Author Archives: Jonathan Parnell

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Jesus Christ saved me (Ephesians 2:1-10)

Hedonism to the Extreme: On the Lamborghini Egoista and Our Souls

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Egoista

“What does a tractor manufacturer know about sports cars?” said Enzo Ferrari to an Italian mechanic from humble roots.1

This mechanic, Ferruccio Lamborghini, did manufacture tractors, and he did well. But he also liked fast automobiles and building things, and in the decade following World War II he decided to try his hand at supercars. Frustrated with the Ferrari’s handling on the road, and Ferrari’s dismissal at some suggested improvements, Ferruccio blazed his own trail by creating Automobili Lamborghini. By the fall of 1963, at the Turin Motor Show, he released the Lamborghini 350 GTV and launched the beginning of an iconic supercar brand — a brand at which most men have only marveled from afar.

This year marks the 50th anniversary of that original design.

To commemorate the anniversary, Lamborghini has unveiled a new car that many say is aptly named “Egoista” — that is, “selfish.” Yes, that’s right. The car is named “Selfish.” It is a single-seat concept engineered for those who want to treat “me, myself, and I.” One commentator writes that the Egoista, along with its 5.2-litre V10, 600 horsepower engine, has aesthetically more in common with a fighter jet than with a vehicle meant for the ground. And there’s no secret about the marketing. Walter DeSilva, the head of design, explains, “[This car] is designed purely for hyper-sophisticated people who want only the most extreme and special things in the world. It represents hedonism taken to the extreme” (David Undercoffler, LA Times).

“Hedonism taken to the extreme.” So there you have it. This car is about pleasure to the max. That deep craving in our souls for ultimate happiness — the craving we all have — that’s what is behind this automobile. That is the bait held out for the few who can afford it. You are not really seeking pleasure until you sit behind this wheel.

But we know that’s an empty promise, on at least two levels.

What Only God Can Do

First, and most fundamental, no car can satisfy a God-shaped void. The quest for pleasure is really a quest for God. He created us to be happy in him. Now, grant the Lamborghini Egoista this: it would be a fun drive. It’s a beautiful machine. But while it’s a fruit of human ingenuity to be enjoyed, it’s not the place to search for the joy we need. While it offers a good experience, even if just to a thin slice of the human population, it’s not the destination of anyone’s deepest longings. That craving is satisfied in God alone. The real pursuit of pleasure must connect the most profound appetites of our being to the One by whom, in whom, and for whom we exist. God is our joy. God. Every other search is a dead-end road, no matter how fast we can drive it.

And we can attest to some experience of this dead-end road. Sinners can’t help but make black holes of the heart. We grab this one thing and give it its own space within the deep places of our souls. A gravitational pull begins. Eventually our whole lives orbit around its force and our resources get vacuumed into it with galactic abandon. What should be a gift — a glorious gift from God — ends up combusting into its own world.

We spin our wheels trying to recreate that superficial glee we felt the time before. We toil and toil for a diminishing return. Sure, entertainment may tarry for the night, but the wakeup call of emptiness comes in the morning. This is what it means to fall short of God’s glory: we exchange the hope of eternal joy for that which does not profit, we spend our money on moldy bread that cannot satisfy, we rebel to dumb ourselves down from the wonder for which we were made (Jeremiah 2:11–13; Isaiah 55:2; Romans 1:22–25).

There just aren’t substitutes for the “pleasures forevermore” of God’s fellowship (Psalm 16:11). The parched land of our lives needs more than a desperate splash from good things here and there. We need to be infused with the rivers that lead us to the One who is good. We need our land eroded by the ocean of God’s glory. And that gets into another level.

Deeper Than a Splurge

The Egoista ends empty not just because God alone can satisfy our souls, but also because this car’s offering isn’t how real pleasure works. This piece of Lamborghini commemoration tries to sell joy as a splurge. Happiness, they’d tell us, is a metric to meet, a high to hit, a rush to realize.

But this is too shallow to resonate with any soul responsibly aware of reality. The pleasure we crave can’t be contained in the excitement of 0 to 60 in less than four seconds, or the elitism of being a Lamborghini owner. The Egoista tells us to buy the car and burn the fuse while we have eternity in our hearts — eternity. We can’t manufacture anything to fill that gap.

The quest for real joy isn’t fulfilled in a moment. It isn’t a one-time event to experience, neither with a Lamborghini nor with God. The quest for real joy is a movement — the movement of God centered on himself as the author and perfecter of pleasure. God, because he is eternally glad in the Trinitarian fellowship of Father, Son, and Spirit, launched a movement to show that gladness. He created everything that there is in order to show that gladness, including us. Out of his gladness he made us such that our gladness would be found in his own — not once or twice, but forever.

