Having Something to Show

3 February 2026

Several years ago, a new friend asked why we don’t invest more heavily in worldview and apologetics training in our ministry. Initially, I was surprised, because I think we do invest quite a bit in those things. But what he meant was hosting weekend seminars on Critical Race Theory or how to prove Jesus rose from the dead. Great ideas, but not where we put our focus. Here’s my account of why we do it the way we do.

Clearly, the evangelical church has utterly failed our youth; the American church is losing them in droves. I agree that training in worldview and apologetics is absolutely essential, but at the same time I know plenty of people who’ve had that training and wandered away anyhow. I’d say there are a couple other necessary ingredients for the apologetics training to bear fruit.   

For instance, consider a guy like Russell Moore. He’s had those classes; he has all the access to apologetics resources you could ever want, and just look at him. On the other hand, remember Kim Davis, that county clerk from Kentucky who refused to issue marriage licenses once they told her that two men or two women could constitute a marriage? She was definitely not the articulate spokesperson we would wish for in a highly charged cultural debate, but she had courage enough to stand firm even when she didn’t know what to say. Kim Davis needs apologetics training, but teaching someone like her what to say is much easier than discipling someone like Moore out of his idolatrous lust to sit at the cool kids’ table. 

Apologetics is hard work, and well worthy of study. I’ve written a whole year of worldview and apologetics curriculum with that in mind, and I’ve taught the apologetics portion of that in multiple churches, schools, and other venues. But years of practical ministry have shown me that apologetics training is the last thing, not the foundation. Apologetics gives you good things to say, but it’s character – love for God and others – that moves you to step up and say them. Apologetics training only helps if you have the courage to stand up and speak to start with.

Part of growing that character is getting grounded in the Story of Our People, getting your loves and loyalties rightly ordered, and learning what to expect in this part of that Story.  I agree with you that there’s a lot of rough water between where we are now and the obvious, end-of-history winning, when Jesus breaks the pagan nations with a rod of iron. But I also think we need to grasp what winning looks like in the middle of the Story. There was a day when winning looked like God Himself being nailed to a cross by the very sinners He came to save. On another day, it looked like Stephen praying for his murderers; on another, they stoned Paul and left him for dead. This to say, God always leads us in triumph, but I don’t expect it to look good from the vantage point of the people who write headlines. They’re going to dance on our martyr graves – and we’ll still be winning.  We took Rome in three centuries, and they were killing us the whole time.

So we need to conduct ourselves like we’re winning, even as we expect to be persecuted, driven from the public square, deplatformed, marginalized, and even martyred. We proclaim the truth, and God uses it to confound the “wise ones” of this world, even as they do their worst to us. Our testimony is a powerful part of the total picture here: loving God, loving our neighbor, loving what is true, good, and beautiful. If our marriages are thriving while theirs are falling apart, if our children are healthy and whole while theirs are neurotic and desperate, if we live with purpose while they drift rootless–that’s very hard to argue with, even if they think they have arguments. Apologetics training helps us highlight those things to pagans who are programmed not to see them. But it’s all for nothing if we got nothing to show. 

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Putting the Puzzle Together

2 December 2025

One of the things that’s really striking about the North American church is its near-total lack of interest in what the Bible says about local church life and worship. The Bible doesn’t give us a specific order of service, tunes to sing, or a template for the church event calendar, but it does give us a series of instructions to obey and examples to follow. When we get all the puzzle pieces on the table at the same time, we learn quite a lot about what we ought to do. I recently had occasion to correspond with a fellow pastor on the topic, with a specific focus on the role of women in the local church. Here’s some of what came out:

Biblical Basics

1. Women are not forbidden to preach, but preaching is for the public square, not the church. (See https://theopolisinstitute.com/conversations/proclaim/ on this)

2. Women are explicitly encouraged to prophesy with their heads covered. (1 Cor. 11, 14:26,31)

3. Women with the pastoral gift should practice it in ways appropriate to their sex (see #5). Since “pastor” is not actually a title, using the word that way just creates confusion. (The Bible never says God only gives that gift to men, and explicitly calls women to teaching/shepherding functions in Titus 2:3-5.)

