A Moment to Quiet the Soul

When did you last feel quiet, truly quiet? No screens. No text chains. No emails, notifications, appointments, pressing needs, emergencies — tyrannies of the urgent? When did you last sit alone for more than a moment, only stillness — listening, watching, ready to hear? When last did you feel truly at peace? Shalom. When last did you seekingly (not passively) wait on God? Darash. Bakash. Shachar.

If you cannot easily answer these questions, this article is for you.

When did you last feel content, truly content? Nothing missing. Nothing broken. No anxiety, loneliness, bitterness, resentment, driving needs and desires — tormenting thoughts? When did you last experience joy, irrespective of circumstances — without apathy, envy, or boredom? When last did neither acedia, lust, nor greed have any hook in you? When last did you stand blameless in God’s presence?

This article is for you.

The Vacancy and the Calling

For just a moment your house is swept clean. You discern something faint filling your soul, your spirit — like a flickering lamp. The Covering, His Presence! The most recent battle is over, the latest sin confessed. Forgiveness, cleansing your heart again, and again you know you are His child. You are loved. He hasn’t left you. He never did. In this precious moment, all the high places are torn down, your idols broken. The Strongman who regularly has his way with you has been bound. You are a captive set free again. Memory stirs — you have been here before. You dread this moment passing again — when again you are pulled into slavery, when again your idle curiosities and desires get the best of you, when again you allow distractions to take you from the Presence.

But not this time. This time, you will wait to be filled — whatever the cost, however long it takes. The breaking has done its work. You no longer maintain agreements with lies. You no longer tell yourself and others wrong stories about the Father. You no longer automatically do what seems right in your own eyes. You no longer know what to do at all! Except to wait for instruction — a warhorse prepared for battle, strength restrained under the authority of the Master. You recognize the Seven, stronger than their predecessor, but refuse them entry. Only the Savior’s voice is permitted — that still, small rhema whisper.

You know it is His voice because it agrees fully with Scripture. It is much different from the lying voice of the python, the Nachash (that old dragon). His voice bids you to take His yoke and learn from Him. He is gentle and humble of heart. He offers rest but calls you to take a small step of faith. And when you step from safety into those places you could never take yourself, it is not to tempt the Lord your God. It is the obedient response to His gentle calling: LORD, if it is really You, command me to come to You on the water. And He says, “Come!”

If He doesn’t call, you don’t jump. Until He calls, you wait.

Years ago I sat alone in my house, meditating on God’s Word, practicing being still in His presence — prepared to take as long as was necessary until I heard from the Almighty Creator of Heaven and Earth. And slowly my thoughts wandered toward the questions underneath everything, and my heart went from heavy to hot, until in Jobish temerity I opened a cross-examination of the Eternal Father.

Why, God? What is the point? Every day I begin by seeking You. Every day I start strong. Every day I stumble and come short of Your glory; every day I pick myself back up, repent, and You forgive — immediately, kindly, without one word of condemnation. And before I know it: rinse, wash, repeat. It is exhausting. You know I will never be perfect here. You also know I am never going to quit seeking You — where can I go that You are not already there? I cannot escape You, and I do not want to. So why this, day after day? Why am I still here? It is pointless!

I went on like that for who knows how long — circular logic, frustration, a little barking dog in the presence of the One who holds All in the palm of His hand — until, somewhere in the middle of it, the still, small voice of Abba began to answer. Soft, but certainly not weak. The strength of it silenced every questioning thought, and I sat in awe and listened:

Michael, my son, I know you are weak and imperfect. I know you will continue to fall, continue to ask my forgiveness, continue to struggle as you walk my path and seek me all the days of your life. But my precious child, I made you with purpose, and your life is not pointless.

My angels were created to worship at my throne — and some failed in the very thing they were made to be. Every time you choose to go against your fleshly nature and follow me instead, you do what those fallen ones would not. You testify that there is none like me. You testify of me in the congregation of Heaven, and all creation watches in awe as — each time you fall — you freely choose to get up, repent, and follow after me again. O, my son, there is such purpose in your life, beyond what you can yet imagine. When you fall, confess quickly, and do not wallow in self-condemnation. Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me, and find rest for your soul.

I have never recovered from that afternoon: still in my 20’s, before the successes and failures, before the partnerships and betrayals, before the deaths and births, before the long years in the wilderness and in the pit, feeling lost and abandoned, forgotten and discarded. Before I could possibly understand what it truly means to be a witness. Yes, I have never recovered from that moment, and I hope I never do. The waiting is never wasted; and the smallest obedience of the most ordinary believer, it turns out, is testimony before the highest court there is.

In the years that followed I began to connect the dots of what God was up to — and it wasn’t the first time He was about this business.

The word of the LORD was precious in those days; there was no open vision . . . The official priesthood had become rotten. Eli’s physical (and spiritual) eyes had grown dim. His sons were helping themselves to the offerings and the women, God’s ministers brazenly engaged in theft and fornication — and we think it’s bad today! [Eccl. 1:9]

And in that fallen and rebellious house, a boy lay in the dark, ere the lamp of God went out in the temple of the LORD, where the ark of God was — lay still enough, long enough, to hear his own name called, and to answer, Speak; for thy servant heareth (1 Samuel 3:1–10). Everything Samuel became — the judge who led a nation, the man who repaired the altars and anointed kings, the restorer of an office his “elder brother” guardians had disgraced — began drawing near to God and listening. Rebuilding always begins with listening. [see, e.g., Neh. 1:4; Isa. 58:11-12; Haggai 1:8 and ch. 2] There is no other door. To act on your own initiative, on what you know is right, is to forsake the only Tree of Life there is — God’s speaking voice, His rhema Word — and to embrace the deception of self-knowledge and the ability to self-determine what is right and wrong.

God starts with a vacancy — an emptying and breaking of self, breaking of self-reliance and self-assurance, and all forms of “self” — and then filling that vacancy for the calling with His presence. He, His presence, His Word, His call is the only thing worth anything. And His calling to the lawyer and non-lawyer alike is primarily one of priesthood: one who stands between the authority and those he represents, who carries the names of others into the Holy of Holies, who pleads and offers sacrifices on their behalf.

And I sought for a man among them, that should make up the hedge, and stand in the gap before me for the land, that I should not destroy it: but I found none. (Ezekiel 22:30) Not: none were qualified. Not: the position was eliminated. None stood. Heaven issued a call that went unanswered, and a city fell for want of one applicant to the vacant office.

Whatever else comes next, hold that in your mind — in your quiet time, pull on that thread. Scripture talks about those who answer the call, those who usurp and seize that to which they have not been called, and those who refuse the call altogether. The gap, the vacancy, in the priestly calling is not a figure of speech. It is a posted position, from the throne room, imprinted in our DNA — long before the Fall, when Adam and Eve still walked with God in the cool of the day. The posting has never been taken down [Isa. 61:6; 1 Peter 2:9] — it remains open to us to respond. (when, where, and as He calls) And one day, all will be ultimately restored. [Rev. 1:6, 5:10] So why not offer ourselves, unto God, in answer to this call, while yet His breath and blood still flow through our earthly bodies?

No Inheritance in the Land

Before the priestly office can be described, one thing must be settled about the man who would hold it. For me, Watchman Nee settles it in a small, intense book (that I have read over and over) called Love Not the World.

John’s command — Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world (1 John 2:15) — is not a contradiction of John 3:16, because John is not using the word the way we do. Kosmos is not the planet, and it is not people. It is an order, an arrangement: a system of getting and holding — of seeing, desiring, and taking (because you can). It is the industry of position, leverage, and self-provision that has been running this world system ever since Cain, a fugitive from God’s Presence, went out and built the first city. (naming it for his son) The post-garden city — civilization east of Eden — began as the fugitive’s project, and it culminates in Babylon, Egypt, Rome, and even rebellious Jerusalem. It is the spirit of the world, the opposite of heaven. And this world system has been to trial, judged, and found wanting: Now is the judgment of this world: now shall the prince of this world be cast out (John 12:31). At the cross the verdict was entered. The system is not awaiting judgment. It is operating under one.

And now, one of the strangest devises in all of Scripture. Every tribe in Israel received an inheritance in the land — acreage, boundary stones, something to hold and defend. But the priests, the Tribe of Levi, received none. Thou shalt have no inheritance in their land, neither shalt thou have any part among them: I am thy part and thine inheritance (Numbers 18:20). The men stationed nearest the Presence were the men who owned nothing in the system. And any lawyer can tell you why. A man cannot represent a cause he holds a stake in; he is conflicted out. We still open every new file the same way, with a conflicts check before anyone considers the merits. Of course, God understood, before there was any land to divide, that His design for the priesthood required a setting apart — they had to be different, in the world of their brothers but not of it. The priests could stand in every gap in Israel precisely because they held no ground on either side of any of them. The priest’s portion was not in the land at all. I am thy part (says God) — the priest’s inheritance was the Presence of God Himself, the only thing worth anything. (easier written than lived, sometimes)

Hopefully, if you’ve been with me through this entire journey, as we come to its conclusion — now, you should see that the order of this series stops being a sequence (of what happens to you) and becomes an argument (of what must be done: the active voice replacing the passive). Yes, the jar must be broken. The high places must come down. The strongman must be bound. The house must be filled. But none of this, by your own power or might; it is only by the Spirit of Almighty God [Zech. 4:6]. He breaks the jar, tears down the high places, binds the strongman, and fills the house. You cannot save yourself — you cannot prepare yourself — you cannot call yourself — and you cannot sit in the office of priest by anything you do in and of yourself. God must be the One to do all of these things. He performs the action upon you, the passive vessel, who has now been fitted to His purpose.

Before the office of priest can ever be recovered, the World, your Flesh, and the Devil must all come off and out of you — because the office cannot be held by a man in whom any anti-Christ system still has its hooks. The prince of this world cometh, Jesus said on the last night, and hath nothing in me (John 14:30). Nothing. No thing. No evidence, no facts supporting his accusations, no cause of action to bring, no conflict to raise. No hook. No claim. This is the new creation, and it is restored vocation.

And here I must stop, lest you think I purport to write all of this from above the indictment. I do not. I write this soberly because I live on the razor’s edge between Christlikeness and violence, between meekness and arrogance, between receiving (from God) and grasping, seizing (what I desire). When the prince of this world comes to me, he does not always leave empty-handed. He still finds hooks and perches and a door willing to be opened. Verdicts I have needed for my own name more than for my client’s. Fees I have called provision when what I wanted was position. A reputation I have kept carefully manicured — and if I am honest before the Judge about why, it was rarely for other men’s praise. It was to prove to myself, one more time, that I am enough. I am a man, a provider, a contributor — a net addition, and not a drain, someone who has earned (not been born into) his sense of entitlement. As I confessed to a friend not long ago, I am a man who has learned how to turn stones into bread — who got good at it, fed a lot of people with it, and called it the work of God.
(O my God, continue to have mercy on me, a sinner.)

Please hear this carefully: the recovery of the office is not a promotion for men and women who have arrived. I know no one in my life who has arrived. Rather, it is the slow divestiture of our holdings in the World, until the day the pull of heaven has won over the pull of the World and we have been truly saved — not just in law, but in fact.

The Office

Let me take a step back and describe my understanding of what a priest is originally. Not what our era assumes — a religious professional, a keeper of ceremonies, a chaplain to whatever the powers have already decided. I am not treading on the province of clergy, of a calling within organized religion. I want to go back to the ancient paths and an original understanding outside of modern religious contexts — the original call of Humanity, before the Fall, and the ultimate return that Revelation promises. Scripture defines the office of priest by its functions.

• A priest takes a stand.

  • The tribe of Levi was set apart to stand before the LORD to minister unto him, and to bless in his name (Deuteronomy 10:8).

  • Standing is the office’s first act and its whole posture — and standing (as every lawyer knows) is a term of art. It is the first question any court asks: does this man have the right to appear and be heard in this matter?

  • In God’s design a priest’s standing was conferred, never seized — by blood, by anointing, and by call. And so is ours: sons and daughters by adoption — purchased by His blood — heirs by covenant, seated with Christ and therefore able to stand. There is a reason petitions open with standing recitals.
    — Ask where you have been called to stand.

• A priest bears witness and represents the cases and causes of others.

  • Over his heart the high priest wore the breastplate of judgment: And Aaron shall bear the names of the children of Israel in the breastplate of judgment upon his heart, when he goeth in unto the holy place, for a memorial before the LORD continually (Exodus 28:29).

  • Judgment, worn as a garment — and the garment full of names. Twelve stones, twelve engraved names, carried on the chest into the Presence every time the priest went in.

  • The office holds the names and causes of others, not his own petty grievances and self-centered desires (I probably could have said that a little more nicely, but I need to be ruthless with my own idols and high places, so please excuse me). It has taken me years to notice which of the two I was actually wearing.
    — Ask what you carry over your heart into your mornings, and for whom.

• A priest runs into (not flees from) the plague, the brokenness, the chaos.

  • When wrath broke out in the camp, Moses did not convene a committee. Take a censer... and go quickly unto the congregation. And Aaron... ran into the midst of the congregation... And he stood between the dead and the living; and the plague was stayed (Numbers 16:46–48).

  • Mark the arsenal Aaron used: fire and perfume. He charged a plague armed with incense, a symbol of prayer offered to the Ancient of Days — a weapon of peace if ever there was one.

  • And mark the direction: into. Priesthood moves toward the thing everyone else is fleeing. Whatever the office is, it is the opposite of acedia, looking away, being distracted from the Presence.

Yet mark this also: Aaron ran because he was sent. When word reached Jesus that Lazarus — he whom thou lovest — lay sick, He abode two days still in the same place where he was (John 11:6), because the Father had not yet said go. Obedience to the Voice of God is what matters. The same obedience runs, and the same obedience waits. As Charles Hummel warned, the need is not the call; the call comes from the God who knows our frame. The priest’s pace is set at the altar, not by the emergency.
—Ask whether you are running sent, or just running.

• A priest pleads.

  • The first recorded oral argument in Scripture is Abraham standing before the LORD over Sodom, arguing the number down from fifty righteous to ten, pressing the bench with the advocate’s oldest question: Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right? (Genesis 18:25).

  • Moses filed a three-point brief on Sinai and obtained a stay of execution for the entire nation. And Job, with no one to appear for him, named the whole ache of the unrepresented: Neither is there any daysman betwixt us, that might lay his hand upon us both (Job 9:33). A daysman — a go-between, with standing to touch both parties. The longing for an advocate is as old as suffering.
    — Ask for what and for whom you plead.

• A priest keeps the law with peace in his mouth.

  • God’s own review of the faithful priest reads like this: The law of truth was in his mouth, and iniquity was not found in his lips: he walked with me in peace and equity, and did turn many away from iniquity. For the priest’s lips should keep knowledge, and they should seek the law at his mouth (Malachi 2:6–7).

  • A true priest speaks rightly — of God, and of men. Law, truth, peace, equity, in one mouth, in one vocation. (There is a whole jurisprudence in that verse.)
    — Ask whether God’s Word is coming out of your mouth.

• A priest judges the hard cases.

  • When a matter arose too hard for thee in judgment... matters of controversy within thy gates, Israel carried it up unto the priests (Deuteronomy 17:8–9). The priests were the nation’s appellate bench; by their word, Deuteronomy says elsewhere, shall every controversy and every stroke be tried. [Deut. 21:5]
    — Ask what hard cases keep being carried to your gates

• A priest blesses.

  • On this wise ye shall bless the children of Israel — and the form of blessing is startling: they shall put my name upon the children of Israel; and I will bless them (Numbers 6:23, 27). The priest’s function is to put the Name of God on people.
    — Ask who last left your presence blessed.

Bar Admittance

The office of priest requires admissions qualifications that do not always come naturally, especially to lawyers. The legal industry emphasizes tangible, measurable skills that translate into efficiency and profitability. Qualities like intellectual prowess, brilliance, pedigree, resume, reputation, portable book of business — all the things we have been trained to measure and, if we are not careful, to admire too much. But Scripture does not qualify the priest as the World does.

When you look at the life of Jesus, our Great High Priest, His is marked by something unknown to the gods of mythology, something impossible to contrive if you were writing fiction — compassion. Compassion, out of shared weakness and out of true love. [Matt. 9:36, 14:14; Mark 1:40-41, 6:34; Luke 7:13-15; Heb. 2:17, 4:15, 5:2]

Contempt, on the other hand, disqualifies. Every attorney knows the slow decay towards contempt — the seat this profession keeps pulled out for each of us, every hour of the working day, welcoming us to sit. And many of us have sat in it. When we read an opponent’s motion, lip curling, composing the humiliation before finishing the analysis. Casting judgment on the fool who signed the contract (after all, it’s just business). Even looking for — or manufacturing — ways the other side might be held in contempt by the Court. (and we will get our fees!) Where Ephesians traces the ascent — seated in Christ before we learn to walk, walking by faith (not by sight) before we can ever take a stand — the first Psalm charts the descent: walking in bad (ungodly, worldly) counsel, standing in the way of sinners, and finally sitting — settled in — in the seat of the scornful. Anytime I have lowered myself into that seat, I have traded down, because I was already seated in heavenly places in Christ Jesus. Contempt caused the inversion.

No lawyer — and especially no Christian lawyer — can occupy both seats. When the Pharisees looked at the multitude and rendered their contemptuous judgment — this people who knoweth not the law are cursed (John 7:49) — the true High Priest looked at the same flock and was moved with compassion on them, because they fainted, and were scattered abroad, as sheep having no shepherd (Matthew 9:36). Same facts. Opposite holdings. If, as lawyers, we are to see our high calling as serving as God’s priests, then we must embrace compassion over contempt, or we will be barred from eligibility.

Now read the list back as the job description of a lawyer: standing, bearing another’s cause over your heart, running toward the crisis and chaos, pleading, keeping the law with your words and being sought at your door for it (all with the compassion that comes from the true love of Christ). Hard cases and controversies within the city gates . . . what a high calling! A friend of mine, a pastor, said to me not long ago (almost in passing, the way the truest things get said) that what attorneys do every day, representing people before powers they cannot face alone, is priestly work. Then he moved on to the next thing, and I have not been able to escape his observation. He was not flattering the legal profession; he was reading the position description.

The Lamp Has Not Gone Out

Read the position description back one more time and notice what Scripture records about the men who received it. There may be more, but I immediately think of three answers to God’s call regarding priestly service.

