When Mom Fails…Crickets

7 April 2026

There’s an online account with a growing following (or so it seems to me; I can’t know the numbers for sure) who recently delivered a noteworthy public error. I think it’s worth discussing. See the screenshot below (the commentary is on top, reacting to the embedded screenshot below).

Do you notice something missing here?

Of course, we could start with the embedded notion that young women have no moral agency. He’s right that youth need guidance, but the overall impression he gives is that the poor girls never had a chance and bear no responsibility for their own poor life choices. Come now. But you know what? Let’s give him that one for now. Far too many of these girls really did follow the advice they were given, which turned out to be horrible. The advisers bear a lot of responsibility, and a bunch of them were in the church. That’s our problem, so let’s reckon with it.

Notice how he immediately points the finger at fathers, grandfathers, teachers, pastors? That’s appropriate. When something bad happens to the sheep, we want to know why the shepherds failed, as we should. If we believe the elders of the church are responsible to “shepherd the flock of God” as Paul commanded them to do, and that the elders should be “the husband of one wife,” and therefore men, then it follows that the women of our churches need to be shepherded by men. Paul wasn’t afraid to do this; he addressed the responsibilities and sins of women throughout his letters (see, for example, Phil. 4:1-3, Eph. 5:22-24, Col. 3:18, Titus 2:1-8, 1 Tim. 2:9-15). If we are going to follow his example, then we will too.

But do you notice something missing? Re-read that comment: he talks about young men, young women, older men…and that’s it.

What about the older women?

Nobody who knows how to fill out a 2×2 grid could possibly miss this, but more importantly, nobody who has been taught by the Scriptures could possibly miss this. If you need a little help, read Titus 2:1-8. Again, Paul is not shy about exhorting women directly; he does it throughout his letters. But here, he also tells Titus that the older women should teach the younger women. What’s the curriculum? “To be discreet, chaste, homemakers, good, obedient to their own husbands.” The exact things, in other words, that young, single millennial women didn’t get, and that as a well-traveled 36-year-old cat lady, she’s still missing.

And honestly, this is kind of obvious. Loving your husband, loving your children, being a homemaker—we all know these things are hard work. They don’t come automatically; they need to be taught, and as with any skill, your best resource is the people who are actually doing it. Which is to say, godly older women. So when our commentator is considering the problem, why did he completely leave them out?

Because he’s terrified, and with good reason. This is exactly how the church world works. Blame for everything that goes wrong flows to the formal male leadership, and those men are not allowed under any circumstances to annoy the middle-aged and older women. Those ladies control the decisions about what the family will participate in—volunteer activities, youth group, giving, church attendance, all of it—and if the pastor annoys them, they will leave and take their family with them, or they’ll run him out of the church. So he keeps them happy. That means that when their daughters aren’t turning out the way they’d hoped, he blames the fathers, he blames the grandfathers, he blames the young men who won’t step up, he blames the church staff, he even blames himself…but he’d sooner cut his own throat than say that mom and grandma failed this girl, and so did the other women of a certain age in the church. Some of these guys are so brainwashed into the limitation, they don’t even think it’s there. Finding fault with the middle-aged women is literally unthinkable for them. They can’t process it. Others are more aware, and more cynical. But either way, they don’t shepherd the older women, and they don’t call them to do their job.

Why would I think this particular guy falls into this category? Because I brought the matter to his attention. I said—this is a direct quote—”[Name], you’ve made a glaring omission here. While the men bear their responsibilities, there is another group that has a direct biblical commission to teach young women on exactly these matters: older women (Titus 2:3-5). You entirely neglected to mention them. Why is that?”

You want to know what he had to say for himself? So do I. Crickets. Zero response.

Because, let’s face it, there’s just nothing to say.

So ladies, let’s do better with the next generation. You know that the things you do—conducting a successful marriage, raising children, managing a household, stewarding and multiplying the wealth and advantage of your family—you know those things don’t just happen by accident. None of it is easy; it all takes discernment, strength, subtlety, and lots of hard work. So teach the skills. Teach them to your own daughters. Teach them to the girls at church that aren’t getting taught at home. Mentor. Guide. Lead. You’ll be glad you did—and so will everybody else.

Leave a Comment » | Equality and Difference of Man and Woman, Mentoring/Disciple-Making, New Fundamentals | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

Hunting for the Innocent

5 April 2026

There’s a lineal descent of protest and grievance in American politics that runs from the civil rights movement to second-wave feminism to gay rights to the trans movement to supporting Hamas in the wake of October 7. (I suspect this line could be extended back in time a good ways: parts of the labor movement, temperance, abolitionism, and more.) The line of descent is a matter of the causes being related, but a matter of the same class of people supporting them, one after the other.

Good has been done along the way. Evil has been done along the way. But as the trajectory becomes both undeniably clear and undeniably evil, honesty compels us to ask if we got something wrong at the very start.

We did. Not with the causes themselves—the merits of the causes are a whole series of separate conversations—but with what we think it means to support them.

There’s a class of Americans that reliably supported all these causes, one after another, in an attempt to relieve itself of guilt. The emotional logic has been the same all along: if I can find innocent victims of oppression, lionize and defend them, then I will be redeemed from my guilt. When it fails—and it fails just as surely as Stalin’s Five-Year Plans—we always react the same way: jump to a new group of supposed innocent victims and try harder. The less obviously innocent they are, and the more extremely we debase ourselves to support them, the better our chances at excising our own inner stain.

It has not worked, and it never will. We are trying to self-medicate our way out of the wrong problem.

That inner stain cannot be removed by any amount of your own effort. Even if we only consider your own life, let’s be honest: your life contains plenty of evil you can’t blame on anyone else, and in your more honest moments, you know it. And that’s to say nothing of your ancestry: we surely all have ancestors who deserve to have their entire legacy wiped from the earth. Do you imagine that in the long history of humanity, you are descended from nothing but saints? No. All of us are descended of rapists, murderers, child molesters. We try to forget. We pretend that if we belatedly rescue the innocent now, we will somehow balance the scales, as if the lives our ancestors destroyed could somehow be restored to health after they’ve ended. As if the murder victims’ descendants who will never be could somehow be brought into existence after generations.