To The Extreme

So “hedonism taken to the extreme” isn’t found in a good supercar. And it’s not even in a good quiet time every now and then. Lasting joy is more than an existential buzz, whatever the source. Hedonism taken to the extreme is the day-in, day-out life of redeemed sinners who know they were created for another world.

Hedonism taken to the extreme is everyday forsaking the jewels of Egypt because our eyes are set on a better Treasure.

Hedonism taken to the extreme is the steady road of enjoying gifts as gifts from God in Christ, tributaries of joy that lead us to his fullness.

Hedonism taken to the extreme is what says, even when darkness veils his lovely face, “My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever” (Psalm 73:26). God. Forever.

1 Fifty Cars That Changed the World, (Kindle Locations 702–703).

This Is the Way to Live

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Romans 12:11–13,

Do not be slothful in zeal, be fervent in spirit, serve the Lord. Rejoice in hope, be patient in tribulation, be constant in prayer. Contribute to the needs of the saints and seek to show hospitality.

Because of God’s mercy, we are called to live totally transformed lives, which is summarized generally as to love others. This is the basic way to understand the string of characteristics that begin in verse 9. Love is the central theme into which every characteristic is united.

This transformational love is first and foremost to God, the one who loved us in Christ when were unlovable (Romans 5:8). And then it is extended out to those around us, thus fulfilling the law (Romans 13:10). It is this horizontal dimension that is illustrated in the several portraits listed in Romans 12:9–21. None of Paul’s points stand above the others in preeminence, but rather, united by the theme of love, they all form a wise, pithy code that helps us navigate life in Christ, in this world.

Verses 11 and 13

The straightforward nature of these lines propels us into meditating on their meaning and how they look in our lives. “Do not be slothful in zeal,” verse 11 begins. “Be fervent in the Spirit, serve the Lord.” There is nothing hidden here. It means precisely what it says. The Christian life of love is not a couch potato. “Be fervent” is reminiscent of Colossians 1:29. We are filled with the Sprit. God’s energy is powerfully at work within us.

Skip to verse 13: “Contribute to the needs of the saints and seek to show hospitality.” This is the practical, nitty-gritty expression of love, both for fellow Christians and for unbelievers. The former reminds us of the Macedonian’s generosity in 2 Corinthians 8:1–5. The latter reminds us Hebrews 13:2 when we’re commanded not to neglect hospitality to strangers. Meeting needs in the church is the call for family concern for one another. Showing hospitality is the call not to become inward-focused about our needs.

A Closer Look at Verse 12

Now consider verse 12. I save it for last not because it is more important. There is nothing grammatical in this list that favors one line over the others. It’s just that verse 12 is a sequence of words that I’ve found personally helpful…

Rejoice in hope, be patient in tribulation, be constant in prayer. 

This could be a paradigm for life. Rejoice in hope is the call to this future-oriented vantage on reality. “Hope” is a very rich word in the Book of Romans. Because we have been justified by faith in Christ and have been brought into fellowship with God, Paul says in Romans 5:2 that “we rejoice in hope of the glory of God.” This hope is filled out in Romans 8 to be the consummation of the new creation. This hope — the final redemption of our bodies — is the hope in which we were saved (Romans 8:23–24). This is the hope that we rejoice in. This is our destiny. Notice this doesn’t say to rejoice in our present circumstances. They may be great right now and we should rejoice in them when they are (Romans 12:15), but the call to rejoice in Romans 12:12 encompasses more. It sets our eyes on what is to come, on the reality for which we were made: life in the presence of God, forever.

And as we rejoice in hope, in what is to come, we must be patient in tribulation. Oftentimes we will find that our destiny feels a lot different from our current location. Here we suffer. But Paul tells us that our present suffering is not worth comparing to the glory that is to be revealed to us (Romans 8:18). Because we rejoice in hope, we can be patient in tribulation. It is momentary affliction. Weeping may tarry for the night, but joy comes in the morning (Psalm 30:5).

And as we rejoice in hope and be patient in tribulation, Paul tells us to be constant in prayer. That is, walk in fellowship with God. Draw near to him. How else can we really rejoice in hope? How else can we be patient in tribulation? Let us be swallowed up into our relationship with God. Let us know him and love him and tell him all our heart.

Because of God’s mercy to us in Jesus, because he has welcomed us into his fellowship, let us walk in glad communion with him, constant in prayer, patient in tribulation, rejoicing in hope.

This is the way to live.

Why Sex Is Central in Our Lifetime

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From Rod Dreher’s article, “Sex After Christianity.”

