Gospel-Centered Resources from Midwestern Seminary
We all swim in a sea of negativity every day, but how should Christians process and respond to specific criticism that comes their way? Whether pastors receiving criticism from their congregations or everyday believers receiving critical words from others, what’s the biblical response to hearing criticism?
Let’s check the mailbag! In the latest installment of the FTC Podcast’s most popular feature, Jared Wilson and Ross Ferguson discuss your submitted question and topics, including: positives and negatives of VBS, avoiding pragmatism, church mergers, disagreeing with a senior pastor’s ministry philosophy, can pastors have close friends in the church?, picking songs for Sunday worship, and . . . church potlucks? Yes, even a question on church potlucks. (Jared and Ross have strong opinions.) Listen in and submit your own questions/topics for the next mailbag ep via [email protected]
I’ve worked within student ministry in some capacity for 12 years. If junior highers smell like body spray and if high schoolers can smell fear, then young adults (YAs) have a nose for inauthenticity. They see right through the smoke machine and lights. They quickly pick up on lack of depth. And they know on first whiff whether the “answer” you just gave to the question that’s plagued them or their friend’s faith (or is sitting at the bottom of their lack thereof) is worthy of consideration or if you’re just grasping at straws. They pull no punches, and they are awesome for it!
If I could encourage those attempting to reach or minister to college-age people toward one thing besides knowing their Bibles and enjoying God, it would be this: you and your ministry must be doctrinally robust. Your acquaintance with the issues YAs raise, and even more importantly, your familiarity with the answers from Scripture and Christian tradition, are indispensable in engaging GenZ 18- to 20-somethings. Whether it’s the unsaved skeptic, the new believer, or the mature believer, there will be no fruitful ministry among GenZ college students and young adults apart from deep, rich, and robust doctrine.
Evangelistic and Apologetic Need
As Derek Rishmawy, himself a campus minister, has said in regard to reaching GenZ college students, “Nerdy theology really does matter for evangelism. Doctrineless evangelism simply will not work.” Amen. The universities where YAs live lack no robust secular doctrine that refutes Christianity. Bart Erdman does not pull any punches, and neither should we. Young adults need to know the church has sufficient and coherent answers to their theological questions, and we who pastor them should be ready to offer those answers (1 Peter 3:15).
The Need for Adult Answers to Adult Lives
Young adults face new life stages and challenges. They have questions about dating, marriage, finance, politics, culture, and more. They often no longer rely on their parents or tradition for answers. They need deep, robust, and coherent doctrine that addresses the complexities and hardships of life. You might get away with shooting from the hip in youth group, but young adults will suss out a run-of-the-mill answer in a heartbeat. Not only this, but as a generation coming of age amid heightened turbulence (American political context, COVID) and lack of solidity (social media), they long for rootedness and concreteness. A concreteness only deep doctrine can provide. YAs need mature doctrine so they can mature into adulthood (Hebrews 5:11-14).
The Discipleship Need
Many, if not most, YAs have no clue robust theology even exists. They rarely read theological books and haven’t sat under good preaching and teaching. I pick up on this when some of the YAs in my church don’t understand the need for church membership, the significance of baptism, the habit of tithing, and so on. YAs, mature or immature, need good doctrine that will instruct them in how they ought to live and stir them up to taste the depths of the knowledge of God so that they might be further formed into his image (2 Corinthians 3:18).
Resources
So, if pastors or volunteers or parents want to effectively engage and disciple young adults, they must equip themselves in knowing, presenting, and defending “what accords with sound doctrine” (Titus 2:1, Cf. Titus 1:9; 1 Timothy 1:10). And we will become so by not only going deep in our Bibles, but going wide in our familiarity with solid Christian theology and growing in our ability to wield it for the good of those young people we long to reach and disciple.
So, as one step toward this, what should one be reading/doing to prepare for ministering to college agers?
