A friend happened to remind me that this week marks the tenth anniversary of when the now-president of the United States posted this comment to the platform then known as Twitter: “Russell Moore is truly a terrible representative of evangelicals and all the good they do. A nasty guy with no heart!” 

That day in May I woke up to a bunch of texts from people saying “Praying for you!” or something along those lines. I never like to get those texts and my first thought was, “What now?” It turned out it was this tweet, which unleashed an online army of trolls and bots and whatnot, which I never even saw because I filter out all comments on that platform except for people I follow. When I went into my office, some of my staff members had posted a picture of the Grinch with “Nasty Guy with No Heart!” as the caption. 

Someone not long ago asked, “How hurtful was it when that was said about you?” I said, “Not at all! I have it framed on the wall!” And I do, not because I am nostalgic for the campaign year of 2016 or because I have changed my mind on Trump in any way. I am not, and, as you know, I have not. 

But the framed tweet is not about my disagreements with Trump (there are other items here in the study that can speak to that). This one, though, is about unity with him on one point. This is one Trump tweet with which I wholeheartedly agreed then and agree now.

Since roughly eight out of ten evangelicals thought, three times, differently than I do on this, I *am* a terrible representative of them, at least on this matter. But more important is the other part. I am a “nasty guy.” 

I sing worse things about myself every Sunday. This framed picture makes me laugh, but it’s hanging right below the artwork I mentioned a few weeks ago that reminds me, “As in Adam all die, so in Christ shall all be made alive.” That reminds me that I am, indeed, dependent on another for my heart because mine is unreliable. As the Apostle John put it, “whenever our heart condemns us, God is greater than our heart, and he knows everything” (1 Jn. 3:20). 

That reminds me that I’m just as vulnerable to the very thing I write and speak against all the time: to substitute correct opinions, whether on this or anything else, for the way of discipleship, because it’s easier. I stand by all my opinions (obviously, or I would change them). And it’s important to me that my future grandchildren or great-grandchildren or great-great-grandchildren know that, when all this was going on, here’s where I stood. But I also need to remember that history is not my judge; Jesus is. And his standards are both indescribably more exacting (Matt 5:20) and infinitely more merciful (Matt. 11:28-30). 

A few years after that tweet, I was in the White House with then-Vice President Mike Pence who introduced me to the President. He said something along the lines of, “You’ve been really rough on me but I hope we’re on the same team now.” I said, “Well, we’re all on team America, aren’t we, Mr. President?” That was a dodge to get out of an awkward conversation, but I am a nasty guy, after all. 

When it comes to that tweet though, we are on the same team, at least about me, ten years later. My heart is too nasty to bear the weight of my life. My hope is in a different heart than mine. 

I said, “How do I know I can trust myself to give you advice about how to trust yourself to make the right decision?” I was only three-fourths of the way kidding.

Here’s the thing, though—the really hard decisions aren’t the enormous ones (”Will I deny Christ if I’m forced to fight lions in the Colosseum?”) or the tiny ones (”Should I eat Chick-fil-A today or warm up leftovers at home?”). The most troubling are the middle-weight decisions: “Should I take that job?” or “Should I call that person?” or “Should I attend that church?”

Part of the reason these decisions are so hard is that most of us are people who either prize the objective over the subjective or the other way around—and if you rely on only one, you will never make a decision.

This week, I walk through eight things I’ve learned about how to navigate decisions—including why your perplexity might be the point, what the late Tim Keller once told me about a decision I thought I hadn’t made yet, and why the Bible’s final warning about idols has more to do with your next decision than you might think.

You can read it here:

https://www.christianitytoday.com/2026/04/russell-moore-major-life-decision-making/?utm_medium=widgetsocial

The art is from the most famous panel of the sixteenth century Isenheim Altarpiece by Matthias  Grünewald. Karl Barth famously referenced this painting, and particularly, the Baptist’s finger, as a kind of metaphor of the Christian life. In this one hand motion, the artistically depicted John sums up his words: “He must increase, but I must decrease” (Jn. 4:30). It reminds me also, though, of a different verse, one that I never really felt until recent years. 

