated by sin any longer. We can walk in freedom and joy (Gal. 5:16–17).

Notes:

  1. The New City Catechism: 52 Questions and Answers for Our Hearts and Minds (Wheaton, IL: Crossway), q. 16 (46–47). Cf. Westminster Shorter Catechism q. 14; Westminster Larger Catechism q. 24; and Benjamin Keach’s Catechism q. 18, in The Philadelphia Confession of Faith Being the London Confession of Faith Adopted by the Baptist Association 1742, with Scripture References and Keach’s Catechism (Sterling, VA: Grace Abounding Ministries, 1977).
  2. Shai Linne, “Atonement Q&A,” on The Atonement (Lamp Mode, 2008).

This article is adapted from How Do I Fight Sin and Temptation? by J. Garrett Kell.

J. Garrett Kell (ThM, Dallas Theological Seminary) is a pastor at Del Ray Baptist Church in Alexandria, Virginia. He is the author of Pure in Heart: Sexual Sin and the Promises of God. He and his wife, Carrie, have seven children.

Related Articles

Listening Might Be the Best Evangelism Tool You’re Not Using

Gospel fluency isn’t just about talking. It’s about listening as well. This requires love, patience, and wisdom. We need to learn to slow down and listen closely to the longings of their hearts.

March 20, 2025 by: Jeff Vanderstelt

Listen and Learn

I recently observed a conversation a few Christians were having with a man who has yet to come to faith in Jesus. It was amazing to me, and saddening, to watch the Christians missing the point of this man’s struggle and questions. It seemed those speaking to him were more concerned about convincing him they were right than about listening to his heart. As a result, he walked away without any good news about Jesus, becoming even more convinced that this “religion” wasn’t for him. It’s not for me either—at least, not what I saw in that conversation.

We can do better. We must do better. We’re talking about people’s souls!

And we’re representing Jesus.

Helping people come to know the love of Jesus is the most important thing there is, and Jesus’s love for us compels us to love people better. If we don’t, the good news that people need gets muffled by our religious pride.

Proverbs 20:5 says, “The purpose in a man’s heart is like deep water, but a man of understanding will draw it out.” We need to become people of understanding—people who seek to understand others before we expect them to understand us and what we believe. We need to learn how to ask more questions and draw out what is deep inside people’s souls. We need to learn to slow down and listen closely to the longings of their hearts. We need to learn their stories. In short, we need to care more about winning people to Jesus than about winning arguments.

Gospel fluency isn’t just about talking. It’s about listening as well. This requires love, patience, and wisdom.

Drawing Out the Heart

Jesus was so good at this.

Whenever I consider how I can grow in being a person of understanding who listens well, I think of Jesus with the Samaritan woman at the well.1

It was high noon, when the sun was at its hottest. There was a reason this woman was getting her water at this time. She chose a time when no one else would be at the well. Nobody went there in the heat of the day. But she probably wanted to avoid running into one of the wives of the men with whom she had been sexually involved. She had had five husbands, and the man she was then involved with was not her husband. However, Jesus didn’t start with where she was wrong. He actually started in a humble posture of receiving from her.

He asked her for water, and she poured out her soul.

I’ve found that starting with a posture of humility, standing in a place of need and having a heart that is willing not only to give answers but also to receive insight, creates a welcoming place for people to open their hearts. The more open we are to listen and learn, the more likely people are to be open as well.

If you look at the story closely, you discover that Jesus continued to make very short, provocative statements that invited more conversation. He was drawing out, little by little, the longing of her soul.

He’s a master at drawing out the heart.

You notice this if you read the Gospels. Jesus regularly said just enough to invite further probing or create intrigue. He also loved to ask questions so that the overflow of the heart (belief) would spill out of a person’s mouth (words).

I’m amazed at how often well-intentioned Christians overwhelm people with a barrage of words. We go on and on about what we believe and what they should believe, assuming we know what others think, believe, or need. I often find that we are giving answers to questions people are not even asking or cramming information into hearts that are longing for love, not just facts.

We fail to listen. We fail to draw out the heart. And we miss opportunities to really love people and share the love of God with them. They also miss out on getting to hear what’s going on in their own hearts. I have found that when people, including myself, are invited to say out loud what they believe, they come to realize something is wrong.

Jesus slows down, draws out the heart, and listens.

Help Us Distribute Bibles to Children in Need

One out of every two children born in the next thirty years will be born in Africa, but many won’t have access to God’s Word. Every $5 you give will provide a Bible for a child in need. Would you partner with us to support the future of the global Church? Learn More.

Talk Less, Listen More

As we are changed by the gospel, we want to share how the gospel has changed us. It’s a great thing to do so. In fact, one of the keys to growing in gospel fluency is to regularly share what Jesus has done or is doing in our lives with others. Our stories are powerful demonstrations of the gospel’s power to save.

However, if we don’t also listen, we tend to share the good news of Jesus in a way that applies primarily to our lives, the way it was good news to us, but fails to address the situations others are facing. We can become proclaimers of the good news while remaining ignorant of the ways in which others need to hear it. This doesn’t negate how good the news of Jesus is at all. However, if we read the rest of the story of Jesus’s encounter with the Samaritan woman, we find that while her testimony created intrigue, the people in the village had to meet Jesus for themselves. It wasn’t enough for her just to share her story. They had to get to Jesus as well.

So she brought them to him.

Our job is to testify to Jesus’s work in our lives while also listening closely to others so we know how to bring the truths of Jesus to bear on the longings of their hearts. We need to bring them to Jesus so he can meet their unique needs and fulfill their personal longings.

In order to do this, we have to slow down, quiet our souls, ask good questions to draw out the hearts of others, and listen.

Our stories are powerful demonstrations of the gospel’s power to save.

Francis Schaeffer said, “If I have only an hour with someone, I will spend the first fifty-five minutes asking them questions and finding out what is troubling their heart and mind, and then in the last five minutes I will share something of the truth.”2

My regular counsel to Christians these days is to spend more time listening than talking if they want to be able to share the gospel of Jesus in a way that meaningfully speaks to the hearts of others.

We were created by God to find our greatest satisfaction and fulfillment in him. Every human is hungry for God. Everyone has eternity written on their hearts, producing a longing for something—someone—better, more significant, and eternal. This is a longing for God (Eccl. 3:11). The cry of every heart— the native tongue of our souls—is for better, not for worse; for the eternal, not for the temporal; for healing, redemption, and restoration. And only Jesus can bring this about.

We all long for Jesus Christ. Everyone is seeking him, even if they don’t know it.

They are looking for something to fulfill their longings and satisfy their thirst.

However, they are looking in the wrong places. They are going to the wrong wells to try to draw soul water. They need to look to Jesus. But they will not come to see how he can quench their thirst if we don’t take the time to listen.

And as we listen, with the help of the Holy Spirit, we can discern the longings of their hearts, the brokenness of their souls, and the emptiness of their spirits. And then, we must be prepared to show how Jesus can meet them at the well with soul-quenching water—himself.

Notes:

  1. This story is from John 4.
  2. Cited in Jerram Barrs, introduction to Francis A. Schaeffer, He Is There and He Is Not Silent, 30th Anniversary Edition (Wheaton, IL: Tyndale House, 2001), xviii.