Sometimes a thing gets broke, can’t be fixed.

We are guilty children of guilty parents. We will never find someone so innocent that the rescue, were it even possible, would balance the scales. The endeavor is doomed from the start.

But our intuitions are not wholly wrong. In the dark recesses of the long, long memory of the Christian church, deep truths move that even most Christians aren’t consciously aware of. Here’s one of them: we hunt that innocent victim for good reason…just not the reason we tell ourselves.

We won’t rescue the innocent. The experiment has been tried. We were once given a truly good human, a man who did literally no wrong. We murdered him in cold blood. So it’s too late. You can’t “stand with” him, and it wouldn’t matter if you did. Thinking there was something you could do…that was the mistake all along. You can’t. Worse, you wouldn’t if you could.

But you don’t need to stand with him. You need him to stand with you.

That day he died, the world changed. Drawn by the monstrous perversion of his murder, every moral failure, every twisted desire, every sin, every sickness, every dark thing that stains our souls was drawn into Him. He willingly accepted it all, carried all of our darkness in his very flesh.

When He was nailed to the cross, so was all your darkness. When He died, it died. When He was buried, it was buried. And because He was righteous, God the Father would not leave Him in the grave. Raised to new, unending Life, He did not come out of the grave dragging a giant bag of your crap. He came out clean, infused forever with the power of an endless life. He lives now to make you clean. That stain you could never remove, no matter who you stood with, no matter how hard you tried? He knows every quarter-inch of it, better than you ever will. And He removes it.

What does He require in exchange? Nothing. Which makes sense, if you stop and think about it for a minute. Nothing you can do contributes to the solution. You have nothing that He needs. And so what could it be, other than sheer gift?

If you want to be clean, you can be. Trust Him to take care of everything, and it’s taken care of. Too simple? Too good to be true? Downright offensive, even? Yup. But there it is. God loves you that much, and so He just did it anyway. You don’t have to contribute; you don’t even have to approve. But since it’s already done, don’t pretend it isn’t. The cost is paid. Just say yes.

…and then, because you have been given mercy beyond imagining, do the same—in whatever limited way you can—for others. Not in a frantic and doomed effort to put yourself right, but as a secure expression of the truth: you are righteous. You are clean. You are forgiven. Because Jesus is risen from the dead.

Happy Easter!

1 Comment | Preaching | Tagged: , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

Every Beggar’s Hand an Altar: New Covenant Sacred Space

31 March 2026

What does sacred space look like for the Church today?

The theology is pretty clear, but there’s different ways to apply it, and it makes a big difference which direction you go.

The theology is “Here we have no continuing city, but we seek the one to come.” The fire and storm that came on Sinai and that inaugurated the Temple sacrifices in Solomon’s day came on every head at Pentecost. From that day forward, sacred space isn’t a chunk of real estate in the same way that it used to be under the Old Covenant; the Spirit-indwelt believer is a portable mountain of God.

The commonest response to that reality is to ignore it, and just think of a church building as the “house of God” in the same way Solomon’s Temple was. Theologically, that’s a non-starter, but it’s very common.

The second most common application is iconoclastic: none of the buildings matter, it’s all just about the people now. This has curb appeal because it’s a very simple, straightforward application of the theology. Too simple, as it turns out. It misses two very important things.

First, in the immediate context of Hebrews, the same passage that says “we have no continuing city,” also says we need to do good and to share, “for with such sacrifices God is well pleased.” The book of Hebrews carefully develops a theology of new covenant priesthood in which Jesus replaces the old covenant priesthood with the far older priestly order of Melchizedek—and we come behind Him as our Forerunner. His sacrifice ends all sacrifice for sin, but there are still new covenant sacrifices, and we offer them as part of our priestly duty. He ministers, not in the earthly sanctuary, but in the heavenly sanctuary of which the earthly tabernacle was a copy. So there is such a thing as new covenant sacred space. It’s just in heaven.

But the iconoclasts are still wrong. Hebrews situates Jesus as our Forerunner and us as His younger siblings. Where He goes, we go. He goes behind the veil, into the heavenly sanctuary. We also offer sacrifices—the fruit of our lips, doing good, and sharing. When you’re a portable mountain of God and the Lord of Lords is your Forerunner, every beggar’s hand is an altar. The picture Hebrews paints is not that the sacred space is far away from us; we have been given the spiritual authority to call the sacred space down right here, right now, to offer our sacrifices in the presence of the Most High. That doesn’t mean there’s no sacred space on earth, that just means it moves: “here we have no continuing city.” We make the sacred space wherever and whenever we need to. Anywhere we offer our sacrifices, heaven meets us there.

Second, the iconoclastic move neglects the way God made us to be: humans exercise dominion over the earth. We build homes, shops, neighborhoods, cities—and that’s not some incidental factor or regrettable failing; it’s obedience to the first command God gave us (Gen. 1:28). We build things for purposes. A merchant has a store, a mechanic a shop, a chef a restaurant, an artist a studio, a teacher a classroom. From the Church’s earliest days, we gathered in multi-purpose spaces: principally homes, but also Solomon’s Porch, the School of Tyrannus, like that. It wasn’t until a few centuries in that we purpose-built spaces for the church to gather – not surprising, considering our quasi-legal status prior to Constantine.

Making a building for the purpose of gathering is the most natural thing in the world; it’s what we do for any other purpose. But constructing the building for that purpose does not make it sacred space. Sacred space is made when we, as new covenant priests, minister in the heavenly sanctuary. We do that all over town. And we can, and should, do it in the church buildings, too.

3 Comments | Ecclesiology | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

Perfection of Character

24 March 2026

Martial arts training, especially for children, is often touted as a tool for character development. You can see this claim on the brochures—half the time, right on the front window—of nearly any storefront martial arts school in your town. It’s not obvious, on the face of it, that learning to kick, punch, and throw your fellow humans would be the sort of thing that makes one a better person.