A man can seize it. This was Saul — the Philistines massing, the people scattering, the prophet Samuel late — I forced myself, he said, and offered the sacrifice that was never his to offer. [1 Sam. 13:8–14] The tyrannies of the urgent screamed, and he obeyed them. He regarded the sentiments of people more than fidelity to God, and that cost him a kingdom. [1 Sam. 15:24] Or, a man can refuse it. That is the whole indictment of Ezekiel 22 — the wall breached, the breach standing open, every man in Jerusalem having found other work, and God’s answer? I found none. Or a man can answer it. And the answer on record — the one that restored an office that his guardians had disgraced — was no plan, pledge, or resume. It was a boy lying still in a dark room: Speak; for thy servant heareth.

I have experienced all of these answers, in myself or in others, sometimes all in the same week. But I don’t want to seize, and I don’t want to ignore. I want to respond in quick obedience to God’s call — it is a high calling, one I cannot fulfill on my own, but I believe, I know, that I can do all things through Christ Jesus who strengthens me.

When God’s call comes, I want to be found listening and ready to say, “Yes, Sir.”

What I have left to write on this topic is too large for a closing paragraph and deserves better than a summary. Whose office this is — that answer deserves discussion, because it is the most important section of this entire docket. I must talk about the Advocate who holds the office in a Court where we are admitted not by merit but by blood. And I must describe the work, what it looks like day in and day out — there is a process and a form to follow that many lawyers, like you, have been following for years without knowing. And there is more to be said — about the priest’s blessing — before this series finds its conclusion.

I am reminded: the word of the LORD was rare in Eli’s day too. The official religion and the character of those called to service were rotten, the leadership had become compromised, the vision of fathers had grown dim — but the lamp of God had not yet gone out. It has not gone out in our practice of law in this day. The posting is still up: will someone stand in the gap? And all the congregation of Heaven still watches what an ordinary believer will do with this calling. The room is as quiet as you will let it be.

For now, lie down near the Ark, where the Presence resides. That is holy ground.

Speak, LORD; for thy servant heareth.

Turris fortis mihi Deus.

— — —

Michael C. Kelley is a Florida attorney and shareholder at Lawson Huck Gonzalez, PLLC. He writes at Turris Fortis on faith, justice, and the practice of law as peacemaking — not the kind that confuses peace with avoidance, but the kind that contends for it with the weapons God supplies. Turris fortis mihi Deus — Prov. 18:10. Stand in the Gap is the seventh and final essay in a series beginning with Where Chaos Meets Holy Ground and continuing through The Weapons of Peace, They Have Not Spoken Rightly of Me, Breaking the Jar, Tearing Down the High Places, and Bind the Strongman — the essay the series has been walking toward: the restoration of the lawyer as priest. It arrives in two parts. Part 2 — whose office this is, the Advocate who holds it, the shape of its working day, and the blessing — to follow.

Twenty-three years ago, I was sitting alone in the living room of the first home I ever bought, in Leesburg, Florida, meditating on God’s Word, practicing being still in His presence. I was prepared to take as long as was necessary until I heard from the Almighty Creator of Heaven and Earth. I was sitting quietly, straining to listen, trying to hear what my Loving Abba would say to me.

Slowly, imperceptibly at first, my thoughts started to wander toward deeper questions and concerns: concerns that were just scratching below the surface of my consciousness; questions that considered the purpose of my very existence. My heart was heavy with disappointment—knowing that I was still so far away from what God intended—and tempered with hopeful resignation: that His yoke is easy, His burden light, and that whatever good work He had begun in me, He would be faithful to complete.

I knew the truth of His Word; I had read it so many times over the formative years it was written on my heart. I was aware of my sin, my failures and imperfections—the places in my heart God’s light had revealed to me that were not right, places I had realized I was powerless to correct on my own. My heart was sad: I wanted to please my Abba in all I said and did, but I was irritatingly becoming more and more familiar with Paul’s “O wretched man that I am” syndrome.

That irritation began to grow until, in Jobish temerity, I started questioning this Eternal Father about just what it was He was up to with this “experiment” of His here on Earth. My line of questioning went something like this:

I continued on like this for who knows how long: circular logic, questions, growing frustration, even anger—what, after all, is the point?!

And somewhere, in the middle of this internalized trial presented before (or against) this Infinite Being that holds All in the palm of His hand, the One in whom I live and move and have my being, the One who gave me the breath to even rail against Him—here I am, like a little barking dog, like a man shaking his tiny fist at the sky—and somewhere in that fervor I had built myself into, the still, small voice of Abba began to answer. Quietly. Gently. Very kindly—more so than I’m sure I deserved.

His answer began to stream into the thoughts of my mind, like code being written into my very soul. It was soft, but it was anything but weak. The strength of His response silenced my questioning thoughts and accusations, and I sat astonished, and listened to what seemed to be an audible voice, but I couldn’t tell. His fatherly admonition went something like this:

At this, all I could utter was, “Yes, Sir.” Job was answered out of the whirlwind and never given an explanation; I was given an explanation, and it silenced me all the same. But before shame and self-condemnation had time to creep in, He lovingly added—

Selah.

This testimony stands apart from the numbered Turris Fortis essays—it precedes them by twenty-three years. The series lives at turrisfortismihideus.com.

We want him to have a face. The Enemy.

Give a tribe a face to hate and they will love you for it, rally around you, rant and scream in the echo chambers and around the water coolers. And it will feel like progress, achievement. “Down with the Man” or whatever current flavor of tyranny we are opposing today.

Strawman arguments are easy when they wear someone else’s face. We choose our villain by tribe — a Trump or an Obama, Hitler, Stalin, or Mao, Christian Nationalism, the Woke Left, Communists, Fascists, the Jews — whichever boogeyman our people have agreed to fear or hate. And we build a moral life out of opposing our named Enemy. And some have done real harm; some were or are truly evil. I am not dismissing or discounting that. But every flesh-and-blood tyrant is in reality a caricature: a mask, worn for a season and then set down. And the man who spends his strength hating a mask has fought only a costume, a façade. The true Enemy, the Strongman is not flesh and blood.

That said, he is not, in himself, actually strong. That is what we cannot see while the mask holds our attention. His nature is parasitic. He has no strength of his own; he leeches it from masses of frightened, grasping people — from tribes fed on fear and hate, from civilizations that heap up power and call the heap progress. Feed him and he grows terrible. Starve him and he is nothing at all. Isaiah saw the last day of him, when every eye finally lands on the Enemy, stripped of his empires: They that see thee shall narrowly look upon thee, and consider thee, saying, Is this the man that made the earth to tremble, that did shake kingdoms? (Isa. 14:16). The whole creation, staring, unable to believe it was deceived by something so insignificant.

But that day is not this day. In this day he is fed well. The last essay ended at a threshold. The high place came down. The room was swept. And one stands outside it who has no intention of staying outside. So the questions come in order: Who is the strong man that must be displaced? And once displaced, replaced. And if replaced, with what, or with Whom?

Where He Keeps House

Today’s Strongman does not need a crown in a democracy. He has learned to work through the crowd, and it is a more efficient arrangement. Our systems do not reliably reward the wisest ruler; they reward the most convincing performer — the one who can stir fear, flatten what is complicated, manufacture an enemy, and promise certainty, set against the slower voice trying to tell a harder truth. But the demagogue is not the disease. He is the symptom, and the amplifier, and the mirror. What we vote for, election after election, is not the man who sees reality most truly but the man who makes us feel safest, strongest, most seen. He manufactures enemies because a frightened tribe is a worshiping tribe, and a worshiping tribe is food. The parasite found, in the ballot, one more mouth. (That the power is divided at all — that no one owns it permanently — is a real mercy: Babel scattered again. But the seizing heart is patient. It learns the system.)

He was at the first tower. Let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name (Gen. 11:4). The whole program of the world in one sentence: strength heaped up by our own hands until it scrapes the sky, so that the name on it will be ours. It is a counterfeit of the only strong tower there is — Turris fortis mihi Deus. The name of the LORD is a strong tower: the righteous runneth into it, and is safe (Prov. 18:10) — and the whole Christian life comes down to the choice between those two towers: the one we build to make ourselves a name, and the one we run into because it already bears His. Our Enemy is the spirit of Babel, and he has worn empire after empire like a skin. Babylon, and every Babylon since.

He practices law. The law was given as a servant of shalom — a fence around the vulnerable, a channel cut so that justice could run down like water. But he takes the servant and makes of it a weapon and an altar. He never announces himself when he does it. He comes as competence. He comes as zeal. He comes as winning — being a good steward. A profession ordained to end conflict learns instead to feed on it, billing the very war it exists to heal, and the advocate set at the gate of justice to hand a blessing down learns to stand at that same gate and collect rent. We build high places out of our own excellence and burn incense to them and call it professionalism. I have done it. I have mistaken winning for righteousness more times than I can count, and every time, the mistake felt like virtue.

And he keeps a smaller house than any of these. The tribe, the tower, the practice — those are rooms he furnishes on his way to the one he wants. He does not care about the empire; the empire is scaffolding. What he wants is the small interior seat where I decide for myself what is good and what is evil — the throne of the self, the fruit of the first tree, the original high place from which every other high place is copied. Eden had no Babylon in it, but he was already there.

When I first began to practice law, I was already well-grounded in my faith and in scripture. I thought it was faith and knowledge of the Word that would set me apart from competitors. But I found out — very quickly — that those who did not share my faith were just as effective, competent, and excellent at the work (if not more so!) as I was. I thought my faith would drive high performance, but I was mistaken.

What I learned after years of reconciling that fact is that my faith, my relationship and experience with the Father — understanding what He cares about, the stories He wants me to tell of Him — instead, provided a means by which I could discern the brokenness around me. And not just the brokenness, the idolatry fueling it, and the agreements with lies upon which those idols desperately depended and thrived. Because of my faith and the indwelling of God’s Holy Spirit, I could peek behind the curtains of all that animated the vitriol and acrimony behind the disputes I was being brought in to resolve. And that recognition gave me new purpose and new fervor. But God had to ensure that I did not become simply another victim to the Machine of my worldly vocation.

The Forgery

God set three offices in a man: the priest, who stands between and carries others in; the prophet, who tells the truth in the light; and the king, who rules under the only High King there is. The Strongman forges all three, and the forgery is so hard to detect. He builds an altar and calls it a temple — priests to the wrong god. He speaks the invented word that flatters the crowd and calls it truth — prophets of the lie. He annexes ground, holds it by force, and calls the holding order — king of a stolen kingdom. Strip the polished appearance and expensive suits and there is nothing underneath but Self, enthroned as god.

He is hard to see because we are hunting a monster. The monster is the outlier, the exception — that is not me; I would never — and the exception is how he keeps the seat. He does not come as a monster. He is competent. He is often sincere about order, admirable at a distance, impressive up close, and he keeps the law ninety-seven times in a hundred. But the other three tell you everything about who he truly is: he breaks the law at the one moment keeping it would cost him, breaks it where no one is looking, and files the breaking under prudence, self-protection, the end that justifies the means. And what is a little compromise, anyway, when everyone else is engaged in the same patterns of performance?

He is not the man who was never offered the true office. He is the man who seized it rather than received it — and what any of us becomes by small decisions, repeated. The way of Jacob before he was Israel: fight and maneuver for whatever it is I want. Take, don’t wait. God helps those who help themselves . . .

And I’ve often noticed with curiosity: in all his empires there is one thing he has never done. He has never sat down. He cannot rest, cannot enter Sabbath.

Scripture runs the order seat-first — God hath raised us up together, and made us sit together in heavenly places in Christ Jesus (Eph. 2:6) — before we can walk, we must be seated in Jesus. And we must then learn to walk (by faith, not by sight) before we can ever stand. And once we learn to stand, we do so not in our strength but in Christ Jesus who strengthens me. Because the work has been finished only by the Son. The work was never ours to finish.

And that is the one confession the Strongman will not make. He must be in charge. So he is always on his feet: prowling about, seizing, grasping, holding, patrolling his own walls, because the moment he stops holding, everything he has taken for himself unravels and falls apart. There is a counterfeit of this pattern described in the first Psalm — walking in the counsel of the ungodly, standing in the way of sinners, and at last sitting in the seat of the scornful (Ps. 1:1) — the scorner’s chair, where an ungodly and unsanctified man finally rests because he has called evil good so long the lie feels like a finished work and he is content to mock others. That seat is the only false-sabbath the Strongman will ever know. One born of arrogance and pride, who has gone unchallenged and undisturbed for so long he forgets he is nothing but a usurper, a parasite that needs a host to survive. Sadly, many thinking to save their lives have laid them down to serve as his host.

Twelve Legions

From the days of John the Baptist until now the kingdom of heaven suffereth violence, and the violent take it by force (Matt. 11:12). Underneath every other question I have about my vocation as a Christian lawyer sits this one: what does the Son do about violent men? Does He rage against the dying of the light? Does He fight when no one else can or will? Does He sit in resignation, a good God allowing evil to win?

He is the one man in history with the raw power to out-strong every strongman at once, and He tells us plainly what He is holding back: Thinkest thou that I cannot now pray to my Father, and He shall presently give me more than twelve legions of angels? (Matt. 26:53). Twelve legions, standing by. And the order He gives is Put up again thy sword into his place (Matt. 26:52) — spoken to the one friend who drew steel for Him. Then He stretches out His arms for my hammer and my nails. That is the picture of the Son.

That is His answer, and there is no other. The violent take the kingdom by force, and the King takes it back by being taken. He does not out-seize the seizer. He receives the worst the Strongman can do — receives it into His own body — and in the receiving breaks the strong man’s actual power, which was never armies. It was the lie that seizing is the only way to hold anything. Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth (Matt. 5:5) — inherit, not take; the meek receive the earth precisely because they would not draw a sword for it. And His people overcome the same way He did, in the same three refusals: they overcame him by the blood of the Lamb, and by the word of their testimony; and they loved not their lives unto the death (Rev. 12:11). Not by seizing — by a blood already shed, a victory received. Not by the invented, flattering word — by testimony to what God has done. Not by clutching their best lives now — by holding them loose enough to spend. The Way of the Son is the Strongman run backward.

And what should this son do about all of this? That is the question swirling in my heart.

I know my options; I have exercised them all. I can chase shadows and windmills — appoint myself to a mission He never gave and call the self-appointment zeal. I can keep my head down and accumulate — money, position, reputation — until I have gathered enough to force my opinion on the room, which is only the seizing heart being patient: force in slow motion, wearing better manners. I can applaud the man in the arena from a safe seat and call the applause engagement, support, encouragement, honor. I can spend my whole strength bailing water out of my own sinking boat, telling myself it is so that soon I will be able to rescue others sinking around me — forgetting I was never told to make the boat seaworthy; I was told to step out of it. Or I can sigh, and call the sigh pragmatism, objectivity, realism.

Underneath all five runs the same instinct: meet strength with strength, answer his seizure with a better one. Out-chess the Chessmaster. And that is the trap. The day opposing counsel stops being a man and becomes the enemy, I have already lost — I said as much at the beginning of all this, and it is truer here than it was there. No man binds his own strong man. Strength against strength, self against self, is the strong man fighting himself, changing shirts, retaking the same throne in a more acceptable, Good Christian manner.

Plead my cause, O LORD, with them that strive with me: fight against them that fight against me (Ps. 35:1). When the meek man is dragged into the rigged court — and you can be sure that the court is rigged; the evidence bent, the verdict drafted before he walked in — he does not reach for a weapon of the same make. He hands the contention up. He appeals past the bought judge to the Holy Judge who cannot be bought, and then he turns and does the small assigned thing in front of him: this client, this file, this hour, the small meal God actually said to multiply today — a lamp unto my feet, a light unto my path, manna for today. The fifteenth Psalm draws that man whole. LORD, who shall abide in thy tabernacle? who shall dwell in thy holy hill? — and the answer is a portrait made almost entirely of refusals to grasp, down to the hardest of them: He that sweareth to his own hurt, and changeth not (Ps. 15:4). A man who makes a promise, watches the promise turn expensive, and keeps it. He can afford to lose the moment; his seat is not in the outcome of his work. The Strongman, on the other hand, cannot afford to lose anything at all, because his seat is secured only by toil.

The Seven Who Return

When the unclean spirit is gone out of a man, he walketh through dry places, seeking rest, and findeth none. Then he saith, I will return into my house from whence I came out; and when he is come, he findeth it empty, swept, and garnished. Then goeth he, and taketh with himself seven other spirits more wicked than himself... and the last state of that man is worse than the first (Matt. 12:43–45). Sweeping is not dispossession — I teed this up in the last essay and here is the rest. I used to read more wicked than himself as a change of degree: the same sins, grown stronger. It is worse than that. It is a change of kind. The first occupant was loud — the bottle, the rage, the appetite. Loud sins announce themselves, and a man can fight what he is ashamed of. These seven come back refined.

Self-righteousness is seven times stronger than hate and lust and gluttony, because lust knows it is sick and self-righteousness is certain it is well. It moves into the swept house and compliments the housekeeping. It thanks God, right out loud, that this house is not as other houses are. And its twin comes with it — the old monks called it acedia — wearing two masks that look nothing alike: the frenzy and the sigh. Frenetic activism, workaholism, committees and causes and a calendar with no white space — motion as the counterfeit of obedience. Then the other mask: the long exhale of the man who has concluded that nothing he does matters, the sins of omission stacking up like unopened mail. Both masks are one refusal — the refusal to sit still in the cell with God until He opens it. Given the choice, I would rather battle addiction than apathy or my good opinion of myself. Addiction knows it needs rescue, and cries out. The refined seven cry out for nothing. They are comfortable in the cell, papering the walls with velvet, serving lavish dinners inside the prison and calling it the work of God. This is most fearsome; the camouflage most difficult to detect. And the predator — the serpent — that wears it is most deadly.

Bind, Then Fill

One verse before the swept house, Jesus gives the only sequence that works. When a strong man armed keepeth his palace, his goods are in peace: but when a stronger than he shall come upon him, and overcome him, he taketh from him all his armour wherein he trusted, and divideth his spoils (Luke 11:21–22). If there is any formula it is this. The strong man is not reformed, not negotiated with, not tolerated, not out-argued, not gradually improved. He is overcome — by a stronger than he — and the Stronger One is not me. Not by might, nor by power, [not by my intellect and ability, not by my education or experience, not by manipulation or reason] but [ONLY] by my spirit, saith the LORD of hosts (Zech. 4:6). GOD binds the strong man; I do not. My part is the part I have hated my whole striving life: to stop generating strength long enough to be dispossessed of myself — the man drowning who needs to come nearest to death before he can be saved —and then to stay empty no longer than it takes to be filled.

