Doing the Right Thing

Welcome to Halting Toward Zion, the podcast where we limp like Jacob to the Promised Land and talk about life, the universe, and everything along the way. I’m Emily Maxson here with Greg Uttinger.

Today we are talking to some old friends, and by friends I mean people we disagree with quite vehemently, but let’s listen to them first. We’ve got Ben Franklin and Charles Finney, who share something in common in their perspective on human morality and our capacity to “do the right thing.”

Ben Franklin conceived a plan in his youth to achieve moral perfection. Indeed, his plan was called “Plan for Attaining Moral Perfection.” He wrote it in 1790. Actually, he wouldn’t have been all that young at that point, I guess. He’s writing about when he was younger.

“It was about this time I conceived the bold and arduous project of arriving at moral perfection. I wished to live without committing any fault at any time. I would conquer all that either natural inclination, custom, or company might lead me into. As I knew, or thought I knew, what was right and wrong, I did not see why I might not always do the one and avoid the other. But I soon found I had undertaken a task of more difficulty than I had imagined.
While my care was employed in guarding against one fault, I was often surprised by another; habit took the advantage of inattention; inclination was sometimes too strong for reason. I concluded, at length, that the mere speculative conviction that it was our interest to be completely virtuous was not sufficient to prevent our slipping, and that the contrary habits must be broken, and good ones acquired and established, before we can have any dependence on a steady, uniform rectitude of conduct. For this purpose I therefore contrived the following method.”

What he did was to come up with a table of virtues, 13 of them, because they fit nicely into weeks of the year, I think, and he was going to tackle one at a time. Before we look any further at this, I would like to read you his definition of some of these, because I think it plays into this a little bit. Some are common enough to the era.

1. Temperance - Eat not to dullness; drink not to elevation.
2. Silence - Speak not but what may benefit others or yourself; avoid trifling conversation.

And so on, but then there are some others like this one.

12. Chastity - Rarely use venery [sexual intercourse] but for health or offspring, never to dullness, weakness, or the injury of your own or another's peace or reputation.

Did you get that?

It leaves something to be desired there.

Yeah. There’s nothing here about purity of heart and loving your neighbor and such.

Or marriage.

Marriage is not exactly part of this. He’s not talking about the life of a married man. He’s talking about the life of any man. “It’s alright to engage in sexual activity, but you shouldn’t do it too much. Rarely use it but for health and offspring. The primary uses are to keep you healthy and to produce children, but you can do it other times, just not too much.” He doesn’t define what ‘rarely’ would mean here.

As long as it doesn’t bother anyone or ruin your reputation. As long as nobody finds out.

Yeah, pretty much, or anybody you would care about finding out, it would seem.

13. Humility - Imitate Jesus and Socrates.

Ah, it hurts!

That could take an entire podcast in itself just to address that particular way of thinking.

“My intention being to acquire the habitude of all these virtues, I judged it would be well not to distract my attention by attempting the whole at once, but to fix it on one of them at a time and, when I should be master of that, then to proceed to another and so on, till I should have gone through the thirteen.”

And so it goes. He found in time that he wasn’t terribly successful even with this wonderful plan of his. He made a little book to keep track of it. He has his 13 on one side and the days of the week on the other. I don’t think we need to spend any more time with him.

Ben Franklin probably was writing a bit tongue-in-cheek, knowing him. Exactly how much he actually cared about morality in his later years is a question worth asking, but maybe not right now, but the idea that we can be good is an old one. The Greek philosophers pursued it. They wanted to know what goodness was all about, and figured in knowing goodness, the ideal quality, they would become good.

Interestingly enough, there were things that it didn’t really seem to affect, like their sexual lives or their habit of owning slaves and a few things like work ethic, but somehow in all of that they would be good.

Flash forward a few hundred years and we come to Pelagius, a British monk who became an adversary to Augustine. One quote from him, and this is from AD 413, his letter to Demetrius –

“Just as a judge is guided by a book of law, so the conscience is guided by an inner law which has been written on the soul by God.”