This article is adapted from Gospel Fluency: Speaking the Truths of Jesus into the Everyday Stuff of Life by Jeff Vanderstelt.

Jeff Vanderstelt is a pastor, speaker, author, and founder and visionary leader of Saturate and the Soma Family of Churches. He serves as a teaching pastor and director of missional communities at Doxa Church in Bellevue, Washington. Additionally, Jeff supports church planting globally through training and as a member of the advisory board of C2C Network. He and his wife, Jayne, have three children. You can connect with Jeff at his website, JeffVanderstelt.com, or on Twitter (@JeffVanderstelt).

Related Articles

10 Key Bible Verses on Evangelism

May 21, 2023

Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you.

Where Is God in a World with So Much Evil?

In this video, Collin Hansen offers encouragement for those who struggle to trust God’s justice and goodness in the face of evil and suffering.

March 18, 2025 by: Collin Hansen

Addressing Doubts about God’s Justice and Goodness in the Face of Evil

When considering the horrific events of the Holocaust, you can’t help but ask yourself the question, “How could God allow such evil?” In this video, Collin Hansen offers encouragement for those who struggle to trust God’s justice and goodness in the face of evil and suffering.

TGC Hard Questions is a series of short booklets that seek to answer common but difficult questions people ask about Christianity. The series serves the church by providing tools that answer people’s deep longings for community, their concerns about biblical ethics, and their doubts about confessional faith.

Collin Hansen’s short and accessible guide answers suffering peoples’ questions about God’s character by exploring the stories of Job, Jesus, and the Jewish people during the horrific events of the Holocaust. Ideal for both skeptics and Christians who want to help others in their pain, this booklet reminds us that God speaks through the cries of his people and offers us the gift of his Son—a suffering servant who makes all things new.

Read an Excerpt

“The problem of evil is the biggest challenge to Christian faith in every generation. Collin Hansen’s short, wise, and thoughtful book is a superb resource for thinking deeply about it and responding with compassion and clarity.”
—Andrew Wilson, Teaching Pastor, King’s Church London

Learn More

Collin Hansen (MDiv, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School) is the vice president for content and editor in chief for the Gospel Coalition and the executive director of the Keller Center for Cultural Apologetics. He hosts the Gospelbound podcast and wrote Timothy Keller: His Spiritual and Intellectual Formation. He is an adjunct professor and cochair of the advisory board at Beeson Divinity School in Birmingham, Alabama. You can follow him on X at @collinhansen.

Related Articles

Is Christianity Good for the World?

Sharon James

January 21, 2025

Some claim that Christianity is oppressive and toxic, but in this video, Dr. Sharon James argues that a biblical worldview is essential for human freedom, flourishing, and fulfillment.

How the Persons of the Trinity Reveal Themselves

Each of the three persons of the Trinity is unique in the way they reveal to us this dimension of infinite depth behind their presence, so we ought to attend to them in different ways.

March 17, 2025 by: Fred Sanders

Eternal Father, Eternal Son, Eternal Spirit

We meet the triune God as he gives himself to us in the history of salvation, as the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Specifically, we meet the Trinity as the incarnate Son, his heavenly Father who loves the world and elects a people, and the Holy Spirit of Pentecost, whom Jesus and the Father poured out on all flesh after the ascension of Christ. We meet them, that is, in the middle of their missions for us and our salvation. We might say that we meet a salvation-history Trinity in the Bible and in our Christian experience. But the persons of the Trinity have a depth of life behind those missions, and that infinite depth is precisely what the actual doctrine of the Trinity points to.

Each of the three persons is unique in the way they reveal to us this dimension of infinite depth behind their presence, so we ought to attend to them in different ways. Perhaps the easiest one to understand is the Son. When Jesus Christ was conceived in the womb of the Virgin Mary and born in Bethlehem, he began his incarnate existence. He became fully and truly human, without ceasing to be fully and truly divine. But he, the person who became incarnate, had already existed before his human birth. He preexisted, in the absolute sense of the term. This is not true of any other human beginning, and it is the chief difference between Jesus and the rest of the human family (more foundational than his virgin birth or his sinlessness). All other humans come into existence from a state of nonexistence, and can be said to preexist only in the improper sense that in the hearts of their parents, or in the providence of God, plans and provisions have been made for them. But when it comes to the Son of God, we have a case of actual preexistence. It is not a paradox, for we do not say that Jesus preexists his own existence; we only say that the Son preexists his incarnation. The pre- in the doctrine of the preexistence of Christ points backward from his taking on human nature; that is the event which this person exists pre-.

Previous to the Word becoming flesh (John 1:14) by taking on human nature, the person who is Jesus Christ already existed. Admittedly, it is odd to call this person “Jesus Christ” before his birth in Bethlehem and his receiving a human name (Jesus) and title (Christ). You could say, if you wanted to be very precise, that he may have existed, but he wasn’t Jesus Christ yet. That is a distinction worth making. But there are several reasons not to enforce such scrupulosity in the way we talk about him. First, we know this person, and we have to call him something. “Unincarnate Word” is just not warm enough to call to mind all that we know about him based on his time among us. Second, there is biblical warrant. On those rare occasions when the Bible explicitly points back to the eternal depth behind the incarnation, it usually anchors its statements in the concrete name of Jesus. When Paul, for example, talks about the eternal Son and calls him Christ Jesus (“Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God . . .” Phil. 2:5–6), we should not rush to correct him: “Oh, Paul, the pre-incarnate one was not yet Jesus or Christ.” Paul may be using the kind of shorthand we use when we say, “The sixteenth president of the United States was born in this cabin.” At the time he was born, of course, he wasn’t the sixteenth president of the US, and he may not yet have been named Abraham; he was an unnamed, mewling infant. And before Abe Lincoln was conceived, he was nothing, unless you want to count as preexistence such things as a twinkle in his father’s eye, or the plan for Lincoln in the foreknowing mind of God. But unlike Abe Lincoln and everybody else, Jesus Christ was already somebody before he was the newborn infant of the first Christmas.

We should take note of the reason that all created analogies break down at one crucial point in understanding the doctrine of Christ’s preexistence. When we say that Jesus Christ existed “pre” his incarnation, we do not mean he preceded it by any finite amount of time. The Son of God preexisted his incarnation the way the Creator preexisted creation: infinitely. Preexistence may be easy to say, but that one little syllable, pre-, is a quantum leap from Here to There, from time to eternity. Before you have finished saying that syllable, you have left behind everything measurable and manageable. Following the biblical argument that leads to this affirmation is one thing, but once you have followed the trail to the place where you confess, with the Christian church of all ages, the preexistence of Christ, you have framed a thought that catapults you into the being of God. Jesus Christ preexisted his incarnation eternally, as God.