Because the house must not stay empty. Empty, swept, and garnished is exactly the condition the seven are looking for. The room where the idol stood is not meant to be a museum of the victory; it is meant to be occupied. A guarded house he can wait out. An occupied house he cannot enter. Know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost which is in you? (1 Cor. 6:19). Pray the Holy Spirit takes His place in the temple of your house — pray it today, pray it before the coal of repentance is cool to the touch — lest your last state be worse than your first. Bind, cast out, remove, then fill. Dispossession of the idol, of Mammon, of Self, then residence of His Presence. There is no third condition of the house. It is his, or it is His.

And I hear the question that comes next. If the counterfeits are this good — if self-righteousness can move into a swept house and pass for sanctification this easily, if a man can mistake winning for righteousness for years and feel virtuous the whole way — then am I even saved? Are any of us?

Sit with that question; do not rush to dismiss it too quickly. The Pharisee never asked it. Ananias never asked it. Jeroboam never asked it. Saul never asked it. The ones who do, in sincerity, ask cannot so much as lift their eyes — they stand far off, beat their chest, and fall to their knees: O God! be merciful to me a sinner — and Jesus says that man, that woman, that child of the King, went out justified (Luke 18:13–14). The terror of being grouped with the “Depart from me I never knew you” is nearer to grace than the calm, contented, pleased-with-himself Good Christian would ever be. And the assurance, when it comes, will not come from your certainty, your record, or your housekeeping — those would only be one more thing grasped. It rests where everything else in this matter rests. You did not seize your own salvation, and you cannot seize your own keeping. Neither shall any man pluck them out of my hand... no man is able to pluck them out of my Father’s hand (John 10:28–29). His grip. Not mine. Received, not grasped, not taken, like fruit from a tree — all the way down, even this.

And the man with the strong one bound and the Spirit in residence — the man who has finally sat down in Christ, the throne of his heart occupied by the Eternal Living Yahweh — is free for the first time to walk by faith and not by what his eyes, his education, his experience, his profession tell him. And then, he can stand. Not in his own strength, but the strength of the One who has truly saved him from the World, the Flesh, and the Devil. And he who the Son has set free is free indeed. Free to stand in gaps, to stand between justice and mercy, stand between giants and children, stand between life and death. And to carry others in. What that man is, and what his work becomes when the temple of his life is occupied by the presence of his God, is the last of these essays. He has a name older than the profession. He is a priest.

Turris fortis mihi Deus.

— — —

Michael C. Kelley is a Florida attorney and shareholder at Lawson Huck Gonzalez, PLLC. He writes at Turris Fortis on faith, justice, and the practice of law as peacemaking — not the kind that confuses peace with avoidance, but the kind that contends for it with the weapons God supplies. Turris fortis mihi Deus — Prov. 18:10.

This is the sixth essay in a continuing series, best read in order — Start Here has the full map.

What plagued God’s children in the days of the kings plagues us still. But Christ has given us what they never had: real freedom from sin, from the fear of death, from the power of the Enemy, from the whole bondage of this World—and weapons of warfare that strike harder and truer than any sword or spear in the natural. We have been handed a strength the old kings could not have fathomed. And most of us let it sit. We tell ourselves the work is done—and it is. The true work of Jesus on the cross is finished. But finished for what? To what end? Because what comes next is not pacifism, and it is not curating our best life now, and it is not surviving in Babylon until the Lord sees fit to take us home. It is not escape from the world. And it is most certainly not tolerance, coexistence, and the slow assimilation that always follows.

There is real work still to be done. Hard work. Destructive work, like breaking up fallow ground or removing an invasive species. Then the work can be restorative—reconciliation and renewal, possible only after the lie has been exposed and canceled, serpents beheaded and crushed, giants slain and dispossessed, the Dragon defeated. It is an aggressive peacemaking that never mistakes flesh and blood for the Enemy and never recreates the Crusades, but that knows it is in a war all the same, and that the only two options are to stand and fight or get off the field. It tears down every high place that has exalted itself against the knowledge of Christ—institutionally and individually—under the discernment of the Holy Spirit: a “rhema” living word proceeding from the written Word, mediated by His hovering Presence, the Covering.

And the war is urgent. When the Spirit reveals a thing of the Enemy, or of my own flesh, or of the cares of this world that would choke me like thorns, my response cannot be—must not be—calculated, budgeted, negotiated, or stewarded well. I have to let Him be ruthless, not tolerant, with my flesh and with every Thing of Darkness that has made camp inside or near my home. Now. Alert. Awake. Not an emptied mind, but a mind filled with Christ. This is what the road of repentance actually looks like once a man sets his feet on it—metanoia, which is not a feeling of sorrow but a reversal of the feet, the body coming around to follow where the heart has already turned. And a man who turns to follow Christ in earnest learns quickly that the road is lined on both sides with high places—altars of false worship, idolatry, deception—and that he has been handed an axe, and knows what must be done.

This fifth essay following Breaking the Jar (parts one and two) is about the axe. And about the most dangerous thing that can happen to a man who learns to swing it.

The Cut Must Be True. The Cut Must Be Quick.

When Israel’s God commanded the destruction of the high places, He did not command an investigation. No committee. No season of discernment. No market study and business plan for an orderly transition. Ye shall destroy their altars, and break their images, and cut down their groves (Exod 34:13). The verbs are violent and fast and non-negotiable. Break. Cut. Burn. Nowhere in the sentence is there a verb that means to consider.

The urgency, the speed is the point. The high place does not fall when it is examined. It falls when it is struck. And the gap between seeing it and striking it is the gap in which it makes its case. Refuse the temptation to negotiate.

I have learned this in my own battles, over a long obedience in the same direction. The Spirit shows me a high place—a lie I have lived under, an idol I have been feeding, a familiar voice I mistook for my own—and in the half-second of clean sight the thing is finished, if I strike now. Because if I pause. If I turn it over in my mind, attempt to negotiate a partial surrender. If I allow one round of well, but — then the oldest sentence in the world arrives, the first the serpent ever spoke: Yea, hath God said? (Gen 3:1). The moment I answer that question, the moment I sit down to negotiate the terms of my own deliverance, I lose. Negotiate with darkness, and you are recaptured by it. Debate the high place, and it will remain.

And the cost of the spared idol is not abstract. Nadab and Abihu brought fire before the LORD—worship, real worship, the actions of priests—but it was strange fire, fire God had not commanded. And the fire that should have honored Yahweh devoured the men where they stood (Lev 10:1–2). Ananias and Sapphira sold their land and laid most of the price at the apostles’ feet, keeping back only a portion and lying about the rest, and they fell dead from that compromise (Acts 5:1–10). Lot’s wife walked out of Sodom—she obeyed, left the city, she was nearly clear—but looked back, and the one glance left her a pillar of salt on the plain (Gen 19:26). None of these was a rebel per se. Each obeyed almost entirely but died on the fraction held back. That is the terror of the high place you compromise with: it does not matter that you tore down the other ninety-nine. The evil you spared is the evil you answer for. There is no parley with it. You cannot rationalize it, negotiate a coexistence with it, or leave it standing while you attend to weightier things. It must come down, and it must come down now.

So the cut must be quick, and it must be true. One stroke. The samurai warrior does not saw; the surgeon does not saw. Light does not wrestle the dark—you flip the switch and the darkness is gone. It never had standing to contend. And these serpents do not coexist with you. The python coils, the Leviathan surfaces, and both of them strangle if given the chance. Give them an inch of territory and they take the whole. You do not treat with them. The head comes off and goes into the fire, and you do not stand over the body admiring your work. Tolerance is not a word in this trade. To tolerate a high place is not to be neutral toward it. It is to preserve it. And a root of sin preserved will, in its season, reclaim the whole garden.

Begin With the Beam. Then the Mote.

Before any of us lifts the axe toward the culture, toward our professions, or another man’s life, we lift it toward our own. Jesus said it plainly: First cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother’s eye (Matt 7:5). The man who has not let the Spirit do the painful work in him is not anointed to name it in anyone else. So, I start by confessing the lies I have agreed to.

Because that is what they are. Lies of this kind are not vague moods or stray thoughts. They are binding agreements. The heart enters them the way a party enters a contract—sometimes deliberately, more often by long course of dealing, sometimes inherited from a prior generation and ratified by my own conduct before I ever read the terms. Once the agreement is in place, it governs. It assigns obligations and intent, allocates risk. It defines performance and sets the default rule for how I live. A Christian lawyer should be the last man confused about what to do with such an instrument. It must be terminated.

The first agreement I signed—the one I keep having to break—is that my productivity, my efficiency, my profitability define my worth. I often face the fiery dart that I am worth more dead than alive. Or that I am only worth what I do next, because what I did yesterday is now past. I want to be a good provider, a faithful husband, a present father, a productive partner, a generous leader, a good steward of what I am given. None of those desires is wrong. They are good. But a good desire slips its place and becomes the thing I serve instead of fruit the Spirit grows in me while I abide. The desire is good. My grip on it is the idol.

This one runs in my family line—a familiar spirit, in the old sense, something that knew my father before I adopted it. My father believed God was the provider; he would have said so without flinching. He also knew, with equal and opposite certainty, that unless he rose every day and did the work, his children would starve. He must provide. He held both beliefs at once. The first was his theology. The second was his agreement with a lie, and the second is the one that often governed his work. He wrestled with it, to be sure. My point is not to diminish the memory of my beloved earthly Papa. But he struggled in daily life to let God break the five loaves and two fishes of his existence and multiply them exponentially. I struggle with the same thought. The lie that drove his admirable work ethic is in my bones as well. I feel its pull every morning—often it wakes me up before the early alarm. Most mornings, praise Yahweh, I break the agreement before I allow myself to begin work. But it stays there, that familiar lie, crouching at my door, looking for any opening I might permit. This is a daily crucifixion of my Old Man. (no pun intended!)

The second agreement I wrestle with is the cultural twin of the first, more dangerous because it sounds (and has been represented as) biblical: God helps those who help themselves. That sentence is not in the Bible. It is in Franklin and children’s stories. And it is antichrist, because the whole weight of the gospel falls the other way: apart from me ye can do nothing (John 15:5). Not little. Not some things. Nothing. The man who believes God helps the self-helping has built a works-based economy inside his own heart, and he will run that economy in his marriage, his practice, his church, his prayer closet, until everything is a transaction and grace has nowhere to land.

The third lie is more subtle, and I find it everywhere in myself: the good will not last, so brace for the loss that is surely coming. It dresses as humility—I’m only being realistic, pragmatic—but it is fear, and it is doubt and unbelief, and it slanders a Father who giveth us richly all things to enjoy (1 Tim 6:17). The man under this lie takes every gift with one hand already on the door. He is never present in the blessing, never able to trust the Giver, and in the end arranges his whole life around dodging a loss he has imagined over and over. There is no fear in love; but perfect love casteth out fear (1 John 4:18). He has not yet been mastered by perfect love. Something else still masters him.

There are more. There are always more. But these I know from personal experience and heredity, and they are thorns in my flesh that I battle regularly.

The Pattern of the Kings

Scripture keeps a record of this, and it is merciless. Israel’s history is, in large part, the story of what its kings did with the bamot—the high places. The historical books grade king after king on one line: did he tear them down? Asa was a faithful king, but the high places were not removed (1 Kings 15:14). Jehoshaphat was a faithful king, howbeit the high places were not taken away (1 Kings 22:43). Jehoash. Amaziah. Azariah. Jotham. The same notation, generation after generation, a refrain of reform left incomplete. The work of consecration left to coexist with desecration. Good men. They worshiped Yahweh. But they tolerated high places. And those high places did what high places always do—theological drift, syncretism, the slow conversion of true worship into something pagan, until the people were burning their own children on altars their grandfathers built and could no longer discern how far from their God they had fallen.

Only two kings broke the pattern. Hezekiah removed the high places, and brake the images, and cut down the groves, and brake in pieces the brasen serpent that Moses had made: for unto those days the children of Israel did burn incense to it: and he called it Nehushtan (2 Kings 18:4)—he named a relic of genuine revelation a mere piece of brass the instant he recognized it had become an idol. Josiah went further, the most thorough reform in the nation’s history: defiling the altars, breaking the pillars, burning the bones of the false priests on their own shrines (2 Kings 23). The text honors these two above the rest because they were ruthless with evil where the others practiced tolerance. An age-old lie.

But there is a king worse than the ones who left the high places standing, and his story should frighten us most, because he was truly anointed, truly called, truly reformed before allowing himself to be caught in compromise. And he tricked himself into thinking, believing he was practicing obedience.

Saul is sent to utterly destroy Amalek (a horrible, polluted race of cannibals)—spare them not (1 Sam 15:3). And he nearly does. He strikes down almost all of it. He keeps only the best: Agag the king, alive as a trophy, and the choicest of the sheep and oxen—to sacrifice unto the LORD (1 Sam 15:15). That is the detail that should alarm us. He honestly did not keep the plunder for himself. He kept it for worship—the wrong kind of worship, but worship, nonetheless. He left one altar standing and called it devotion—and this is what all the high places represent: false, confused, compromised devotion. Samuel’s verdict is the whole doctrine of this essay in a line: obedience is better than sacrifice (1 Sam 15:22). Partial obedience does not receive partial credit. It is disobedience wearing the cloak of worship. The thing you spare because it seems too good to cut—the Agag you save as a trophy, the choice sheep you mean to lay on the altar later—is the very thing the command was about. And, of course, the spared king does not stay spared. Agag is hewn in pieces by the prophet of God anyway (1 Sam 15:33), because what you will not cut willingly must still be cut in the end, at greater cost—the cost of kingship—after it has done its damage. So when the Spirit names the high place in your life, do not negotiate an exception for it. Do not hold the best of it back for any reason. Do not rationalize a different use to prevent waste. Cut it now, cut it immediately, while the command is fresh, without presumption or self-deception, and without guile.

The lesson is frightening. The men who kept a high place were not the wicked kings. They were the good ones—the ones who looked good to the people, who seemed to grant compassion and mercy. But their sincerity did not save the altar. The hand of mercy and compassion was extended toward evil. They offered a partial obedience, in the form of sacrifice. The Almighty God requires complete obedience.

The High Places of a Christian Man

So what are my high places? Not only the obvious cultural idols I recited above, though those are real—career as identity (what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul — Mark 8:36); mammon, the wealth I intend to steward but will grow into the rival lord the heart cannot serve alongside Yahweh (ye cannot serve God and mammon — Matt 6:24, where he says cannot, not ought not); politics as salvation (put not your trust in princes — Ps 146:3); the sentimental Jesus refashioned for a therapeutic age, gentle without the consuming fire of holiness, divorced from the One whose eyes are as a flame of fire (Rev 1:14); the sovereign self of the moment, the my truth that bows to no claim from outside itself (ye are not your own; for ye are bought with a price — 1 Cor 6:19–20).

Those are real, insidiously deceptive, lingering exalted in the upper echelons of society and our hearts. And all must come down. But, they are sort of obvious—or surface level at best. Today, I have grown more suspicious of the high places, the thoughts that exalt themselves against the knowledge of Christ that do not announce themselves so boldly, so obviously—the ones built into the structure of being a good Christian in the modern age, the ones that decorate the institution of organized Christianity. The high place of my own self-image—a true man of God. A gift to my family and others. The cherished picture of what it is to be a godly Christian man, a serious believer, a man of the Word. That thought which exalts itself against the knowledge of Christ (2 Cor 10:5) is very often one about how well I am following the LORD. These high places are hardest to see, because they are shades of gray, slight deviations, minimal compromises, built of what appear to be right materials. These are consecrated brass. A Nehushtan—a true gift from God, a genuine deliverance from torment—that has slowly, secretly become the thing I burn incense to.

Which brings me to the trap the rest of this essay is aimed at. One waiting for those passionate to swing the axe of deliverance.

The High Place Built on the Grave of the Last One

I have two buddies over coffee to thank for this one—

The really insidious thing about self-satisfaction is, the moment you tear down a high place, that idol-factory of your heart begins—immediately, instinctively, almost lovingly—to build a new high place on the grave of the old.

You break the idol of mammon, and within a week you are privately proud of how little money means to you now—now you are the man who has defeated that old demon. You break the idol of reputation and find yourself guarding your reputation out of a new desire to project humility. You tear down the high place of career and raise, on the smoldering rubble, an altar to the man who has escaped the pull of the World. The hunt for high places becomes a new high place. Being delivered becomes the subtlest idol of all, worse than the ones it replaced, because it is camouflaged as obedience, religious devotion, and chastity. You cannot see the deadliest predators. And these predators wear your face, speak with your voice. They look the part. And seem so close to holiness. They glimmer like the Nahash. And the voice offers sound logic, reason, and understanding. A form of godliness that denies the true power of God.

The heart’s habit of raising new idols on old graves is more insidious than I can say. It is the seven worse spirits coming back to the house that was swept and garnished (Matt 12:43–45) — and this is the hinge of it: the house was clean, and the house was empty, and empty is exactly what let them back in. Sweeping is not dispossession. Tidying the room is not the same as evicting its occupant. A man can reform every visible behavior and never once sit down and receive a new tenant—and the old strong one walks back in with seven worse, and the last state is worse than the first. The idols come back dressed as virtues now, fluent in theology. And the once-delivered person walks into a cell of self-righteousness, so trapped in the upside down of Babylon that he can’t even recognize when the Son of God is standing before him.

This is what Nicodemus could not grasp. The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is every one that is born of the Spirit (John 3:8). You cannot summon the wind or bottle it. You cannot turn the sound of it into a formula and sell it. To be a child of the Spirit is to be unshackled, unformulated, unable to live off yesterday’s manna—and most of us, most of the time, do not want that sort of vulnerability and utter dependence. We want assurances, safety, procedure, the barns filled with grain. We would rather be experts in appearances and certainty—holding back just enough to be sure we are safe—than children of a God who requires complete faith, the sort of faith that abandons all forms of safety, that abandons all forms of self . . . reliance, satisfaction, control, esteem. And that wanting to be in control is the highest place contending with true worship.

So here is where I must disappoint. I have no clear answer. There is no formula, no self-help trick to living your best life now. Tearing down high places cannot be a program, a discipline I master and then administer. The instant I treat it as a skill—(1) identify the idol, (2) engage in self-deliverance, (3) move to the next—I have built the master high place, the altar to my own competence at controlling outcomes and delivering myself. Something has to break in and rescue me from all forms of self. And I have begun to experience the one thing Who does it.

