As Ideology, Useless

17 June 2025

As an ideology, an arrangement of mental furniture, Christianity is absolute trash. If all you’re after is a way to arrange your head, an “I like to think of things like this…” kind of thing, then save yourself a pile of trouble and just go Buddhist-lite. You’ll be a lot happier. Your ideology won’t comport with reality in spots, but you can always blame that on residual Western dualistic thinking, and just try to transcend the contradiction.

Christianity doesn’t claim to be an arrangement of mental furniture that will make you happier, more satisfied with life, or a better person somehow. That’s not the claim. The claim is that it’s actually true. God incarnate walked the earth in the Man, Jesus Christ. He lived in perfect harmony with the Holy Spirit, and empowered by the Spirit, He healed the sick, preached freedom to the captives, cast out demons, and was murdered by a coalition of the respectable people. When He died on the cross, every sin, every dark thing, every character flaw and sickness, everything that stands between you and God — it was all nailed to the cross with Jesus, died on the cross with Jesus, was buried in the heart of the earth with Jesus. And when God raised Him from the dead three days later, He did not come out of the grave dragging a Hefty bag of your crap. It’s all done, it’s gone, it’s taken care of.

Now as an ideology, that’s pretty useless. You can think of your unfortunate actions as sins, and your sins as forgiven, but that doesn’t really change anything much if it’s just a way of thinking about it. But if it’s true, then it’s a truth that remakes the entire moral and physical universe. If it’s true, then all the things you’ve ever done that make you just sick to think of them? There’s a medicine that cures that sickness. You need only accept the reality of what Jesus has done for you; you could be free today, and stay free for the rest of your life.

And it is true.

People often object at this point: “I did those things. If someone has to suffer for them, it should be me.” Sure. If God had consulted with you beforehand, you would be morally obligated to object, wouldn’t you? But He didn’t consult you. He just did it. He loves you that much, so He just conspired to pay all the costs on your behalf and set you free forever. And now it’s too late to object; it’s done.

You can either pretend He didn’t do it, or say “Thank you.”

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Pax Christi

25 December 2024

“Glory to God in the highest,
And on earth peace, goodwill toward men.”
-the “multitude of the heavenly host” (King James translation)

That word “host” is στρατιά, and it doesn’t mean “choir.” It means “army.” See, “peace on earth” isn’t a feel-good slogan to embroider on pillows. Have you met us? Bringing peace to our world is a serious undertaking. Nobody’s successfully done it yet.

But the Man who will has already been born: Jesus of Nazareth, the construction-worker son of an unwed mother in a town 5 miles from nowhere. Even as a baby, He had a supernatural army at His back. He’s going to need one. His methods are not what we expected; instead of slaying the wicked, He died so that the wicked could live and be transformed. (That’s you and me, in case you were wondering: “the line between good and evil runs through every human heart.”)

So eat the fat and drink the sweet; taste and see that the Lord is GOOD! The eternal Son became man that man might partake in the divine nature; nothing less could get the job done. It takes supernatural power to bring peace; join His army on earth. Rebuke, convince, encourage, with all humility. Let the peace of God rule in your heart, that in your peace others may also have peace, and in theirs still others. None of this comes easy; we’re following a Man who was murdered by a coalition of the Respectable People: the mainline liberals (Sadduccees), conservative grassroots (Pharisees), the politically-connected (Herodians), the deep state (Scribes), the Roman civil power — they were all His enemies, and their spiritual descendants will hate you too.

But we keep going. We extend peace everywhere, to everyone, and in the end, there will be fewer stragglers for that angelic army to mop up, and “the earth will be full of the knowledge of the glory of the Lord, as water covers the sea.” Start being part of the peace of Christ today, with your in-laws.

Merry Christmas!

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Ruined in the Kitchen

16 July 2024

I saw a meme the other day:

Once upon a time, there was a chef named Burk. Burk absolutely refused to cook with anything less than the very finest ingredients. Thing is, Burk sucked at cooking. He would buy perfectly ripe, beautiful, crisp peas and boil them into tasteless grey mash. His chicken cutlets were raw on the inside, and his pies were burned black. Obviously, the feedback Burk got was less than stellar.