How many times have I read the Gospel of John over my lifetime? And how many times have I preached and taught it? Most of it I have memorized just from sheer repetition. There’s a tiny section, though, that I always thought of us as just an interlude between important moments: between the teaching of Jesus about himself as the Good Shepherd and the death of his friend Lazarus. Referencing Jesus escaping an attempt to arrest him, the Apostle John writes of Jesus going back to the Jordan, where he had been baptized by his cousin, the Baptist. The Gospel records: “And many came to him. And they said, ‘John did no sign, but everything that John said about this man was true’” (Jn. 10:41). 

Here’s why that hits me now. 

We’ve all seen some ugly stuff in the past decade or so, a lot of it going under the name of Christianity. Much of it some of us can look back, in retrospect, and think, “We should have seen where this was heading.” In the kind of “shaking” the church is undergoing now, many moments for something new happen, but so do many dangers, toils, and snares. For many of us, one of those vulnerabilities is cynicism. 

We become cynical when we want to protect ourselves. We start to think “If something I thought was so stable turned out to be so fragile” or “If I something I thought was so convictional turned out to be corrupt” then how do I ever know what’s real? We can start then to preemptively conclude that everything’s fake, everyone’s corrupt. The cynicism offers a kind of protective armor so that we can’t be hurt again or fooled again. But it doesn’t work, and it leaves a person empty and alone. 

On the other hand, there can be the pull to the reverse: to just try to wipe from our minds all the ways that institutions have failed. That’s self-protective too, we think. It doesn’t work either. The heart knows what it knows. And more importantly, this kind of willed gullibility allows structures to fail others in the future, others who will resort to cynicism or gullibility and the process starts all over. 

The pointing John the Baptist figure reminds me, every time I see it, of how it felt, sitting here in my study a few years ago, when I stopped as I was reading John and felt the weight of that verse. It was as though I were sitting there hearing it addressed directly to me. 

“John did no sign.” Those who hoped that John would deliver them were wrong. In prison, he came to the point when even he was asking Jesus, “Are you the one who is to come or shall we look for another?” (Lk. 20). And, of course, he ended up beheaded by the ruler and disposed of in some unmarked grave. If the point was John, it was all a waste of time. 

“But everything he told us about this man was true.” I can say this. I can look back on the people who taught me the Bible. Many of them are people I would want to emulate, a few are not. Some of what they taught me wasn’t true. Gog and Magog did not turn out to be the Soviet Union. The Second Coming did not come within “a generation” of forty years after the founding of the modern state of Israel. People who drink wine or smoke a pipe aren’t degenerates (well, some of them are but for other reasons). All the blind spots and missteps are there, just as in retrospect I will be able to see they are with me in other areas. And yet. 

Everything they taught me about this man was true. Churches lose their lampstand. Denominations fall apart. Movements attract and empower hucksters and grifters and demagogues. Within six feet of any act of worship is someone trying to use it to create his own postage-stamp-sized theocracy. All that’s true. And Jesus told us it would be. Some people in the first-century came to Christ through the preaching of Judas Iscariot. 

I’ve found, though, that cynicism doesn’t get me to anything real. And I’ve found that my cynicism falls away when I look at him. When I see him I really do see the glory of God to which every longing in my life is somehow directed. When I hear him I really do hear One who is full of grace and truth. And I can see all the ways that, even when I cannot see him, he’s shepherding me along. I believe him that he knows the way home, or, rather, that he *is* the Way home. All of that is true. 

Every time I look at that picture I’m reminded that the head of John the Baptist didn’t stay on. The finger that’s pointing there disintegrated in a grave. But the One to whom he was pointing is still here. Everything he said about that man is true. 

The story starts where so many of these stories start: in a church. A Church of Christ preacher in northwestern Alabama, afraid of losing his congregation and his livelihood, hires two men to kill his wife. They are caught, tried, and sentenced to death. The case drags on for nearly four decades. One of them is finally executed in 2024.

Gladwell's argument is that forgiveness — radical, costly, action-requiring forgiveness — would have been the more merciful path. Not just for the condemned, but for everyone caught in the orbit of the crime: the families, the churches, the communities left to wait for a closure that never quite arrives.

He found a contrasting case — a Mennonite pastor's daughter who fought to spare the life of the man who killed her father. She succeeded. And in doing so, she freed something — in herself, in the killer's family, in her congregation.