Yes? No? Huh? Could you explain yourself, Pelagius? I’m not quite sure what you’re laying down here, Pelagius. If you mean that man is the image of God, bears the work of the law in his heart (Paul’s expression), then yes, that’s certainly true. If you mean it’s up and running and active and all we need to do is let our conscience be our guide, Jiminy Cricket might agree, but the Bible doesn’t.

“Just as a judge is guided by a book of law” – is he not familiar with the possibility of an unjust judge who has no regard for precedent? We have several of those around today and I think that’s more akin to our situation, dealing with our conscience in our fallen human nature.

There’s a good deal of naivete here. Pelagius did not have a bad moral reputation. Franklin, frankly, had a much worse one by anybody’s standards pretty much, but apparently Pelagius, what little I know of him, was well-behaved, chaste, temperate, relatively humble, and claimed to love God.

So he would do pretty well on Franklin’s rubric.

Yeah, he probably would do fine on that. Outwardly he seemed to live a life above reproach. He was not in this because there were horrible sins that he wanted to commit. He just looked at himself and saw how well he was doing and told the world, “You know, being good is not that hard. I do it all the time.” We maybe need to look a little deeper into God’s law than you, Pelagius, may be looking. There may be a little more to it than you think, but we’ll come back to the depths of the law later perhaps.

The other person we want to talk about is our old friend Charles Finney. Charles Finney lived from 1792 to 1875, so his life overlapped Franklin’s just a little bit. He was a preacher at the end of the Second Awakening and then continued his work beyond that. He’s a hero of a great many Evangelicals, and in fact of some people who in some regards I would even respect, but I suspect it’s because they never read what he wrote, and he wrote quite a lot. He was a book writer.

He had been trained as a lawyer, and in fact it was his legal training that led him to read the book of Romans, and that led him to decide that God was calling him to be a preacher. He was ordained by the Presbyterian Church in New York, I believe, having been asked, “Have you read the Westminster Standards and do you agree with them?” Rather than asking specific questions, they settled for the general question, to which Finney replied, “I haven’t read them exhaustively, but what I’ve read I agree with.”

“Sounds good to us.”

“You are now a minister of the gospel.”

“We pronounce you a minister of the gospel. What God hath joined together…”

The truth was he had hardly read them at all, and I’m being nice. And when he did read them finally, he was rather horrified at what was there because there were things that to him did not make sense; that is, they did not make moral sense.

First of all is this idea that man has a fixed or given nature which he did not himself create, and therefore in Finney’s mind couldn’t possibly be responsible for, and which he can’t change. This Calvinistic idea that man is by nature a sinner, at war with God, incapable of any spiritual or moral good – “No, it can’t work that way. That’s not possible. It’s not right. It’s not fair. It’s not just.”

Secondly, the idea of substitutionary atonement and therefore justification by faith made no moral sense. “How can God punish someone else for my sins? Furthermore, if I’m a sinner, justified or not, how can God befriend me? God is holy. It’s nice if my past sins have been forgiven and all that. That’s important, but I need to stop sinning so I can be God’s friend.

“So coming to Christ, conversion, regeneration, is not a change of nature because we don’t have a nature to change. It is a decision to stop living one way and to start living another, to stop breaking God’s commandments and to start obeying them. Anybody can do this at any time. Now, man has a slight problem and that’s his environment.”

You can hear the overtones of Romanticism here. Man is born into a culture that’s framed by social institutions and social realities that are not helpful. There’s the alcohol industry. There’s political injustices and inequalities. There’s poverty. For our dear sisters there is legal and political subjugation of women. Of course, there’s slavery. All of these things and more – these were part of the problem that got in the way of man making proper choices. Finney believed that in order to balance those forces it was fair play to appeal to man’s emotions as the counterbalancing force.