… It is nearly impossible for contemporary Americans to grasp why sex was a central concern of early Christianity. Sarah Ruden, the Yale-trained classics translator, explains the culture into which Christianity appeared in her 2010 book Paul Among The People. Ruden contends that it’s profoundly ignorant to think of the Apostle Paul as a dour proto-Puritan descending upon happy-go-lucky pagan hippies, ordering them to stop having fun.

In fact, Paul’s teachings on sexual purity and marriage were adopted as liberating in the pornographic, sexually exploitive Greco-Roman culture of the time—exploitive especially of slaves and women, whose value to pagan males lay chiefly in their ability to produce children and provide sexual pleasure. Christianity, as articulated by Paul, worked a cultural revolution, restraining and channeling male eros, elevating the status of both women and of the human body, and infusing marriage—and marital sexuality—with love.

Christian marriage, Ruden writes, was “as different from anything before or since as the command to turn the other cheek.” The point is not that Christianity was only, or primarily, about redefining and revaluing sexuality, but that within a Christian anthropology sex takes on a new and different meaning, one that mandated a radical change of behavior and cultural norms. In Christianity, what people do with their sexuality cannot be separated from what the human person is.

It would be absurd to claim that Christian civilization ever achieved a golden age of social harmony and sexual bliss. It is easy to find eras in Christian history when church authorities were obsessed with sexual purity. But as Rieff recognizes, Christianity did establish a way to harness the sexual instinct, embed it within a community, and direct it in positive ways.

What makes our own era different from the past, says Rieff, is that we have ceased to believe in the Christian cultural framework, yet we have made it impossible to believe in any other that does what culture must do: restrain individual passions and channel them creatively toward communal purposes.

Rather, in the modern era, we have inverted the role of culture. Instead of teaching us what we must deprive ourselves of to be civilized, we have a society that tells us we find meaning and purpose in releasing ourselves from the old prohibitions. …

Read the entire article.

(HT: @drmoore)

Walter Schultz Explains Jonathan Edwards’s Dissertation on the End for Which God Created the World

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There is no such thing as a deeper truth than this.

Walter Schultz, in the March issue of JETS, Volume 56, No. 1, page 122:

God’s original ultimate end in creating and sustaining the world is the pleasure he takes in his self-knowledge, holiness, and happiness eternally-increasing in a society of beings who are upheld in existence moment-by-moment ex nihilo. Before creating anything, God appraised this goal as being inherently valuable and esteemed and desired it as such. He then began to pursue this and continues to act toward it. God is moved to pursue this end solely by virtue of his eternally-occurrent supreme regard for himself as Trinity and for his capacity-attributes.

The God-Centered Cross of Love Inexhaustible

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The hands-down, most horrific nightmare possible is that of a God who is angry without due cause. Could we imagine anything worse?

It would be the most terrible thing if the only person who has the power to destroy you forever were ferociously angry with you for no reason. That God would hate you just because. That he would throw his fury around on a whim. What if he were arbitrarily annoyed with everything about you? What if he were to burn with indignation toward you only because he can?

There is no idea worse, and no idea more untrue.

Now to be clear, God is angry. He “feels indignation every day,” as Psalm 7:11 says. But here’s the crucial point to remember: his anger is always a righteous response to sin.

Because God Is Holy

God is love, not wrath. The reason he wields wrath is because of sin. And the reason sin deserves wrath is because he is holy. He is absolute purity. His triune essence is blinding perfection. Sin belittles this holiness. Sin speaks into existence a lie about the way things really are. Sin slanders God’s handiwork and refuses to recognize his worth. Sin on the loose — sin unpunished — injects the air with a false witness about who God is. It puts the world in the dark.

Sin makes a world of closed eyes and plugged ears — a world that leaves God alone to uphold the value of his name. Only God is left to perceive and love what is most lovable, which is God himself. He alone maintains the righteous orbit of the moral universe. And the way he does this is by wrath against the wrong.

As John Murray writes, “Because he loves himself supremely he cannot suffer what belongs to the integrity of his character and glory to be compromised or curtailed.”1 Sin in God’s economy will always ultimately be punished sin — either one day in the hell of a burning fire, or that one Friday in the hell of a Roman cross.

This is why there was a cross. God’s holiness and our sin explain why at the heart of the Christian message is the death of Jesus in our place — a death that fundamentally was propitiation. In fact, D. A. Carson says that propitiation is what “holds together all the other biblical ways of talking about the cross.”2 So it’s important that we understand what it means.

What Is Propitiation?

First, let me say what it isn’t. Christian propitiation is not the works of sinful man to crudely appease an angry deity. That’s the pagan idea. Rather, Christian propitiation is the work of God to absorb his divine anger toward sinful man. The first is capricious and whimsical. The latter is the calculated selfless act of a loving God — indeed, of a God who is love.