Historical Theology
YAs don’t need new answers. They need age-old answers applied to contemporary phrasing of age-old questions. And thankfully for us, the Christian tradition is in no small part the history of answering the most foundational questions humans have ever wondered about. Metaphysics, morality–these are the same questions GenZ has, though staged somewhat differently.
Pick a (preferably not from this century) systematic theology or theologian and dedicate yourself to ingesting it/them. Go slow and let the sound theology seep into your bones. Recognize how the answers given centuries ago are the answers needed today, just with your own presentation.
And let the 21-year-old know where you’re getting these answers from. This will not only give you the next most solid foundation outside of Scripture with which to grapple with the questions young adults have, but it will also provide a rootedness to the young adult asking as they see this isn’t something thought up last week.
You can’t go wrong with Herman Bavinck’s Reformed Dogmatics. Or, if four volumes is understandably a bit much for a first bite, Louis Berkhof’s one-volume Systematic Theology is a great place to start. For a modern presentation, look at John Frame’s.
Biblical Anthropology
You knew you needed to read in this area. And you knew why. If YAs have questions about anything, it is about our bodies. What are they? Am I my body, or am I inside of it? Do bodies matter? How much do they matter? How do we know they matter more than what my mind says? Speaking of, what’s a mind? These are just the snowflakes of the iceberg.
But these questions aren’t theoretical. YAs have these questions because they have friends whose lives hang in the balance of these questions, or so it seems to them. These are live questions for YAs because they deal with lives. That is why they matter to YAs, and they should matter to you because those very lives might walk into your campus or church young adult group.
But you don’t just need to know what you think about LGBTQ+, the goodness of the material body, God’s design for marriage and family, abortion, assisted suicide, and the like. You need to know why you know. And you need to know and be able to explain why the Christian answer is not only true, but also the most beautiful and genuinely good option in the marketplace.
Here’s a starter pack:
Miscellaneous Apologetics
We must also be familiar with the various topics that YAs are likely to ask questions about. Especially for those YAs going to college, they are interacting with peers and professors who operate from a different worldview. This raises a range of questions for YAs, most of which can be categorized into a broader field that we would do well to engage. This will require us to know the best arguments of the other side. Doing so enables us to gather our own compelling and sound answers, while also being able to formulate our own questions for those worldviews to reveal their inadequacies. A few general areas in which to be well read are
Write
Finally, consider writing as you read. Writing solidifies ideas in your mind and heart. It helps you synthesize the large amounts of information you take in through books. There are countless ways of doing this. I (Dan) have a running doctrinal statement along with documents on theological topics that I add to and tweak as I read new theological material. I try to keep the writing short (100-200 words) but carefully written. Writing will make you more confident and clear when you are in an off-the-cuff conversation with a YA on a theologically dense or apologetically precarious topic.
Conclusion
Take heart, God is pursuing YAs in this generation as he has in every generation before. He formed them and knows the hurdles they have to faith in his gospel and greater growth in it. He has many people in this generation (Acts 18:10) and is more than capable of saving them. His arm is never too short. And be encouraged, while he is not dependent on you, he wants to use you to reach them. So pray for them, go on fast food runs or coffee shop meet-ups with them, hear them out for hours at a time if needed, and arm yourself with robust doctrine so that when they ask their questions or the questions of their friends, you are ready to give a sound response.
Editor’s Note: This article is taken from Christ Our All: Poems for the Christian Pilgrim and used by permission of B&H Academic. The book is now available everywhere Christian books are sold.
Spurgeon’s love of hymns began at a young age. Once, during a summer holiday, his grandmother offered him a penny for each Watts hymn he memorized. With his gifted mind, young Spurgeon memorized so many that his grandmother soon had to change her offer or risk financial ruin! The money earned was eventually spent, but his love of hymns remained with him for the rest of his life, becoming a part of his theological vocabulary. “No matter on what topic I am preaching,” he wrote, “I can even now, in the middle of any sermon, quote some verse of a hymn in harmony with the subject.”[1] As Spurgeon grew in his knowledge of hymns, his sermons would come to include not only Watts, but Toplady, Cowper, Wesley, and many other great hymn-writers of the Christian faith.