4. Women do not serve as elders; it’s a fatherly role. (1 Tim. 3:2//Titus 1:6, 1 Tim. 3:4-5)

5. Women are not allowed to teach or exercise authority (or judge prophecy; an exercise of authority) in the church service. (1 Tim. 2:12, 1 Cor. 14:34-35)

Problems with the way we currently do church

1. We don’t permit women to be pastors since it is seen as a subset of being an elder, but this means we often bar women from shepherding when the Bible does not. Or when women do exercise the gift of shepherding, we have to invent another category for it, lest we confuse it with being a “pastor.”

2. In strictly biblical terms, our typical Sunday morning “preaching” is actually a combination of teaching and prophecy exercised within the church. In conservative churches, women are usually barred from “preaching” since it is correctly seen as a teaching role, but as a consequence they are also barred from exercising their prophetic gifts within the church. Furthermore, since we wrongly define “preaching” as something for the church, rarely will anyone (man or woman) preach in the public square, which is a problem. Public proclamation is one of our basic responsibilities.

3. 1 Corinthians 11-14 allows women to do than your typical conservative church will allow because of the way we bundle functions together (especially with a single long sermon and no opportunity to share or exercise gifts in the service). It is natural for male leaders to feel this lack and try to find a way to mend it by making room for women to do more. The problem is, in most of our services, the only thing for them to do is give a sermon—which is typically heavy on authority and teaching, and so crosses the line.

Toward a solution

We don’t know everything we’d like to know about early church praxis, but if we trust in the sufficiency of biblical revelation, then we don’t need to. Where the Bible doesn’t specifically tell us what to do, we have liberty. That’s a feature, not a bug: God is giving us the responsibility to adapt to the needs and circumstances of our neighbors and communities. However, where God does give us specific instructions, we have the duty to submit to them, trusting that God really does know best. So for example, elders should be male because the Bible says so, but we need not meet in homes—even though we know they did—because the Bible doesn’t tell us that we have to. We’re free to meet in homes if we like, or build a building, or rent space somewhere.

Male eldership was directly commanded; plurality of elders was normal. We know there were deaconesses and prophetesses and church widows (likely a subset of deaconess). We know services were highly participatory (1 Cor. 12-14) and included the Lord’s Table (1 Cor. 11) and a meal, but the meal’s not commanded. We know services could include extended teaching (nobody thinks Eutychus died during a TED talk), but we don’t know that it was normal practice. In fact, from 1 Cor. 12-14, it seems that long-form teaching from a single speaker was not normal, at least not in the Corinthian church. “Pastor” was a spiritual gift in the early church, but whether it was a church office is highly debatable (probably the best argument is based on Eph. 4:11, but mostly the people who make that argument don’t apply the passage consistently). Given what we know for sure about church offices, we can confidently say that if pastor were an office in the early church, it certainly was not the modern office of pastor (=CEO). They were certainly singing the biblical psalms, and there’s good indication they were writing new songs (Paul quotes some of them in his letters). The NT tells us three times to be a psalm-singing people. The Psalms themselves tell us to sing a new song, so we need new songs to sing too. We know they devoted time to Scripture reading and prayer, and we know that prophetesses prophesied with their heads appropriately covered.

The modern church files virtually all of that under “descriptive, not prescriptive” and moves on to just do whatever it prefers. They rely on accrued tradition (although in most churches, those traditions are much younger than people think) or on marketing consultants that tell us what will sell. By contrast, we have long thought that we should take the biblical revelation more seriously than that. After 10+ years of brainstorming and development, covid presented us with a need to begin holding worship services…so we’re busily putting all that into practice as best we can.