“You have all this stuff that’s already corrupting you, manipulating you, forcing you into a mold. It’s okay for me to use a little bit of emotional excitement to push back against that and push your will back into moral equipoise so that you are again in that spot of freedom where you can choose. And once you’ve got back there to a point of choice and you can look at things honestly and rationally, living a godly life is so much better than living in sin. Anybody can see that. So the rational soul will choose to imitate Jesus and keep God’s commandments, and that’s the gospel. Be good.”

Finney’s revivals were of a very emotional nature, though he was a very logical individual, because this was necessary to counteract the evil influences of the socio-economic life into which man found himself, so lots of emotional appeal, lots of emotional pressure, kind of like trying to sell a vacuum cleaner. If you’ve ever run into a Kirby salesman you would know what this is all about.

He was the first one to institutionalize the anxious bench. The Methodist circuit riders had kind of come up with this. He took it and made it a permanent fixture of American evangelism. This was a pew or bench up toward the front, so when people began to get nervous and anxious about their spiritual condition, their stance before God, he would call them up front to sit on this bench.

Now, there were a couple practical reasons for this:

You’re right under the preacher’s glare and so the emotional tension is higher. It’s another way of manipulating the emotion of the thing.

Practically, you know who your audience is and you can target them.

When all is done, they’re right there. You can go right over to them or have your helpers go right over to them and push further.

This is where the idea of going forward at the end of a worship service to receive Christ originated. For 1700 years the Church knew of no such thing. The Jewish faith certainly had no such thing. We have the Day of Pentecost where the whole audience spontaneously says, “What shall we do?” but it didn’t have to be manipulated. You just had to hear the truth, so this is very deliberate.

I think it’s good now to read a couple quotes from Finney. You can find his Systematic Theology online someplace at Google Books or some such place. This is from his “Lectures on Revivals of Religion.” He says this –

“There is nothing in religion beyond the ordinary powers of nature.” Religion is just one more natural thing.
“It consists entirely in the right exercise of the powers of nature.” Religion just means man being man, but doing it right.
“It is just that and nothing else. When mankind become religious, they are not enabled to put for the exertions which they were unable before to put forth. They only exert the powers they had before in a different way [that is they exert in a different way] and use them for the glory of God.” In other words, they start making better choices than they were making before.

That’s it. There’s nothing supernatural. Whatever the Spirit does, he does not change nature because again man doesn’t have a nature. He does not give a man a new heart. He does not beget him again to a lively hope.

He provides additional argument on a different level, but man is still left with his natural faculties, his natural rationality, his hearing, his sight, his feeling, his ability to think logically and to deduce from greater principles. And using that, he should be able to figure out that becoming a Christian, following Jesus, and imitating Jesus’ obedience is by far the much better way of living. Regeneration then is not something divine, but something human. He says this –

"Sinners are under the necessity of first changing their hearts, or their choice of an end, before they can put forth any volitions to secure any other than a selfish end.

So changing their heart – what does he mean by heart? He means your choices, their choice of an end, he says. The sinner has to decide that he wants to end up someplace different than where he’s ending up. His goal – take end as goal or take it as the end of one’s life – wherever he’s going, whatever he wants to accomplish, he’s got to decide that that involves the glory of God, the lifestyle described in the Bible, and he’s got to want that. Then having done that, he needs to choose it.

He can’t choose it until he’s made the commitment – that is the self-conscious commitment – “Oh, I want to be a Christian. I want to live like Jesus. I want to obey God’s law perfectly.” Notice we are not far here from Ben Franklin. “I will be good.” Or Queen Victoria, perhaps, in her youth.

He says –

“This is plainly the everywhere assumed philosophy of the Bible.”

“Charles, have you actually read the Bible?”

“That uniformly represents the unregenerate as totally depraved and calls upon them to repent, to make themselves a new heart.”

Something’s broken there.

You can think of reading a couple verses here and there when God says to circumcise your heart. Certainly, God calls us to repentance but that’s balanced by dozens more verses that say other things like God gives us a new heart, and we’re going to look at those verses in a bit. That’s the essence of the new covenant, at least one of the central tenets of the new covenant.

So men have to set their hearts aright. They have to re-create themselves by an autonomous act of the will. How far is this from existentialism actually? Man has no nature. Man makes himself by his decisions moment-by-moment.

