# KR Labby > Rooted in the ancient Christian faith, I help people slow down and think clearly about what they believe, how they live, and why. Public Ghost content for AI and LLM tooling. This file includes a bounded export of public pages first, then recent public posts. Append `.md` to any post or page URL to get the content in Markdown (for example, `/example-post.md`). ## Pages ### About this site URL: https://www.krlabby.com/about/ Last updated: 2026-07-10T04:37:13.000Z ### Welcome I help people slow down and think more clearly about the ideas that shape how they live, believe, and decide. ### Stay up-to-date Never miss an update—consider subscribing. ### A Note on Process This content is grounded in three decades of vocational ministry and multidisciplinary study. I hold a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science from Grove City College, a Master of Divinity from Reformed Presbyterian Theological Seminary, and a Master of Science in Organizational Leadership from Geneva College. I have also completed doctoral coursework at Reformed Theological Seminary and am currently pursuing a Doctor of Ministry at Liberty University. My working method hasn’t changed much: primary sources, careful exegesis, theological reference works, and a lot of margin notes. Logos Bible Software and AI-assisted research and editorial tools support that work. Everything that goes out under my name has been prepared and reviewed by me. ### Privacy Policy URL: https://www.krlabby.com/privacy-policy/ Last updated: 2026-06-10T23:58:53.000Z **KR Labby Channel / Labbe Media, LLC** *Effective Date: June 6, 2026* --- This Privacy Policy describes how Labbe Media, LLC ("we," "us," or "our") collects, uses, and protects information when you visit this website, subscribe to our newsletter, or engage with content on the KR Labby Channel (@krlabby) on YouTube. We are committed to handling your information with care and transparency. Please read this policy carefully. 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Contact Labbe Media, LLC Email: [krichardlabby@gmail.com](mailto:krichardlabby@gmail.com) ### Reading List URL: https://www.krlabby.com/reading-list/ Last updated: 2026-06-17T02:13:10.000Z Good theology travels best by word of mouth, one person handing a book to another and saying, *this one is worth your time.* These lists are that. Each one is organized around a topic the channel covers, curated for readers at different levels, and updated as the channel grows. You won't find everything here. You will only find what I've actually read and recommend. Some links on this page are Amazon affiliate links. That means if you click through and buy something, I earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. It doesn't affect what makes the list. --- **Where to Start** Not sure where to begin? The [Start Here shelf](https://www.krlabby.com/start-here-shelf/) is a short list of books I'd hand anyone — skeptic, new believer, or longtime churchgoer looking for more depth. --- **Browse by Topic** [Apologetics](#) [Bible Study](#) [Church History](#) [Confession & Catechism](#) [Creedal](#) [Devotional](#) [Evangelical](#) [Modern Controversies](#) [Philosophy](#) [Theology](#) ### Start Here Shelf URL: https://www.krlabby.com/start-here-shelf/ Last updated: 2026-06-17T02:28:46.000Z *These are some of the books I'd hand you first. Whether you're just curious, just starting out, or just realizing your faith has more depth than you've been given access to, I think you'll find them worthwhile.* Links on this page are Amazon affiliate links. That means if you click through and buy something, I earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. It doesn't affect what makes the list. --- **1\.** [***Mere Christianity* — C.S. Lewis**](https://amzn.to/4vg0CEh?ref=krlabby.com) *For: The skeptic, the curious, the person wanting to think carefully about what they believe* Lewis sets out to explain what Christians believe and why, all without assuming you're already convinced. It has been in print for over seventy years. --- **2\.** [***The Reason for God* — Timothy Keller**](https://amzn.to/43BljhJ?ref=krlabby.com) *For: The honest doubter with specific objections* Keller takes the most common objections to Christianity seriously — suffering, exclusivity, science, hell — and works through them carefully. A good read whether you're persuaded at the end or not. --- **3\.** [***The Story of Reality* — Greg Koukl**](https://amzn.to/4vS9yzp?ref=krlabby.com) *For: The seeker who wants the whole map before committing to any corner of it* About 180 pages. Koukl lays out the basic shape of the Christian worldview — creation, fall, redemption, restoration — clearly enough that you know what you're actually being asked to consider. --- **4\.** [***Knowing God* — J.I. Packer**](https://amzn.to/4xAejiH?ref=krlabby.com) *For: Anyone desiring to know God* Packer's aim is modest: to help readers move from knowing facts about God to actually knowing him. The book does what it sets out to do. Start here if you're not sure where else to start. --- **5\.** [***The Prodigal God* — Timothy Keller**](https://amzn.to/3ScTolH?ref=krlabby.com) *For: The lapsed, the wounded, the spiritually dry and worn* A short reading of one of Jesus's most familiar parables. Keller finds things in the text that most people, including most churchgoers, have walked past. Worth two hours of your time regardless of where you land. --- **6\.** [***What is the Gospel? Greg Gilbert***](https://amzn.to/4oxyKZq?ref=krlabby.com) *For: Anyone who wants to know what the gospel (good news) of Jesus Christ actually is, and what it actually gives* Crisp and clear. This is an excellent summary and explanation of the central message of the Christian faith. --- **7\.** [***Delighting in the Trinity* — Michael Reeves**](https://amzn.to/4vOB9RX?ref=krlabby.com) *For: The new believer and the longtime churchgoer alike* The doctrine of the Trinity is not where most people expect to find a book this enjoyable. Reeves makes a case that the Trinity is not a puzzle to be solved but good news to be received. See what you think. ## Posts ### The Economist Who Called the Bluff: What Ludwig von Mises Knew About Envy URL: https://www.krlabby.com/the-economist-who-called-the-bluff-what-ludwig-von-mises-knew-about-envy/ Last updated: 2026-07-27T02:21:02.000Z The Wall Street Journal’s student-written “Future View” column asked this month why democratic-socialist candidates do so well with people their age. One contributor said the quiet part almost aloud. Kathleen Keesey, a finance major at the University of Colorado Boulder, wrote that democratic socialism offers young voters an alternative to hard work: simply “having a capitalist system to blame for any societal economic woes.”¹ She was not citing Ludwig von Mises, but she sounded a good deal like him. Seventy years earlier, in a short book called *The Anti-Capitalistic Mentality*, Mises had already written the theory down. It is a fitting companion to the polling. Favorable views of capitalism have fallen from a wide lead in 2019 to a near-coin flip today, and the shift is not confined to the usual places. Even Republicans are souring on the free market.² Socialism is enjoying a moment, and not only in surveys. It is showing up in ballots cast by people young enough to have little personal experience with socialism and its steep cost. Mises was not so naive. He wrote the book as a man already chased across two countries by the systems he was diagnosing. He was not guessing what planned economies do to people who ask the wrong questions. He had been one of them. His book runs five chapters, but the argument comes down to three moves. First, why people resent the market. Second, what the market actually is, and what it is not. Finally, what truths answer that resentment. Each move sets up the next. ### A Man Who Paid to Learn the Lesson Mises was born in 1881 in Lemberg, at the ragged eastern edge of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and trained in Vienna under Carl Menger’s young Austrian school.³ By day he advised the Vienna Chamber of Commerce; by night he ran a private seminar that trained a striking share of the next generation of serious economists, Friedrich Hayek among them.⁴ The dark century soon caught up with him. Sensing the gathering storm of fascism, he fled Vienna for Geneva in 1934\. He was right: when Austria fell to the Nazis in 1938, the Gestapo searched for him specifically and ransacked the apartment he had left behind. Two years later, as German forces swept through France, he escaped Europe entirely, arriving in New York in 1940 and rebuilding a career from nothing at fifty-eight.⁵ His stolen papers later surfaced in a former Soviet archive in Moscow—ironically catalogued and preserved by the very kind of state he had spent his life warning against. By 1956, when he wrote *The Anti-Capitalistic Mentality*, Mises was no detached observer. He had already paid for the alternative. ### First: Envy Dressed as Philosophy The book’s central claim can be stated in a sentence: under an unhampered market economy, a man’s failure to get what he wants is his own responsibility, not the system’s.⁶ In a status-based society, a peasant’s son stays a peasant, and there is no shame in that, since birth decided it before he had any say. Capitalism removes the excuse. It rewards whoever serves the paying public best, so whoever fails to grow rich, or famous, or acclaimed must face the possibility that the market judged him correctly. It's his fault, no one else's. Mises thought most people would rather blame the system than accept that judgment. So they translate the complaint. Instead of saying “I failed,” they say “the market is unjust.” Mises is describing a psychological pattern. Scripture shows its ancient root. When Adam is confronted, he answers, “The woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me fruit of the tree, and I ate.” Eve replies, “The serpent deceived me, and I ate” (Gen. 3:12–13). The first human response to failure is to shift responsibility. The anti-capitalistic mentality is a later version of the same move. That claim has a limit. Mises is describing what he calls an unhampered market—one “not sabotaged by government-imposed restrictions.”⁷ By this he means the social system of the division of labor under private ownership of the means of production, free of coercive interference. Where a tariff shields a weak competitor, where a subsidy keeps a favored firm alive past what customers would pay, or where occupational licensing and regulatory capture protect incumbents from new entrants, his diagnosis flips. That is not capitalism working. That is capitalism rigged, and a person blaming that arrangement is not scapegoating. He identifies true injustice: an outside hand tilting a game in its favor. A skeptic will object that this is too convenient, that defining capitalism narrowly lets it dodge every failure the way “not real socialism” lets central planning dodge its own. Fair enough. But the two objections are not the same. Central planning drifts toward concentrated control by its own internal logic: someone has to decide what gets made, so power accumulates at the center almost by definition. Rigging works differently. A tariff, a subsidy, or a licensing barrier does not arise from two people trading value for value. Someone has to reach outside the transaction and borrow the state’s coercive power. Mises makes nearly this point in his chapter on the reactionary spirit: guilds blocked newcomers, farmers demanded tariff protection, and threatened incumbents sought government favor—all reaching for the state because the market would not give them what they wanted.⁸ Cronyism is not capitalism’s destination. It is an import. “Wealth can be acquired only by serving the consumers.” — Ludwig von Mises, *The Anti-Capitalistic Mentality* He aims this squarely at intellectuals. Physicians, professors, and writers live in constant proximity to former classmates who did better, and a professional culture that calls everyone “colleague” makes it hard to admit that a colleague’s success stings. So the resentment looks for a bigger target, and the market—which pays a popular novelist more than a serious one—makes an easy one.⁹ Mises adds an American wrinkle: in Europe, “society” still included scholars and clergy; in America it meant money and little else, leaving intellectuals shut out of a hierarchy they thought they deserved to lead. It's a fair criticism to call the envy thesis reductive. Reducing every objection to capitalism to a single psychological complaint is too tidy for a phenomenon with multiple intellectual and historical objections. But reductive is not the same as false. The anti-capitalistic mentality involves more than envy, but not less. The tenth commandment does not merely forbid taking your neighbor’s field; it forbids wanting it. The Westminster Larger Catechism names envying and grieving at another’s good as a sin in its own right.¹⁰ ### Second: A Mechanism, Not a Verdict The middle chapters of the book widen the lens. Mises challenges a common habit: the tendency to credit rising living standards to nature or to technology alone, while overlooking the capital that had to be saved and invested to make those improvements possible. He turns briefly to literature and notes an irony of the free market in books: the same commercial system that creates a genuinely free press also produces a steady stream of writers who resent the public for preferring someone else’s work over their own. And he insists that nature itself is not generous. It has always restricted the supply of the things human life depends on. Comfort and abundance had to be wrested from scarcity by capital and sustained effort.¹¹ Underneath these observations is a larger claim Mises makes about freedom, not just about markets. Simply describing the physical limits on what any person can do, he says, does not amount to a moral or metaphysical justification of freedom.¹² He treats the market the same way. He is not claiming that every purchase people make is wise or good. He is only describing what markets actually do with the choices people make, wise or foolish. He is not a moralist in disguise, quietly blessing consumer preferences. He is closer to a mechanic: he explains how the machine works and refuses to tell you whether you ought to want what it produces.The middle chapters of the book step back to correct a common misunderstanding. Many people assume that rising living standards come mainly from nature’s gifts or from new technology. Mises argues that this overlooks the decisive factor: the capital that had to be patiently saved and invested—tools, machines, factories, and businesses—before those improvements could reach ordinary people. Without that accumulated capital, neither natural resources nor inventions alone would have produced widespread prosperity. All of this rests on a basic fact about the world: nature has never been generous. The things human life depends on—food, shelter, medicine, comfort—have always been limited. Abundance had to be created through work, saving, and investment rather than simply received from the natural world.¹¹ Mises is careful about what follows from these observations. When he describes the physical limits on human action, or when he describes how markets process people’s choices, he is not making a moral argument. He is not claiming that freedom is good by some higher philosophical standard, and he is not claiming that every market outcome is wise or virtuous. He is simply explaining how the system actually works. He functions more like a mechanic than a moralist: he shows what the machine does with the choices people make—wise or foolish—and declines to tell you whether you should want what it produces.¹² ### Finally: A Case For, Not Just Against In the last chapter Mises moves from diagnosis to positive argument. He insists that real opposition to communism cannot stop at rejecting its worst features. It must also make an affirmative case for free-market capitalism. A movement that only knows what it is against has nothing left once the opposing is finished. This is the point where a Christian reader needs to take the next step. Mises never claimed that the market itself produces virtue, and he should not be criticized for leaving that question unasked. Yet the system he describes turns out to be a necessary condition for certain virtues rather than a replacement for them. Consider a simple example. A man living under central planning may never overeat simply because the shelves are empty. His thinness is not the virtue of self-control; it is the result of rationing. Only when food is actually available does the decision to refuse a second helping become a genuine moral choice rather than an accident of scarcity. Something similar is true of many ordinary acts of generosity and restraint: they take on their full character as moral decisions when real alternatives exist. God gave human beings the natural freedom to choose, as the Westminster Confession teaches, and the apostle Paul asks the church for cheerful givers, not people who have no choice in the matter.