Introduction
The task before us is far more comprehensive than spot cleaning our cultural carpet. The West has more problems than a stubborn stain here or there. We stare at the carpet, thinking that it seems kind of raggedy and droopy, no matter how often we shampoo it, and we are consequently thinking about upgrading to some kind of industrial carpet cleaning solution. Or maybe a new rug altogether. But the actual problem is that our floor joists are riddled with termites, and that is why the thing is spongy. This is not really a carpet problem. When the foundations are destroyed, what can the righteous do (Ps. 11:3)?
What must be done? In what I write here, I will be making a point to address the men. If the men give themselves entirely over to these things, then surprised women will come along also, and lots of merry children after.
Stand Up Straight
It has always been the case that when God converts a man, He gives him a new heart. He takes away the heart of stone, and gives in its place a heart of flesh. This is the clear message of Ezekiel, which was that a man must be born again if he would see the kingdom of Heaven (Eze. 11:19). But we live in rickety times, and this means that when God moves in reformation and revival—which we pray for constantly—He will also have to provide some additional body parts, and not just a new heart. Gonads would be great for one thing, and a spine is also called for.
We don’t need boys who shave, and we don’t need a tough guy act. We need true masculinity, which is the glad assumption of sacrificial responsibility. When men stand up straight, they can see a lot further, and one of the things they can now see is what men are for.
In order to pray for God to raise up men to deliver us, we must in the first place pray that He simply raise up some men who are men.
Start Reading Your Bible
Saturation in the Word is absolutely necessary. You don’t need a Bible verse here or there, and you don’t need a cursory glance at a favorite psalm whenever you are feeling a little blue. We need an army of men who have been marinated in Scripture, steeped in it. As Spurgeon said of Bunyan, if you pricked him anywhere, his blood would run bibline. He would bleed Bible verses, which is not the same thing as bleeding John 3:16, and also having to check a couple times to see if you got it right.
One of the reasons why believers are consistently surprised at the wickedness of our generation is that they have accepted the propaganda of our enemies with regard to what people are like, instead of believing what Scripture says that people are actually like. Learn what the Word says about human depravity and the American system of separation of powers bequeathed to us by the Founders starts to make a lot of sense. What the Left wants us to assume about human nature is that we are all made out of fluffy white clouds and rainbow juice.
Understanding the doctrine of radical sin is the base coat of all Protestant political theory.
Worship God
The worship of God on the Lord’s Day is the most important thing you ever do in your life. Nothing is more important than appearing before God every seven days, you and the family God has given you. You come before Him to report, to confess your sins, to dedicate yourself anew to Him, to commune with Him in the Supper, and to be sent back out into the world in order to conduct your kingdom work.
You come before God in order to renew covenant, and not because the covenant was going to expire like a lease. You renew covenant because our life in Christ is an organism. It is alive, and we are summoned to nourish that body. Worship is far more important than your child’s soccer league, and more important than sleeping in, and more important than anything else we might dream up as a replacement.
Man was created, at the fundamental level, to be homo adorans—worshiping man. No other activity in your life is as important.
Walk Clean
Lay aside every weight, and the sin that so easily entangles (Heb. 12:1). Do not go into any battles with a troubled conscience. Sin saps the strength, and will drain it right out of you. When the armies of God are beleaguered by the enemy, we do not send out recruiters to bring in more Achans. We didn’t need any more Achans.
But in pressing the duty that we have to confess our sins, we must first get it into our minds that God is the only one who defines sin. This means there is a negative duty that accompanies our responsibility to confess our sins to God. That is the corresponding responsibility to stop confessing the manufactured sins that are thrown in our teeth on a regular basis. Stop confessing made-up sins.
There is no sin in being white. There is no sin in being masculine. There is no sin in being the father of seven. There is no sin in refusing to sort your garbage. There is no sin in letting your old Ford pick up idle at intersections. There is no need for absolution here, except for absolution for the sin of having gone along with these wowsers at all.
Confess your real sins, and do it honestly. Don’t blow sunshine at anyone, and especially not at God. God and God alone defines sin, and God alone, through Christ, can forgive it.
Go Ahead, Marry Her
If you are twenty-seven and still not married, then stop fooling around. As my father put it, men turn into old maids faster than women do. If you are not a frontier missionary with a gift of celibacy, a gift that is running on eight cylinders, then you need to stop burning daylight. Stop being so precious. Quit being fastidious. Stop being diffident. Go find her, and ask if you can buy her an ice cream cone, two scoops. Figure it out from there.
It is quite true that a lot of Christian women do not understand what league they are in. It is also true that many Christian women do not understand how much feminism has seeped into their assumptions about everything. But that’s alright because you shouldn’t ask any of them. Go find a sweetie pie. If you have grown slack and are accustomed to your bachelor ways and crotchety lifestyle, then repent and go find out her name, and ask her out for ice cream, and coffee later. Listen to her silvery laugh.