And yet, there’s a long history of these claims in martial arts. In fact, a number of the arts practiced today (judo, karate-do, kendo, taekwondo, and so on) were explicitly formulated for “perfection of character.” In order to understand that, we have to reflect on the massive disruption that firearms brought to the world of combat. When cold weapons (spears, swords, etc.) were king and their fighting methods were regularly used on the battlefield, in civilian fights with bandits, and so on, those fighting skills were like growing vegetables or shoeing a horse—just part of the life skills toolbox. Nobody thought a guy was a paragon just because he could fight, any more than they’d think a good farmer or blacksmith or cobbler was automatically a saint. The skills are not obviously related to good character, and anyway, there are too many counterexamples. Lots of guys could fight that were not model citizens.

The same is true today, if you look at the predominant fighting technology of today: firearms. Nobody thinks that their pistol instructor is automatically a good role model or financial advisor or life coach. Nobody thinks of their local Marine barracks as the obvious place to go look for direction in how to be a good person. And yet somehow, an aura of good character clings to someone who’s mastered the skills of fighting with empty hands or swords—why is that?

It didn’t happen by accident. When cold weapons took a back seat to firearms, the old skills became far less important, for the same reason that 15-year-olds don’t learn how to take care of a horse in Drivers’ Ed. Many of those older skills were simply lost, because they weren’t that useful anymore. But in Japan in particular, some of the old skills were recycled into martial ways. So kenjutsu, “sword technique” became kendo, “sword way” iaijutsu, “the technique of drawing the sword” became iaido, “the way of drawing the sword,” thus also for kyudo, judo, aikido, karate-do, and so on. That -do suffix means “way” and denotes a way of life, with overtones of introspection, character development, and spirituality, as opposed to the older -jutsu suffix which simply implies a pragmatic method of doing something. An older -jutsu art would render a practitioner competent in a year or so of assiduous practice, good in three years, excellent in five. The -do forms, the martial ways, were intended to be lifelong pursuits, explicitly repurposing old-style combat training methods toward the goal of “perfection of character.” Why this became such a big trend in Japan in particular is a longer discussion than we have time for, but feel free to dig into it if you’re curious; the decline of the samurai class in the late shogunate and the Meiji Restoration is an interesting study.

For our purposes it’s sufficient to notice that the shift from a -jutsu, a practical skill, to a -do, a way of life, is a really substantial change, with something gained and something lost. What’s lost is the sense of immediately practical skill accessible to relatively short-term study. What’s gained is a host of opportunities for personal development. Martial arts training gives you all the opportunities that any athletic endeavor would give for developing focus, precision, discipline in working toward a goal, etc., and adds conflict management and emotional control on top of it. In a number of ways, martial skills really do create an ideal venue for learning larger life lessons. But there are two problems:

  1. While becoming good at a physical discipline certainly will give you opportunities to grow your character, it doesn’t automatically mean you will make the most of the opportunities. Plenty of guys are NFL/NBA-level athletes and terrible human beings. Plenty more are good at karate or judo or whatever and are equally terrible human beings.
  2. What “perfection of character” means is highly variable. A martial way is a potent tool to shape character in a particular direction, but what direction? The “perfection of character” fostered by judo, karate-do, kendo and the other early 20th-century Japanese martial ways gave us the Rape of Nanking, the Bataan Death March, the “Three Alls” policy, the Changjiao Massacre, the Rape of Manila…I could go on. It’s not for nothing that cults have a long history of using these sorts of physical disciplines to mold their followers. Lots of groups do, because they’re a potent tool.

In a contemporary, Western context, though…consider your basic storefront dojo with “Lose Weight! Build Character! Better Grades!” in the window. The suburban soccer mom who signs her kids up for lessons there has a very particular meaning of “character” in mind: courteous, kind to others, able to resist bullying, diligent, hardworking, fair, honest…you know the drill. When an art specifically says (in that context) that it’s about character development, people expect a black belt or instructor credential to indicate a role model, a person worth emulating. And there are organizations that do that, and do a good job of it. Jason Wilson’s Cave of Adullam Transformational Training Academy comes to mind as a particularly notable current example.

But not every organization works that way, no matter what’s on the front window. One way to gauge what the black belt or instructor rating means in a particular art is to look at who does, and who doesn’t, get the credential. If you don’t disqualify a man for, say, taking a couple friends to go catch a professional rival alone for a three-to-one beat-down that culminates in beating him with an iron bar…well, there ya go. Maybe don’t look to that organization’s instructors as life coaches. There’s a lot of distance between a Jason Wilson and an Helio Gracie.

Leave a Comment » | Physicality, Uncategorized | Tagged: | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

A Grifter or a Mark

17 March 2026

One of the things about getting a little older is that patterns begin to emerge. They were always there, but the older I get, the harder it is to ignore them. One of them is the pattern of the a-little-too-wide-eyed take on Bible prophecy anytime a global crisis looms, or a war starts, or whatever. It’s the sort of thing where it’s easy to get drunk on your own passions.

There’s always a fresh supply of 20-somethings (and, embarrassingly, some older folks) who are just fit to burst with the way Things Are Lining Up Like Never Before. I remind them that people said the same thing in the 1980s…and they say things like, “Of course they did, but I’m sure we can all see things far more clearly lining up now than they did in the 80s.” Right, kid…but they said the same thing in the 80s, about the 1940s. And in the 40s, about the turn of the century. And at the turn of the century, too—although back then the postmillennial version was more popular, until WWI ruined everybody’s optimism.

“Sure,” they’ll say. “I’m not saying we should be dogmatic about it” while at the same time heavily implying that anybody who doesn’t think the rapture will happen within the year is just not taking things seriously. For my entire life, popular authors and conference speakers have been incredibly dogmatic about how we are “living in the last days.” (We are, too. Have been—if you’ll pardon a note of philistine biblicism—since the resurrection of Jesus, but that’s not what they mean, and we all know it).