In his classic The Cross of Christ, John Stott parses out Christian propitiation with three crucial points.

First, God’s wrath is the reason why propitiation was necessary. Remember, the nightmare of unsubstantiated indignation is untrue. “The wrath of God is his steady, unrelenting, unremitting, uncompromising antagonism to evil in all its forms and manifestations” (173). God has wrath because wrath against sin is the fitting expression of a holy God.

Second, God is the one who makes propitiation. This wasn’t man’s idea, but God’s. It is all due to his mercy and grace. Stott is all over this. He writes, “God does not love us because Christ died for us; Christ died for us because God loved us. If it is God’s wrath which needed to be propitiated, it is God’s love which did the propitiating” (174).

Third, God was the propitiatory sacrifice. What hung on the cross wasn’t a thing. It wasn’t a basket of fruit or a headless chicken. Stott notes that God giving his Son was God giving God. The blood that soaked into Golgotha’s soil was not the blood of a man partly divine, but of God himself who had become a man.

One fact rings loud in all three of Stott’s points. It is the fact that every right way to parse propitiation is profoundly about God.

It is God himself who in holy wrath needs to be propitiated, God himself who in holy love undertook to do the propitiating, and God himself who in the person of his Son died for the propitiation of our sins. Thus God took his own loving initiative to appease his own righteous anger by bearing it his own self in his own Son when we took our place and died for us. There is no crudity here to evoke our ridicule, only the profundity of holy love to evoke our worship. (175)

Do you see it? A God-centered God created a God-centered cosmos that he saves by a God-centered cross. Far from a nightmare, this is better than our greatest dream. God’s God-centeredness doesn’t make him a reckless tyrant who flies off the handle at the drop of hat. It makes him a sovereign God who is great enough to stoop this low to rescue us. It gives him a mighty arm able stretch to the uttermost with love for those who deserve his anger.

Who can fathom this wonder? Man would not make this up. Man could not. Do you see it? Do you see what he has done? What do we do but bow speechless? We put our hands over our mouths in awe. Do you see what he has done?

He has loved us with a love inexhaustible.

1 John Murray, Redemption Accomplished and Applied, (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1955), 32.

2 D. A. Carson, Scandalous: The Cross and Resurrection of Jesus (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2010), Locations 954-955.

When Sex Is Profound and Marriage Is Real

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From Anthony Esolen’s article, “Neither in the Jungle Nor Out of It.”

Beasts copulate; but men and women are meant to marry. They perform the marital act; they know, when they unite in that act, that it is, or it ought to be, the seal of a love that, to quote another of Shakespeare’s sonnets, “bears it out even to the edge of doom.” We are the creatures aware of time, and oriented toward eternity. We know that the act of marriage brings into the bond of love the past generations, whose history we bear in our loins, and the present, and the future, in the child that may be born of the act. We cannot copulate! We cannot forget, when we unite, that we are doing what our parents did, and their parents; we cannot forget that we are saying, with our bodies, “We now may beget a child, to whom we will be devoted together for the rest of our lives.” We can only tell lies, and in doing so mimic the beast, or rather “improve” upon the beast, since we add the power of our unleashed brains to the beast’s frank provocation or aggression.

For lust longs for the innocent mindlessness of the beast; and, to grasp that mindlessness, will pervert language itself, calling sex “safe” or “protected,” and cohabitation “honest,” and relationships “mutual,” which are nothing but forays into a jungle, where the strongest and most cunning survive. There is no way to make such a place habitable. The only choice is to leave it, and return to a land of love, humility, gratitude for the excellence of the other sex, and marriage.

(HT: @drmoore)

How Christians Prepare for Suffering

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The apostle Paul suffered. Did he ever.

He was imprisoned. He was beaten, often near death. He took 195 total lashes from his Jewish kinsmen on five occasions. He took three pummels with rods. He was once stoned — and then also shipwrecked three times. Then there are the endless dangers of travel in the first century, plus countless other experiences mentioned and unmentioned in the New Testament (2 Corinthians 11:21–33).

It doesn’t take long until we wonder how in the world he did it. How did he take so much pain? So much loss? How did he prepare for suffering?

The answer is in Philippians 3:7–8.

Counting Everything As Loss

In the 1992 sermon “Called to Suffer and Rejoice: That We Might Gain Christ,” John Piper unfolds the significance of Paul counting his gain as loss. Basically, the apostle took a long look at his life apart from Christ. All the things that he valued — his Jewish pedigree, his place in the upper echelon of religious society, his law-keeping — he took a long look at this list and wrote “LOSS” over it with a giant Sharpie.

