In the Company of Badasses

6 May 2025

One of my daughters sent me Aaron Renn’s interview with David Murrow a while back. The subject of the interview is “Why Men Hate Going to Church,” which is also Murrow’s book title. There’s a lot to unpack there, and I encourage you to listen to it, but one particular thing jumped out at both of us: safety.

Murrow talks about how virtually every Christian radio station has a tagline that’s something like “listening that’s safe for the whole family,” which is obviously designed to appeal to Christian moms. That makes good business sense for the stations, since mom is the one who decides what to listen to in the car. Murrow points out that at the same time Mom is getting her safe listening option, little Johnny in the back of the minivan is getting catechized that Christianity is the safe option that appeals to his mom. By age 11 or so, testosterone is flooding his body and he’s looking for danger and adventure and the opportunity for hijinks…and we’ve spent his whole life teaching him that Christianity is safe. Then we wonder why he’s turned away!

My daughter is a teacher and youth minister, so kids abandoning the faith is something of a preoccupation for her, as it should be. “You were raised on Christian music,” she said to me. “How did you avoid this trap?”

As it happens, part of the answer is that I wasn’t really raised on Christian music the way she was thinking, not like Murrow is talking about. I grew up on a lot of old music: everything from old cowboy songs to bluegrass to classical to native American chants recorded on the reservations to the soundtracks of Victory at Sea and Hatari! (Yes, on vinyl, but not because it was cool; it was just all we had.) Contemporary Christian music wasn’t really in the mix much at home, although I certainly heard plenty of it at church.

But there’s a much more significant answer: I grew up around people on mission. I never thought Christianity was safe.

My parents weren’t missionaries (although they tried, to the point of attending candidate school once upon a time). My pastor wasn’t a missionary either, but he’d tried, hard. After getting rejected by around 30 mission boards, he concluded that the Lord was telling him to stay stateside, and accepted a pastorate. My pastor’s brother, however, founded a little mission agency called World Evangelical Outreach. WEO (pronounced “wee-oh”) was headquartered in my hometown, first on the church grounds and then in the same little office building as my dentist. I still remember walking into the office and hearing the secretaries answer the phone “Wee-oh, how can I help you?” (Later on they changed their name and moved to a bigger location, then ultimately to a KOA property outside Orlando. You would know them today as Pioneers International. They’re, ah, a little bigger these days.) A lot of their missionaries passed through our church, along with others with New Tribes, Sudan Interior Mission, Arctic Missions, China Inland Mission, Baptist Mid-Missions, Greater Europe Mission, Missionary Aviation Fellowship, and many more.

These people were not safe; they were badasses. Men who smuggled Bibles into Communist countries and evangelized whole villages on their way back out, who made contact with reclusive tribes in deep jungle, seeking to save them from extermination by loggers and oil workers, who spent nights on an Albanian warehouse roof with an AK-47 to protect the winter’s food supply for an orphanage, who flew in and out of tiny jungle airstrips to get someone to life-saving medical care. Women who saved abandoned twins in sub-Saharan Africa, brought girls out of sexual slavery in Saigon, defied apartheid to bring the gospel into villages that would never otherwise hear. Couples who travelled the Sahara together to find nomadic Tuareg camps, built houses in the New Guinea highlands to bring medicine, literacy, and Jesus to remote villages, ate and shared Jesus with Hezbollah fighters, their wives, and their children.

Of course we didn’t stay stuck in our own century either: we read tons of missionary biographies and all kinds of Christian history, too. I learned about Mary Slessor, David Livingston, Amy Carmichael, Corrie Ten Boom, Brother Andrew, John Wyclif, William Tyndale, Polycarp, the Forty Soldiers. So as I write these paragraphs, I have names and grainy photographs and artists’ renditions in my head for some, but I also have memories of men and women around my dinner table. One of them taught me how to play dominos; I showed another how my Transformer worked; a third explained to me how he lost his ring finger. The stories from centuries ago are real to me, part of an unbroken legacy that stretches from the Old Testament prophets through Jesus and the apostles and right on down to the guy sitting next to me at the kitchen table, asking me to pass another of Mom’s sourdough muffins (which are in fact delicious).

