How did Paul demonstrate the power of the Spirit in his ministry? By preaching in weakness, Paul showed a faith that boasts only in Christ crucified.

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According to Covenant Eyes, an esteemed internet accountability and screen-monitoring service, 40 percent of professing Christian women consume pornography. That is astoundingly tragic because “consuming pornography” is consuming poison. If you are reading this and you are one of the 40 percent, you likely feel a compulsive drive to return to this poison, even though you wish you could stop. But if you are a Christian woman, you can stop consuming pornography. How?

Fight the enemy inside you.

Read God’s word and believe it.

Pray.

1. Fight the Enemy Inside You

Sexual sin — in desire or physical action — is contrary to our identity as redeemed women.

When we pray, “Your kingdom come, your will be done,” we are praying for God to judge sin, for truth to triumph, and for evil to perish. Arm yourself through repentance. Puritan Thomas Watson says true repentance depends on these six ingredients:

1. See and recognize sin as sin (and not as a psychological problem for which you are not responsible).
2. Feel sorrow for sin. Shedding tears because you have sinned against the God who loves you and ransomed you is a balm to your soul. It softens you to God and his word.
3. Confess your sin. Confessing to God and those you have sinned against gives glory to God and shows your reliance upon him.
4. Have shame for sin. Shame, in its ancient context, means “uncovered.” Having shame for sin means relying upon Christ alone and his covering. It means uncovering your sin so that you can be covered by the blood of Christ.
5. Hate your sin. Hating sin — and learning how to hate your sin without hating yourself — helps you repent of indwelling sin because it helps you externalize it. It helps you understand what Paul meant in Romans 7:15: “I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.”
6. Turn away from sin and cultivate affections opposite of sin. For example, the thief in Ephesians 4:28 does more than stop stealing. He stops stealing, works with his hands, and gives to the poor. Likewise, the woman who consumes porn needs to stop and ask, “How can I cultivate a life that replaces consumption of sexual sin with a life of productive sexual purity?”

You might even read Watson’s whole book, or another that focuses on repentance from sexual sin. I recommend Jared Moore’s 33 Days to Freedom from Lust: A Hope-Filled Devotional. While geared to young people (ages 10–18), it is packed with spiritual disciplines to end the tyranny of sexual lust.

2. Read God’s Word and Believe It

Romans 6:1–14 is God’s plan for liberation from pornography and all other sinful habits, thoughts, and lusts for the believer. The gospel delivers us from the guilt, penalty, and bondage of sin; Romans 6:1–14 shows us how to fight sin. It requires that we focus our minds on three distinct practices. We need to know (verses 3–4), consider (verse 11), and present (verses 13–14). Let’s unpack this.

First, we need to “know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death. . . . Just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life” (verses 3–4). Christ’s resurrection living in you brings down the power of God from heaven to fight your sin and win. We die to our particular sins because Christ died for our deliverance from sin.

Next, we need to “consider [ourselves] dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus” (verse 11). Aware of our new life in Christ, we must never return to the dead women we once were. We need to engage our minds in considering and believing the truth: I have the power to never use pornography again. Act like the woman that you are.

Finally, we need to present our bodies and minds, our whole beings, in purity from here on out — not presenting our bodies as “instruments for unrighteousness.” Why? Because we “have been brought from death to life” (verse 13). We were bought at a price, and that price has made us born-again believers. That cataclysmic, supernatural transformation has forever changed us: “Sin will have no dominion over you” (verse 14). Never again. This is your invitation to live porn-free.

3. Pray

Pray against your pornography. Indwelling sin enlists the believer in a war between the (sinful) flesh and the (Holy) Spirit, a war Galatians 5:17 describes as perpetual on earth, “to keep you from doing the things you want to do.” The flesh wars against your desires for purity. But in the power of the Holy Spirit, you can fight your flesh to the death.