Every generation of prophecy enthusiasts thinks they see something nobody’s ever seen before. And they’re right; every year’s a new year. But that doesn’t mean what they think it does. Every generation of prophecy enthusiasts thinks they invented not-quite-setting-the-date while managing to imply (nod, nod, wink, wink) that we’ll all be watching next year’s Super Bowl from the heavenly grandstands. Someday, somebody’s gonna be right about that, sho’ nuff.

But let’s be honest: this is like buying a Pick Six ticket. Can’t win if you don’t play, but how many times can you say “This is it! This is the one!” with total conviction? The answer to that question has a lot more to do with personality (and immaturity) than it has to do with the likelihood of winning, doesn’t it? Somebody will be right, sure enough; odds of it being you are not great. Live long enough, and unless you’re exceptionally credulous, at some point you grow sober-minded about it. There are a LOT more people saying “This is the one!” than there are winners—and the suckers are the ones so manically high on their own point of view that they can’t imagine they might be wrong.

In biblical prophecy, there have been plenty of people who pointed out all the things that were coming together and said “I’m not saying today’s the day—no man knows the day or the hour—I’m just saying that if you’re paying attention, things are coming together like never before, and I’d be very surprised if we’re all here in a year.” Or five, or thirty, whatever – pick your horizon. Or be cannier than that and never say a number while you imply to the youth group kids that they’d better win their friends to Christ now, because there’s no way they’re gonna graduate. To date, they’ve all been wrong; every last one of them.

And the sad part is, they’ve caused their hearers to become jaded and cynical about biblical prophecy, which is the real cost of the whole madness. Biblical prophecy is edifying and beautiful, and helps us to see our own times clearly even when our time is not the primary referent (as, say in Habakkuk’s case). The task before us is to read the text and the world, and be sober-minded about the whole thing.

Sober-minded people actually study the history, and learn that we thought Things Were Coming Together about the Ottoman Conquest, and the turn of the first millennium, and the Black Death and the Protestant Reformation and the Cold War and the turn of the second millennium—we didn’t learn our lesson the first time, apparently—and heaven knows what else. It’s not all bad; it’s good exercise to look around and think, “If it kicks off today, what might that look like?” (I know, if you’re postmillennial, you think it can’t happen today…but you could be wrong about that; somebody is.)

It’s good to feed your sanctified imagination on the thought that you might be wrong. If you’re the sort of premil that made Hal Lindsey and Tim Lahaye rich, consider what the world would look like if the postmil guys are right, and seven thousand years hence, seminary students will be struggling to remember whether Athanasius relied on C. S. Lewis’ thought, or the other way ’round, because all those early church fathers just run together in your head after a while. If you’re postmil, consider that if Jesus returns today, then the premil guys were right about a lot, and what might it look like for God to bring all things together in Christ in that way? (Do you think He can’t?) If you’re amil, maybe consider that even if you’ve read the mythic/symbolic dimensions of the text correctly from a literary point of view, what if God also realizes it all literally? Wouldn’t be the first time He’s ever done that—His Son did come up out of Egypt, after all.

Speaking of: go back and look at the prophecies of the first advent, especially the ones highlighted in the New Testament. Get a lesson in how to read prophecy from the ones that are already fulfilled. Reflect on the literalness, on the symbology, on God’s twisty way of doing exactly what He promised in a way nobody quite anticipated. Then think to yourself: “If I’d had a mastery of Old Testament messianic prophecy, how much of Jesus’ life could I have predicted before the fact?” Some things, like being born in Bethlehem, sure. But how much?

Right. So a little humility is in order.

As to the second advent, then: no man knows the day or the hour. Some morning, the sun will come up, and Jesus will return before suppertime. That day surely is coming. If in God’s good providence, it’s today, what might that look like? Imagining that is a good exercise; keeps you limber. But there’s a big difference between keeping limber and thinking that you’re seeing your interpretation of Revelation coming to pass in the headlines of the Washington Post. Those guys….

Lemme put it this way: in history, there are very few trends that hold even for a century, let alone across millennia. Death. Taxes. Prophecy wonks being wrong about the Second Coming. It’s that level of consistency. Those guys have been wrong, every single one of them, every single time, without fail, for two solid millennia. That takes skill. And they will continue to be wrong, until one day, finally, they aren’t.

Today really might be the day—be sober, be vigilant, and share the gospel—or ten thousand years from now, so be sober, be vigilant, and pay your bills on time. If it could be any day, then there’s nothing special about today except that it’s the day I happen to be living in, and the only one I can have an effect on. Faithfulness tomorrow is a dream; faithfulness yesterday (if there was any) is a memory; faithfulness today is what actually matters. A grasp of prophecy that encourages daily faithfulness is a great thing! Sensationalism and hucksterism and overblown nonsense of the type that’s never yet been right…that doesn’t build faithfulness.

Biblical prophecy is edifying and glorious when read soberly, but foolish and unstable people twist it to their own destruction, “as they do also the rest of the Scriptures.” If you’re cynical and blase about Scripture, you’re doing it wrong; if you’re drunk on your own passions, you’re doing it wrong; if you’re whipping up people’s emotions about it to sell your book, you’re definitely doing it wrong, and Jesus would flip over your table at the booksellers’ convention.

Two guys can both say “It could be any day,” but one of them means it could be today or tomorrow, or a thousand years from now, and the other one means it could be today, or tomorrow, but there’s no way we’re still around in five years. The former is honest and sober-minded; the latter is a grifter—or a mark.

Leave a Comment » | Discernment, Hermeneutics | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

Questions on Sex Education

10 March 2026

On a discussion forum I’m part of, someone, a parent of teenagers, I believe, posted a list of questions about sex education. I think it’s a great list, and bears discussing. I’ll give my answers below, but I’m going to just give you the questions first. I’d encourage you to take a crack at answering them for yourself before you read mine.