Some of them came back every four or five years to tell us how things were going. Some of them came back on medical evac flights. Some of them came back on medical evac flights and then went back again, and again, and again. (Ralph and Maridee Sauers, I’m looking at you.) Some of them didn’t come back at all; we’ll see them again in glory.

Obviously their Christianity wasn’t the safe, Mom-approved path. It was the biggest adventure in the world, far superior even to joining the Peace Corps or the military (which some of them had also done, before). Tourist travel was childish and self-indulgent by comparison — not even in the same league. For the longest time, I thought I was going to join them overseas. I did short-term hitches doing child evangelism in Spain, a building project in Trinidad & Tobago, teaching English and computer skills in central Russia. Closer to home, I served on street evangelism teams in the Atlantic Provinces of Canada, various locations in metro DC, and a series of places in the southeastern US, especially Florida. I knew that God could call me anywhere, and I was ready to go!

Imagine my surprise when He called me to California, of all places. We had a long argument about that, and I lost. After all, I did tell Him I would go anywhere! So I went. After I finished seminary, He took me into the desert for six years, and from there to the heathen wilds of Denver, where I’ve been ever since. I’ve been overseas, training pastors in Australia and such, but it seems likely that the majority of my calling is stateside.

These folks’ legacy of following Jesus anywhere He leads has informed my decisions my whole life, is with me today, and I’m pleased to pass it on in turn to my students, my daughters, my disciples. There’s another little kid I ate with last week, and I’m the guy at his kitchen table, asking him to pass another muffin while he shows me his Lego model. (And because God’s fun like that, his name is Timothy too. Wild.)

I’m not surprised when God calls me somewhere surprising, if I may put it that way. The darker the corner, the more it needs light. Some of the corners have been pretty dark, but that’s another post. The point for today is, your kids don’t need more vapid CCM; they need time with Christians doing dangerous things for Jesus.

Comments Off on In the Company of Badasses | Autobiography, Love of Generous Fruitfulness, Mentoring/Disciple-Making, New Fundamentals | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

On Becoming a Mentor

1 April 2025

In Part 1 of this series, we considered finding a mentor. Now, let’s talk about the other half of the equation: finding an apprentice.

Lack of mentorship is of the biggest problems the West faces today, in and out of the Church. The Boomers as a generation shrugged off mentoring. When they were young, they were famous for saying “Never trust anybody over 30.” (I think it was Joe Queenan who observed that as they aged, they have done their part to ensure that it remains good advice!) As a result most of them were never mentored themselves, and then didn’t know how to mentor when it was their turn to give back. Mostly, they assumed every generation behind them would want to be neglected, which explains most of what you need to know about how Gen X was parented. This assumption was highly convenient for the Boomers, who as a generation were focused on enjoying life and couldn’t be bothered with the inconveniences of legacy. (Yeah, I know, not all of them. But a critical mass, easily enough to create a crisis of mentorship.)

But let’s assume, Gentle Reader, that you’re willing to embrace the hard work of mentoring. Probably the most common question I get from would-be mentors is, “Where did your apprentices come from? Where do you find these people?” Here’s what you need to know about that.

(1) They’re everywhere. People are desperate for what a mentor can provide, young adults especially. I can almost guarantee that you talked with someone I’d consider a candidate in the last couple days. It’s not about where you look, it’s about how you look. You need to learn to see what’s in front of you.

(2) Mostly they don’t walk up and ask for mentoring. But they definitely signal need:

  • “I guess I don’t really have a dad.”
  • “It must have been great to have had someone to show you how to do these things.”
  • “I just don’t understand those people!”
  • “I don’t really know what else to do.”

In a hundred little ways, people signal that they need what mentoring can provide, and that they are aware of the need. They often don’t know that mentoring can meet that need, but they have something going on where they’d be happy to hear “I think I might be able to help with that.” That’s where it starts. Don’t wait to be asked; go fishing for men!

3) Since you’re not waiting to be asked, you’re going to do some work up front. You know the white-bearded master that pupils climb a mountain to find? Being that guy is a cool little fantasy, but most of the time that’s what it is–a fantasy. In real life, they’ll show you a need, and you’ll respond with blessing and service, demonstrating that you can help meet that need, and that there’s more where that solution came from. They might jump over hurdles later after you’ve demonstrated what you can offer as a mentor, but they aren’t going to do it to start with. Expect to be generous with your time, money, effort, attention. If you’re not willing to do that, you shouldn’t be mentoring.