As the pastor of a church, Spurgeon sought to pass on his love of hymns to his congregants. In addition to preaching, he planned the liturgy for the gatherings of the church, including the selection of hymns. When he first arrived, there were two hymnbooks in the pews, one by Watts and the other by John Rippon. But watching people fumble with multiple books convinced Spurgeon that something had to change. So, in 1866, he compiled and published Our Own Hymn-Book, containing 1,130 psalms and hymns. As reflected in the title, Spurgeon’s concern was the church. This was not Spurgeon’s hymnbook; this was the church’s hymnbook. One of his top priorities was to pull together psalms and hymns that reflected the church’s doctrinal convictions. After all, Spurgeon understood that a church’s hymnbook was often the only book of theology most church members would ever read.
But even while Our Own Hymn-Book reflected Spurgeon’s Reformed and Baptist traditions, he also sought to introduce a wide variety of traditions, pulling together hymns from all of church history. He wrote:
The area of our researches has been as wide as the bounds of existing religious literature, American and British, Protestant and Romish; ancient and modern. Whatever may be thought of our taste we have used it without prejudice; and a good hymn has not been rejected because of the character of its author, or the heresies of the church in whose hymnal it first occurred; so long as the language and the spirit commended the hymn to our heart we included it, and believe that we have enriched our collection thereby.[2]
Thus, we see in Spurgeon’s collection of hymnbooks a wide variety of hymn writers: Scottish Presbyterians, English Baptists and Methodists, German Lutherans, Anglicans, medieval Catholics, and other nationalities and church traditions, ranging from the nineteenth century all the way back to the medieval and early church. From all these psalms and hymns, Spurgeon sought to bring out the ones that best reflected the historic faith of the apostles and the church’s doctrinal convictions. In his day, Our Own Hymn-Book was recognized as an achievement in Christian hymnody.[3]
But Spurgeon’s love of poetry extended beyond hymns. His library reveals that Spurgeon enjoyed just about every kind of poetry: ancient poetry, poems about nature, love poems, children’s rhymes, and many others. Most of all, however, Spurgeon loved poems about God and the Christian life. Preaching in 1855, Spurgeon declared, “Much as I respect the genius of Pope, or Dryden, or Burns, give me the simple lines of Cowper, that God has owned in bringing souls to Him.”[4] William Cowper was indeed one of Spurgeon’s favorite poets. He usually included Cowper’s famous hymn whenever he signed autograph albums, “E’er since by faith I saw the stream . . .”[5] Fittingly, these lines are etched on his tombstone.
Another poet he loved was John Bunyan. Throughout his life, he read, “at least a hundred times,” The Pilgrim’s Progress, “that sweetest of all prose poems,” which shaped his vision for the Christian life.[6] What he loved most about it was simply how much Bible was in it.[7] Bunyan brought together Spurgeon’s love of Scripture with his love of poetry.
Yet another of his favorite poets was George Herbert. Herbert was a source of refreshment for Spurgeon, especially after a long day of ministry.[8] His wife, Susannah, recounted:
It is the Sabbath, and the day’s work is done. The dear preacher has had a light repast, and now rests in his easy chair by a bright fire, while, on a low cushion at his feet, sits his wife, eager to minister in some way to her beloved’s comfort. “Shall I read to you to-night, dear?” she says; for the excitement and labor of the Sabbath services sorely try him, and his mind needs some calm and soothing influence to set it at rest. “Will you have a page or two of good George Herbert?” “Yes, that will be very refreshing, wifey; I shall like that.” So the book is procured, and he chooses a portion which I read slowly and with many pauses, that he may interpret to me the sweet mysteries hidden within the gracious words. Perhaps his enjoyment of the book is all the greater that he has thus to explain and open out to me the precious truths enwrapped in Herbert’s quaint verse;—anyhow, the time is delightfully spent. I read on and on for an hour or more, till the peace of Heaven flows into our souls, and the tired servant of the King of kings loses his sense of fatigue, and rejoices after his toil.[9]
For Spurgeon, poetry was about more than just entertainment. It gave him the perspective of a Christian pilgrim. It provided spiritual nourishment for his tired soul. And it strengthened him with a renewed joy in God for the week ahead.