“Ah,” you say. “I have tried this in the past. I have asked three women out, and have been shot down three stinking times.” But here’s the thing. If you are not gifted with celibacy, and you quit after three rejections, then the only thing you are establishing is that those three women had remarkably sound instincts.
Genuine reformation will result in a generation of men who are highly sexed, and there is only one lawful sexual outlet, which is marriage. So make it happen.
Provide a Christian Education
When the previous exhortation is heeded, there will be results. Those results will be running up and down the stairs of your house, creating a certain amount of glorious and chaotic fun. That energy needs to be formed, shaped, and challenged, and then aimed at a Christ-centered vision for life. This means Christian education.
All Christian kids require a Christian education. All covenant children require a covenant education. If Christian kids don’t learn how to live like Christians when they are kids, when they arrive at adulthood, they won’t know. So don’t make them have to play catch-up the way you had to play catch-up.
The government’s grooming academies are out. Think of them as a complete non-starter, not to be contemplated for a moment.
Christian education for our children is an essential glory of the Christian home.
Abandon Dualism and Secularism
Be an open Christian everywhere you go. Do not compartmentalize your faith. Do not allow yourself the faithless luxury of trying to have any godless boxes in your life. If Christ is not the Lord of all, then He is not your Lord at all. To label a box in such a way as to indicate that you think Christ has no authority there is high disobedience. Such common labels would be “realistic business practices,” or “politics,” or “academic respectability.”
The greatest commandment, found in Deuteronomy 6, instructs us to love the Lord our God with absolutely everything we’ve got. We are summoned to love Him with all our heart, soul, and might (Dt. 6:5). And when Jesus quotes the commandment, He expands it, and says that we are also to love God with all our minds (Matt. 22: 37). We must love God in all our thinking. We must love God with all our brains.
If we divide up our lives, and there are certain places where we check our faith at the door, like it were a hat or an umbrella, then we are flatly disobeying this command. But the Lord teaches us that it is the greatest command. Where do we get off saying that we need not love God if it involves academic credibility, or political viability, or business success?
You cannot check Christ at the door of any of your pursuits without at the same time picking up an idol at that same door. And Christians are told, bluntly, to keep themselves from idols (1 John 5: 21).
Serve Christ only. Be a Christian everywhere.
Reject Darwinism, but with an Appropriate Amount of Derision
Malcolm Muggeridge spoke well when he said that in retrospect, evolution will be seen as one of the great jokes of history. It is not just an error—it is an absurd error. At the same time, it is one of the foundation stones for this great teetering edifice that the secularists have built up around us.
The previous point, that we should reject every form of dualism and every whiff of secularism is not going to be possible until we collectively see evolution as the absurdity that it is.
Turning away from evolution, and turning back to God through Christ, needs to be done in true repentance. Realizing the incoherence of evolution will aid us in that repentance, for it will illustrate that when man is blinded by sin, he will accept absolutely anything—however inane—other than Christ.
Turn to Your Work
The man who excels in his work is going to stand before kings (Prov. 22:29). So give yourself to your work, and not as a dabbler either. Figure out what it takes to be excellent in your calling, fill a pool up with it, and then take a header in.
But do not evaluate your work by how frenzied you can get in the pursuit of it. Measure your work. Evaluate your expertise with an objective metric. Stop kidding yourself. Those who compare themselves with themselves are not wise (2 Cor. 10:12). No one should think of himself more highly than he ought (Rom. 12:3). Check the numbers.
Excelling in your work involves more than just doing your work all day. Cream rises, but cream is not the only thing that thinks it is rising.
When it comes to vocation or calling, reject the form of dualism that distinguishes “full time Christian work” from ordinary work, placing them on different spiritual levels. A man is called by God to be a backhoe operator, or a sewing machine repairman, or a software developer, every bit as much as another man might be called to pulpit ministry or to the mission field. Our word vocation comes from the Latin vocare, to call, and if you are a servant of Christ, you are called. And where you are called, be the best you can be at that assigned station.
Whatever God has placed in your hand to do, do it with everything you’ve got. That includes using your head.
Pursue Deuteronomic Blessing
We are called to live before God as embodied creatures. Our spiritual worship includes presenting our bodies to God (Rom. 12:1-2). Spiritual worship is not ethereal worship, and the right kind of spiritual worship does not produce ethereal results.
A carnal man just thinks about the material goods he can get—like a pig eating acorns under an oak tree, he does not look up. He does not consider where the blessing is coming from. But pietistic pigs, gnostic pigs, walk around under the oak tree, craning their necks, trying to feed on the heavenly acorns, the ones out of sight at the top of the tree. They are the ones producing meager bacon.
We are embodied creatures, and we are called to serve God with body, soul, and spirit (1 Thess. 5:23). Without giving way to the health-and-wealth foolishness, and without over-reacting away from that into a grim and sour rejection of God’s material blessings, live as though matter mattered.