And one major way you fight is through prayer. When you pray against your own sin, you confess that sin can never be stewarded for good; you confess that your indwelling sin is not who you are but rather how you feel. Because this evil “dwells within [you]” (Romans 7:20), you can own your sin as yours to repent of, forsake, and kill. And because your Savior loves you, died for you, and gives you day by day the power of the resurrection, you can walk in freedom from slavery to your evil desires and actions. Learning how to hate your sin without hating yourself frees you to pray against your sin and live in the freedom and victory of repentance.

We stop hiding when we pray against our sin. We externalize the conflict before ourselves and God — and ideally before other Christians. We ask people stronger than we are for accountability. We avoid Bible-twisters, sin-coddlers, and others who make their living on the internet asking some version of Satan’s question to Eve: “Did God actually say . . . ?” (Genesis 3:1).

A prayer against our own sin is also serious, committed, ruthless, and definitive. When we pray for God’s will in our lives, we are praying that truth would triumph and evil perish. Our lives are living epistles of God’s grand story.

The Sin of Porn Needs the Word of Truth

Perhaps you noticed that I failed to tell you that you are a victim of Adam’s fall — that your porn problem is normal and that you are merely trying to meet understandable, legitimate needs in the wrong way. Perhaps you noticed the glaring absence of what I didn’t say.

Instead of Bible-twisting lies, you need the bold and clear truth of Scripture. Christ overcame the world by love for his elect and by endurance of suffering. Because of this, and in the power of the Holy Spirit’s grace and Christ’s resurrection, the elect will overcome sin by love for Christ and the endurance of the ongoing battle between the flesh and the Spirit. Being a born-again Christian reverses your whole moral compass.

Know your enemy. Read your Bible and believe it. Pray.

Why is self-reliance so foolish? John Piper opens 2 Chronicles 16:9 to show how it forfeits the help God gives to those who trust him.

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Jesus endured unspeakable agony at the cross. Pastor John marvels at the force of his love sustained by expectant joy.

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I stare at the clock: 3:00am. If I fall asleep right now, I can still get three hours. Nighttimes are full of these elementary calculations when you’re an insomniac.

Insomnia has been my constant companion since high school. Some seasons are worse than others, but the worst of my life began just after my daughter’s first birthday, when her two older brothers were three and four. I went to bed that night as usual, only to wake two hours later and never fall back asleep. I began to skip entire nights of sleep, sometimes as many as three times a week. I hoped doctors could fix me, but as the weeks stretched into months and the months into years, I realized this was no short-term trial.

It’s difficult to overstate just how desperate I felt when I’d still be awake at 4:00am, 5:00am, and then 6:00am when the alarm would sound and the day would officially begin. Many nights I despaired. But then slowly, over time, a surprising thing happened: God trained me, as he has countless others of his children, to “kiss the wave that throws me against the Rock of Ages.”¹

Lay Your Hand Over Your Mouth

I turned to the Psalms, feeling a certain kinship with those who called out to God long after the sun had gone down. I hoped God would also give me a “song in the night” (Psalm 77:6). I strove to “remember [him] upon my bed and meditate on [him] in the watches of the night” (63:6). Though my hand was “stretched out without wearying,” begging God for relief, it was as if God held “my eyelids open,” denying me the sleep I craved (77:2, 4). “Why have you forgotten me?” I cried along with the psalmist (42:9). Have you “shut up [your] compassion?” (77:9). It was hard to believe God was storing my tears in his bottle (56:8).

Over and over I would beg God to let me sleep. I’d accuse him of not providing for my needs as he had promised; then I’d half-heartedly repent of my false accusations and remind myself I’d probably think more reasonably during daylight hours. There is wisdom in distracting yourself when you cannot gain the advantage over a different kind of wave — the wave of “rising doubts” and “rebel sighs.” I learned to get up and do something else until I could summon more sanctified logic.