At Christ the Anchor, we try to include all the elements commanded or modeled in Scripture. We sing the Psalms (Eph. 5:18-19, Col. 3:16). We have four long Scripture readings (Psalm, Old Testament, New Testament, and Gospel) totalling about 20 minutes (1 Tim. 4:13). Following the Scripture readings, an elder will deliver a brief (7-10 minute) homily, then open the floor for sharing and reflection (1 Cor. 14:26), wrapped up by an elder summing up what’s been said and correcting what needs correcting (1 Cor. 14:29-35). Then comes a time of prayer (again, open floor- 1 Timothy 2, 1 Corinthians 11:3-16) before moving into confession, passing of the peace (1 Peter 5:14), Eucharist (1 Cor. 11:17-34), and a meal (Acts 2:42).

In our church, women participate in the open forum (especially to exercise the gift of prophecy) and in prayer (1 Cor. 11:3-16, 14:24,31). As a matter of practice (not a Biblical requirement), to distinguish between the roles of men and women in the church, a man (as a representative of Christ) will read the Gospel, and an woman (as an image of the Bride) will lead the corporate prayers of the people.

There are more than a couple of kinks to work out, but as a baseline, this approach to our church service has allowed us to be strongly father/elder led while encouraging our women to step up to what Scripture calls them to do in the service.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

An Orphanage for Pastorlings

18 November 2025

Seminaries serve an important function: they train up leaders whose churches are simply not adequate to the task. This is the same function that orphanages serve. But we think ill of parents who—simply because orphanages exist that will take in their kid—decline to do the job themselves.

In today’s churches, we think it’s normal. Why?

It’s not because the Bible taught us to think so. The first-century church raised up its own leaders. “The things which you have heard from me among many witnesses, commit these to faithful men who will be able to teach others also” (2 Timothy 2:2). That verse was given to a man in church ministry. Today, you’ll find that verse all over seminary websites and literature, but Paul intended it to be obeyed in the context of the church.

It’s not that the New Testament is somehow opposed to academic preparation; it says nothing of the kind. But the New Testament knows nothing of “preparation for ministry” that is abstracted from the local church context, taking place outside the local church and away from the oversight of local church leaders. That’s not a thing in the New Testament—and for good reason.

Is our way better? Consider that the seminary is famously unable to prepare its students for the realities of practical ministry. “They don’t teach you that in seminary!” is a very common joke among seasoned ministers, but for the guys in their first couple years of ministry, it’s not funny.

Imagine walking up a nice suburban sidewalk, knowing that on the other side of the front door you’re about to knock on, there’s a young widow and three kids whose dad is never coming home. And they don’t know about it yet; you’re the one who’s going to tell them. And nobody ever taught you how to do it. Nobody even mentioned that you’d have to.

That’s a sign of pretty serious dysfunction. Seminary-trained pastors, answer me this: would you go to a doctor whose med school prepared him for practicing medicine as poorly as your seminary prepared you for ministry?

Why do seminaries fail so terribly? I think it’s pretty obvious. A seminary is two principal things: classroom and library. Naturally, it gravitates toward the things classrooms and libraries are good at. Doing the rough work of discipling people through the dust and mud of daily life, becoming a generalist in the varieties of human misery along the way—that doesn’t fit well into semesters. In most academic programs, you can’t even flunk someone for having weapons-grade empathy but no discernment or vice versa, no tolerance for disagreement among teammates, or other critical failures of personal development, and still less for lack of personal spiritual maturity. In other words, there’s a fairly obvious mismatch between the tools a classroom brings to bear and the task of preparing someone for ministry, and an even more obvious mismatch between what the classroom can assess and the needs of real practitioners.

You know what I find particularly maddening? As a culture we know exactly how to solve for that mismatch. In trades where practical know-how is everything, from electrician to doctor, we solve that problem reliably with a relatively simple formula. We use academic study to give the trainees sufficient background knowledge to get them started, and then put them into the field for supervised practical experience. Practical performance is graded, tests with meaningful feedback are frequent, and the trainee is expected to improve rapidly, because their future opportunities hang in the balance. We don’t let them practice independently until they’ve been through that gauntlet and prevailed.

