Hope Blog

▶ 1:04:53

We are still reading through the Gospel according to John — not in order, but
hitting the highlights. Matt commended the whole book anyway: it is short enough to read on your
own, and there are chapters we may never reach on a Sunday. This week is John 13, the
conversation with the disciples just before the betrayal, picking up where last week left off.

1. He knew exactly who he was, and he picked up a towel

▶ 1:05:55

We see his love in the incarnation, in the death, in the resurrection. But this verse points
somewhere else — at the way he had been living with them all along, the way he spoke to them and
arranged his life around them. He loved them to the end.

▶ 1:06:34

Then verse 2, and the staging is deliberate. The devil has already put betrayal into Judas’s
heart. Jesus knows the Father has given all things into his hands, that he came from God and is
going back to God. Matt walked the room through the weight of that — God from God, light from
light, begotten not made, of one being with the Father, the one through whom all things were
made. And with all of that as context, he rises from supper, lays aside his outer garments, and
ties a towel around his waist.

2. Peter’s objection was the right instinct

▶ 1:08:19

Matt reached back to Leviticus 8,
where Moses installs Aaron and his sons as priests and washes and dresses them in front of
everyone. The same Aaron, he noted, who had led the golden calf incident — “mistakes were made.”
The parallel is a man who knows exactly how unworthy he is being honored by someone who is in
every way his superior.

The disciples had seen the signs and wonders. They knew his character was not what his
opponents claimed when they asked
whether he was a Samaritan with a demon.
They knew his strength and they knew their own weakness. So when Peter says “Lord, do you wash my
feet?” it is not false modesty. Nothing in the record suggests rabbis did this. It was not a
familiar rite Peter could accept as a formality. It felt inappropriate and wrong.

▶ 1:10:20

Peter swings straight to the other extreme — hands and head too. But his hands were fine, and
Jesus says so: the one who has bathed needs only his feet washed
(John 13:10).
The word clean is doing two jobs in one breath. With Peter it is literal. With “not
every one of you” it is about a heart, and John tells us why — Jesus knew who would betray him.

▶ 1:12:07

And the literal part is worth sitting with, because reclining at a table means one man’s feet
end up near another man’s head. Somebody had stepped in wet trash, or a chamber pot dump, or what
a sheep left behind. At minimum it was warm and they were sweaty. “If you’re going to eat a meal,
the last thing you want is somebody’s gross toes next to your nose,” Matt said. That is the
context. He actually got water. He actually got a towel.

3. “I have given you an example”

▶ 1:13:33

Not a ceremony — there was no such ceremony yet. An embarrassing errand, the kind a lowly
servant did, or that a host skipped by simply handing guests a basin. Which is why the example
binds: there is no task in the body that any of us can call beneath us. A servant is not greater
than his master, and blessed are you if you do these things
(John 13:16–17).

▶ 1:17:41

Then a detail Matt flagged as personal interest. In
John 13:19,
“you may believe that I am he” is, in the Greek, simply that I am — one of John’s quiet
reminders, dropped in because Jesus really said it. In
Exodus 3:14,
Moses asks for a name and gets “I AM WHO I AM.” So the reminder of glory arrives at the exact
moment of the lowest service.

▶ 1:19:41

And we know what that love looks like, because he showed us: touching lepers, letting little
children come to him, healing the sick, washing feet, dying for us.

4. The ceremony and the chore are not the same thing

▶ 1:20:51

Matt was careful here, and said so more than once: he is not making fun of foot washing
services, and there is a time and a place for ceremony. But a ceremony can drift out of sync with
the event it honors. The original was shocking and unprecedented; ours is expected — it even
turned up in a Super Bowl ad. The original was useful; a modern service is not, because he
already washes his own feet, wears socks, and lives in air conditioning. The original served the
recipient; in a service he half suspects he is the one doing the favor by letting someone else do
the thing they wanted to do.

▶ 1:24:17

So he offered a better test. What actual demeaning chore would you pay someone else to do
because you would rather not do it — and can you picture Jesus doing that one for you? The last
thing most of us want is the boss showing up to help clean out the garage. That is where Peter’s
objection stops being ancient.

