Masculine Agency
[This lecture was delivered at the 2024 Men’s Retreat in Zumbro Falls, MN]
Welles Crowther was born and raised in Nyack, New York. He played hockey and lacrosse, and at 16 years old he became a volunteer fireman. He started working in finance right out of college, and he was 24 years old on September 11, 2001, when he settled into his office on the 104th floor of the South Tower of the World Trade Center.
By 8:46am, a plane had crashed into the North Tower, and so people started to evacuate the South Tower. About 200 people crowded the 78th floor, waiting for the elevator to take them down. But at 9:02, a second plane crashed into the South Tower and one of its wings completely took out floors 78–84. Instantly, there were dead bodies everywhere, and those still alive were absolutely stunned. It was fire, smoke, and carnage all around, and suddenly a man shouts that he had found the stairs. He gathered a group and led them down to the 64th floor where firemen met them and helped them onto elevators. Then Welles went back up to the 78th and to find more people still alive, and he reportedly called out: If you can stand, stand, and then help the person beside you. Welles led that second group down the 64th floor, and then went back up the stairs again, but that was the last time he was seen. At 9:59am, the South Tower collapsed.
The body was Welles Crowther wasn’t recovered until found March 19, 2002, and it’s believed he saved the lives of 18 people. …
There are 18 people still alive today because of masculine agency.
* * *
That’s the topic this morning — masculine agency — which is an application of masculine strength. Mike Polley defined masculine strength as “an internal spiritual resolve that manifests itself in powerful love and agency for God’s people and God’s purposes.” I’m just gonna focus in more on that. So think of this talk as a second part to Pastor Mike Polley’s talk last night, but then also, this is like a Part Three to some teaching I did back to June.
At the Men’s Breakfast in June, I spoke on the “Pursuit of Manhood.” My thesis was that: Being a Christian is the fulfillment of your manhood, and in no way contradicts it.
I argued that the Christian life fits well with the masculine spirit, and the reason it does is because the Christian life is quest-oriented, just like manhood is.
The Christian Life As Quest-Oriented
And the idea of the Christian life as quest-oriented was much more obvious in the early church, and even centuries after that — really, the biggest change here has come in just the last hundred years —
Most people today do not associate the Christian life with a quest and I’d argue that it’s mainly because of the influence of secular humanism and its syncretism with Christianity. That’s where we get “Moral Therapeutic Deism” (MTD). That’s a term that’s been around for twenty years now (you’ve probably heard it before). It captures what many people actually believe about God. Basically, MTD believes that God mainly wants us to be good and happy, which means we should be nice people who focus on self-improvement.
There’s no quest there. If anything, the idea is more about keeping your head down — it’s the reverse of the Golden Rule: “don’t disturb others the way you don’t want them to disturb you.” It’s extremely passive, insular, and risk-averse. I’d call it effeminate.
But the biblical vision of the Christian life — and again the one that has carried the day for most of church history (especially in the earliest years) — is that the Christian life is a difficult journey. To become a Christian is to embark on a quest that traverses the ever-changing terrain of both internal and external obstacles. In other words, struggle is inherent to the Christian life. And if you wonder if people really thought this way about the Christian life, I point you to John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, which has sold more copies than any other book in the world other than the Bible. It’s the most famous allegory of the Christian life ever written, and there’s a reason why! John Bunyan portrays the Christian life as a quest.
(And there’s a lot more I could say about this, but I don’t have time to get into now. Please, let’s talk more about this. I think Pilgrim’s Progress is a great book for all Christians, but especially men. I think some of the struggles and tensions that men feel in their Christian walk is because they’ve been set up wrong. Bunyan will help.)
Living the Christian life is a quest, and it’s not easy. Do you what else is a quest and not easy? Being a man.
Manhood As Quest-Oriented
Some of this is review from June. If you were there, you might remember that is said: Being a man is different from being merely male.
To be male is biology. Maleness is purely given by God (e.g., XY), and it’s the most basic, normative way to talk about our sex.