Thou Art My All (by C. H. Spurgeon)
Dear Lord, in thee I view my all,
And lovely is thy name.
For though on earth I slip or fall,
Thy love remains the same.
Each day reminds me I am weak
To stand against my foes;
And, but that I thy help may seek,
I’d fall beneath my woes.
But thou hast said my strength shall be
According to my day.
Thy promise has been kept to me,
And still will be I pray.
For what are we if left to roam
In life’s deceitful way?
Yet farther off, not nearer home,
Our feet are prone to stray.
Then never have us Lord to tread
This world without a guide.
And never let the tempter lead
Thine erring sheep aside.
“I will not leave, nor yet forsake
My people here below;
Until in glory they shall wake
And purer regions know.”
For further reflection: Deuteronomy 33:25–27
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[1] Autobiography 1:43–44.
[2] OOH, vi–vii.
[3] For an appreciative nineteenth-century analysis of Spurgeon’s contribution to Christian hymnody, see Josiah Miller, Singers and Songs of the Church: Being Biographical Sketches of the Hymn-Writers in All the Principal Collections: with Notes on their Psalms and Hymns (London: Longmans, Green, 1869), 580–81.
[4] NPSP 1:344.
[5] Hayden, Highlights, 101.
[6] MTP 45:495.
[7] “Next to the Bible, the book I value most is John Bunyan’s ‘Pilgrim’s Progress.’ I believe I have read it through at least a hundred times. It is a volume of which I never seem to tire; and the secret of its freshness is that it is so largely compiled from the Scriptures. It is really Biblical teaching put into the form of a simple yet very striking allegory.” C. H. Spurgeon, Pictures from Pilgrim’s Progress: A Commentary on Portions of John Bunyan’s Immortal Allegory with Prefatory Notes by Thomas Spurgeon (Pasadena, TX: Pilgrim Publications, 1992), 11.
[8] “Frequently, when I return home from chapel on the Sabbath evening, I get down George Herbert’s book of songs; and when I see how much he loved the Lord, it seems to me as if he had struck upon his harp the very notes that he had heard in Paradise, and sung them all again.” MTP 46:106.
[9] Autobiography 2:185–86.
On this episode of the FTC Podcast, Jared Wilson and Ross Ferguson talk about the place of humor in preaching. Should it ever be used? If so, how? What are some things to do and *not* do?
Editor’s Note: The following poems were written by Charles Spurgeon and compiled by Geoffrey Chang in Christ Our All: Poems for the Christian Pilgrim . They are reproduced here by permission of B&H Academic. The book releases May 15 and is available to preorder now.
The One Request[1]
Cambridge / Waterbeach, June 1853
If to my God I now may speak,
And make one short request;
If but one favor I might seek
Which I esteem the best, —
I would not choose this earth’s poor wealth;
How soon it melts away!
I would not seek continued health;
A mortal must decay.
I would not crave a mighty name;
Fame is but empty breath.
Nor would I urge a royal claim;
For monarchs bow to death.
I would not beg for sinful sweets;
Such pleasures end in pain.
Nor should I ask fair learning’s seats;
Love absent, these are vain.
My God, my heart would choose with joy,
Thy grace, Thy love, to share;
This is the sweet which cannot cloy,
And this my portion fair.