And it works. Our electricians and our plumbers and our doctors graduate into their trade able to practice competently. What we do with our pastors, at this point, is analogous to putting a guy through the first two years of med school—the classroom part—and then sending him out to practice medicine with no support at all. We’ve no right to be surprised by the results.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Wanting vs. Needing

14 October 2025

What people need and what people want are frequently two different things. In ministry, the observation “That’s not what the sheep want” gets used to justify all kinds of defections. “I’d love to teach more Bible, but it’s not what the sheep want!” “I’d love to have more prayer in our church, but that’s not what the sheep want.” “I’d love to care more for the poor, but that’s not what the sheep want.”

The sad fact is, these things might be true. But it’s the shepherd’s job to lead the sheep where they need to go, not where they want to go. They have their own will and they get to make choices, but that doesn’t relieve us of our responsibilities. If they’re headed the wrong way, we chase them down and turn them toward what they actually need. If their desires are disordered, it’s our job to help them want the right things. Let’s get to work!

I have to admit, leading the sheep toward what they need is a lot harder than giving them what they want. Bright-eyed guys coming fresh out of seminary and hoping to just be good shepherds and make a living wage at it may well be disappointed, and it’s discouraging to see ear-ticklers prosper while good shepherds struggle. But remember Who we’re following: foxes have holes, etc. While there’s nothing wrong with making a paycheck in pastoral care, that’s a relative rarity across the sweep of history and cultures.

Even in our prosperous times, shepherding work is mostly not what churches pay for, at least in my experience. My pastor father was a great shepherd, in a place where they certainly had the means to pay him. He got paid for teaching Christian school and media distribution; the shepherding he did–which was a lot–he did on the side, for free. I once served a church for two years with the title “Pastor of Discipleship and Ministry Logistics” and got zero support for the discipleship side of things. Nobody above me on the org chart ever asked how discipleship was going — not my boss, not any of the elders, nobody. My spending request for curriculum (a whopping $60) was turned down; I ended up buying what I needed out of my own pocket. I got plenty of support and accountability around making sure the bulletin got done and we didn’t run out of copy paper, though. Part of the answer here is to adjust your expectations; churches, like sheep, don’t always want what they need. Helping them want what they need is the job.

That particular church is where I learned this lesson the hard way. They’d hired me because they knew they didn’t know how to disciple or shepherd. They wanted me to bring those skills to the church, and I did. I expected them to support me intelligently in the task. I look back at that now and think, “Well isn’t that cute!” Of course intelligent support is a reasonable thing to want, but it’s very naive to expect people that don’t understand your job to support you well. Of course they didn’t know how to support me, for the same reason that they needed to hire me in the first place — they didn’t understand discipling or shepherding! The wise course of action would have been to actively train the leadership in how to support my work. Instead, I was struggling to do my job in spite of them, and was therefore constantly frustrated at the lack of support. As I say, that was the place where I learned this lesson. Feel free to profit from my error: go thou, and do un-likewise.

But mostly, that’s not a problem shepherds have. Most of the shepherds in Christ’s flock, most of the time, support themselves. Even Paul did, sometimes — if he’s not too good to make tents, who are we to balk at it? I can tell you, self-supporting ministry comes with a certain kind of freedom. If you’re self-supporting and you have a small network of godly men who will provide wisdom and accountability for your work, you don’t need anybody else’s approval. Just go forth and shepherd, and be glad you have the time to do so! During a big chunk of that two-year stint I mentioned above, I was tracking my time in 15-minute increments. Since I found the practice helpful, I continued it for a while after I left that position. Fun fact: in the weeks after I left, I spent *more* time shepherding than I had when I was on a church payroll, ostensibly being paid to shepherd and make disciples. Fewer distractions, you see. No marathon staff meetings. No copy paper to order. No bulletins to make. Just people who needed pastoral care. So I cared for them.