Masculinity, on the other hand, is an expression — it’s derived from maleness but then it’s culturally informed. Back in June, we talked about how different cultures have different ways of expressing masculinity, but that what they all have in common is that masculinity is distinguished from femininity by its calling to separate and sacrifice for the community’s good. That was the big discovery of David Gilmore in his research of several different cultures (from North America to the Middle East to aboriginal South America, to East Asia and Micronesia and Ancient Greece, etc.) — he researched very different cultures, but found that there was a universality when it came to masculinity (even with it’s different expressions). One thing that all these cultures had in common was that masculinity was not an achievement that can be possessed irrevocably (except by war or martyrdom), but, in general, masculinity is a quality that must be earned by continued practice. And masculinity, together with maleness, is what makes you a man. So, as an equation, we’d say: Maleness + masculinity = manhood. And to equal manhood means you have to keep doing the masculine thing. You’re on a quest! Building on Gilmore’s research, Leon Podles writes,
To be masculine, a man must be willing to fight and inflict pain, but also to suffer and endure pain. He seeks out dangers and tests of his courage and wears the scars of his adventures proudly. He does this not for his own sake, but for the community’s, to protect it from its enemies, both human and natural. Masculine self-affirmation is, paradoxically, a kind of self-[renunciation]. A man must always be ready to give up his life. (43)
And when you hear that last part, who do think of? Who is the preeminent example of sacrifice?
Jesus.
Fulfillment: The Truest Man
Jesus is the truest, perfect man. Jesus is the preeminent example of true manhood.
I appreciate Doug Wilson’s definition of manhood. He says manhood is to gladly assume sacrificial responsibility. Another way to put it is to say that as a man you are called to lead, provide for, and protect your family and community even at a cost to yourself. Jesus modeled this. Podles writes,
Human masculinity, whose purpose is the protection and provision of the community, finds its fulfillment in the one who is Lord because he is sacrifice and savior. (75)
So, this means: when your pursuit of manhood is being most realized, you are most like Jesus.
This is why to be a Christian, to live the Christian life, actually fulfills your calling to manhood. Going by our definition of manhood, you will never be a true man while also not being Christlike.
In fact, I would go as far as to say that you can only become a true man — in the fullest sense that God intended — if you become a true Christian, which means you are converted, born again, and enlisted in the pursuit of conformity to Christ through struggle (see 1 Cor. 3:4).
The thesis again: Being a Christian is the fulfillment of your manhood, and in no way contradicts it.
So, brothers, pursue Christ, pursue manhood, together — and in that pursuit there are two indispensable needs we have as men. The first is fraternal affirmation.
The Indispensable Needs of Men
I. Fraternal Affirmation
If manhood is a pursuit, when does it begin? Where’s the starting point?
Well, in the Christian life, where’s the starting point? Or, a better way to say it: What symbolizes the starting point of the Christian life? … Baptism.
And baptism is an initiation rite, and most fundamentally it’s an affirmation. In Jesus’s baptism, the Father affirmed him: “This is my beloved Son with whom I am well-pleased.” (Matthew 3:17). And when we’re baptized, God says the same thing to us, and the local church agrees with God. Through that communal affirmation, we are officially welcomed into the pursuit of Christ.
In a similar way, the starting point of the pursuit of manhood is also affirmation. David Gilmore also observed this in his research of masculinity in different cultures. According to Gilmore, you can travel anywhere you want in the world, and one thing that you’ll find true in every culture is that boys begin their pursuit of manhood when the respected men in their community tell them they do. And in most cultures other than the West, this kind of affirmation is expressed through initiation. There’s often a whole process that’s meant to sear the affirmation into the young man’s memory.
It’s deeply formational, and it makes sense: Men who are already on the manhood quest affirm young men to now be on the quest themselves. These young men are affirmed to be joining other men on the journey, where the expectations are clear:
You are now a man, which means you are called to gladly assume sacrificial responsibility, to lead, provide for, and protect your family and community even at a cost to yourself.
Men need to hear this affirmation from other men. We need it, first, from our fathers and/or father-figures, and, in an ongoing way, we need it from other men we respect — both affirmation and accountability. Accountability is almost a subset of affirmation — because all it really means is that the affirmation is real. It has substance. Affirmation without accountability is what we call flattery. It’s blowing sunshine up somebody’s butt. But accountability is the basic expectation that someone act like who you’ve affirmed them to be.
Remember, manhood is a calling we live up to — it’s a continual calling — which means we don’t tell one another only once that we’re men and leave it at that. But we say and keep saying:
“You are a man, act like one.”
“You are a man, act like one.”
“You are a man, act like one.”
There are seven crucial words. We’re saying: Be who you are!