God tells the Israelites that one of the central reasons judgment was going to come down upon them was because they failed to rejoice in all the stuff God had given.
“Because thou servedst not the Lord thy God with joyfulness, and with gladness of heart, for the abundance of all things; Therefore shalt thou serve thine enemies which the Lord shall send against thee, in hunger, and in thirst, and in nakedness, and in want of all things: and he shall put a yoke of iron upon thy neck, until he have destroyed thee.”Deuteronomy 28:47–48 (KJV)
American Christians have sinned in just this way. We have either rejected the blessings in a hyper-spiritual fashion, or we have plunged into the blessings in a way that has forgotten God.
Love God. Pursue the truth. Make money.
Sing Psalms
Stop singing that “Jesus is my girl friend” music. God has given us a psalter filled with psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs (Eph. 5:19; Col. 3:16), and we should sing from it. And the Church over the last two thousand years has given us an immense treasury of settings for these songs, and we should make sure to take full advantage of our legacy. This is our heritage, and we should be acting like it is our heritage.
A great deficiency in modern worship music is that it is devoid of enemies, and the psalms, by way of contrast, are filled with countless references to enemies. And it is not as though we dropped that out of our singing because we are somehow living in a golden age when there are no enemies. No—the enemies of God are currently raging and frothing in high rebellion, and with a true hatred for God’s people. But in this moment, instead of resorting to the musical vocabulary that God bequeathed to us, to equip us for just such an hour, we have instead turned to our little ditties. It is as though the Philistines have lined up against us, all along the ridge, and have roared out a battle song in honor of Dagon, their fearsome god, and we respond with some pious version of “twinkle, twinkle, little star.”
Learn to sing the psalms. Learn the hard ones. Learn to sing them in four parts. You will be surprised at how much iron it puts into your soul.
Assume the Center
For many years I have been urging Christians to assume the center. Instead of remaining at your assigned spot on the periphery, a place of designated irrelevance, walk as though the inspiring words we read in Scripture were actually talking about something. “And hast made us unto our God kings and priests: and we shall reign on the earth” (Rev. 5:10). If we call ourselves believers we should, of course, believe some things. What is it that overcomes the world? Is it not our faith (1 John 5:4)?
There is a sociological aspect to this that even some insightful non-Christians have been able to see. Napoleon once said that imagination rules the world, for example. And Curtis Yarvin wrote this:
“You gain power by acting with the confidence of the powerful before you have any power.”
Curtis Yarvin, Gray Mirror, p. 81
And yet, as he notes, “getting ‘thirsty’ for power is never the way to become powerful.”
How it is possible to speak with authority—and not as the scribes—is a true mystery. The scribes have the certificates and the degrees and the awards. How is it possible for some seer to come roaring out of the wilderness, or out of the pages of a Flannery O’Connor story, and speak a word of authority? I don’t know, but it has happened many times.
The Christian church has authority. It may be in a storage closet in the church basement or something, and so the elders should organize a search for it. When they find it, they should put it back in its rightful place, which is behind the pulpit.
Assume the center, and speak to the princes of the earth. Kiss the Son, lest He be angry.
Cultivate Gaminerie
Gaminerie is a word I should have learned a long time ago. Probably due to a misspent youth, that didn’t happen until just recently. It refers to an impish, roguish, or wisecracking spirit.
We are certainly in a fight, but there is a difference between fighting like d’Artagnan or fighting like Bruno in a back alley somewhere.
Therefore the task before us is to learn how to fight like the wisecracking sidekick of the main hero in an old school World War 2 movie.
Take the truth seriously without taking yourself seriously. We have to be in the war without be of the war.
Giveaways are an Indication That You Need to be Reading More
Of course, the available giveaways start at noquarternovember.com.
The Canon giveaways are always on that page, although the titles change throughout the month. The Canon titles will always be found in the same place. You should have a stack of these books by now—and a stack of digital books is a sight to behold.
Today’s freebies are . . . When the Man Comes Around, Diamonds in a Cardboard Box, One New Man, Partakers of Grace, The Pillar of the Truth, and To the Church in Rome at noquarternovember.com.
The second place you should want to go would be to my Mablog Shoppe. The list of free titles will grow throughout the month, and is almost done growing. The current list of free titles there is as follows:
Concise and to the Point
Virgins and Volcanoes
Blue Sky Vision
The Pink Spiders of Empathy
Letters to a Rootless White Kid
Jokes I Like to Tell
Chestertonian Calvinism
21 Prayers for Pastors
Letters of Marital Counsel
No Artificial Tweetners
N.T. Wright Rides a Pale Horse
Letters on Homosexual Desire
Letters to a Broken Girl
Some Adventures of Fun Dad
A Parliament of Pots
Song of Shulamith
The Doors of the Sea
All the Condemnation in the World
Calvinism 4.0
Sounds FV
Fire on the Mountain
Remember that we can’t make you take them home. That’s your job.