So Burk did the obvious thing: he took to the internet to complain. “Chefs who use the best ingredients will be rated poorly only by people who are seeking something besides the best ingredients,” his meme read. Lots of other chefs liked Burk’s meme, and Burk never got any better at cooking.

Is there a subset of the Christian public that the meme accurately describes? Sure, and it’s not a small group, either. But that “only” in the meme transforms what could have been a penetrating observation about the Christian public into a steaming pile of pastoral cope. They will only call you boring if they’re not interested in faithful preaching? Really? It’s just not possible that you’re, well, actually boring?

Don’t be ridiculous. Nothing you can buy at the farmer’s market is so good you can’t ruin it in the kitchen. In the same way, the Word is living and powerful and profitable, but YOU can still ruin it with bad presentation. You might get called boring because you’re hard to follow and never get to the point. You might get called boring because you make your point in the first five minutes, and then repeat that same five minutes relentlessly for an hour before mercifully closing in prayer. You might get called boring because your voice is a flat monotone and it puts people to sleep no matter how good your content is. Or for any one of a hundred other reasons. Preaching isn’t entertainment, but it is public speaking, and it’s a skill, and it’s entirely possible to be terrible at it. If you’re patting yourself on the back purely because people call you boring, you’re an idiot.

There’s a subset of conservative pastors who are absolutely terrible teachers, and genuinely proud of it. They preach long, impenetrable sermons, use Greek and Hebrew grammatical terms that are meaningless to the congregation they’re preaching to, adorn their preaching with unnecessary theological neologisms, wander off on rabbit trails that are at best diagonally related to the point they’re making. Their congregants tend to be proud of it too, to the point of dismissing other skilled teachers as “not serious enough” if they don’t also do these same things.

Among these folks, there’s a group that maintains, in all seriousness, that if you’re walking with the Holy Spirit, the Spirit will teach you through your pastor’s sermons, no matter how bad they are. Therefore, they reason, if you didn’t get anything from your pastor’s sermon this week, it must be that you had some unconfessed sin gumming up your relationship with the Spirit, and were unable to grasp what the Spirit was teaching you. (I am not making this up — I’ve heard this taught from the pulpit, and I’ve heard it invoked self-condemningly from people who were struggling to understand a poorly constructed sermon.) That’s all rot. Pastors are not inerrant; sometimes we just preach a bad sermon.

Do not be like the hypocrites. There’s no excuse for sucking at your craft, and slagging the audience instead of finding ways to improve yourself is a really lame approach to ministry. Don’t do that.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Welcome to Eastertide

2 April 2024

Like Christmas, Easter is not only a day; it’s a season. Beginning with Easter Sunday, it will continue until the seventh Sunday after Easter, known as Whitsunday (or more popularly, Pentecost). This is traditionally a time of great rejoicing — as it should be! We need not wait until we die to experience the life of the resurrection; the resurrection has already begun! Jesus left the tomb behind, and we are raised with Him.

Is there a new beginning that you’ve been dragging your feet on, something that you need to start and haven’t quite made the time, or found the will? Whatever new life, new growth, new healing God is calling you into, there’s no time like Eastertide! So get with your wise people, and have the talk: “I think God is calling me to ________. What do you think?” Get their input, and then get about it! Be done with porn. Forgive your father. Be grateful for your wife. Discipline your children with love, not convulsions. Pay back that debt. Get godly counsel. Do the physical therapy, every day, all the way to the annoying end. Ask that wise grey-headed person to mentor you. Whatever it is, begin it!

This is not some weird little secular self-improvement plan. Don’t turn it into that. This is the present manifestation of the new life Jesus came to bring. Put your hand to the plow with a good will and a song in your heart. As with the incarnation of God, the resurrection has implications that take time to absorb. This is dense theology, people, and there’s not a chance of getting your head around it if you aren’t being obedient as you go. So get out and do; faith without works is dead, and we ain’t about that life. Once you’re in motion, contemplate. Here’s one place to start that focuses on the post-resurrection events themselves, each one meaningful and worth your attention in its own right.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

What’s in the Manger?