We need to hear this from one another, and when men are eager to support one another in this way, it will create a flourishing community full of industry and impact. Fraternal affirmation is what fuels masculine agency.
II. Masculine Agency
Masculine agency is our second indispensable need in the pursuit of manhood, so what is that?
We use the word “agency” a few different ways, but here’s what I mean: agency is the ability to act independently with a sense of control. You are choosing to do what you mean to do.
Here’s how I define masculine agency: Masculine agency is men choosing to resist the status quo to make a positive difference.
Men need to do this in order to be men. God made us for this. There’s a reason the symbol for man is the circle with the arrow pointing out. That’s our calling in a symbol. God made men to assert our wills into this world, and in particular, God made Christian men to assert our redeemed wills into this dark world.
For the rest of this talk, I want to unpack my definition, breaking it down into three parts:
Masculine agency is choosing.
Masculine agency is resisting the status quo.
Masculine agency, by choosing to resist the status quo, makes a positive difference.
1) Masculine agency is choosing.
To choose is to exert your will. It means you are separating — you are deciding on one thing instead of another thing (and sometimes instead of several other things).
You are saying “not that or those, but this,” “not there, but here” — and the whole time you know that your choice of one thing could end worse than your choice of the other thing, so there is inherit risk involved, because we’re human. We’re creatures. We don’t know exactly what God has ordained, and so the only thing we have to guide our choices is that God has graciously given us a world of causality and that God has spoken.
Help from Causality
Because of God, we have causality and Scripture. We live in a world of cause and effect. In general, you reap what you sow. And we have a wealth of knowledge of what certain causes have certain effects. And your choices should reflect them. At some point, you’ve got to put gas in your vehicle. That’s a choice.
You’ve got to choose at what point will you take 15 minutes out of your day to pull into a gas station, up to a pump, get out of your vehicle and spend money. And if you don’t put gas in your vehicle, what will happen? [… run out of gas]
And it’s great, because most vehicles have the technology to remind us of that effect — it’s called the “Low Fuel Light.” When that little light comes on, it’s saying, Hey, we live in a world of causality and I’m putting the ball on the tee for you. You need to make a choice very soon or else.
And there are all kinds of examples like this. Causality. We could not live without it.
Help from Scripture
And, at the same time, God has revealed himself to us in Scripture. We have his Word, which includes promises, warnings, and commands, and blessings and curses. Sometimes it’s really clear: Should I date the non-Christian girl?
Answer: No (see 2 Corinthians 6:14)
But then other times, a lot times, it’s less direct. Scripture, instead, is meant to shape us and guide us on the path of wisdom and faith. We don’t have “Low Fuel Lights” for everything! In fact, most of life’s biggest choices bring us to forks in the road where we have no assurance about potential effects. But God has spoken, not always about exactly which path to take, but about what he is for us in the uncertainty.
Here’s an example:
Going back to the end of 2022 and the early part of 2023, Joe Rigney was one of our pastors, serving at President at Bethlehem College and Seminary, and some doctrinal and instinctual digressions began to emerge. Joe is one of my closest friends, and all of this is public knowledge. Joe got into political theology, which was mostly fine, but then he started rethinking his stance of baptism, and we spent hours on this. We agreed (and still agree) on most everything, but there were differences on some important things, and we knew it would come to a head. Joe was not changing his convictions (as much as I hoped he would), and we weren’t changing our convictions either, and eventually something had to give.
During all of that, choices were being made but the known effect of those choices were still coming down the pike. It was almost like a domino was doing a slow-motion fall. And in that waiting, for the Rigneys and my family (who dearly love one another), God’s word helped us. It’s the story of Joab and Abishai in 2 Samuel 10. The two brothers were surrounded in battle, and they divided their armies, and Joab says,
I’ll take these guys, you take those guys. [Separation, choice, but also uncertainty.]
And then Joab said: Be of good courage, and let us be courageous for our people, and for the cities of our God, and may Yahweh do what seems good to him.
And it was that last part that really helped me, “may the Lord do what seems good to him.” I said that lot in 2023 … as choices were being made, as the dominos were dropping. This verse didn’t tell me what to do, but it fueled my faith in God’s activity during the uncertainty.
Causality guides our choices, and God’s word guides us in our choices, either directly, or indirectly through comfort and perspective.
So men, get causality and Scripture in view. Know them, grip them, and then choose. Exert your will. Separate — “not that or those, but this,” “not there, but here.”