And the failure he named is not ceremony but hypocrisy: a pastor who holds a foot washing,
tells everyone how much it makes us like Jesus, and then refuses to do the dishes at the
reception afterward. “That would be literally a concept attainment failure.”

5. Servant leadership that has gone ugly

▶ 1:26:42

From there to Philippians 2:3 —
nothing from selfish ambition, but in humility count others more significant — and then to Jesus
on the rulers of the Gentiles:

Wanting to lead is not the problem; God may call you to it. The problem is the version where
“servant leadership” means I’m the leadership, you do the serving. Matt said you can feel
that it is wrong when you see it — your discernment tells you. It is ugly in church leadership
and ugly in every other kind.

▶ 1:28:24

He took the same knife to male headship in the home, which he granted has real scriptural
support and then turned obscene when it becomes the wife cooks everything and the husband swoops
in for the photo op of carving, while diapers and dishes are beneath him. When Paul writes about
the household in Ephesians 5:31–32
he says outright that it is a picture of Christ and the church. Husbands are cast as Jesus in
that play. Take the shell of the role without its core and the result is bizarre. How did Jesus
lead? Interceding, blessing children nobody counted as important, touching lepers, speaking to
outcasts, befriending the lowly, washing feet.

6. The shell with nothing alive inside it

▶ 1:29:56

The rest of the message was a short catalogue of the same failure in other rooms. Prayer, where
Matthew 6:5
warns about people who love to be seen praying — though Matt admitted he cannot judge that from
the outside, since some people really do talk that way at home. “The cool thing about prayer is
not how cool we look or sound. It’s that we get to talk to the living God — and perhaps even
cooler, that he actually cares to listen.” Generosity that looks like giving without helping
anyone. Attending church as a box to tick, which he pointed out the Bible never actually commands;
what it says is
not to neglect meeting together,
and those are different concepts. Passive attendance and long-term TV church both count as the
imitation version of a real thing.

And worship, which is where he was headed: it is possible to do all the actions of worship
without adoring the living God for who he actually is. He named that as the thing he least wants
in his own life.

7. Come with the whole thing

▶ 1:32:57

The close came back to the towel. This is the God we have — the Son in the flesh, washing gross
feet — and he is
gentle and lowly, with a light burden,
so you can bring him what you are carrying. A friend’s line stuck with Matt: Jesus doesn’t want
your best, he wants everything.

▶ 1:34:37

“You can give him your best. You can also give him your worst — the embarrassing stuff, the
stuff you don’t want to divulge to anyone but probably should, or just the neutral but kind of
dumb stuff.” The one thing that will not do is a performative approach, words with nothing behind
them. Come in real life, as your real self. There is no life anywhere else anyway.

▶ 1:00:38

Matt had been away three weeks, so he gave himself room for a preamble — the
call to pray and fast for the nation ahead of inauguration day, gratitude for Philip
Boucamp’s message on loving the city with God’s love, and thanks to the three who prayer
walked the neighborhood that morning in twenty-nine degrees. Then, it being MLK weekend, he
commended the Dream speech, noted that a preacher touching politics is always a gamble, and
used it to open the door onto what the message was actually about.

Identity, and the dignity God insists on

▶ 1:04:59

One set of thought leaders wants your ethnicity and gender to dominate your identity;
another insists those things mean nothing at all. Matt’s read is that both are downstream of
the same source. “God’s enemy and yours is anti-male and anti-female — he’s anti-human. His
goal would be for each and every one of us to look in the mirror and feel ashamed and
disgusted with what we see.”

Scripture refuses both errors. Heritage survives:

And heritage does not rule you. Matt spoke about his own — ancestry on both sides of the
Civil War, British blood, German blood, Viking blood, and plenty of material to feel
apologetic about in the mirror if he chose to. “It was God himself who soothed my heart and
gave me the chance to have dignity as I stand before him.” The verse he anchored it to is
Samuel being told to stop appraising David’s brothers by height:
“Man looks on the
outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart.” King’s
emphasis on content of character over color of skin, he said, is vital precisely because it
is infused with that wisdom.