How a Man Lives in the Spirit

When the Spirit exposes a high place—a tormenting thought that has invaded my peace, an accusation of the Accuser I have started to believe, a lie I brought my life into agreement with, an old familiar spirit I have lived with so long it feels like a limb—I do the plain things first, and fast. I name it aloud. The lie that lives in the dark feeds there; named in the light it starts to die. I expose it. I cancel it. I rebuke it. I renounce the agreement out loud and purpose in my heart to turn. On the hard ones, the ones grown so deep into me I cannot tell where they end and I begin, I cry the two oldest prayers of a divided man: Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief (Mark 9:24), and God be merciful to me a sinner (Luke 18:13).

All of that is right. All of it is necessary. But if I stop there I am still on the rubble, head down, taking my own spiritual pulse—and that posture, eyes on self, is the soil the next high place grows in (or where the old one keeps its root). Naming and renouncing, done alone, curves back on the self and becomes navel-gazing in the dress of repentance. So the moment the renouncing is done, I break the curve.

Every tormenting thought, every exposed lie, every demon the Spirit drags into the light in my heart, I turn at once into intercession for another. For the ones I love who I know are in the same fire—the same serpents, the same traps, the same familiar spirits I have just been shown in myself. And most of all—this is the part the flesh cannot stomach and the part that seems to work best—for my enemies. Not my spiritual enemies. With those there is no treaty; they made their choice, and I have no mercy and no tolerance and no kind word for the powers of darkness (neither do I bring any railing accusation against them, but simply state, “The LORD rebuke you”). No, I mean my human enemies. The men who lied to and about me, who deceived and took advantage of me, betrayed me, decided to be my enemy—decided not just to let me offer to wash their feet but that I should be down there washing their feet. (Imagine Jesus washing the feet of one He knew already betrayed Him to be tortured, publicly humiliated, and executed! I long for such grace, to be like Him.)

For my enemies and adversaries, my opponents and the ones waging warfare viciously against me and those like me, I get on my knees. Like David, who prayed for the men hunting his life. Like Daniel, who interceded for the empire that dragged him off in chains. I supplicate for them. I cry out for them. I take up their cause. I forgive them and plead for them even though my own flesh hates doing it, accuses me of betraying myself, and the stuff that comes out of me seems more like an infected wound than any fragrant precious oil. Our true selves really do not want to die!

And here the lawyer in me is not a figure of speech. It is actually how I pray. I bring an action on their behalf before the only Court that truly matters. I plead the cause of the poor and the needy, the orphan and the widow, and the enemy, before the Judge of all the earth. I file an action of ejectment against the powers squatting on ground that belongs to Christ, and I demand the trespasser be removed and lawful possession restored. I sue for restitution of what the thief has stolen from the man who wronged me, and I ask that what was taken be given back, with increase. I bring every petition on statutes already enacted and relief already secured, because every promise of God is a vested right and every word of Christ a cause of action, and the instrument I am pleading was signed in blood and cannot be revoked.

I want to be like my Savior. So, I do not pray vaguely. I quote the Word. I worship the way David worshiped, reciting the Psalms back to their Author. I speak Jesus most of all—and the sharpest blade that I have found is the words of Christ Himself, as He takes up the law and the wisdom and the prophets, His own citations of Moses and David and Isaiah and Jeremiah. Those cut quickest and with the most lethal effect. Those take the heads off giants and Leviathans in one stroke. It is written (Matt 4:4) — three words, and the wilderness tempter has no answer. So I write my petitions out of the Words of the Son. I pray His promises as binding statutes. I file my causes of action on the relief He has already made available. And I ask the Almighty to tear the high place down and to establish His kingdom—by the finger of God (Luke 11:20)—in the freedom of a man delivered from the dark.

This is what keeps the work from ever becoming a method. You cannot professionalize intercession for your enemies (plus, people will think you are crazy). There is no technique for loving the man who betrayed you; it has to be drawn out of you fresh every time, by the Spirit, against the full force of the flesh. The work cannot harden into a formula, because the formula does not exist. Every high place, the instant it is exposed, becomes not a trophy on a shelf but fuel to be burned in the holy fire of intercession—a reason to get off the ground, off myself, onto my knees for someone else. The eyes come off the broken altar. The eyes come off me. They go onto Jesus, and onto the ones He is serving and bleeding and interceding for at the right hand of the Father this very minute—because that is what He is doing now: he ever liveth to make intercession for them (Heb 7:25). To pray for my enemies is only to do, in my small prayer closet, what the Great High Priest is doing before the Throne. This is what Jesus is doing for each of us: advocating on behalf of those who [still] slay Him.

I pray like this with my body when I can—on my knees, on my face, in the quiet of my time with Abba. I take actual steps, actual work, and ask for actual restitution to the man I wronged or who wronged me. I do it in the prayer closet or the drive back to the office when I am alone. And I do it corporately with my wife or close friends. But I take the step. I do not merely hold the lofty thought and the good idea. I do not pontificate. I do not curate my deliverance for an audience. I get on the floor and pray hard for someone who does not deserve it (because I don’t deserve it either!), and in the praying the high place I just tore down has no material left to be rebuilt on—because I am no longer standing victorious over it. I am on my knees somewhere else, with my hands full of someone else’s cause.

The Turn

That is the turn. That is what Tearing Down the High Places actually is—not a demolition a man completes and then admires, but a permanent reorientation of the eyes, off the self and onto the Father and the ones He loves. The jar was broken in worship; the worship has become movement in a different direction from self; the direction is outward and upward—out toward the family-member, friend, and enemy being prayed for, up toward the Judge who hears the cause.

And see what the man has become, kneeling there. He has stopped being a litigant for himself. He pleads another’s cause before the throne, on the authority of a covenant signed in blood, asking that the trespasser be ejected and the captive set free. He stands in the gap. He offers the one sacrifice the New Covenant still asks—the sacrifice of praise to God continually (Heb 13:15)—on behalf of people who cannot or will not offer it for themselves.

That is a priest. That is the whole of what a priest is: a man who stands between, who carries the names of others into the Holy of Holies, who pleads. The lawyer who learns to tear down his own high places by interceding for his enemies has, without marking the moment, become the thing the last essay of this series will be about. He has become a priest. And a prophet, who names the high place in the light and will not call brass anything but brass. And a king—a small king, a lower-king under the only High King there is, who holds real authority over real darkness only because he has surrendered entirely to the authority above him.

But notice what is not yet finished. The high place is broken. The house is swept. But it is not yet filled. To tear an idol down is to empty a room, and an empty room is an invitation. There is a strong one who held that house, who will not vacate because the furniture has been rearranged, who waits at the threshold for the room to stay empty long enough to walk back in. Tearing down is real, and necessary, and not enough. The office is meant to be recovered, not merely vacated — received, not seized. What binds the strong one, and what fills the cleared and waiting house, is the next thing. That is where we go from here.

The axe is in your hand. The first high place is in your own heart. It has your face, and it is most likely the cherished image of how well you are following Christ. Strike it quick. Do not negotiate. Do not let yea, hath God said get a word in. And the instant it falls—before your heart can pour a footing for the next one on its grave—get up off the rubble, get on your knees, and pray, hard, for the man or woman who wronged you.

That is how a delivered man lives in the Spirit. That is how the high places stay down. And that, it turns out, is how a lawyer begins to become a priest.

— — —

Michael C. Kelley is a Florida attorney and shareholder at Lawson Huck Gonzalez, PLLC. He writes at Turris Fortis on faith, justice, and the practice of law as peacemaking — not the kind that confuses peace with avoidance, but the kind that contends for it with the weapons God supplies. Turris fortis mihi Deus — Prov. 18:10.

This is the fifth essay in a continuing series, best read in order — Start Here has the full map.

I need to write a Part 2 to the Alabaster Jar article. I admire Mary because she “got” it. When she broke her jar for Jesus, she had already been broken of self. As I ponder that article today, I have to wonder, “What does it take for me to be broken?” This second essay is my answer to that question. And it begins with Waiting.

My soul waits for the Lord more than watchmen wait for the morning; more than watchmen wait for the morning. — Psalm 130:6

Waiting on God is active; it is not passive. It is not sitting around waiting for something to happen. It is not doom-scrolling or playing video games, and it is not sleeping the day away while you hope something good happens. Neither is it going about your normal business with the mentality that if God wants to do something different, He knows where to find me. It is not apathy, and it is not stoicism—both ditches of pseudo-intellectual passivity that many fall into. Rather, it is digging for buried treasure where you have some idea, but cannot be sure, of where it is hidden. It is seeking the one pearl of great value, worth more than everything else you own combined. It is pouring over scriptures and prophecies and star charts like Magi waiting for a Messiah not yet born. It is the mother waking early, at 3:33 a.m., to pray for the family and the loved ones who desperately need Him. It is the father rising hours earlier than he has to, to seek the Father in quiet and stillness.

And contrary to all the common sense of the world system, it is the most productive and dutiful thing a person can do. There is no better expenditure of a life than the hours spent in solitude, waiting upon Abba. It is hard work, the stuff of warriors. Playing games, exercising, eating, sleeping, running the day’s errands—these are easy. Some necessary. Others excuses and abdication. But even hard, visible, productive, spend-yourself labor is easy, in its way, because it feels like you are doing something worth doing. Waiting on God is the harder work, and the more significant: grueling, Gethsemane labor—sweating drops of blood, crushed under the weight of all that depends on you, all that waits on you to move. And yet you sit in the silence, and still you wait. It is wrapping your arms tight around the leg of the Father and refusing to let go—believing He is carrying you where you would never dare to tread alone, on your own strength, by yourself. There is no better use of your time, your life, your breath than to wait upon the LORD.

I feel I have spent my life waiting, but often not very well.

The protest

There is a sentence in the Psalms that I have seldom been able to obey without first arguing with it. Be still, and know that I am God (Psalm 46:10). The instant I read it, a second voice answers—the voice of the reasonable, professional, exquisitely well-trained man—and the voice says: Still for how long? What about your work, your responsibilities, your obligations? What about everyone who is counting on you? Unless you stop being too heavenly minded to be of any earthly good, people you love will starve.

The questions are not wrong, exactly. In the natural order, they are even commendable. They are the questions of a man who has been entrusted with things—files, deals, a firm, a family, the literal liberty and fortune of clients who pay him to never, ever sit still. The lawyer is hired precisely because he will not wait. He will not let the silence sit; he fills it. He does not abide an unanswered letter; he answers it. He is the one who moves while others freeze, who acts while others deliberate, who is paid by the hour to do something. Stillness, to a temperament like this, does not register as obedience, but as malpractice.

So when God says wait, the trained man hears abandon your post. And he refuses—out of what he is sure is faithfulness, but is more often fear wearing faithfulness as a robe. This is the first thing I had to learn: that my reflexive busyness was not the opposite of sloth. It was sloth’s respectable twin. Both of them are ways of refusing to wait on God. One refuses by doing nothing. The other refuses by doing everything.

The counterfeit

The enemy does not usually fight a command head-on. He counterfeits it. He cannot stop you from waiting, so he sells you a fake wait and lets you congratulate yourself on your patience while you starve.

Watch how he did it in the wilderness, because the three temptations of Christ are, every one of them, temptations of a man who is being made to wait (Luke 4; Matthew 4). Turn these stones into bread — that is, do not wait for the Father to feed you; provide for yourself; you, and your family, have to eat, don’t you? Throw yourself down from the temple — that is, do not wait for the Father to move; force His hand; if the present is not the mission, then jumpstart the mission, hurl yourself into danger and obligate God to show up and show off. Bow down, and all the kingdoms are yours — that is, do not wait for the Father to give you the inheritance He has promised; take the shortcut, without the pain and death of the cross; bend the knee to a lesser power and have it now, quick and easy. Self-provision, forced timing, the idolatrous shortcut. These are the three faces of impatience. These are how the world, the flesh, and the devil get you to sell your soul.

I have turned stones into bread and called it diligence, being a faithful steward. I have flung myself off cliffs and called it stepping out in faith. I have bowed to things I would never have named as gods, because they offered me a faster route to a thing God had already promised to give me slowly.

There is a subtler counterfeit still, and it is the one that besets people like us most—the responsible, the competent, the dutiful elder brothers of the world. It is the waiting of the good Christian man. Many have worn that title in their own way. The Pharisee of Jesus’s day was, in his own mind, a man who waited on God; he was biding his time, keeping the law spotless, holding himself in reserve for the day the Messiah would come and hand him the keys to the Kingdom. But it was not waiting. It was a holding pattern with the eyes fixed on the self—a shadow government assembling in the dark, rehearsing for the moment it would finally be put in charge, when all the nations of the world would finally be blessed under his self-righteous rule.

That is not the posture of a servant watching for his Master. That is the posture of a usurper checking his watch. And it is terrifyingly easy for a serious Christian professional to slide into it: to treat the whole of this life as a green room before the show, to keep ourselves credentialed and politically spotless and ready to rule, mistaking ambition held in escrow for faith.

None of these is the real thing. Real waiting does not provide for itself, does not force the clock, does not take the shortcut, and does not stockpile power against the day it gets to be in charge. Real waiting keeps its eyes off itself entirely. And that, it turns out, is the one thing the counterfeit can never do.

The plateau

I know the difference because I embraced the counterfeit for years and called it the summit—the Western man’s normal Christian life, the one who did not bury his talent.

I had done, I thought, the hard thing. Somewhere back in my younger faith I had come to the genuine end of myself and prayed the genuine prayer: LORD, I cannot do this on my own; I cannot do it at all; take my life and do with me as You will. And He took it. I laid it down and He picked it up. He opened doors I had not knocked on and carried me into rooms I had not earned. And I concluded, reasonably, that I had arrived. I have reached the plateau, I told myself. I am where God wants me. I have given Him the one thing He asked for—complete control. I am sold out.

But He wanted more. Not more striving. He wanted me, the part of me still standing just behind my own surrender, watching to see how the surrender would pay off. So He let the rain stop. The doors that had swung open now swung shut. The sense of His nearness thinned to nothing. And I did what a dutiful man does in a drought: I worked harder at waiting. I rose earlier. I prayed longer. I poured myself out—and still nothing came, and I cried the only honest prayer I had left, which was not a prayer so much as a complaint with a verse attached: What more do I need to do? I know not what else to do. I can only keep pursuing You, because I am otherwise lost—too far gone to be of any earthly good; not far gone enough to be of any heavenly good.

It was in that season that I sat down with my father’s old notes—pages he had written eleven years before, three and a half years before he was gone—and read his hand making the very promises to himself that I was making to mine. And the thought rose up: Dad believed all of this, too. Did any of it ever come true for him? In the years that have followed I had earned the right to ask the question that Job and his friends asked, and I asked it with boldness. Does God perform His Word, or do we just die holding it?

What I heard back was not consolation. It was correction, and it was this: There is a generation that will see it. It may not have been your father’s. It may not be yours. But My Word is true. I perform it—you do not. And I am not on your timetable.

I had been doing the thing I am trained to do, the thing that pays my bills, the thing I cannot stop doing: I had been judging God by the evidence in front of me on this particular afternoon, rather than by everything I already knew to be true about His character. I was reading the present circumstance like a closing statement, when it was only a line of testimony in a trial God had not yet rested.

That is what the plateau is for. It is not a reward for arriving. It is the place where God reaches in and removes the last thing your surrender was still hiding—the watching, weighing, calculating self that had agreed to give Him everything provided it could keep score. Watchman Nee said it more plainly than I can: what we most need to be delivered from is not our circumstances but our selves; God lets the trial sit on us not to break the situation but to break the one inside it who will not stop looking at himself. The drought was not God withholding. It was God operating.

The turn

The thing that finally moved was so small I almost missed it.

In one of my worst dry seasons, I had taken to going to an empty church building in the middle of the day and praying for an hour on the floor—pressing in, asking, seeking, knocking, demanding answers with Scripture in my fist like a brief. And one day I walked in and simply did not feel like praying. I felt like going to the piano. So I did. I played before God alone for an hour. The next time, I prayed. The time after that, I played again, or I lay flat on the ground, or I did things I had never done before and could not have explained. And still — still — no answer came to the question I had been hammering on, until I heard from someone, not even talking to me, that two of the most important things a Christian can do are worship and intercession. And the whole locking mechanism began to turn over.

Because here is what I had been doing wrong, after I had done everything else right. I had laid down my life. I had picked up His desires. My heart was, as far as I could tell, genuinely His, without guile. But the eyes were still on me. Every hour of that fierce, sincere, sweating prayer had been, underneath, a prayer about myself — what do I lack, what must I do, when do I get the answer, why am I still here. And the Father was not saying try harder. He was saying: Take your eyes off yourself and put them on Me—that is worship. Take your eyes off yourself and put them on others—that is intercession. You have asked, and sought, and knocked, and that was right; now set all of it down and just look at Me.

That is the secret hidden inside the command to wait, and it is why the command is active and not passive. To wait on God is not to suspend the work. It is to be relieved of the only work the self ever really wanted to do, which is to manage its own outcome. What is left, when that is taken away, is not idleness. What is left is the two most strenuous and least self-interested acts a creature can perform: to adore the One in front of you and to carry the one beside you. Eyes up. Eyes out. The waiting room turns out to be the one place on earth where it is impossible to be selfish, because the self has nothing left to do there but die.

F. B. Meyer wrote that the manna only ever fell where the cloud of God’s presence was brooding—that the food was certain to be found on the very ground that, an hour before, had been bare. The waiting is not the absence of provision. The waiting is standing under the cloud until the bread comes down. And he wrote, too, the sentence I have leaned on for years: that God is already in our tomorrows; that He is down in front, the way a shepherd walks ahead of the flock; that all the tomorrows of our life have to pass Him before they can ever get to us. The thing you are waiting for has already been to see the Father. It cannot reach you in a place of self-preservation. That is why you can sit in the silence without panicking, and why the silence is not empty.

The reward

There is a promise at the bottom of all this, and it is the one every weary person already half-knows by heart.

He gives power to the faint; and to those who have no might He increases strength. Even the youths shall faint and be weary, and the young men shall utterly fall: but they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; they shall walk, and not faint (Isaiah 40:29–31).

Read it slowly and notice the scandal in it: the strong fall, and the waiting fly. Not the busy. Not the gifted. Not the ones who turned the most stones into bread. The one who waits. Strength is not what you bring into the wait; it is what the wait does to you.