Here's how Gladwell put it to me:

 "The failure to grant him forgiveness meant that suffering persisted for decades. It's not just about the criminal, it's about everybody else."

 What became clear in our conversation is that justice, as we usually imagine it, doesn't resolve things nearly as cleanly as we think. And in that waiting, we're forced to confront something deeper: whether we really believe in the possibility of redemption, or whether we've quietly decided some people are simply beyond it.

 I also couldn't let him go without asking about my favorite episode of Revisionist History — "King of Tears," about the making of "He Stopped Loving Her Today." And what he said about George Jones turned out to bear directly on everything we'd just been discussing about Alabama, punishment, and grace.

You can watch it here:  https://youtu.be/a3NWFbLdiRk

I have a new piece out at Christianity Today on the frightening ease with which some people now invoke Joshua, “holy war,” and the judgment of God to excuse what previous generations would have recognized as war crimes. The problem here is not Joshua. The problem is using the Bible instead of reading it.

War presents many hard moral questions. The targeting of civilians is not one of them.

You can read the full piece here:

https://www.christianitytoday.com/2026/04/bible-does-not-justify-war-crimes-iran-ceasefire/?utm_medium=widgetsocial

One afternoon, in between campus tours and committee interrogations and entrance exams, we stopped across Lexington Road at the Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary campus for me to look around the bookstore. There I saw this stone plaque with a bas relief of Adam and Eve and 1 Corinthians 15:22: “As in Adam all die so in Christ shall all be made alive.” 

I loved it but I couldn’t afford it, especially since I was about to leave my ministry and uproot to another state, where I wasn’t sure how I would make a living. Unknown to me, Maria bought it, somehow smuggled it home without my seeing it, and gave it to me for Christmas that year (“The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the plaque, and I did hang it”). 

At first, Maria was hesitant to get it because, though the primal man and woman seem to be in their aprons of fig leaves, Eve isn’t all the way covered. I said that if anyone complained I would say, “Who told thee that they wast naked?” and I would launch into a sermon on Genesis 3. 

I keep it on the wall because it reminds me of the most important truth in the cosmos. We are exiled from the Tree of Life, from the source of our connection to God. We are all on a long walk toward fragmentation and decay, to return from the dust from which we came. 

Jesus, however, bore the full reality of that Genesis 3 curse. The thorns of the ground pressed against him. The communion with his friends and family was broken as most of them fled. He was naked and shamed, counted as a criminal. He, too, was exiled “outside the camp” (Heb. 13:12-13). 

And, raised from the dead, he found the woman weeping in a garden and said to her, “go to my brothers and say to them, I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and to your God” (Jn. 21:17). The language there is astounding. His “brothers,” after all, were most of them hiding in shame and filled with fear that they too would be arrested and killed. The resurrected Christ, the firstborn from the dead, nullifies all of that, and, in spite of everything, is “not ashamed to call them brothers” (Heb. 2:11). 

The object reminds me of something I once heard an elderly Eastern Orthodox priest say. We are separated from God by three divides: finitude, sin, and death. In Incarnation, Jesus joins the human nature to the divine, tearing down that barrier. In atonement, Jesus carries away the curse and shame and guilt of sin in his own body. And in resurrection, Jesus defeats the accuser whose only real power is our fear of death (Heb. 2:14-15) and joins us to the very life of God. 

Jesus told us: “Where I am going you cannot follow me now, but you will follow me afterwards” (Jn. 13:26). Where we follow him toward is the home we’ve been seeking all along. Where we follow him is the communion with God that need not cower in the bushes. Where we follow him is to the Tree of Life (Rev. 22:2), without a serpent in sight. 

That stone piece was too expensive for me to buy in 1996. Now, in 2026, the message it sends me is one I cannot afford to be without. 

Bonhoeffer, of course, was the Confessing Church leader who resisted the Nazi heresy which enveloped the German Church in the 1930s and 40s. His writings have had a deep influence on my own thought. He hangs there now, though, because I want to remember not only what he taught me in his theology, ethics, and New Testament writings but also the outcome of his life. He was executed by the Nazi regime. 

The painting reminds me not only that integrity and courage, living before the face of God and not of the crowd, is important but also that those the Book of Hebrews describes as “commended for their faith” did not, in fact, “receive what was promised” because “God had provided something better for us, that apart from us they should not be made perfect” (Heb. 11: 39-40). 