▶ 1:10:26

The Bible holds the corporate and the individual together without strain. You have a
people, a language, a community —
Romans 5 is
emphatic that death spread to all men, with no pockets of humanity quarantined from it. And
yet John 3:16
says whoever, and
Romans 10:9
puts salvation in the singular mouth and the singular heart. That is the frame Matt wanted in
place before opening John: in the vine, we are not droplets falling into a pool and losing
ourselves. We remain ourselves, connected to him.

“Let not your hearts be troubled”

▶ 1:12:21

Where the enemy works to keep you anxious about what you are and what you have done, God’s
settled desire is an untroubled heart —
cast your
anxieties on him,
do not be
anxious about anything, and the one who sanctifies you completely is named
the God
of peace.

Matt lingered on the verb. Jesus says I will take you — he does not merely concede
entry to whoever manages to find their own way. And the destination is not primarily an
address. “I like to imagine a beautiful place, the New Jerusalem, my own apartment in it,” he
said, before landing on the clause that matters: to myself. In his presence is
fullness of joy, and healing for woundings and insecurities, “because he will love us in a
way that no one else ever has or ever will.”

▶ 1:15:44

Thomas asks the way; Jesus answers
“I am the way, and
the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” Then Philip asks
for the Father as though it were a small request — five bucks, and we won’t bother you again.
Matt caught how immense the ask actually is, and how it had already been granted:
“Whoever has
seen me has seen the Father.” For men carrying a tradition that no one has seen God and
anyone who does will die, hearing “from now on you do know him and have seen him” would have
set a heart racing.

That claim is particular, not pantheistic. Jesus is not saying we have all seen the Father
because we are all connected to everything. The Father is in Jesus and Jesus in the Father in
a way that was true of no other rabbi. And notice the concession he offers: believe on account
of the works themselves. Matt heard no frustration in it — more like at least recall that
I raised the dead.

Greater works than these

▶ 1:19:16

Matt refused to temper it, with one qualification he considers a clarification rather than
a restraint: “if
we ask anything according to his will, he hears us.” This is not a mechanism for private
jets. He also declined a dodge he had once been handed by a minister uneasy with the spiritual
gifts — that the promise is plural and cumulative, enough small good deeds eventually
outweighing Jesus casting out devils. The Greek is singular, and the accounting was never the
point. Jesus healed the sick, cast out devils, ministered to the poor, encouraged the lonely.
Greater works are possible because he ascended and can therefore baptize in the Holy Spirit —
a thread he picks up at the end.

The true vine — and the vine that went wild

▶ 1:22:52

“Takes away” translates a verb that also means lift up, which is why translators
disagree. Matt’s test was horticultural and pastoral at once: when part of a plant is weak, is
the first move to cut, or to prop the sagging branch up toward the light? He pointed to
the fruitless
fig tree, where the vinedresser argues for one more year and some fertilizer. “He wants
fruit in your life and he’s willing to do work towards that.”

▶ 1:24:42

The imagery is not a fresh analogy picked for a Tuesday. Israel is God’s vine brought out of
Egypt in Psalm
80, the vineyard of
Isaiah 5,
the luxuriant vine of
Hosea 10.
Matt thinks one text in particular is under Jesus’ hand here:

Because look at what Jesus says next:
“Already you are
clean because of the word that I have spoken to you.” Not lye. Not soap. His word. And to
be connected to what God is doing on earth through his people now requires being connected to
him, because he is the true vine.

Abide — and what abiding produces

▶ 1:27:53

Matt would not soften this to the point of falsehood: sometimes the vinedresser lifts,
sometimes he prunes, sometimes he fertilizes — and a branch that never abides can be removed,
because it was not truly connected. What he denied is the panic reading, that a fruitless
season means God is coming for you with the shears because he dislikes you. There is a chance
to repent and abide.

▶ 1:29:35

And here the identity question closes. Our unity is not a merger; it runs through Christ at
one degree of separation. “Anyone in church history from any country, any century, any
tradition, culture or language is part of our heritage, because they are connected to the
vine.” You cannot divvy the saints up by ethnicity and assign them to their respective
peoples. They are our heritage and we are their legacy, through him.