Effectiveness comes from focus. Focus is mainly about what we don’t do.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Why Church?

23 September 2025

An acquaintance recently posted this meme:

This is a seriously dumb stance to take. It’s not an either/or thing.

But — whoever wrote the meme — let’s give him his due. I understand why church attendance feels irrelevant to a lot of people. For too many of us, church is Christian karaoke, a TED talk, and lying about how great your week was over bad coffee and stale donuts in the foyer. We don’t see those people in between Sundays, and in bigger churches, we won’t see the same people week to week even on Sunday. It’s not hard to see why that seems irrelevant.

That is irrelevant. But that’s not what church actually is.

So get a better church. Start obeying what the Bible says to do when we’re together: use your gifts to edify one another (1 Cor. 12-14), sing the Psalms to one another (Eph. 5:18-21//Col. 3:16), do good to one another and share (Gal. 6:10, Heb. 13:15-16). Can’t find a church like that? Don’t worry about it — find yourself a couple other believers who also want to obey these commands together. Get together and support one another. See where it goes.

A gathering like that isn’t irrelevant to your impact on the world; it’s where you get patched up from last week and armored up to go out into spiritual battle this week. It’s where you find answers and moral support for the hard things you face. It’s the people who pray for you when you’re headed into something tough; the people who show up at your door with a big pot of chicken soup when you’re sick; the people who will give you a ride home from the hospital after an outpatient surgery.

You need these people. If you don’t have them, you’re missing one of the great blessings of the Christian life. And not to put too fine a point on it, you’re disobeying one of the basic commands in the Christian life (Heb. 10:24-25).

Now if you’re one of four guys posted to a radar station in the Aleutians, and you’re the only Christian, then it’s not your fault you don’t have fellowship. You’ve been providentially prevented, and that’s on God. He’ll see you through it; take your time in the Cave of Adullam and turn a profit on it as best you can. But let’s be honest, that’s not most people.

Most Christians don’t have fellowship because they aren’t seeking it. They aren’t even trying to obey the instructions God clearly gave. If that’s you, there’s no better time to start obeying. Find yourself a few people and get to it!

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Posted by Tim Nichols

The Glories of a Good Corn Dog

13 September 2025

My latest Theopolis post, “The Glories of a Good Corn Dog,” went up this week. Enjoy!

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Posted by Tim Nichols

How Important is Theology?

8 July 2025

I was corresponding with a fella about practical ministry and seeking Christian fellowship. In passing, he asserted that soteriology is really the heart of it all. I had an intense, visceral reaction to that line, and it made me stop and interrogate it. Soteriology really is important, after all. Different Christians focus on different aspects of theology, and that’s as it should be; if soteriology is his focus, why is that bothering me so much?

Upon reflection, here’s where I’m coming from: Soteriology is not the heart of it all. Jesus Himself is the heart of it all, which I hope is what he meant, but the language matters here, so bear with me in a little folly! The distinction is not trivial: soteriology is an ever-more-detailed set of ideas and convictions; Jesus is a Person. People who prioritize Jesus will work at getting along with other people who prioritize Jesus; they find ways to handle their differences charitably for the sake of serving their mutual Friend and realizing His righteousness in the world. People who prioritize soteriology will turn on their fellow believers over a series of ever-smaller distinctions, all the while congratulating themselves loudly on their keen discernment. I could name names here — I certainly have some in mind — but what for? You can probably think of your own examples, and if you’d recognize the names I would mention, then you can see what I’m talking about anyway. The temptations may be subtle in the moment, but the results are visible from orbit.