I waited patiently for the Lord; and He inclined to me and heard my cry. He brought me up out of the pit, out of the miry clay, and He set my feet upon a rock (Psalm 40:1–2).

The lifting is on His end. The waiting is on ours.

And the highest reward is not even the renewed strength. It is what the strength is for. When the risen Christ had finished His work and was about to leave His friends, He did not send them out. He told them to wait—remain in the city until you are clothed with power from on high (Luke 24:49). They had the commission already; they had seen the resurrection with their own eyes; every instinct a competent person has would have sent them running into the streets that morning. And He sat them down to wait. Because the work He had for them could not be done in their own strength, and the only way to receive His was to stop generating their own long enough to be filled. The wait was the antechamber of Pentecost. It always is. The swept house is not left empty for nothing; it is held open, waiting, until the Spirit comes and fills it.

This is the part the world will never “get,” and we should stop expecting it to. We are not called to climb back into the boat and ride out the storm in something seaworthy and sensible. We are called to do the absurd thing—to step out onto the water at His word (not our own initiative), and to wait there, on a footing no engineer would certify, for the only One who can hold us up. It will not look efficient. It will not look prosperous. It will not look wise. It will look, from the shore, like a man standing still while everyone else rows. But the man standing still is the one wrapped around the leg of the Father, going exactly where the Father goes and nowhere else, and there is no safer place in all the world to be.

So wait. Not the way the dead wait, but the way the watchman waits—awake in the dark, leaning toward a dawn he cannot yet see but has been promised, more sure of the morning than of his own eyes.

The Lord is good to those who wait for Him, to the soul who seeks Him
(Lamentations 3:25).

Seek Him at the third hour of the morning when the house is silent. Adore Him when you would rather be solving something. Carry the people He has given you on your back into His presence and lay them down there. And when the rational, professional, exquisitely trained voice rises up to ask how long, and what about your work, and who is counting on you—answer it honestly. Tell it that this is the work. Tell it that you have never been more on duty in your life.

Because waiting on God is not what you do before God acts. It is what God does to you while you cannot.

Michael C. Kelley is a Florida attorney and shareholder at Lawson Huck Gonzalez, PLLC. He writes at Turris Fortis on faith, justice, and the practice of law as peacemaking — not the kind that confuses peace with avoidance, but the kind that contends for it with the weapons God supplies. Turris fortis mihi Deus — Prov. 18:10.

This is part two of the fourth essay in a continuing series, best read in order — Start Here has the full map.

The world has a smell. We are born into it, and never notice. The way a fish has no idea it is wet. It is the smell of striving and keeping score, of measuring and being measured, of eat-or-be-eaten and take-what-you-can and only-the-strong-survive. We wear it our whole lives. We wear it to church. We wear it into the office and into the courtroom, the boardroom, the funeral of a cherished loved one. We have worn it so long that we mistake it for something else—competence, seriousness, respectability, a man who has his life in good order. I wore it like the rags of my own righteousness for years trying to make myself into that witness of God I wanted so desperately to be, that image of a man wholly given to the LORD, that example to others of THIS is what it means to be a “good Christian.” I worshiped my own image of righteousness, my faith, my obedience, my godly moral character. And to describe it as an unpleasing aroma would be too generous. It was putrid, the smell of the world.

There is only one way it comes off.

You have to be broken.

A woman walked into a house in Bethany carrying a sealed jar of pure nard—a year’s wages worth, perhaps the one thing of real value she owned. And she broke it. Not opened it to dabble what could be spared. Broke it, spilling it in an act of sheer waste. The word Mark uses is the word for shattering. She snapped the neck of the thing and emptied the whole of it over the head and the feet of Jesus and wiped His feet with her hair. And the house—and His soon to be beaten and crucified body—filled with the smell. Every person in that room was suddenly standing inside a cloud of something they had not chosen and could not stop. She did not pour out a little and keep the rest for a more deserving day. She destroyed the container, so that nothing could be held back, and the fragrance went into the curtains and into the beards of the furious men around the table, and it would not wash out for days.

We have been taught to see this as an act of worship, and it is. But worship is what came out. It is not what happened to her. What happened to this woman, this true witness of Jesus, is that she had finally been set free—free from every measure and logic and process of the world. Free from her not-so-velvet cage of existence, and free from her own hopes and dreams and expectations and good stewardship of having saved up such a treasure to begin with. And the breaking of her jar was how the rest of the room found out, of how she was broken and freed from her prison.

The jar is you

I had it wrong for a long time, and the wrongness is worth explaining, because it is the comfortable man’s mistake. And I havehad been a comfortable man. I thought the alabaster jar was a possession. A thing she owned and gave up. The expensive thing surrendered, the sacrifice made, the line item moved from her column into His. Read it that way and it stays safe, outside of you. It becomes a story about generosity, and you can admire generosity from across the room without any of it touching your skin.

The jar is not a possession. She is the jar.

The jar is you. It is the whole of what you have made of yourself—your name, your record, the version of you that wins, the man or woman other men and women respect, the conception of who-you-are that you have spent thirty years building and would defend to the death because somewhere along the way it stopped being something that you have and became the thing that you are. You are the jar. And God’s whole design, written into the dirt of the world from the beginning, is that the jar has to be broken before anything of true value can come out.

He hid the lesson everywhere so we could not miss it. The olive is beautiful on the branch and useless; it gives nothing until it is crushed, and then it gives oil. Oil for the lamp, oil for the wound, oil for the head of a king. The grape is also lovely in the bunch but gives nothing until it is trodden and ruptured, and then it gives wine. The grain of wheat is gold in the field and feeds no one standing up; it has to be cut down, threshed, ground to powder, mixed and kneaded and put into the fire, and only then, broken and crushed, does it become bread. There is no oil without the press. There is no wine without the winepress. There is no bread that was not first a seed that died and a kernel that was crushed. God did not arrange creation that way by accident. He arranged it so that when the time came for Him to be crushed Himself, and for you to be crushed along His side, we would have spent our whole lives surrounded by the reason.

We are jars of clay, made to be broken. We are the olive and the grape and the kernel of wheat. And the fragrance that the world calls waste is the only thing any of us was ever made to give. You are not your own. You were bought with a price. Made to be a fragrance, an incense offering, a sweet aroma unto the God of all Creation.

The years in the belly

I cannot write the rest of this honestly without telling you that I know about the breaking from the inside, and often fought it. It’s not fun to be broken.

There was a season, years ago now, when everything I touched seemed to be blessed. I rose early to pray over my business and the favor came in like a tide. Sometimes maybe I confused the tide for something I had done or deserved. Then it was taken. A financial collapse I did not see coming and could not stop turned an owner back into a nomad. After that the years run together the way they do in a wilderness—law school, another country, a miscarriage, then another, a place that felt like a pit, then one that felt like Potiphar’s house, the slow education in betrayal that a certain kind of partnership gives you, the discovery that I could be the one betrayed and also, God help me, the one doing the taking from people who were not strong enough to keep what was theirs. My father died. My sister died. My mother died. Somewhere in there I sat at a beautiful resort among partners during a year my work was failing, surrounded by men I was sure despised me, and I wrote to God that I felt I did not belong and could not tell whether He had set the table for my good or set me down in the presence of my enemies. I had stopped knowing how to pray. I had stopped knowing what to ask for. I had stopped hearing His voice. It felt so dark.

Here is the part that shames me most. God had brought me into rooms as a gift, and I had decided that I was the gift. I thought I was the instrument that mattered, when I was only ever a tool that had to be made fit for the Master’s hand. A hammer does not swing itself. A chisel takes no credit for the shape that comes off the stone. The whole temptation, the original one in the garden, was the offer to be your own god, your own savior, the one who provides for himself and rescues himself and does not finally need anyone. I had taken the offer without ever once admitting I had taken it. I had a Bible on my desk and the offer in my heart at the same time, and I could not smell it.

What I called a dark night, and a storm, and a being-swallowed—Jonah in the belly of the thing, sinking, certain God had forgotten—was none of those things. It was the press. I was the olive, and I was being crushed. I was furious about it, and was sure it meant God had withdrawn—when in fact, it was the most attention He had paid me in my life. He was not absent. He was pressing. He withholds because the withholding is the mercy. He takes the tide back out because the tide had become a wall between us. He lets the owner become a nomad because it is hard to follow and move from a castle. The nomad has little choice. I did not like being a nomad. I did not appreciate having things stripped away, being pruned—having weeds and rocks torn out of me. And I did not understand a word of this while it was happening. I understand a little now, with the oil just beginning to seep out. I am telling you all of this because those I most want to reach will recognize the press even if they have not yet seen it for what it is. It is breaking, crushing—a death—that produces oil and wine and new life.

The ones who would not break

There were others standing at the same threshold she stood at, in other rooms in the Book, and they did not break. I have been or met every one of them.

A husband and wife in the early church sold a piece of property and brought the money to the apostles and laid it at their feet, exactly as a generous man named Barnabas had just done. The form was identical. The posture was identical. The difference was that they had kept part of it back and said they had not. Peter does not rebuke them for keeping it—he tells them plainly the money was theirs to keep, all of it, none of this was required. He rebukes them for the lie, and the lie is the worst lie a person can tell, because it was a lie about being set free from the world when that had not happened. It was a lie about the work of the Holy Spirit in their lives, delivering them and calling them into service, when He had not. They were trying to buy access and position and status in the early church, faking a move of the Spirit that had not occurred. This was unpardonable. Barnabas’s gift was smoke that proved a fire. Ananias and Sapphira wanted the smoke without the fire—the opportunity to speak without having experienced the burning coal on their lips. They wanted the church to smell deliverance on them while they kept the cherished portion locked in a back room of the heart where no one could see it was still theirs. They didn’t burn the boats and abandon all hope of return to Egypt. They held back a safety net, just in case this didn’t work out, just in case they needed a little something extra when sharing everything else with the Body. They wanted to be thought broken and delivered and set apart by God, without the inconvenience of being crushed. And they fell down dead, both of them, because you cannot fake the one thing that is the true difference between life and death. I have brought God a portion and called it everything more times than I can count. (O, my God, have mercy on me, a sinner!) I have stood in the posture of the surrendered man with the real thing still held back. The reason the story frightens me is that I have lived it. Sometimes I fear I still live it. (Selah)

A woman dragged by the hand, out of a city God had sentenced, set down outside the walls, told one thing — Do not look back. But she did look back. She had been delivered in body but not in heart. The city still had her, even with her feet already on the road escaping judgment. And the look over the shoulder was her heart refusing to let go of the things she treasured most, even above her own life and family—the status, the home, the friends, the life, all that she truly held dear. Deliverance from the world had never actually happened inside her. She did not let the place go, so when the leaving came, the place had her still. She stood there at the edge of her own rescue and became salt. I know that backward glance. Have walked out of things God plainly delivered me from with my head turned the whole way, grieving what I was being saved from, smelling of it long after I had supposedly left.

And then the careful, immaculate men—the spiritual leaders of their day. The ones who had mastered all the behavior. They did not drink, did not curse, did not chase the obvious sins; they tithed the herbs in the garden down to the leaf. And the Lord’s hottest anger in all the Bible falls on them. It has taken most of my life to understand why, because their conduct was so much cleaner, their character so much better than mine. It fell on them because they had never come out of the world’s system into the true Kingdom of God. Worse, they had learned to win at it, to thrive in it, to flourish in the world of their making. They recognized the cell, but rather than escaping it and helping others do the same, they papered the walls with the velvet of a good moral life, faithfully following Torah and congratulating themselves for their righteousness. They served themselves lavish dinners inside the prison and called it the work of God. They coveted the things of God, more than knowing Him, and gorged themselves on food meant to be shared. And the most egregious thing was not that they sat comfortably in the cell content with the lives they had built apart from the Father—it was that they shut the door on every prodigal trying to return to Him. They would not go out themselves, and would not let anyone else go either. They loved the smell of the world. Lied to themselves and called it holiness. It was putrid—like a beautiful sepulcher containing a rotting corpse.

I will say the obvious thing, because those I am writing to will not say it about themselves and I have to say it about myself first. The legal profession is one of the most comfortable cells ever built. The bars are upholstered with fine crushed velvet. The food is epicurean and arrives on demand. They do not throw us to lions anymore. There is no need. When the partnership track and the verse on the wall and the family photo on the desk and the respectable margin will do the same work without the mess. The enemy stopped persecuting this church long ago. It is cheaper and easier to keep the inmates fat and call them free.

How many of us are current inmates, asking for seconds, not even knowing there is a door out?

Before the body is gone

Back to my favorite witness of Jesus: Mary. The heroes are not, first, the men: those who betray Him and deny Him, flee from Him—leaving even their dignity and clothes to save themselves—later hiding in an upper room afraid to show their faces. The hero is, first, a woman—and one who didn’t even have the best reputation among them.

Mary “got” it. She came beforehand, when there was still a moment in time—before His betrayal, torture, and death. As Jesus said, She is come aforehand to anoint my body to the burying. It is one of the most piercing statements in the Gospel and almost no one notices it. Mary is the only person out of all His disciples, all those we revere and glorify today, who actually listened to Him, understood what was happening, and anointed the body of Jesus for burial. The other women came on the morning after the Sabbath with their spices, loving Him, fully intending to do the thing—were too late, because He was not there. The grave was empty and the spices went home unused. The moment for the anointing was while the body was still in the room, and exactly only one person in the whole story stepped through it. She was the one the men were calling wasteful, lazy, sitting at His feet instead of doing something useful. They would have prevented her from fleeing the prison, but she would not be held.

We are people of after. After it is too late. We will pour out our lives on God after the children are raised. After the practice is steady. After the loans are gone, the calendar finally clears. After we have built enough that we have something of significance to give. The whole architecture of after is the architecture of a man who has not yet been broken—because deliverance is not a thing you schedule for a more convenient time. It happens while the body is in the room, and the body is in the room only for a little while. The clients in the office, the wife across the table, the children in the house, the partner across the conference room, the case that came in this morning—the Holy God is with me in this moment. Will I not consecrate and pour out my whole life on Him now? There will not be a tidier, clearer, more appropriate moment.

Gethsemane

Here is what John does that I had read past for thirty years. He sets Mary’s broken jar down in the twelfth chapter, the house still full of the smell of it—and within the same breath, the same chapter, Jesus opens His mouth and says, Except a grain of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit. And then, Now is my soul troubled. He watched a woman crush a jar and pour herself out, and He turned and told the room that He was the kernel of wheat about to be put in the ground, the One about to be crushed for real.

Her breaking was a symbol. His was the substance.

He went to Gethsemane—a garden whose name means the press of oils, the place where the olives of that hillside were crushed for their oil—and in the press named for crushing He was crushed, until the sweat came off Him like blood falling to the ground. It pleased the LORD to bruise him. Can you imagine?! He was the olive in the press, the grape in the winepress, treading it alone—He drank the wrath meant for me. And the wine that came out of Him is the cup we still drink. He was the grain of wheat that fell and died and rose with the whole harvest in His hands, and the bread that came out of His breaking is the bread we still eat. His body, broken for us. His blood, shed for the remission of our sins. The perfect Passover Lamb.

This is where the comfortable lawyer needs to hear the only good news there has ever been, because the breaking I have been describing is more than any of us could survive on our own. We follow Mary into the press, yes. But Mary herself was only following Him. He went first, and He went all the way down, into a crushing that would have annihilated us, and He did the part we could never do. He broke the thing we could not break. Our breaking does not earn anything and does not need to. He has already done the only breaking that pays. Ours is the small, derivative, grateful crushing of people who have been carried through the press in the body of Someone Else—my Jesus!—and come out the other side smelling, for the first time in our lives, not like ourselves, and not like the world, but like Him.

What pours out

When a life like that has been broken, what fills the room is not the noise of the breaking. It is the smell. And the smell is not the man. Watchman Nee, whose reading of Mary in his last chapter of The Normal Christian Life, which I have leaned on here and will not attempt to improve, put it as plainly as it can be put: the principle of waste is the principle of power. The life that looks most squandered to the careful religious man is the only life that has ever changed anything, because what runs out of a broken vessel is not the vessel—it is whatever the vessel was filled with. Fill it with the world and break it and you get the world. Fill it with God and break it and the room fills with God.

The Lord asked once whose face was stamped on a coin, and they said Caesar’s, and He said then give it back to Caesar—it is his, it belongs to his economy, send it home. And on the man stamped with the image of God the same logic falls with terrible weight: give the God-stamped thing back to God; it belongs to His economy; send it home. A coin in a vault does no work. A coin only works when it is spent. We were minted to be spent, poured out, paid into His hands and gone—and the held-back life, the life kept safe in the vault of the self, accomplishes exactly what hoarded coin accomplishes when it is buried in the ground, which is nothing at all. It is not about good stewardship, it is about being able to be spent. You are the image and inscription of God, His currency to spend as He pleases.

People will smell Him on you. Not the achievements. Not the verdicts or the titles or the polish—those they will note, admire perhaps for a moment, and then forget. They will catch, the way you catch a fragrance in a house before you have found its source, the impression of God on a man who has been crushed and poured out, and it will make them hungry for something they cannot name. That hunger is the only thing preaching has ever had to work with. You cannot argue a full man into wanting bread. You can only let him smell it baking.

— — —

A final word.

We read these stories and put ourselves in the wrong place in them often. We read the prodigal and think we are nothing like the wayward boy—and we are right, and miss that we are the older brother in the field, dutiful but furious, having not loved the Father for only Himself, instead of His things. We read Bethany and think we are nothing like the wasteful woman—and we are right about that too, and miss that we are the men around the table, doing the math on her devotion, criticizing her waste. The stories were given to us in a way we could read all our lives without ever finding ourselves inside them, and that is exactly how a comfortable man stays comfortable—admiring the woman at the feet of Jesus from the safe far end of the table, scoring her, judging her past, pricing her ointment, certain he is one of the good and faithful ones.

I am done observing Mary from a safe distance. I want what she has—what she has given up, what she has been set free of—and have begun to learn what it costs. It hurts to be broken, and crushed, and spent. It’s safer to hold back a portion. To be a man who wins, who has a good name, and who donates to good causes when its not too costly. One who can afford to wait for a more appropriate time to surrender. I no longer want to keep these parts of me from Him. I want all of my self-reliance, self-approval, and self-satisfaction to be broken. And more, I want every Christian lawyer who reads this to look down and see that the cherished thing in his own hands, the thing he would not and dares not break, is not a treasure worth protecting. It is a wall between him and the only freedom there is. The breaking is not the loss. The breaking is the deliverance. Deliverance from the trap of this world, and the putrid smell of rotting death. The world’s smell does not come off any other way.