And then we went a step further.

It wasn’t just the past values of his personal life. It wasn’t just “whatever gain he had.” Paul looks out into the future and declares everything as loss. Everything out there that could pass as positive. Everything good that he has yet to experience and everything which he will never experience. Compared to Jesus, everything is loss.

This Is Normal Christianity

And lest we think this puts Paul on a pious pedestal, that he is at a spiritual level we’d never reach, Piper reminds us that this sort of reckoning is normal Christianity (Matthew 13:44; Luke 14:33). To consider Jesus better than everything else in the world is at the heart of what it means to be a Christian.

It may be worth reading that last sentence a couple more times, until it feels uncomfortable. Many of us are so quick to console our hearts when the least bit of unsettling winds blow through. But what about conviction? It’s a good thing not to be comfortable with a watered-down Christianity foreign to the Bible. It’s not works-righteousness to say that saving faith in Jesus means we have to really love him. It’s works-righteousness to think that our really loving him is the reason we’re saved. Paul said that everything is loss compared to the surpassing worth of knowing Jesus. Paul said that and so should we.

Jesus Is Better

And that’s how Paul prepared for suffering. He saw Jesus as superior to everything else. Piper lays it out this way:

Suffering is nothing more than the taking away of bad things or good things that the world offers for our enjoyment — reputation, esteem among peers, job, money, spouse, sexual life, children, friends, health, strength, sight, hearing, success, etc. When these things are taken away (by force or by circumstance or by choice), we suffer. But if we have followed Paul and the teaching of Jesus and have already counted them as loss for the surpassing value of gaining Christ, then we are prepared to suffer.

This means that if we treasure Jesus, then every aspect of suffering in our lives is losing something we have already declared as loss.

If when you become a Christian you write a big red “LOSS” across all the things in the world except Christ, then when Christ calls you to forfeit some of those things, it is not strange or unexpected. The pain and the sorrow may be great. The tears may be many, as they were for Jesus in Gethsemane. But we will be prepared. We will know that the value of Christ surpasses all the things the world can offer and that in losing them we gain more of Christ.

Loving Him Today

None of us knows the sorrows that may meet us tomorrow and are sure to meet us if Jesus tarries. We don’t know what hardships God will call us to walk through. But even though we don’t know them, we can prepare for them. And the way we prepare for afflictions then is by gaining Jesus now.

It will not minimize the pain. Not at all. But we will know, even in the darkest night, that Jesus is our God and all, that he is our Rock and treasure, that he is enough.

The way we suit up for our sufferings tomorrow is by cultivating our love for Jesus today.

How to Run with Endurance

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Hebrews 12:1,

Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight, and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us.

The writer to the Hebrews wants us to run well. He is writing this epistle to encourage the church to endure in faith, to hold fast to our hope, to look to our God who will never leave us nor forsake us (Hebrews 2:1; 10:23; 13:5).

Chapter 12 reaches a crescendo. The previous chapter has given a thundering list of Old Testament saints who persevered in faith. Over and over we have seen this “by faith… by faith… by faith…” formula of people just like you and me. They are people who had their eyes set on a new city, a future homeland, a better country (Hebrews 11:10,14, 16).

And then in verse 39 the writer explains that these saints, as epic as their faith was, did not receive what was promised (cf. Hebrews 11:13). He means that the reality they hoped in hasn’t yet been realized. They hoped in a new Jerusalem that even up to our present day they have not yet seen.

But why? Why haven’t they seen it yet?

They’ve not experienced consummated fulfillment of what was promised because we’ve not yet experienced it. The age of anticipation, before Jesus came, is joined with our age of inaugurated fulfillment, after Jesus has come. The writer to the Hebrews encourages our faith by telling us that we are one people with the Old Testament saints. Abel, Enoch, Abraham, Moses — they are our brothers. Sarah is our sister. Their hope is our hope.

We Have Something Better

And in fact, God has provided something better for us. We have seen fulfillment. We have seen the kingdom come already, though not yet completely. We have seen the cross and the empty tomb. We have received the apostles’ teaching. And the final day of fulfillment — the moment when all the promises will be complete — that is a moment we will experience together with the Old Testament saints (Hebrews 11:40).

So then we can understand their vested interest in our perseverance. We are one people of God with them. They will arrive at the new Jerusalem when we do and they want us to run well unto that day. The writer to the Hebrews tells us that they are a cloud of witnesses surrounding us. They are a stadium of spectators cheering us on.

And therefore, because this is the case, because we are one people with the Old Testament saints and have their hopes bound up in our own, including their rallying support, we should lay aside everything that holds us back and we should run the life of faith with endurance.