27 December 2023

So Christmas just happened. It’s grown popular in the evangelicalism of our time to get cranky about the crass commercialism of it all. You know what? I’m tired of the crankiness. Christmas Day is a time for raucous celebration: blinking lights, flying wrapping paper, egg nog and good chocolate, viewing our gifts through the delighted eyes of the receiver. It is good.

It is very good. I hope you enjoyed it to the hilt.

And now, let’s reflect a bit, because Christmas isn’t over. December 25th isn’t Christmas; it’s the first day of Christmas (yes, like the song). The Christmas season continues for 12 days; the evening of January 5th is Twelfth Night — the end of Christmastide — and January 6th is Epiphany, the feast where we celebrate the revelation of Jesus for who He is. On Epiphany, we remember both the Transfiguration and the Wise Men finding Jesus (about which more anon). For this week, let’s focus on the thing we’re celebrating at Christmastide: the incarnation of God.

Bless the LORD, O my soul;
And all that is within me, bless His holy name!
Bless the LORD, O my soul,
And forget not all His benefits:
Who forgives all your iniquities,
Who heals all your diseases,
Who redeems your life from destruction,
Who crowns you with lovingkindness and tender mercies,
Who satisfies your mouth with good things,
So that your youth is renewed like the eagle’s.
(Ps. 103:1-5)

Did you eat anything good in the past month? That was Him satisfying your mouth with goodness. You’re welcome. Take it as a downpayment on the rest of the psalm, a tangible sign that He is giving you all these things. All your sins are forgiven. All your diseases will be healed. Your youth and vigor will be renewed.

That’s who was in the manger. The God who forgives all our sins. The God who heals all our diseases. Who redeems us from destruction. Who pours mercy on our heads. And who gave you that salted caramel.

Taste and see that the Lord is good!

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Where the Road Goes

17 October 2023

Suspicious Christians like to say that you shouldn’t take grace too far. If it’s just all grace, all the time, then nobody will be motivated to do the right thing. You have to lower the boom on people at some point. The more biblically savvy of them will point to Romans 6:1, where no less an authority than Paul himself faces the question, “Shall we keep on sinning?” and answers it with a resounding “NO!!!”

“See?” they say. “Even Paul says you shouldn’t take it too far.”

But I want to know what “it” is that we “shouldn’t take too far.” What is it that they think grace is? Because they’ve fundamentally misunderstood both grace and Romans if they think “shouldn’t take it too far” is what Paul is saying in 6:1. The message of Romans 6 is not that you should only go so far down the road of grace. The message of Romans 6 is that when you red-line the engine and take it all the way to the end of the neverending road of God’s grace, that road doesn’t go anywhere near sin. Far from it!

When grace superabounds your sin, no matter how much sin there is, then–and only then–you can know that you’re truly dead to sin and alive to God; you can reckon yourself so. On that basis–what other basis would serve?–you can surrender your members as instruments to God. Of course that doesn’t quite work out the way you’d hope, there being another law in your members that strives toward sin despite your best intentions. Serving God with your mind and sin with your flesh is a devil’s bargain if ever there was one–“who will deliver me from this dead body?” indeed! Glory to God, He doesn’t leave us there.

The Law–the ever-present admonition not to go too far–could never deliver us from that predicament. But what the Law could never do, God did by raising Jesus from the dead. That same Spirit now indwells us, and although our bodies are not yet redeemed, He cheats and gives spiritual life to our (yet-dead) bodies. The life of the Resurrection is available to us now, before the Resurrection, and so we are able to offer our Spirit-indwelt bodies as a living sacrifice that is acceptable to God.

No amount of “not taking grace too far” could have rendered our yet-dead bodies even an acceptable sacrifice, still less a living one; nothing short of a resurrection could possibly do that. And a resurrection is precisely what we have–not ours, but His, and we participate in it solely by grace.