Be one who acts rather than one who is only acted upon.
This is the first step of masculine agency. Second:
2) Masculine agency is resisting the status quo.
What is the status quo? What is the “way of things” in our society? Overall, in simplest terms, the status quo of 21st century American society is for men to be passive.
And it’s not like that by accident. There are dark spiritual forces that have been scheming for a very long time to sideline men. It should be no surprise to us that Satan wants Christian men to be passive — it’s literally the oldest trick in the book! (See Genesis 3). And it’s effective. Because:
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph in the world is for good men to do nothing.
Maybe you’ve heard this quote before. (It’s often attributed to Edmund Burke, but apparently we’re not entirely sure who first said it.) I first read that quote when I was 18, and I wrote it on an index card and propped it up on the desk in my bedroom: “The only thing necessary for evil to triumph in the world is for good men to do nothing.”
That’s all Satan wants. For us to do nothing.
C. S. Lewis was all over this in The Screwtape Letters. Screwtape, the senior demon, is advising his nephew, Wormwood, on the best way to lead this Christian man astray. In Letter 13, the Christian man, or “the Patient” as Screwtape calls him, had some real progress. He was experiencing joy, which means Wormwood dropped the ball. So Screwtape tells Wormwood what to do next. He says it’s a “disaster” that this man is doing well, but here’s the plan. Screwtape says:
The great thing is to prevent his doing anything. As long as he does not convert it into action, it does not matter how much he thinks about this new repentance. Let the little brute wallow in it. …
Let him do anything but act. No amount of piety in his imagination and affections will harm us if we can keep it out of his will. As one of the humans has said, active habits are strengthened by repetition but passive ones are weakened. The more often he feels without acting, the less he will be able ever to act, and, in the long run, the less he will be able to feel. (66–67)
According to Lewis, Satan doesn’t even care if you’re doing well as along as you’re doing nothing.
This is spiritual warfare. Satan, along with all the rulers and authorities and cosmic powers over this present darkness, they are all set against you, man, to demobilize you. Satan wants you to do nothing, and there are three tactics he uses to get you to do nothing:
1) Surround you with a value-system that rewards whiners.
Proverbs 26:13,
The sluggard says, “There is a lion outside! I shall be killed in the streets!”
Ancient wisdom knew how to recognize a cover-up. The man going on and on about the lion needs an excuse to do nothing. He might get hurt, so he sits out. His whole life he’s just “calling in sick.” In past generations, men would have recognized that as pathetic, like the Proverbs do, but today, this is actually celebrated. It’s victim status.
According to the values of our snowflake society, it’s more advantageous to be wrongfully acted upon than to act. Our world prefers to reward survivors, not achievers. We like whiners more than doers. Because doers are intimidating. Doers make people feel uncomfortable.
But, instead, you know what people really like? Groveling. Go online and tell everyone how hard it is for you. Tell everyone how you’ve been hurt and done wrong. Race to the bottom, hold grudges, play the victim, whine away. This is what our society wants to see. People love that stuff.
And men, look: don’t fall for that. Don’t let each other fall for that.
And I’m not saying here that life is not hard — of course life is hard — and some of you are going through an absolute furnace right now. In fact, I think it’s best if we just go ahead and all admit that life and our human problem is way worse than most people realize.
The bad things we experience and know about are oftentimes barely scrapping the surface on the kind of evil that goes on in our world, and the kind of real heartbreak people live with. When it comes to human brokenness, Christians of all people understand it the most — this world is so broken that it took God himself to intervene, which he has done in Jesus Christ. We know that there are worse things than lions in the streets. Much worse. But don’t sit at home and whine about it, no matter how much validation you get for it today. There are countless people waiting to rub the back of whiners, but in the end, whining is just a whole bunch of nothing, and that’s what Satan wants.
Another tactic Satan uses to get you to do nothing is to …
2) Distract you with technology that puts endless information and leisure at your fingertips.
If you guys like to keep up with technology and AI stuff, you’ve probably ran across the word “agency.” It’s a buzzword right now. One of the biggest concerns with our new digital world and AI — or what is sometimes called the “black box” — is that it undermines human agency. And this concern is coming within that field, from the people who understand the technology best. (I first heard about the concern from Jack Dorsey, the founder of Twitter.)