¹³ Some older Christian traditions viewed commerce itself with suspicion, treating trade as somehow tainted. Yet the very human desire for improvement that Mises saw as the engine of progress has, over the last two centuries, lifted a vast portion of the world’s population out of extreme poverty. Clean water, antibiotics, and reliable food supplies exist for most people today largely because of the dynamic market system he defended. A Christian tradition that takes seriously God’s concern for the poor has strong reason to affirm that system, not merely put up with it. Mises stops short of the final question: what is all this abundance ultimately for? The Westminster Shorter Catechism begins by asking what the chief purpose of human life is, and answers that it is to glorify God and enjoy him forever.¹⁴ Mises left space for that answer; he never tried to supply a different one. He explained carefully how the bread is produced and why there is no shame in wanting it. What the bread is finally for remained the next question, and he left it for others to answer. ### Why This Still Matters Mises was not guessing what happens when people look for a system to blame for their dissatisfactions. He watched educated men and women do it throughout most of his working life. The pattern remains familiar. In 2025, when NBC asked Zohran Mamdani—then a candidate for mayor of New York and now its sitting mayor—whether billionaires should have a right to exist, he answered: “I don’t think that we should have billionaires because, frankly, it is so much money in a moment of such inequality, and ultimately, what we need more of is equality.”¹⁵ His concern is inequality. Yet the conclusion he draws is the one Mises identified long ago: the mere existence of large differences in wealth is treated as evidence that the system itself is illegitimate. The unequal outcome becomes the proof of injustice. That is the anti-capitalistic mentality in concise form, resentment of the result redirected into a verdict on the process. Mises can explain why markets raise living standards and why many people resent the unequal results those markets produce. He does not try to answer the deeper question of what all that abundance is finally for. That question belongs to us, the church included. Our task is not merely to defend markets. It is to form people who can live with the moral weight of abundance without turning wealth into an idol or turning its unequal distribution into a scapegoat. --- ### Notes 1. Kathleen Keesey, “Real Progress Takes Time,” in “Socialism and the Young,” *Wall Street Journal*, Opinion, Future View, accessed July 26, 2026, [https://www.wsj.com/opinion/socialism-and-the-young-d32844a2](https://www.wsj.com/opinion/socialism-and-the-young-d32844a2?ref=krlabby.com). 2. Aaron Blake, “Americans — Including Many Republicans — Are Losing Faith in Capitalism, Polling Shows,” CNN, July 23, 2026, [https://www.cnn.com/2026/07/23/politics/republicans-capitalism-socialism-poll](https://www.cnn.com/2026/07/23/politics/republicans-capitalism-socialism-poll?ref=krlabby.com). 3. “Ludwig von Mises,” Ludwig von Mises Institute, accessed July 26, 2026, [https://mises.org/profile/ludwig-von-mises](https://mises.org/profile/ludwig-von-mises?ref=krlabby.com). 4. “Ludwig von Mises,” Britannica Money, accessed July 26, 2026, [https://www.britannica.com/money/Ludwig-Edler-von-Mises](https://www.britannica.com/money/Ludwig-Edler-von-Mises?ref=krlabby.com). 5. Richard M. Ebeling, “Mission to Moscow: The Mystery of the ‘Lost Papers’ of Ludwig von Mises,” Foundation for Economic Education, accessed July 26, 2026, [https://fee.org/resources/mission-to-moscow-the-mystery-of-the-lost-papers-of-ludwig-von-mises/](https://fee.org/resources/mission-to-moscow-the-mystery-of-the-lost-papers-of-ludwig-von-mises/?ref=krlabby.com). 6. Ludwig von Mises, *The Anti-Capitalistic Mentality* (Princeton, NJ: D. Van Nostrand, 1956). 7. Mises, *The Anti-Capitalistic Mentality*. On the market economy as “the social system of the division of labor under private ownership of the means of production,” see also Mises, *Human Action*. 8. Mises, *The Anti-Capitalistic Mentality*, chapter V, “‘Anticommunism’ versus Capitalism.” 9. Mises, *The Anti-Capitalistic Mentality*. 10. Westminster Larger Catechism, Q. 148. 11. Mises, *The Anti-Capitalistic Mentality*. 12. Mises, *The Anti-Capitalistic Mentality*. 13. Westminster Confession of Faith, IX.1; 2 Corinthians 9:7 (ESV). 14. Westminster Shorter Catechism, Q. 1. 15. Zohran Mamdani, quoted in “Mamdani Says Billionaires Shouldn’t Exist: ‘What We Need More of Is Equality,’” Truthout, June 30, 2025, [https://truthout.org/articles/mamdani-says-billionaires-shouldnt-exist-what-we-need-more-of-is-equality/](https://truthout.org/articles/mamdani-says-billionaires-shouldnt-exist-what-we-need-more-of-is-equality/?ref=krlabby.com). The original NBC exchange appears in “Zohran Mamdani says ‘I don’t think we should have billionaires,’” NBC News, June 29, 2025. --- This post draws on Ludwig von Mises’s *The Anti-Capitalistic Mentality*, supplemented by biographical and polling sources cited above. Direct quotation from Mises has been kept to a minimum in favor of paraphrase; readers interested in his exact wording should consult the original text, available free from the [Ludwig von Mises Institute](https://mises.org/library/book/anti-capitalistic-mentality?ref=krlabby.com). No affiliation—I just like what they do. ### "What God Does with the Things Meant to Stop Him" - A Sermon from Acts 8:1-25 URL: https://www.krlabby.com/what-god-does-with-the-things-meant-to-stop-him-a-sermon-from-acts-8-1-25/ Last updated: 2026-07-26T22:00:36.000Z --- **Text:** [Acts 8:1-25 (ESV)](https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Acts%208%3A1-25&version=ESV&ref=krlabby.com) Every parent who's ever tried to get rid of dandelions knows how this goes. You mow the lawn on a Saturday, run right over that whole yellow patch, and feel pretty good about it. A week later there are twice as many, and half of them have already gone fluffy and white. You didn't kill the dandelions. You just made your neighbors angry. Here's why. Every one of those white puffballs is packed with seeds, and a lawn mower blade sends them flying in every direction — across the yard, over the fence, into the neighbor's flower bed. The mower was supposed to end the problem. Instead, it planted next month's crop. That's almost exactly what happens in Acts 8\. The church in Jerusalem is already growing fast, and a man named Saul takes a figurative lawn mower to it. He goes after the church with real force, meaning to flatten it for good. In the cloud of that destruction, seeds are scattering everywhere, and they're about to come up thicker than before. At first, Saul's persecution looked like the end of the church, an insurmountable obstacle. Everyone probably thought that's what it was. However, in time, it turned out to be an opportunity. If we're not careful, the same thing can happen to us. We can stare so hard at the obstacle in front of us — the setback, the diagnosis, the thing working against us — that we miss what's happening underneath it. Let's see how God turns obstacles into opportunities. ## God Turns Obstacles into Opportunities (8:1–4) Let's begin by reading Acts 8:1–4: > **1** And Saul approved of his execution. And there arose on that day a great persecution against the church in Jerusalem, and they were all scattered throughout the regions of Judea and Samaria, except the apostles. **2** Devout men buried Stephen and made great lamentation over him. **3** But Saul was ravaging the church, and entering house after house, he dragged off men and women and committed them to prison. **4** Now those who were scattered went about preaching the word. Saul is standing there approving of Stephen's murder, and within two verses he's dragging men and women off to prison. The word behind "ravaging" (lumainomai) is used for wild animals tearing at flesh. Luke's language is clear: this is a ruthlessly violent attempt to rip the church out by the roots. But then look at the word Luke picks for what happens to the believers: they were "scattered" (diaspeirō). In the Greek, that's a farming word, the word for scattering seed. It's the same picture as that dandelion patch. Saul thought he was mowing down a threat. Luke's own vocabulary tells you he was sending seeds flying everywhere! None of this is by accident. Jesus had told his followers they would be his witnesses "in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth" (1:8). For seven chapters, the church has barely left Jerusalem. It takes a violent persecution to get them moving. The gospel spread because frightened people fled for their lives and kept talking about Jesus wherever they went and eventually landed. Obstacles are often opportunities. God routinely uses the very things aimed at stopping His work to move it forward instead. You've no doubt lived versions of this yourself. The friendship or romantic relationship that ended badly, which freed you up for the one that's actually good for you. The season of unemployment that felt like free fall and turned out to be the run-up to work you actually like. Neither one looked like an opportunity while you were in it. Each looked exactly like what it was: a setback. However, in time, you came to see that the obstacle also produced the opportunity you needed. The same thing happens at the level of a whole church. I once heard of a family who were on their way to visit a church but were stuck in traffic due to a car accident. Interestingly, their car was right in front of another church. Too late to visit the church they planned to attend, they pulled in and worshiped with that church family instead. Years later, they were introducing and leading new ministries at the church, one family member even joining the staff in a paid position. As far as I know, they're still there. None of that gets planned in a strategy meeting. It gets forced on people by something that looked like a setback. Acts 8 is the same pattern at a far larger scale: persecution violent enough to imprison women and kill a man like Stephen, used by God to launch a mission nobody had planned. God turns obstacles into opportunities. ## God Uses Opportunities to Reveal His Glory (8:5–17) God does something wonderful with those opportunities, too. He reveals His glory in them. Let's read Acts 8:5–17: > **5** Philip went down to the city of Samaria and proclaimed to them the Christ. **6** And the crowds with one accord paid attention to what was being said by Philip when they heard him and saw the signs that he did. **7** For unclean spirits, crying out with a loud voice, came out of many who had them, and many who were paralyzed or lame were healed. **8** So there was much joy in that city. One of those scattered refugees was a man named Philip. Along with Stephen, Philip was one of seven men originally appointed to serve tables and look after Greek-speaking widows in Jerusalem (6:5). With Stephen now gone, Philip becomes a standard bearer. You need to feel how radical this is. Jews and Samaritans had hated each other for the better part of a thousand years. They had different temples, different Scriptures, and deep-seated, ancient contempt for each other. Philip walks into the middle of it proclaiming Christ. He doesn't get distracted by theological divisions or minutiae. He keeps the gospel – the Main Thing – the main thing. Demons come out shrieking, the paralyzed walk, and there is "much joy in that city." The joy even seemed to extend in an even more unlikely direction. We're introduced to him in verse 9: > **9** But there was a man named Simon, who had previously practiced magic in the city and amazed the people of Samaria, saying that he himself was somebody great. **10** They all paid attention to him, from the least to the greatest, saying, "This man is the power of God that is called Great." **11** And they paid attention to him because for a long time he had amazed them with his magic. **12** But when they believed Philip as he preached good news about the kingdom of God and the name of Jesus Christ, they were baptized, both men and women. **13** Even Simon himself believed, and after being baptized he continued with Philip. And seeing signs and great miracles performed, he was amazed. That city already had somebody performing amazing wonders. Simon had spent years amazing everyone with magic and grand claims about himself. He wasn't shy about the title "the power of God that is called Great." Notice the difference in messaging. Simon's whole pitch is himself: "Look how amazing I am! Look at what I can do!" Philip's pitch is the opposite: he preaches "the kingdom of God and the name of Jesus Christ." The word used for what Simon did to the crowds in verse 11 — he "amazed" (existēmi) them — is the very word used again in verse 13, except now Simon is the one amazed. Real power entered the scene, and even the man who'd been faking it for years could tell the difference. Soon, word of the change in Samaria hits the church back in Jerusalem: > **14** Now when the apostles at Jerusalem heard that Samaria had received the word of God, they sent to them Peter and John, **15** who came down and prayed for them that they might receive the Holy Spirit, **16** for he had not yet fallen on any of them, but they had only been baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus. **17** Then they laid their hands on them and they received the Holy Spirit. Word reaches Jerusalem, and the apostles send Peter and John to see for themselves. They find these Samaritans have believed and been baptized, but haven't yet received the Spirit (a unique delay to reinforce the inclusion of Samaritans as co-heirs with Christ). Peter and John pray, lay hands on them, and the Spirit falls, in front of witnesses. The gravity of this moment cannot be overstated. A wall a thousand years old, between Jews and Samaritans, comes down in that single moment, and God makes sure both sides watch it happen together, through the same two apostles. One church. One Spirit. One standing. No second class in either direction. But watching that happen changes nothing in Simon. If anything, it exposes what was there all along. Persecution aimed at the church became the very thing that carried the gospel into Samaria, and once it arrived, God displays His glory. He does this in Philip's preaching, in the healed and delivered, in the Spirit falling on people the Jews had despised for a thousand years. The glory has powerful, even divisive, effects. It draws some people to Christ. It draws others to what Christ can do. ## God's Glory Reveals What the Heart Truly Worships (8:18–25) Simon shows himself a part of the latter group. Let's continue reading, beginning in verse 18: > **18** Now when Simon saw that the Spirit was given through the laying on of the apostles' hands, he offered them money, **19** saying, "Give me this power also, so that anyone on whom I lay my hands may receive the Holy Spirit." **20** But Peter said to him, "May your silver perish with you, because you thought you could obtain the gift of God with money! **21** You have neither part nor lot in this matter, for your heart is not right before God. **22** Repent, therefore, of this wickedness of yours, and pray to the Lord that, if possible, the intent of your heart may be forgiven you. **23** For I see that you are in the gall of bitterness and in the bond of iniquity." **24** And Simon answered, "Pray for me to the Lord, that nothing of what you have said may come upon me." **25** Now when they had testified and spoken the word of the Lord, they returned to Jerusalem, preaching the gospel to many villages of the Samaritans. Simon doesn't ask for the Spirit. He asks to buy the ability to give the Spirit to other people. He's not seeking God. He's shopping for a franchise. Peter's answer is far from gentle, and then he names the diagnosis underneath the cash offer: "your heart is not right before God." Simon's problem was not a knowledge gap; he heard the same preaching everyone else in that city heard. His heart wanted power, not Christ. Even here, Peter doesn't slam the door: "Repent... and pray to the Lord." There's still a way back for a man this compromised by selfishness and sin. But look at Simon's answer: "Pray for me." He doesn't pray. He asks Peter to do it for him. He's asking to avoid consequences, not to be made right with God. That is not clear repentance. That's more like a man trying to dodge a lightning bolt. Peter and John don't stop with Simon. They keep preaching in Samaritan villages on the way home, still extending the very pattern we already saw: opposition