But who was this person before he took on the nature of humanity, the name of Jesus, and the title of Christ? He was the Son of God. When the biblical authors say that God sent his Son into the world (John 20:21; Gal. 4:4; 1 John 4:14), gave his Son for the world’s salvation (John 3:16; 1 John 4:10), or spoke definitively through his Son (Heb. 1:1), they are presupposing that the Son was already in existence as the Son, a person present with God the Father from eternity. He did not become the Son when he became incarnate; God did not so love the world that he gave somebody who became his Son in the act of being given. God, already having a Son, sent him into the world to become incarnate and to be a propitiation for our sins. So when the apostles encountered Jesus Christ, they were encountering “that which was from the beginning . . . the eternal life, which was with the Father and was made manifest to us.” That is why they could claim to have “fellowship . . . with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ” (1 John 1:1–4).1

Jesus Christ, then, is eternally the Son of God; or, he is the eternal Son, the second person of the Trinity. He is God the Son, in the first place, for Trinitarian reasons. He is called Son because he is the Son of the Father from all eternity. When he becomes incarnate, he becomes the son of Mary, the promised son of David, the Messiah. But there was never a time when he became the Son of God; that is who he eternally and essentially is. For us and our salvation, the eternal Son became the incarnate Son.

Having paid close attention to how the eternal Son made himself known, we can also see how, in the same central event of salvation history, the first person of the Trinity revealed the eternal depth behind his personhood. The first person of the Trinity is God the Father. God is called the Father, in the first place, for Trinitarian reasons. He is the Father because he is Father of the Son, from eternity, at home in the happy land of the Trinity. He did not become the Father at Christmas, or at any point in human history, or in any pretemporal history. He did not undergo any transformation from being not-the-Father to being the Father. There was never a time when he existed as a solitary God without his Son, so he was always God the Father. This is a straightforward implication of confessing the deity of Christ. If Jesus is God the Son, God must always have included Son and Father.

Jesus Christ preexisted his incarnation eternally, as God.

Usually when we think about God the Father, we are tempted to consider his fatherhood as being grounded in something else besides this core Trinitarian basis. We tend to associate his fatherhood with the things he has freely chosen to do in salvation history. For example, God the Father predestined the chosen ones to be adopted as sons (Eph. 1:5), an act in which he determined himself to become the adoptive Father of the elect. But great as this saving, adoptive fatherhood is, it belongs in the sphere of something God does, not something that determines who he is. He would have been God the Father if he had never adopted created sons and daughters, because he would have been God the Father of God the Son. It is understandable that when we think of God the Father, our minds and hearts leap first to this gracious adoptive fatherhood. But there is something behind that adoptive fatherhood, and when we ask about the essential grounding of God’s fatherhood, we must look further into the being of God, where we find a foundation of fatherhood that does not presuppose us. It would be a mistake to make the fatherhood of God the Father depend on human sons and daughters: he was the Father before we got here.

An even bigger mistake, however, is the more common one of thinking that the main reason God is “the Father” is that he has created, or “fathered,” the world. In the few places where the Bible does talk about God as the parent of all creation, or the Father of all humanity, it tends to use this language in a metaphorical or poetic way (see Job 38:28; Acts 17:28). The main idea in Scripture is not that every creature already is a child of God the Father but that those who receive Jesus are given the right to become sons of God (John 1:12) on the basis of the work of Jesus, the essential Son of God. There was a school of thought in nineteenthcentury liberal theology that proclaimed the central idea of Christianity to be “the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man.”2 Turned into a system, this idea of universal fatherhood was theologically disastrous. Classic FOGBOM (Fatherhood Of God, Brotherhood Of Man) liberalism made the gospel seem like a description of a general state of affairs rather than an announcement of what God has done in Christ; it was never able to account for sin or recognize the need for a costly redemption; and it quickly lost its grip on the doctrine of the Trinity.

But it is not only nineteenth-century liberals who made the mistake of thinking first of creation when they hear God called “Father.” It is an easy mistake to make if we let our minds be guided by a general symbolism of fatherhood instead of by the main lines of biblical teaching. The generalized, cosmic idea of fatherhood is probably one of the reasons many people visualize God as an old, white-haired, bearded man. God the cosmic father is always devolving into God the cosmic grandpa in the popular mind. Scripture, by contrast, points to something very specific and much less sentimental when it calls God “the Father.” It points to the fact that within the life of the one God, there is an eternal relationship of fatherhood and sonship. The first person is Father for Trinitarian reasons first of all. He is the Father of the Son by definition. That is who he is. Consequent to that is what he does: he acts to become the Father of those whom he predestined for adoption as sons (Eph. 1:5). Finally, in an extended or poetic sense, it may sometimes be appropriate to depict God’s general love and care for all his creatures by using a parenting metaphor. But to start with cosmic fatherhood is exactly backwards. God did not have the world as his son; he so loved the world that he gave his only Son (John 3:16).

The same logic that we have seen with the Father and the Son applies also to the Holy Spirit: he is who he is for Trinitarian reasons, as the eternal third person of the Trinity. Based on that Trinitarian identity in which he exists together with the Father and the Son, he freely steps into the history of salvation and does what he does. The work of the Spirit is closely linked to that of the Son at every point. It is the Spirit who brings about the Son’s incarnation by causing his conception in the womb of the virgin. It is the Spirit who anoints and empowers the Son in his messianic mission. And the Spirit is finally, at Pentecost, poured out on all flesh only when the Son’s work is completed. The Spirit’s work is to indwell believers, applying the work of Christ directly and personally to them. He is who he is as the eternal Spirit, and he does what he does in salvation history as the Spirit of Pentecost.

Because the eternal Son became the incarnate Son, we had much to say about his sonship. Tracing the line back from his appearance in Bethlehem is how we learned anything about the Trinity at all, for this is the central event in which God revealed that he had a Son. We had relatively less to say about the Father, and most of it was directly connected with the Son: the Father is the person of the Trinity who is obviously at the other end of the relationship that makes the Son the Son. But we have least of all to say about the eternal divine person who is the Holy Spirit, not because he is any less God, or any less a person, or any less related to the other persons of the Trinity. He is all those things, just as fully as the Father and the Son are. But his self-revelation is less direct than the Son’s, and his relationship to the other persons is not as immediately evident as the Son’s and Father’s, whose mutual relationship is built into their very names. We should avoid the urge to fabricate more concrete things than have actually been revealed about the Spirit or to pretend that our knowledge of the Spirit’s corner of the Trinitarian triangle is as intricately detailed and elaborated as the Son’s.

Notes:

  1. For a brief, accessible explanation of eternal sonship and a refutation of alternative views, see John MacArthur, “Reexamining the Eternal Sonship of Christ,” accessed October 3, 2016, http:// www.gty.org/Resources/Articles/593.
  2. The most influential statement of the case for “the fatherhood of God and the infinite value of the human soul” was by Adolf von Harnack, What Is Christianity? (New York: Putnam’s, 1902). G. E. Ladd refutes the classic liberal case in his “God the Father” article in the International Standard Bible Encyclopedia, E–J, ed. Geoffrey Bromiley (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1982), 511.

This article is adapted from The Deep Things of God: How the Trinity Changes Everything by Fred Sanders.

Fred Sanders (PhD, Graduate Theological Union) is professor of theology at the Torrey Honors College at Biola University. Sanders is the author of The Deep Things of God and blogs at fredfredfred.com.

Related Articles

Extend Hospitality Beyond Your Church

While our hospitality should start in our local churches, it shouldn’t stop there. In addition to welcoming one another, we should welcome unbelievers, as well as needy saints.