What abiding yields, Jesus lists plainly:
asking and
receiving, the Father glorified in much fruit, and then love and joy:

Matt sidestepped the perennial argument over whether joy and happiness are the same word.
“He’s not stingy with his joy because he’s running low. He doesn’t have a pantry that’s
half-full of grace and peace and joy.”

Friends, commands, and a world that will not be charmed

▶ 1:32:39

“This is my
commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you… You are my friends if you do what
I command you.” Obedience, Matt said, is one of Jesus’ love languages — and not out of
ego. “All of his ideas for your life are the best. He knows they’re medicine for your sick and
distorted situation. This is not controlling. This is healing.” The same note sounds in
John 15:16:
you did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you to bear abiding fruit — the third
time in one conversation that asking in his name is tied to it.

▶ 1:34:45

Matt was careful to put this on himself rather than the room. “It’s a fearful thing to come
to realize that the world loves you and doesn’t really hate you. I tremble at these words.”
With the caveat that there are unimpressive ways to make people hate you — stealing their cars
was his example — hostility on account of Christ is not a mark of failure. He also confessed
a mind virus he is still being cured of: the belief that he could nice people into the
kingdom, Boy Scout them until they woke up one morning admiring him and, by some untraceable
step, loving Jesus. “It’s a mirage. It’s not really there.”

▶ 1:38:21

Persecution follows the master
(John 15:20),
and those who hate him hate the Father too — because response to Jesus is response to
God. As for the worry that Jesus might judge without allowing for ignorance, Matt pointed at
Matthew
11:21: Tyre and Sidon would have repented in sackcloth and ashes. He knows the difference
between knowledge and ignorance, and he knows the hypotheticals. “He’s trustworthy. He’ll be
the judge of the earth. I’ll just abide in him and obey him. He can be Jesus, I’ll be a
branch.” The quotation of
“they hated me
without a cause” comes from the Psalms he had been formed by.

Don’t abide near the vine

▶ 1:40:07

This is where the greater works come from. Jesus dies, rises, is glorified, and the Father
sends the Spirit on the church — so he is with this room, and with the church in Mongolia, and
with the church in Europe, all at once. He never left us alone and he never will.

Which makes the closing exhortation the sharpest sentence of the morning. God has no
grandchildren. There is a way of living adjacent to the vine — your wife believes, your
brother believes, you go to the potlucks, you sit through services, you are patriotic and you
make a mean barbecue, and the mind wanders off into bizarre rationalizations about honorary
membership.

▶ 1:24:53

Philipp and Sarah Bußkamp pastor and plant churches in Leipzig, Germany, and
they spent the first part of the morning making the congregation love a city most of the room
will never visit — Bach’s city, a city with more bridges than Venice, the city where Monday
prayer meetings swelled into the marches that helped bring down the Iron Curtain. And then the
number: 84.5% of Leipzig actively declares itself non-religious, and by Philipp’s own count
with fellow pastors, fewer than one person in a hundred has a relationship with Jesus. “People
get born, live and die in Leipzig without ever having a chance of hearing the gospel,” he said,
“let alone knowing a believer personally.”

1. Why Jonah ran

▶ 1:29:45

Jonah prophesied in Israel under Jeroboam II. God sent him to Nineveh, capital of the
Assyrian empire — modern-day Mosul, in northern Iraq. Philipp was blunt about what the
Assyrians were: a terror state that impaled and flayed prisoners alive and wrote it down
themselves, because terror only works if everyone knows.

The common assumption is that Jonah fled because the Assyrians were cruel. The book says
otherwise, and Philipp insisted on letting it say so.

▶ 1:34:31

Jonah’s fear was that it would work. If he stayed home, God would flatten his nation’s
worst enemy. “In these verses we see Jonah’s heart for that city, and we see God’s heart for
that city,” Philipp said. “And there’s a difference. Can you tell? He preached, they turned, he
wants to die.”

2. The worst sermon ever preached, and it worked

▶ 1:32:17

Philipp put every verse of Jonah’s message on one slide, because there are almost none. Two
of them are God speaking to Jonah rather than Jonah speaking to Nineveh
(Jonah 3:1–2).
What the prophet actually said to the city is one line:

Five words in Hebrew. “End of sermon,” Philipp said. “So if you look for brevity in a
sermon, Jonah is your guy.” The point underneath the joke is serious: God’s lesson in this book
is plainly not preaching technique or seeker-sensitive method. Jonah preached judgment with the
grace left out — arguably on purpose, so it would not land — and the city
believed
God, fasted and turned from its violence anyway.