3b) One of the other common things I hear is “I’m investing everywhere I can, but nobody’s taking my advice!” If you’re having that problem, reconsider the nature of your investment. Invest your gratitude, your praise, your effort, your connections, your money. If there is anything virtuous, if there is anything praiseworthy, invest in it! Bless what can be blessed. If you can’t see what’s good, nobody will listen to you about what needs correcting, and nobody should. Quit pontificating and do some actual work.

4) The most straightforward way to “fish for men” is to make the initial overture and invest in the people around you, and then pay attention to what happens next. Most people won’t reward the investment. That’s fine; plenty of people didn’t reward Jesus’ investment either. Think “Parable of the Sower” here: some never start, some are drawn away by shiny objects, some quit when it gets hard, but some pay off –some just okay, some well, and some handsomely. But none of that happens if you don’t sow the seed. Start the ball rolling. Notice the need and do something about it; at least make an offer. When you see a return, invest more, and let the relationship grow organically from there.

When that works, congratulations! You’re a mentor. How do you do it well? Stay tuned.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Can We Afford It?

20 November 2024

Treating someone graciously is a form of generosity. As with all forms of generosity, graciousness is greatly cramped when we don’t think we can afford it. This is true whether we can actually afford it or not.

Say we have a single mother in the church who asks one of the men in the church to come look at her tires. It seems to her that something’s wrong, she says. He goes out into the parking lot, and the tire has a great big bulge in the sidewall.

“I don’t get paid until Friday,” she says, “and I have to pay rent out of that. Do you think it can wait until I get paid again in two weeks?”

No, it cannot. Now suppose as they’re talking about how she really shouldn’t delay replacing the tire, another fellow walks over and also takes a look. He agrees with the first guy that the tire should be replaced immediately.

Now suppose that one of these guys has $30,000 in the bank and no pressing need for it, while the other has $700 to his name, and his own rent payment looming at the end of the week. Which one of these guys is going to help this lady pay for tires?

You’d be tempted to say that of course the first guy will do it, but if you’ve been around people a little, you know better than to be so sure. We’ve all known people with tens of thousands of dollars who didn’t think they could afford to part with ten bucks, and we’ve all known people with only a few hundred who would buy you lunch if you looked hungry. Generosity does not depend only on some objective measure of what you can afford. Generosity depends on what you believe you can afford.

The guy with a few hundred bucks to his name, who goes and buys the lady’s tires? He believes that God has been good to him. He believes that God has given him everything he has, and everything he has is therefore at God’s disposal. He believes that God put him here to help take care of the tires, and that God knows the rent is due at the end of the week, and He will take care of it. He knows himself to be living in the lap of God’s largesse; why would he struggle to share? “You can’t outgive God!” he’ll say. Or “I shovel it out, and God shovels it in, and He’s got the bigger shovel.”

I’ve known a bunch of guys like that over the years; had occasion to be one now and again. Let me tell ya: it’s a lot of fun giving God’s money to people who need it! You maybe feel a little dumb come Friday afternoon and you’re still not sure how the rent gets paid, but you know what? I’ve seen God come through over and over and over again. (Standard disclaimer: It’s possible to overdo giving just like it’s possible to overdo anything else. I’m not saying you should just be a moron with your money; I’m saying you should be generally wise, and also know that at any given moment, God might call you to do something that looks really foolish. He gets to do that; everything you have is His. When He does, know that He’s got your back, and He’s good for it.)

To return to the observation I began this post with, it’s not just money. I digressed into money because money is easy to talk about, but you can be generous (or not) with any resource you have. It might be your time, your effort, your expertise. It might be a little space on your web server, or a little space in your garage for someone to store a couple boxes. It might be a late-night run out to the airport to pick up an old friend’s stranded kid, and another run back out there in the morning to get the kid on the next flight out. It might be your sympathy. It might mean showing grace to someone who–this being the meaning of grace–doesn’t deserve a bit of it.