Now obviously all this is ridiculous, but Jesus did it anyway. Good thing He didn’t listen to the people who would have told Him not to take it too far.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Guilt Without Accusations

17 January 2023

How do you talk with contemporary people about guilt? If you grew up with a fairly traditional Christian set of categories, it can be tricky. In a self-consciously post-Christian world, people tend to blow off the things you would normally say. There’s a place and time to preach a barn-burner, but in general, my goal is to speak about guilt without taking the role of the Accuser. The devil’s got that one covered. It’s not like he needs my help.

The fact that guilt and brokenness don’t fit into the contemporary sense-making scheme doesn’t mean that contemporary people have somehow eliminated them. One of the dangers of thinking everything is a “language game” or everything is socially constructed is that you think you can change reality just by changing language. Guilt and shame are enduring realities; people today are as guilty and broken as a preconversion Luther — but unlike Luther, they’ve been deprived of the language to make sense of it all. Because that language has lost currency, there is no generally accepted way of talking about those realities, but people try to put them into words anyway. I spend a lot of time listening for what language this person is going to use. Some common options include absorbing the sin into their identity (“I guess I’m just a cheater”), attempting to positive self-talk it away (“I just gotta stop focusing on the negative”), or aspirational sociopathy (“Eh, shit happens; gotta move on”).

If I can help someone put their guilt into words, then I’m not the one who’s accusing them of something. They introduced the problem; I’m just helping them sort it out. At that point, I can introduce sin by way of contrast:

“We used to talk about this kind of thing as sin. We’ve kind of ruined the word; anymore the only time we talk about sin is when we’re selling desserts or lingerie. But it used to mean something. In the classical sense, sin doesn’t mean you had 5% too much fun or some crap like that. It means missing the mark. It means that you were built for a purpose, and you stepped outside the design parameters in a way that’s gonna hurt you and others around you. See, God is not a tight-shoed, overly regimented Father who says ‘Don’t play!’ He’s a caring Father who says ‘Don’t play in traffic.’

“What I’m hearing you say is that you did play in traffic, and you got hurt, and some other people got hurt because of you. You can’t make it all better, and you don’t know what to do about it, because the culture you live in has deprived you of any way to make sense of that and deal with it.

“The good news is that what’s happening in you is actually totally normal. You’re not crazy or negative or neurotic; you’re actually built to notice when you’re outside the parameters in damaging ways. Just like physical pain is designed to tell you when something is wrong, guilt is moral pain designed to tell you something is wrong. Just like with physical pain, the purpose is not to punish you for doing a bad thing; it’s to motivate you to correct the problem. Even though the culture is a little brain-dead on this, God hasn’t forgotten how to deal with it.”

From there, I can go straight to what the cross and the resurrection really mean, or I can take a more priestly role and lead them into a direct confession of their sin in the situation we’ve been discussing, in order to then talk about the cross and God’s promise of forgiveness and life.

Lots of people have heard of Jesus dying on the cross; many of them don’t know what it means. When Jesus was crucified, every sin, every weakness, every sickness, every character flaw, every dark thing that separates us from God, all of it was nailed to the cross with Jesus. Died on the cross with Jesus. Was buried in the heart of the earth with Jesus. And when God raised Him from the dead three days later, Jesus did not come out of the grave dragging along a Hefty bag of your crap. It’s gone. It’s done.

Anything that you think is separating you from God — He’s already tended to it. You could let it go today, right now, and be free for the rest of your life.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Epiphany: Just Jesus

6 January 2023

Epiphany is the day we celebrate Jesus revealed to the Gentile world. Nothing Mary and Joseph could have said or done would have convinced the Magi – wealthy, powerful astrologers, philosophers, and rulers – to pay attention to a toddler. But God pulled it off. Through a combination of Balaam’s fourth prophecy (1400 years before Jesus was born), Daniel’s rise to chief of the Magi in the Babylonian captivity (900 years after that), and signs in the heavens, God led them from their home in the empire next door to a construction worker’s house in Bethlehem. What did they find there? A treasure hoard, a magical amulet, scrolls brimming with ancient secrets? No. Just a person, Jesus Himself. And they worshiped.