I’m easy friends with people who put Jesus at the heart of it all. Whatever their foibles, I got mine too, and we get along all right. Folks who put soteriology at the heart of it all, on the other hand…no. Not even if we agree on the soteriology. They need to repent, hard. I pray that they do. If they won’t, then they can’t backstab their way into irrelevance fast enough to suit me, and I certainly don’t wanna be standing within reach while they do it.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

The Anatomy of Apostasy

1 July 2025

When someone has–as far as we can tell–come into the faith, but then walked away again, it can be hard to tell exactly what happened. Three things are possible:

1) This person was hanging out with us, being a social chameleon to ‘try on’ Christianity, and never believed any of it. That’s certainly possible–it’s been a time-honored way to access a Christian dating pool, for example. (It’s also a little dangerous; people who start out like this have a way of meeting Jesus if they hang out for long enough.)

2) This person did not understand the gospel and was trying to work their way into being a Christian. Your group may present the gospel clearly, but as every preacher knows, people hear very selectively, and it can be hard to overcome their prior programming. The ‘folk Christian’ idea that good boys go to heaven and bad boys go to hell is very, very strong, and some people will hear absolutely everything you say through that filter. These folks leave because nobody can actually live the life they’re trying to live. They’re exhausted — of course they are! — and they don’t want to keep up the pretense anymore. Who could blame them?

3) This person understood and believed the gospel, and then left the faith for whatever reason. Often this is because Scripture told them a hard truth they didn’t want to hear. Sometimes it’s a costly moral demand, and they’d rather retreat from the faith than grow into obedience. For more status-conscious people, it’s often a realization of just how much their faith — if they take it seriously — will separate them from the cool kids. For prophetically gifted people, it’s often a preference for demonic lies over the hard truths of the Spirit. But then, sometimes it’s none of those things. Sometimes it’s exhaustion from faithfulness, as the readers of Hebrews were experiencing.

Happily, we don’t actually have to know which of these things happened to know what to do. Where this person belongs is back in the fold, walking with Jesus. No matter whether that will be a prodigal son returning or a fake believer becoming a real one, we preach the gospel to them and the goodness of God that calls them to repentance. Paul preached the gospel to the Romans (Rom.1:1-17) even when they were faithful. We can certainly preach it to the faithless, confident that it’s what they need to hear.

If it turns out this person actually grasped the gospel all along, great! This is an opportunity to help them see how the same truths they’ve already grasped work out in daily life. For MANY Christians, their honest answer to Paul’s question in Gal. 3:3 (“Having begun in the Spirit, are you now being made perfect by the flesh?”) would be “Yes, of course! How else would you do it?”

Anytime someone says “I just couldn’t do it anymore,” I always ask them what it was they were doing that they could no longer stand to do. Because, mark it down, they didn’t get sick of all the Spirit-produced love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, faithfulness, and self-control that was overflowing in their life, and wish instead for hatred, misery, conflict, short-temper, cruelty, evil, coarseness, betrayal, and impulsiveness.

But something happened. Listen. Find out what, if you can. But even if you never figure out what happened, bring them to Jesus. That’s always the answer.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

A Wish List

24 June 2025

I’d like to commend to your attention Peter Leithart’s Wish List for a reformational catholicism. I think it’s worth contemplating in some depth. Ask yourself, as you read each item on the list: if God gave us this, would we be better off than we are now? Are there reasons why we don’t want this? What are they? Would those costs outweigh the benefits?

(Full disclosure: I’d make a few edits to the list, myself. But only a few.)

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Posted by Tim Nichols

So You Don’t Quit

10 June 2025

Really grasping the doctrine of heavenly rewards is an important tidbit in the Christian life. I’ve noticed that some people really like to believe in some version of a democratic socialist heaven, where everybody is rewarded the same regardless. The notion of different rewards for different investments of devotion and service really offends them. But the Bible speaks of this regularly, so it would behoove us all to get our heads around it. (See the Personal Eschatology section of my Free Grace Theology page for a little more on this.)