March 16, 2025 by: Keri Folmar

Love of Strangers

The New Testament word translated as hospitality is literally “love of strangers.” We know we’re not wrong in applying the term to welcoming those in our churches because each of the hospitality commands is nestled within passages about brotherly love. At the same time, while our hospitality should start in our local churches, it shouldn’t stop there. In addition to welcoming one another, we should welcome unbelievers, as well as needy saints.

Once when Jesus dined in the house of a Pharisee, he said to his host:
When you give a dinner or a banquet, do not invite your friends or your brothers or your relatives or rich neighbors, lest they also invite you in return and you be repaid. But when you give a feast, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind, and you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you. For you will be repaid at the resurrection of the just. (Luke 14:12–14)

The world schemes and calculates, “What can I get out of this in this life?” But Christians are strategically storing up treasure in heaven. Imagine the meals and accommodation there!

We bonded with our former next-door neighbors because they had kids the same age as ours and a friendly labrador who liked to play with our golden retriever. They had lived in Dubai for a long time and were happy to join us for dinner and attend our Christmas carol parties, but they never showed interest in the gospel.

Nevertheless, when a Muslim friend of theirs wanted a Bible, they came to us. As a result, I was able to lead my neighbor and her Muslim friend in a Bible study through the Gospel of Mark. Eventually both started coming to church.

How well do you know your neighbors? I confess, my husband and I have gone through seasons of being more or less involved with our neighbors—often realizing that we had wrongly become too “busy” to reach out. But fellow Christian, make time to invite your unbelieving neighbors into your life for the sake of the gospel.

Remember, you don’t have to go it alone. Are there other church members in your neighborhood with whom you can partner? For instance, I know several women who rotate hosting neighbors for dessert. They use “get to know you” questions aimed at deepening their conversations and have found that many neighborhood women are lonely and in need of friends. Through rotating dessert nights, they have ample opportunity to share the best news in the world with their neighbors.

Thank God that Jesus extends his welcome beyond those of worldly repute—even to the likes of you and me!

Do you have neighbors, coworkers, friends from school, or other relationships you can invest in for kingdom purposes?

And what about the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind? Is there a prison you can visit? A retirement home? A crisis pregnancy center? Is someone in the hospital? Can you invite someone into your home who cannot return the favor? Jesus welcomes those with nothing to give, and so it should also be with us. Thank God that Jesus extends his welcome beyond those of worldly repute—even to the likes of you and me!

Another way of extending hospitality beyond your church is by opening your home to missionaries or traveling saints. Living in Dubai, we’ve had this kind of welcome offered to us numerous times when we’ve traveled back to the United States. We’ve been shown hospitality by longtime friends in Austin, new friends in Williamsburg, a single pastor who bought a big home in Texas to house missionaries on furlough, and other dear saints who have sacrificed their time and space to make us feel welcome. We’ve even had a family give us their car to drive for months at a time. These saints remind me of Gaius whom John commends in 3 John 5–6:

Beloved, it is a faithful thing you do in all your efforts for these brothers, strangers as they are, who testified to your love before the church. You will do well to send them on their journey in a manner worthy of God.

Gospel-workers depend on the hospitality of the saints.

The book of Acts is a record of hospitality extended in the early church. People like Jason, Priscilla, and Aquila risked their necks to show hospitality to those who were preaching the gospel. Hospitality toward gospel-workers is all over Paul’s epistles. He expects hospitality for himself from both churches and individuals (Rom. 15:24, 32; Philem. 22). He asks the churches in Rome to show hospitality to Phoebe, writing, “Welcome her in the Lord in a way worthy of the saints, and help her in whatever she may need from you” (Rom. 16:2). He asks the Colossians to welcome Mark and Titus and to help Zenus and Apollos as they travel through Crete, instructing, “See that they lack nothing” (Titus 3:13).

Housing and supporting traveling missionaries and gospel-workers is a privilege— one that is mutually beneficial. Hearing about what’s happening in other parts of the world makes us thankful for our access to Bibles and fellow believers, and it spurs us on to pray for those who haven’t yet heard the gospel. One day, we’ll worship God face-to-face with the people we’ve prayed for!

Do you have a spare room or an empty basement? Use them to bless missionaries you know or that your church supports. Who knows? The Lord may just use one visiting missionary to get you overseas for gospel work too.

As God has welcomed us, we have the responsibility and privilege to extend our welcome to others beyond our local church.

This article is adapted from How Can I Grow in Hospitality? by Keri Folmar.

Keri Folmar is a member of the Evangelical Christian Church of Dubai, where her husband is the senior pastor. She has three adult children and is the author of The Good Portion: Scripture and the Delighting in the Word Bible study series.

Related Articles

How to Respect the Dignity of Loved Ones with Dementia

God has made us social people; we thrive in the context of relationships. So do many of those with dementia, who are often desperate for human companionship and an escape from loneliness.

March 15, 2025 by: John Dunlop, MD

Give the Gift of Your Time

God has made us social people; we thrive in the context of relationships. So do many of those with dementia, who are often desperate for human companionship and an escape from loneliness. All too often, they are ignored by others, including those they love. Their loneliness is exacerbated by their illness, for they often quickly forget when someone has spent time with them. I well remember a time when my mother-in-law told my wife that I no longer loved her because I never came to see her. Based on the facts as she viewed them, her conclusion was valid. But the truth was that I had visited her daily, and she had forgotten. Though Mother would forget my visits, the time was not wasted because she enjoyed them at the time.

Contrary to what we might think, the gift of presence is perhaps most significant in the advanced stages of dementia. It is not infrequent at that time for loved ones to feel that their visits do not count for anything. They assume that they won’t be recognized or their visit remembered, which may be precisely the wrong conclusion. Those with advanced dementia are often like a three-monthold baby. She will not say, “Mommy, I love you, and I’m so glad you are here,” but she is conscious of her mother’s presence, allowing her to feel comfortable and secure. Of course, adults with dementia are not children and should never be treated as if they are.

Focus on the Person

When dealing with dementia patients, it is easy to forget that they are unique people with needs, abilities, and potential. We have seen that they still have feelings and need human relationships. We must never see them as a problem to fix. I learned a lot from Elizabeth, a patient I saw several years ago. She came to the office with her sister, Frances. Immediately Frances told me that Elizabeth had wandered out at night, and the police had found her and taken her home. Frances was in tears when she related the incident, fearful that something worse might happen. Elizabeth herself sat there sulking and rather indignantly tried to explain that she had gotten hungry and wanted to go out to get something to eat. Then she said, “But no one listens to me! Aren’t I important too?” I was taken aback and ashamed, recognizing that though Frances was telling the truth, Elizabeth deserved to be involved in the discussion, and out of respect for her dignity I should have interrupted Frances and asked Elizabeth what her concerns were at the start of the visit.

All too often, the needs and feelings of people with dementia are discounted. It happens within families as well as in the medical community. How often have I heard remarks like this one: “Mr. Jones was complaining of a headache this afternoon, but he is demented, so who knows what he really feels?” Not only is that bad medicine; it also denies Mr. Jones’s value. It focuses on his disease but loses sight of him. Mr. Jones’s description of his pain may have been inaccurate, but it should not have been discounted.