One of the more memorable distractions from that season was a podcast featuring an Englishman from Liverpool reading sections from the King James Bible. I listened hopefully, peradventure I might nod off anon to the rasping sounds of the Liverpudlian dialect. But mostly I found myself mentally engaged. The words were so beautiful. (Also, What is a ‘sackbut’? I’d wonder. An ‘ensample’? ‘Lucre’?) In that confusing season, God trained me to calm and quiet my soul by listening to truth rather than meditating on my fears and doubts (Psalm 131:2). I learned to “lay my hand on my mouth” and let God instruct me (Job 40:4). Besides, I was often too tired to argue.

God Sweetens the Trial with Gifts

God had other lessons for me in this two-year crucible. I learned that he delights to accompany his trials with bespoke gifts. He gave so many graces specifically designed to lift my spirits: dear friends, good books, sunny days, a husband who (along with many other strengths) could make me laugh, a little girl who gave the best hugs, in-laws who would take the kids for a few hours, children who were good nappers, a new doctor who really listened, some medical answers, and some unexpected opportunities to teach the Bible that drove me deeper into the word — exactly where I needed to be. I found God to be as personal in his graces as in his griefs.

A Good Father Disciplines His Children

Perhaps the best gift dispensed to me in this season was a much-needed chastening. Sleep deprivation has a way of robbing you of the necessary energy to lose your temper. God deployed insomnia to mellow my impatience, anger, and autonomy. It also had the effect of depriving me of hot, scolding words, and many other words, for that matter; tired people, after all, are not the most articulate. Exhaustion slowed me down, teaching me to be more observant and more reflective.

Isn’t it just like our heavenly Father to do for us what we can’t — or won’t — do for ourselves? Because he loves me, he did not hesitate to do what was necessary to chip away at the hard, dead places in my heart. He humbled and subdued me, and I was better for it. I began to hope that the painful season of discipline might yet yield the promised harvest of righteousness (Hebrews 12:7–11).

His Grace Is Sufficient

When Paul prayed for relief from his thorn in the flesh, God answered, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness” (2 Corinthians 12:9). I’d heard and even quoted this verse many times before, but insomnia tutored me in its meaning. I wanted it to mean that God gives abundant, even profligate grace in weakness — grace that miraculously supplies boundless energy and a clear head even after thirty hours of wake time. Now, that’s quite a semantic stretch for the word sufficient, but despite my weariness at the time, I was still an optimist.

When reality settled in, I learned that sufficient meant that God gives what is necessary to accomplish the good work at hand. It was a “manna for today” situation; I learned to depend on his grace moment by moment (Exodus 16:4–5). And moment by moment, he delivered. The kids were clothed and fed and loved and tucked in at night. The house was still standing. Sometimes the bathroom was clean. I had pieced together a talk for a women’s conference at church. And I couldn’t account for any of it. Praise God. Again, he kept his promise.

Others Also Need Grace

Over time I got better at nighttime prayers. It helped to stop thinking so much about myself. Self-pity is a real threat to virtue. I learned that if God “takes thought for me,” and if those thoughts are a numberless sum, perhaps I could spare a few of my own for others (Psalm 40:17; 139:17–18). I began to consider all the other people who were also awake in the night. There are so many: parents of newborns, grieving widows, the chronically anxious, the terminally and chronically ill, post-op patients, third shifters, the homeless, and bar crawlers chasing momentary happiness deep into the night. How desperate we all are for God’s grace! As God brought people to mind, I prayed for them, believing with all my heart that if he had prompted me to pray, he was prepared to work.

Kiss the Wave

If you’re in a similar sleepless season, here’s my best advice: Don’t resist the wave intended to throw you against the Rock. You cannot hold your breath and dive under the wave until it passes. You cannot brace yourself against its power. It is God’s good hand to pin you to the Rock. Though it will hurt you, it will not destroy you. It may feel like evil, but the pain is on God’s leash, controlled, hedged in, and precisely deployed only for his good purposes and fatherly intentions for your life.