producing range, not retreat. ## So What Do You Do With This First, briefly: don't let the obstacle in front of you convince you that God's work has stalled. If persecution violent enough to kill Stephen and imprison women couldn't shut down the gospel, whatever is standing in front of you isn't outside God's reach either. Second, and this one's harder: it's possible to be genuinely amazed by what God is doing and still not actually want God. Simon believed. Simon was baptized. By every outward measure available that day, he looked like everyone else who came to faith in that city. The only thing that separated him was what he was after underneath it all. Luke never tells us how Simon's story ends, and we're not in a position to pronounce on his soul. What we can see is what his response revealed at that time. If we're not careful, the same thing can show up in us. Ask yourself honestly: when you're drawn to church, to Christian community, to the parts of faith that feel good, are you actually after Christ, or after what He provides? Peace of mind. The feeling that your life is finally working. A God who acts more like a life coach than a Lord, someone who can empower you to do great things. Simon's story is a cautionary tale. It shows you how subtly these can become the whole point, while the name of Jesus becomes just the vocabulary you use to ask for them. He didn't want the Giver; he just wanted the gift. But, again, Peter didn't tell Simon he was beyond hope. He told him to repent and pray. The same grace that made Simon's money worthless would have covered every wrong reason he'd ever come looking for God, the moment he actually turned and wanted God instead of God's power. That offer didn't expire when Simon fumbled it. It's still open to you. ## An Invitation Same obstacle. Same opportunity. Two very different outcomes. What was meant to crush the church became the very thing that carried it into new territory nobody expected, and that same advance quietly exposed a man who wanted its power without wanting the person behind it. So ask yourself, on your way out: when the gospel does something remarkable near you, what's actually drawing you? You can be baptized, show up every week, and still be Simon — amazed by the power, uninterested in the person who has it. But if it's Christ Himself you want, nothing stands in your way. Not a status to earn. Not a price to pay. The greatest obstacle anyone ever threw at Him was a cross, and it looked, to everyone watching that Friday, like the final word. It wasn't. God turned that obstacle into the opportunity that saves you. --- *Scripture quotations are from the ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.* ## Sources Consulted - Barry, John D., et al. *Faithlife Study Bible*. Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2012, 2016. - Hughes, R. Kent. *Acts: The Church Afire*. Preaching the Word. Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 1996. - Marshall, I. Howard. *Acts: An Introduction and Commentary*. Vol. 5\. Tyndale New Testament Commentaries. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1980. - Peterson, David G. *The Acts of the Apostles*. Pillar New Testament Commentary. Grand Rapids, MI; Nottingham, England: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2009. - Polhill, John B. *Acts*. Vol. 26\. The New American Commentary. Nashville: Broadman & Holman Publishers, 1992. - Stott, John R. W. *The Message of Acts: The Spirit, the Church & the World*. The Bible Speaks Today. Leicester, England; Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1994. - "After Doubt … Assurance." *Tabletalk Magazine*, February 1992\. Lake Mary, FL: Ligonier Ministries, 1992. --- *These sermon notes were prepared in my capacity at First Evangelical Free Church of White Oak and McKeesport, PA and are shared here for the devotional use of our members and friends. They are neither a transcript nor a professionally-edited document. Please don't distribute without permission.* ### The Socialist Who Changed His Mind: What Max Eastman Learned the Hard Way URL: https://www.krlabby.com/the-socialist-who-changed-his-mind-what-max-eastman-learned-the-hard-way/ Last updated: 2026-07-25T20:06:39.000Z Capitalism is suffering in the polls these days. Favorable views have dropped from a wide lead in 2019 to a near-coin flip today. Much of that shift exists beyond the more predictable places; even Republicans are souring on the free market.¹ Perhaps not surprisingly, socialism is enjoying an apparent resurgence. I grew up in the Cold War. I cheered when Rocky, wearing red, white, and blue shorts, knocked out a genetically modified Soviet supervillain. I remember looking out my classroom window, waiting for Red Dawn-style communist paratroopers to land in the adjacent cow pasture. I laughed when a Wendy's commercial featured a Soviet fashion show: a parade of Russian women wearing the same drab, burlap dress as daywear, eveningwear, and swimwear. All of that is to say that when many younger people, and a bunch of Gen Xers who, at least in my opinion, should know better, start harboring sympathy for socialism, I start hearing "Eye of the Tiger" in the background. I then reach for some books in need of a resurgence. A staple of this genre is Max Eastman's *Reflections on the Failure of Socialism*. What makes Eastman so fascinating is that he spent much of the early twentieth century as a vigorous proponent of socialism. He edited radical magazines, admired Russian revolutionaries, and even spent considerable time in Russia to see the revolution up close. Eastman wasn't a Starbucks Marxist in a Che Guevara t-shirt; he was the real deal. This is what makes *Reflections on the Failure of Socialism* so worthwhile. Eastman wasn't a pundit popularizing scripted talking points and peddling pre-determined conclusions. He was a once-true believer who saw socialism take a dark turn, a turn he came to believe was an inevitable feature, not an avoidable flaw, of the system. Reading him as a Christian, I also find that his secular analysis of human nature and power unexpectedly illuminates deeper theological questions about the limits of rearranging external conditions. His book moves through three connected stages: his own history as a radical, the economic argument that grew out of that history, and a sobering analysis of human nature and belief. The three conclusions that follow are not independent talking points. Each one is forced by the one before it. ## A True Believer As editor of *The Masses* and later *The Liberator*, Eastman was one of the sharpest pens the American left had. When the Bolsheviks took power in Russia in 1917, he greeted Lenin in print as "a Statesman of a New Order" and dedicated himself "with no doctrinal reservations to the defense of his principles of action and his Soviet regime."² His commitment wasn't content to stay on the sidelines in New York. He went to Russia in 1922, arrived in time to learn a little Russian before attending the fourth congress of the Third International, and by his own admission was "going over to find out whether what I have been saying is true."³ What he found instead was the disturbing groundwork for Stalin's rise to power and a brutal, increasingly totalitarian regime. The Bolshevik plan had always rested on the idea of a "vanguard," a small, disciplined party acting on behalf of the working class until the workers were ready to rule themselves. Eastman watched as, under Stalin, this same vanguard executed "a plot by which Stalin made himself master" after Lenin's death.⁴ The same machinery built to hand power to the working class turned out to work just as well for consolidating power in the hands of a single man once Lenin was gone. Eastman came to see that device accomplishing the opposite of its stated intent. "Instead of liberating the mind of man," he wrote, "the Bolshevik Revolution locked it into a state's prison tighter than ever before."⁵ As Eastman explored the movement at ground level, he expected that some trace of socialist benefit would appear once Russia's capitalists were expropriated and the state took over production. He looked for it. He didn't find it. "It seemed perfectly clear," he later recalled, "that if the socialist hypothesis were valid in general, some tiny shred of the benefits promised by it would have appeared." Out of this experience he concluded that "the whole idea of extending freedom... through common ownership of the means of production was a delusive dream, a bubble that had taken over a century to burst."⁶ That personal collapse of confidence did not remain private. It forced Eastman to ask a harder question: what does a state actually have to become once it takes charge of an entire economy? The answer he reached forms the first of his three lasting conclusions. ## First: The Market as Guardian of Liberty, Not Just Efficiency Eastman saw firsthand what a state does once it takes over an economy. A government in charge of production requires the authority of a business executive over every aspect of the enterprise, including the people. That authority does not stay neatly confined to economics. It spreads into politics, speech, and elections, because a planned economy cannot tolerate deviation from the plan or organized opposition to it. He points to the one-party ballot as intrinsic proof: "The phony elections in totalitarian countries, the ballots with only one party and one list of candidates, are not the mere tricks of a cynical dictator—they are intrinsic to a state-planned economy."⁷ Nicaragua supplied a fresh illustration of the pattern in July 2026, when President Daniel Ortega declared, "There will be no more elections here so that they \[the opposition parties\] can try to seize the government, seize power." The parallel is not perfect, Ortega's regime is a hybrid of personalist rule and socialist rhetoric, but the underlying logic Eastman identified still holds: once organized opposition is treated as an existential threat to the plan, the ballot itself becomes an early casualty.⁸ Against this, Eastman insists that a market economy spreads decisions across millions of people, none of whom can unilaterally boss the rest. The choice is stark: either goods are produced and distributed through "the impersonal mechanism of the market, issuing its decrees in the form of fluctuating prices," or they are produced and distributed by "commands issuing from a personal authority backed by armed force." There is no stable middle option in which a government runs the entire economy while leaving the people in it free.⁹ That is why Eastman argues a free society needs multiple competing centers of power: labor, capital, government, church, press, each strong enough to check the others. He has no patience for the anarchist hope that abolishing the state will leave people cooperating peacefully on their own. The state must be limited by other genuine powers, not wished away. "The state... must be regarded as but one of those social forces upon whose equilibrium a free society depends."¹⁰ Eastman also rejects the idea that private property is a capitalist invention. He viewed the drive to own as closer to instinct: "a robust instinct extending far and wide in the animal kingdom."¹¹ Given that reality, a society has two real options for dealing with unequal property: place it under state control, or spread ownership more widely so more people hold a stake. He preferred the second.¹² > "No one need starve, no one need be destitute, in order to preserve the sovereignty of the market."¹³ For Eastman, society can chase perfect economic equality or it can keep people free. Not both. "In no conceivable society can men be in the economic sense both equal and free." If the logic of comprehensive economic planning itself requires authoritarian control, a second question immediately follows: can a gentler, democratic version of socialism escape that logic? ## Second: Socialism and Communism, Related Roots, Same Institutional Logic Eastman will not let democratic socialists off the hook merely because they are, rightly, horrified by Soviet violence. Theoretical socialism typically begins as something gentler: shared ownership pursued by persuasion rather than force. Communism is what happened once that hope hardened into a rigid theory of history and was handed to men willing to use guns to make it real.¹⁴ Eastman does not claim the two are identical in moral atmosphere or temperament. He does argue that they share the same institutional destination. Whether the state economy arrives by ballot or by revolution, it requires continuous, centralized authority to function. The democratic socialist and the Bolshevik may differ sharply in method and scruple, yet both pursue a structure in which the state takes charge of the decisive means of production. "Whether... hard-headed Bolsheviks, soft-headed Social Democrats, or genteel liberals," thoroughgoing socialism tends toward "either phony elections or no elections at all."¹⁵ This is Eastman's sharpest critique of the liberals of his day: they cheered economic centralization while insisting it had nothing to do with the totalitarianism they claimed to hate.¹⁶ The reason the two keep converging is not mere historical accident. A planned economy works only if the plan is followed, and organized dissent is precisely what prevents a plan from being followed. A government that begins by promising modest democratic control over a few industries eventually faces the industries it has not yet touched, the prices it has not yet set, and the critics who note that the plan is not delivering. At each stage the easiest "fix" is more control. That is how a program that starts at the ballot box can drift, emergency by emergency, toward the same concentration of power Eastman watched Bolshevism reach by force. If both the hard and soft versions of the project tend toward the same institutional outcome, the deeper problem may not be merely institutional. It may lie in the assumptions about human nature and morality that underwrite the entire enterprise. That brings Eastman to his third and most unsettling conclusion. ## Finally: A Different Religion Underneath the Economics Eastman's ultimate target is Marxism itself, the theory that supplied both socialism and communism with their intellectual architecture. He came to see it functioning less like an economic hypothesis and more like a religion. Marxism teaches that history is moving, on its own, toward one inevitable outcome: a classless society. Believers are called to work toward that outcome the way a religious believer works toward salvation.¹⁷ It is a religion with the moral logic inverted. Eastman contrasts it sharply with Christianity: the vital difference is between "a religion which teaches personal salvation through sympathy and loving-kindness" and "a religion which teaches social salvation through bringing the morals of war into the peacetime relations of men." Once salvation is relocated to a future social order, almost anything, deceit, character assassination, the withholding of truth, can be justified if it advances the cause. He quotes the principle bluntly: "For us morality is subordinated completely to the interests of the class struggle of the proletariat." He calls the result "the religion of immoralism."¹⁸ Eastman remained a secular writer. He never framed his critique in confessional language. Yet his diagnosis of human nature aligns, in striking ways, with a Christian anthropology. Marxism assumes human nature is infinitely plastic, a product of economic conditions, fixable once the conditions change. "All history," Marx claimed, "is nothing but a continual transformation of human nature." Eastman replies that socialism "assumed a greater self-dependence, as well as a more peaceable disposition, than these human animals are born with." The ideal society, he insists, "must be adapted to the unideal man."