Now, Finney would have man plan ahead. I’m not so sure that Camus or Sartre would say, “Yes, play the long game. Plan for the end.” They seem to be more committed to one day at a time, because there’s always the possibility of knowing and learning more, but Finney is willing to accept the idea that Christianity and the Christian life can be a goal, and in fact you actually do need to settle on that. But having done that, that’s a long way to go. You have to start making the right decisions. You have to start choosing to do right, to be good, and it’s not that hard, apparently, despite what Ben Franklin found out when he tried.

There’s a long strain of this in American evangelicalism. The emotionalism, to be sure, the manipulation of the hearers, yes, absolutely, but more than that a disregard for systematic doctrine and the assumption that there is something man can do to start himself down the road of obedience.

Most American evangelicals, I would think and hope, would reject where Finney goes from there. I would assume that most evangelicals would say with some assurance and determination, “No, you don’t choose to be good. You just choose Christ.”

“Yeah, and choosing Christ is something you do that’s a good thing? So you do start the process by your choice of a good thing, and then God steps in and begins to help you?”

The fingerprints of Finney are all over American evangelicalism and American – I hate to call it Arminianism, because it isn’t really.

It’s a corruption even of Arminianism.

Yeah. I encountered one young pastor fresh out of seminary who had just learned how to battle Arminians. He came to our Bible study and had this clever question of something you can ask Arminians. We were just kind of looking at him like, “No. Everyone we know would not go down there because they don’t believe that. That’s not what Californian Arminians believe. They’re not really Arminians.”

That’s a problem with gotcha questions as a strategy. It’s like, “Maybe you should try actually listening to what your conversation partner actually thinks.”

The truth is, in my experience, most evangelicals believe that God saves them and that God has given them a new heart. If you push them they’ll get their hackles up and say, “Yes, but there’s a free choice in there.”

“Okay, fine, there’s a free choice there.”

But they’ll immediately fall back on, “Jesus is my Savior. I called on him and he saved me. He loved me before I loved him,” and they’ll run through a whole mash of things that, taken out of context or maybe left in their context, reek of Calvinism. They believe in the sovereignty of God. They pray for their loved ones to be saved.

A true Arminian really can’t do that because that’s beyond God’s purview. God can’t interfere. He can at best coach and advise, which was Finney’s attitude toward the Holy Spirit. He can provide the same kind of arguments that a very intelligent human being could provide, but that’s it. He can’t actually change the heart. Most evangelicals that I know do believe that God changes the heart.

Now, is there inconsistency there? Of course. We’re mostly all inconsistent at some point in our theology, and I think we need to not waste a whole lot of time tracking down, as you say, the gotcha moment, but rather encourage people in the positive things they say that are absolutely true, and let the other recede into the background and die a slow quiet death while no one’s looking at it.

I know there were theological trends in the mid-20th century that people still confess, but they’re dying out because we have better things to do and other problems right now. Sometimes we just need to work together on what we do believe and do confess and where we can go directly to scripture and say, “Can you use this language?”

“Well, of course. It’s the language of scripture.”

“Okay, cool. Let’s use it.”

But Finney, not so much. Finney said he liked the Bible, and yet there was so much of it he had to ignore to say what he was saying. Specifically, he ignored the new covenant.

We’re kind of moving through the Old Testament and we’ve come to Ezekiel, Jeremiah, and Daniel, who all lived at the same time. We’ve left Daniel for a little bit and gone back to Judea, where Jeremiah is ministering, and he delivers at this time one of the greatest promises and prophecies in scripture. Although the name of Messiah is not in it, I think every good Jew would have known, “This belongs to the time of Messiah. This is what Messiah will do.”