So, when you’ve exhausted your words, lay your hand over your mouth and listen. Imbibe the word like the thirsty Israelites drank from the rock in the desert. If you can’t settle your mind to read Scripture, listen to it. “It will be healing to your flesh and refreshment to your bones” (Proverbs 3:8). (Or, if you prefer, “health to thy navel and marrow to thy bones,” KJV.) Then, look up and look out. Observe the many custom-designed gifts accompanying the trial and thank God for each one by name. Reflect on how God is recreating you through the trial, transforming you from the image of Adam into the likeness of his dear Son. Gratefully receive the sufficient grace he dispenses like medicine from a dropper — one drop at a time and only as needed. Observe the many others who are trying to stand in the breaking waves and pray for them.

Do all these things while grasping for your spiritual Rock, Jesus, who is himself acquainted with grief and stands ready to help you in your hour of need (Isaiah 53:3). He who did not let Peter sink beneath the waves will not allow you to slip into the stormy depths.

We tend to study what delights us. When a delicious new flavor hits our taste buds, we ask for the secret ingredient. When a new athlete delivers an outstanding performance in a sport we love, we want to know the stats. When we enjoy a conversation with someone new, we press in to learn their story. Delight leads us to deeper study.

The psalmist expresses this clearly in Psalm 111:2 when he declares, “Great are the works of the Lord, studied by all who delight in them.” Those who delight in God’s many works of creation and redemption channel their delight into deeper study. If it is true that delight leads to study, then we should expect that, with worthy objects, further study leads to greater delight. We can describe this as a positive flywheel — like a potter’s wheel or wind-up toy car — that directs the energy of delight into study, which builds momentum leading to even greater delight. This positive flywheel is at the heart of lifelong learning, serving as an engine for our joy that energizes our love for God and neighbor. True education aims not merely at acquiring information or skills but at forming our souls’ capacities for lasting joy.

Given this purpose, how can a teacher guide his students toward delight in learning? And how might a teacher maintain his own delight when repeatedly teaching a subject he has already studied?

Teaching for the Student’s Joy

Most people have experienced a boring classroom. The learning is lifeless. The study is all drudgery and no delight. Student and teacher alike count the minutes until class is over. Whatever the cause — whether teacher or student, content or context — learning in this mode will not last. External motivators like grades for the student or a paycheck for the teacher may keep the classroom functioning, but learning stops when the last grade is posted. Without the joy of encountering something good, true, and beautiful, learning does not last. What can be done?

The Latin root for education means “to lead forth,” which is precisely the job of the teacher. Good teachers lead their students to see what is honorable and lovely about their subject. But for the student to value what he studies, he needs more than information; his loves must be formed. Teachers must train him to “taste and see that the Lord is good” (Psalm 34:8), instruct him in how to “abhor what is evil; hold fast to what is good” (Romans 12:9), and encourage him to “rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep” (Romans 12:15). In The Abolition of Man, C.S. Lewis describes how education requires training in what Augustine called ordo amoris, or rightly ordered love:

St. Augustine defines virtue as ordo amoris, the ordinate condition of the affections in which every object is accorded that kind and degree of love which is appropriate to it. . . . [The student] will not at first have the right responses. [He] must be trained to feel pleasure, liking, disgust, and hatred at those things which really are pleasant, likable, disgusting, and hateful. (17)

Genuine learning leads us to love what is worth loving, and to teach for a student’s joy is to cultivate his loves. Students need teachers to lead them; we all need models for right loving. When students watch their English teacher exult over John Donne, they see a model for loving poetry. When they witness their music teacher awed by Beethoven, they’re drawn to the beauty of symphonies. The teacher’s joy in his subject invites the student to join him in delight. Learning that leads to joy will last far longer than the hour in the classroom. When teachers skillfully introduce the treasures of their discipline, they cultivate the taste buds of their students’ souls.