Learn How to Communicate

Recognizing people’s dignity requires us to aspire to understand what they intend and, as much as possible, assure that they understand us. As we noted earlier, effective communication may require much patience from both speaker and listener. When those with dementia have trouble choosing the right word, they might appreciate a suggestion; at other times, they might find that insulting. A great deal of sensitivity is required in our efforts to respect their dignity.

In the later stages of dementia, limited cognition may curtail all verbal communication. At that point various odd behaviors may, in fact, be efforts at communication. Those seeking to understand a specific behavior must be willing to wrestle with what the behavior communicates. Spitting out food might be a way of saying, “I really don’t like what you gave me. Could you feed me something else?” Undressing in public may mean, “I want to use the toilet,” or “I am too hot.” Wandering may mean, “I’m bored and looking for something to do.” I hear patients with dementia repeatedly say, “Please let me go home,” which frequently means, “Can’t I go back to a world where I know and understand what’s going on?”

At such times, we can articulate what we think they mean and ask them if we are right. They may be able to answer us. If they spit out food, we can ask if they would rather eat something else. At times they will not be able to respond appropriately. If they are crying out, and we suspect they are trying to tell us about a particular pain, we can ask if they are hurting and, if so, to point to where it hurts. If we fail to recognize that offensive behaviors might actually be efforts at communication, we might get angry. But if we try to correctly interpret their efforts to communicate, we are respecting their dignity.

Effective communication requires not only trying to understand dementia patients but also enabling the patients to understand us. It may help to speak slowly, using short sentences and simple vocabulary and introducing only one thought at a time. Make sure patients have their hearing aids in and glasses on so they can read your lips. Face them when speaking and repeat your words. It may help to use gestures and body language to make sure you get your message across.

Jesus entered our world so that he could effectively serve us. So, too, we need to enter the world of those who suffer from dementia to effectively serve and respond to them.

Respect Their Autonomy

In earlier stages of dementia, patients are quite capable of making many decisions on their own, and when this is the case their wishes should be followed. As dementia progresses they may still be capable of choosing between a few options but be unable to make wise decisions when faced with more complex issues. So, for example, if you go out for ice cream, offer them a choice between only their two favorite flavors; it is best not to list all the flavors. As decisions become more complex and the implications of those decisions weightier, it is necessary to assess whether patients have the capacity to understand the intricacies of a decision before asking them to make it. A patient quite capable of making a decision about ice cream may not be able to understand the issues involved in deciding to have open-heart surgery. Still, as much as possible, the more we allow the patient to feel they have significant control over their choices, the more we show respect for their inherent dignity.

Respecting autonomy is not always easy. All too often I have seen conflict between an individual with mild to moderate dementia whose primary value is independence, and his family who above everything else desires his safety. I remember Edwardo, who, in the context of a moderate dementia, refused to accept any help from his loving sister and brother-in-law. He insisted on living independently, cooking his own meals, and caring for his apartment. As a result, he lived in filth and became malnourished, and his health rapidly declined. At least his independence did no harm to anyone else. It was extremely troubling not only for his family but also for me, his doctor, to allow him to live that way. Knowing he would be miserable in any other situation, we let him continue till a crisis occurred that required nursing-home care.

Protect Their Dignity

Preserving autonomy as a means of respecting dignity is important, but it is not the only thing to consider. At times we have to protect people with dementia from making mistakes that would discredit their dignity and their reputation. This is necessary because dementia often causes poor judgment, illogical thinking, and lack of inhibition that prevent them from recognizing they have any problem at all. This may be particularly true in frontotemporal degeneration, the form of dementia that Nick and Suzanne had to struggle with. It was complicated because Nick could hold a reasonably decent conversation, and his memory was pretty good.

On first meeting him, no one would guess that he had dementia. Nevertheless, his social skills and judgment were profoundly affected, and his ability to take on a task and get it done (executive function) was very limited. Most distressingly, he lacked the insight to recognize that anything was wrong. Nick insisted that he was capable of continuing in his profession in which many depended on him for their health and livelihood. Everyone but Nick recognized that he was incapable of doing his job. When confronted with his failures, he became upset and angry. Suzanne did not want to embarrass Nick by sharing his diagnosis with his friends and employers. At the same time something had to be done, or others would be hurt and his good reputation damaged. Suzanne finally had to intervene, working behind his back, and she arranged to have Nick relieved of his responsibilities. In this case, respect for autonomy and dignity had to be trumped by the need to protect his good reputation and keep him from hurting others, and in so doing, God was honored.

Driving poses a similar challenge. Allowing those unfit to continue to drive will not uphold their dignity, and it puts others at risk.

Enter Their World

People with more advanced dementia often live in their own little world. This makes it critical for those who relate to them to seek to understand what their world is like. This is intriguingly Christlike, as Jesus took on “the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself” (Phil. 2:7–8). Jesus entered our world so that he could effectively serve us. So, too, we need to enter the world of those who suffer from dementia to effectively serve and respond to them.

Early in the disease, practicing what is termed “reality orientation” can be an effective way to respond to the confusion. When my mom started to think I was someone else, I would gently remind her, “No, Mom, I’m your son, John.” Then every time I saw her, I announced myself, saying, “Hi, Mom, it’s John.” She responded to that for a while, but as her disease progressed, reality orientation was no longer helpful. When later she was convinced I was my dad, my best efforts to tell her otherwise only frustrated her, and she became convinced I was trying to play a trick. That was the time to practice “validation,” to enter her world and go along with her thinking. So I responded by telling her how much I loved her and reminiscing about some of the great family times we had in the past. I didn’t lie to her, but neither did I correct her, much like entering a child’s imaginary world. I remember practicing validation when our eldest son was three. For several weeks he decided he was a frog. Whatever he was eating, he said it was mosquitos. At bedtime he would lie down on his “lily pad,” croak, and say, “Ribbit, ribbit,” and then go off to sleep. It was great fun, and we never felt obligated to practice “reality orientation” by insisting he wasn’t a frog.

There are a number of practical ways in which we can respect dignity by entering the world of people with dementia. Here are a few examples:

  1. Get to know their past history, if you are not already familiar with it. Talk to them about stories from their past to allow them to enjoy the memories they still have. It may help to compile a picture book and have them explain the pictures in it.

  2. Share some funny stories. They may not understand them, but if you laugh, they may enjoy laughing along with you.

  3. Learn what they prefer to be called and use that when speaking with them. It may be the nickname they had as a child.

  4. Learn their likes and dislikes from earlier in their lives. You might take them to places they used to enjoy and serve them the comfort foods they once relished. Their forgetfulness may enable you to do this repeatedly. If they used to love mac and cheese, they may be fine eating it every day.

  5. Play the music and sing the songs they used to love.

  6. Slow down to get into their world. Life for those with dementia moves slowly. Anything you do together will take more time, as it may upset them or even lead to a meltdown if they feel rushed.