And it’s pretty straightforward where the concern is: Digital systems and AI diminish human agency by centralizing decision-making in algorithms. These algorithms dictate what content we see and what products we become interested in, and this all shapes the choices we make, but in subtle ways.
We’re still doing things and making choices, but those choices becomes less free, because these digital influences have steered them. Basically, the concern is that we’re being manipulated. We’re not really acting independently, but our actions just responses to all of this digital stimuli.
(And there’s a ton we could get into here about the meaning of free will; but basically, I’ll just leave it at the fact that our wills are especially vulnerable to manipulation because they’re not free, they’re in bondage to sin.)
All technology is practical. It’s all meant to affect what we do. It starts there, affecting what we do until eventually it actually replacing our doing altogether.
I don’t want to get too much into technology here, but I’ll repeat what I said back in June: technology is more of a threat to men than women, and it’s for this reason. Technology not only takes men’s jobs, but it castrates our agency.
Satan loves the idea of millions of men glued to their phones, not just passive but debilitated, by the false comfort of instant leisure with no accountability.
This is one of the reasons I quit Instagram in March. It’s not because of anything bad in my feed, but because it was all too good. The algorithm was incredible: I could open up Instagram and in less than a second, I’d have a buffet of sermon clips and top plays. Sometimes it’d be a great soundbite from a John Piper message, other times it was a hitting tutorial from Ken Griffey Jr. It was rewarding everywhere, it never disappointed, the dopamine soared, but then I would feel empty.
It gave the illusion of productivity in the moment, it felt good, but after 15 minutes on my feed, do you know what I had to show for it in real life? … Nothing. That’s an example of distraction, but it’s more than that. Satan wants to use technology to take you out. We think technology should help us do more better, but the enemy uses it to make you do a whole bunch of nothing.
A third tactic Satan uses to get you to do nothing is to …
3) Lead you to love convenience so deeply that you can’t imagine choosing anything that causes discomfort.
We could call this another averse effect of technology, or really, this is the culmination of whiner-culture and technology mixed — it’s that we’ve been so bombarded with “easy” that we have little tolerance for difficult things.
So many things in our lives have been made easier that we’ve come to expect that everything is supposed to be easy. So when we are doing something and we meet the smallest bit of resistance, we want to do something different.
Maybe you’ve noticed this before at work (or in anything) … I feel this if I’m writing a sermon or an article … if I get to a spot where it starts to feel really tough, when the words dry up and I start to struggle, everything in me wants to get out of there. I want to open my email or check my phone — I want to run as fast as I can to something easy. My brain craves that dopamine.
We’ve been so conditioned by easy that the first feeling of resistance makes us want to turn and run, and a lot of time, just the possibility of resistance makes us not even want to start something.
I’m helping a friend with a little drywall project right now and I needed a pair of stilts. So I ordered some from Amazon — and I’ve worn stilts several times before when I did drywall with my dad, but I’ve never put together a brand-new pair of stilts, and these things came in a box way smaller than I expected.
I knew I would have to assemble these things piece by piece, which would not be easy, so you know what I did? I left the box at the door. I didn’t open the box, not the first day, not the second day. I just left the box sitting right there beside the front door. And eventually it became a matter of how long can I keep this going? How long can I keep the box by the door?
Eventually I gotta open this box, and read these instructions, and do the thing. And I did. And it was hard and it took time.
Here’s the thing: we all have these metaphorical boxes at the front door of our lives — there are things we know that are good but also hard, and risky, and so we just set them aside by the door.
We’ve been so conditioned by convenience, we love it so much, that the idea of doing something hard can paralyze us. And you know what ends up getting done? A whole bunch of nothing, just the way Satan like it.
These are three tactics of Satan — he attacks our values, he attacks our attention, and he attacks our pain-tolerance, all in the effort to get us to do nothing. Because that’s all Satan wants.
Strengthen Your Ability to Resist
That’s the status quo of our present darkness and masculine agency is resistance to this.
And resistance is something we have to learn. It starts by small resistance, with little disciplines. Overall, in all things big and small, your attitude is to choose what you want most over what you want now. That’s the best definition of self-discipline I’ve ever heard: choosing what you want most over what you want now. Because what you want “now” will always be what’s easiest.
As an example, this is why I believe physical exercise is good for us, not because it’s enjoyable but because it’s not. Weight training, most basically, is resistance. You are literally resisting gravity, and it’s not fun.