¹⁹ From a Christian vantage point, that observation is not merely political. Christianity assumes something still less flattering: the human heart is broken, and no rearrangement of property repairs what is actually wrong with us. Eastman does not say this. He does not need to. His secular argument already shows that socialism repeatedly fails to reckon with the limits of human nature. For the Christian reader, those limits point beyond economics to the deeper problem of sin and the necessity of a Savior rather than a revolution. That is why neither socialism nor communism ultimately fits easily with a Christian view of the world. The economics are only part of the difficulty. Underneath them sit a different doctrine of history, a different diagnosis of the human condition, and a different story about what finally sets things right. ## Why This Still Matters Eastman was not guessing what concentrated power does to a country. He watched it happen in real time. Perhaps that is the piece still missing from the current conversation. Fewer and fewer Americans know the horrors of communism firsthand. Many never watched the Berlin Wall fall, never learned what the Stasi did to East Germans who criticized the regime at their own kitchen tables, never studied the gulag system that swallowed millions, or the killing fields of Cambodia, where an attempt to build an agrarian socialist utopia left roughly a quarter of the population dead within four years. Even now, Cubans stand in ration lines and millions of Venezuelans have fled a collapsed economy. These are living footnotes to the argument Eastman made seventy years ago. For Christians thinking through political economy, Eastman remains a useful conversation partner precisely because he is not utopian in either direction. He knows capitalism presents real challenges and is far from flawless. His claim is narrower, and stronger for it: a market economy, whatever its flaws, disperses power in a way that supports human liberty. A planned economy, however good the intentions behind it, concentrates power in ways history has shown, again and again, lead to the loss of rights, freedom, dignity, and human flourishing. And underneath the politics and the economics lie competing claims about human nature and moral order, one of which sits far more comfortably with the Christian faith than the other. Eastman's final practical counsel, delivered in an address to the American Federation of Labor, still lands cleanly: "Don't kill the goose that lays the golden eggs... Capitalism... is the only creature on this earth that ever laid golden eggs, and in my humble but mature opinion she's the only one that ever will."20 --- Want the whole book? [Get your free copy at the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE)](https://fee.org/ebooks/reflections-on-the-failure-of-socialism/?ref=krlabby.com). No affiliation, I just like what they do. --- ## Notes 1. Aaron Blake, "Americans — Including Many Republicans — Are Losing Faith in Capitalism, Polling Shows," CNN, July 23, 2026, https://www.cnn.com/2026/07/23/politics/republicans-capitalism-socialism-poll. 2. Max Eastman, *Reflections on the Failure of Socialism* (New York: Devin-Adair, 1955; digital ed., Foundation for Economic Education, 2016), Biographical Introduction. 3. Eastman, *Reflections*, Biographical Introduction. 4. Eastman, *Reflections*, Biographical Introduction. 5. Eastman, *Reflections*, Biographical Introduction. 6. Eastman, *Reflections*, Biographical Introduction. 7. Eastman, *Reflections*, chap. 1, "Both Hopes Are False." 8. "Nicaragua's President Says Country Will Not Hold Any More Elections," The Guardian, July 20, 2026, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jul/20/nicaraguas-president-says-country-will-not-hold-any-more-elections. 9. Eastman, *Reflections*, chap. 2, "Freedom and the Planned Economy." 10. Eastman, *Reflections*, chap. 3, "The Real Guarantee of Freedom." 11. Eastman, *Reflections*, chap. 4, "Replacement for the Dream We Lost." 12. Eastman, *Reflections*, chap. 4, "Replacement for the Dream We Lost." 13. Eastman, *Reflections*, chap. 2, "Freedom and the Planned Economy." 14. Eastman, *Reflections*, chap. 1, "Both Hopes Are False." 15. Eastman, *Reflections*, chap. 1, "Both Hopes Are False." 16. Eastman, *Reflections*, chap. 1, "Both Hopes Are False." 17. Eastman, *Reflections*, chap. 7, "The Religion of Immoralism." 18. Eastman, *Reflections*, chap. 7, "The Religion of Immoralism." 19. Eastman, *Reflections*, chap. 10, "Socialism and Human Nature." 20. Eastman, *Reflections*, chap. 11, "Don't Kill the Goose" (An Address to the American Federation of Labor). ## Bibliography Blake, Aaron. "Americans — Including Many Republicans — Are Losing Faith in Capitalism, Polling Shows." CNN, July 23, 2026\. https://www.cnn.com/2026/07/23/politics/republicans-capitalism-socialism-poll. Eastman, Max. *Reflections on the Failure of Socialism*. New York: Devin-Adair, 1955\. Digital edition: Foundation for Economic Education, 2016. The Guardian. "Nicaragua's President Says Country Will Not Hold Any More Elections." July 20, 2026\. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jul/20/nicaraguas-president-says-country-will-not-hold-any-more-elections. ### Friendship in the Wake of Failure URL: https://www.krlabby.com/friendship-in-the-wake-of-failure/ Last updated: 2026-07-24T15:44:33.000Z John Mark failed. Paul and Barnabas took him along on a missionary journey, and partway through, John Mark quit. He went home, left the work unfinished, let everyone down. Luke records it in a single verse (Acts 13:13). It may not have been his first failure. Many think this is the same John Mark (the one who wrote the gospel bearing that name) who fled the Garden of Gethsemane in fear, abandoning Jesus Christ at his arrest, years earlier (Mark 14:51-52). Later, Barnabas, Paul's partner and John Mark's cousin, proposed giving him another shot. Paul wanted nothing to do with it. A sharp disagreement ensued. A vibrant partnership ended, all because of John Mark. The Bible doesn't tell us what John Mark felt in response, but it's not hard to imagine. Probably guilt, shame, and embarrassment, the kinds of things that drive most of us into isolation. We tell ourselves that we need to get ourselves together first. We will do the quiet work of repair on our own, atone for what we did, and re-present ourselves when we're worth something again. We will be accepted and loved when we make ourselves acceptable and lovable. Lies. Those quiet, lonely places don't stay quiet. The voice of shame doesn't take a break because you've asked for some space. It gets louder. It fills the room. And the voice we need most, the one that actually tells the truth about us, is exactly the voice isolation cuts us off from. Thankfully, John Mark didn't only have failure. He had a friend: Barnabas. Paul went one direction and Barnabas went another, with a continued commitment to the one who hadn't honored his own. That's the last we hear of Barnabas in Acts. It's not the last we hear of John Mark. Years later, in a letter written from prison, Paul asked for him by name. Restored. Trustworthy. Useful, he called him, someone he actually wanted at his side (2 Timothy 4:11; Colossians 4:10). What happened in between? We don't entirely know. But we know what didn't: isolation. Are you recovering from a failure? Are you tempted to believe the answer is to hide yourself until you heal? You don't need isolation. You need a friend. You need a Barnabas, someone who walks with you before you have it together, who reminds you that God does not define you by your worst chapter. And you need what Barnabas declared and demonstrated: the Word that tells the truth about who you are in Christ, the community that keeps speaking it over you, and the Table that says you are welcome here before you are fixed. The Good Shepherd is looking for you. And He tends to find people through other people. Don't make yourself hard to find. ### The Identity That Powers Lasting Habits URL: https://www.krlabby.com/the-identity-that-powers-lasting-habits/ Last updated: 2026-07-23T14:22:57.000Z Somewhere in your house sits an unused piece of exercise equipment, now the world’s most expensive coat hanger. You bought it with genuine intention. You wanted to become someone who moved daily. Spring came and went. The equipment stayed. You weren’t lazy or dishonest with yourself. The gap wasn’t a lack of willpower. It was a deeper problem of identity. ## Willpower Has Limits Willpower is real but fragile. It’s the ratio between your desire for a result and the discomfort you’re willing to endure right now. After a hard day, even strong goals often lose. Relying on bursts of willpower is like heating a house by striking individual matches. Each one gives temporary heat, then dies. You can survive an evening this way, but not a winter. Better systems and better fuel are required. Your habits flow from your identity, what you believe about who you are. Change your identity, and your desires and behaviors tend to follow. This is why small habits stick better when they reinforce an identity you want: “I am a reader” beats “I want to read more books.” The problem arises when that identity is built entirely on performance. Many of us quietly try to earn our sense of worth through productivity, discipline, or achievement. Miss too many workouts and the failure doesn’t just sting; it threatens who we think we are. Anxiety pushes us for a week, then fades. Fear is still just another short-lived match. ## A Secure Identity You Don’t Build There is a better foundation. The gospel offers an identity that is received, not achieved. In Christ, your standing with God is not earned by perfect habits or lost by failed ones. It is secured by grace. The apostle Paul, a man who once built his entire identity on superior religious performance, later wrote: > “I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.” (Galatians 2:20) This is union with Christ. You are not simply “accepted.” You have died and risen with Him. His life is now at work in yours. This identity was given before you had anything to offer, while you were still His enemy. It cannot be improved by your best day or destroyed by your worst. Picture two children wiping the same kitchen counter. One scrubs anxiously, like an orphan auditioning for adoption. The other works freely, like a daughter who already belongs. Her name is on her bedroom door, her place in the family known and secure. Same task. Entirely different spirit. Grace does not eliminate discipline. It relocates it. You no longer discipline yourself to prove you belong. You live disciplined because you already do. Obedience becomes an expression of gratitude and union with Christ rather than a desperate attempt to earn acceptance. This does not make the Christian life effortless. Suffering, weakness, and seasons where habits collapse still come. But the ground beneath you holds. Grace is big enough for real failure—not just skipped runs, but seasons of depression, injury, or grief. ### How to Live This Practically 1. **Anchor Daily in Union with Christ.** Start your morning by remembering Galatians 2:20 (or another gospel promise). Remind yourself: “I am in Christ. My worth is not on trial today.” This is not positive self-talk. It is alignment with reality. 2. **Attach Habits to Your New Identity.** Instead of “I need to run so I can get in shape and look better to impress others,” try “I move my body because it is a gift from the God who gave Himself for me and I want to honor Him with it.” Small shifts in language reinforce the deeper truth. 3. **When You Fail, Return Quickly.** A missed habit is no longer condemning evidence for a life lived on trial. You are no longer under condemnation. Instead, it is an opportunity to remember the gospel and begin again. The same grace that saved you sustains you. You will still need systems, environment design, and repetition. These are the tools that can help make habits automatic. But those tools now rest on a foundation that performance can never provide. ## The Deeper Freedom Good habits matter. They honor God and serve your neighbor. What the gospel adds is the secure identity underneath them: an identity held not by your grip, but by the One who will never let go of you. When your deepest worth is already settled in Christ, you stop frantically chasing all kinds of things at once to prove yourself. You become free to pursue the right habits for the right reasons, with ordinary, grateful consistency. The equipment in the corner doesn’t have to stay a coat hanger. It can become a quiet expression of stewardship and gratitude, all because who you are is no longer resting on how well you use it. ### Second Chances Take Time URL: https://www.krlabby.com/second-chances-take-time/ Last updated: 2026-07-22T17:27:35.000Z John Mark quit the mission, deserted Paul and Barnabas, and earned a reputation as untrustworthy. Paul didn’t want to give him another chance. Barnabas felt differently. The two continued in ministry together, just in a different direction. That was around AD 47\. More than a decade later, writing to the Colossians from a Roman prison, Paul mentioned Mark warmly: “If he comes to you, welcome him” (Colossians 4:10). A genuine endorsement. Then, near the end of his life (nearly twenty years after the split), Paul wrote to Timothy: “Get Mark and bring him with you, because he is helpful to me in my ministry” (2 Timothy 4:11). Sharp refusal. Warm endorsement. Urgent request. A clear trajectory across two decades. Something had changed. The Bible doesn’t narrate the reconciliation. But we can trace the outline of what must have happened: trust, once broken, is rebuilt incrementally. John Mark took the opportunities available to him (even if smaller), proved faithful in them, and slowly restored the trust his failure had cost. Paul, for his part, didn’t permanently close the door. Forgiving someone and trusting someone are two different things. We can forgive even when we’re not ready to trust. But forgiveness creates an openness, a willingness to consider what, if anything, is appropriate to offer. Sometimes that’s a big gesture. Other times it’s a smaller opportunity. Sometimes wisdom, and the need to protect others, means closing one door while looking for others to open, all while continuing to wish the person well in ways that are genuinely helpful. That kind of forgiveness doesn’t come naturally. It flows from having received it. Jesus said those forgiven much, love much. Those forgiven by God have the deepest motivation to forgive well. Paul modeled that. John Mark honored it. And behind all of it — one imagines — was Barnabas, the man who started it all by simply refusing to give up on someone. Restoration is rarely dramatic. It’s usually quiet, slow, and shared. Are you rebuilding after a failure? Take the opportunities in front of you seriously, no matter how small. Don’t wait for someone to hand back everything at once. Get to work. Are you deciding whether to extend an opportunity to someone who let you down? Forgiveness doesn’t require immediate trust. But it does ask you to stay open. Are you watching this play out between two people you care about and wondering if there’s a role for you? There may be. Sometimes restoration needs someone willing to stay connected to both sides. Stay there not to take sides, but to keep the door from closing permanently. Barnabas modeled that much from the start. It may be exactly what someone in your life needs. ### “Why Religion Is Not the Problem” - A Sermon from Acts 7:38-60 URL: https://www.krlabby.com/s-why-religion-is-not-the-problem/ Last updated: 2026-07-26T21:59:17.000Z **Text:** [Acts 7:38-60 (ESV)](https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Acts%207%3A38-60&version=ESV&ref=krlabby.com) Have you ever felt the sting of being called "religious" derisively in a conversation, as if that one word explained why you're so narrow-minded, judgmental, bigoted, or maybe even dangerous? Many of us have. One of the sharpest criticisms of people of faith today is that religion itself is the root of the world's evil. Push it to the margins, secularize everything, and intolerance and violence will finally fade. It's a tidy diagnosis. A lot of smart people believe it. Acts 7 invites us to examine the claim a bit more closely. Think about it for a second. Some of the most peaceful, generous people you know are deeply religious. And some of the most judgmental, small-hearted people you know are deeply religious too. If you've spent any real time in a church, you already knew that. Religion, by itself, doesn't sort people into good and bad. Something underneath it does. Here, in one of the most dramatic scenes in the early church, two groups of deeply religious people face the same crisis. One group's faith fuels murderous rage. The other group's faith produces courage and forgiveness in the face of death. Everyone is in the same category: religious people. Even so, we see completely different results. So religion can't be the real dividing line. Something else is going on, at a deeper level. Look closely at both groups in this chapter and you'll find the same disease running underneath. Call it self-righteousness: the constant, mostly unconscious need to justify ourselves. This takes the form of proving we're respectable, even better than the person standing next to us. It doesn't need religion to survive. It just needs some standard to measure ourselves against, and then to measure everyone else against too. Hand it a Bible, and it turns pious. Hand it a career, a political cause, or some social media accounts, and it turns secular. Either way, it's the same disease underneath. The Bible diagnoses this sickness, and it cures it, with two words: law and gospel. By law, the Bible means God's good and holy commands. His standards for how we're supposed to live all of life, for his glory. The first job of God's law is to show us we don't measure up, and then to