Get Rid of Your Sin

There are numerous incentives to get rid of our sin. First, we know that though we all do sin, if we continue in an unrepentant lifestyle of sin it proves that we are not truly believers (1 John 1:8, 5:18). Paul tells us to kill our sin in order to live (Romans 8:13), to cleanse ourselves for holiness’ sake (2 Corinthians 7:1). But the important point about sin in Hebrews 12 is that it messes up our run. It slows us down. It makes us drag. It impedes our endurance and would ultimately sabotage it completely. And therefore we should hurl it aside out of the way.

We can’t persevere in faith if we don’t keep knocking sin down. This means, at least, that there is no endurance without growing in grace. There is no running well in the race of faith without realizing holiness.

Whatever it is that is holding us back, whatever besetting sin seldom looses its fangs, we are encouraged to break free. Indeed, we are cheered on to break free by a stadium of Old Testaments saints who hope together with us. Today as we enter into the nitty-gritty of our lives and temptations come, know that the Father delights to give you the kingdom, the Lord Jesus intercedes for you, the Spirit fills you with power.

And add this extra layer of incentive: Moses and the saints of old are watching you, pumping their fists with enthusiasm, chanting together for your victory, your endurance.

More Than Body Parts Indeed

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A kid in Colorado with male genitals is prohibited from using the girls’ bathroom.

That’s the straightforward backstory on a recent piece from Donna Rose, a transsexual journalist writing her opinion for CNN. A Colorado school district has decided that a six-year-old child with male anatomy should use the boys’ bathroom at school, or a private one, Rose reports. Rose decries the school’s decision as discrimination because the child apparently has a deep sense of being a girl.

This six-year-old child, Rose writes,

knows she’s a girl. She dresses as a girl. Her legal documents recognize her as a girl. Her parents accept her as a girl. On the playground, you would have difficulty identifying her as different from any of the other girls, because in all ways that matter socially and legally, this child is a girl.

We are talking about a transsexual first-grader. A first-grader. Thanks, Mom and Dad.You see, in all the ways that really matter, this child is a boy. But the parents, ABC news reports, say when he was 18-months-old he began to “struggle with gender identification.” In short, he played with Barbie dolls and said he wanted to be a girl. So Mom and Dad took him to a “specialist” who diagnosed him with gender identity disorder and there you have it.

So it’s a disturbing story, to say the least, but with that said, I appreciate a couple things Donna Rose writes about it. She is right to say that the surrounding moments of a person’s birth are significant, and she is right to say that gender identity is not just body parts.

Those Moments Surrounding Birth

Rose writes, “I doubt many people stop to consider that the single most significant moment in their lives happens within minutes of their births. That’s when, upon simple inspection, a doctor or a nurse pronounces a baby a boy or a girl.”

That is a significant moment. Not counting my own, I’ve been there to see three of these moments. It was in those moments that my wife and I received our children as the boy or girl that God had given us, not as the children whose gender we determine ourselves. That’s one blaring problem in this story. Rose talks like this child in Colorado vacationed at Walden Pond and decided that she was really a girl. But actually, to Rose’s point, those moments surrounding this child’s birth were insanely significant. It seems as though Mom and Dad just weren’t settled that their boy was a boy. Perhaps they needed the infant to speak up after coming through the birth canal and explain that his penis was there for a reason. That what they see is, well, what they get.

The injustice didn’t happen in a Colorado school. It happened in the home of this child. It happened when this child’s parents thumbed their noses at God and decided they’d treat their son as if he were a daughter.

Gender Identity Is Not Just Body Parts

The title of Rose’s piece is, “Gender identity is not just body parts.” This is absolutely true. Gender identity is more than body parts, but not less.

This is true because reality is more than biological. That is one perspective on personhood, alongside societal witness and our existential sense, which informs our sexual identity. Not one of these three perspectives determines our sexuality on its own, but each work together — as three vantages on one whole — to inform us on who we are. Three distinctions of “sex,” “gender,” and “gender identity” can serve to highlight these perspectives. You might call them normative, situational, and existential. Theologian Kevin Vanhoozer explains:

In brief: sex is something biological (chromosomal marker); gender, something sociological associated with perceptions of masculinity and femininity (cultural marker), and gender identity, something psychological (consciousness marker). (“Four Views,” Kindle Locations 3251-3254)

The biological, normative perspective is the chromosomal make-up, expressed in the anatomy. It’s the recognition, Rose says, that comes by a simple inspection by the doctor that causes “reverberations for the rest of our lives.” Rose is right again. It is a simple inspection, because it is simple. If you have a male’s anatomy, you are not a female. And at the same time, the anatomy doesn’t say it all. The Ethiopian eunuch was not less than a man when he believed the gospel (Acts 9:27ff).

