Gospel Centered Discipleship

Most people who’ve only known me during the past two decades don’t realize that I once struggled massively with my weight. In fact, I weighed more during that season than I did when I delivered my first baby. So, when a new friend recently learned that I haven’t always been a healthy weight, she wanted to know how I got here.As I pondered her question, I realized that the same principles that once helped me lose weight years ago could also be applied to my current challenge: how to use my time wisely. At the time, I was employing the “put off/put on” principle, in which we put off our old self, corrupted by deceitful desires, and put on our new self, created after the likeness of God in true righteousness (Eph. 4:22–24).I did not lose weight by saying no to overeating. If I had tried to simply say no to food, I would have fixated on what I was missing. Instead, I had to focus on saying yes to something better. This was long before body positivity in the age of “heroin chic,” when it was trendy to look emaciated. It was tempting to say yes to abs so flat that no one would suspect I had organs, but I knew that such a goal was ungodly and unhealthy. I needed a better yes. This pattern of saying no to one thing in order to say yes to something better has become my approach to every area where I need transformation.RecognizeFirst, I had to recognize the problem: I was looking to food to fill needs God wanted me to fill in other ways. (I realize this is not the case for every person who struggles with their weight. That was just my honest struggle at the time.) I ate because I was tired. I ate because I was bored. I ate to get away from my live-in nanny job in the evenings. I ate to spend time with friends.Instead of reducing my fatigue, overeating made it worse. Activities like hiking became harder. My shopping options were increasingly limited as I started to need the largest size in the stores where I bought my clothes. I recognized that I was outgrowing my ideal lifestyle and budget, and it was time to make changes.Is God mercifully allowing you to experience consequences that show you a need for change in your life? Is your calendar too full? Are your children parroting you in ways that show you the ugliness of your anger? Do you drag through your days because you were scrolling social media into the wee hours? Recognizing the problem is the first step toward resolving it.RepentTo repent means “to change one’s mind.” Part of changing our minds is having something we want to say yes to so badly we’re willing to say no to what we’re doing now. This is true whether the thing we’re doing now is sinful or simply not ideal.I had to say no to eating when I was bored in order to say yes to productive boredom. Some of us remember the days of simply staring out the car window and tracking the slow journey of a rain droplet on a long road trip or lying on our backs and watching the clouds change shape. Boredom creates opportunities for contemplating the truth about God and meditating on his Word. I was robbing myself of the benefits of boredom while also damaging my body by filling the void with food.I had to say no to overeating so I could say yes to treating the real root issue of my fatigue. If a person experiences ongoing fatigue as I did, it’s wise to seek medical help to rule out physiological sources of trouble. At this point in my life, I am aware that autoimmune issues are one source of my fatigue, and this knowledge helps me seek the right treatment. When fatigue is an indication of depression or anxiety, a biblical counselor, pastor, or godly friend can offer better help than food.I had to say no to wasting food in my body so I could say yes to stewarding my body for God’s glory. Most of my overeating happened at restaurants, where I paid good money for a portion of food that brought me beyond the point of satisfaction to uncomfortable fullness. I felt guilty about wasting food and wasting money, but what I ultimately realized was that the food was already wasted when it was more than I needed. I was, in fact, creating a third kind of waste by cleaning my plate: waste in my body. While wasted food in the garbage is unfortunate, wasted food in my body had knock-on effects for my health.Perhaps your struggle isn’t disordered eating. Maybe it’s something that other people can’t see when they look at you. Either way, you are not your own. You were bought with a price, so glorify God (1 Cor. 6:19b–20). Consider the ways God made you and how he wants you to use your gifts in service to him and others. What do you need to say no to so you can say yes to something better?Rely on GodI did not grow up understanding God’s sovereignty and man’s responsibility. In many ways, they are still a mystery to me. John MacArthur said we don’t need to understand how they work together—we simply need to affirm both truths because both are in Scripture. What does this mean for your sanctification as you recognize and then repent of sin in your life? It means you have a responsibility to obey Scripture, and you should also humbly realize your reliance upon God for your obedience. Paul urges us in Philippians 2:12b–13 to “work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure.” This is not a contradiction but rather a tension. We must obey, but it is God who works in us to obey, and even to desire to obey. Apart from him, you can do nothing (John 15:5).Twenty years ago, God gave me a very gradual victory over my eating problems, and after developing a healthy lifestyle, I was able to reach a healthy weight. I am once again facing this struggle, but it’s harder this time. I know I need to discipline myself, but I also know that my self-discipline will fail apart from the extravagant grace of God.Whether your current struggle is small or large, I know it’s something the Bible speaks to, and you can turn to God’s Word for guidance about how to be obedient in the midst of it. I do not know God’s timeline for helping you to overcome your struggle. It may be that he will give you a miraculous and instant transformation, and you will simply cease to struggle with that thing at all. Praise the Lord! It may be that he will give you very gradual, incremental success that is barely observable until you look back one day and realize it’s not as hard as it used to be. Praise the Lord! You might experience alternating seasons of victory and defeat until you die or Christ returns. Praise the Lord!God can be just as glorified by your humble dependence upon him and recognition of your inability to sanctify yourself as he is by giving you victory over that sin in your lifetime. Soli Deo gloria. In whatever way you struggle, you can be reassured that Jesus lived perfectly in your place, and your life is hidden with Christ in God (Col. 3:3).One thing I know for certain is that just as God has freed you from the penalty and power of sin through Jesus’ death and resurrection, one day he will free you from the presence of sin at Jesus’s triumphal return! Hold onto him. Do not despair. And until then, let your no be a yes!