The Johnny Cash mugshot is a bit of irony. Cash once said that people would always come up to him after concerts and say, “My father was in prison with you.” This was assuming that he actually lived the life he described in Folsom Prison Blues, which he did not. But it felt real because Cash so inhabited solidarity with those who were forgotten and hopeless. He sang, “But just so we’re reminded of the ones who are held back, up front there ought to be a man in black.” 

Bonhoeffer, in prison, refused to be trapped in despair and pointed to the hope of newness in Christ. Cash, in stardom, refused to be trapped in comfort and pointed to the hurt of a fallen world. 

And, underneath them both, there’s that painting of the moment of deliverance, with the focus up against the night sky on that pillar of fire. This points me to one of my favorite passages of Scripture: “And the Lord went before them by day in a pillar of cloud to lead them along the way, and by night in a pillar of fire to give them light, that they might travel by day and by night. The pillar of cloud by day and the pillar of fire by night did not depart from before the people” (Exod. 13:21-22). 

 Cash sang, of course, about a Ring of Fire—the pull of the passions against which he struggled not to lose his way. Bonhoeffer faced even worse, the possibility that the light of the gospel itself would be snuffed out by the blood mysticism of the Nazis. Both of them sought to, as Cash would put it, “walk the line.” I want to walk the line too, to keep a close watch on this heart of mine, to keep my eyes wide open all the time. 

The line, though, is visible only right in front of one’s next step and then in the far, far horizon of eternity. Between here and there things seem to be an impenetrable cloud. That cloud is grace too. 

And the line we walk is following after a pioneer who has already gone before us, and who also stands behind us, hemming us in from both directions and leading us out into the dark. When we ask for the way to be laid out for us, where we can see it and absorb it and control it, we hear a Galilean accent saying, “I am the Way” (Jn. 14:6). 

All this reminds me that, even in Buchenwald camp or Folsom prison, the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it. 

Here’s a section of it:

“The Bible tells me to be anxious for nothing, but I still worry,” she said. “What is wrong with me, and how can I ever fix it?”

A listener of my podcast sent this question, and I haven’t been able to get it out of my mind all week. The reason I keep mulling it over is not because it’s unusual but because it’s so normal.

The irony is that the question isn’t really about anxiety: It’s about anxiety about anxiety. It’s not really about worry, but about worry about worrying. Why do we feel this way?

The listener is worried because she doesn’t want to disobey Jesus.

And she’s interpreting this the way she would if she were refusing a moral command from the Lord…

The irony is that because of that, she can’t see that these passages are not warnings but reassurances.  

If this might be of use to you, you can read the rest here: https://www.christianitytoday.com/2026/03/stop-being-anxious-about-your-anxiety/?utm_medium=widgetsocial

Maria and I were living in Louisville, where I was a doctoral student at Southern Seminary. We had just found out that we were expecting our first child. My mother sent this cap, along with some other things, expressing excitement about the impeding arrival of her first grandchild. 

A few weeks later we learned we had miscarried. In the grief of it I quickly put away every reminder that I could, including this, into a box. We went through a couple more of those miscarriages, to the point that I had almost, but not quite, given up hope. 

There was a song at the time, about the very ache I was feeling: “We Thought You’d Be Here by Now,” and it included a line that summed it all up for me: “I never knew the silence could make me so dead; I never knew that I could miss someone I’d never met.” 

When Maria became pregnant seven years after that, we at first didn’t celebrate because we assumed that, like the others, this would end in tragedy. When we went to the first follow-up doctor’s appointment and they heard the heartbeat we still grieved, assuming that it was just going to be even longer of waiting for the inevitable. And then there was another doctor’s visit, and then another, and then another, and we looked at each other and thought, “He might actually arrive!” 

He did. And by that point we were already parents, having adopted two sons a couple of years before. Now there are five. All five of them have worn it. 

I keep that hat to remind me of God’s providence when I could see a situation like none I had ever experienced to that point: one over which I had not even an illusion of control. It also reminds me how different a man I was by the time that hat first went onto the first head. Something had broken that needed to break. 

If all had gone according to my plan, I would have thought it was plan. I would have expected that parenting a child was like having them: everything happening as it should, right on time. And I would have missed what a sheer gift it all it is, how fragile it all is. 