  1. Is there a genuine difference between “Christian sex ed” and secular information, or do we just add a few Bible verses to the same biological facts?
  2. What is God’s actual design for sex? (Looking for biblical evidence here, not just traditional “churchy” opinions.)
  3. Does the Bible even offer a blueprint for sexual education, or have we been winging it for centuries?
  4. How do we stop the cycle of “sex-negative” or “sex-neutral” parenting? Can we actually give what we never received?
  5. Is “taboo” ever healthy? Is there any topic that should remain strictly off-limits between parent and child?
  6. Is there a “too early,” or is our silence just giving the world a head start?
  7. Is it time to scrap the “mom talks to girls, dad talks to boys” rule? Who is truly responsible? Does the gender of the parent or child even matter in these conversations, or is that just a cultural tradition?
  8. Silence is not consent—if a child never asks, are we failing them by not forcing the issue? How do we handle the “shut down” and the averted eyes?
  9. If we aren’t the primary source, who is the safest “second-in-line” for our kids?
  10. Is the church (or small group) actually stepping up, or are they just outsourcing this uncomfortable job back to parents?
  11. How can we advocate for “waiting” today? (I’m looking for arguments that a teenager can relate to, even if they haven’t had a conversion experience yet!)
  12. Can we define “boundaries” before marriage without turning it into a legalistic checklist of “how far is too far”? What is your exact answer if your kid asks for it?
  13. How do we address the “puberty gap”? What should a young person do with being biologically mature when marriage is still far (5-10-15 years) away? When the Bible was written in the Middle East, women often married at 12-16, which almost coincided with puberty—this meant something entirely different back then!
  14. How do we dismantle the “test-drive” argument? Is compatibility something you find or something you build?
  15. Our own marriage as a “silent teacher” of intimacy. How/What kind of example can we set for our children in this area through our own marriage?

Give yourself some time to think those over. I’d love to hear your answers to these questions. I’d especially love to hear what you think is missing from the list here—what other questions that should be here? What other insights need to be part of a well-developed perspective? What do you think?

When you’re ready to continue, my answers are down below.

  1. Is there a genuine difference between “Christian sex ed” and secular information, or do we just add a few Bible verses to the same biological facts?

Yes. The materialists are wrong about everything, all the way down to the ground. The world is not what they think it is; humans are not what they think we are; heck, even matter is not what they think it is. And they don’t know what anything actually means. Secular information is not “right as far as it goes,” it’s fundamentally wrong about absolutely everything. That doesn’t mean we can’t draw information from pagan sources, but when we baptize it, we need to make sure we’ve done a thorough job. We’re going for “dead and resurrected,” not a light rinse, and that’s harder than most people think. 

  1. What is God’s actual design for sex? (Looking for biblical evidence here, not just traditional “churchy” opinions.)

Natural law gets to weigh in here, too: designed things “want” to be used in particular ways. It doesn’t take you too long to figure out which end of the paring knife to hold. For sexuality, fruitfulness is a major purpose of the design: it’s our reproductive mechanism, and we’re powerfully driven to exercise it. The hormonal effects of sexual union are also a big deal, and show that bonding and communion are also major purposes of sex. It’s enormously pleasurable, and God designed it to be. Say thank you. 

Looking to Scripture, we find that fruitfulness is the very first recorded blessing and command to man and woman (Gen. 1:28). Zooming in on the creation of humanity in the next chapter, we find that sexual difference is specifically designed by God, and designed to motivate a man to leave his parents and take a wife. This moves the conversation in a different direction than the way I was raised. Instead of my constant young male horniness being sinful fleshly weakness to be ashamed of, it’s the motivator God designed to create a new household. On this account, then, the fact that the desire is so powerful isn’t because you’re extra sinful, it’s because sexual desire is the mainspring of the household, which is in turn the building block of civilization. Of course it’s strong! We’re supposed to be exercising dominion over the whole world! Weak, take-it-or-leave-it desire wouldn’t do the job, would it? 

  1. Does the Bible even offer a blueprint for sexual education, or have we been winging it for centuries?

Neither. The Bible is authoritative on everything it speaks to, and it speaks to everything – but not necessarily in the format we were wishing for. It’s not enough to let the Bible supply our answers; we also need to let it critique our questions. So no, the Bible doesn’t provide a blueprint for sex education; it provides an extensive set of blueprints for marriage. The Church has not been winging it for centuries; what we’ve been doing (in our better moments) is building our education on the Bible’s blueprints for marriage, so that when we teach about sex, it’s in its proper context. 

  1. How do we stop the cycle of “sex-negative” or “sex-neutral” parenting? Can we actually give what we never received?

You can’t give what you ain’t got, but you can and do give your kids all kinds of things that you didn’t get while you were a kid. Unless you seriously think that we’ve gotten worse every single generation since Adam and Eve, then yes, you can give your kids something you didn’t have as a kid. That’s how generational advance works: our ceiling is their floor. 

  1. Is “taboo” ever healthy? Is there any topic that should remain strictly off-limits between parent and child?

Strict taboo, absolutely not. Are there topics that we must not approach casually or flippantly? Of course, and I suspect that’s how the taboos come to exist to start with. Some topics are very high-stakes, and you can’t afford to do them badly. We then begin to fear making mistakes, and from that fear, we begin to think it’s safer not to approach those topics at all. We start saying stupid things like “You just have to be so careful…” no matter how someone is approaching the topic. That’s nonsense, and God has not given us a spirit of fear. It’s precisely in giving due weight to consequential topics that we render the taboos ridiculous. 

  1. Is there a “too early,” or is our silence just giving the world a head start?

That’s a judgment call you have to make in your context. If you’ll pardon a horrible example, there are ages where it’s “too early” for a kid to learn about rape, but if it happens to them or one of their friends, you’re not (I hope!) going to tell them “It’s too early to talk about that.” It might be too early, but so what? If that’s what they’re dealing with, then we’re gonna talk about it. In a sane world, a lot of this stuff might wait until later…but we don’t live in a sexually sane world, and you can’t fight lies with silence.

