Trust your Feelings?

8 August 2023

I am known, in certain quarters, for my scornful response to people suggesting that we trust our feelings. I usually object by way of a Star Wars reference: “Trust your feelings” is bad advice unless you’re Luke Skywalker—and even he ended up kissing his sister, so you see what trusting your feelings gets you.

When I’m making that argument, I’m driving home the point that we have no magically prelapsarian place within us that can’t be wrong. There’s a case to be made for distrusting every part of us. You shouldn’t believe everything you think any more than you’d believe everything you feel, nor the other way round. We can and should interrogate and discipline our emotions just like we should interrogate and discipline our bodily urges and our thoughts. At the same time, there’s a ditch on both sides of the road. We can deify our God-given emotions, elevating the gift over the Giver, and that’s bad, but it’s equally bad to denigrate and ignore the gift God gives.

There’s no biblical reason to think emotions are any less trustworthy than thoughts. When Adam fell, he didn’t land catlike on his feet, so that his heart didn’t fall quite as low as his belly, his genitals (of course!) falling lowest and his brain landing uppermost, and therefore most to be trusted. No, it was a faceplant worthy of Wile E. Coyote — all of him fell all the way to rock bottom, and made an Adam-shaped hole when he hit. The project is to sanctify the whole shebang.

God made emotions, and He didn’t do it just so we’ll have something to distrust. There’s a righteous use for them, and when we’ve catechized our loves and loyalties properly and we’re using them rightly, there’s every reason to act based on emotion, just as there’s every reason to act on a properly vetted logical argument.

  • Jesus endured the cross for the joy set before Him. Should He have distrusted that emotion?
  • Love fulfills the law. Someone will say, “Love is not an emotion.” What a foolish idea! It’s not just an emotion, but it is an emotion, isn’t it?
  • Paul also says to let the peace of God rule in your hearts. What is that, if not emotional experience?

Someone will have noticed by now that these are the fruit of the Spirit. Yes, just so; the Spirit works in our emotions as well as our thoughts. Why are we determined to distrust the fruit of the Spirit?

1 Comment | Dust and Breath Anthropology, Healing | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

“The Children God Has Given Me”

1 August 2023

I had a chance to talk with Chris Morrison of Gulfside Ministries in our continuing series on Hebrews. Our latest conversation covered 2:5-18. Hope it’s helpful to you!

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Those Little Old Ladies

30 July 2023

“We have to cultivate a certain kind of character in order to read well. It’s not just a matter of applying hermeneutical rules or a typological framework; it’s about the kind of person you are.  That’s why the little old ladies at your church who’ve never been to a hermeneutics class in their life, but have spent a life in the word, spent a life in prayer, have suffered and seen the Lord deliver them from suffering—those little old ladies understand so much of the Bible that you don’t. Because they are disciples, and they know that they are encountering God in the pages of Scripture.”

-Peter Leithart on hermeneutics

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Two Objections

25 July 2023

The previous post addressed the continuing role of imprecatory psalms in the Christian’s life. I regularly hear two objections to this.

The first is “but where’s the specific New Testament command to pray these kinds of prayers specifically?” This one is really just a matter of basic reasoning. If you’re commanded to sing the psalms, then the different sorts of psalms are necessarily included. Demanding a specific verse for the imprecatory subset of the psalms is like saying “I see the verses where Paul prohibits stealing in general, but where’s the verse about boosting cars?” What’s wanted here is not another verse, but a course in elementary logic.

To my eye, that one is more an excuse than an argument. If the commands to sing the psalms and the New Testament examples of imprecations don’t convince someone, then more verses aren’t likely to do the job either.

The second, more substantive, objection is that praying such prayers would be vengeful, and God forbids vengeance in the New Testament: “Beloved, do not avenge yourselves, but rather give place to wrath; for it is written, ‘Vengeance is Mine, I will repay,’ says the Lord. Therefore ‘If your enemy is hungry, feed him; If he is thirsty, give him a drink; For in so doing you will heap coals of fire on his head.'” (Rom. 12:17-20)

This is one of those cases where you have to pay close attention to what the passage actually says. Romans says you may not take vengeance for yourself, but pay attention to the rationale Paul gives. God doesn’t say “Vengeance is bad.” God says “Vengeance is Mine” — and then He says He’ll repay.

Now, when God says that He’ll do something, do we usually take that as grounds not to pray about that thing? Or as grounds to pray for it? He promises to meet our needs, and we pray: “Give us this day our daily bread.” He promises to take vengeance — is there a reason we shouldn’t ask Him to do what He said He would? Paul doesn’t seem to think so: “Alexander the coppersmith did me much harm; may the Lord repay him according to his deeds.”