In any of these cases, the key to generosity is the belief that you can afford it, and that, in turn, depends on your gratitude for what God has given you. This is particularly the case with showing sympathy, moral grace.

People who feel a need to signal virtue, people whose virtue is brittle, shallow, only skin-deep, can’t afford to be generous. It would endanger their fragile bona fides. They need to be hard on others, critical, scathing even, lest somebody begin to wonder if they themselves are somehow soft on that particular sin. When you’re about the impossible task of establishing your own righteousness, there’s no audience too small or occasion too petty.

Go thou, and do un-likewise. But this is not something you’re likely to be able to fake, or to muscle through as a raw exercise in self-control. You should be a deep and genuine conduit of God’s grace, and that means you need to become grateful for God’s grace to you. So begin to meditate on God’s grace to you. If you need a place to start, you could do worse than Ephesians 2:1-10. Let’s get about it.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

The Pooping Goes Mobile

24 October 2023

The human duty to love fruitfulness goes all the way back to Genesis 1, and presents having children as the prototypical act of fruitfulness. Every part of having children is messy, from the lovemaking that leads to conception, to the morning sickness that follows, to the birth. Then there’s a lot of spitting up, even more pooping, and before long, the pooping goes mobile!

Believe it or not, that’s still the simple part — the messes keep getting harder, more complex, more consequential. The first leaky diaper feels like a catastrophe at the time, but it’s nothing compared to the first E.R. visit, first break-up, first car accident. In the end you launch a new adult into the world.

No part of this process is clean and efficient. It’s long, grueling, labor-intensive to the point of comedy. It teaches us how fruitfulness works. You can’t be afraid of hard work. You can’t be afraid of looking ridiculous. And above all, you certainly can’t be afraid of making a mess.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

No Coffee in Israel

14 March 2023

My latest article is up at Theopolis. Have a look!

Comments Off on No Coffee in Israel | Ecclesiology, Love of Generous Fruitfulness, Mentoring/Disciple-Making, New Fundamentals | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

Crypto-Buddhist Christians

23 August 2022

I think of myself as having grown up on the slightly fundamentalist side of normie Evangelicalism, which is true as far as it goes, but I also grew up in a strongly renunciate household. My parents regularly told stories of praying fervently for some particular result, and continuing in prayer for weeks until they reached a point of surrender at which they said “Fine, Lord, I leave it in Your hands entirely. Whatever You choose to do is fine with me” — at which point, the prayers would finally be answered.

Now, those stories were true. This is a thing that God actually did. It was a running theme in both my parents’ lives, and there’s a good lesson to be had here. But the lesson I learned from those stories was seriously unbalanced.

The point — so I thought — was to extinguish my own desires as fast as possible, so that God could work in whatever way He chose. And you know what? Sometimes, that’s exactly what needs to happen. It is entirely possible for me to want my own way so hard that I can’t (or won’t) see what God is really doing. But there’s more to it than that.

I was raised to see God as the boss, and His will as more important than my own — and that’s true, as far as it goes. I was missing the goodness of God, and the goodness of His creation. When I ask God to heal someone, I am asking for a good thing. I’m supposed to want that. When I ask God for the funds to pay a bill, or the wisdom to navigate a sticky relationship, or to save someone’s marriage, these are all good things. There may be a mismatch between God’s timing and mine, or what God wants to do may look different from the picture in my head, but that doesn’t change the goodness of the thing I’m asking for.

There’s a kind of crypto-Buddhist strain of thought that a really good Christian eradicates all desire. We’re typically very selective about where we apply this line of thinking, but in recent years it often rears its ugly head in the guise of accusations about “idolatry of marriage” and “idolatry of family.” These accusations generally come from barren couples, or single folk who object to the way the church centers and normalizes fruitful marriage and family as over against their (sometimes involuntary, but all too often chosen) lifestyle.

We wanted children and weren’t able, so I’m going to speak concretely in those terms. Anybody can turn anything into an idol, and that can be a real concern, but I don’t think that’s what we’re seeing here. What we’re seeing here is a revolt against the way God made the world. Children are a good gift from a good God, and barrenness is an affliction. That is objectively true. “Be fruitful and multiply” is not a suggestion; it is a command, and even a cursory grasp of biology demonstrates that producing children is a major purpose — if not the purpose — of sex.