  1. Is it time to scrap the “mom talks to girls, dad talks to boys” rule? Who is truly responsible? Does the gender of the parent or child even matter in these conversations, or is that just a cultural tradition?

This would be a good place (like #2, above) to ask for biblical support. Where did this “rule” even come from? It certainly doesn’t come from Scripture. Of course the gender matters in these conversations, and that’s precisely why God gives a kid a mom and a dad. Every kid should hear from both of them.  

The first time we did a unit on this in youth group, we had a 6-week series on marriage and sexuality, and we had only a portion of one session that we split by gender. It’s important to have that opportunity, because kids sometimes raise questions that they wouldn’t raise in a mixed-gender group, but the kids also need to see adults interacting intelligently and calmly with members of the opposite sex on these topics. They take their cues from us: if we’re afraid or uncomfortable, they will be too. If we’re sober, reverent, and clear-headed, they’ll learn to be that way themselves. 

  1. Silence is not consent—if a child never asks, are we failing them by not forcing the issue? How do we handle the “shut down” and the averted eyes?

You are failing them if you don’t deliver what they need to know, in exactly the same way you’d be failing them if you didn’t teach them division or reading or how to eat their vegetables. “Foolishness is bound up in the heart of a child;” it’s not their job to dictate what they’ll learn. And also, if you manage to deliver the material in a way that’s forced and makes them hate it, you’re failing them, in the same way that you can make them hate math by approaching teaching division poorly, or make them hate broccoli by boiling it until it’s grey. As with food, so with education: nothing is so good you can’t bungle it. There’s no substitute for knowing your kids well and leading their hearts well, in any topic. This one too. 

  1. If we aren’t the primary source, who is the safest “second-in-line” for our kids?

First of all, you should be the primary source. Unless you’re radically disqualified in some odd way, you have no business shirking your responsibility to speak to your children about sexuality. And also, as with anything else from driving to calculus to piano lessons, there’s nothing wrong with outsourcing a portion of the work to trusted members of the community. There’s no rule that says your kid has to learn only from you. 

As far as who you trust, of course that’s a judgment call you make in your context. I think it’s safe to say that if you’re relying on government-funded schools to do the heavy lifting for you, you’re bound for trouble. You can’t hand your 5-year-olds over to enemies of the faith to be catechized for years on end, and then be surprised when your 16-year-olds act like they’ve been catechized by the enemy. So stock their lives with people that you trust to talk with them about topics that matter. Too many Christian parents isolate their kids. Sometimes it’s out of fear, but often there’s an ego component. It starts with a (possibly well-intended) sense that “I should be the person my kid talks with about this,” but then proceeds to wondering, “What does it say about me as a parent if my kid talks with someone else?” Finding that option intolerable, the parents attempt to deny their children other options. Listen, I’ve been doing youth work for a really long time. I promise you, if you draw the circle too tight, they’ll find someone outside your circle, and it won’t be someone you’d have picked. It’s much smarter to give your kids easy access to interested and trustworthy adults, and then trust the adults to do the job. Paradoxically, if you’re not afraid, your kids will see that, and most of the time they’ll come to you.

  1. Is the church (or small group) actually stepping up, or are they just outsourcing this uncomfortable job back to parents?

Again, depends on your context. But first of all, whaddaya mean “uncomfortable job”? Who says? Kids are naturally curious about everything, and educating them is a natural part of preparing them for the world. Why do we just accept that we’re somehow obliged to be performatively uncomfortable telling them about sex? There’s nothing inevitable about that, and mostly the recipe for being comfortable with it is “decide you’re going to be comfortable with it.” Emotions are contagious; the kids will mostly take their cues from you. So govern yourself. If you dramatize it, they’ll treat it like forbidden fruit. If you hem and haw and look at the floor, they’ll be uncomfortable. If you’re at peace with it, they will be too—and then sex won’t have the wrong kind of mystery attached to it.

There’s a lot of weird evangelical folkways around this. Different families handle things differently, and some parents are really spiky about other people answering their kids’ questions, so people are understandably cautious. If you surround your kids with a community that can actually handle adult matters like adults and give straight answers to serious questions, then you’re gonna be fine. Just don’t be overly precious about it, and let your community do its job.

  1. How can we advocate for “waiting” today? (I’m looking for arguments that a teenager can relate to, even if they haven’t had a conversion experience yet!)

This would be another place to go back to Scripture first. Because God says to. If your 15-year-old isn’t prepared to remain chaste simply on that basis, then you have much, much bigger problems than who they’re gonna sleep with.

But it turns out that God has pretty good ideas, so if we dig into how all this works, we will discover that His instructions are also a wise way to live. You wait to ignite sexually until marriage for the same reason you wait until you’re out at the fire pit to start your fire, instead of starting it while you’re sitting on the couch: sex is unbelievably potent, and marriage is the container that will hold it safely.  There’s a lot of potential starting points, but here are two of mine:

A. If you’re not ready to pay for the doctor bills, the diapers, the baby food, the whole shebang, then you’re not ready to do the things that lead to babies. And don’t tell me about birth control; it fails. Not a ton, these days, but if you’re the one it happens to, it won’t much matter that it is statistically rare. You made that kid; you owe your child the best launch into the world you can manage, and that means having adult money. Feeling really impatient and horny? Excellent—channel that energy into building the life you need; that’s the very first thing your sex drive is for.

B. Bad things happen when intimacy and commitment don’t match. If you get commitment too far ahead of intimacy, you’re a stalker. If you get intimacy too far ahead of commitment, you’re going to get really hurt. These two things are meant to go together, and intimacy within the shelter of that commitment is an entirely different experience than having sex in sales-and-marketing mode, trying to elicit commitment. (In a way, it’s analogous to the difference between doing good works because God graciously saved you versus trying to earn your salvation with your works.)

  1. Can we define “boundaries” before marriage without turning it into a legalistic checklist of “how far is too far”? What is your exact answer if your kid asks for it?