point us to the one person who does: Jesus. But our culture runs on law too. It just doesn't call it that. Any moral code, religious or secular, that we use to prove ourselves in front of other people is functioning as law, whether or not it ever mentions God. Think about what actually keeps you up at night, or what you scroll through Instagram hoping to feel. Chances are it's some version of significance, satisfaction, security, or superiority, and you've got a law for getting there. Maybe your law is professional. You measure your worth in title, salary, or how indispensable you are at the office, and a bad performance review doesn't just sting, it feels like a verdict on your soul. Maybe your law is political. You've decided which positions the good people hold, and you feel the quiet righteousness of being on the right side, especially compared to the people who aren't. Maybe your law is your body, your kids' report cards, your carbon footprint, or how many people liked your last post. It doesn't matter what the specific code is. What matters is that you're using it to prove you're one of the ones who's okay. Self-righteousness is simply what happens when you take any of these laws, religious or secular, and use it to establish that you measure up. By gospel, the Bible means something completely different: the news that Jesus has already done for you what you could never do for yourself. He fulfilled the law of God, and he suffered its condemnation, in your place. This is the only thing that actually cures self-righteousness, because it's the only thing that frees you to stop proving yourself at all. Acts 7 shows us how the Sanhedrin took God's law and turned it into a weapon for their own self-righteousness. Stephen took the same law and it humbled him, which is what opened the door for him to receive the gospel of grace in Jesus, the only truly Righteous One. That one distinction explains everything that happens in the rest of this chapter. And it exposes the same choice sitting in front of every one of us this morning. ### The Context: Why Is Stephen before the Sanhedrin? At the end of Acts 6, the church in Jerusalem is growing fast, and Stephen (a man Luke describes as full of grace and power) is doing signs and wonders among the people. His opponents can't out-argue him, so they do what people do when they can't win an argument: they deflect from the original and manufacture a new one. False charges of blasphemy against Moses, against God, against the temple, against the law itself. They drag him in front of the Sanhedrin, the same council that had condemned Jesus a short time earlier. Stephen's answer is a long walk through Israel's history — all the way back to Abraham and up through Joseph, Moses, David, and Solomon — building to one devastating point: God was never confined to a building, and Israel has a long history of resisting the very Spirit sent to lead them. It's a strange defensive strategy on the surface. Accused of dishonoring Moses and the temple, Stephen doesn't defend himself at all. He puts the council itself on trial, using their own history as the evidence. And then he brings it home. ### God's Law Will Reveal a Hardened or Humble Heart Stephen lands the point in verses 51 through 53, which you just heard read: you stiff-necked people, uncircumcised in heart and ears. This is the same charge Israel's own prophets leveled at their ancestors, going all the way back to Moses. "Stiff-necked" and "uncircumcised in heart" are Moses's own words for Israel, straight out of Deuteronomy, and Jeremiah picks up the same language centuries later. Stephen is telling the council, in their own Scriptures, that they are doing exactly what their ancestors always did with the law God gave them. He's not out-arguing them with a new idea. He's holding up a mirror made out of their own Bible and forcing them to look into it. And here's what they were doing with it. The Sanhedrin were the most careful guardians of the law in the ancient world. Nobody studied it harder. But instead of letting the law do what it was designed to do — i.e., expose their sin and their need for mercy — they had turned it into proof of their own superiority. It became a badge, not a mirror. So when the Righteous One Himself stood in front of them and their whole system of self-justification, they wouldn’t even consider examining themselves. They covered their ears, ground their teeth, and picked up stones. That's not a first-century problem. It's every century's problem. We do the same thing with whatever code we live by, religious or not. Some of us turn moral performance or theological correctness into proof we're better than the person next to us. Others do it with career success, or our social media portfolio, or which side of a cultural or political argument we're on. In every case, the pattern is identical: the law is meant to humble us by showing us where we fall short. Misused, it does the opposite. It hardens the heart. It produces contempt for people who don't measure up to our standard. And perhaps most tragically, if you follow that far enough, eventually it produces deep-seated animosity or even violence. You've felt this in smaller ways than a stoning, probably this week. Maybe you sat in traffic behind someone driving badly and felt a flash of genuine contempt, not just frustration. It was like their bad driving told you something about their character. Maybe you scrolled past someone's political post and felt that same flash. That little surge of superiority is the Sanhedrin’s spirit. It feels like conviction. It's usually just self-justification and, if we’re honest, a dash of self-glorification. ### A Heart Softened by the Gospel Sets You Free Stephen shows us the other way to hold the law. He knew exactly what the law demanded, and he knew he hadn't kept it. But he had also knew the only one who had: Jesus, the Righteous One, who kept the law perfectly and then died bearing the penalty in the place of everyone who trusts Him. Stephen had stopped trusting his own record and started trusting Christ's. And in the middle of being murdered for it, Luke tells us Stephen, full of the Holy Spirit, looked up and saw heaven open, and Jesus standing at the right hand of God. Some of you no doubt know this already, but that detail matters more than it might first appear. Most every other place in the New Testament where someone pictures Jesus at God's right hand, He's seated. He’s enthroned, at rest, with His work finished. Here, Jesus is standing. The most natural reading is that Jesus has risen from His throne to receive His servant, the way you'd stand up when someone you love walks into the room. The judge of the universe is on His feet for Stephen. And then watch what Stephen says as the stones start falling: "Lord Jesus, receive my spirit." And then, on his knees: "Lord, do not hold this sin against them." If those words sound familiar, they should. They're almost exactly what Jesus said from the cross. "Father, into your hands I commit my spirit." "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do." Stephen isn't just dying bravely. Luke is showing us a man so shaped by the gospel that his death starts to look like his Savior's death. That's not something Stephen worked up in the moment. That's what grace does to a person over time. It it starts to reproduce Christ's own character in them, not just in how they live, but also in how they die. Only the gospel produces that. Not willpower. Not religious discipline. Not gritting your teeth and trying harder. When you actually know you're accepted by grace, in spite of your failure, the law stops being a ladder to climb or a weapon to wield. It also stops being a threat. It has no more condemnation to hold over you, because Christ already absorbed it. And a person who has truly stopped fearing condemnation is finally free to do the hardest thing in the world: forgive the people who are hurting them. They let go of what would otherwise entangle them because they’re focused on laying hold of what matters most. One more detail, easy to miss, and you heard it too: the witnesses laid their coats at the feet of a young man named Saul, who approved of the killing. That's the same Saul who, a few chapters later, meets the risen Jesus on the road to Damascus. We know him as the apostle Paul, the man changed and commissioned to carry this gospel further than anyone else in the book of Acts. Stephen never sees that. As far as he knows, his death accomplishes nothing but his own suffering. But God is doing something in that watching, approving young man that Stephen couldn't see and we can. As we said last week, God’s plan doesn’t rest on us recognizing it. Your faithfulness in a hard moment is never wasted, even when you can't see where the seed lands. ### Our Only Hope: The Righteous One in Our Place Here's the truth underneath all of this. Every one of us misuses the law in some form, religious or not, turning good things (whether a moral code, a career, a cause, a relationship, or something else) into proof we're worth something — that we’re secure, superior, etc. And when that project gets threatened, it feels existential; we lash out. That's not just the Sanhedrin's story. It's the mechanism behind most of the anger and fear you carry, if you look closely enough. Paul says it plainly: all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. The law's job is to show us that guilt, not to fix it. It can expose the disease. It can't cure it. Only the gospel can do that. The gospel is the good news that Jesus, the Righteous One, took the condemnation we earned, so that people like us could be accepted, not on the strength of our record, but on the strength of His. So let me ask you two different questions, depending on where you are this morning. If you're comfortable in your own righteousness — maybe you're the person who quietly judges anyone with a messier life than yours, or the professional who looks down on people who haven't achieved what you have, or the person who feels morally superior to whoever's on the wrong side of the latest argument — let the law do its good work on you. Self-righteousness takes many forms. It shows up as the parent who's a little too satisfied comparing their kids to someone else's. Maybe it's the church member who's kept every rule in the book and has quietly started to think that's what makes you acceptable to God. The forms are endless. Even so, for all the apparent diversity, that impulse to judge is the same impulse that fueled the Sanhedrin. Let the law humble you, and run to Christ. And if you're not comfortable at all — if you're worn out trying to measure up and always coming up short, if you're carrying an addiction or a broken family or shame you haven't told anyone about — hear this. You’re ready. The gospel is for you. Only the weary know their need; only they will receive it. Maybe you've been staying away from church, or from God altogether, because you assume you'd need to get your life in order first. You don't. You do not have to clean yourself up before you come. Jesus stood up to receive Stephen in the middle of his weakest, most desperate moment, covered in his own blood, still trusting. He'll do the same for you, exactly as you are today. ### Conclusion: Self-Righteousness or Christ's Righteousness? Religion was never the real problem. Self-righteousness, fueled by misused law (the attempt to save ourselves, dressed up in whatever code we happen to live by) is the deeper issue and grim diagnosis. And the gospel is what delivers us from it. The same Jesus who stood to receive Stephen is standing ready to receive you, right now. He offers a new identity through forgiveness that ends the exhausting work of proving yourself. We'll talk more about that in coming weeks. Until then, may we be people humbled by the law, resting in the gospel, full of the Spirit, and overflowing with the same grace that freed Stephen to seek that grace on behalf of others. Amen. --- *These sermon notes were prepared in my capacity at First Evangelical Free Church of White Oak and McKeesport, PA and are shared here for the devotional use of our members and friends. They are neither a transcript nor a professionally-edited document. Please don't distribute without permission.* ### How to Pray for Your Leaders (Even the Ones You Don't Like) URL: https://www.krlabby.com/how-to-pray-for-your-leaders-even-the-ones-you-dont-like/ Last updated: 2026-07-18T16:34:33.000Z Most of us will admit, if we’re honest, that we pray more naturally for leaders we respect. When someone we distrust holds power, prayer can feel less like obedience and more like defeat. But Scripture doesn’t give us the option of praying only for leaders we approve of. And the reasons it gives are more bracing than we might expect. Some believers may indeed be called into public service, even partisan politics, and that can be both honorable and necessary. But for all who follow Christ, our **primary identity is not political but spiritual**. We are citizens of a greater Kingdom. Our loyalty to Jesus shapes how we engage with public life. That includes how we pray. That means we don’t just pray for leaders we admire. We pray for all who hold authority because God commands it (1 Timothy 2:1–2), and because He remains sovereign over them all (Daniel 2:21). That’s not political weakness or resignation. That’s spiritual obedience, and, it turns out, the most consequential thing any of us can do in a political moment. So how do we pray for our leaders, especially when we struggle to respect them, or grieve over their leadership? --- ### Jesus Taught Us to Honor Earthly Authority When the Pharisees tried to trap Jesus with a loaded political question — “Is it lawful to pay taxes to Caesar?” — He didn’t sidestep it. He reframed it. “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s,” He said, “and to God the things that are God’s” (Mark 12:17). In one sentence, Jesus affirmed the legitimacy of earthly government and the supremacy of divine authority. Jesus didn’t just speak those words; He lived them. He paid the tax (Matthew 17:27). He submitted to unjust rulers, even to the point of crucifixion. And when He stood silent before Pilate, it wasn’t because Pilate had power, but because Jesus knew: “You would have no authority over me at all unless it had been given you from above” (John 19:11). That reshapes how we view political power. However flawed the system or person, all authority is on loan. Those who follow Jesus are called to honor that structure, even when they lament who occupies it. --- ### The Apostles Taught the Same, and Called Us to Pray The early church followed this pattern. Paul wrote, “Let every person be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God” (Romans 13:1). He didn’t write those words under a godly king or benevolent system, but under Rome. A pagan empire. A violent regime. A government that would eventually kill him. Yet Paul still urged believers to pray “for kings and all who are in high positions” (1 Timothy 2:1–2), so that “we may lead a peaceful and quiet life, godly and dignified in every way.” These prayers weren’t based on a leader’s moral fitness, but on God’s command and the believer’s witness. Peter echoed the same: “Honor everyone. Love the brotherhood. Fear God. Honor the emperor” (1 Peter 2:17). Not because the emperor was honorable, but because God is. Our prayers for leaders aren’t rooted in how much we approve of them. They’re rooted in how much we trust the One who reigns above them. We pray not because they deserve it, but because **He does**. --- ### How to Pray for Leaders in a Broken World You don’t have to pretend your leaders are good in order to pray for them. Scripture gives us better prayers than flattery, and more faithful ones than rage. #### Pray for Their Regeneration The deepest need of every human leader is the same as yours and mine: to be born again. To know the mercy of Christ. To be transformed by grace. To bow not to polls, power, or pride, but to Jesus as Lord. And God can do it. He has done it. Think of King Nebuchadnezzar, who was humbled and then restored to declare that “the Most High rules the kingdom of men and gives it to whom he will” (Daniel 4:17, 34–37). Think of Manasseh, the notoriously wicked king of Judah, who after being taken captive by the Assyrians “humbled himself greatly before the God of his fathers,” prayed, and was restored — going on to remove idols and rebuild the altar of the Lord in Jerusalem (2 Chronicles 33:12–16). Think of countless lesser-known rulers throughout history who, under conviction of the gospel, turned from pride to humility and began to seek justice, mercy, and peace. **So we pray:** *Lord, awaken their hearts. Save their souls. Turn them to You.