If you want a place with singing, celebration, joy and feasting, then live for the place where you get all those things forever. Christ welcomes you to that eternal home. He goes ahead of you to prepare a place for His disciples. He will take you by the hand and lead you into the promised land.

But you have to leave Babylon to get there.

“Come out of her, my people,” says the Lord, “lest you take part in her sins, lest you share in her plagues” (Revelation 18:4).

Dabney warns that governments are often eager to lean on the church to do its bidding and that if we are not careful the energies of the church will be subsumed under the aims of the state. The establishment of the church by the state almost always turns out better for the state than the church.

Boniface lived a remarkable life (accomplishing much for the gospel) and died a triumphant martyr’s death. It would fall to later generations to convert the heathen peoples of Germany, but the memory of Boniface inspired those efforts. We might say his principal work was reformation and revitalization. He was constantly enmeshed in organizational questions and issues of power-politics. Nevertheless, Boniface bore witness to Christ wherever he could—even at the cost of his life.

In the end, for as much as Boniface is chiefly remembered for his axe, it was the many decades of sharing the gospel, discipling Christians, building monasteries and bishoprics, cultivating personal holiness, navigating conflict, and keeping his hand to the plow that made Boniface successful. That is the option Boniface chose for his life and ministry, and that is the option open to all of us.

Until the last few decades of human history, it was understood by virtually everyone everywhere that each of us is born wholly and irrevocably as a “he” or as a “she.” Maleness and femaleness are identities that we do not choose and cannot change.

I know that the impulse to attend a gay wedding, or to allow that others may do so, is often borne out of a good and sincere desire to love our family and friends. There are few things more painful than making a decision that we know our child or grandchild will interpret as rejection. But we simply cannot bless, even by our mere presence, what we know to be a lie—a lie that Scripture calls an abomination and that according to 1 Corinthians 6 will destroy eternally the souls of those who continue in it.

“Man can have no other standard and signpost than things as they are and the truth which makes manifest things as they are; and there can be no higher standard than the God who is and His truth” (40). If Jesus is right, and surely he is, that we are sanctified by the truth (John 17:19), then there is no path to faithful Christian obedience and faithful cultural witness that does not begin in praise of prudence.

In Praise of Prudence: What the Cardinal Virtues Can Teach Us About the Splintering of Evangelicalism

The unsatisfying answer to the title of this post is that we don’t know as much as we would like. We know that a bishop named Nicholas existed, that he had a great influence on his homeland, and that he probably died on December 6. While we should be careful to separate fact from fiction, there are elements of the Nicholas story we can know—and what can be known is worth retelling.

One of the first things we learn about God is that he is good. “God is great, God is good, let us thank him for our food.” Many of us grew up hearing this prayer at the dinner table. It’s good theology—simple and true.

It also highlights an attribute of God that is surprisingly hard to define. We think we know what it means for God to be good, until we try to explain it. Then we usually start listing other attributes (God is loving, God is gracious, God is kind) or resort to platitudes (God helps us). It takes some reflection to understand all that we mean—or should mean—when we confess that God is good.