I still get in that mode, all the time, of growing accustomed to grace, of taking the gift that life is for granted. That hat reminds me of a time when I could barely look at one object without wincing with tears and of the fact that now I cannot see without a smile, and sometimes, a whisper of “thank you.” 

Here’s why I keep this prayer close at hand. 

Merton, for those of you not familiar with him, was a Cistercian monk who spent most of his life at Gethsemani Abbey just outside of Bardstown, Kentucky. I’ve spent a lot of time praying and walking around there in the chapel and in the hills all around it. 

What I like about this prayer is that it hits a couple of key problems that I have faced in my own prayer life. 

Merton prays: “My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end.” 

I need to pray this. I come out of a tradition that rightly emphasized the personal aspect of prayer. But sometimes the assumption was that prayer is meant to lead us to a “peace” when we are seeking direction, and that this is more or less immediate. Prayer, though, whether in the Psalms or in the teaching of Jesus or in the Pauline epistles, doesn’t work that way. 

A key aspect of prayer is often this: “For we do not know how to pray as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groaning too deep for words” (Rom. 8:26). Sometimes before the Spirit gives us a sense of clarity as to what we are to do, we must first go the long way around, where part of the prayer is, “What is going on here? What am I supposed to do?” 

That’s not a blockage or a cul-de-sac. That’s a key part of the way the Spirit shapes us into the likeness of Christ, to get us to the point of saying, as Jesus did in the garden, “Nevertheless, not my will but your will be done” (Mk. 14:36). 

Things can often get foggier before they get clearer. The Pillar of Fire is also a cloud. 

What Merton is getting at in this prayer is akin to what Rich Mullins would sing: “I can’t see where you’re leading me unless you’ve led me here, where I’m lost enough to let myself be led.” 

The other thing that resonates with me in this prayer is the pulling away from the limits of what one can know about oneself. He prays: “Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think that I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so.” This gets at something clear that Jesus teaches about sincerity and integrity in prayer: what is heard by God is not the repetition of mouthed words but as the “deep calling unto deep” of the heart unto God. 

The problem with that is that those of us who are given to being more introspective can get ourselves into a loop of watching for insincerity inside of ourselves that we just keep peeling through layers of our self-knowledge to try to find that one part of us that has no mixed motives, no divided loyalties. The problem is we cannot ever find that part of us because that part would be without sin and “If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us” (1 Jn. 1:8). 

That’s why this part of the prayer is so necessary: “But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you.” That puts a stop to the loop of self-inspection. I cannot know myself. I cannot know what all my motives are. What I can know, though, is that I would not even have the pull to seek God if he were not seeking me first. 

That reminds me to stop trying to get myself fixed up and together enough to pray. That will never happen. The prayer itself, or rather the presence of God through prayer, is *how* I am to be fixed up and put back together. So, as Hebrews puts it, “Let us then with confidence draw near to the throne of grace, that we receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need.” 

Maybe prayer is easy for you; it is often not easy at all for me. This little prayer helps me to stop procrastinating and hedging and to pray, when I don’t know what to pray: “Lord, I don’t know what to pray.” 

That is, itself, a prayer. 

When I was president of the ERLC, I had John come and speak at a summit we had on race and the gospel. He and I did an on-stage dialogue where he was brilliant, per usual. He was, though, very, very hard to “guide” in a conversation because he said what he wanted to say, when he wanted to say it, which is one of the reasons we all loved him. 

At some point in the conversation, JP took aim at Christian rap. We had several very high-profile Christian rappers there, in the audience, including one who was on the front row. I caught his eye and cringed. I tried to navigate JP onto some other topic and eventually we did (if I remember right, it was JPs thoughts on Kenneth Copeland’s private jet, which you can just imagine). To be fair, I don’t think JP had ever heard the best stuff from Christians in the genre, but, still. 

After it was done, I went up to the Christian hip-hop artist, who is both an amazing talent and a top-notch mind, and said, “I’m sorry. I really didn’t know he was going to do that on rap and rappers.” 

The artist said, “Are you kidding me? He’s John Perkins. He’s earned the right to say anything he wants. He could have blasted me personally and I would still give him a standing ovation.” 