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Break Their Teeth? Really?

18 July 2023

Regular readers here know I’m a big advocate of singing the Psalms. On the (unfortunately rare) occasions that believers seriously engage in that project, a question comes up pretty quickly: “What do I do with these psalms?”

It ain’t all “As the deer panteth for the water” in the Psalter. There are also prayers that God would break the arm of the wicked (Psalm 10) or their teeth (Psalm 58), pursue and persecute them (Psalm 35), drive them away and kill them (Psalm 68) and so on. What’s a Christian to do with these prayers?

Sing them, that’s what. Three times the New Testament says we should sing psalms (Ephesians 5:19, Colossians 3:16, and James 5:13). The phrase “psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs” is possibly open-ended enough to include more than just the 150 biblical psalms, but it’s certainly not talking about singing less than what God gave us.

As to how we pray them appropriately, it’s important to read them in context. It’s easy for us to read these psalms in terms of middle-class North America, which is pretty tame by comparison to the times and places these psalms were actually written. You may wonder “When would I ever pray that?” because you’ve never faced the kind of adversity that the psalmist was facing. David has Saul trying to kill him, and murdering every man, woman, and child in the city of priests along the way. It’s not so hard to see how these prayers are appropriate in actual life-and-death struggle with genuinely murderous enemies who are killing innocent people.

In less dire situations, the prayers should reflect the reality at hand. You don’t ask God to break the teeth of your barista because she messed up your latte order. Not even if she did it on purpose. “Let the rich glory in his humiliation, for as a flower of the field he passes away.” If that’s what adversity looks like for you, you’d better milk it for all the spiritual benefit you can.

You don’t pray “let his wife be a widow; let his children be vagabonds and beggars” because someone is running a little mean-girl scheme to get your funding reduced. Asking God to cause their designs to come to nothing and their trap to return on their own head might be more appropriate.

That said, there’s one more thing to remember: “With what judgment you judge, you will be judged, and with what measure you measure, it will be measured back to you. That cashes out in two ways: first, the way you forgive other people in this life is how God’s gonna treat you in this life, so bear that in mind when you make your requests. When you ask God to permanently stop someone who’s killing innocent people, you’re effectively also asking Him to do the same to you if you’re ever killing innocent people. You can and should be fine with that, but if you’re not, don’t pray that prayer.

Second, remember that “in wrath remember mercy” is also a biblical prayer, and something we should take to heart. Jesus asked His Father to pardon His murderers. Stephen, following Jesus’ example, prayed a similar prayer, and God honored that prayer by taking the young man who ran the coat check at the murder and turning him into the most famous missionary and church planter in Christian history. Modern martyrs — the Stams, those killed by the Ayore and the Waorani, the persecuted Russian and Chinese saints who died in the gulags and camps — rightly continue the tradition.

Do those examples mean that imprecations should be a thing of the past in the New Testament? It’s a good question, but the answer is no. Imprecatory psalms are invoked in the New Testament. Jesus invokes an imprecatory psalm in John 15:5. The early church follows suit in Acts 4:25, as does Paul in Romans 11:9. Peter applies the threat of Psalm 110 immediately and directly to his audience, in order to provoke repentance in Acts 2:34. There are other examples, but those will suffice to demonstrate that at minimum, Christians should still be reading these psalms and putting them to use in prayer and preaching. Clearly, if you’re serious about following the examples set by Jesus and His early followers, you can’t just exclude the rougher psalms out of hand; they didn’t.

One could use these examples and others to construct a more nuanced argument about the way we use these psalms now. In making that argument, you’ll also have to account for the existence of fresh New Testament imprecations. 2 Timothy 4:14, 1 Corinthians 16:22, Galatians 1:8-9, and Matthew 23 come to mind offhand, and to cap the stack, Revelation 6:10, by saints who can’t possibly be sinning because they’re already dead. There’s a great conversation to be had about how to do this well, but that is a post for another day.

For today, the reason you shouldn’t be averse to imprecatory prayer is very simple: the Bible plainly isn’t. Evangelical culture is, and that aversion is driven by sentiment, not Scripture.