  7. Respect the constrictions of dementia. As the disease progresses, patients will be less interested in the past and future and more focused on the present. They will be less interested in news of the world outside and may not want to leave the comfort of their home or room. What is going on in the lives of other people may not be important to them; eventually, however, they will care only about how they feel in the here and now. To respect their dignity, those around them must learn to enjoy the present moment with them. At times, being touched and held may be all they want. Recognize that caregivers’ need for activity may be far greater than theirs.

  8. Respect their resistance to change. Establish routines they are comfortable with. Having meals at the same time and going to bed and getting up on a regular schedule are usually best. The world they live in does not require much variety.

  9. If they perceive that you did something wrong and have become upset by it, accept that their understanding of what happened may be totally different from yours. Do not make excuses but apologize profusely. That will affirm them, avoid arguments, and allow them to feel better.

This article is adapted from Finding Grace in the Face of Dementia by John Dunlop, MD.

John Dunlop (MD, Johns Hopkins University) practiced geriatric medicine for thirty-eight years and taught in the bioethics program at Trinity International University. He now lives in New Haven, Connecticut, where he taught at the Yale School of Medicine. Dunlop is the author of Finishing Well to the Glory of God; Wellness for the Glory of God; and Finding Grace in the Face of Dementia.

Related Articles

How to Pray about Aging

Susan Hunt

January 09, 2021

In God’s sweet providence, I began studying Psalm 90 about a year before my eightieth birthday, asking the Lord to teach me how to glorify him in old age.

The Biggest Challenge the Church Faces Today Is to Think Differently than the World

The greatest challenge that the church faces today to avoid thinking like the world is the same as the greatest challenge that the church always faces to avoid thinking like the world.

March 14, 2025 by: D. A. Carson

Same Old Challenge

The greatest challenge that the church faces today to avoid thinking like the world is the same as the greatest challenge that the church always faces to avoid thinking like the world. Now, one can specify peculiar temptations today that have not been dominant in another time or culture.

For example, if I’m speaking at a university mission today in the Western world, somewhere along the line in the Q and A that follows, people are going to say, “Well, that’s just your view of truth. People have a different view of truth.” The truth question, and the subjectivity of human claims, and knowledge attributions, and so on will always come up in the discussion.

But if I’m speaking at a university in the Middle East, nobody asks the question, “Yeah, but what is truth?” They may have some disagreements about what truth is and where it’s hidden and what it says, but very few people think there’s no such certainty as something called truth. If you’re in a part of the world where what the truth is is disputed, that doesn’t mean that you’re necessarily in the same part of the world arguing about whether truth exists.

Christians in every generation, including ours, are responsible for getting a firm grasp of what the gospel is, as taught by Scripture.

The church is constantly faced with one form or another of denial of the truth, or a modification of the truth, or a re-slanting or re-shaping of the truth. So in that sense, there’s nothing new when that happens today. There are some forms of such debates that have novel features to them. But as in Paul’s day, as in Jesus’s day, so in our day. People think that the most important thing about the Bible or the most important emphasis in the Scripture is such and such, and there will always be temptations to steer away from the centrality of the gospel—deeply, richly, and biblically defined. In that sense, there’s nothing new.

The particular element that’s being questioned will vary from culture to culture from time to time. But the danger of skirting the truth, ducking the truth, domesticating the truth, being bored with the truth, or confusing the truth with something that sounds much like it, that sort of phenomenon keeps coming back and back and back and back. So Christians in every generation, including ours, are responsible for getting such a firm grasp of what the gospel is, as taught by Scripture, and such a firm grasp of Scripture itself that at the end of the day, they’re less likely to be snookered by popular add-ons or popular adjuncts or the like.

D. A. Carson is the author of The Gospel and the Modern World: A Theological Vision for the Church.

D. A. Carson (PhD, Cambridge University) is Emeritus Professor of New Testament at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. He is a cofounder and theologian-at-large of the Gospel Coalition and has written and edited nearly two hundred books. He and his wife, Joy, have two children and live in the north suburbs of Chicago.

Related Articles

Is Christianity Good for the World?

Sharon James

January 21, 2025

Some claim that Christianity is oppressive and toxic, but in this video, Dr. Sharon James argues that a biblical worldview is essential for human freedom, flourishing, and fulfillment.

Do the Psalms Contain Self-Righteous Boasting? (Psalms 7, 17, and 26)

A number of psalms include professions of innocence, and these professions are not casual but prominent in the songs. Some have taken the claims of innocence here as a kind of self-righteous boasting, but this is a mistake.

March 14, 2025 by: C. John Collins

This article is part of the Tough Passages series.

Listen to the Passages

The Apparently “Self-Righteous” Passages in Psalms

A number of psalms include professions of innocence, and these professions are not casual but prominent in the songs. The allegedly innocent party is the particular worshiper (Psalms 7; 17; 26), the king (Psalm 18), and the whole community (Psalm 44). These passages can strike the reader as silly (“I am a victim of circumstance!”), as self-deceiving (contrary to Prov. 20:9; Eccles. 7:20, 29), as portraying an unattainable level of perfection, or as something more sinister—a kind of repulsive bombast and self-promotion (e.g., Luke 18:9–14).1

A better approach is to begin with the meaning of such words as “righteous” in the Psalter. When applied to members of Israel, the terms “righteous” and “righteousness” can be used in several ways.2 First, the terms can be applied to the whole people, who have the covenantal revelation of the righteous Creator (Hab. 1:13), as opposed to the Gentiles, who do not. Second, it can be applied to those members of the people who embrace the covenant from the heart, who have sincere faith and seek to please the Lord in their conduct and character (Deut. 6:25; 24:13; Isa. 1:21, 26; 5:7; Hab. 2:4; Zeph. 2:3; Mal. 3:3). This second usage appears often in the Psalms (e.g., Pss. 7:8; 37:16–17), which also make clear that these “righteous” are people who readily confess their sins (Ps. 32:11). A third usage is for persons among the faithful who are especially noteworthy for their healthy role in the community and are therefore worthy of honor and imitation (a good king, Ps. 18:20, 24; ordinary folk, Pss. 37:30; 112:3–4, 6, 9). And finally, the words can be applied to the innocent party in a dispute (e.g., Gen. 38:26; 44:16 [“clear” = “make righteous”]; Ex. 23:7; Deut. 25:1) and hardly claims moral perfection.

We can also find the complementary phenomenon with negative terms, such as “wicked,” “sinner,” and “fool.” These words can denote those who are not God’s people, the unfaithful within Israel, or those whose impiety leads to distinctively evil behavior.

We discern which sense is present in a given text by way of the contrasts in view. As C. S. Lewis put it, “The best clue is to ask oneself in each instance what is the implied opposite.”3 Further, different psalms focus on different oppositions. For example, some of these are individual laments, well suited for a worshiping congregation with a member under threat from “enemies” using false accusations to harm the faithful person (Psalms 7; 17; 26). In these cases “we need therefore by no means assume that the Psalmists are deceived or lying when they assert that, as against their particular enemies at some particular moment, they are completely in the right.”4 To use these psalms in such instances allows the congregation to rally around its unjustly accused brethren and also reinforces its commitment to love the virtues and hate the vices depicted in these texts and to honor those who display these virtues.