For further reflection: Psalm 16:5–8
Immanuel[2]
Cambridge / Waterbeach, June 1853
When once I mourned a load of sin,
When conscience felt a wound within,
When all my works were thrown away,
When on my knees I knelt to pray,
Then, blissful hour, remembered well,
I learned Thy love, Immanuel!
When storms of sorrow toss my soul,
When waves of care around me roll,
When comforts sink, when joys shall flee,
When hopeless gulfs shall gape for me,
One word the tempest’s rage shall quell,
That word, Thy name, Immanuel!
When for the truth I suffer shame,
When foes pour scandal on my name,
When cruel taunts and jeers abound,
When “bulls of Bashan” gird me round,
Secure within my tower I’ll dwell,
That tower, Thy grace, Immanuel!
When hell, enraged, lifts up her roar,
When Satan stops my path before,
When fiends rejoice, and wait my end,
When legion’d hosts their arrows send,
Fear not, my soul, but hurl at hell
Thy battle-cry, Immanuel!
When down the hill of life I go,
When o’er my feet death’s waters flow,
When in the deep’ning flood I sink,
When friends stand weeping on the brink,
I’ll mingle with my last farewell,
Thy lovely name, Immanuel!
When tears are banished from mine eye,
When fairer worlds than these are nigh,
When Heaven shall fill my ravish’d sight,
When I shall bathe in sweet delight,
One joy all joys shall far excel,
To see Thy face, Immanuel!
For further reflection: Matthew 1:21–23
[1] Autobiography 1:293.
[2] Autobiography 1:294; SOOH 13.
The sportswriter Red Smith was once asked if writing a daily column was difficult.
“Why, no,” Smith replied. “You simply sit down at the typewriter, open your veins, and bleed.”[1]
Admittedly, Smith’s observation is a little overwrought. But only a little.
There is a way to write that costs the writer very little. And then there are Writers. There is a contemplation of the art and an undertaking of the craft that engages all we are and all we have, as if the ink on our page is drawn from our very blood.
Maybe you’re not sure which one you are. Are you a writer or a Writer? It’s okay. You don’t have to know just yet. Both Writers and “people who write” can create work that impacts readers in profound ways.
Writers write. That is the bottom line. There is no getting around it. It is a nonnegotiable truth. You don’t need to be particularly good at writing to be a writer. You don’t have to be published to be a writer. You don’t even have to be read to be a writer. But you must write. By definition, writers write.
Wanting to write is not being a writer. Thinking about writing is an important part of being a writer, but it isn’t by itself being a writer. Fancying yourself a writer is not being one.
Writers often hear wannabe writers say, “I want to write someday,” but actual writers don’t say such things. They’ve been writing.
Writers don’t ask for permission. They don’t wait for the perfect moment. They feel the inexorable draw to create coming from the inside; it’s something they just do, something they are. Nobody has to assign them the task. They usually don’t need anyone to give them an idea.
Someone once said, “I don’t know what I think about a thing until I write about it.” That is the sort of thing only a writer would say. Writers cannot conceive of their place in this world apart from processing it through the written word. Putting the stuff on paper or a screen makes it more real. Modern society possesses a pronounced shortage of people who will admit to not knowing things, but among those whose pride will not forbid them this confession are the ones who make up their minds about a thing after reading about it. Writers do that too. But only writers understand the concept of writing to understand.
Writers understand writing as a way of being.
If you just consider yourself “someone who writes,” all this talk of costliness and bleeding onto the page might be making you a little queasy. I do apologize. And I promise there’s not a whole lot of gore in the rest of the book.
For all you Writers, though—this introduction is especially for you. It’s for those of you who make reading introductions a habit because you suspect every bit of a book matters. After all, it all matters when you write.