I laughed. But I’ve thought about that many times over the years, usually when JP and I were speaking together. The man was mistreated, beaten, and attacked, and he still kept standing for what he believed. That was genuine moral authority. I will have more to say about it in the piece in the newsletter tomorrow, but, for now, this made me smile. 

If the person asking this is someone who is reading, and who’s frustrated by what he or she is reading, and wanting recommendations to go toward what’s really good, then I’ll have a long conversation about how to tell the difference, and maybe give a long list of recommendations. 

But what I would not do is to say to people that they should give up reading what some would call “dumb” books. I wouldn’t recommend eating McDonald’s every day (unless one is CEO and then, apparently, one should do it more often), but that assumes that the choice is between McDonald’s and a balanced home-cooked meal. If the choice is between McDonald’s and starvation- go to McDonald’s. And if McDonald’s is an occasional treat that you enjoy, have at it. 

I look back and realize that I became the reader I am not because I started with Shakespeare and Milton, but with Edgar Rice Burrough’s Tarzan of the Apes and Chris Claremont’s Uncanny X-men and so on. Even C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia, which I read over and over and over, as a kid would have been looked down upon by J.R.R. Tolkien. Read what you want and then ask, “What’s next?” 

If War and Peace is not for you, right now, put it down, and find something else. Disciplining yourself to read Tolstoy is worth it, but if your options are between avoiding reading Tolstoy and reading at all- read. 

My counsel would be a little different with the Bible, but only because I think those words are not only words but words the Spirit hems in before and behind them. Don’t get discouraged if you say “I don’t understand what Leviticus means for me.” The perplexity, at first, is often the point. The disciples did not understand what “Take up your cross and follow me” really meant either until much later. Often you receive what you are able to receive when you’re able to receive it, but the path toward it is, like Ezekiel before the Valley of Dry Bones, meant to prompt you an initial confusion (“Lord, you know”) before clarity. Don’t let that discourage you. 

Read good books, yes. I can recommend some. But often not-so-good books are what you need at the moment, and, as long as you don’t think that’s all there is, can be a good start. 

If I played golf with Tiger Woods I would lose. If we played Trivial Pursuit I would have a shot.

That seems obvious enough, but it’s not. Most of us go through almost every day doing just that- setting the wrong metrics by which to judge whether we are winning or losing without ever thinking that the real question is “winning at what?”

I’ve been thinking about this all week since teaching the ending of Hebrews 11. Written to exhausted Christians, who are wobbling and wanting something more secure and visible, the book recounts a list of figures of the faith who “endured as seeing him who is invisible” (Heb. 11:27). But what struck me is the way he ended- noting that many of those who were commended for faith were imprisoned, tortured, exiled, stoned, even sawn in two.

This hardly sounds encouraging. It feels like the person who, when hearing your prayer request about a health problem, responds with “Yeah, my mom died of that.”

But look closer. The entire point is that faith isn’t confident arguing or life flourishing, but the “substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” His argument is that these Christians think faith is not *working* but they are using the wrong measuring standards.

All of these men and women of the past were, the author writes, “those of whom the world was not worthy” (Heb. 11:38). But every one of them seemed to be, and probably felt themselves to be, not worthy of the world. All of them probably were at some near collapse because they didn’t get the commendation from whatever audience they expected. And yet they were “commended through their faith” not in spite of, but because “they did not receive what was promised” (11:39).

The One commending them was not observable by the metrics most people expected. The same was true of the faith he commended. And the same was true of what was “hoped for.”

Maybe you’ve spent your whole life trying to hear “I’m proud of you” from a parent. And maybe that parent is gone and you never heard. Or maybe you tried to keep up, to be as happy or as successful as some peer group against whose Instagram feed you are measuring yourself. All that’s exhausting and self-defeating.

LeBron James can afford to lose a round of Monopoly. The game that matters for him is a different one. The same is true for you. Declare your freedom from the tyranny of what the culture around defines as success or failure. Do your best at what love, but when you win hold it lightly. And when you lose, recognize it’s not an existential threat to you. In the most important ways, your life hasn’t even started yet, even if you’re ninety years old.

The world doesn’t know what counts as winning—and never has. Hand them their scorecard back and start living.