Before any of us can pull down the high places we have let stand in our own houses for years, before we can sweep the rooms clean and fill them with something holy, before we can stand up again as priests in the work God actually gave us—we have to be first broken and poured out and spent—the way she was. The way He was. There is no other way around that mountain. The breaking and crushing comes first. Either fall on Him, or He will fall on you.

My mother is gone now. Toward the end I thought of her the way you think of bread that has been in the oven a long time—kneaded hard, left in the fire longer than seemed kind, and then, at the right moment, pulled out and broken open and given away. And the smell of her broken offering when this life gave way to eternity was the sweetest smell filling His house. I have one prayer left about my own life, under all the others. That when He finally takes me out of the fire and breaks me open, I smell like that. That I smell like she did. That I smell like Him.

His fragrance smells good on you. Heavenly Father, may it one day smell good on me.

Turris fortis mihi Deus — the Lord is my strong tower. Into it the broken run, and are safe. Out of it they go, holding nothing back, an open jar, and pour out all of themselves, wasted at His feet. He is worthy.

— — —

Michael C. Kelley is a Florida attorney and shareholder at Lawson Huck Gonzalez, PLLC. He writes at Turris Fortis on faith, justice, and the practice of law as peacemaking — not the kind that confuses peace with avoidance, but the kind that contends for it with the weapons God supplies. Turris fortis mihi Deus — Prov. 18:10.

This is the fourth essay in a continuing series, best read in order — Start Here has the full map.

In the closing chapter of the book of Job, after thirty-eight chapters of speech and four chapters of God’s reply from the whirlwind, the verdict comes from heaven. Not against Job. Against his friends.

Job’s friends had not been irreverent. They had been religiously articulate, quoting scripture, defending God’s honor, offering theology in what appeared to be proper terms. They were on every conventional measure the religious authorities in the room. Job was the broken man on the ash heap, contradicting them, pleading his own cause, wrestling with God in language that certainly appeared defensive and angry, and occasionally bordered on even impudent. The reader, coming to chapter forty-two for the first time, might reasonably expect the rebuke to fall on Job. It does not. It falls on the religiously articulate men who sought to defend God and convict Job of his sin. But the man on the ash heap is vindicated. He has spoken of God what is right.

This may be one of the hardest chapters to read in the Old Testament for those of us in the religiously fluent class. It is a warning against the temptation to which Christian professionals and pastors and elders and serious lay believers are most prone: the temptation to tell beautiful, well-meant, theologically organized, fundamentally wrong stories about God. We can be the Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar friends of Job in suits and ties and with fancy degrees and careers.

The two errors of Job’s friends

The friends were not stupid or irreligious men. They came in good faith. They sat with Job in silence for seven days—a remarkable act of patient, persistent presence by any standard. When they finally spoke, they spoke from the moral framework of their worldview: a world in which the righteous prosper and the wicked suffer, a world in which God’s hand can be seen in a man’s circumstances as plainly as a sentence on a page. The argument is consistent across all three voices. Suffering is the wages of sin. Prosperity is the wages of righteousness. Job is suffering. Therefore, Job has sinned.

Two errors are at play here, and it is worth naming the errors precisely.

The first is a consequentialist theology of providence. God, on this reading, is the moral accountant of the universe, distributing fortune and misfortune in proportion to merit. He is bound by a system of cosmic equity that He has put into place. What He gives, He gives because it is owed. What He takes, He takes because it is deserved. One of my favorite theologians, Miroslav Volf, in a sermon on the book of Job, names this view the “moral world order” and identifies it as the theology Job’s friends were defending. It is a deeply human view because it feels right—it feels just. But it is completely pagan. The gods of the surrounding nations were transactional in exactly this way, and Job’s friends, despite their orthodox Hebrew vocabulary, are speaking of the LORD in terms borrowed from those false gods. They have taken the moral principles of false religions—do good, get good; do ill, suffer ill—and painted Yahweh, Most High, with the same brush. They did not speak rightly of Him.

The second error is a defensive theology of God’s reputation. Beneath their argument, the friends are protecting God from Job’s criticism. If Job’s righteousness and Job’s suffering can both be true at the same time, then God’s character is open to question. And Job’s friends will not have that. So they choose, instead, to question Job. Job must have sinned, they reason, because if he is righteous and made to suffer, then God has been unjust—and God cannot be unjust, therefore Job is lying and delusional. Volf names the absurdity of this tactic: God does not need to be defended against a suffering human being. The friends believe they are speaking on God’s behalf. But they are speaking against the man God has called His servant. And in so doing, they speak wrongly of God.

Both errors produce the same end: a God who can be predicted, managed, and ultimately controlled. Theirs is a gospel of manipulation—a salvation bought by good works. A God whose ledger you can track at your own desk. A God whose favor you can earn and whose wrath you can avoid by sufficient observance. A God who is, finally, a celestial servant of the moral world order, owing good to those who have followed the rules and punishment to those who have broken them. Do righteousness; receive prosperity. Commit sin; receive suffering. The transactional mechanism is fixed, visible, predictable. It is formulaic. The deity at the center of it is reduced almost to a function.

This is the theology God indicts at the end of the book.

We have inherited their errors

What I want to say next is hard, and I want to say it carefully. The Christian-professional class to which I belong—the class of lawyers and doctors and executives and consultants and serious lay leaders who form the backbone of mainline life in affluent Western contexts—has not evolved beyond Job’s friends’ theology. We have inherited it like stare decisis. It is the water we swim in. And we have made ourselves comfortable inside it without often noticing. Woe to those of us who have not spoken rightly of God!

In its crude form, the moral world order is easy to recognize and easy to reject. Send your seed-faith offering and God will repay one-hundredfold. Speak abundance and abundance will manifest. Confess health and wealth and heaven will provide. No serious reader of scripture is going to be taken in by that. We pride ourselves on rejecting such a false “name it and claim it” theology for the manipulation that it clearly is.

But there is a quieter, more respectable version of exactly the same theology that the Christian-professional class has fully embraced. It is the version we tell ourselves when we look at our careers and our houses and our 529 plans and our positions of influence and read all of it as evidence of God’s blessing on our faithfulness. I have been blessed because I have been obedient. My comfort is the wage of my discipline. My career is the fruit of my devotion. The vocabulary is more sober than the prosperity preacher’s, but the theology underneath is the same. Reward is owed for righteousness. The ledger holds. We have absorbed the moral world order in a Reformed accent and called it gratitude.

The reason this matters is not that we are unrighteous. Many of us are quite genuinely righteous, by the standards of common decency and sustained vocational fidelity. The problem is what righteousness comes to mean inside that frame. Righteousness becomes a possession—something I have accumulated, something I can point to, something I can defend, something that gives me credibility and standing. And once righteousness is a possession, it becomes the very thing that has to be surrendered. Because the Gospel of Jesus is not the doctrine that righteous people deserve good things. The true Gospel is the doctrine that none of us deserved the amazing gift that was given to us, and that those who have received it must spend their lives giving it away for nothing in return.

I have been tempted by the moral world order more times than I can count. When the practice goes well, when the case settles favorably, when the fee comes in, when someone calls and thanks me for my advice, the inner voice—the voice I am most ashamed of—says, of course; I have been faithful, a good steward; this is what such faithfulness produces. That voice is Eliphaz speaking inside me. It is not the voice of the Master. It is the voice that produces a lifetime of comfortable Christian-professional achievement and almost no actual wilderness, cross, and living sacrifice redemption.

The wrong stories told about the character of God

What the friends did to Job, the Pharisees did at scale to the people they were charged to lead. They told stories about God that placed themselves at the top of God’s economy. They taught that the righteous earn favor and the unrighteous deserve what they get. They used the names of God to enforce a system in which they were the experts and the rest of Israel was either climbing toward them or falling away from them. The Pharisees were not irreverent. They were religiously serious, scrupulously observant, publicly devoted to Torah. Jesus’s anger at them is not an anger at irreverence. It is the anger of Job 42:7 transposed into the Gospel. They have professed to know me and have not spoken of me what is right.

Take the parable of the prodigal son. We have inherited it from centuries of folk preaching as a story about disobedience and forgiveness: the wayward son repents, the father takes him back, the elder brother is mildly resentful but ultimately right to be patient. In the original Pharisaic telling of the parable, the disobedient son is taken back as a slave in the father’s house; the obedient son retains his rightful inheritance. The moral of the story is, Be careful, lest ye lose your standing as a son and be made a slave. The elder brother is rewarded, vindicated, justified, and praised. That reading flattered the elder son, which is to say, it flattered the religiously faithful and observant Pharisees, which is to say, it flatters us, the religiously articulate class who act the part and do what is right.

Jesus told the story differently. In Jesus’s telling, the father rushes to the repentant prodigal because he has returned! In Jesus’s telling both sons only wanted the father’s things. The younger son wants them crassly and impulsively—he asks for his inheritance while the father is still alive, which is, in the culture of that time, equivalent to wishing the father dead. The elder son wants them too. He has just hidden it better. When the prodigal returns and the father celebrates, the elder son’s mask slips: “Lo, these many years do I serve thee, neither transgressed I at any time thy commandment: and yet thou never gavest me a kid, that I might make merry with my friends” (Luke 15:29). What he wanted was payment. What he wanted was the wage of his obedience. He had been working all along for the father’s things, and had presumed that obedience would purchase them, and now he sees the father giving freely to a son who has earned nothing and squandered everything, and the Pharisaic theology in his heart erupts into bitterness and resentment. He can’t even stand to be in the same room.

The harder thing the parable is doing—if you read it carefully—is naming which son’s rebellion is worse. The younger son’s rebellion is visible, blunt, unmistakable. He has gone away to live frivolously. The elder son’s rebellion is hidden. He has stayed to serve faithfully. He has done all the right things. He has accumulated the merit. He has been the obedient one, the dependable one, the one the father can count on. But he has not truly loved the father once; he doesn’t know the father’s heart—how he longs for the lost son. The elder has loved the father’s things, and has used the appearance of obedience as the means of getting them, and now that the system has produced an outcome he does not control, he discovers that he never knew or loved the father at all. The father has to come out and beg the elder son to come into the feast. The story does not tell us whether the elder son does. The story is told to Pharisees who, at that moment, were standing outside God’s true kingdom.

This is the move I want to name carefully. The Pharisaic reading of the parable is itself the parable. The Pharisees told the story wrong because the Pharisees were the elder brother, and the elder brother could not see himself even when Jesus described him. They had not spoken of God what is right because they had never met God except as a system that paid out. And so when God’s Son walked among them telling them the truth about the Father, they could not hear it. They could not even hear the parable. I have to ask myself, as a religiously articulate Christian-professional, whether I have heard the parable.

The shape of the disease in our vocations

I have written elsewhere about a set of axes on which the Christian-professional consensus has consistently chosen the easier side and called it faithful. They bear restating here, because they are the symptoms of the deeper disease this group of essays has been trying to name. Each of them is what happens when the moral world order becomes the operating theology of a life. None of them is the failure of bad people. All of them are the temptation of good people. They are mine before they are anyone else’s, and I name them that way.

It is easier to practice stewardship—to manage well what we can already afford to part with—than to practice sacrifice, which is the offering of what would actually cost us. Stewardship has become what we can live without. Sacrifice is what costs that which we cannot bear to lose. We give what comes easy and call it faithful giving.

It is easier to maintain a veneer—a Bible on the desk, a verse on the wall, the right vocabulary in the meeting, no cussing or drinking or coarse company—than to live in actual submission to a Master who may ask us to act against the common sense of our profession, against the status quo of the accepted way of doing things, against that which seems right in our own eyes. The veneer signifies obedience to other people. True submission signifies obedience to Christ.

It is easier to make donations—to write a check to a worthy cause, to attach our name to a worthy board, to post a worthy gesture on social media—than to do the silent, anonymous, unrewarded labor in the trenches that nobody sees and that builds no reputation or social media following. The donation makes us look like good people. The labor only makes us tired and unseen.

It is easier to delegate—to ask the small-group leader, the staff pastor, the ministry partner, the Christian counselor to do the actual care of the actual person—than to sit with him ourselves, in our home, at our table, with our hands. Delegation produces structures and predictability—a clear return on our investment. Intimacy produces vulnerability and messy relationships. The first one scales; the second one converts sinners into saints, but seems so hard and inefficient.

And it is easier to take a short-term missions trip—to fly somewhere photogenic, to build houses for a week for people who do not speak our language, to come home with stories and a tan—than to answer the long, inconvenient, unphotogenic call God has been making on our daily life at home, with our neighbors, at our firm, in our marriage, with our children, where the cost is paid in years and the obedience does not produce a slide deck. The trip is sacrificial in appearance. The call to serve at home is sacrificial in every meaning of the word. It cuts and costs us in blood, sweat, and tears—and, right now, is so inconvenient for my life.

I have made every one of these substitutions. I am writing this essay because I keep making them. The point of naming them is not to find a person who has avoided these things. There is no such person. The point is to recognize that all of this is a form of the same calculation: that there is an easier path that looks Christian, that buys us standing in our community of faith, that even produces real fruit—and that lets us avoid the harder path on which fruit is produced by hands that have been broken. I have listed five examples—substitutions that I have fallen victim to—but they underly one choice. These are what the moral world order produces when it is given the run of a vocation. The transactional God, the celestial accountant, the deity who owes goods for goodness, asks nothing of us that costs us anything; therefore, his servants can stay comfortable and call it Christian.

Bonhoeffer named this exactly when he called it cheap grace—grace severed from discipleship, severed from the cross, severed from Jesus Christ living and incarnate—and said it was the deadliest enemy his church faced. He was writing in 1937 about the German church on the eve of catastrophe. He could just as easily be writing about us now.

Kierkegaard, a century earlier, named the same disease from a different angle. He said Christ wants followers, not admirers. The admirer keeps his distance. He sees the picture and praises it. He does not enter the picture. The follower must enter the picture. The Christian-professional class, by and large, has admired Christ at length and from a safe distance. We have made the admiration into a vocation. We have hung the picture on the wall and decorated the office around it and never once stepped inside the frame (well, some of us—certainly not all, and I mean no offense to those who have already lived in this conviction).

The high places of this deadly disease in the battlefields of our minds have been there so long, and they blend so seamlessly into the furniture of modern Christian life in affluent Western society, that we no longer see them. We think we are worshiping God in the name of Jesus. In truth, we are often worshiping a butler we have named Jesus, are paying our worship in the form of comfortable manner and approved opinion, and we have so confused the names that we cannot tell which gods we are serving. Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name? the religious professionals of every age ask, and I tremble to contemplate that the answer could be the same answer Jesus said will be given: Depart from me. I never knew you (Matt. 7:22–23).

That is severe—to me, the most frightening passage in scripture. To think you lived a life serving God but He never knew you. I want to be careful with this, though. I do not believe most Christian-professionals are headed for that verdict, and forgive me if this is sounding like a hellfire indictment against my entire class of professionals. But I do believe many of us may be nearer to it than we know, and the only way to find out which side of it we stand on is to be willing to ask.

The Job who was righteous and still needed deliverance

Here is where the book of Job breaks the moral world order from the other side.

Job was righteous. The narrator says so in the first verse of the first chapter. “There was a man in the land of Uz, whose name was Job; and that man was perfect and upright, and one that feared God, and eschewed evil” (Job 1:1). God Himself says so, twice, to Satan: “Hast thou considered my servant Job, that there is none like him in the earth, a perfect and an upright man, one that feareth God, and escheweth evil?” (Job 1:8; 2:3). At the end of the book, after the friends have been rebuked, God turns to them and tells them to go and ask Job to pray for them, “for him will I accept” (Job 42:8). Job’s righteousness is not the problem. The story of Job in the Bible is not interested in deconstructing it.

But Job had to be delivered from something. The whole structure of the book demands it. God does not appear in the whirlwind to congratulate Job; God appears to silence him. Job covers his mouth. He says he had heard of God by the hearing of the ear, “but now mine eye seeth thee. Wherefore I abhor myself, and repent in dust and ashes” (Job 42:5–6). What changed?

Job had been delivered from his trust in his own righteousness. Not from his righteousness. From his trust in it. As the story progresses, you can hear Job constructing the case for his vindication, almost as a brief: I have done this, I have not done that, I have kept my covenant with my eyes, I have been a father to the fatherless, I have been a defender of the widow, summon me before God and let me plead. Job is not lying. Every claim is true. But every claim is being marshaled in defense of himself, and the deeper thing the book is saying is that even a true righteousness, when made into a character trait, an identity, a possession to be defended, becomes the obstacle between a man and God. It is exactly the same arc as the Gospel Jesus taught—it is salvation by grace, a gift of God, so that no one can boast of their own righteousness. And, just like in Jesus, God had to do it! Job had to lose his case touting his righteousness before he could see God. He had to set down the brief, the argument, the good work. He had to let the moral world order break in his hands as he came to grips with a God that is after something infinitely more important than us living our best lives now.

This is the most uncomfortable thing the book of Job does, because it does not let the reader settle into either of the two cheap consolations. Job suffered because he sinned? Rejected. Job suffered and his righteousness vindicated him in the end? Also rejected. Job suffered, was righteous, was rebuked anyway, was delivered by being silenced, and emerged on the other side of his own righteousness with eyes that could see God for the first time. The book is not a theodicy—an attempt to justify the goodness and omnipotence of God in the face of suffering and evil. It is a deliverance narrative. The thing Job is delivered from is the very thing the friends were trying to take away from him by accusation: his confidence in his own moral standing. They tried to break him through false accusation. God breaks him through revelation. Both efforts converge on the same point. The man on the ash heap had to lose his righteousness before he could find his God.

The application for the religiously articulate is imminent. We do not have to be unrighteous to need this deliverance. The legitimately righteous Christian-professional, the one who has actually kept his covenant, told the truth, paid his taxes, raised his children, served his church, and not strayed, is the one most in danger of trusting in his own righteousness, because it is real. The voice that says I’ve got this in our strengths is much more dangerous than the voice that says help me! in our weaknesses. The first voice keeps God at arm’s length in everything that is going well. The second voice at least drives us to Him in the rubble. The corrective is to run to God in our strengths the way we already run to Him in our weaknesses. We must not save up the running for the days the strength fails us. We must seek Him, today (and every day), if we are to be saved.