3. A God who keeps working on his prophet

▶ 1:36:08

It took a storm and a three-day fish retreat — “no smartphone, no social media to distract
him” — to get Jonah moving. Even then he delivered his line and left, then sat on a hill east
of the city hoping the forty days would run out badly. God grew a plant for shade, then sent a
worm to kill it, and Jonah asked to die a second time.

Philipp lingered on the cattle, which he finds comical and also telling — the animals had
been made to fast along with the city, so of course they were making themselves heard. God
counts them too.

▶ 1:38:42

The book ends without telling us what Jonah did with that question. People have theories;
Philipp declined all of them. “If the Bible leaves it open, let’s just leave it open.” What is
not open is God’s patience: a commission, a rescue, a second commission, an object lesson, and
at no point an abandoned prophet. “Would you not have abandoned that useless prophet with that
message without any grace, trying even when he’s proclaiming the gospel to make it so that the
people won’t accept it? But God walks with him.”

4. Leipzig, and a neighbor who would rather be crucified

▶ 1:23:10

Forty years of socialist dictatorship in the GDR left Leipzig with a deep distrust of
authority and organized religion, and a suppression of Christianity that plainly worked. Sarah
told the story of a neighbor who slammed the door on her first delivery of Christmas cookies —
“you can’t give things away for free, people will take advantage of you” — and who later told
her, to her face, “I would rather be crucified on a cross than come to your church.” Sarah’s
reply was that at least she was not lukewarm. Eight years of conversations, prayer and small
gifts later, that woman had learned to give gifts herself and was leaving little things at
Sarah’s door. The kingdom of God grows like yeast.

Then a wealthy, well-educated friend at a grill party: “I have everything, so I don’t
understand why I’m not happy.” He said it, drank his beer, and turned back to the grill.

5. How is your heart toward Austin?

▶ 1:44:11

Philipp was candid that he does not have God’s heart for his own city either. He named the
Leipzigers he struggles to love: voters at both political extremes, people who expect to be
owed a living, the gangs, and — very specifically — whoever stole Sarah’s bicycle in broad
daylight outside the hospital. “But God loves even Nineveh.”

Then he turned the question on the room, and did it evenhandedly. If you are conservative
and afraid of what the progressive left is doing to the city and the nation — how much do you
care about people on the far left being saved? What do you think God’s heart is for your woke
neighbors? If you are liberal and afraid of what a simplistic conservatism is doing —
standards for the character of leaders lowered, the ends justifying any means — how much do you
care about people on the far right being saved? What is God’s heart for your MAGA neighbors?

▶ 1:46:06

He confessed the underlying habit plainly: some people seem so close that a little Bible
would finish the job, and others seem so busy or so hostile that he finds them “not just
unsavory but unsavable.” That is the category the whole book demolishes. A city of cruel,
violent people turned because of the most incomplete message of God’s word ever delivered.

6. Something greater than Jonah

▶ 1:50:19

The comparison runs in every direction. Jonah was obedient in fits; Jesus obeyed every
command. Jonah withheld the grace; Jesus gave the message in full and lived the character of
God in full — whoever
has seen him has seen the Father. And the three days are not parallel at all: “Jonah had to
go into the fish’s belly because he was rebelling against God. Jesus had to go into the earth’s
heart because we rebelled against him.”

The sharpest contrast is the posture. Jonah watched Nineveh from a hill hoping it would
burn. Jesus came over the ridge and looked at Jerusalem:

They rejected him, and he had every right to strike, and he wept instead. Philipp landed the
message there: “I need the one who wept for Jerusalem to share his heart of mercy, so that I
will start weeping over my city.”