* #### Pray for Their Repentance Not every leader who names Christ walks in His ways. Not every baptized official governs righteously. So we pray for their sanctification, that they would walk not by self-interest or human wisdom, but with a growing fear of the Lord. Psalm 2 tells rulers to “serve the Lord with fear, and rejoice with trembling” (v. 11). Romans 13 calls them “God’s servant for your good” (v. 4). That’s not just an ideal. It’s a call to real repentance for vices like pride, injustice, cruelty, compromise, and foolishness. History offers a striking example: when Emperor Theodosius authorized a brutal massacre in Thessalonica, Bishop Ambrose of Milan refused to celebrate communion in his presence. He called the emperor to public repentance, and Theodosius listened. He wept, confessed, and performed penance before reentering worship. A ruler rebuked. A bishop bold. A God who brings kings low to raise them up in humility and grace. **So we pray:** *Lord, renew their minds. Correct their course. Let them hunger for righteousness and justice.* #### Pray for Their Renewal Leadership is lonely. Hard. Relentless. Even good leaders grow weary. Weariness, left unaddressed, tends to produce the very failures we fear most in those who govern us. David understood this. His prayer for the king in Psalm 72 is striking in its specificity: “Give the king your justice, O God... May he judge your people with righteousness” (vv. 1–2). He didn’t pray for charisma or popularity. He prayed for the moral and spiritual qualities that make leadership genuinely good: justice, discernment, care for the poor and vulnerable. Those qualities require ongoing renewal, not just initial appointment. The Scottish Reformer John Knox prayed so fervently for the leaders and direction of his nation that Mary Queen of Scots reportedly feared his prayers more than she feared an army of soldiers. Whether or not the account is apocryphal, the instinct behind it is right: prayer for leaders is not passive resignation. It is active, expectant participation in what God is doing in and through the people He has placed over us. Even in flawed leaders, we pray for wisdom to hold. For good decisions to be made with clarity and integrity. For right instincts to be strengthened rather than worn down. **So we pray:** *Lord, sustain what is good. Give them wisdom they don’t have on their own. Help them not grow weary in doing good (Galatians 6:9).* #### Pray for Their Restraint Sometimes, leaders do not seek the Lord. Sometimes they promote evil, not good. They lie, abuse power, or exploit the vulnerable. They harden their hearts. Even then, our prayers do not stop. We pray for restraint: that God, in His sovereign mercy, would hold them back from doing further harm. Psalm 33:10 says, “The Lord brings the counsel of the nations to nothing; he frustrates the plans of the peoples.” We see this in how God restrained Pharaoh (Exodus 10:1), frustrated Saul (1 Samuel 19:23–24), and turned evil plans on their heads (Esther 6:1–11). **So we pray:** *Lord, if they will not yet turn, then restrain their foolishness. Frustrate what is evil. Protect the vulnerable.* #### Pray for God to Replace Them (with Better) There may come a time — grievous, sobering, and not without cost — when a leader’s corruption or persistent defiance of what is right becomes so entrenched that we no longer know how to pray except to entrust both that leader and the people they govern into God’s hands. Scripture does not teach us to seek vengeance in those moments. It teaches us to rest in the justice and wisdom of God. He not only appoints leaders; He replaces them. “He removes kings and sets up kings” (Daniel 2:21). “When the wicked rule, the people groan” (Proverbs 29:2). Throughout history, God has brought down tyrants and raised up those who would lead with greater humility, righteousness, and care for the vulnerable. But this kind of prayer must never be vindictive. It must not be shaped by political zeal or personal bitterness. It should come with trembling lips and a longing for justice. It should not long for a mere change in power, but a change that reflects the mercy, truth, and holiness of God. **So we pray:** *Lord, if this leader will not turn, and if You in Your mercy see fit, then raise up better. Give us leaders who fear You, love justice, and protect the vulnerable. And let Your will — not ours — be done.* --- ### The Courage to Pray It is easy to rage. Easy to mock. Easy to withdraw in despair. It takes Christlike courage to intercede. We are not powerless here. Prayer for leaders is not the last resort of people who have run out of options. It is the first and most faithful act of citizens who know who actually governs history. Our King lives, reigns, and hears. He has a long track record of doing unexpected things with the prayers of ordinary people on behalf of the powerful ones who rarely pray for themselves. So pray for your leaders. Not just when it’s easy. Pray when it costs you something, when it feels like the last thing you want to do, when the gap between who they are and who they ought to be seems impossibly wide. That gap is exactly where intercession belongs. > “The king’s heart is a stream of water in the hand of the Lord; He turns it wherever He will.” — Proverbs 21:1 No matter who rules the nations for a time, Jesus is King of kings and Lord of lords. He will reign with perfect justice. That’s why we pray, and why we never pray in vain. ### What Jesus Really Said about Caesar URL: https://www.krlabby.com/what-jesus-really-said-about-caesar/ Last updated: 2026-07-18T16:26:46.000Z > 15 Then the Pharisees went and plotted how to entangle him in his words. 16 And they sent their disciples to him, along with the Herodians, saying, "Teacher, we know that you are true and teach the way of God truthfully, and you do not care about anyone's opinion, for you are not swayed by appearances. 17 Tell us, then, what you think. Is it lawful to pay taxes to Caesar, or not?" 18 But Jesus, aware of their malice, said, "Why put me to the test, you hypocrites? 19 Show me the coin for the tax." And they brought him a denarius. 20 And Jesus said to them, "Whose likeness and inscription is this?" 21 They said, "Caesar's." Then he said to them, "Therefore render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and to God the things that are God's." 22 When they heard it, they marveled. And they left him and went away. > > *Matthew 22:15–22 (ESV)* The Pharisees didn't approach Jesus themselves. They sent their disciples, paired with the Herodians, an alliance odd enough that it's worth noticing before the trap even opens. Pharisees generally resented Rome's presence in the land God had promised his people. Herodians owed their entire political future to it.1 The two groups agreed on almost nothing except that Jesus needed to be stopped. Matthew's word for the plot is telling. Mark, writing up the same encounter, uses a fairly ordinary verb for "catching someone off guard." Matthew reaches for something sharper: a rare word that pictures setting a snare for an animal, and it shows up exactly once in the whole New Testament, right here.2 The trap was, we might say, elegant. Ask Jesus whether Jews should pay the Roman poll tax, a specific, hated levy that went straight into Rome's treasury, and either answer destroys him.3 Say yes, and you hand the nationalists a reason to write him off as a Roman collaborator. Say no, and you hand Rome a reason to arrest him. A classic catch-22. Jesus asked for a coin. ## The Coin "Show me the coin used for the tax." A denarius appears. The very fact that his questioners could produce one on the spot already told on them. Devout Jews found the denarius offensive on two counts. One side bore the emperor's portrait along with the words "Tiberius Caesar Augustus, son of the divine Augustus," a claim to divine sonship and, simply by picturing a ruler's face, a likely violation of the Second Commandment.4 The reverse carried a second title, *Pontifex Maximus*, "high priest," an assertion of religious authority no Caesar actually held.4 They were willing to carry the coin every day. And yet, they only found it troubling once Jesus put it in their own hands.5 Jesus asks the question that reframes everything: "Whose image is this? And whose inscription?" Caesar's, they say. "Render therefore to Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and to God the things that are God's" (Matthew 22:21).6 The crowd marvels. His opponents leave. But what exactly did he say? The standard reading treats this as a tidy division of life into two columns, civic duties over here, religious duties over there. Pay your taxes. Say your prayers. Keep the categories straight. It becomes a proof text for minding your own business. That reading misses what made the crowd marvel. ## The Image That question, asked before the answer came, is the key: whose image is this? In the ancient world, a coin bore the image of the ruler who issued it. This particular coin's obverse inscription made an explicit claim to divine sonship. The coin belonged to Caesar: it bore his image, it came from his treasury, it was his instrument. So: the coin has Caesar's image on it. It's his. Give it back. But then the other half of the statement lands: render to God the things that are God's. What bears the image of God? You do. Every human being has been stamped with the *imago Dei*, the image of God, since the sixth day of creation (Genesis 1:26–27). Even after the fall, the New Testament maintains that stamp: James, writing to fallen readers about their fallen neighbors, still calls other people those "made in the likeness of God" (James 3:9). The connection to Caesar's coin runs through the vocabulary itself. The Greek *eikōn*, "image," used for Caesar's portrait on the coin, is the same word the Greek Old Testament uses in Genesis 1:26 for the image of God stamped onto the first human beings.7 That's a feature of Matthew's Greek text, not a claim about the Aramaic Jesus actually spoke to this crowd, but it's no less inspired for that: however the exchange first sounded, the Gospel that records it draws the line on purpose. Commentators have long drawn the same line from that overlap: the coin carries Caesar's *eikōn* and belongs to Caesar; the human person carries God's *eikōn* and belongs, entirely, to God.8 Jesus turns the coin itself into what one commentator calls "a visible parable," handing his questioners a piece of ownership logic they can't argue their way out of, then quietly pointing that same logic back at them.9 One further possibility, drawn from a proposal by C. H. Giblin, pushes the wordplay a step past that.10 Isaiah pictures God's people writing "The LORD's" on their own hands (Isaiah 44:5), a kind of inscription of belonging to set alongside the coin's inscription of ownership. It's a thinner connection than the image parallel, resting on one scholar's proposal rather than a settled reading, but it points the same direction: if the coin carries Caesar's claim stamped into it, the believer already carries God's. The coin bears Caesar's image. We bear God's. If the coin belongs to Caesar because his image is on it, then we belong to God because his image is on us. Jesus isn't drawing a tidy line between two separate domains. He refused the premise of the question entirely. His opponents thought they were going to force a choice; instead he made an all-encompassing claim that left them with nothing to argue. Caesar gets the coin. God gets you. ## In the Lord, and No Further This is also where the passage's political edge sharpens. Christians are not called to disengage from civic life. Pay taxes. Honor governing authorities. Paul makes this explicit in Romans 13, and Peter echoes it in his first letter. Civic participation, even under a pagan government, is part of what it means to live faithfully as image-bearers in the world God made and sustains. Commentators land on the same conclusion from those same texts: Caesar's authority is real, but it isn't self-generated.11 Paul makes the same point almost by accident in his word choice. In Romans 13:6, he calls the taxing authorities God's "ministers" (*leitourgoi*), the same word family Paul uses for his own gospel work in Romans 15:16 and that Hebrews uses for Christ's own priestly service (Hebrews 8:2). Caesar collects taxes the way a temple servant tends the incense: on someone else's authority, for someone else's purpose. He is not an autonomous lord. He is a temporal administrator of God's order, granted a specific and limited job: restrain evil, promote the common good. His authority is real. It is also derivative. He rules under God, not alongside him. Caesar's claim on us is therefore bounded by the one who granted it. He is owed taxes, civic respect, the ordinary obligations of ordered society. What he has no legitimate authority to demand is anything contrary to the will of the God he serves, whether he knows it or not. The early Christians understood this with painful clarity: living under an empire that required, on pain of death, worship of the emperor's own image.12 They would pay their taxes. They would pray for the emperor. They would be model citizens in nearly every respect. But when Rome demanded they burn incense to Caesar's image and confess him as Lord, they refused and paid for it with their lives. It wasn't civil disobedience for its own sake. It was the logical conclusion of what Jesus said about the coin: you render to Caesar what bears Caesar's image. You do not render to Caesar what bears God's. Christians have worked out differently, across history and across traditions, exactly what follows when a government crosses that line, and this passage alone doesn't settle every case. What it does settle is the principle underneath every one of those cases: Caesar's command carries weight only within the borders of the authority he was actually given. Christians can honor a leader, obey a law, pay a tax, in the Lord, as those who belong first to God. What they cannot do is cross the line where Caesar's claim conflicts with God's. At that point, the logic of the coin holds: the image determines the owner. And we do not belong to Caesar. ## The Problem with the Image Here is where the passage stops being merely brilliant and starts being convicting. A coin is inert. It doesn't resist. You hand it over and it's done. But we are not inert. We have competing loyalties, carefully maintained kingdoms of self, areas we have quietly decided are ours to manage. We'll give God Sunday morning. We'll give him the category labeled "spiritual life." We'll pay our religious taxes. But the whole self, the ambitions, the resentments, the private fears, the things we reach for when no one is watching, those we tend to hold onto. And beneath that resistance is a deeper problem: the image is marred. Not destroyed (the New Testament maintains the *imago Dei* even after the fall) but distorted, defaced, like a coin worn smooth or bent out of shape. We know we were made to reflect something our lives don't quite manage. Paul says we were created to be "conformed to the image of his Son" (Romans 8:29), which implies we aren't there yet and can't get there on our own. The demand to render ourselves to God is total. None of us meets it. And that failure is the hidden weight of the passage. ## The Image Restored The command, then, is real. It also does not stand alone. Jesus is more than a clever debater who outmaneuvered his opponents on a Tuesday. He is, as Paul puts it, the image of the invisible God (Colossians 1:15), the full, undiminished original, bearing what none of us has managed to bear without distortion. Where every one of us has bent and worn and marred the image we carry, he bore it perfectly. Where Adam, the first image-bearer, failed, Christ succeeded. The incarnation is, among many things, God himself entering the world as the one human being who renders to God exactly what God is owed: the whole self, held back nothing, to the point of death. He did what we cannot. And in union with him, what we cannot do is credited to us and, by his Spirit, begun in us. The image that sin defaced is being restored, not by our effort at self-improvement, but by the Lord who put his image on us in the first place and is now, patiently and without abandoning the project, remaking it. We are, as Paul says, being transformed "from one degree of glory to another" by the Lord who is the Spirit (2 Corinthians 3:18). You offer yourself, marred image and all, and he does the work of restoration. ## Render Accordingly The image on the coin goes back to the one who minted it. The image in you goes back to the one who made you, at a cost that staggers the imagination, and he is already making you new. That is the gospel this tax question was hiding all along. Pay the tax. But don't mistake that for the main thing Jesus is saying. You were made for God, marked by God, and claimed by God. That claim was worth a cross to make permanent. Render accordingly. --- **Go Deeper:** Francis Schaeffer's [*How Should We Then Live?