I was at my Y a few weeks ago and I saw my friend Jim, whose close to 80, who I’ve known for years. And I said “Hey, Jim, how it going today?” And he said, “Well today I’m trying to figure out if I don’t want to be here because I’m lazy or I’m tired.” But the truth is, neither one was stopping him. I want to be like Jim.
Learn resistance by starting with small resistance. Wake up early. Make your bed. Go workout. Take a cold shower. Fast through a meal. Whatever, figure out a way to strengthen your ability to resist. Masculine agency requires it.
3) Masculine agency, by choosing to resist the status quo, makes a positive difference.
This last part is really important. We don’t exert our will to make a bigger mess, but we exert our will to make a positive difference. And the simplest way to think of a “positive difference” is to think: I’m going to leave this better than how I found it. And this can go for all kinds of things, big and small. To leave it better than how you found it.
Imagine that you make that your responsibility in everything you do. It doesn’t mean that you’re the one always solving the problem. Most of the time there’s no fanfare. But you are choosing, as resistance, to make something better. And I think we run this all the way down. It gets as basic as don’t litter. Put your trash where trash goes.
Taking Ownership
I learned a lesson here I’ll never forget in high school baseball. My coach was a man named Pat Smith, he was just inducted into the Johnston County Athletic Hall of Fame. Coach Smith was notorious for being a hard-nose coach. One day at the start of practice, we all ran a lap, got to him, and he made us run one again, and then again. And then finally we got to him and he sat us in the dugout, and asked us “Whose home field is this?”
We said it was ours.
And he said, “You boys take pride in this field?
And said, Yeah of course! (we had a nice field and facility).
And then pointed to a plastic grocery bag blowing around in the outfield and said, “Y’all ran past that plastic bag three times and nobody picked it up.”
(And I can tell you, I saw the bag. We all saw the bag, but we all figured somebody else would pick it up.)
Then he said, “When you care about something, you take ownership of it.” And when you take ownership of something you’re not waiting for someone else to do what you should do.
That’s passivity, see — waiting for someone else to do what you should do. And the thing with passivity is that I’m sure you’re being polite. And I’m sure more people are going to like you. And I’m sure it’s very comfortable — but I’m also sure that you will making no positive difference. Masculine agency is men choosing to resist the status quo, pushing against what is easy, to accomplish what is good.
And men need to do this because men were made for this. We were made to take ownership. Jocko calls this extreme ownership. It means, as men, gladly assuming sacrificial responsibility, we look out in the world and say: Put that on my shoulders.
But put what on our shoulders? What exactly are men taking ownership of?
Civilization on Our Shoulders
You may think that I’m over-speaking in what I’m about to say, but I’m not. I mean this as profoundly as I can:
Men should take ownership of civilization.
That’s how civilization was built — men being men, sacrificially exerting their will for the common good. (Starting with your family, your church, your city, your country.)
Anthony Esolen, in his book No Apologies: Why Civilization Depends on the Strength of Men, writes:
Look around you. Every road you see was laid by men. Every house, church, every school, every factory, every public building was raised by the hands of men.
You eat with a stainless-steel fork; the iron was mined and the carbon was quarried by men.
You type a message on your computer; the plastic it is made of came from petroleum dredged out of the earth, often out of earth beneath hundreds of feet of sea water, by men.
The electricity that powers your computer—where did it come from? Perhaps from an enormous turbine whirled about by countless tons of water, on a great river dammed up by men, or from a power plant burning coal, harvested out of the earth, with considerable risk, by men.
The whole of your civilization rests upon the shoulders of men who have done work that most people will not do—and that the physically weaker sex could not have done. (p. X).
Our world has always needed men — our world needs men today, and men need to act. That is masculine agency. It means men, as men, choose to resist the status quo to make a positive difference.
And we do it in a country, in a world, that many believe is on the brink of collapse. And it’s not quacks who are saying that, it’s respected voices, James Davidson Hunter, Joshua Mitchel — they saying from a sociological, historical perspective, things cannot continue as they have, and so what do we do as not just men, but Christian men. It means that we look out, in all the fire and smoke and mess, and we choose to act in the name of Jesus, in all the grace that he supplies, resisting, we’re gonna do our best to leave it better, and we’re gonna save some.
Ultimately, all of our agency, all of our action in this world, is in light of the next, when “the kingdom of this world has become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ, and he shall reign forever and ever” (Revelation 11:15).
Lord, help us! Amen.