Reviving Our Joy as Teachers

But as teachers, what can we do when our own joy in the subject fades through familiarity? Boredom in the classroom may reflect misdirected loves in the student, but sometimes the teacher has lost his passion for the subject.

The labor of teaching, of course, is no easy task. Teachers must know their subject and learn principles for good pedagogy, often by trial and error. They also must know their students and learn the best ways to lead each individual, which is a fresh challenge with every new class. But even when a teacher knows his stuff and knows his students, he may still struggle to teach with delight.

In a letter titled Instructing Beginners in Faith, Augustine names a challenge every seasoned teacher has experienced: the difficulty of teaching cheerfully when “constantly rehearsing familiar phrases” or themes for each new group of students (45). We can lose our original joy in a truth when we rehearse that truth for others. How do we maintain our joy when we already know the literary text or philosophical paradox or mathematical theorem so well that we could recite the truth without reencountering it ourselves?

Augustine guides us to shift our attention from what we are teaching to whom we are teaching. When our subject no longer excites us, he says, we must draw near to the student with love. When we teach from love, we develop compassion for the student before us — just as Jesus modeled when teaching the crowds (Mark 6:34). This compassion transforms teacher and student alike. “This feeling of compassion is so strong that, when our listeners are touched by us as we speak and we are touched by them as they learn, each of us comes to dwell in the other, and so they, as it were, speak in us what they hear, while we in some way learn in them what we teach” (45). The labor of teaching and learning is a shared enterprise. Our teaching affects (“touches”) the students, and their learning affects (“touches”) us, the teachers. The compassion of the teacher launches both parties into the shared joy of learning.

How exactly do teachers “learn in [the student] what we teach”? Don’t we already know what we teach? Augustine unpacks his surprising claim with an analogy. When we show a friend a beautiful yet familiar sight, we see that sight afresh through the eyes of our friend (46). For me, growing up across the bay from San Francisco, the sight of the Golden Gate Bridge became so familiar that I might overlook its gleam even on a sunny day. Yet, when college friends visited from the Midwest, I reencountered the majesty and wonder of seeing that bridge at sunset from the East Bay. Augustine describes this well when he says, “Our own enjoyment [of familiar sights] is revived by sharing in the enjoyment that others derive from seeing them for the first time” (46).

In our teaching, we have the distinct privilege of reviving our joy in familiar truths through the delight of our students encountering them for the first time. The familiar becomes fresh when we see through their eyes. The student’s joy can pull the teacher back into the positive flywheel of delight — and in the best circumstances, redirect our eyes to the source of all joy.

Learning That Leads to Loving

Learning cannot end with the student’s or the teacher’s joy. When we delight and study, we cannot help but invite others into what has produced joy in us. All learning done for our joy overflows in love for God and neighbor — because all genuine learning ultimately leads us to God. And finding our joy in God compels us to invite others to know and be satisfied in him. There is no greater act of love than inviting brothers, friends, neighbors, and even strangers to find their joy in God.

All genuine learning, then, leads outward in love. As we delight in our studies and study what delights us, we would be wise to look for ways to deepen both our delight and our study of God and his works so as to energize our love for God and neighbor. Jesus invites us to come and see (John 1:39) — to learn from him — so that we might find fullness of joy when we draw near to him (John 15:11). Come learn of Christ so that you might love Christ.

Paul relates everything to Christ crucified, including his own ability to preach. How else could he promote faith that boasts in God’s power?

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Since COVID, there have been plenty of fine sermons, blogs, articles, and books about anxiety. There have been even more books and discussion about rest, one of anxiety’s opposites. But it is hard to see much impact from all this teaching. Today, anxiety simply is. It seems to have reached a tipping point: It has become normal. For many, it is the background noise of life — irritating, always there, nothing you can do about it. If the noise were to stop, some of us might even feel a bit lost.