I bring to this project a spirit kindred with yours. I love the whole writing process out of all proportion. I love the finished project, of course. Everybody loves that. But I also love the first bit of noodling around on a page, typing and typing and backspacing and backspacing. I love the part when I’ve been writing for a while and suddenly something unlocks and, lo!, a rushing wind, a tongue of fire, unction!, and the words are now carrying me rather than the other way around. I love moving chunks around, scratching out lines, cutting, pasting, turning a series of disjointed what’s-its into a smooth pastiche without the seams. Finding le mot juste? I adore.
What I’m trying to say is that if you love to write, feel called to write, or cannot not write, this book is for you. If you wonder sometimes if any of it is worth it, if you wonder if there’s such a thing as a “call to write,” if you get frustrated that the work won’t flow like you want it to—this book is for you too.
I see writing as more than an opportunity to communicate creatively. Creative writing is in fact a reflection of the creative meaning of the universe, a direct derivation from the Creator himself. He has made everything with words and has given even of himself as the Word. This isn’t some piddling around kind of stuff.
I don’t care if you write novels or a recipe blog, theological essays or personal letters, book-length devotionals or thirty-minute sermons. Your writing is divinely gifted, eternally scaled, and gloriously weighted. I’m going to spend this book convincing you of that fact.
Together we’ll remind each other that God is telling an important story about himself in the world. To do that, he tells important stories with our own lives. And getting to the glory of the former means getting in touch with the glory of the latter. I’ll tell you a little bit about how my own journey has helped me see my ordinary life as a storied life, a succession of days (the number unknown to me) full of wonder and insight, despite the pain and ignorance, because of the way they are driven and shaped by the glorious gospel.
Oh, sure, to get to the glory, you have to go through the chaos. We’ll talk about that too. If you’re a writer, you already know you can’t write much of anything worth much of anything without getting a little banged up, maybe a little bloody.
But we know what our Lord does with blood.
[1] The line is often attributed to the likes of Ernest Hemingway or Thomas Wolfe—I’ve even seen it attributed to Ray Bradbury—and while its origin is in some dispute, it most likely derives from an anecdote related to Smith, whom, it so happens, Hemingway regularly read. See Garson O’Toole, “Writing Is Easy; You Just Open a Vein and Bleed,” Quote Investigator, September 14, 2011, https://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/09/14/writing-bleed/.
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Editor’s Note: Taken from The Storied Life: Christian Writing as Art and Worship by Jared C. Wilson. Copyright © 2024 by Jared C. Wilson. Used by permission of Zondervan. www.harpercollinschristian.com
The Storied Life is now available wherever Christian books are sold.
“Thank you, Lord,” I uttered when I got off the phone with my doctor. A few months before I had been diagnosed with melanoma, and a few days after the surgery, I received the welcomed news that the cancer had not spread. The Lord kindly answered my prayer.
Several weeks later I sat on our couch praising God for answering yet another specific prayer in the way we had hoped. I then moved on to pray about an additional weighty matter, but I stopped.
My sin and skepticism got the best of me, and I thought, Am I out of asks? “Oh, but God,” I muttered, “Please hear this one.” I have experienced the Lord not answering my prayer in the way I hoped, so fear unexpectedly gripped my heart as I prayed, pleaded, doubted, and as I wondered whether I had used up my asks of God.
But this is not the way our Father works. Every area of our existence is tainted by sin so that even our prayer life is replete with our brokenness. But a careful look at others in the Bible who pleaded with God reveals for us the character of God which shapes the way we ask of him.
Through Moses: Prayer Reveals God’s Relationship with His Children
Moses prays to God throughout the book of Exodus, and it is remarkable how dialogical his prayers are. They reveal a deep relationship between Moses and his Creator. On many occasions, Moses is invited into a conversation with God, and his dialogue with him, while often sequential, is also very relational. He prays, he asks, but in doing so, he desires to know more about God. He says in Exodus 33:13, “…please show me now your ways.”
There is an intimacy to his ask, and God answers his request in the next verse: “My presence will go with you” (33:14). In essence, Moses asks of God, Please let me in on your plans to experience your presence! And God answers, I will always be with you, Moses.