This is Jeremiah 31:31 and God says this –

Behold, the days come, saith the LORD, that I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel, and with the house of Judah, not according to the covenant that I made with their fathers in the day that I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt, which my covenant they brake, although I was an husband unto them, saith the LORD, but this shall be the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel.
After those days, saith the LORD, I will put my law in their inward parts, and write it in their hearts; and will be their God, and they shall be my people. And they shall teach no more every man his neighbour and every man his brother saying, Know the LORD, for they shall all know me, from the least of them unto the greatest of them, saith the LORD. For I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more.

The end is forgiveness of sins and justification by faith, but he starts by saying, “In this new covenant I’m not going to write my law merely on tablets of stone or on parchment with ink. I’m going to write it on the fleshly tables of the heart; that is, I’m going to write it in the very center of their inner being, the focus of their soul, the I, the ego, the thing that says ‘me,’ where the values and the priorities lie. I’m going to rewrite it and I’m going to change it. What I’m going to put there is my law and my commandments. I’m going to do it by the work of my Spirit.”

The prophet Ezekiel has a number of similar prophecies –

And I will put my spirit within you and cause you to walk in my statutes…

As Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Isaiah and the other prophets look forward to the coming of Messiah, one thing was really clear. Israel had failed in their obedience. If that’s what the old covenant meant – and it didn’t, but if that’s how you’re going to take it, “Do this and live,” they were a wonderful testimony to “Not do this and die.” They had broken God’s covenant again and again.

When the writer of Hebrews come to address this he says not that God found fault with the covenant, he found fault with them. The covenant was great for what it was supposed to do. Its moral code was perfect for the time and the situation. It accurately reflected the glory and holiness of God and the trinitarian fellowship of the persons of the Godhead. It was the perfect way of showing love toward God and toward neighbor. The problem was not the law.

The sacrifices were great, as pointers to Messiah, but if you took these things and tried to turn them into a self-help program, a “Do this and live” kind of agenda, then it was absolutely a failure because, 1) it wasn’t designed for that, and 2) no one could keep it. The problem again was with God’s people.

They said they wanted to keep it. They talked about keeping it, but like Ben Franklin they found it wasn’t that easy, and without the indwelling of the Holy Spirit this program was not working because it was not God’s program in the first place. It was a shadow. It was a road map. It was a picture. It was a pointer. It all focused on Jesus.

When Jesus sat on the night in which he was betrayed and had a final meal with his apostles, he said, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood. This do ye as often as ye drink it in remembrance of me.” He instituted a new covenant. The apostles’ ears would have perked up and said, “You mean this is what Jeremiah was talking about? This is it? It’s come? It’s happened?”

They probably were very disillusioned as they completely screwed up that night, ran away and hid and denied the Lord, and yet that’s exactly what Jesus was going to the cross to accomplish, to not only merit justification and righteousness for his people, but to procure the promise of the Father, the Holy Spirit, who he said would pour out into his church, into the heart of his elect, into the heart of those who were ordained to believe, so that they could believe and so that they could receive the law and so they would have the law of God, the Word of God at the very center of their being.

So every Christian is perfect and does it all, right? That’s not what it says.

A thought in passing about this. We have friends in broader evangelical circles who today look at this passage and say, “Look, in the new covenant everybody’s a Christian, so the covenant only applies to true believers.”

“You know any true believers who perfectly keep God’s law?”

“Well, not yet.”

“Exactly.”

Most of this is a “not yet.” We are justified by faith, and yet God daily forgives our sins. We have a new heart, and yet we have to keep putting on the new man and dying to self.

Even the “they shall teach no more.” We have the exhortation in the New Testament of Paul to Timothy, Paul to Titus. “You’re supposed to be teaching still. We’ve not reached this perfect state where we’re all individually interpreting the law of God perfectly for ourselves.”

Yes, because, as you said, we’ve all reached perfection, right? You ask any of these guys and they will in all honesty say, “Well, no, our church isn’t perfect but…”

“No, there’s no ‘but’ here.”

That’s the end of the conversation about perfection. We’re not there.

“But shouldn’t we try?” Well, yes and no.

Be perfect as your Heavenly Father is perfect.