Christians have work to do. We want to make the attractive truths from Scripture more available. This follows the lead of the wisdom tradition, which is always thinking about what to say and how to say it — accurate words in a wrapping that is just right. Proverbs, for example, contains truth that comes and finds you. It invites you to listen. The person speaking clearly loves you and is passionate about the topic. There are stories that make you want to yell to the person walking blindly into a trap, “Stop, stop, don’t go there!” There are images of pigs with jewelry that make you laugh. And the fear of the Lord is always in view.

Anxiety needs these creative approaches. By nature, it is distracted and will not remember too much from a thirty-minute-plus sermon or a systematic teaching about fear and anxiety. We who teach, in response, are happy to learn new ways of communicating old truths. Emily Dickinson put it this way:

Tell all the truth but tell it slant . . .
The truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind.

How can we offer truth in a way that dazzles just enough to incite the anxious person’s imagination and will?

The material ahead will approach anxiety through two ideas borrowed from the Psalms: Speak to God more than about him, and animate that conversation with God’s implicit questions. The Psalms are Scripture’s literary peak, and they often invite us to imagine God leading us deeper into conversation with him. (Psalm 10 is one example of a psalm that has these implicit questions, which steer the psalm’s focus from doubts to troubles to God’s promises.)

As with all the Psalms, you can begin by letting the words ahead speak on your behalf, but don’t stop there. You will want to embellish them with your own words, and then, as you hear God’s questions to you, craft your own cry to him — your own psalm — in response.

Consumed by Worry

“Please, tell me,” God says. “What is truly on your heart? What fears and anxieties run deep in you?”

You might be reluctant to respond at first. Anxiety tends to turn inward, so you are not accustomed to just speaking about them to God. If you pray, you might only ask that they be taken away. But he’s asking, so you respond.

“My anxieties are beginning to feel so . . . normal. They are like my heart beating or my breathing. They are just one big thing hanging out in the background of life, though occasionally they catch fire and become the only thing I feel.

“My anxiety is very physical. I really do feel it. It barks out commands: run, escape, die, hide, disappear. When it is strong, I would prefer to be anywhere but where I am. It might start in my gut, but then it moves through my whole body. The sky, I think, will fall — but I don’t know when. Once it gets to my brain, it can take control. It becomes the only thing I think about.

“So, I counter it, sometimes with mindless scrolling or AI. That can distract me from my worries, but it also provokes new ones.”

“Like what?” God asks. “Say more.”

“My anxieties feel like they are floating free and untethered, but when I think about them, they are connected to certain threats. Money, health, and the likelihood of failure — these are the usual suspects. Then there are fears that relationships could fall apart, the country could go up in flames, and an active shooter could show up anywhere. The more I think about them, the more I see that my worries are about . . . everything.”

Comforted by His Care

God responds, “You have good reasons for your worries. You cannot control the next minute of your life, let alone world events. Now tell me: What do you know about me, and what is on my heart?”

“Hmm. I could say what I feel — that you are far away and busy with other things. But you are asking for more than that. This is a difficult question.

“So, to know the Father, I look to the Son. I think the Son is gentle and compassionate with his worried, stressed, anxious, and fearful people. Jesus takes us for a walk and points us to daylilies and birds (Matthew 6:25–34; Luke 12:22–34). He wraps his words in gentleness, because he knows weakness. And for him, the threats on his relationships and his life actually came true. In Gethsemane he knew what it was like to find the next step almost unbearable. He, after all, is the real author of the psalms of lament.

“Then the apostle Paul confirms one of the clearest themes in all Scripture. When fears and worries seize us, we know that God is with us (Philippians 4:5–6).”

“Say a little more,” says your God. “Do you believe that I care for you?”

“I see that I was in my own head. Thinking about you is good; talking to you is better.

“Do I believe that you care for me? . . . Do I believe that you care for me? My first thought is, Not really — and for bad reasons. I am so often in my own world. I consider my version of life, and I don’t often think about what is true about you. If I do, I don’t make it personal.