2 Comments | liturgy, New Fundamentals, Prayer, Social Reality of the Fall, Speaking as God Speaks, Worship | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

Niceness: A Unity-Breaking Disease

11 July 2023

I hang out in theology discussion groups some. In a particular (very doctrinally narrow) group, someone recently asked a question about non-theological issues in the group. “What things other than doctrine divide the group?” he wanted to know. As I mulled it over, it occurred to me that one of the biggest divides is our accepted modes of speech. Some of us seem to think that the speech norms of the faculty lounge should govern all Christians all the time; others of us don’t buy that. Now if you’re reading here, you probably already know that I am in the latter group. As far as I’m concerned, kindness is a virtue, but niceness is a disease. We should be willing to speak like Jesus did, and He didn’t say nice things and make everything smooth. He was willing to make things awkward and difficult for the sake of a jagged truth. Among brothers, of course, we have no business slinging a ‘truth bomb’ and then running away; Jesus never did that. We hang around for the whole conversation, and then move forward and work together regardless, because action for Jesus’ sake matters more than agreement on every little thing.

I’d made my defense for a more biblical mode of speech in that very group multiple times already (and mostly been rebuffed), so this particular question would hardly have been worth commenting on by itself. But it sparked another thought: many of the members of the group are also very, very specific about who they’ll fellowship with or collaborate with. “Is there a [___insert affiliation here___] church near my town?” is a frequent question in the group. The responses will always include tales of people who drive 60 miles to get to a church they can stomach, others who are listening to an internet broadcast from another state, and still others who’ve simply given up for lack of a local fellowship they can be satisfied with. Still others, having found a local church that meets their exacting specifications, are busy pretending that all the other local churches don’t exist.

The same people who upbraid me for being coarse and disagreeable — people vastly nicer than I am, who want me to be nicer too — are unable to get along with the majority of their fellow Christians. You’d think that the niceness would make it easier, but it doesn’t seem to. Meanwhile, as rough as I sometimes am with people, I’m deeply embedded in two local churches, we routinely join up with other groups for prayer and sometimes for shared worship services, and our working partnerships span Anglican, Messianic, Charismatic, Baptist, Reformed, and more.

This to say, adherence to faculty-lounge norms of smooth speech does not seem to be the difference that makes a difference. There’s a divide between people who value honest community and people who value niceness, and it shows up in the way we’re able to minister. In my experience, honesty makes you able to minister in ways niceness can’t touch, and gives you partnerships you couldn’t get by being nice. So don’t be nice; be like Jesus. The more you’re like Him, the more you’ll be able to share life with others who are like Him, despite your disagreements. Truth is, talking and being like Jesus is your best shot at getting the disagreements resolved anyway.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Swan-Diving off the Skyscraper?

8 July 2023

“Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God.” This was Jesus’ answer when the devil enticed Him to jump off the pinnacle of the Temple (see Matthew 4). The pinnacle was (for the time) a dizzyingly high point. Many Christians look no further than that, take it as the ancient equivalent of being tempted to swan dive off the Empire State Building to see if God would protect you. In this reading, “Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God” is a general rule not to do stupid things hoping that God will save you. Look both ways before crossing the street. Skip dessert; your arteries and your waistline don’t need it. Max out your 401(k) contribution. Jesus would.

The problem, of course, is that throughout the Bible, God has people break this rule. Moses is wanted in Egypt, but God sends him back. There’s no water or food in the desert past the Red Sea, but God leads Israel out there anyway. Jesus is a homeless wanderer for three years. They stoned Paul at Lystra, and he barely escaped with his life, but he’s going back to encourage the church there. The Macedonian churches give “beyond their ability.” What gives?

Scripture does expound some general principles about sowing and reaping and handling risks, but trying to find those ideas in this text is biblically ignorant and sloppy. None of that is what “Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God” is talking about.

It’s not a ‘general rule,’ it’s a specific quote from Deuteronomy (6:16), as are Jesus’ other responses to the devil’s temptations (cp. Matthew 4:4//Deuteronomy 8:3, Matthew 4:10//Deuteronomy 6:13). Read Deuteronomy 6:16 in context: Moses is warning the conquest generation not to be like their parents, and specifically warns them against the sin their parents committed at Massah (Heb. “Temptation”). That sin is described in Exodus 17:7. See also Deuteronomy 9:22 and 33:8, where Moses brings it up again.

(According to Exodus 17:7, the place is also called Meribah (Heb. “Rebellion”), and by that name it comes up in Psalm 95, which is then a central part of the argument of Hebrews 3-4. So the warning gets repeated in David’s time, and is still an issue for Christians — praise God that we have Jesus’ example to follow in resisting it!)

What, exactly, is the sin at issue here? Read Exodus 17: Israel tempted God at Massah, saying, “Is the LORD among us, or not?” Was the question legitimate? No! This is after all the plagues, after Passover, after He saved them through the Red Sea, after He gave them drinkable water at Marah, after He began literally dropping food (manna) from the sky daily. They are following the pillar of cloud by day and the pillar of fire by night; it couldn’t be clearer that He has led them to this place in particular. They have every reason to trust that He will provide for them in the place He has led them to.