The perfection is there as the goal, but side-by-side with that is the growing humility that says, “And I’m nowhere near it, and my church is nowhere near being a perfect church, and not everyone in our church does know the Lord. You know what, there are reprobates in our church.”

This is the mistake the Puritans made. They wanted churches of visible saints, so although they baptized their children, they would not confirm them into full membership until they could give a convincing description of them having passed from death into life

There’s a small Dutch Reformed denomination that partakes of this. My roommate was one such. He said, “Because it’s like the catechism. You have to know how great your sin and misery are, and then you can trust Jesus and then you can be thankful to God for such redemption. Oh, how I am redeemed from all my sin and misery. But before you can get to Step 2 and 3 you’ve got to do Step 1, and until you know your sin and misery at a deep emotional personal level…” – he didn’t say it that way, but that’s what he was describing – “…then you can’t go to the next.”

And so since God does that, there’s nothing you can do. You just sit back and wait and go to church and hope that someday God will do that for you. How sad.

That sounds really unpleasant – not that what’s pleasant is the rule of what’s right, but God promises us joy in Christ. He doesn’t promise us that “Maybe after sufficient misery I will have mercy on you.”

Yeah, and I pointed that out to my friend. “To know your sin and misery – misery does not mean being sad.” Misery is an objective state. The nature of your misery is you’re going to hell. That’s a pretty miserable condition. It doesn’t get much worse than that, maybe just how far in hell you’re going. That doesn’t require an emotional response. It doesn’t require some kind of conscious-altering experience. It simply requires you to realize intellectually, “Oh, if I die today I would go to hell and suffer eternally. Huh, I probably don’t want that.”

It may come with emotion, it may come with lots of emotion, it may come with tears, it may come with weeping, it may come with rolling in the aisles or your sudden realization that you’re miserable, or it may be a very quiet thing. But there needs to be a realization of this so that there can be a realization of, “Okay, that’s my condition. Is there a way out?” and then we talk about Jesus.

We don’t have to wait to talk about Jesus until we’re sure we’ve got our guy on board. “Do you really recognize your misery? Shall we talk about hell some more? Shall we talk about your sins some more?”

“I’ve got it. Can we move on?”

We can pack the message together, and as we look at the New Testament and even the Old, the prophets and apostles generally did. They didn’t just do nothing but, “This is it. You’re going to die and go to hell” for 20 or 30 or 40 chapters and then finally when they saw some kind of reaction move to talk about Messiah.

Sometimes they would just leave the sin and death and misery hanging for a minute, and then people would be like, “Wait, wait, wait, there must be more. Tell us what’s next.”

And if there isn’t that response then, yes, you might walk away, but the power of salvation is not in the law. The law convicts, but the law does not change hearts, so we need the intellectual knowledge so that we can understand the salvation.

“You say Jesus wants to save me – from what?”

“Okay, we haven’t explained enough yet. Let us explain to you the nature of your rebellion and of the judgment to come.” We can do that very quickly or we can take a long time, depending how the Spirit leads us and what seems to be appropriate for any given person. But then we move on because it’s the message of Jesus crucified and risen that changes people’s hearts, and in that is the power of transformation that starts us on the road of obedience.

The catechism asks, “Why does God so tightly enjoin this, the 10 commandments, on us, even though no one can keep them?” It’s a good question and there are a number of answers. One has to do with learning to show love to God and our neighbor. One has to do with assurance that something actually has happened to us, and another is our testimony before men, that they can see that there is power in Christ to change lives.

Are we going to in this life learn to do well perfectly? No, we’re not, and when we don’t tell people that we set them up for a horrible fall, and when we don’t tell our children that we set them up for a horrible fall.

Yes, there is power to deal with any sin, any addiction, to break the bondage of any kind of iniquity, but that doesn’t mean it’s going to come overnight. It doesn’t mean it’s going to be easy. It doesn’t mean that it won’t be accompanied by tears, and it doesn’t mean necessarily that it may not be something of a lengthy process. I think most of us have sins that we’ve struggled with to one degree or another, in one form or another, over maybe even a lifetime.