It’s becoming increasingly obvious that at the heart of the culture a war is raging around us in a battle for truth. It’s like truth has become somehow subjective, as if we can all determine it for ourselves. At the same time, we’re being sold all kinds of truth claims, such as being born in the wrong body, that we question at our peril. So even our ability to freely discuss or search for truth has come under fire.Welcome to our postmodern world, where the line between truth and falsehood is becoming increasingly blurred. “My truth.” “Your truth.” “Their truth.” The way to thrive has also become equally self-focused and self-determined. “Follow your heart” (whatever it tells you), and you will be free. “Fulfill your desires” (whatever they may be), and you will be happy. Just make sure that “you do you.” After all, “you’re worth it.” Don’t get me wrong—many desires in and of themselves are not wrong to have; God built us with deep desires, and he meant to. And we are always “worth it” to God. He wouldn’t have sent his Son to us if he didn’t think the whole redemption project worth the cost. And yet, when we make our desires and personal definitions of morality ultimate—when we make them gods and follow down their paths without critical thinking and intentionally evaluating them against God’s truth—we end up more depressed, more anxious, more suicidal, more broken, more alone, and more lost than ever.Over the past few decades, having one’s own self-gratifying ideologies and agendas has become highly popular. It has become a force of its own, leading people to harbor a new “truth” of choice. But truth itself is not subjective. A “subjective truth” worldview gives itself the right to undermine any sort of moral code or absolute. It can adhere to the worst atrocities as simply “my truth” versus “your truth.”The world might believe that if we follow our hearts, we’ll be free, but I’ve been down that road only to find that it might be the most ruthless lie of all. There was no lasting freedom waiting for me at the end of my gender transition—no satisfaction, no completion, no peace, and no relief that was promised. What I desired for years ultimately left me feeling empty.I suspect we’ve all experienced some level of disappointment with this kind of self-autonomy. It can only ever fail us. For in the final analysis, autonomy says that I can be my own god, establish my own “truth,” and fulfill my own dreams. And that seems like it should be the perfect solution and a big draw! But it’s actually an insidious lie, one that will lead us into a form of slavery. It requires putting our faith in something other than the God of the universe or his objective truths—like the fact that human beings are either male or female. It forces us to sign up to lies that perhaps help us obtain approval, affirmation, or status from others, or perhaps simply achieve whatever we crave the most. And doing so forces us to become slaves—servants to our self-gratification.Since the sexual revolution of the 1960s, our culture has taken the approach, “If it feels good, do it.” But how is that working for us? Does it hold water that we are therefore improving as a society or are more satisfied as individuals? Are we more at peace? Are we more fulfilled when we chase our pleasures above all else? Are we more content? Are there fewer wars? Is there less hatred in the world? I think we all know the answer. Clearly, unchecked hedonism is not creating the happiest people on earth, despite the rhetoric. And neither is autonomy raising our “cosmic consciousness.” In fact, it’s causing the world to become increasingly fragmented.But that’s the price we’re paying for the powerful reality shift from where we once were in Western culture to where we’ve now landed in the twenty-first century. The attempt to remove God both from the lives of individuals and from society at large has only led to more darkness, more confusion and a deeper rejection of God’s design for us as his image bearers. All of which keeps driving us further from the truth, further from the satisfaction and freedom we so desperately long for.Jesus said, “And you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free” (John 8:32).Truth brings freedom. And truth is determined and defined by God—his mind, his thoughts, his nature, his heart, his desires, his words, his will, and, above all, his Son Jesus (the truth incarnate, John 14:6) and his Spirit (the Spirit of truth, John 16:13). All that flows from God is pure truth. What he says is. What he declares true is true. He cannot lie, nor can he ever side with falsehood because he is, at his core, truth (Num. 23:19; Titus 1:2). Which means his Word is true, and we can believe it.Because God is the source of truth itself, only he can bring lasting freedom, love, joy, satisfaction, and peace. He’s