Psalm 18, by contrast, is especially about the ideal for the Davidic kingship. A congregation could use it to foster the community’s shared yearning that its king would embody these ideals, which would lead to prayer that the current king would indeed embody them. Christians profess that Jesus, as the ultimate heir of David, does in fact embody the ideals and is therefore worthy of admiration and imitation (John 13:15–16; 1 Cor. 11:1; Eph. 5:1; 1 Thess. 1:6; Phil. 2:5).

It bears repeating: to use these psalms well requires careful and bold pastoral leadership. Self-identification as an innocent sufferer is neither healthy nor invited!

Psalm 7

O Lord my God, if I have done this,
   if there is wrong in my hands,
if I have repaid my friend with evil
   or plundered my enemy without cause,
let the enemy pursue my soul and overtake it,
   and let him trample my life to the ground
   and lay my glory in the dust. (Ps. 7:3–5)

Psalm 7 is an individual lament from David. The title refers to an otherwise unknown incident in the life of David on which a man of Benjamin (the tribe of Saul) said some “words”; from the content of the psalm we may infer that these words were slanderous. Hence the situation shows us how to understand the claims of innocence here (Ps. 7:3–4, 8): the innocence is relative to the accusations being made, rather than absolute. Hence this psalm provides a vehicle by which people may call to God for help when they are unfairly criticized or persecuted.

The first movement of the psalm professes the singer’s innocence: the person singing this in good faith claims not to have betrayed the trust that should bind the people of God together.

Observe how the general expression in Psalm 7:3 (“wrong in my hands”) finds closer clarification in verse 4 (“repaid my friend with evil,” “plundered my enemy without cause”). That is, the specific wrongdoing in view concerns the social connections between the fellow members of God’s people. The Sinai covenant established Israel as (ideally, anyhow) God’s new humanity, whose relationships are to show forth true humanness for all the Gentiles to see. Hence often in both the Psalms and the Prophets the sins denounced are “social,” for the ethic assumed throughout the Bible prizes a peaceful and loving community.

This psalm is suited only for those cases in which the danger stems from the malice of the persecutors, not from the wrongdoing of the person in trouble. Thus verse 5 offers a prayer of self-malediction: “If I am guilty of the things of which I am accused, then let my enemy succeed.” A person who cannot make the claim of verses 3–4 in good faith ought not sing this! Hence this serves as an implicit warning that those who commit the evils listed here ought, rather than using this psalm to ask for God’s help, to begin with confession of sin (i.e., a different song, such as Psalm 6).

Daily Devotional Email signup

We All Need Reminders!

In the busyness of life it’s all too easy to forget who God is, what he has done for us, and who we are because of him. Crossway wants to help! Sign up today to receive concise Scripture-filled, gospel-saturated reminders that will encourage you and strengthen your walk with Jesus.

Psalm 17

You have tried my heart, you have visited me by night,
   you have tested me, and you will find nothing;
   I have purposed that my mouth will not transgress.
With regard to the works of man, by the word of your lips
   I have avoided the ways of the violent.
My steps have held fast to your paths;
   my feet have not slipped. (Ps. 17:3-5)

Like Psalm 7, this psalm provides a prayer for supporting members of the faithful who face persecution in the form of false accusations.

Professions of innocence such as we find here, and in Psalms 7; 17; 26, can trouble sensitive Christians. C. S. Lewis wisely observes an important distinction “between the conviction that one is in the right [about the particular issue of the accusations] and the conviction that one is ‘righteous.’”5 Lewis, however, was not sure that the psalmists themselves always preserve this distinction. I certainly support Lewis’s spiritual concern to protect Christians against self-righteousness, but I do not think he has seen the particular psalms in the proper light. First, Lewis himself rightly saw that the Psalms are songs for worship,6 but he did not consistently apply that observation in his discussions. Since they are songs, they are used under the pastoral guidance of the personnel who choose them, each one in the spiritual context of all the others.

A pastorally wise form of prayer for such circumstances must both caution the faithful to be sure they really are innocent and also warn the unfaithful of what awaits them unless they repent — and this song does just that. Further, in professing innocence it reinforces the feelings of approval for the kind of social relationships for which God called Israel from the start.

Indeed, by the way this psalm closes, it equips the faithful to trust God in their trials, ready to await their own eternal reward for their full and final vindication (and hence it strengthens them to resist the temptation to forfeit that vindication by turning to unfaithfulness).

Psalm 26

I do not sit with men of falsehood,
   nor do I consort with hypocrites.
I hate the assembly of evildoers,
   and I will not sit with the wicked.
I wash my hands in innocence
   and go around your altar, O LORD,
proclaiming thanksgiving aloud,
   and telling all your wondrous deeds.
O LORD, I love the habitation of your house
   and the place where your glory dwells. (Ps. 26:4–8)

Some have taken the claims of innocence here as a kind of self-righteous boasting, but, as already argued on Psalm 7 and Psalm 17, this is a mistake. First, the mention of God’s steadfast love and faithfulness (Ps. 26:3), a clear echo of Exodus 34:6, shows that divine grace is the foundation for holy living. Second, the references to worship in God’s house (Ps. 26:6–8) indicate that the covenantal means of grace, with their focus on atonement and forgiveness, are in view. And third, singing this psalm serves to enable worshipers more and more to like and embrace the ideal of faithful covenant membership—but it does not make achieving that ideal a precondition for true worship.

Like Psalm 7 and Psalm 17, this psalm has worshipers singing to profess integrity in their lives; like the case for those psalms, it would be an easy mistake to suppose that this is self-righteous braggadocio. Pastoral wisdom would have been called for on the part of the priests arranging and leading the worship.

But also like Psalm 7 and Psalm 17, one crucial function of singing a song like this one is to set the virtues as the ideal toward which the faithful will more readily give themselves the more honestly they sing the words. The integrity that it praises covers both observable deeds and one’s invisible inner life, actions and feelings.

A similar situation faces Christians as they read, say, 1 John, with its various terms for genuine believers (those who keep God’s word, abide in God, have been born of God, etc.), and its variety of expressions for what they do (walk as Jesus walked, confess their sins, love their brethren, listen to the apostles, etc.).7 Extensive discussions have pondered what these assertions in 1 John mean, but certainly they do not claim sinless perfection, as 1 John 1:9; 2:1 make clear. Better is the idea that the statements using the present form of the verb describe the prevailing practices of the faithful—as over against particular lapses, for which the aorist would be normal. Nevertheless, I think that, in view of the disputative context (a group of false teachers have left; 1 John 2:18–19), the author’s goals recognize that those who remain true to the apostles must be regrounded in their identity. They must learn to say, “This is what we do.”

It would probably be going too far to see the violations of the approved way of life in the Psalms and in 1 John as disqualifications for membership; rather, the grace of God sets a person on the path of faithfulness by equipping him or her with the proper likes and dislikes. The affirmations of positive virtues enable the congregation to feel their own approval of those virtues, and the denunciations of vices enable them to feel their own disapproval of those vices.

This is the life Christians admire, this is the kind of people we want to be. This is our graciously given identity, and as a body we support and nourish in one another the aspiration to be good as we simultaneously create a safe environment for those who are not yet very good at being good.