That’s not to say that Jesus is powerless and that he leaves us to wallow in sin, but sin gets really creative and sneaky. We think we’ve dealt with pride, and then we smile at how humble we are, and then…oops. There’s always something coming around the corner, but the power of Jesus is sufficient to deal with it, and we are called to deal with it.

One of the verses of scripture that’s come to mean a lot to me in the last couple years is from 1 Peter. It’s Peter’s greeting to his listeners. He calls them “elect according to the foreknowledge of God the Father, through sanctification of the Spirit, unto obedience and the sprinkling of the blood of Jesus Christ.”

That used to puzzle me because I thought, “blood of Christ, that’s justification. Why doesn’t that go first?” because he’s not actually talking about justification, he’s talking about sanctification. The Spirit moves us to obedience, but even those good works are corrupt, so they too need to be sprinkled with the blood of Christ. Our good works need to be forgiven.

This is something of what 1 John 1 tells us about –

But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship one with another, and the blood of Jesus Christ his Son cleanseth [keeps on cleansing] us from all sin.

There’s an ongoing sanctifying work of cleansing both of the heart, the intention, but also a covering for our sinful good works. When we understand this, we will not be Charles Finney. We will not boast about how easy obedience is, and how good we are, and how we got this nailed, and we will not criticize others because they’ve slipped on some point here or there.

We will be careful to guard the holiness of the Church because we know that sin is like leaven and destroys and corrupts, and that sin also can be very abusive and violent. We’re going to keep an eye on that, but we’re not going to assume, “Well, you sinned. You are a sub-par human and I have every right to despise you and defame you and to mock you and to belittle you because you’re not a good Christian like I am.” Rather we will move to say, “I’ve been there. Let me show you the Savior. Let me show you the way out.” That’s the new covenant.

The lecture series or the book by Sinclair Ferguson that we’ve recommended so many times, The Whole Christ, points out that the common error between legalism and antinomianism is the separation of God’s law from who he is. There’s always this desire to make good works stand apart from their source, and to either dismiss the law as not applying or to cling to it in our own power, regardless of our standing in Christ and the gift of God to us that is Christ, not the law, not the good works – Jesus.

Right, so there’s another recommendation for you if you haven’t already pursued it. And I think this may be a good place to stop. Your husband likes it when you have a recommendation first, so you got anything?

I would like to recommend local yarn stores.

Tell me about local yarn stores.

If you are into any sort of yarn craft at all – David does crochet, I do some knitting and embroidery on and off very inconsistently – but when you start to figure out all the different materials that there are to work with and what you like working with and what you don’t, and what you want your final thing that you’re making to be like, you realize that the main craft stores don’t have a very good selection. It’s all made of acrylic and it’s not soft and it’s not warm and it’s not nice. Also if you go there, the people who work there don’t know anything. They are not trained well.

Are they trained at all? I’m shocked.

No, actually, as a matter of fact, and they’re not paid very well, either. If you go to the internet and ask it where a local yarn shop is, it might point you to a few different ones that have sort of a subculture built around them, where people actually go and work on projects together or take a class together. They’ll host different classes.

The one we went to recently had a lot of locally-sourced yarn, so it’s stuff that has been spun and dyed here in the area, which is just another layer of cool. It’s investing in where you live. It’s really nice, especially for Christmas. We were looking for a little bit of stuff to make our Christmas season be what we want it to be, merry and bright and all those things. So local yarn shops.

Mine is a little more not that. I’m going to recommend a book because it kind of goes with what we’ve been talking about. The book is The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis. My students in school have just finished reading it and just finished a test on it. It was somewhat interesting to see their answers. At first it looked like they were just going to fail it left and right, but the further in I got the more they seemed to come to terms with the language.

I look at Lewis and he was alive when I was young. The gap does not seem that great to me, but some of the students were saying, “We don’t really understand what he’s saying.” Hmm, okay. That’s weird.

What do they mean? What was the language that they were having trouble with?