This is the deliverance the moral world order cannot offer, because the moral world order needs the trust in righteousness to function. The whole accounting of the world’s system depends on it. A God who is a butler cannot ask you to set down your case or your cause. A God who pays out for goodness cannot rebuke you for trusting in that goodness. Only a God who actually loves you for nothing, and asks you to love Him for nothing in return, can do what Job 42 does. Which brings us to the question Volf has, from what I can tell, spent a career asking.

Loving God for nothing

The book of Job opens with a wager. Satan stands before God in the heavenly court and asks the question that the rest of the book is the answer to: “Doth Job fear God for nought?” (Job 1:9). It is the accusation buried in every transactional theology of God. Of course Job loves you, Satan says, you have given him everything; pull the protection back and watch what he loves. The wager is whether Job loves God or whether he loves what God has given him. The friends will spend most of the book taking Satan’s side without realizing it. They will assume that Job’s love for God is conditional on God’s reward, that the loss of reward proves the loss of love, and that the only way to restore the love is to restore the reward.

Volf, in his sermon on Job, names the wager as the question the whole book is testing, and he says the answer Job’s life eventually gives is the right one. Job loves God for nothing, and at the end of the book he ends up not with nothing but with God Himself. Volf draws the analogy from human love. We do not love a person for a particular feature; if we love a woman because of her face, what becomes of that love when her face changes? Real love is not for a reason. Real love is for the person, which is to say, for no-thing. So with God. Real love of God is for God alone. Not for the things He gives. Not for the favor He bestows. Not for the moral world order He underwrites. For Himself.

What Volf names as a theological claim, Bonhoeffer names as a discipleship claim and Kierkegaard as an ethical one. All three are saying versions of the same thing. The grace we have been given is costly because it cost the Son of God the cross, and we do not get to make it cheap by treating God as a cosmic vending machine. The Christian life is following, not admiring; the picture is not for hanging but for entering. The God we are called to love is not a God who pays out for goodness but a God we love for nothing, and in loving Him for nothing, we find that we have been given Him entirely. Thus are the answers to our disease of self-righteousness.

The disease of self-righteousness, particularly in the quiet of our suburban homes—like so many other pleasant captivities of the western-liberal mind—is so layered that no single voice can name it whole. I’ve tried in this essay, but I can only describe it from the touch it’s had on me. The disease is in our theology and in our discipleship and in our ethics and in our professions. It is in what we believe about God, in how we follow God, how we steward His gifts, praise His name, and in how we live before Him. And the cure begins in the same place each time: with the recognition that we have been telling ourselves wrong stories, relying on our own righteousness, and seeking after the Father’s things more than the Father Himself. Instead, we must learn to tell the right stories by continuing in that long obedience in the same direction: Jesus. God is looking for those who will speak rightly of Him, tell the right stories about who He is, and introduce Him to those He longs to know.

This is why Jesus taught in parables—stories—right stories about a Father who loves you so much He refuses to let you remain reckless and unbridled and so full of yourself that you think you don’t need Him. Loves you so much that He will let you wander and treat him as dead. Loves you so much that He falls over Himself, running to you when He sees you return home. It starts with the simple act of laying down your own righteousness for His.

— — —

A final word. I have written this essay from inside my own experience, and I want to leave it the same way.

I am not standing outside the Christian-professional class delivering a verdict against it. I am one of its members, writing about temptations that have been mine for as long as I have practiced law and walked with God. The voice that says I’ve got this; I have been faithful; this is what faithfulness produces is a voice I know intimately. The substitutions I’ve called out—stewardship for sacrifice, veneer for submission, donation for labor, delegation for intimacy, the trip for the call to be faithful and present at home—are not other people’s substitutions for the right stories. They are mine. The trust in my own righteousness is mine. The high places that blend in with the furniture have been in my house. I have looked at them every morning for years and not seen them.

What I am asking, then, is not to condemn anyone. The book of Job ends with God commending Job to pray for his friends, and the friends accepting that mercy. They have not spoken of me what is right is the diagnosis; the treatment is the prayer of the man whose righteousness has been broken so that he can intercede for those whose righteousness has not yet been. We are recovering, together, the practice of speaking rightly about God. We are learning, slowly, to love Him for nothing. We are setting down the arguments we have been making in our own defense. We are being delivered, by grace, from the moral world order—counterfeit to the Kingdom of God.

The next essay in this series will turn from diagnosis to embodiment. Mary of Bethany, who poured out everything she had on Christ for nothing in return, is the figure of someone who has been delivered from the elder brother’s heart and learned to love for nothing. Her fragrance fills the house. His fragrance smells good on her. It can fill our houses, too.

But before any of that—before the cure can be embodied—we have to admit what the disease is. We have not spoken rightly of Him. We have told beautiful, well-meant, theologically organized, fundamentally wrong stories. We have made God a butler we named Jesus, and we have worshiped at the high places without knowing that is what they were. The Lord whose wrath was kindled against Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar is the Lord we have followed badly, even at our most faithful.

Lord, have mercy on us.

— — —

Michael C. Kelley is a Florida attorney and shareholder at Lawson Huck Gonzalez, PLLC. He writes at Turris Fortis on faith, justice, and the practice of law as peacemaking—not the kind that confuses peace with avoidance, but the kind that contends for it with the weapons God supplies. Turris fortis mihi Deus — Prov. 18:10.

This is the third essay in a continuing series, best read in order — Start Here has the full map.

Introduction

Every lawyer knows the feeling of stepping into someone else’s chaos.

A deal has fractured. A partnership is collapsing. A board is divided. A family business is bleeding mistrust. A contractor, owner, architect, regulator, lender, or public agency has reached the point where ordinary conversation has broken down and formal process has begun. By the time many matters arrive at a lawyer’s desk, chaos is already in the room. So is pride, fear, anger, anxiety, resentment. So is self-protection. Often, so is exhaustion.

Lawyers are hired to enter that space and do something useful with it.

That is why Joshua 5 may be one of the most important texts for Christian lawyers to consider. Joshua looks up and sees a man with a drawn sword and asks the natural question: “Are you for us, or for our adversaries?” It is, in many ways, the lawyer’s question. We want to know where God stands in relation to our client, our cause, our risk exposure, our desired outcome. “Yahweh, are You with us? Will You help us win? Will You vindicate our side?”

But the answer Joshua receives refuses that whole frame. The Lord does not come as a partisan. He does not present Himself as an ally for Joshua’s cause. He comes as Commander. And Joshua’s response is not calculated strategy but spontaneous worship: he falls on his face and removes his shoes, because the place where he is standing is holy ground.

That stark, seemingly brutal reality – “God may not be on my side” – should reorder the imagination of every Christian lawyer.

Because if this moment for Joshua teaches us anything, it is that the places of the most hostile battles can be holy ground. The mediation room can be holy ground. The conference room where accusations are exchanged can be holy ground. The jobsite trailer, emergency injunction hearing, deposition, board meeting, settlement call, late-night conversation with a frightened client: all of it can become holy ground. Not because conflict is good. Not because every claim is righteous. But because God is not absent from human brokenness and conflict. He is Lord there too.

That changes everything.

More Than a Broken System

It is common (and correct) to say that the legal system is broken.

When I first started the journey of discovering what it means to be a Christian lawyer, I believed that meaningful access to justice is often denied those who lack the financial means to procure it. And while in many ways that may be true, I have found that the problem runs deeper than just money. Meaningful access to legal process, at its very core, is often denied in practice, even when it exists on paper. Resources regularly matter more than right. Delay becomes leverage. Complexity becomes exclusion. Greed and pride deform judgment. A “win at all costs” mentality rewards scorched-earth tactics and teaches lawyers to confuse ferocity with faithfulness. Years ago, I tried to describe that brokenness in plain terms: the best representation is often reserved for those who can pay for it, while moral and legal right can be eclipsed by resources, stamina, and institutional advantage.

But the deeper problem is not only “out there” in a system that favors resources and process over true justice. It is also “in here” in us.

The profession catechizes us into habits of soul that reflect love of the world more than love of the Father. We begin by wanting to serve, and somewhere along the line we start to crave control, to fall for that old lie, “If you can’t beat them, join them.” We begin by wanting justice, and somewhere along the line we start wanting victory more than to see things put right again. We begin by wanting to produce peace, and somewhere along the line we settle (apathetically) for managed process. We begin by wanting to protect clients, and somewhere along the line we begin accepting – if not downright encouraging – every fear, grievance, and demand that comes through the door.

A lawyer can become very skilled at navigating and profiting from conflict while becoming spiritually deformed by it. We move from idealistic optimism to experienced pragmatism, to hopeless cynicism.

And in our present age, that danger is heightened by speed. We move faster than we can pray. We answer before we discern. We are tempted to optimize instead of abide. We delegate labor to systems and tools, and then slowly begin outsourcing judgment and authority as well. In that kind of world, prayer becomes less practical, patience becomes less plausible, and the slow work of wrestling for moral clarity begins to feel inefficient and wasteful. Yet Christian vocation has never been sustained by efficiency and maximization alone. It is sustained by presence, obedience, and truthful dependence before God.

So yes, the system is broken. But the Christian lawyer must also ask a harder question: what is this work doing to me?

Holy Ground in the Middle of Conflict

Joshua 5 answers that question by repositioning us before it instructs.

Before I am counselor, advocate, negotiator, or litigator, I am a mortal before the living God. Before I ask God to bless my strategy, I must ask whether I have mistaken my strategy for God’s plans and purposes. Before I seek divine help in defeating an adversary, I must remember that I too am under authority. Before I speak for a client, I must learn again how to listen in reverence, wait in quiet patience, and live only by every word that proceeds from God’s mouth. Like Joshua, lawyers are warriors, prepared for battle and capable of extreme violence. As Christian lawyers, we must be submitted to the authority and instruction of the Master—true examples of meekness, not weakness.

That is what it means to take off our shoes and fall to our knees in humble adoration and without guile.

For Christian lawyers, the first task in conflict is not triumph but consecration. Not, “How quickly can I gain leverage?” but, “Abba, what do You want to accomplish? Search my heart and see if there be any wickedness in me.” Not, “How do I secure the ruling?” but, “Father, what in me must be removed before I enter this room in Your name? Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done, in this moment as it is in heaven.” Certainty, self-satisfaction, and what seems right in our own eyes must fall away. Our God is holy. He is love, yes, but He is also a consuming fire. Ego must come off. Contempt must come off. Vanity must come off. Fear must come off. The hunger to be impressive must come off. The desire to weaponize truth rather than serve it must all come off.

This is where the old biblical command becomes newly concrete: do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with your God.

Justice without humility becomes severity. Mercy without truth becomes sentimentality. Humility without courage becomes passivity. But when all three are held together in meekness under the lordship of Christ, a different kind of legal presence becomes possible—clear-eyed, restrained, brave, honest, and useful in the Master’s hands.

A Christian lawyer is not called to be passive. But neither is he called to be spiritually casual. He is called to enter conflict reverently, because he stands where lives, relationships, reputations, institutions, and futures will be deeply affected. And he enters conscious of God’s presence and God’s ultimate authority.

That is holy ground.

Peacemaking, Not Peacekeeping

This is where an important distinction becomes necessary.

In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus blesses peacemakers, not peacekeepers.

Peacekeeping is often about preserving manageability and status quo. Keep things from getting louder. Keep the temperature down. Keep the parties functional, at least on the surface. Keep the institution from embarrassment. Keep the file moving. Keep the damage contained.

Sometimes that is prudent. Often, however, it is not peace but the furthest thing from it.

Biblical peace—shalom (nothing missing, nothing broken)—is not mere calm. It is right order under God. It is truth brought into the light. It is justice rightly rendered. It is mercy rightly extended. Reconciliation where it is possible; honest judgment where it is not. It is not a ceasefire at any cost. It is not superficial closure. And it is certainly not the false “peace, peace” of refusing to name what is actually wrong.

That makes peacemaking, often, much more costly than peacekeeping.

Sometimes peacemaking looks like early settlement. Sometimes it looks like vigilant confrontation. Sometimes it looks like litigation pursued cleanly and without hatred, but with dogged determination. Sometimes it looks like saying “no” to a client who wants vengeance cloaked as principle. Sometimes it looks like telling the truth no one in the room wants to hear. Sometimes it looks like slowing everyone down long enough to let reason and opportunity cost re-enter the conversation.

A Christian lawyer should want peace, but not the kind of peace that leaves lies intact, injustice unaddressed, victims unprotected, or hearts unexamined.

That is why the ministry of reconciliation in 2 Corinthians 5 cannot be reduced to niceness. Reconciliation is not the denial of wrong. It is not the refusal of judgment. It is not a sentimental wish that everyone leave feeling affirmed. Reconciliation is a distinctly Christian word because it presumes alienation, truth, repentance, grace, and the possibility of forgiveness and real restoration. It has moral content. It has theological depth. And it always costs someone something.

So the Christian lawyer’s calling is not to make conflict disappear, but to submit it—so far as he is able—to truth, justice, mercy, and the possibility of rightly ordered shalom.

Against Darkness, Not Flesh & Blood

At this point, some Christian lawyers become uneasy, because the language starts to sound too spiritual for the practical world of pleadings, contracts, injunctions, and negotiation strategy.

But Ephesians 6 is practical precisely because it is spiritual.

We must never forget: our struggle is not against flesh and blood.

That does not mean people are innocent. It does not mean institutions are neutral. It does not mean there is no such thing as fraud, abuse, predation, cowardice, or corruption. It does mean that the Christian lawyer must never collapse the problem into “those people over there.” The deeper enemies are vain imaginations, agreements with lies, deception, accusation, domination, fear, pride, bitterness, confusion, and the disordered loves that take root in individuals and systems alike. The deeper enemies are the love of this world, our own flesh, and the Enemy of our souls.

This matters because once opposing counsel, the judge, the regulator, the witness, or even the client becomes the true enemy in my imagination, I am fighting flesh and blood and have already lost the battle. I start speaking in ways I can justify but Christ would not approve. I begin to confuse harshness with strength. I begin to serve the machinery of conflict even while talking about justice. I may still win motions and close files, make money and earn a great name, but I will have become less free, less truthful, and less fit for true peace.

The Christian lawyer must therefore learn to fight vigorously without hate.

That is not weakness. It is warfare of a deeper kind.

Truth must be spoken. Lies must be exposed. Injustice must be resisted. The vulnerable must be protected. But all of this must be done without surrendering to the very forces that deform the profession from within. The lawyer who can stand firm without becoming consumed by contempt is already doing something rare.

A Different Way to Pray

All of this comes to a head in prayer.

Because prayer reveals what we really believe our work is for.

Listen to the prayers lawyers often pray:

Lord, help me win.
Lord, help me do well.
Lord, help the judge see it my way.
Lord, let the deal close.
Lord, protect my client.
Lord, don’t let me look foolish.
Lord, keep this from blowing up.

None of those prayers is automatically wrong. But they can still come from wrong motives. They can still assume that God’s highest purpose in the matter is to secure my preferred outcome.

Joshua 5 invites a better question: not “Are You on my side?” but “How do I stand rightly before You here? How do I participate in what You want to accomplish in this holy moment—to bring beauty from ashes, joy in place of mourning, gratitude and praise instead of heaviness and despair.”

That leads to better prayers.

Lord, use me as a catalyst to let truth be seen.
Lord, purify my own motives in this moment.
Lord, keep me from producing fear, anxiety, self-righteousness, and pride.
Lord, do not let egos or idols—including my own—get in the way of what is best for these parties.
Lord, help me do justice without contempt and love mercy without cowardice or appeasement. Father, where reconciliation is possible, open that door. Where judgment is necessary, keep me humble, restrained, and clean-handed.
Abba, teach me how to stand in your presence on holy ground throughout this controversy.

That is the beginning of a Christian lawyer’s prayer life.

Not prayer as superstition. Not prayer as leverage.
Not prayer as a religious coating over ambition.
Prayer as surrender. Prayer as clarification.
Prayer as resistance. Prayer as a refusal to let the adversarial system dictate the final shape of the soul.

In my own reflections over the years, the recurring call has been simple: seek Abba’s face, wait for Him, walk in “The Way,” stand firm, speak truth, and trust God as my strong tower. (Turris fortis mihi Deus) That is not a retreat from legal work. It is the only way to remain human and redeemed in it.

The Christian lawyer is not called to float above conflict, nor to sanctify every adversarial instinct as zeal. He is called to enter the middle of human chaos and remember that he is standing on holy ground.

And perhaps that is where renewal begins: not first in a better tactic, though tactics matter; not first in a better argument, though arguments matter; but in a recovered posture before God.

Take off your shoes.
Get on your knees—invite God into the battle.
Seek His face—wait on Him.
Listen for His voice.

Take a step in faith—speak holy truth to chaos.
Do justice. Love mercy. Walk humbly and in the restrained strength of meekness.
This is what it means to be a Christian lawyer.
This is what it means to be Peacemaker.

— — —

Michael C. Kelley is a Florida attorney and shareholder at Lawson Huck Gonzalez, PLLC. He writes at Turris Fortis on faith, justice, and the practice of law as peacemaking — not the kind that confuses peace with avoidance, but the kind that contends for it with the weapons God supplies. Turris fortis mihi Deus — Prov. 18:10.

This is the first essay in a continuing series, best read in order — Start Here has the full map.

If legal conflict is holy ground, then the next question for the Christian lawyer is unavoidable: How then should we live practice?

In Where Chaos Meets Holy Ground, I argued that the rooms in which lawyers do their work – courtroom, mediation table, deposition, boardroom, late‑night conference call – are not vacant of God’s presence simply because they are full of conflict. They are precisely where Joshua’s question is most pressing, and where the Captain of the Host of Heaven still answers today as He answered then: not partisan, but holy.

“Loose thy shoe from off thy foot,” He says, “for the place whereon thou standest is holy” (Josh. 5:15).

As legal advocates, that reality reorders our posture. Next, it must reform our methods.

It is one thing to say the conflict‑room may become holy ground. It is another to decide what kind of lawyer one must become there. Lawyers are not hired merely to feel reverent. We are hired to act, and to do so decisively. We advise, draft, object, negotiate, demand, defend, examine, settle – and when necessary, we fight. We use the weapons of our natural warfare: words, rules, process, leverage, timing, authority, strategy. Those are real weapons, and they most certainly can be [used for] good. They can protect the vulnerable, reveal truth, expose falsehood, reframe narrative, restrain evil, and bring order to those places where chaos has taken hold.