That’s a conversation to have, not a set of rules to give. I usually aim to elicit the boundaries from them rather than just give them an answer. (Depending on the kid. I’m not averse to just giving an instruction if they really need it, but it’s better if they think it through themselves.) If they understand what marriage is for, and what sex is for, and how sexual attraction is designed to work in the mating process, then it’s not that hard to reason out a set of guidelines that makes sense. 

“How far is too far?” is fundamentally the wrong question. It’s the question you ask when you’re chasing pleasure for its own sake, playing stupid games trying to stand as close to the edge of the cliff as you can without falling over. We’re not trying to just-barely-not-miss the target; we’re trying to hit the bullseye! There’s a better question to ask.

“What is my sexuality for?” is the right question. The goal is to deploy sexuality as a tool and enjoy it as God’s good gift without damaging each other in the process. We’re on a mission to take the world here, and sexuality is the mainspring of the whole enterprise. Once we’ve accepted that, we’re no longer preoccupied with how close to the line we can get without falling over. We’re pursuing the goal, and that’s a whole different conversation.

Once you’ve got the right question in front of you, it’s pretty obvious that if you don’t have a life and a marriage, but your hands are down somebody’s underpants, you took a wrong turn somewhere. If I need to get more directive at this point, I can, because now the “rules” aren’t a system to game, they’re just trail markers to let you know you need a course correction. If I need to: keep your clothes on. Keep your hands out of each other’s clothes and off each other’s genitals. Clothes notwithstanding, keep your genitals off each other too; until you’ve built a life and a marriage, you have better things to do than dry hump. This very minimal rule set is not in the Bible and I make no promises that if you keep them, you’re in the clear. NOT A CHANCE. No list of rules can do that; “if there had been a law that could have given life, truly righteousness would be through the Law.” That’s just not how it works. You have to reckon with God, and He knows your heart. Keep your heart in the right place, and you’ll be fine. Get sidetracked into pursuing momentary pleasure for its own sake, and I can’t help you no matter how many rules I give you. No amount of rules can save a wrongly directed heart.

  1. How do we address the “puberty gap”? What should a young person do with being biologically mature when marriage is still far (5-10-15 years) away? When the Bible was written in the Middle East, women often married at 12-16, which almost coincided with puberty—this meant something entirely different back then!

As much as you can, minimize the gap. In my community, we’re raising them to be ready to step into adulthood at 18, and marry soon after. The ridiculously protracted childhoods we visit on our children do them a lot of damage. When teenagers make big drama out of something stupid, it’s frequently because they’re emotionally capable of caring about big things, but we won’t let them have anything big and consequential to care about. A 14-year-old can have a business they run themselves with a little oversight (that’s late, actually). A 10-year-old can cook a meal for people that won’t eat tonight if he doesn’t get it done. Expect and empower them to do consequential things, and they will. Nice side benefit: having perspective cuts down on stupid drama.

In God’s good providence, we may have kids that marry older, and they’ll have to learn how to live a chaste single life long-term. They’re not alone; Isaac didn’t marry Rebekah until he was 40 (Gen. 25:20). We can’t control everything. But there’s no reason why a 25-year-old should be struggling with long-term chastity because the kid is just not marriageable. We can get them ready early, and we should. 

  1. How do we dismantle the “test-drive” argument? Is compatibility something you find or something you build?

No two sinful human beings are compatible, period. You build compatibility with patience, self-control, and care for each other. Your brains aren’t fully developed until you’re 25, so that’s another good reason to marry young—God designed us to grow together in our latter years of development. It’s easier to become compatible if you get married while the concrete is still wet.

The stats on “test driving” are actually not that encouraging, so that’s worth looking into as well.

  1. Our own marriage as a “silent teacher” of intimacy: how/what kind of example can we set for our children in this area through our own marriage?

Embody the distinction between private and secret. Your sexuality is private, shared between the two of you, but it is not secret. You have sex. You enjoy it. You are attracted to each other. We all know, and that’s ok. These things are not secrets, and you should not treat them like secrets. Struggling with what private-but-not-secret looks like? You poop. You do it in private. But it’s not a secret, and you’re not overly disturbed if someone happens to realize that you’re pooping right now, behind that door over there. In fact, for someone to be preoccupied with you pooping would be a sign of fairly serious immaturity. You poop discreetly, and intelligent, mature people discreetly leave you to your business. We all appreciate the same consideration from you; not everything needs to be a topic of preoccupation or conversation. Some things were made to be private.

You need not sneak about like adulterers in your own house. You’re living righteously in front of your kids; why would you model sneaking around? It’s ok for your kids to learn that if the bedroom door’s locked, they shouldn’t knock except in a real emergency. When they ask why, it’s ok to tell them “Mom and Dad need private time” and leave it at that (or however you choose to handle it). It’s ok for them to figure out what’s happening behind that door. It’s ok to teach them not to be preoccupied with it; don’t they have math homework to do or something? And those baseboards are starting to look pretty dirty…there’s an old toothbrush and a spray bottle under the kitchen sink….

What about you? How would you answer differently? What questions would you add to the list?

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Who Were the Nicolaitans?

3 March 2026

Reading the early chapters of Revelation, have you ever wondered who, exactly, the Nicolaitans were? So have a lot of other people. There’s not really an answer in the Bible itself.

Some people will try to tell you that it refers to a kind of clericalism. This is based entirely on etymology, dissecting the parts of the word. The theory goes that “Nicolaitans” comes from two Greek words: nikao, “to conquer,” and laos, “the people.” By this reasoning, the Nicolaitans aspired to be a clerical ruling class in the church seeking to control and subdue the people.

Among those who accept this definition, there’s quite a range of application. Some folks will use it to condemn Roman Catholic clericalism, but be fine with Baptist practice. At the other extreme, some folks will use it to condemn any hierarchy in the church at all. (They have to do some really fancy dancing in passages that talk about obeying your church authorities!) Of course, there’s a range of options in between, with various…let’s say interesting…embroideries on the theme. Some while ago, I encountered a guy who, in all seriousness, discouraged us from having a pastor, lest we fall into Nicolaitanism, and then volunteered to serve as our bishop so that we would have a “proper covering!” In practice, the working definition of Nicolaitanism is often “anybody who has more authority than I do.”