When we ask of God, our prayers do not function like a business transaction. Rather, when we come to the Lord with requests, we are leaning into the relationship that God desires to have with his children. He wants you to ask of him boldly and frequently because doing so strengthens your relationship with him.
God hears, he answers in his timing and according to his perfect will, and the more we talk to him, the more we understand that prayer is not just about getting what we want. Prayer is a dialogue that causes us to abide in our Savior and connect to him so much so that all he is pours out in and through us.
Through David: Prayer Reveals God’s Mercy with His Children
The way David honestly pours out his heart to God throughout the Psalms is an encouragement for believers in Jesus. His prayers express anger (Ps. 10), doubt (Ps. 13), and sometimes deep, deep sadness (Ps. 88). What is remarkable is God’s never-ending mercy and gentleness with David. Even as an adulterer and murderer, David is treated by God with kindness and patience as God inclines his ear and draws near to a man whose emotions run the gamut. What’s beautiful is that David acknowledges in Psalm 18:35 that it is the gentleness of God that has made him great. He knows the depth and significance of his Savior’s mercy through his many failings, and not only is he grateful for it, but he has learned from it.
We do not ask of a God who is harsh and volatile. The perception of God as a violent storm ready to consume those who ask too much of him is not what the Bible teaches us about his character. He is just and holy (Deut. 32:4; 1 Sam. 2:2) and deserving of our reverence, but he is also gentle and merciful, willing and wanting to carry our greatest burdens (Ps. 55:22). Mercy and justice mingle necessarily; his mercy toward his children springs forth from his justice, and we see this throughout David’s prayers in the Psalms.
Ask of your Father with honesty, child of God. He already knows the deepest longings of your heart, so there is no need to fear openness before him. Our Father is patient and merciful as we learn through our doubts and uncertainties of his matchless mercy and grace.
Through Paul: Prayer Reveals God’s Perfect Sovereignty
Paul had a thorn in his flesh, something that regularly caused him grief. I have a thorn in my flesh, an area of weakness which I regularly ask God to take away. I imagine most believers empathize with the constant, dull pangs from these thorns that we wish we could be entirely freed from.
Paul pleads with God for the thorn to be removed (2 Cor. 12:8), and you can almost sense the emotional exhaustion from his prayer. We don’t know what exactly his thorn is, but we do know that he asks for it to be taken away persistently and honestly. But God does not remove it.
Instead, he answers Paul’s ask with these words: “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness” (2 Cor. 12:9). Paul sees one way forward in his ministry, and that is the removal of this thing that causes him distress. But God sees a greater way forward. He leaves the thorn and lavishes on Paul his grace. Interestingly, the Apostle does not lament this; instead, he rejoices because God takes him to a place of miraculous strength and power that he would not have experienced otherwise.
There are times when God’s answer to our ask is not what we hoped for. But there is no need to fear this outcome because our Father consistently answers better than we ask. We are not the author of stories, nor should we want to be. The heart of God is such that he answers us in ways that are more stunning than we could ever imagine (Eph. 3:20). We can trust this will be the case with every prayer uttered to our Father. Ask of him. You can never ask too much, nor can you ask too many times. Your Father loves to answer your prayers with his unconditional love and incomparable glory. As his child, you are never out of asks.
In an episode in anticipation of Mother’s Day, Jared and Ross talk about their favorite biblical moms.
My new book The Storied Life: Christian Writing as Art and Worship is now available from Zondervan Reflective. This book is for both experienced and aspiring writers — whether you write stories or sermons or even just social media posts or daily journal entries — and is designed to equip you with some nuts and bolts practicalities for better writing and to see your writing as a reflection of the One who is “writing” you!
Here are some quotes from the book to whet your creative appetite.