*](https://amzn.to/4eULu9B?ref=krlabby.com) (affiliate link) traces what happens to human dignity, and to the limits on state power, once a culture stops believing people are made in anyone's image but their own. It's the civilizational-scale version of the same question Jesus faced. *As an Amazon Associate, Labbe Media, LLC earns from qualifying purchases. This description contains affiliate links. If you use them to make a purchase, we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you.* --- *Scripture quotations are from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version. ESV® Text Edition: 2016\. Copyright © 2001 by Crossway Bibles, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers.* --- ## Footnotes 1. J. Knox Chamblin, *Matthew: A Mentor Commentary*, Mentor Commentaries (Ross-shire, Great Britain: Mentor, 2010), 1072–1083; R. T. France, *Matthew: An Introduction and Commentary*, vol. 1, Tyndale New Testament Commentaries (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1985), 317–319\. 2. Stuart K. Weber, *Matthew*, vol. 1, Holman New Testament Commentary (Nashville, TN: Broadman & Holman Publishers, 2000), 354–356; John Nolland, *The Gospel of Matthew: A Commentary on the Greek Text*, New International Greek Testament Commentary (Grand Rapids, MI; Carlisle: W. B. Eerdmans; Paternoster Press, 2005), 892–899\. Nolland notes that Matthew specifically upgrades Mark's verb to a more vivid one for setting a trap. 3. France, *Matthew*, 317–319; Nolland, *Matthew*, 892–899\. 4. Craig L. Blomberg, *Matthew*, vol. 22, The New American Commentary (Nashville: Broadman & Holman Publishers, 1992), 330–332; Chamblin, *Matthew*, 1072–1083\. 5. Craig S. Keener, *Matthew*, vol. 1, The IVP New Testament Commentary Series (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1997), on Mt 22:19–22. 6. The Pharisees had asked whether it was lawful to "give" (*didōmi*) the tax; Jesus answers with a different verb, *apodidōmi*, "give back," the ordinary word for settling a debt. The distinction is discussed at length in Nolland, *Matthew*, 892–899, and assumed throughout France, *Matthew*, 317–319; Daniel M. Doriani, *Matthew*, vol. 2, Reformed Expository Commentary (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing, 2008), 289–300; and Chamblin, *Matthew*, 1072–1083, all of whom take the shift as meaningful: paying the tax isn't a religious concession, it's returning a coin to the man whose face is already stamped on it. Nolland himself is the exception, cautioning against leaning too hard on the compound verb, since the plain sense of "give" already carries the argument without it (*Matthew*, 897–898). 7. Chamblin, *Matthew*, 1072–1083, drawing the connection to the Septuagint's use of *eikōn* in Genesis 1:26\. 8. Chamblin, *Matthew*, 1072–1083; France, *Matthew*, 317–319\. 9. Chamblin, *Matthew*, 1072–1083\. 10. C. H. Giblin, in *Catholic Biblical Quarterly* 33 (1971): 520–25, as cited in Nolland, *Matthew*, 892–899\. 11. Doriani, *Matthew*, 289–300; Chamblin, *Matthew*, 1072–1083\. 12. Keener, *Matthew*, on Mt 22:19–22; Doriani, *Matthew*, 289–300\. ### No Place to Hide: Why 'How Should We Then Live?' Might Be the Most Timely Book You Haven't Read URL: https://www.krlabby.com/no-place-to-hide-why-how-should-we-then-live-might-be-the-most-timely-book-you-havent-read/ Last updated: 2026-07-18T16:26:30.000Z There's probably a small black camera on a pole somewhere near you. You might have walked or driven past a dozen of them this week without noticing. And there's also an increasing chance it photographs your license plate, your bumper stickers, the dent in your rear fender, and quietly files all of it into a database that law enforcement agencies across the country can search, usually without a warrant. Somewhere between eighty and a hundred thousand of these cameras are already up nationwide, but not without pushback. Cities have been canceling their contracts by the dozen in recent months.1 And a small but growing number of people have decided not to wait on their city council. In Virginia alone, residents have taken vice grips and spray paint to the cameras themselves.2 That fight is happening right now, and it's happening across the political spectrum in a way almost nothing else does anymore. Democrats and Republicans agree on very little these days, but a growing disgust with Big Brother seems to be one of the exceptions. What does it say about a culture when this is one of the only things left that unites it? Francis Schaeffer thought he knew the answer, and he wrote it down fifty years ago. Schaeffer was an American Presbyterian pastor who spent much of his ministry in Switzerland, where he and his wife Edith founded a study community called L'Abri. By the time he wrote *How Should We Then Live?* in 1976, he'd spent two decades listening to young people from across the West arrive at his door with the same questions underneath all their different questions: what's actually true, and is there any solid ground left to stand on while we figure that out. That's the vantage point the book comes from. It isn't an academic's detached survey. It's a pastor's field report on what he'd watched an entire generation go looking for and fail to find. ## A Roman Bridge Schaeffer opens with Rome, and the choice is deliberate. Rome is the ancestor civilization of the modern West, the place its law, its architecture, and a good deal of its self-image still trace back to, and Schaeffer wants you to watch a civilization fall before he asks you to consider whether ours might be walking the same road. To make the point, he reaches for a small, homely picture. The Romans built humpbacked stone bridges across the streams of Europe, and those bridges carried foot traffic and wagons safely for two thousand years. Drive a modern six-wheeled truck over one, though, and it collapses instantly, not because the bridge changed, but because the load finally exceeded what its foundation could bear.3 That's Schaeffer's picture for a civilization, not just a bridge. A culture can run for centuries on a weak foundation, as long as the pressure on it stays light. Rome inherited its foundation partly from Greece: the polis, the city-state, was the Greek attempt to found a society on shared citizenship, complete enough to define a person's whole meaning, as when Socrates chose death over exile from it. Even that kind of devotion couldn't make the polis a sufficient foundation. It still collapsed. What Rome shared with Greece more deeply was its gods, and both were finite: human-shaped deities, amplified humanity rather than anything actually divine, dressed up as ultimate answers to questions they were never built to answer. That foundation held for a long time. It held right up until the pressures of empire (a self-interest that outran any shared sense of the common good, a citizenry that had stopped believing in anything worth sacrificing for) finally exceeded what a merely human foundation could bear, and Rome reached for Caesar to hold the pieces together. This is the pattern Schaeffer wants you watching for. Not the specific gods, but the general shape: a civilization's foundation determines how much pressure it can take before it trades its freedom for order. ## Losing the Reference Point *How Should We Then Live?* was never meant to be read as a philosophy textbook, even though it walks through four centuries of Western art, philosophy, and law along the way. Schaeffer's actual subject is simpler and more personal than that survey suggests. The young people who found their way to L'Abri weren't confused about facts. They were living after a series of two world wars and a century of collapsing certainties had quietly stripped away the shared Christian framework their grandparents' generation still took for granted, and nobody had ever handed them anything to put in its place. They had all the freedom in the world to ask any question they liked, and increasingly no shared ground on which any answer could be judged true or false. Schaeffer wrote this book to explain to a general reader how the West arrived at that condition, and what it costs a civilization to stay there. The thread running through the whole book is this. Western thought once rested on what Schaeffer called an infinite reference point: specifically the Christian God, an infinite and personal Creator who had spoken and could actually be known, and against whose character truth and right and wrong could be measured with some confidence.4 As confidence in that reference point eroded across the centuries Schaeffer surveys, Western thought didn't find a sturdier replacement. It found nothing, and slid toward a point where a culture no longer has any shared basis for calling one thing true and another false, one act right and another wrong. Once that shared basis is gone, Schaeffer argues, something still has to settle the disagreements that inevitably come. If it isn't truth, it's force. And a society, he was careful to note, cannot stand chaos indefinitely. When enough pressure mounts (economic strain, the threat of war, rampant criminality, plain apathy) people will trade freedom for order almost without noticing they've made the trade, as long as the trains keep running and the shelves stay stocked. He named the two values he expected to survive the collapse of everything else: personal peace, meaning simply the wish to be left alone and undisturbed by anyone else's troubles, and affluence, an ever-increasing pile of material comfort.5 Once those two things are all a people still cares about, an elite that can guarantee them, an intellectual and technical class running things by data and expertise rather than conviction, doesn't have to seize power. It gets handed the keys. That's a fifty-year-old argument that reads like this morning's headlines, and it moves fast to get there. Scholars sympathetic to Schaeffer have long noted that a four-hundred-year sweep through Aquinas, the Reformation, and Hegel in one volume compresses real nuance. Fair enough for a book that was always a pastor's panorama, not a specialist's monograph. The broad brush still deserves your trust, even where a brushstroke or two moved too fast. ## He Named the Tools, Not Just the Trend Here's what intrigued me most as I returned to this work for yet another pass. Schaeffer doesn't just gesture vaguely at "technology" as a looming threat. He runs through a specific inventory of mechanisms he expected a manipulative elite to reach for: genetic engineering deciding who gets born, B.F. Skinner's behavioral conditioning shaping what a population wants without its consent, Jose Delgado's experiments using implanted sensors to control aggression electronically.6 And then, in language that reads less like 1976 and more like a headline from this month, he turns to the computer. The high-speed computer, he wrote, makes it possible to call up a person's entire recorded history at the touch of a button, and paired with the technical capacity to monitor a nation's phone and cable communications, the combination "leaves no place to hide and little room for any privacy."7 He wasn't picturing a shadowy villain flipping a switch. He was picturing exactly what has happened: a slow, largely uncontested layering of data collection and monitoring capability, adopted piece by piece because each piece solved a real, immediate problem. Which brings us back to the camera on your street corner. Schaeffer named this exact mechanism, information storage plus communications monitoring, as one of the concrete tools he expected an authoritarian order to use, decades before either was remotely practical at this scale. Fewer than one percent of the cars these cameras scan turn out to be connected to any crime at all, and roughly one plate in ten gets misread outright.[1](#user-content-fn-1) That imprecision hasn't stayed theoretical. A CBS News investigation spent six months verifying more than a dozen wrongful stops around the country, including a mother and her young daughter pulled over at gunpoint in Aurora, Colorado, after a misread plate flagged their car as a stolen motorcycle registered in a different state.8 The tool has also been turned against critics rather than crime. Police in Lenexa, Kansas used their license-plate network to investigate a resident who had written a newspaper op-ed critical of the department, opening a case over sidewalk posters within hours of his column running.9 Whatever you make of the underlying public-safety case for these systems, that's the actual cost side of the ledger, not a hypothetical one. What's striking about the current backlash, cameras vandalized and all, is who's driving it. Dozens of cities have voted to cancel their contracts in recent months, and the opposition runs across the political spectrum in a way almost nothing else does right now. Schaeffer's own account predicted the opposite: a population sedated by personal peace and affluence, trading liberty for order so quietly it barely notices. The fact that this fight is loud, bipartisan, and ongoing is either a hopeful wrinkle in his prediction, evidence the deeper consensus he thought was dying isn't quite dead yet, or simply the early skirmish before the larger apathy sets in. I don't think it's obvious yet which. China offers one well-documented example of this pattern playing out at scale. According to a peer-reviewed study out of Stanford's Center on China's Economy and Institutions, about 19 of China's roughly 330 cities run a comprehensive local system of this kind.10 One of them, studied closely and treated within China as something of a model for the others, gives every adult resident a social credit score tied to their national ID, starting at 1,000 points and sorted into eight tiers from AAA down to D. The system runs on 389 separate rules, 124 rewarding behavior the local government wants and 265 penalizing behavior it doesn't, drawing on data from traffic police, banks, and neighborhood staff who report on everyday conduct like how residents dispose of trash. Most of what gets penalized, the researchers found, already breaks some existing law; the system mostly just formalizes it. The more telling part is the minority that doesn't. Certain offenses trigger an automatic downgrade regardless of context, drunk driving among them, and new rules get added on short notice whenever local officials decide the moment calls for it, mask mandates during COVID among them. So, oddly, does petitioning the local government, a legally protected activity that nonetheless accounts for two-thirds of the system's most severe political penalties. Top scorers get a discount on their heating bill. The lowest tier gets police monitoring.10 It's a government deciding, rule by granular rule, what counts as "sociologically helpful," and building the machinery to reward and punish accordingly, argued entirely in the register of civic order rather than any account of what a person is actually owed. That's the mechanism Schaeffer described, working exactly the way he said it would. None of this requires believing any single official or company is secretly plotting tyranny. That was never Schaeffer's argument. His argument was quieter and more disturbing: once a culture loses its footing on why a person matters, the tools built for entirely reasonable purposes (public safety, efficiency, convenience) tend to get used exactly the way tools without a moral floor eventually get used. ## Why This Book Matters Today What *How Should We Then Live?* offers is a category: a name for something easy to feel and hard to argue, the sense that today's fights over privacy and power never really land because nobody involved can say, with any shared authority, why a person's dignity should outweigh whatever the system finds efficient. Schaeffer thought Christians already had that answer: a Creator who made people with an intrinsic dignity, the same root Locke would later secularize into inalienable rights, that no efficiency argument could override. That's the one reference point sturdy enough to hold once autonomy runs out of road, and it's worth the time to hear him make the case. --- ## Read the Book **How Should We Then Live?** Francis A. Schaeffer (Fleming H. Revell, 1976). Also available in Crossway's 50th Anniversary edition. Read it this summer. \[**Get the book on Amazon →** [https://amzn.to/4h59wjx](https://amzn.to/4h59wjx?ref=krlabby.com)\] *As an Amazon Associate, KR Labby earns from qualifying purchases. If you buy through the link above, we may receive a small commission at no additional cost to you. This has no bearing on the recommendation itself, made on the book's merits alone.* --- *This article represents the personal creative and educational work of the author, undertaken independently. It does not represent the positions, endorsements, or official teaching of any church, denomination, employer, or organization with which the author may be affiliated. Historical and contemporary claims in this piece reflect the author's understanding of the available documentary record; sources are cited in the notes below, and readers are encouraged to consult them and engage critically with all claims made. No copyright infringement is intended with respect to any quoted or referenced works; fair use is claimed for brief educational quotation of third-party material.