“But what if we don’t want children?” Doesn’t matter. If you cut off your own foot (rather than, say, losing your foot in an accident), you are just as lame, and lameness is still an affliction. Likewise, if the barrenness is self-inflicted, it is still an affliction. Legs are meant to have feet on them, and a penis and a vagina are meant to meet up and make babies, and designed to do so in a way that’s a lot of fun. These are objective realities that God made; they can’t be wished away by reframing them in the context of our own fallible desires.

So barrenness is like vertigo — if you have it, you ought to seek to rid yourself of it as quickly as possible, and by all lawful means. If it turns out that you can’t, you will have to find a way to live fruitfully despite the debility, but nobody needs to pretend that it’s somehow a good thing. You must submit yourself to God’s Providence, but eradicating your desires is a poor substitute for submission to your Father.

It is not only lawful, it is normal and healthy, to want the good things that God made. We aren’t supposed to be in the business of extinguishing our desires for good things. Buddhism is just wrong about this; desire is not the root of all suffering. Sin is the root of all suffering. The world is broken, and we sometimes have to make our peace with the way, in God’s Providence, that brokenness hurts us.

And so we trust God. We ask Him to end the affliction, and we keep asking, unless, as with Paul, God tells us to stop. And we don’t criticize the people who have — and love — the things that we lack. It is not idolatry to love God’s good gifts. It is idolatry to elevate our own perspective above the objective realities God made.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Not Automatic

2 August 2022

In conversation with a young female friend about how the church handles conversations on modesty, we stumbled on something interesting.

Men need female attention; women need male attention. “Need” is actually the right word here — God made us for relationship, and we actually do need each other. When a young woman’s father has not been doing his job well, and she then she hits puberty, that’s a recipe for disaster. Suddenly, she’s getting male attention she never got before. It feels like water in the desert, and it doesn’t take her long to figure out how to dress to get more of that sort of attention.

Now, normally in the church, we want to say something to her like “You don’t need to do that.” Here’s the thing: for a lot of these girls, that’s just not true.

If she’s been neglected by her father and the other men in her life, if no one has taken the time to nurture her talents and abilities, then her legitimate needs have gone unmet. She’s spent her whole life hungry for male attention. The only reason she’s getting it now is her body, and she knows it. Of course, in the abstract it’s certainly true that a young woman could get a better class of attention through musical talent, intellectual prowess, writing well, athletic achievement, and countless other ways. But the thing is, none of those things come automatically, and if no one has taken the time to nurture her talents, then not only does she lack those skills, she doesn’t know how to develop them. Meanwhile — pardon me putting it crudely — she got her hips and her boobs for free, and that’s getting her the attention she never got before.

In her experience, she does need to flaunt her body. As far as she knows, that’s all she’s got.

If we know better — and we do! — then the path forward is not to shame her for using what she’s got. Scolding that girl about her necklines is not going to get her where she needs to go. We know that she’s handcrafted in the image of God, shaped with God’s purposes in mind. Even if nobody knows what her talents are, we know they’re in there. What if we just decline to notice her neckline, look her in the eye, and focus our attention on her talents, her achievements, her growth as a human being? Maybe, if we can give her a better class of attention focused in the right direction, she’ll find she likes that attention better. We aren’t likely to succeed at getting her to give up the wrong kind of attention if we offer nothing in return.

2 Comments | Equality and Difference of Man and Woman, Kingdom of God, Love of Generous Fruitfulness | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

Post-Industrial Revolution Ecclesiology

4 January 2022

One of the great tensions in the 21st-Century church is the place of business operations. The vast majority of churches – especially large churches – run as corporations. Many leaders have objected to the trend. John Piper published a book for pastors titled Brothers, We Are Not Professionals. Mike Breen regularly comments on how the saints of future centuries will look back in bemused wonder that anyone ever thought it was a good idea to run a church like a business. Darvin Wallis does a particularly good job of showcasing the flaws of taking our leadership lessons from the business world. But so what?