Lots of people do. I hear from them all the time. You look around in the church and in the public arena and see awful, hollow people with awful, hollow agendas marching onward, while those who actually believe the stuff we said we believe (in the church- the gospel, the Bible, and Jesus and morality; in the public arena- character, morality, decency, democracy, limits). 

What happens for most people is not that they walk away altogether- leave the church or ready their passport to leave the country. It’s that they just go quiet, having concluded that nothing they’ve said or done in the past has worked so they might as well just garden or play Wordle until the world burns. 

All that’s understandable. 

On Sunday mornings these days, I’m teaching through the Book of Hebrews. I did so about twenty years ago but am finding that teaching that book in the present moment is an almost entirely different experience from ever before. I am seeing all kinds of emphases in the text that I think I just passed over before because I didn’t notice them. 

The primary problem of the book seems to be people who are on the verge of losing their nerve, of giving up. In the context of an imperial Rome that marginalizes them, some of them seem to want to go backward to what seems more familiar, more stable, what can give more visible and palpable reassurance that all will be well for them. They’re exhausted. 

Right now, I’m teaching through chapter 11- what I’ve heard countless preachers and teachers gratingly call “The Faith Hall of Fame.” The implication is that the chapter is assembling a list of heroes of the faith, showcasing their extraordinary faith as a way of encouraging this audience to do the same: “It worked for them; it can work for you. Try harder.” That’s not only *not* what’s going on here, it’s the exact opposite of it. 

The point of Hebrews 11 is not heroes of faith versus failures of faith. It’s not even about more faith versus less faith. Instead, it tells these wavering Christians that their problem is that they are expecting something of faith that not only it doesn’t do but that it never claimed to do. The contrast here is between “visible” and “invisible.” 

The chapter starts by reiterating what the book argues in the first chapter- that visible realities don’t create invisible ones, but the other way around. With the universe, what came first was Word. The world around us is the result of that, not the cause. “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen” (Heb. 11:1). 

The first readers were starting to conclude that faith doesn’t get results, doesn’t produce the substance of what they hoped for. The writer was arguing that faith *is* the substance of what they were hoping for, and that they already know that, from the Scriptures where they encountered these stories in the first place. 

Noah trusted in a word “concerning events as yet unseen” (Heb. 11:7). Abraham “went out, not knowing where he was going” (Heb. 11:8). Jacob gave blessings to the future on his deathbed, knowing he would never see those blessings come to fulfillment. Joseph trusted his brothers with his bones, when before he couldn’t even trust them with his coat. Moses “endured as seeing him who is invisible” (Heb. 11:27). And in every case: “The all died in faith not having received the things promised, but having seen them and greeted them from afar, and having acknowledged that they were strangers and exiles on the earth” (Heb. 11:13). 

The first readers of this book seemed to expect faith to give them a sense of stability, a blueprint showing them how to move forward in the world. Faith, though, is not a blueprint but a Way. The disorientation they felt is not a failure of faith; it’s what faith *is*. Not one of the examples given in Hebrews 11 felt settled or tranquil. 

They were all terrified and, at various points, ready to give up. The point is not how unique these men and women were, but how similar to the original hearers, and to everyone of us. And the only thing that could motivate these ancestors of old was not the accumulation of visible evidence, but trust that, behind all of this, a Word is holding all things together, and that this Word is their brother. 

That’s why the application was not so much to focus on getting more faith or more hope. That can lead to its own sort of default to the visible and the quantifiable. It was to look to Jesus (12:2) who is the beginning-point and endpoint of faith. They can go to him where he is, and where he is is “outside the camp” (Heb. 13:12-13). 

What most of us expected was what sociologists tell us we ought to expect from religion. “People of faith,” they tell us, experience belonging, stability, predicability, flourishing. That’s not, though, what faith is. Faith destabilizes now so we can seek what cannot be shaken where it really is- behind the veil of the visible. Faith makes us feel the sting of rejection because we are not using the same metrics of approval we once did. Faith makes us homeless, because it is pulling us away from what we once thought was home, to set us out for “another homeland” that we’ve never seen and that we don’t have the independence to plan the route. The map is a voice. The Way is a person. 

That’s unsettling. Good. That’s what faith does. Short-term it sometimes means you end up sawn in two or wandering in caves. Long-term? Well, that’s just beyond your sight, behind the veil of the holy place. But the pioneer is already there. Can’t you feel the pull of the anchor?