They just didn’t understand some of the words or the sentence structure or how he was using words. For instance, the question I just graded was on the difference between love and charity. Now, if you go to this not taking with it your own definitions and the way you hear the word used in our culture, you would think of love as the thing that makes the world goes around, the greatest thing ever, whereas charity is…

…giving money to the Salvation Army, so there’s no reason to say what the difference is, because they’re totally removed concepts from each other.

Yeah, and charity can just be giving something to somebody you don’t even know, whereas love is the thing that sparks the universe.

Now Lewis, if you slow down and read him, leaves you with a very clear idea of exactly how he’s using the words. Love is agape. It’s God’s love, divine love, the love that scripture demands of us and what the Holy Spirit sheds abroad in our hearts. That’s charity. Being in love – he tells you exactly what he means by being in love, but some of my students had trouble understanding that.

Also a few of them, sadly, had a little trouble when the character Screwtape talks about the enemy. For those of you who don’t know the book, let me do some ‘splaining here. The book is fictional. It is a series of letters from a senior demon to a junior demon on how to tempt humans. You probably need to understand that before you start reading, lest you find the advice positively diabolical, as one pastor did.

When the demon talks about the enemy, he’s talking about God, so that’s kind of important to understand the whole thing. At least a few of the students seemed a little bit confused about that. I thought I had told them. Maybe I didn’t spend enough time. Anyhow, they had some struggles with that.

There were other letters where they did very well, so I think probably they just waited too long and spent more time on some of them than on others, and the ones they spent time on and talked to each other about, they probably did fine.

I throw that out first as saying I read it first when I was probably a teenager. I don’t remember exactly. I think I heard it quoted in some sermon on Christian radio when I was a kid and got interested in it and eventually found a copy and read it, and I don’t remember ever having any particular trouble with it. But Lewis was writing in the ‘40s and that’s 80 years ago, so maybe it might be a little challenging, so maybe you don’t want to hand this to your 10-year-old just yet. Maybe it’s something to read around the table so you can explain concepts and words and thought forms and where a particular thing is coming from.

What the devil Screwtape does is to give us a cynical view of human nature and show us how our minds work when they are bound by sin, or even just corrupted a little bit by sin. When sin gets in the way, when selfishness, contempt for God, and unbelief get in the way, we resort to little devices, little patterns of avoidance and such that are common across the human family.

So this book is an interesting, somewhat humorous (if you’re following what he’s saying) guide to our own hearts and to the nature of sin and to how tricksy sin can be. It helps us see ourselves as God sees us, and helps us to reconsider that maybe what we thought was a really good job maybe wasn’t, and where we thought we were really on fire for the Lord, maybe that was something very different and we need to reconsider in the light of God’s Word.

So that’s The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis. I recommend it first for older people, but also something to read in families, at least until your children can tell you, “Oh yeah, I’ve got this. I understand exactly what he’s talking about.” Well then, good for everybody then.

I can’t remember if it’s in Screwtape or Mere Christianity where Lewis says the devil loves to cure us of a great sin by giving us a small sin, or vice versa. I can’t even remember which way it goes, that’s how poor my memory is on that quote, but I remember it resonating because either way it works. Either way we’re still falling on the crutch of our own sin and it’s not helping us toward perfection.

Yes. Well, perfection is in Christ, and until he comes we’re going to not be perfect, but we can keep looking at him and be transformed by that vision.

Thank you so much for this conversation. It’s been a pleasure. Thanks also to David, our producer and my lawfully-wedded husband. Thank you to you, our listeners. We appreciate you tuning in. If you’d like to get in touch with us, you can always do so at our email, [email protected].

If you’d like to join our financial supporters, to whom we are very grateful, you can visit our website, anchor.fm/haltingtowardzion or our Patreon, patreon.com/haltingtowardzion.

We are on YouTube, Rumble, and Substack, which is the way to get us in your email with no fuss, no hassle, and that’s also how to get our transcripts. If there is a podcast catcher that you enjoy using that you can’t find us on, let us know and we will fix that.

Thank you so much for listening and we hope you’ll join us again soon.