Notes:

  1. A helpful resource is Gert Kwakkel, ‘According to My Righteousness’: Upright Behaviour as Grounds for Deliverance in Psalms 7, 17, 18, 26 and 44 (Leiden: Brill, 2002).
  2. I leave out “righteousness” as “deserving” (Deut. 9:4–6) as having no bearing on this discussion.
  3. C.S. Lewis, Studies in Words (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1967), 43.
  4. C.S. Lewis, Reflection on the Psalms,18. Unfortunately Lewis, lacking the kind of social analysis given here (and not following his own principle about the Psalms as hymnody), attributes a kind of self-righteousness not simply to abuse of these psalms but even to the psalms themselves.
  5. Lewis, Reflections on the Psalms, 17.
  6. “What must be said, however, is that the Psalms are poems, and poems intended to be sung: not doctrinal treatises, nor even sermons.” Kirkpatrick, Book of Psalms , 1:2.
  7. I have given an analysis of some of the literary and linguistic features in C. John Collins, “What the Reader Wants and the Translator Can Give: 1 John as a Test Case,” in Translating Truth (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2005), 77–111, esp. 94–105.

This article by C. John Collins and is adapted from ESV Expository Commentary: Psalms–Song of Solomon (Volume 5).

C. John Collins (PhD, University of Liverpool) is professor of Old Testament at Covenant Theological Seminary in St. Louis, Missouri. He has been a research engineer, church-planter, and teacher. He was the Old Testament Chairman for the English Standard Version Bible and is author of The God of Miracles, Science and Faith: Friends or Foes?, and Genesis 1–4: A Linguistic, Literary, and Theological Commentary. He and his wife have two grown children.

Popular Articles in This Series

View All

Why We Must Face Our Sinful Selves

We cannot fully comprehend the horror of our spiritual condition, and our spiritual condition is the reason why. Our sin prevents us from seeing the scope and depth of our sin.

March 13, 2025 by: Mitchell L. Chase

Our Spiritual Condition

We cannot fully comprehend the horror of our spiritual condition, and our spiritual condition is the reason why. Our sin prevents us from seeing the scope and depth of our sin. But as the nature of our condition becomes clearer, we might recoil at what we do see. Think of the prophet Isaiah when he had a vision of the Lord. He saw the glorious presence of God, which was hailed by angelic voices. The seraphim cried out,

Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts;
     the whole earth is full of his glory! (Isa. 6:3)

In the presence of glory and holiness, Isaiah had a keen sense of his own sin. “Woe is me!” he declared. “For I am lost; for I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips; for my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts!” (Isa. 6:5). The prophet’s recognition and confession are refreshing. He doesn’t sound like Adam. Isaiah knew God’s holiness, so he had a better understanding of his guilt and desperate condition. The response of the Lord is seen in the action of a seraph, who touched Isaiah’s lips with a burning coal and said, “Behold, this has touched your lips; your guilt is taken away, and your sin atoned for” (Isa. 6:7).

Loincloths and tree coverings cannot atone for sin. We need confession and forgiveness. We offer the former, and God provides the latter. A true sense of sin confronts us with our unworthiness to receive mercy, yet the beauty of mercy is that it is undeserved. To mix metaphors, our loincloths are just filthy rags (Gen. 3:7; Isa. 64:6). We need our guilt removed. We need our sins covered, and only God can cover the deeds we have done against him. Sin, says Mark Jones, is “the soul’s disease, blinding the mind, hardening the heart, disordering the will, stealing strength, and dampening the affections.”1 We are helpless before God, and our only hope is God.

Our admission could sound like the words of Peter. In Luke 5, Jesus performs a miracle from a boat, and the fishermen witness an extraordinary catch of fish (Luke 5:6–7). In the presence of such power and wonder, Peter immediately senses his own unworthiness. They have never met anyone like Jesus. The holy, holy, holy God is walking among sinners. Peter says, “Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord” (Luke 5:8).

Peter’s instinct is like Adam’s: in the presence of such greatness and glory, create some distance. But the sinfulness of Peter is not new information to Jesus. He knows Peter’s condition before getting into the boat! Peter knows he is a sinner, but that doesn’t bring the scene to an end; sinners are the people Jesus came for. Peter wants to put up some distance, but Jesus has already crossed the distance to come to him. Jesus tells Peter words that calm the soul of anxious and terrified sinners: “Do not be afraid” (Luke 5:10). Jesus knows the fear in Peter’s heart, so he addresses it. In the presence of unrivaled glory and holiness, fear seems reasonable. But Peter’s fear isn’t a reason to distance himself, and his sin isn’t a reason to send Jesus away.

Jesus has come to call sinners out of the darkness and into the light. He came—and still comes—for the hiding and the fearful, the ashamed and the sinful. Do not be afraid. The rescuing grace of God has stepped into the boat.

This Christian Life

The promise of the new covenant is a deep cleansing of the heart.

I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you shall be clean from all your uncleannesses, and from all your idols I will cleanse you. And I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. (Ezek. 36:25–26) Do you see the truth of your defilement? There is cleansing in Christ.

Do you understand your hardness of heart? There is a new heart in Christ. The new covenant consists of sinners who are now united to Jesus by grace through faith. They have forsaken the loincloths and tree coverings. They have come out of hiding in order to find a new refuge. The work of Jesus is the burning coal to purify us.

The promise of the new covenant is a deep cleansing of the heart.

Because Christians have not experienced the resurrection of the body and the fullness of God’s sanctifying work, we are still short of glory. Nevertheless, we are free in him from the penalty and power of our transgressions. We can walk in honesty, confessing our sins and rejoicing in the finished work of Christ on our behalf. It would be futile to err in the ways that John wrote about in his first letter: “If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us” (1 John 1:8). Or, “If we say we have not sinned, we make him a liar, and his word is not in us” (1 John 1:10). Let’s not be deceived, and let’s not call God a liar. We have sinned and have sin.

The believer’s answer to the question “Where are you?” is different from the Genesis 3 context. We now answer “Where are you?” by saying, “I am in Christ.” My covering comes not from fig leaves but from the old rugged cross. Our refuge is not among the trees but under the tree. The cross has become the tree of life for sinners. It is there that our atonement was accomplished.

We may feel tempted to say to Jesus, “Depart from me,” but he is saying to us, “Come to me.” As the light of God’s word reveals our transgressions and we sense greater depths of our shame, we may feel overwhelmed. But your sin does not overwhelm Christ. If you say to him, “I am afraid, for I cannot bear my sin,” he will say to you, “Fear not, for I already bore your sin.” Don’t walk—flee—to the refuge of his mercy tree. The very reasons you think he should depart are the very reasons he tells you to come.

Notes:

  1. Mark Jones, Knowing Sin: Seeing a Neglected Doctrine through the Eyes of the Puritans (Chicago: Moody Publishers, 2022), 39.

This article is adapted from Short of Glory: A Biblical and Theological Exploration of the Fall by Mitchell L. Chase.

Mitchell L. Chase (PhD, The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary) is an associate professor of biblical studies at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. He is also the preaching pastor of Kosmosdale Baptist Church in Louisville, Kentucky, and is the author of several books. He blogs regularly at Biblical Theology on Substack.

Related Articles