“My second thought is that your love and mercy do not change because of my unfaithfulness. I know that I need Jesus and to rest in his forgiveness and righteousness and not my own works. You call me ‘little flock.’ Your plan was that Jesus would bring me to you, once and for all.”

“Do you believe I care for you?”

“Yes, I believe you care, even for me.”

“This,” says Jesus, “has been a fine walk with my Spirit.”

Writing Your Psalm

There is much more to say, but Scripture itself is not a systematics text that tells us everything at once. Tomorrow, you will rehearse this conversation and perhaps go further. For today, what makes this a fine walk is that you spoke to your Lord. With your first sentence or two, you made this a psalm.

Local churches are the engine of cross-cultural missions, but it is easy for a church to see itself only as the benefactor and not also as a beneficiary. I’ve seen the shift occur in two ways.

Sometimes, a local-church missions program becomes a grant-writing foundation. A committee oversees how a slice of resources gets distributed among strategic ministries. Partnership with missionaries consists in a minimal monetary commitment and sporadic contact. In this situation, the church functions like an export terminal in a port city. Resources are loaded onto containers and shipped away in the hope that they will be used well.

In another situation, the church’s missions program serves primarily as a gauge of the spirituality and service-oriented status of the church itself. “Do we care about the world? Let me show you the list of ministries we support.” The ministries and missionaries are doing solid work, no doubt, but the program functionally exists to showcase the church’s strength and godly priorities.

In both cases — the export hub and the advertising campaign — the local sending church is the source from which missions flows out. Church leaders may want more from their missions involvement, but it can remain unclear how missions contributes to the local church’s own health and life.

Rather than focusing exclusively on the export side of missionary involvement, churches can also reflect on how global engagement shapes the local church. Missions pastors can say not only, “Look at what God is doing through us!” but also, “Look at what we are learning!” or “Here is how missions changes us.” By participating in cross-cultural missions, we invite God to shape our church in at least three ways: We learn from global churches, we guard against ethnocentrism, and we strive to show old truths in new ways.

Learning from Global Churches

Partnership with missionaries engaged in frontline cross-cultural ministry helps your local church develop a proper posture toward other churches around the world. We see this posture in the New Testament when the apostles remind churches that they stand together.

For example, Peter directs our attention to believers throughout the world when he calls the church to “resist [the devil], firm in your faith, knowing that the same kinds of suffering are being experienced by your brotherhood throughout the world” (1 Peter 5:9). The “brotherhood” he refers to exists globally. Your church may send missionaries, but that does not mean it is only a benefactor, parent, or teacher to other churches. It is part of a brotherhood, a family that extends around the world.

This brotherhood experiences “the same kinds of suffering.” Our struggles are not identical or equal in intensity. But wherever we live, all believers face the temptation to throw away their confidence in Christ. American Christians sometimes place a categorical difference between their own suffering (“first-world problems”) and those of Christians in other nations. We should, of course, be mindful that a church protest is not the same as an armed attack or the constant fear of imprisonment. And yet, Peter makes the Christian experience universal. We are all potential martyrs, and we all hear Jesus’s assurance that “the world hates you” (John 15:19). Remembering this unity helps us to resist the devil and stand firm in faith.

The apostles also expect that Christians can learn from the experience of others. Paul anticipates a blessing when he prepares to visit the Roman Christians, so that “we may be mutually encouraged by each other’s faith, both yours and mine” (Romans 1:11–12). He points to the generosity of Christians in Macedonia, in spite of their suffering, as an example for the Corinthians (2 Corinthians 8:1–4). And he asks Timothy to share about his trials with the Thessalonians “to establish and exhort [them] in [their] faith, that no one be moved by these afflictions” (1 Thessalonians 3:2–3).

The normal pattern of church life includes sharing stories, inspiration, and models of courage from churches in different places. When your church has personal connections with believers around the world, often through the ministry of cross-cultural missionaries, you will view other churches as sources of mutual encouragement and benefit.