He had even already warned them at Marah (Exodus 15:25-26) the last time they complained about water. Now, the next time they come up short on water, they accuse Moses (and God): “Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to kill us, our children, and our livestock with thirst?” They have no faith that God will bring them to the place He promised. Deuteronomy 6:16 is Moses’ admonition to the next generation not to commit that same sin, and that’s what Jesus quotes.

What does that have to do with the situation Jesus is facing? The temptation is to leap off the pinnacle of the Temple. There’s no danger; it’s not yet His time, and to whom do the assurances of Psalm 91:10-12 apply, if not to Jesus Himself? Does He not fulfill the conditions of 91:9? Jesus could kick off His ministry by floating down from the pinnacle, carried by angels into the throngs of worshippers gathered in the courts of the Temple. What a way to start! Why not?

But no. Jesus has reason to know that God is with Him: the Father spoke over Him from heaven at His baptism, the Spirit descended on Him in the form of a dove, and John witnessed the whole thing. It is the Spirit who has led Him out into the desert, where He has gone without food these past 40 days (an occasion for another temptation that He also answers out of this passage in Deuteronomy). He should remain committed to following the Father’s lead, and not gin up His own solution to the question of launching His ministry — effectively accusing the Father of leading Him to the wrong place.

The recipients of Hebrews faced a similar temptation. These were the people who stayed in place after the stoning of Stephen when everyone else fled, who cheerfully accepted the persecutions of that time to remain where God had called them to be. They are tired, beaten down, and are considering giving up and returning to the Temple worship — effectively accusing God of leading them astray. Hebrews 3-4 treat this as parallel to Exodus 17, but the warning of Hebrews 2 has already made it clear that although the cases are parallel, this would be a much worse sin than the Exodus generation committed in the desert, and would be subject to a much harsher punishment.

We continue to face this perennial temptation today. When a financially tight month tempts us to believe that God is not caring for us, when we discipline children out of panic rather than trusting God’s kindness to us and mirroring it to our children, when we do something flashy and self-aggrandizing at work (or in ministry) rather than trusting God’s leading and His ability to promote us in His time, we face this same temptation. Let’s handle it the way Jesus did: “Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God.”

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Posted by Tim Nichols

(Not) Fencing the Table

27 June 2023

“How do you fence the Table?” my friend asked me.

We were talking about the church service I host for homeless folks every Saturday night. For those of you not familiar with the terminology, he was asking how I regulate who is allowed to partake in the communion service.

I had a simple answer: “I don’t.”

I’m very much in the minority here. Across the history of the Church, the vast majority of churches have felt that since the Lord’s Table is a sacred thing, the church leadership should carefully regulate who is allowed to participate, and under what terms. I used to think the same way, but I noticed a few things that changed my perspective.

First, the Bible never tasks church leadership with fencing the table. It never tasks anybody with fencing the Table. The one place it talks about examining someone with reference to coming to the Table, it says “let a man so examine himself.” If I were going to fence the Table, I would need authority to do so–after all, it’s not my table, it’s the Lord’s Table. He has not delegated that authority to me as a church leader; therefore I may not do it.

Second, I noticed that the historical pattern is out of step with Jesus’ own way of being in the world. We fence the Table lest someone profane the body and blood of the Lord by partaking unworthily. Jesus gave Himself recklessly to a world that constantly received Him in an unworthy manner, and in the end gave His very body and blood to His enemies. Is it blasphemous? Of course! But it’s not my blasphemy; Jesus did it Himself. If I’m following Him, then why would I be paranoid about some pagan getting away with a wafer?

Third, I noticed that we haven’t empowered people to examine themselves well. We’ve taken self-examination to mean that you need to descend into morbid introspection and confess all your sins before you partake, lest God strike you down. That’s just not what the passage is talking about: you will ransack that whole chapter in vain looking for a mention of confessing your sins before the Table.

Rather, the passage talks about correctly discerning the Lord’s Body, and that’s what we need to present so people can self-examine and decide whether to partake. We need to say what Scripture says about the Table: “This is the body of Christ,” “This is the blood of Christ.” We need to say what Scripture says about the Body that celebrates at the Table: “You are the Body of Christ.” And we need to let people decide on that basis whether this is something they want to be part of. If they do, then we should do what Jesus did, and give them His body and blood.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

What’s that Tree for?

20 June 2023

Did you ever notice that Adam didn’t do anything to bring on the temptation? He didn’t leave a gate open that God told him to close, and then get a snake in the Garden. He was doing everything right, and the snake showed up anyway. Trouble and temptation are not the result of the Fall; they’re the occasion for it. Man is born for trouble; that’s just part of the Story God is telling.