Mary and Joseph, for their part – what did they get? Did they get a vindication that salvaged their reputations with their families? No. They got gold, frankincense, and myrrh – symbolic gifts to be sure, but more importantly in the moment, unexpected wealth with which to fund their flight to Egypt to save their child’s life. 

God gives us enough. He doesn’t often give us what we expected, but He gives us what we need. When God reveals Jesus to you, it will be the same way: not necessarily what you like or how you expected, but what you need, when you need it. Say yes – Jesus is enough. 

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Posted by Tim Nichols

The Twelfth Day of Christmas: Do The Thing 

5 January 2023

In hindsight, it’s easy to see how key figures at pivotal moments in history have opportunities to enact major social change: St. Fabiola, the Nicene bishops, or Basil of Caesarea for hospitals; for slavery, figures like William Wilberforce, William Lloyd Garrison, and Harriet Beecher Stowe. But most of us don’t find ourselves in that kind of position, and that’s ok. Remember how Jesus constantly surprised people by acting on the Father’s guidance? Follow His example and act where you are. 

That’s what St. Paul did. St. Paul wasn’t in a pivotal position to abolish slavery either, but that didn’t stop him from doing something surprising when God dropped an opportunity in his lap. A runaway slave named Onesimus came into Paul’s circle, having fled from a Christian master named Philemon – a man Paul knew. As a runaway, Onesimus could have been executed. Paul wasn’t in a position to take down the institution of slavery, but by doing what he could, he planted the seeds of its demise. In one short letter that has haunted slaveholders for centuries, Paul forced Philemon to resolve his former slave’s precarious legal position, freed Onesimus, and did it all at his own expense. 

“I appeal to you for my son Onesimus…I am sending him back….Perhaps he departed for a while for this purpose, that you might receive him forever, no longer as a slave but better than a slave—a beloved brother….If you consider me a partner, receive him as you would receive me. If he has wronged you or owes you anything, charge it to me….I will pay it back.” (The whole letter is only a few hundred words long – click through and read it; it’s worth your time.)

The question is never about what you can’t do.  The question is what you can do, right where you are. Perhaps you can’t change healthcare, but you can change the bandage on a homeless man’s hand. You can’t change the past, but you can provide a firm hug and a soft landing for someone who’s trying to put their life back together. Jesus came to heal the brokenhearted, free the oppressed, heal the sick – follow Him by doing what’s nearest and clearest, what’s within your reach right now. (In an age of social media slacktivism, I feel compelled to add: You can’t “stand with” anybody while sitting on your ass. Go actually do the thing.) Merry Christmas! 

https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Philemon%201&version=NIV

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Posted by Tim Nichols

The Eleventh Day of Christmas: The Slave is our Brother

4 January 2023

“Chains shall He break, for the slave is our brother/And in His name, all aggression shall cease.” My favorite Christmas song has been “O Holy Night” since I was a kid. Those two lines from the second verse are my favorite part. Whence this bold assertion of brotherhood with a slave? You won’t find that anywhere in the ancient world, but it fits very naturally in a Christmas song. Why?

Ubiquitous across time and culture, slavery is everywhere in history and still practiced in places to this day. Jesus came to liberate the captives, and Christians started working against slavery very early, but abolition was slow and painful. By the late Middle Ages, a number of jurisdictions in Christendom had rejected slavery, but then we lost ground and had to stomp it out all over again several centuries later. We didn’t bin it for good until 1865. In the long argument over slavery, a lot of the apologists for slavery were Christians. Christians today find that embarrassing, and should. 

It’s particularly embarrassing because abolition is uniquely ours. The entire discourse of abolition was–and still is–conducted on Christian principles. And it was so wildly successful that the whole Western world now thinks of the universal brotherhood of humanity (and therefore abolition and equality) as common sense. We often forget that to this day, the Christian West remains the only culture in world history ever to abolish slavery as a matter of moral principle, because it’s harmful to the slaves. We think that’s common sense now, but only after Jesus did it become common sense, and only in Christian and Christ-haunted places does it remain common sense.  

For which all thanksgiving. Merry Christmas!

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Posted by Tim Nichols

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