Then there is the social, situational perspective. It’s the perspective that says if he looks male, walks male, and talks male, he must be male. We live in a sexual world, and we’re hardwired to see reality through this binary lens. Take most languages for example. Again, it’s not the say-all, but we recognize masculine and feminine.

Lastly, there’s the personal, existential perspective. It is how we perceive ourselves. It is how we feel. In most cases of transsexualism, this is the linchpin. Despite the chromosomes God gives, despite the way the world sees, the way we feel must be the only truth-teller. But actually, in the case of this child in Colorado, it seems biology is the only faithful witness. The parents have said one thing over and over and over. They’ve dressed the child in pink and put bows in the child’s hair. But every time the child has to potty, he knows. When his chest doesn’t look like the other girls’, he’ll know. When he has to take medicine to hold back the hair from growing on his face, he’ll know. When he can’t get pregnant because he doesn’t have ovaries, he’ll know. Poor child. How tragic that his parents have done this to him.

Good News for Donna Rose

Rose admits the existential perspective in mentioning her own struggles. It’s the part, I presume, that most transsexuals believe nobody else understands.

This is a topic close to home for Rose. And lest I sound like a distant commentator, this is a topic close to home for me, in my extended family. So Rose doesn’t sound weird, she sounds like someone I could have grown up with. She sounds like someone I love. And therefore, with the sincerest warmth, I want to say to Donna Rose what I’ve said before to someone much closer: I understand you feel broken.

It’s not strange that our psychological perspective is messed up, that you might feel one way although your biology and society says something else. We are all broken people somewhere, whether in our sexual attraction or our deepest thoughts or a thousand other ways. Sin taints us. But how we feel is just one perspective among three. This is one angle that informs our sexuality. Only one.

So yes, gender identity is not just body parts. All three of these perspectives — biological, social, psychological — inform who God created us to be. And no matter how hard we try, we can’t manipulate all three of these perspectives to say something they don’t. You can think yourself female, and you can fool society to see female. You can even go under the knife and reorder the look of your anatomy. But you can’t make XY become XX. You just can’t. God’s imprint will haunt our every effort to rebel against his handiwork. And the fact is, when the dust settles, you’ve only suppressed your identity with a surgical procedure and hormone injections.

But surgery and injections can’t pass for a Creator. As much as you’d like to believe that these props made you finally become “who you should have been,” there’s one voice still calling. It’s the voice of the One who made you, the One who knit you together in your mother’s womb (Psalm 139:13). It’s the voice of the One who knows how broken this world is and how broken you feel. He knows because he himself has come to this earth and walked in your shoes. He knows because he took all of your brokenness, and sin and guilt and pain, and he died on the cross to give you a new identity summed up in one word: his.

He came to make you whole in him, not in artificial hormones.

Turn from them and trust in Jesus.

As broken as you feel in this world, believe that you were created for another.

Embracing Weakness Will Change Your Life

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Achilles was a vicious warrior with a complicated history. In Homer’s Iliad we see him rise to the top as the preeminent player at the end of the Trojan War. His full backstory is melodramatic enough to make Downton Abbey blush, but suffice it to say that no one was quite like him. Achilles was simultaneously drunk in rage and meticulous in skill as he led the Greeks in battle. But most of us probably only know him because of his heel.

Achilles doesn’t die in Homer’s story but Greek legend says that he later suffered a mortal wound to the back of his foot. The “Achilles’ heel,” as it’s called today, has become one of the most popular idioms in Western culture. It refers to a person’s point of weakness leading to their downfall.

But that idea comes from Greek mythology, not Christian reality.

God’s wisdom gives us another picture. Believers in Jesus don’t have an Achilles’ heel — we are an Achilles’ heel.

Here’s what I mean: Greek mythology shows us an invincible warrior with one weakness that when exploited leads to defeat; Christian reality shows us a dependent servant with thorough weakness that when exploited leads to triumph.

That’s our story. That’s the trail that Jesus blazes (1 Peter 2:21). A hero died for villains. Victory came through loss. Life was born out of death. Conquest was accomplished by suffering. The darkest night in history gave way to the brightest morning. In God’s economy, our weakness is one of our greatest assets.

Defining Weakness

Now what do we mean by weakness? The word has such a general meaning that we must sketch some type of definition before we go any further. First, let’s be clear about what weakness is not. The biblical concept of weakness does not mean the things we’re not good at. We’re tempted to think this way. It would be easier if weakness were contained to the things we stink at doing. But it’s much more pervasive than that. We can’t simply tip-toe around it.