the standard, the litmus test, and, in Jesus, the embodiment of all that is true, good, and beautiful.The plumb line for truth is not my next door neighbor, my aunt, my coworker, my best friend, my social media of choice, or the government. No mere human is a perfect moral compass. Though we have inherent dignity from being born in God’s image—all of us, no exceptions—we also inherited a fallen nature at birth because of sin, which infiltrates every human heart—all of us, no exceptions. That means that even on our best day with the best of intentions, we’re all selfish, misguided, fallen or bent in some way. We can look around or look at history and see it clear as day. “For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Rom. 3:23).Instead of being led by truth, we’re disastrously prone to being deceived by false narratives, especially regarding sex, sexuality, and gender. Consequently, many have somehow concluded that if their mind feels something, then their body must change to conform to it. And that was me! But God says quite the reverse: “Do not be conformed to this age, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that you may discern what is the good, pleasing, and perfect will of God” (Rom. 12:2).Being made in the image of God means the body is not only biological but theological. It’s a glorious divine design that communicates the attributes of God and the interdependence of the sexes. If we get this bit wrong, we’re missing the big picture. And the big picture is literally God revealing the mystery of the whole universe to us, including our part in it. Adapted from TransFormed: The Power of God's Word and God's People in One Woman's Journey through Gender Confusion, Reassignment Surgery, and Detransitioning, ©2026. Used by permission of B&H Publishing.

I’m embarrassed to say that a few years ago, when cooler fall weather arrived in central Pennsylvania, the mice that lived outside my house decided to move inside. They didn’t knock or ask permission. The rodents announced their arrival by eating my Oreos. Someone needed to act fast. One very important family member in our household believes that in such a dire situation, the entirely logical next step is to flee our home, burn it down, and permanently move into a hotel. I love the person who feels this way about mice, and we have less than ten years left on our thirty-year mortgage, so I quickly called a professional exterminator. I thank God for how quickly he came, he saw, and he conquered. But before he achieved victory, the exterminator explained the situation and how he would prosecute his war. What he said was both funny and profound—and perfectly fits with lines from Paul in 2 Corinthians about Christian ministry. My exterminator told me the mice would eat the poison and then go outside to die. “There was,” he said, “a small chance they might stay inside.” If that happened, he wanted me to know a faint odor could linger for a day or so. “But don’t worry,” he added. “Do you know what I call that smell?” “No,” I said. He gave me a big smile and said he calls it “The Smell of Victory.”That happy response to the stench of decay remains a matter of perspective. Yes, for us who live in the house, the unpleasant smell signals that all hope is not lost and that we don’t have to move to a new house. But to the other mice, to those who are perishing, it is the smell of death to death. Paul uses this very language in 2 Corinthians to describe the binary outcomes of gospel ministry. “For we are the aroma of Christ to God,” he says, “among those who are being saved and among those who are perishing, to one a fragrance from death to death, to the other a fragrance from life to life” (2 Cor. 2:15–16). This imagery for gospel ministry seems grotesque, especially when paired with the image in the previous verse. Paul pictures himself as a captured foe led shackled in the victory parade of Jesus, while outsiders presumably mock him as a loser (2 Cor. 2:14). For these reasons, many in the Corinthian church held Paul’s ministry in low regard. “Some apostle,” they scoffed. “Everywhere he goes, a few people might get saved, but more people want to kill him.” The views of success that wafted into the church from Corinthian culture led those inside the church to think success meant big speaking fees, compelling orations, splashy results, and viral TED talks. Their Corinthian hearts wanted super-apostles, leaders who didn’t seem so needy and weak. In the comment sections on social media, these wolves would not have been kind to Paul. Yet Paul rejects this prevailing wisdom and doubles down. As should we. “For we are not, like so many, peddlers of God’s word,” Paul says (2 Cor. 2:17a). He borrows the term peddler from the marketplace. The word denotes buyers and sellers, supply and demand, products and consumers. In