Nobody’s listening. While the occasional dissident complains, the juggernaut keeps moving. The pragmatists among us simply keep feeding the beast, tending to the needs of the business. There’s a budget, a mortgage, utilities to pay, payroll to meet every month, big events, and more. The show goes on. Nobody’s going to stop treating the church like a business without some sort of viable alternative.

There is one. A different model to steer by, and it’s been sitting in the pages of the Bible the whole time. In Ephesians 3, Paul describes the church as the household of God.

You’re probably thinking, “So what?”

The modern household has fallen so far from what it was in the first century that it barely even registers as a category. We think “household” is a synonym for “family.” It’s not.

Our modern households are pits of consumption and consumer debt that don’t really produce anything or have any particular purpose, other than as holding pens for human beings when we’re not doing something productive. Naturally, in seeking to run productive churches, we’ve looked elsewhere for a model, and – surprise, surprise – ended up looking to business, with all the problems that entails. 

The first-century household, by contrast, was a center of production. Take Peter’s household, for example. He ran a commercial fishing concern, and the whole family would be involved — from gardening to tending the little children to mending nets to preparing the fish for market, everyone would have work to do. The household produced food, raised and educated children, and interacted in the marketplace. This engine of production was what Paul had in mind when he described the church as the household of God, and we’re so far from it, we can barely even think about what that means.

So let’s quit trying to mend our ecclesiology by thought experiment, and mend it by real experiment. Let’s recover productive households, so we can learn what the church should look like. We can’t all move to the country and homestead, but we city-dwellers don’t have to live in a pit of consumption either.

A productive household has a mission. Chiefly, it gives the world functioning adults, which it brings into the world as babies and then raises and educates until they’re prepared to enter the adult world, but a productive household is also an economic entity that operates in the marketplace. A household maintains property and tends to its business interests, but a productive household has a mission beyond maximizing profits or shareholder value, a mission for which the business interests are necessary, but to which they are subordinated. It gives something to the world, and it raises children who are givers in their turn.

So let’s get about it. What does your household produce?

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Posted by Tim Nichols

But Is It Mine To Take?

7 September 2021

“In Christ,” Paul writes to the church at Colosse, “are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.”  Let’s scrape off the Sunday School language for a minute and ask what that means in the real world.  A “treasure” is something well worth having.  Biblically speaking, “wisdom” is skill — it can be skill at a trade, skill at interpersonal relationships, skill at anything.  “Knowledge” is understanding of facts, but biblically it also includes understanding and intimacy with the facts — grasping how they relate to one another.  So “all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge” means all the skills worth having and all the things worth knowing — and all of them are hidden in Christ.  Every last one.

So what are we to do when we find a pagan claiming that these particular treasures of wisdom and knowledge right here belong to his idols?

Refuse to believe him, of course.  But does that mean that the pagan really doesn’t have treasures of wisdom and knowledge, even though he thinks he does?  That will be the case sometimes,  but often enough he’s got the real thing, courtesy of common grace, and the devil is lying to him about where it came from.  After all, the Canaanites were not living in make-believe houses and harvesting pretend grapes to make imagined wine.  They had the real thing — all gifts from the loving hand of a gracious God, which the devil was only too happy to claim for his own, with the Canaanites’ complicity.

Faced with that situation, the task of God’s people is obvious enough — take those good things back, and return them to their lawful role in service to the Creator.  The devil is not Abraham, and he may not claim territory everywhere he leaves his cloven hoofprints.  It all belongs to Yahweh, every last bit, and we will be taking it back in Yahweh’s name.  This is as true in the New Covenant as it was under the Old: “The weapons of our warfare are not carnal, but mighty in God for pulling down strongholds, casting down arguments and every high thing that exalts itself against the knowledge of God, bringing every thought into captivity to the obedience of Christ….”  

The earth is the Lord’s, and all its fullness, and we look forward to a day when everybody knows it, and the knowledge of the glory of God covers the earth like water covers the sea.  This is God’s will, and while we wait to see it come to full fruition, we pray for little pieces of it to invade here and now — “Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”  

That’s the long view, the answer in principle.  However, just because the whole thing belongs to God does not mean we are fit to take it all back right this minute.  Abraham’s family wasn’t ready to inhabit the land during Abraham’s lifetime — hence the centuries-long delay.  Even at Kadesh Barnea, Israel wasn’t ready.  Still filled with fear, they believed the ten spies instead of Joshua and Caleb.  God told them that He would respect their wishes and give the land to their children instead, and then, predictably, they decided they would try to take it after all.  God warned them that He would not go with them, not now, but they tried anyway, and a bunch of them died in the attempt. 