* ## Footnotes 1. American Civil Liberties Union, "Fight Creepy ALPR Cameras" ("Get the Flock Out"), aclu.org, last updated June 25, 2026, [https://www.aclu.org/campaigns-initiatives/get-the-flock-out](https://www.aclu.org/campaigns-initiatives/get-the-flock-out?ref=krlabby.com). 2. "People are vandalizing Flock surveillance cameras in Virginia amid privacy concerns," WUSA9, [https://www.wusa9.com/article/news/crime/people-vandalizing-flock-surveillance-cameras-in-virginia/65-16c95c7e-378e-4d01-b1a1-00e30c2e27f8](https://www.wusa9.com/article/news/crime/people-vandalizing-flock-surveillance-cameras-in-virginia/65-16c95c7e-378e-4d01-b1a1-00e30c2e27f8?ref=krlabby.com). 3. Francis A. Schaeffer, *How Should We Then Live?* (Old Tappan, NJ: Fleming H. Revell, 1976), 20–21 (the polis, Socrates, and the finite gods of Greece and Rome), 23 (the bridge). 4. Schaeffer, *How Should We Then Live?*, 87\. 5. Schaeffer, *How Should We Then Live?*, 205 (definitions of personal peace and affluence); 247–250 (the pressures that trade freedom for order). 6. Schaeffer, *How Should We Then Live?*, 228–239 (Skinner, Crick, Delgado, and the chapter's broader survey of manipulative techniques). 7. Schaeffer, *How Should We Then Live?*, 243–244\. 8. "When license plate readers get it wrong," CBS News, [https://www.cbsnews.com/news/license-plate-readers-alpr-mistakes/](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/license-plate-readers-alpr-mistakes/?ref=krlabby.com). 9. Sam Zeff, "Missouri and Kansas police use cameras to track license plates, but residents resist surveillance," KCUR, [https://www.kcur.org/news/2026-06-29/automated-license-plate-readers-alpr-kansas-city-lenexa-weston-police](https://www.kcur.org/news/2026-06-29/automated-license-plate-readers-alpr-kansas-city-lenexa-weston-police?ref=krlabby.com). 10. Chuncheng Liu and Akos Rona-Tas, "Trusting by Numbers: An Analysis of a Chinese Social Credit System Governance Infrastructure," *Critical Sociology* (2024), as summarized in "Assessing China's 'National Model' Social Credit System," Stanford Center on China's Economy and Institutions, [https://sccei.fsi.stanford.edu/china-briefs/assessing-chinas-national-model-social-credit-system](https://sccei.fsi.stanford.edu/china-briefs/assessing-chinas-national-model-social-credit-system?ref=krlabby.com). ### What Kind of Preaching Shapes a Church? A Case for Expository, Law-Gospel Preaching URL: https://www.krlabby.com/what-kind-of-preaching-shapes-a-church-a-case-for-expository-law-gospel-preaching/ Last updated: 2026-07-18T16:26:14.000Z You can tell a lot about a church by listening to a few of its sermons. Some churches preach as if every sermon has to close the deal on conversion. The message always circles back to "make a decision," "say the prayer," or "come forward." That comes from a genuine evangelistic heart, and God has used it. But over time, a diet of nothing but altar calls can wear thin. It's a church that's always in the delivery room and never in the living room, where most of actual Christian life gets lived. Other churches lean topical: a rotating menu of self-help, cultural commentary, and the occasional doctrinal aside. One week it's a word on relationships. The next, a strategy for anxiety. Scripture shows up, but mostly as a launching pad for whatever theme is on the calendar, rather than a well the sermon actually draws from. There's another way to preach, one that Reformation-shaped churches have practiced for five centuries: open the Bible, passage by passage, and preach what it actually says. Not because doctrine is more important than the struggles people actually carry, but because God has spoken, his Word is sufficient to build up a believer and bring a sinner to faith, and every passage carries both a diagnosis and a cure. Law and gospel. Both, every time. This is an argument for that kind of preaching, and for why it feeds a congregation in ways the alternatives can't quite manage. ## What Expository, Law-Gospel Preaching Actually Is Expository preaching, at its core, is the patient work of drawing the meaning out of a biblical text and putting it in front of God's people. It isn't a launchpad for the preacher's favorite ideas, and it doesn't flatten Scripture into a list of moral takeaways. It asks a simpler question: what has God said here, and how does this word confront, comfort, and change us today? Preaching expositionally means letting the passage lead. Not the preacher's personality, not this quarter's cultural anxiety, not the calendar of national observances. The aim is to say what God said, the way he said it. That can take more than one shape. Sometimes it means moving through a whole book of the Bible in sequence, week after week. Other times it means camping on a single passage and mining it for everything it holds. The form matters less than the discipline: let the text speak on its own terms, inside the larger story it belongs to. None of this works apart from the Holy Spirit. No sermon, however carefully built, changes a heart by the strength of its own argument. The Spirit who inspired the text is the same Spirit who opens eyes to understand it and drives it home with conviction. Expository preaching isn't just instruction delivered well. It's a means of grace, God speaking and acting through an ordinary sermon. Left on its own, expository preaching can go dry. All observation, no pulse. That's where the law-gospel distinction earns its keep. Most passages of Scripture, read in the context of the whole canon, carry both a call and a comfort. The law is God's holy standard: it tells us what he requires, exposes where we fall short, and shows us our need. The gospel is God's gracious rescue: what he has already done in Christ to save sinners, and how everyone who trusts him is forgiven and made new. This isn't a grid imposed on the text from outside. It's the text's own heartbeat. Preaching this way lets a sermon hold moral clarity and tenderness together, so it never collapses into pure demand (which crushes) or pure comfort (which coddles). The Word gets to wound and heal in the same sitting, the way it was built to. The order matters as much as the balance. Law comes first, diagnosing what's wrong. Gospel follows, announcing what's been done about it. That order doesn't reverse itself once the good news lands. The law doesn't come back afterward to secure a standing the gospel already settled, as if grace needed the law's help to keep a believer in. Once someone is united to Christ by faith, the law has finished that particular job: exposing sin and driving a sinner to the cross. The law does come back, though, in a different capacity. Once a heart has been made new, the law returns not as a gatekeeper but as a guide, the shape gratitude takes once it has somewhere to go. This is the law's third use: no longer a means of acceptance, but a picture of the life a rescued person is now free to grow into. That doesn't mean the law becomes a checklist again. A heart the Spirit has actually renewed doesn't return to the law as a taskmaster; it grows into loving what the law was asking for all along. Paul puts it plainly: "love is the fulfilling of the law" (Romans 13:10). That kind of love isn't the law wielded as a whip to produce compliance. It's the law's own aim, finally reached, in a heart the Spirit has freed to want it rather than merely obey it. And all of it sits inside one larger story: God's covenant plan, unfolding from Genesis to Revelation, arriving at the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. Preaching this way doesn't just aim for a response in the moment. It aims at formation, the slow shaping of a heart to love the Lord, trust his Word, and follow Christ with both reverence and joy. ## What It Isn't The shape of expository, law-gospel preaching comes into focus against a few common alternatives, none of which are worth dismissing outright. Topical preaching has its place. A well-chosen theme (marriage, anxiety, stewardship) deserves a direct, careful look at Scripture now and then. The trouble starts when every sermon becomes a themed talk, built around what the preacher senses people need rather than what the text actually says. Scripture starts functioning as a proof-text machine, a few verses in support of a point, rather than a passage allowed to reshape the point in the first place. The congregation walks away inspired more often than rooted. Therapeutic preaching usually comes from a sincere pastoral concern. Its focus sits on emotional wholeness and practical steps toward a better life, and Scripture does speak to grief, anxiety, and weariness with deep compassion. But when sin, holiness, and repentance quietly drop out of the rotation, urgency drops with them. The gospel starts sounding less like death and resurrection and more like feeling better by Friday. God becomes a life coach instead of a Redeemer, and the cross fades into scenery. Revivalist preaching carries plain passion, and plenty of us were first stirred by exactly this kind of sermon. God uses it, and it's worth remembering that some of history's most urgent evangelists (Whitefield, Edwards, Spurgeon) were also relentlessly expository, their urgency built on the text rather than instead of it. But when the altar call becomes the only mode a church knows, apart from that textual foundation, the long-term cost shows up: every text gets flattened into an invitation, and every Sunday becomes another chance to return to the starting line. Mature believers end up unsure of their own assurance, malnourished in discipleship, and quietly exhausted by a message that measures faith by tears rather than trust. None of these approaches are wrong so much as incomplete. Decisions without discipleship. Inspiration without formation. Affirmation without repentance. They can generate plenty of energy on a Sunday morning and still leave a congregation underfed by Tuesday. ## How This Kind of Preaching Feeds a Church When preaching stays tethered to the text and moves through the rhythm of law and gospel, something happens that isn't loud, but is deep and durable. It shows up in at least four ways. First, it builds a congregation that actually knows its Bible. Walking through whole books, or lingering in a single passage without skipping the hard parts, teaches people to see Scripture as one unified story rather than a shelf of unrelated verses. They learn to trace an argument, follow a theme, and recognize the Shepherd's voice, even in the Bible's quieter corners. That kind of congregation isn't easily blown around by whatever's trending. Second, it teaches people to hear both God's holiness and his mercy in proper measure. The law reminds a congregation that God takes sin seriously. The gospel reminds them he is not stingy with grace. Preached together, week after week, this frees people from both shame and presumption. They stop treating grace as something to earn and stop treating it as something cheap. That's the space where lasting change actually happens. Third, it gives room for the Bible's full emotional range. A church fed only on victory verses never learns to lament. A church fed only on guilt forgets how to rejoice. Preaching the whole counsel of God means preaching with the honesty of the Psalms, the stubborn faith of the prophets, the hard-won wisdom of the epistles, and the piercing hope of the gospels sitting side by side. The result is a congregation that feels less performed and more human. Fourth, it forms people for the long haul. Revivalist preaching can produce decisions. Topical preaching can meet a felt need for a week. Expository, law-gospel preaching builds disciples, people who know how to follow Jesus on a quiet Tuesday when no one's watching, because the faith was forged over years of steady feeding rather than one emotional high. That's how a church grows in more than numbers. The roots go down. ## Preaching to the Proud and the Brokenhearted Alike Every preacher hopes people will listen, that the Word will take root, that lives will actually change. Hope isn't enough on its own. What's needed is clarity about the aim, because not every heart in the room needs the same medicine on the same Sunday. That's why the law-gospel distinction is pastoral, not just theological. Martin Luther is often credited with the line that the law is for the proud and the gospel is for the brokenhearted, and it captures something true. Some people in the pew carry shame, fear, or quiet failure. Others sit comfortably self-satisfied, or defended, or hardened without quite noticing it. Both need the whole Word. Neither needs the same part of it in the same way. The law confronts self-reliance, unmasks pretending, and reminds a congregation that they are not the center of their own story. It drives a person to the end of themselves, and that turns out to be a mercy, not a cruelty. The gospel comforts the weary, lifts the head of the ashamed, and speaks the news that Christ has already done what no one in the room could do for themselves. His sacrifice covers actual sin, not just a bad feeling about it. That's enough. The goal was never to provoke an emotional spike or manufacture a decision on the spot. It's to shape people into the likeness of Christ, over time, through grace, in the middle of ordinary life. Some Sundays that sounds like an invitation. Other Sundays it sounds like a warning. Either way, the aim stays fixed on holding out Christ himself, not an example to imitate or a helper on call, but the crucified and risen Savior who fulfills the law and freely gives the gospel. ## The Best Evangelism Might Be Feeding the Church Well A common objection surfaces here: shouldn't every sermon do double duty as an evangelistic appeal, given the people in the room who don't yet believe? It's a fair question, and a longing for the lost to meet Christ is worth having. But the answer isn't to repackage every sermon into a gospel tract. The better question is this: what kind of church actually compels an unbelieving world to take a second look? Is it the church that dilutes every message down to whatever a newcomer can absorb in one sitting, or the church where the Bible gets opened in earnest, sin gets named plainly, grace gets preached without hedging, and Christ gets lifted up as who he actually is? A well-fed church becomes its own witness. A visitor who doesn't catch every reference in a sermon will still notice something: a people who've been humbled by truth and changed by mercy, hearing a message that doesn't shrink to meet expectations but calls them toward something costly and free at the same time. Over time, that's often what draws someone in, not a simplified message, but a full one. There's a second layer to this. A congregation that's regularly hearing the gospel applied to everyday life starts speaking it fluently outside the building: over lunch, in a hard conversation, in the quiet kindness shown to a neighbor. Those become the everyday evidence of a faith that's actually taken root. So the sermon doesn't need to double as a sales pitch every week. It needs to be a feast, faithful enough that believers grow rooted and skeptics find themselves curious about the strange, good story of a crucified King who still speaks. ## Why This Is Worth Defending We live in a moment that measures preaching by how entertaining it was, how funny, how emotionally moving. Faithful preaching was never about impressing a room. It's about delivering a message someone else wrote, and remembering who wrote it. Expository, law-gospel preaching holds together because God's Word is alive, his law is holy, and his gospel is good news that still stands up after two thousand years of scrutiny. The Spirit who inspired that word is still the one doing what no sermon, however well-crafted, could do on its own: raising what was dead, softening what was proud, and comforting what was crushed. It isn't the fastest kind of preaching, or the flashiest. It's the kind that lasts. If this describes the preaching you sit under, that's worth being grateful for. Bring your Bible. Listen for the wound and the healing in the same sermon. Let it shape how you see God, yourself, and the world around you. And if you're the one standing up to preach, take heart. You don't need a gimmick. You don't need to reinvent the gospel for this decade. You don't need to compete with a screen. Open the Word, and let it do what it's always done. --- *Scripture quotations are from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version. ESV® Text Edition: 2016\. Copyright © 2001 by Crossway Bibles, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers.*