1. “To get to the glory, you have to go through the chaos.” (xvi)
2. “One key to powerful Christian writing is not in our trying to say something new but in our saying something old in a new way.” (17)
3. “It is one thing to say in my preaching that ‘Jesus is glorious.’ That is definitely true and it must be said. But it is another thing to preach Jesus in such a way that the hearer is led to declare in response, ‘Oh, Jesus is glorious!'” (23)
4. “It’s not always explicit gospel content that makes writing Christian, but often the worldview of the writer and, most importantly, the way the writing reflects a sense of the Divine Author’s story of the world. The content is not incidental, and there are certainly worldly ways to tell ostensibly Christian stories. But for writing to be well thought of as Christian, it must reflect The Story.” (29)
5. “Christian writers will find that to write in a way that is true, they must also give space for the incursion of the world into the attempt to subdue it. Parted waters recede. Manna spoils. Weeds shoot back up. We do not have to yield to the reality of the curse, but to write what is true, we must be honest about it. The worst Christian writing glosses over the dirt in the garden of cultivation.” (38)
6. “The story that God is telling in the world is beautiful, but it’s not always pretty.” (67)
7. “It is in the creation of art, perhaps, that image bearers most closely reflect their status as image bearers. To contemplate a blank page or a blank canvas or a lump of clay and turn that void into something articulate, resonant, to make of it something that was not there before, is akin to creation ex nihilo. When we create, we image the Creator.” (74-75)
8. “All artistic creations are innately spiritual acts.” (76)
9. “Training to read and write well is not simply about improving one’s skills. Reading and writing are formational for our improvement as persons.” (79)
10. “Whether I’m staring out the window or looking at Van Gogh’s paintings of cypresses or reading Leif Enger or John Milton or Thomas Hardy, I want to tune my internal narration to the God who has given us all of this vision and these visionaries. I realize the right disciplines can make me good, but it’s the right dreaming that can make me great.” (83)
11. “The Christian writer’s first audience is the one who has gifted him.” (87)
12. “You must see reading not just as an imperative for becoming a better writer, but for becoming the kind of writer whose life is shaped by story (and The Story).” (99)
13. “Your voice is somewhere deep in the uncharted jungle of the writing life. You must hack your way sweaty and weary to get to it.” (105)
14. “It’s never too soon to start writing, but the writer you are when you start is not the writer you will be later.” (105)
15. “For the Christian artist, finding one’s voice is not about building some Babel tower of personal distinguishment but about contributing your voice to the music of the spheres, which exists to glorify the truly distinguished Creator of all.” (111)
16. “There is a way to write about Christian doctrine that doesn’t sound very Christian at all. You could go to your local bookseller and find the books marketed to evangelicals and discover a whole range of options that read like appliance manuals. The theologian may be the smartest guy in the room, but his book is as dry as old toast. The inspirational influencer may be the peppiest gal on Instagram, but her book book reads like it was spit out by an A.I. program. It probably was.” (129-130)
17. “The writer is to love his neighbor as himself.” (132)
18. “People who say they’ve always wanted to write a book typically mean they’ve always wanted to have written a book.” (138)
19. “Nonwriters do not understand. They want the magic spell, the magic beans. But there are none. You have to put the words down on a page.” (139)
20. “Even if you do achieve amazing success, you need to remember that The Story is not about your fame, but Christ’s.” (150)
21. “Platform is a stewardship from God.” (152)
22. “One of the worst things we can do in the face of [writer’s] block is to give up. We are going to have to fight it in some way.” (161)
23. “The words don’t show up if you don’t.” (164)
24. “The stuff of our everyday lives isn’t meant to be oriented around the idol of our creativity. Rather, our creativity is meant to flavor our everyday life.” (169)
25. “The call to write is a call to see as many ways as possible that God is telling stories in the world. The call to write is a call to press deeper into The Story. And when we do, we find that we are not just being called to ‘make stuff,’ but to be made. God’s calling is in fact a storying of us.” (191)
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