When they finally went in with Joshua, even then God told them that He would drive out the peoples of the land gradually before them, lest the land be overgrown and overrun with wild beasts.  The conquest has its cataclysmic moments like the destruction of Jericho, but it is a process, and the process was always meant to be directed by divine guidance.  It’s God’s territory, and we have to retake it on His timetable, in His way.  

The question is not simply, “Is this God’s?”  The question is, “Is God giving this to me?”  “Is it mine to take?”

***

Prayer Exercise

  1. We all encounter enemy strongholds — in our own lives, in our communities, in the world we live in.  Where are some of the enemy strongholds that you encounter?
  2. God gives us His armor because He means for us to be active in warfare.  Is there a stronghold that God wants you to assault?  
  3. If God gives you a target, don’t assume He wants you to go charging up that hill immediately.  Ask how God wants you to go about it.

1 Comment | Love of Generous Fruitfulness, New Fundamentals, Prolegomena | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

Changing the Sheets…and Loving it!

10 March 2020

God gave us a command to be fruitful and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it. This is an essential part of what it means to be human.

The basic, straightforward meaning of the command is simple enough: have lots of babies, lead them to Jesus, baptize them, and raise them in the nurture and admonition of the Lord, so they will do the same. This is the direct meaning of the command, and it is also the middle of the bell–curve of human behavior. Across time and culture, we pair off and have kids. It’s how the species continues.

So what does that mean for those of us who — in God’s providence and the brokenness of the world — are denied children? Those of us who’d give anything to have kids, and for whatever reason, can’t?

There’s a broader meaning to the command; it’s not less than the direct, literal meaning. It’s a good and necessary consequence of it, and the broader command applies to us all.

A particular couple may not be able to have kids, but we are still required to be the sort of people who would have kids, the sort of people who love fruitfulness. We are called to love children, love other people’s children, love the raising and training of children to be more like Christ, love the institutions that shelter and grow children. Beyond that, we should love and practice fruitfulness in all its forms and varieties — art and music, daffodils and peach trees, building houses and farming fields and breeding cattle and throwing pots and writing books and baking flaky biscuits, all of it — and we should hate things that are fruitless by design.

We are in the midst of a cultural trend where forward-thinking young people don’t get married and have kids; they shack up and get dogs. (These folks think of themselves as the people of the future, although, as my friend Richard Bledsoe observes, it’s wildly unlikely that the future belongs to people who don’t reproduce.) These folks pride themselves on sliding through life with no complications — no mortgage, no kids, no need for a divorce if things go south — no mess, in other words.

Against that, we should let ourselves be taught what fruitfulness looks like by the literal fulfillment of the command. Obeying “be fruitful and multiply” is a messy business. God could have designed human reproduction so that it happened with a fist-bump. Instead, He made sex visceral, primal, messy, the sort of thing where you might need to change the sheets afterwards — and we love it, as we should. Pregnancy only gets messier, and birth messier still — even more linens to wash. And then the diapers! Toddlers are petri dishes with legs, ambulatory forces of destruction wandering the house with an illicitly gotten permanent marker in each tiny fist. As they get older, they get messy in ever more complicated ways. We’re called to love all that too…and to do all the laundry.

All fruitfulness is messy, filled with confusion, cleanup, course corrections. We should not just love the product; we must learn to love the messy process of creation. There’s an ever-present temptation to reject the necessary mess. Writer’s block, for example, is a rejection of the messiness of the process of creation, a desire for everything to be preternaturally bright and clean the first time around — and it never works out that way.

The good news is it doesn’t have to. We are the image of God; we are designed to dream and to make and to do, and then to bring our glory and honor into the New Jerusalem, which is the Church, the Bride of Christ. He made us for this, and all His ways are good. The sooner we learn to love changing the sheets afterwards, the more often we’ll create something good.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

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