When I teach Creation and the Fall to my middle-school kids, they unfailingly ask about the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil: “Why did God put that tree in the Garden to start with?” The answer is that it was a tool for Adam’s maturation. That Tree was God’s gift to Adam and Eve, the site where they would learn good from evil. In biblical terms, knowing good and evil is not a bad thing; it’s a way in which we become like God — as God Himself says in the account (3:22). God will later bless Solomon for asking for this exact thing (1 Kings 3:9).

In order to live in the world God had made for them (which included the serpent), Adam and Eve would need knowledge of good and evil. The Tree would have been the site where Adam and Eve attained knowledge of good and evil one way or the other, but they were meant to gain knowledge by resisting temptation, not by yielding to it. By yielding, they seized knowledge by illegitimate means, and died.

The Tree is a gift, but it’s like someone giving you a chainsaw for Christmas — it’s a good gift, but if you handle it badly, it’ll kill you all the same. The biblical account teaches us that knowledge of good and evil is inherently dangerous, and do notice that it’s not just knowledge of evil. There is a knowledge of good that can kill you too. The vital thing is to handle the gift in the way God tells us to handle it.

Adam and Eve had been given everything they needed to know to handle the temptation in front of them. If they’d simply remembered God’s instructions, if they’d waited until the cool of the day to meet with God and ask Him what He thought, if…. But they didn’t.

By way of analogy, imagine a kid whose parents own a bed & breakfast. Reaching the age where he’s curious about sex, the kid conceals a camera in someone’s room on their wedding night. What the kid observes is a Good Thing, but him observing it is not! The way he’s supposed to acquire that knowledge is by participating in his own wedding night in due time, not by watching someone else’s. Grasping illegitimately for that knowledge is sin, it damages him, and he doesn’t really learn the same things that he would have if he’d waited and gone about it the right way.

So it is for us. Knowing good and evil is becoming more like God, but we don’t need to grasp after it. He will take us there in the right way. Our job is to trust Him and be faithful to what He has already given.

1 Comment | Meditations, Real Ministry Training, Theopoetics | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

Out of the Greenhouse

13 June 2023

“One of the things Christians are disagreed about is the importance of our disagreements.”
-C. S. Lewis

Let me say a hearty “Amen!” We make the mistake in both directions, but soft-pedalling a major disagreement is something we’ll come back to another day. Today, I’d like to address our pernicious habit of making far more of a disagreement than we ought.

When we’re making a mistake of this kind, usually the problem has relatively little to do with the merits of the actual disagreement. Far more often, the problem has to do with pursuing comfort and avoiding hard work.

The comfort pursued has chiefly been of two kinds. The first kind is very personal. Person X and Person Y have a tiff of some sort, X’s ego is bruised, and X lacks the skills or the will to address it properly. So he waits, and in due time, some doctrinal molehill will arise that, properly nourished by his latent discontent, can be turned into a mountain. At that point X will divide from Y, ostensibly over the molehill in question, and entirely too many of us will think that is respectable. In this way as a community we have frequently given at least grudging respect, if not open admiration, to people who should have been sternly ordered into no-nonsense pastoral counseling.

The second kind of comfort we’ve pursued is avoiding the very ordinary rough-and-tumble of interacting with the full range of our fellow Christians. In the West, we’ve been spoiled quite a bit. We’ve been so successful for so long. If you grew up Methodist, chances are excellent that every city you ever moved to had a Methodist church. Ditto for the other major denominations, and a lot of the minor ones.

Once the seeker-friendly movement kicked off, a lot of the denominational distinctives got smoothed out of everyday church life, radically expanding the number of places a generically homogenized evangelical could attend church without being jostled by something unfamiliar. Most of the “worship wars,” in fact, boiled down to people not wanting to be jostled by something culturally unfamiliar — and that was true both for the children of old (mostly 19th-cent. revival, honestly) church culture who didn’t want to be jostled by contemporary music, and for the children of contemporary culture who didn’t want to be jostled by old music.

If we decide — as we are biblically required to do — to fellowship at table with people who are culturally different from us, but whom Jesus has declared clean, then we’ll find ourselves navigating all kinds of things. The guy on my right baptizes babies; the guy on my left celebrates Purim but not Christmas, and the guy across the table plays worship songs on a tuned badminton racket and speaks in tongues. (Okay, I made up the badminton thing. But not the tongues.) A lot of us think of that as insanely uncomfortable, impossible to live with. It’s not. That’s just being out in the field instead of cloistered in the greenhouse.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

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