7. Holy and merciful, both

▶ 1:53:04

We hold these badly, Philipp said, and we hold them badly in the same direction. We do not
hate the sin in our lives or our neighbors’ lives nearly as much as God does, because we have
no idea how destructive it is — “whenever you get a deep glimpse in your heart and you’re
sometimes a little frightened, God sees way deeper than that.” He hates sin because he knows
it. And he is merciful enough to save Nineveh. Both, at full strength, at once. That is the God
who still sends people out — to Nineveh, to Leipzig, to Austin — with the news that the holy
God loves this city and is calling it home.

▶ 2:01:04

Afterward the Bußkamps asked for prayer rather than for anything else, and were specific
about why: “The
thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I came that they may have life and have it
abundantly.” Their church plant’s three leaders have all had serious health trouble in
their families over five years. Workers are thin on the ground. Maintaining a church draws
little opposition; spreading the gospel draws plenty, and they asked to be prayed for as people
who intend to keep doing the second thing. They are in Austin for about a month, with a Q&A
lunch in two weeks.

▶ 1:05:53

Frank opened with the prayer he always opens with — “Let the words
of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in your sight” — and then explained
that this message came to him differently than any other. Asked in December to preach, he went
through his usual process of asking the Lord for a passage or a story. He got neither. He got a
name.

Whose sermon this is

▶ 1:09:39

Richard Halverson, a Presbyterian pastor at Fourth Presbyterian Church in Bethesda, Maryland,
was the 60th chaplain of the United States Senate, from 1981 until his death in 1995. The woman
who discipled Frank’s wife Deborah attended that church; Deborah went whenever she could and told
him you never knew what was going to happen there. Frank had not thought about Halverson in thirty
years.

The chaplaincy is older than most people realize. When the Senate first convened on April 6,
1789, one of its first orders of business was to find one, and it elected Samuel Provoost, the
Episcopal Bishop of New York. The job is not ceremonial — spiritual care and counsel for senators,
their families and their staffs, a constituency of roughly six thousand people, plus prayer
meetings and a weekly senators’ prayer breakfast.

Halverson preached the sermon Frank read on September 17, 1987, the two-hundredth anniversary of
the signing of the Constitution. He called it The Question Facing Us. When Frank asked the
Lord whether he should preach another man’s message, the answer was direct: “I gave it to him,
I’m giving it to you.” He changed only what was too awkward to quote, and said the thing has aged
in the wrong direction — almost forty years on, spiritually and morally, worse.

Cut flowers

▶ 1:14:27

Halverson’s wife Doris would not have cut flowers in the house, and he could not understand it.
They were beautiful. They smelled good. Her answer was that it did not matter what you did for
them — water, refrigeration, anything — they were going to wilt and be thrown out, because they
were already dead. They had been cut from their roots.

Halverson had lived in Washington more than thirty years when he preached this, and the
conviction that had been deepening in him — and that detonated when he became chaplain — was that
Doris had described the country. A futile effort to preserve the beauty, strength and order of a
national life already severed from what produced it.

“We the people”

▶ 1:15:52

Frank read the preamble aloud and asked the room to hear how strange it was. Every other nation
then had a king; the people were subjects, called that because they were subjected to
whatever the king wanted. Kings claimed divinity and headship of the church, which meant they
meant to govern not only what people did but what people thought. We can relate to that today,
he noted, more than we would like.

▶ 1:17:58

He traced the idea back further than 1787 — to the first chapter of Genesis, where God puts the
couple in the garden and makes them stewards of the earth. People
as partners in governing. Then he worked backward through two sentences of the Declaration:
rights are inalienable because they are endowed by a Creator, and governments exist to secure
them, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. A sovereign people, not a
sovereign government. “Take God out of the equation, the whole thing collapses. No equality, no
human rights.”

▶ 1:19:30

The illustration Halverson reached for was fresh at the time: the Senate had just honored
Anatoly Sharansky, a Russian computer programmer who asked as a Jew to emigrate to Israel, lost
his job for it, and spent nine years in the Gulag. Soviet Russia, like China now, wanted to govern
thought as well as behavior; Mao’s line was that there is one truth, the one the state declares
politically correct. That is where the phrase comes from. Sharansky was the victim of a godless
government, and godless governments do not care about human rights.

Beware prosperity

▶ 1:21:35

Moses is at the end of forty years, about to hand Israel over to the land, and the warning he
chooses is not about hardship.