But those tools can also be used to avoid or pervert justice, the opposite of Micah 6:8. So the Christian lawyer must not ask only, “What outcome do I want?” Or even, “Is my client right?” He must also ask, “What weapons am I using, and what are they doing to my soul and to the souls of others?”

Paul’s words in 2 Corinthians 10 are direct:

“For though we walk in the flesh, we do not war according to the flesh; for the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh, but mighty before God for the pulling down of strongholds” (2 Cor. 10:3–4).

That does not make the Christian passive. It makes him accountable under authority. He is not called to apathy, stoicism, therapeutic niceness, or to surrender in the face of disorder (we need to avoid those ditches). But neither is he permitted to embrace the wrath of man and call it zeal . . . to use fleshly weapons because he believes the desired outcome is just.

This is the difference between grasping and receiving. Between forcing my will and waiting on God. Between doing what seems right in my own eyes and living by every word that proceeds from God's mouth (Deut. 8:3; Matt. 4:4).

Not passivity, not domination

There are two errors the Christian lawyer must reject.

The first is passivity. This is the temptation to confuse peace with avoidance, kindness with tolerance, patience with laziness, humility with weakness, and trust in God with refusal to act. It sounds spiritual, but it is often only fear or apathy in religious clothing. “God is sovereign,” we say, while declining to confront what should be confronted, name what should be named, or protect those who need protecting. That is not biblical peacemaking. That is dereliction dressed up as piety. It is self-righteous indifference. Pride and self-interest expressed through cowardice and false professionalism. We all know what it looks like when a leader fails to lead . . . when good men and women do nothing.

The second error is domination. This is the temptation to offload vulnerability for unbridled authoritarianism; to confuse force with courage, control with wisdom, retaliation with justice, and anger with moral clarity. It also sounds spiritual when cloaked in the right language. We tell ourselves we are contending for truth, defending the innocent, preserving order, being good stewards, fighting evil, preserving the institution. Sometimes we are. But sometimes we are only enforcing our own will with religious confidence – confidence that makes us harder to correct, not easier. That leaves a path of destruction and brokenness in our pursuit of what we've decided to be worthy and good.

The Christian lawyer must learn a harder, disciplined, restrained, narrow Way. He must be willing to act without self-interest – without grasping (seeing the fruit, desiring it, and taking it because he can); willing to fight without hatred or indifference; to wait patiently without surrendering to hopelessness; to pursue justice without enthroning his preferred outcome as the will of God.

None of this comes naturally or from typical legal training. It comes from formation under Christ by the work of the Holy Spirit. A long obedience in the same direction of following Jesus.

That is one reason one of my favorite Christian thinkers, Oswald Chambers, remains so useful. He does not let us admire Christian ideals from a safe distance. He keeps pressing the same question: “Have I ever yielded in absolute submission to Jesus Christ?” In other words, not merely, “Do I agree with this?” but, “Have I yielded myself, my strategy, my cause to Christ?” Not merely, “Is this worthy, well-intentioned?” but, “Am I surrendered to God in the manner, motive, timing, and spirit of my action?”

For the Christian lawyer, these questions are never abstract. The intentional, persistent surrender of my will for God’s applies to the demand letter. It applies to the deposition. It applies to the emergency motion. It applies to the billing entry. It applies to the advice we give when the client wants revenge. It applies to the sentence we know is technically defensible but not fully true.

The issue is not whether lawyers may use force. Of course they may. Law itself involves authority, judgment, consequence, and constraint. The issue is whether that force has been submitted to Christ.

The Lord’s Prayer as legal formation

This is one reason the Lord’s Prayer matters so much.

“Your kingdom come. Your will be done. On earth as it is in heaven” (Matt. 6:10)

. . . Is not a prayer of resignation. It is not spiritual apathy. It is not a pious way of saying, “Whatever happens, happens.” It is not moralistic therapeutic deism dressed up in liturgy. It is not a vague request that God help us feel peaceful while the world burns.

It is a revolutionary prayer. It asks for heaven’s order to invade earth’s disorder.

But it is also not a prayer for God to bless my preferred outcome. It is not: “My kingdom come, my will be done – through this court, this judge, this contract, this motion, this settlement, this client, this strategy.” It is not the sanctification of my control, my preferences. It is surrendered agency. It forms the person praying it before it directs the work that person will do.

Our Father (“Abba”) means I am not autonomous. I do not enter conflict as a self‑made actor with ultimate authority over my life, my work, or my client strategy. I submit to Him.

Your kingdom come means my client’s desired outcome is not ultimate. Neither is my reputation, my fee, my fear, or my need to be vindicated.

Your will be done means my strategy must be submitted. The question is not merely what can be done, but what faithfulness requires.

Give us this day our daily bread means I do not need to grasp. I do not need to build up storehouses I may never use. I do not need to treat every matter as though my security depends on my ability to force the result.

Forgive us our debts means I am not morally above the conflict. I enter the room as one who needs mercy – not merely as one retained to expose the need for mercy in others.

Deliver us from evil means I need rescue not only from the evil around me, but from the evil that can take root in me while I fight it. When I have dealt with the mess of others, I still need to look into - see my reflection in - the golden laver of God's Word and be cleansed.

This is deeply practical. The lawyer who cannot pray the Lord’s Prayer honestly before a contested matter is not yet ready to enter that matter as a Christian lawyer. He may be technically prepared. He may be strategically ready. He may be ethically compliant. But he is not yet spiritually prepared. And spiritual preparation matters, because legal tools are dangerous – capable of great violence – in the hands of an unformed, unrepentant, unsanctified soul.

There is more here than catechesis. There is jurisdiction. There is asserted standing. There is applicable law, a private right of action, procedure, and promised relief.

I have come, slowly, to think of prayer itself as a form of pleading. We who know what standing means in an Article III court ought to understand it best in the heavenly one. The believer who prays does not approach God as a stranger asking a favor; he approaches as a son (she approaches as His daughter), with concrete injury (the wound, the wrong, the oppression), traceable causation (the work of the accuser, the brokenness of a fallen world, the lusts of his own wretched flesh working against him), and redressability (the finished work of Christ on the cross, the precious blood of the Lamb, the promises and statutes of God). He pleads under a recognized cause of action – the new covenant in Christ Jesus (Heb. 9:15; 10:19) – and seeks a remedy heaven itself has authorized: forgiveness, restoration, deliverance, captives set free, deaf/dumb/blind healed, the binding of what binds him, the loosing of what God has already decreed loosed (Matt. 18:18). The believer’s standing is not in himself. It is in Christ (Rom. 5:1-2; 2 Cor. 5:18-21; Eph. 2:6). He stands on conquered ground – and though the ground may not yet be surrendered completely to God’s will: because He is present, the ground is holy.

Once a lawyer sees prayer this way, the Lord’s Prayer becomes formation in two directions at once. It teaches how to plead before the throne of God and how to plead before any earthly tribunal: under authority, with clean hands, in his Father’s name, seeking his Father’s will, asking only for what heaven has already authorized. That is no small reformation of method. It bends the practice of law (and of spiritual warfare) at the core.

The weapons of peace

So what are the weapons?

If our warfare is not according to the flesh, then what do we actually fight with?

God does not leave us guessing. Across the Gospels and Pauline letters, the weapons God supplies are concrete: truth proclaimed, the Word of God, prayerful dependence, faith, righteous character, gentleness, righteousness, sound doctrine, fasting, praise and worship, authority submitted to Christ, our testimonies, peace that surpasses human understanding, patience, kindness, mercy, joy unspeakable, meekness, purity, holiness, the blood of the Lamb and the power of the Holy Spirit – just to name a few! (Matt. 5; Eph. 6:10–18; 2 Cor. 6:7; 10:3–5; 1 Tim. 1:18; 2 Tim. 4:7)

These are not decorative religious ideas. They are weapons. They are not weak. They are not sentimental. They are not less effective because they are spiritual. They are stronger than fleshly weapons because they reach places fleshly weapons cannot reach.

Fleshly weapons can coerce behavior. Spiritual weapons confront lies, vain imaginations, thoughts that have exalted themselves against the knowledge of Jesus Christ.

Fleshly weapons can force compliance. Spiritual weapons expose strongholds, dispossess giants, assert authority over principalities.

Fleshly weapons can secure outcomes. Spiritual weapons reorder loves, thoughts, motives, and allegiances under Christ, carry the peace of His presence, and establish Shalom.

That is why Paul says these weapons are

“mighty before God for the pulling down of strongholds; casting down imaginations and every high thing that exalts itself against the knowledge of God, and bringing into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ” (2 Cor. 10:4–5).

The target is not first a person. It is not opposing counsel, the judge, a regulator, a witness, or even a difficult client. The target is every argument, imagination, pride, fear, deception, and false agreement that exalts itself against the knowledge of God.

The battlefield is the mind, the conscience, the imagination, and the will. So the weapons must be fitted to the battlefield.

Truth is a weapon, because lies are often the architecture of conflict.

Prayer is a weapon, because the lawyer cannot often reach the heart solely by argument.

Faith is a weapon, because fear will otherwise dominate strategy.

Righteous character is a weapon, because - like leprosy - corruption in the lawyer eventually corrupts the cause and everyone who touches it.

Sound doctrine is a weapon, because a disordered theology of justice, mercy, authority, or peace will produce disordered practice and results.

Authority is a weapon, because lawyers are entrusted with real power. But authority under Christ is never for domination. It is for building up, correcting, restoring, protecting, and ordering life toward truth.

And the Holy Spirit is not an accessory to these weapons. He is the power by which they become effective at all.

It is worth noting where this leaves us. When Jesus encountered Satan in the wilderness, He did not sing songs. He did not quote the Psalms. He cited the Law – “It is written” – invoked the authority of heaven, and announced swift judgment (Matt. 4:1–11). The Christian lawyer should learn from this. There is a kind of intercession, and a kind of resistance, that looks much more like a brief than a love letter. We are people of the Word. The Word is our sword (Eph. 6:17; Heb. 4:12). We should be at home with it.

Lawful tools and fleshly weapons

This distinction matters because almost every lawful tool can become a fleshly weapon.

A demand letter can tell the truth with appropriate urgency. It can also become intimidation wrapped in professional formatting.

A deposition can seek clarity, test testimony, and expose falsehood. It can also be used as a humiliation ritual.

A motion can narrow issues, correct error, and protect a client. It can also multiply cost and delay for leverage.

A settlement proposal can be wise, merciful, and efficient. It can also be cowardice disguised as prudence.

A trial can be necessary for justice. It can also become vanity and vengeance.

The tool itself is not often the problem. The problem is usually the motive, the manner, and the end for which the tool is used.

This is where lawyers are especially vulnerable. We are trained to think creatively and to justify ourselves. We can explain why the aggressive letter was necessary, why the humiliating question was relevant, why the delay served a legitimate purpose, why the pressure tactic was within bounds, why the client’s anger had to be honored, why the half‑truth was not technically false.

But the Christian lawyer must ask deeper questions:

Am I using a lawful tool in a fleshly way?

Am I an agent of truth or manipulation?

Am I doing what seems right in my own eyes, thinking I know Him (but He doesn't know me)?!

Asked honestly, transparently, vulnerably – these questions cut.

They cut through pretend professionalism; through perceived reputation; through the congratulation of colleagues; through the approval of clients. They cut through long‑running excuses that “this is just how the game is played,” “eat or be eaten,” “survival of the fittest,” “God helps those who help themselves.”

The Christian lawyer is not free to use spiritual language to justify fleshly lawyering. He is called to use legal skill under spiritual authority.

The danger of merely “good” outcomes

This is also why good outcomes are not enough.

That may sound strange in a profession measured largely by outcomes. We want to win the motion, close the deal, settle the dispute, protect the client, collect the judgment, avoid liability, recover damages, solve the problem. None of those things is wrong. Many are good and necessary.

But the Christian lawyer cannot measure faithfulness by outcome alone. A lawyer can get the right result in the wrong spirit. He can win while becoming proud. He can settle while becoming cowardly. He can expose lies while becoming contemptuous. He can protect a client while inflaming the client’s bitterness. He can pursue justice while worshiping victory. He can become useful to the client while opposing the very things of God he professes to champion. It is insidious.

This is why the question “How then should we live?” must become, for lawyers, “How then should we practice?”

The answer cannot be: “Do whatever works, then thank God if it succeeds.”

Nor can it be: “Do nothing and call it trust.”

The Christian answer is harder. Act faithfully with the weapons God supplies, under the authority of Christ, toward the ends of truth, justice, mercy, reconciliation where possible, judgment where necessary, and peace rightly understood.

Not peace as avoidance.

Peace as right order under God. Shalom – the state in which things are made well again – not the truce in which things are merely quieted.

Mastery under Christ

This kind of practice requires mastery.

Not mastery in the worldly sense of domination, control, reputation, or superiority. Christian mastery is strength submitted to Christ. 

The Christian lawyer should become more skilled, not less. More prepared, not less. More rigorous . . . more courageous . . . more strategic, not less. But less captive to the flesh.

In fact, the Christian lawyer should be like the most disciplined warrior or martial artist: capable of real force, but not in love with force; capable of confrontation, but not captive to contempt; capable of disarming without destroying; capable of restraint without cowardice; capable of authority without domination.

That is true meekness (strength, power under authority) – and meekness is no friend of timidity. Meekness is not weakness. It is not reluctance to act. It is not the absence of strength. It is strength trained, bridled, submitted, and made useful in the hand of the Master. It is the warhorse, prepared for battle, but who answers to the rein.

That kind of lawyer will still file motions. He will still negotiate hard. He will still expose lies. He will still confront misconduct. He will still protect clients. He may still litigate all the way through to final judgment when justice requires it.

But he will not love the fight.

He will not confuse the adversary with the enemy.

He will not call grasping zeal.

He will not call control wisdom.

He will not call retaliation justice.

He will not call domination courage.

He will remember that the weapons of our warfare are mighty through God. And because they are mighty through God, they must remain submitted to God.

The practice of receiving

The final movement is receiving.

That may be the hardest word for lawyers.

We are trained to anticipate, manage, argue, protect, leverage, draft, persuade, and act. We are not naturally trained to receive. Receiving feels inefficient, unearned. Waiting feels vulnerable. Dependence feels like a professional liability.

But the life of faith is not first a life of grasping. It is a life of receiving.

We receive sonship. We receive grace. We receive wisdom. We receive authority. We receive the Spirit. We receive daily bread. We receive the kingdom as gift before we participate in it as servants. Then we act.

That order matters.

In practice, this becomes a posture more than a moment. I have come to begin each day, before the urgencies have arrived, by laying down what is mine to lay down – the deadlines and tyrannies, the hopes I am tempted to hoard and the fears I am tempted to nurse, the desired outcomes I would force if given half the chance – and asking God to take them. All. I exchange, by faith, the heavy burden I have loaded for myself for the easy and light burden He has promised: daily bread (Matt. 11:28–30), manna for today. Most mornings nothing changes about the calendar or my obligations. What changes is who is carrying my burden.

When I grasp, I turn law into a tool of my will. When I receive, I can offer law as a servant of God’s truth.

When I grasp, I need the outcome to secure me. When I receive, I can pursue justice without needing victory to become my identity.

When I grasp, I use pressure to force peace. When I receive, I can become a peacemaker.

Then through the day, the prayer continues. Which matter should I pick up first? Which call should I make, email should I respond to? Papa, what do You think I should do? Not because I always hear an answer; most often I do not. Most often I act a moment after I have asked – walking by faith and not by sight (2 Cor. 5:7), trusting that if I have surrendered my will and stepped in good faith, He will catch me when I fall and correct me when I drift. Over time it becomes a kind of savings account: small petitions, small surrenders, small askings, deposited continually, over and over, day in and out. The returns, when they come, often arrive before I knew I would need them, at times feeling - maybe - even miraculous.

This does not make the Christian lawyer less practical or effective. It makes him more practical, more effective, by laying down his will and allowing God to call the shots. It makes him more free (John 8:36).

Free to tell the client the truth. Free to resist panic. Free to refuse contempt. Free to pursue settlement without cowardice. Free to litigate without vanity. Free to win without pride. Free to lose without despair.

That freedom is not natural. It is bought by the blood of Jesus and formed in us by the Spirit of God. It is the fruit of a life lived in the cycle of received gift and offered obedience; what Scripture calls walking in the Spirit, what the prophets called Jubilee (Lev. 25:10; Isa. 61:1–3; Luke 4:18–19). It is the lawyer’s life made part of a larger composition: neither random nor self‑built, neither Babel nor Rube Goldberg, but a small movement in an incredible symphony already underway.

How then should we practice?

So how then should the Christian lawyer practice?

Not passively. Not timidly. Not sentimentally. Not by the wrath of man. Not by procedural cruelty. Not by intimidation justified as zeal. Not by whatever seems right in his own eyes.

But by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God (Deut. 8:3; Matt. 4:4).

With truth. With prayer. With faith. With integrity. With sound judgment. With authority submitted to Christ. With the power of the Holy Spirit.

The Christian lawyer does not become less of a lawyer. He becomes a lawyer whose weapons, motives, and methods have come under the lordship of Christ.

That is how we practice on holy ground.

That is how we fight without the flesh.

That is how the lawyer becomes, by grace, a weapon of peace.

— — —

A final word. The real question beneath this essay is not whether lawyers care about justice. Many do, and many always have. The deeper question is whose voice finally defines justice.

I cannot escape the old indictment: “In those days there was no king in Israel: every man did that which was right in his own eyes” (Judg. 21:25). It is just as true and just as living a temptation today as it has ever been. We are a profession with very little appetite for kings, and very great confidence in our own eyes.

Christian lawyers are called to something harder, and better. Not self‑defined righteousness, but obedience to every word that proceeds from the mouth of God. That is daily bread. That is holy ground. That is the path of the peacemaker.

Turris fortis mihi Deus — the Lord is my strong tower (Prov. 18:10). Into that tower the righteous run, and are safe. From that tower they go out, and do not lose themselves in the work.

— — —

Michael C. Kelley is a Florida attorney and shareholder at Lawson Huck Gonzalez, PLLC. He writes at Turris Fortis on faith, justice, and the practice of law as peacemaking — not the kind that confuses peace with avoidance, but the kind that contends for it with the weapons God supplies. Turris fortis mihi Deus — Prov. 18:10.

This is the second essay in a continuing series, best read in order — Start Here has the full map.