But this is all nonsense. Trying to reconstruct a whole belief system based only on the etymology of the group name is the equivalent of some archaeologist 2000 years hence claiming that the Rotary Club believed in reincarnation, based entirely on their name. It’s just not good evidence. For all we know, it was a cult of personality following a guy named Nicolas, with totally different heretical practices. There simply is no evidence that the Nicolaitans were clericalist, by whatever definition.

The best evidence we have is from the memory of the very early church. There turn out to be some records on this, and they don’t all agree with one another; that’s history for you. If you believe that George Washington, Ferdinand Magellan, and Julius Caesar were real people, this kind of evidence is why. Discernment and sober-mindedness are very much required, but this is a kind of evidence that honest people can work with. If you’d like to explore what our forbears remembered and wrote down, Dan Jennings was kind enough to collect a bunch of the early church references to the Nicolaitans. Enjoy.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

An Introduction to Romans

24 February 2026

A couple months ago, I had the opportunity to cover the introduction to the book of Romans in some detail. Enjoy!

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Posted by Tim Nichols

The Peach and the Turnip

17 February 2026

When you pick a peach and dig up a turnip, you have two very different things on your hands. Lots of people will eat a peach straight off the tree. There are few better ways to enjoy a peach, actually. Very few will pull a turnip out of the ground, rinse it off, and take a big bite standing right there in the garden. 

Turnips can be wonderful, but we have to be convinced. It takes a good recipe and a skilled cook to get us to fall in love. And even then, some people just don’t like turnips. It’s ok; we all understand. Even if we think “You haven’t had turnips until you’ve had Aunt Minnie’s famous maple-glazed basil turnip slaw,” we understand that some folks don’t like them.

Peaches, on the other hand…if it’s hard to improve on a peach straight off the tree, it’s also hard to ruin one. I made a pretty bad peach pie once—bad enough that I wouldn’t give it away—but I happily had a slice with breakfast every day until it was gone. You almost have to burn peaches to ruin them, and even then…I once didn’t stir a batch of peach jam enough, and burned the bottom. I transferred what I could save to another pot, tasted it, and discovering a pleasantly smoky flavor, added a little Laphroig to accent it. It was divine. Everything I’ve ever made with peaches, I’ve been happy to eat, even if I wouldn’t serve it to a guest. Literally everything.

And so it is with school subjects. Geometry is a turnip: delightful in its way, but getting most people to like it takes skilled preparation and presentation. History, though…history is a peach. Everybody loves a good story, and history is one long story, with lots of little vignettes and episodes embedded in it, all of them crafted by the best Storyteller to ever live. When someone doesn’t like history, it’s because they had a teacher that actively ruined it for them.

Unfortunately, the profession seems to be full of people who delight in doing exactly that.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

The “Higher Standard” is Bunk

10 February 2026

What does it mean when James says that teachers will face “a stricter judgment”? Most people interpret that to mean that teachers are held to a higher standard than “ordinary” Christians, but if you think about it a little bit, there are major problems with that idea.

First problem: the idea that there are two different moral standards in Christianity is fundamentally incoherent. Jesus is the standard; every Christian is called to be like Him. So if every Christian is already called to be like Jesus, who is the perfect moral standard, what is this allegedly higher standard teachers are supposed to reach? Or are we going the other way and saying that teachers really do have to be like Jesus, but “ordinary” Christians can slack a bit, and it’s ok?

Second problem: the idea that there are two different standards doesn’t really make sense in James. James’ own summary of the book is in 1:19-20: “So then, my beloved brethren, let every man be swift to hear, slow to speak, slow to wrath; for the wrath of man does not produce the righteousness of God.” The “swift to hear” section starts in 1:21 and runs through chapter 2. The “slow to speak” section is chapter 3. The “slow to wrath” section begins with chapter 4 and runs into 5.

All three of these sections lay out demands that James makes of “every man.” It does not seem coherent to say that the “slow to speak” section — a duty required of every man — turns around and says that some men have to meet a lower standard than others. But if it doesn’t mean that, what does it mean?

Notice that James doesn’t actually say that there’s a higher standard, either in other people’s eyes, or in God’s eyes. He says that teachers face a stricter judgment. What might “stricter judgment” mean, if not different standards? Well, perhaps we can see this more clearly by looking at how James himself explains his statement. What he does say is that the tongue is particularly difficult to control and particularly dangerous when it gets out of hand.

So “stricter judgment” in this context doesn’t mean two different standards. It means that teachers are called into an arena where failure is particularly likely and greatly consequential. A teacher’s job is to do neurosurgery on a guy who was just airlifted out of a 6-car pileup. This is not like being a pizza driver. When the neurosurgeon messes up, the patient dies, or maybe is damaged for life. When the pizza driver messes up, the pizza is a few minutes late — not good, as anybody who’s had to entertain a hungry crowd of 6-year-olds for an extra 10 minutes can attest — but nobody dies of it. Now, a pizza driver can also make a mistake that kills someone in the course of his work, and if he does, he’ll find that he’s held to the same standard as the neurosurgeon. But there’s a key difference: the pizza driver’s job is to avoid situations where someone could easily get killed; the neurosurgeon’s job is to get into situations where someone could easily get killed.

To put it a little more in James’ terms, the teacher’s job is to go into a California forest in the third straight year of drought and host a bonfire. There’s a lot that can go wrong, and when it does, as it sometimes will, we face judgment for it. Our judgment is stricter not because standards are higher, but because the stakes are. When we mess up, we damage people, sometimes for life. There’s a reckoning for that, and there should be.

Is this stricter judgment from men, or from God? Yes! As a teacher, I’ve certainly faced consequences from men when I’ve screwed up. No doubt there will be conversations on the last day as well.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

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