Guarding Against Ethnocentrism

Active involvement in cross-cultural ministry lifts our eyes off ourselves and so fights against ethnocentrism (the habit of thinking that our own ethnic group, nationality, or culture is inherently superior).

Ethnocentrism in missions emerges when cultural or national strengths of the sending culture become the primary values celebrated and encouraged within a target culture. For example, since I greatly appreciate the Western tradition of the rule of law, I would love to see distinctive rights of that tradition — such as trial by jury, freedom of the press, and freedom of religion — emerge in more countries. Cross-cultural missionaries, however, need the discipline of proclaiming Christ crucified as their primary goal — lest we advocate more for a certain culture than for Jesus.

Connections with cross-cultural missionaries and local believers remind us that believers in other places embody the gospel in unique ways. For example, Vietnamese believers recite, “In Jesus’s name, amen,” in unison at the end of every corporate prayer. This has at least two benefits. First, it reminds them (and us) that we pray as those who come to the Father in Christ. The practice among many English-speaking Western believers of ending prayers in a variety of ways may foster a certain freedom, but it allows for some strange and abrupt endings. Second, the unison ending means that everyone participates out loud in the prayer. It is a corporate practice that requires each person to pay attention for the cue to show that this prayer is coming to an end.

A little, distinctive practice like that gets known only through participation in that community. Perhaps a long-term missionary shares about it in your church, or short-term visitors come back with a new experience of prayer. Simply knowing that another church has committed to closing prayer “in Jesus’s name” challenges us to ask how we might better reflect the gospel in our own prayers. It teaches us that the gospel will look slightly different as it finds its home in another culture. And that unique display of Christian faith reminds us that our own cultural expression of Christianity is uniquely fitted to us.

Long-term investment in cross-cultural missions helps a local church avoid ethnocentrism as it learns to become a humble learner from other churches around the world.

Showing Old Truth in New Ways

We all tend to get bogged down in our own ruts, to ignore new questions because we are satisfied with old answers. Churches can be the same way, but cross-cultural missions demands fresh words for communicating the gospel in new places. Unchanging truths often require original expression in new cultural contexts.

The cross-cultural impulse in a church asks, “How can we explain the gospel to people who are different from us? What illustrations might we use? What words best translate the message? What songs can we compose? What shape of life can we commend to ourselves and our neighbors that will make the gospel connect?”

These aims are not achieved by simply repeating what we know from our own culture. Insight is earned through the diligent work of speaking in a local language, living in a different environment, and experiencing life from within a different culture — and then through bold attempts to make the gospel clear and persuasive there.

For East Asian cultures, sin as a trespass or disobedience requires further explanation. The personal nature of sin against God needs to be explicit for people to understand its seriousness. So, evangelists can speak about dishonoring God’s majesty or about betrayal against God’s kindness. Those aspects are mentioned in the Bible (Romans 1:21–23; 2:23), but some Western ways of sharing the gospel leave them implicit. Local Christians or cross-cultural missionaries can remind our churches that the New Testament speaks about sin in various ways, some of which may stick better in another culture.

The missionary impulse forces every local church to ask, “How are we engaging in fresh cross-cultural evangelism and outreach both to other cultures and here in our own place?”

Maturing Through Missions

Your local church missions program is neither a grant-writing institution nor an advertisement for your church’s godliness. It is, rather, a source of unity and renewal as your church grows in appreciation for God’s work around the world.

When a local church prioritizes the efforts of called men and women to proclaim the gospel among other people groups, that practice becomes part of its own growth toward maturity in Christ. Happy is the church that engages with challenges in other parts of the world and then expects to grow as it hears new echoes of gospel witness from missionaries and believers in those places.

What gain is worth risking your whole life for? John Piper opens Psalm 25 to show why joy in God frees us for sacrificial love.

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