▶ 1:23:23

Frank stopped on the word. Beware prosperity. Isn’t that the whole American project? He
added a footnote of his own: you cannot build a case against wealth from the Bible, and the same
passage says God is the one who makes it possible. The problem is substitution — wealth taking
God’s place. Which is exactly the choice Jesus frames in
Matthew 6:24:
no one can serve two masters, God and mammon. And the sentence Moses lands on is
unambiguous —
forget the Lord and go after other gods and you will perish. Not because you were wealthy.
Because you did not listen.

The reading earlier had been the vine, and it sits underneath all of this:

The problem is not the atheist

▶ 1:24:47

Of the seven churches in Revelation, the last one gets the harshest word, and it is not for
hostility.

Roger Hull, president of Mutual of New York and one of Halverson’s closest friends, used to say
the greatest danger America faced was the casual Christian. Halverson agreed, bluntly: “I’m not
bothered at all by atheists. They’re not the problem in America. The problem in America are the
people who say they believe God and act like He doesn’t even exist.” Not the secularist or the
humanist — evangelicals who have taken up a secular way of life, materialism, the love of money.
Frank let the date do the work: that was the diagnosis forty years ago.

▶ 1:26:02

And it is to that church — the one that needs nothing — that Jesus says
“Behold, I stand at the door and knock.” He is outside, asking to be let back in.

Four quotations, and what they used to be possible to print

▶ 1:26:46

Halverson closed with four, and Frank’s reaction to reading them was that no mainstream outlet
would run the first two now. A Life editorial from April 11, 1949: communism is not the
greatest threat to Western civilization; the greatest threat comes from within it, and our
euphemism for it is secularism, the blunter word being godlessness. David Lawrence — founder and
editor of U.S. News & World Report, and the only non-senator who regularly attended
the Senate prayer breakfasts — wrote in 1956 that NATO is temporary, the United Nations is
temporary, every alliance is temporary, and the only permanent thing is a God-controlled world.

▶ 1:29:31

Third, MacArthur on the deck of the Missouri at the Japanese surrender: war had seemed the last
resort and had proved not to be, the problem is basically theological, and our character has not
kept pace with two thousand years of advance in science and art and material life. “It must be of
the spirit if we are to save the flesh.”

▶ 1:30:18

Fourth, Lincoln, two years into the Civil War, setting April 30, 1863 as a day of national
humiliation, fasting and prayer — Frank repeated the phrase to be sure it landed. Nations, the
proclamation says, owe their dependence on the overruling power of God and are bound to confess
their sins in humble sorrow; only those nations are blessed whose God is the Lord. “Intoxicated
with unbroken success, we have become too self-sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and
preserving grace. Too proud to pray to the God who made us. We have grown in numbers, wealth, and
power as no other nation has grown. But we have forgotten God.”

Halverson’s closing question, which Frank left standing: can the liberties of a nation be secure
when we have removed the conviction that those liberties are a gift from God?

What he actually asked us to do

▶ 1:34:56

Frank said he would spend time before January 20 fasting and praying for the nation, and invited
the church into it — fasting, humility, repentance, prayer, beginning with himself. “I want him to
show me about me.” The promise he stood on was the one made to a nation on its knees:

He had no patience for Christian fatalism. Too many people in the church, he said, believe the
battle is already lost and that scripture ordained it that way — which makes
“greater is he who is in you than he who is in the world” into nonsense. “You’ve been sold a
lie. Don’t buy it. Pray.”

▶ 1:37:19

He tied it back to what the room had sung that morning —
Isaiah 60:1–3,
arise and shine, darkness covering the earth and the Lord rising over you, nations coming to the
brightness of your dawn. Not nationalism, he said; the nations are drawn to the Lord. Then the
most concrete instruction of the morning: ask God to give you the name of one particular
politician, and go for it. Pray for mercy, for protection, for salvation if they are not saved,
for godly counsel around them. “We fight in prayer.”

He ended by praying for the church and for the country, thanking God for the people who crafted
a constitution that gave us freedom to worship — freedom, he said, worth fighting for — and asking
for revival. Then the heart ministry teams came forward.