Weakness is everywhere in the New Testament. Jesus told his disciples that, in contrast to the spirit, the flesh is weak (Mark 14:38). Luke, in Paul’s voice, refers to the weak as those who are economically disadvantaged (Acts 20:35). The Corinthian believers were weak in the social sense (1 Corinthians 1:26–27). The Book of Romans tells us that Jesus died for us while we were still weak, that is, while we were ungodly and lacked any possibility of deserving the slightest good (Romans 5:8). But we are also weak when we pray, when we lack the words or know-how (Romans 8:26). And then there are fellow Christians who are weak if they can’t get past judging others on matters of conscience (Romans 14:1–4). Also throw in this pile the physical infirmities that Paul seems to cite in 2 Corinthians 10:10, the thorn in the flesh in 2 Corinthians 12:7, and the litany of unpleasantness in 2 Corinthians 12:10. One way or another, we have felt the way the Bible speaks about weakness.

The context, of course, determines the specific meaning of weakness, but every use is connected back to the general idea of deficiency. If there were one broad explanation for weakness, it would be to lack. Weakness means we don’t have what it takes. It means we are neither sovereign nor omniscient, nor invincible. We are not in control, we don’t know everything, and we can be stopped. Weakness means that we desperately need God. And the plea for my own soul, and for yours, is that we would embrace weakness, not despise it.

The Impact of Embracing Weakness

When we embrace weakness, it means we’ve looked at ourselves long enough to know we can’t make it without looking to Another. Embracing weakness means we know we need God very badly. This discovery, as unenthusiastic as we may be about it, refuses to leave us alone until we’ve been changed, affecting our church, our communion, and our commission. Getting more specific, here are three ways that embracing our weakness impacts our lives.

1. Embracing weakness means that spiritual gifts are a big deal.

The church is a supernatural community, and we don’t do supernatural — God does. We’re too weak to fabricate the faith-building work we’re called to, no matter how unique our particular personalities may be. It comes from somewhere else, namely, asEphesians 4:7–13 tells, the resurrected Christ.

In that passage, Paul quotes from Psalm 68 and pictures Jesus as a victorious king dispensing the spoils of his triumph. The ascension of Christ was his monarchial procession to the throne of Zion after defeating sin and death. This procession was more than bright lights and a hallelujah chorus. This king is a conqueror. He has scars. And one fruit of those scars is your pastor’s teaching gift. Or your small group leader’s relational wisdom. Or Mrs. Betty’s encouraging words.

When we see the victory of Christ in the gifts of others, our eyes become more grateful than critical. We celebrate instead of nit-pick. We are more moved by God’s awesome power than off-put by our arbitrary preferences. Jesus died for that gift. He died for your brother or sister to have that gift and for you to be built up by it. It’s a big deal.

2. Embracing weakness gives more vigor and peace in our relationship with God.

Vigor and peace is what John Owen says is at stake if we don’t mortify our sin. Vigor is the idea of our outward-facing activity. It is our labor in the Lord. Peace is the thing in the deep recesses of our souls. It’s the character of our silent prayers.

Embracing weakness brings a surge of vigor because we realize that our work must be in God’s power, not ours. It’s like trading in a bicycle for a Ferrari — there’s more horsepower.

Embracing weakness brings more peace because we realize afresh that God loves us by his grace, not because we’re strong. Our joy doesn’t rest in our ability, but in the approval God gives us in Christ, the one in whom he chose us before the ages began according to his own purpose and grace (2 Timothy 1:9).

3. Embracing weakness maximizes our fruitfulness.

When we are stuck on ourselves, we create a ceiling for God’s potential. We define possibilities by our capabilities, not his. And if you stare at yourself long enough, your capacity to dream will dwindle down to nothing. That is a safe and sad way to live, refusing to let your dreams extend beyond what you know for certain you can do on your own. It’s also a sign that you mistake yourself to be stronger than you are.

Knowing we are weak ruins self-sufficiency. We confess that we are severely flawed individuals who have no hope of doing any lasting good in this world unless a God who can raise the dead works through us. And that’s just it — a God who raises the dead does work through us. In fact, the immeasurable greatness of his power toward us is according to the power he worked in Christ when he raised him from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly places (Ephesians 1:19–20).

When we embrace our weakness, we know that God’s work must be done in God’s power. And if it’s on God, we can dream big. He is strong enough to do whatever he wants (Psalm 135:6). He is good enough to not spare his own Son but give him up for us all (Romans 8:32). And with a God that strong and that good, the question we must ask ourselves is what we are asking him. In the new heavens and new earth, when our faith becomes sight and we behold the glory of Christ, we will not think back to our time now and say, “You know, my dreams for God’s glory were way too big.”

We won’t ever say that. Because this is Christian reality, not Greek mythology.