a market, a peddler must understand what the buyer wants and then find a way to meet those felt needs, eager to adapt his product to a changing market. These are not necessarily bad impulses. God uses the market to provide us with food and clothing, cars and homes, and exterminators skilled at killing mice. What Paul critiques are those who adapt God’s Word to meet the market, thinking, “Hmmm, ‘as is,’ the Word of God seems to bring both life to life and death to death. What if I changed the Word of God so that it brought only life to life? Perhaps I can alter the Word to get better results.”In contrast, Paul says, “But as men of sincerity, as commissioned by God, in the sight of God we speak in Christ” (2 Cor. 2:17b). His point is that if you change the Word of God, you don’t get more life to life; you get what seems like life, but that which in the end leads to death. Commissioned by God and in the sight of God, Paul remains unwilling to tamper with the Word to win people’s favor. He already has the favor of the King. The lines have fallen for him in pleasant places, even as his general always leads him in triumphant procession everywhere he goes. “If you change the Word of God, you don’t get more life to life; you get what seems like life, but that which in the end leads to death.” — Benjamin Vrbicek I think back to my exterminator and the faint stench he called “the smell of victory.” All things being equal, no one in my family wants dead-mouse particulates in our nostrils. So perhaps my shrewd exterminator could have thought, “Instead of spreading poison, I’ll spread potpourri.” We would all have been happy—at first. Not only would the mice soon disappear, but my house would smell of cinnamon apples, and I’d give him a glowing Google review. Yet exchanging poison for potpourri offers false security.This kind of short-sighted peddling recalls the haunting rhetorical question Jeremiah posed about the end of everything: An appalling and horrible thing    has happened in the land:the prophets prophesy falsely,    and the priests rule at their direction;my people love to have it so,    but what will you do when the end comes? (Jer. 5:30–31, emphasis added)In our cultural moment, so many once-faithful churches and denominations have gone the way of the peddler, untethering from orthodoxy and moving beyond the fruit of the Spirit to get more people in the building. “If we change what God says about sex,” some say, “we’d have a whole new demographic to reach,” while others might say, “If we preach angry hot takes and political rants, we’d have a whole new demographic to reach.” Of course, these logical steps away from orthodoxy and orthopraxy rarely seem overt or brazen to the one making them. The Overton (ministry) window shifts subconsciously, just as the good desire to contextualize morphs into syncretism easily. Still, if our church mocked protestors and immigrants as always evil, I know we could fill our church with more giving units. And if we mocked law enforcement and immigration enforcers as always evil, we’d find plenty of people who would love to make our church their home. Extending the imago dei even to our enemies seems antiquated, something that might have worked in the past but doesn’t get results in a negative world. Paul renounces this kind of peddling, choosing to stay focused on Jesus and to preach faithful, steady, nuanced truth, even if it doesn’t make him appear as a super-successful apostle. Bold preaching that bears the fruit of the Spirit will sometimes look boring and blah when compared with the faux boldness of tribalism. I’m not advocating that preachers always find the middle way or seek the supposed safety of avoiding all language someone might deem too left-or right-leaning. May it never be. Instead, I’m advocating not being so tethered to one ideology or another that Jesus can no longer critique your own leanings or your own tribe. Rightly dividing the Word and maintaining godly character always go together when we follow the Way, the Truth, and the Life. “Keep a close watch on yourself and on the teaching,” Paul told a young preacher (1 Tim. 4:16). So, when the algorithm smothers your live-stream and sermon clips, double down and do the ministry that Christ rewards. When your ministry looks and smells like a cross to the watching world, rejoice, and again I say rejoice, for in Christ you already have the favor of the only one who matters. When snark and vitriol earn a larger platform, remember that as the cross of Jesus has become to you the beautiful smell of victory, so also your cross-shaped life will give others the faint aroma of Jesus. And when people mock you as a coward for not preaching sermons that get more clicks, remember that those who deny themselves and take up their crosses daily will one day take up their resurrection.