Once you’ve grasped the idea, though, there are still some pitfalls to avoid. One of them is developing a calculator mentality, where you’re constantly keeping score in your head, thinking about all the heavenly rewards you’re racking up. Jesus does encourage us to lay up treasures in heaven “where moth and rust do not corrupt, and where thieves do not break in and steal,” but He discourages keeping score. When Peter asked Him “What do we get for all we’ve left behind to follow you?” Jesus told the parable of the workers in the vineyard, a tale wherein nobody gets cheated, but a lot of folks get surprised.

Another pitfall is to keep score in the opposite direction: constantly mindful of your sins, failures, missed opportunities, and keeping track of all the reward you’re losing as a result. Obviously, that’s a miserable way to live.

So what are we to do with this doctrine, once we grasp it?

Use it to fuel the mission, that’s what. God didn’t put you on earth so you could daydream about heavenly rewards, or so you could be paralyzed by the thought of losing them. God put you on earth for a purpose. Focus on the purpose. If you’re driving to a friend’s birthday party and you want to actually get there, you don’t daydream about how good the party’s going to be, nor do you spend all your time staring at the ditch you don’t want to accidentally drive into. You keep your eyes on the road, right? Now obviously, you’re motivated by the party; that’s why you’re driving there to start with. But on the trip, you focus on the task at hand.

Be about the mission. God in Christ is reconciling the world (that means you, too!) to Himself, and has committed to us the ministry of reconciliation. Quit thinking about the hoard of goodies that awaits you in heaven, and focus on helping the people around you become fully reconciled to God, whether that means leading unbelievers to Christ or helping believers grow in maturity or helping unbelievers inch their way closer to the cross, even if they’re not going to convert this year. Or just being the hands and feet of Jesus to the people who are around you, loving the hurt and lost and broken because God loves them, whether they love Him or not. You don’t need some higher purpose to feed a hungry man or dress a homeless woman’s foot wound; it’s enough that this person is the image of God and He loves them. Love them. (Wear gloves when you dress the wound; I’m not saying you should be stupid!)

When you join in the dirty, dangerous, soul-harrowing work of being present to the people God loves (that would be all of them), the doctrine of rewards will help you — not because you’re keeping some kind of running tally in your head, but because the work is hard, and the results are not always visible. It gets discouraging. I tell my disciples “If you don’t wanna quit every couple months, you’re probably not playing hard enough.” Sometimes it’s really helpful to remind yourself that every good thing you do, every ziploc bag of Clif bars and tampons you give away, every wound you dress, every ounce of love and attention you share — none of it is for nothing. God is telling a magnificent story; you get to be part of it. Every little detail matters; He isn’t wasting any of it. Everything you do is seen in the halls of heaven, and you have never given so much as a cup of water unnoticed — you’ll see a reward for that some day.

You don’t reflect on that so you can rub your hands together like Scrooge McDuck; you reflect on that so you don’t quit.

  • When an angry girl throws her entire plate of food across the room because you won’t give her a second cinnamon roll, you don’t quit.
  • When you have to turn a haggard man with holes in his shoes out into 10-degree snowy weather because your shelter is out of space, you don’t quit.
  • When a guy you loved and counseled gets his life turned around, then relapses and dies of an overdose, you don’t quit.
  • When the lady you just fed turns around and chucks a hammer through your window for some meth-induced reason, you don’t quit.
  • When a dear friend drinks herself to death rather than face the hard work of healing, you don’t quit.

You remind yourself that God never wastes anything, that everything good, even if it “failed” as far as we can see, is rewarded. You shrug off your crippling self-pity, get your head back in the game, and love the next person God puts in front of you. God in Christ is reconciling the world to Himself, and He has committed to us the ministry of reconciliation. (And by the way, none of the examples above are invented, and I still feed the lady with the hammer. Had a good little conversation with her just last Saturday, in fact. God brings some rewards here, too, if we have eyes to see.)

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Posted by Tim Nichols

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