The "Little laws" of New Year's | Theocast

The Pressure of New Year’s Resolutions and Little “l” Laws

Hi, this is Justin, and today on Theocast, we are talking about the little L laws of new year season. This is the time of year when we all make resolutions. We feel all kinds of pressure. There are a thousand different things that we need to be doing or abstaining from, and if we're honest, most of us fail in the things that we resolve to do, and it doesn't even take that long before we don't even live up to our own expectations for ourselves in the new year.

What do we do with all of this and what do we make of it from a reformed perspective, we talk about that in the regular episode and then the members episode, we talk about two kingdom theology and how that comes to bear on this conversation, and we also talk about the importance of maintaining proper distinctions between Bible and common sense.

We hope the conversations are helpful to you. Stay tuned. Welcome to Theocast, encouraging weary pilgrims to rest in Christ. Conversations about the Christian life from a reformed perspective. Our hosts today are John Moffitt, pastor of Grace Reformed Church in Spring Hill, Tennessee, Jimmy Buehler, pastor of Price Community Church in Willmar, Minnesota, and myself, Justin Perdue, pastor of Covenant Baptist Church in Asheville, North Carolina.

Brethren, we have met to podcast yet again in the year 2020. Here we are in the early weeks of this new year. How are things going for the two of you? John, I guess maybe I'm slightly more interested in what's going on with you than Jimmy, because you have the cultural update today.

He does.

Yeah, I do. Yeah, no, it's beginning of the year, which means it's just 1 ,001 projects, as all of you probably are experiencing.

I have no idea what you're talking about.

Yeah, I decided to make it 1 ,002 projects, so I'm finishing off my basement into three sections. We're doing a playroom, my office, which I'm sitting in right now. If you're watching the video, it's a basement with brick walls, so I try to make it somewhat nice, and then a bathroom.

So, yeah, I mean, it's church planning, Theocast, finishing off basements. It's all fun and games, so I go to bed giggling every night. It's a blast.

Doesn't everybody?

Yeah, right.

No, but it's good. I'm excited. We just kicked off our new men's and women's Bible study. We're going to be doing Chad Bird's book, Upside-Down Spirituality. We just finished Sinclair Ferguson's book, which was By Grace Alone, and we'll have that actually for you available.

For those of you who want the study that I wrote for that, it's a seven-chapter study, and we'll make that available on Theocast here soon, so stay tuned for that, but yeah, just kind of back into it.

That's the big event that's going on in my life right now, so I'm looking forward to kind of seeing how the basement will progress, and hopefully one day in the next few months, I'll have an actual nice office to record in and not be looking at ducking and stuff like that, so.

Stuff like that.

Really suffering for Jesus at the moment.

Seriously. The three of us are knocking the rust off a little bit, getting our podcast groove back. This is the first time all three of us have been behind the mics together in a few weeks' time now. So we hope that we have a really good conversation today.

Jimmy, why don't you give the people just a little bit of a taste about what we're going to be chopping it up on today?

Well, and welcome, Jimmy Buehler, back to the mic. It's been since 2019 since we've seen him, so.

The people have been clamoring, and now they get what they want. That's right.

That's what we like to tell ourselves. So gentlemen, as you well know, and as the listener who has perhaps perused our previous episodes well knows, one of the things we like to discuss here on Theocast is the distinction between law and gospel, and we don't need to get into that particularly right now because that is not really what we're going to talk about, but rather what we want to talk about is what we would call the little l laws.

And so let me back up and kind of explain what I mean by that. So when we say law and gospel, specifically when we say law, what we are talking about, capital L law, big L law, is God's moral law, or what we would see in the 10 commandments as, or see in scripture as the 10 commandments.

And so when we talk about distinguishing the law and the gospel, we're talking about distinguishing that from what God has declared over us in Christ freely by grace through faith. However, one of the things that we as people, because we are inherently bent toward a legal scheme, one of the things that we can do as people is we can jump on what we would call little l laws, and this is language that we're borrowing from other brothers and sisters that we have seen.

And by these little l laws, we mean things that aren't necessarily required of us. They may be helpful. They may serve a purpose for a season, but they're not necessarily required of us in scripture. And we thought it's pertinent to discuss this because these are things that we see heavily in the new year.

And so we create all of these little l laws for ourselves in the new year, whether it be eating better or exercising more or doing this behavior more or not doing this behavior as much, and not necessarily that these are bad things and they can be good things and they can serve a purpose.

But I think what we want to discuss is perhaps maybe the pitfall or the dangers of living in that realm in ways that can perhaps become unhealthy. And so I don't know if one of you kind of wants to help flesh this out a little bit more and jump on what we mean by little l laws.

For the last few months, I've been super fascinated by social psychology and why people do what they do, why humans make decisions that they make, the pressures. The Seculosity, probably David Zoll's book, is what got me interested in looking at culture a little bit more.

And as a pastor, it's helpful to understand why people in your particular country, so the United States for me, why do they buy what they buy and why do they look the way they look and talk the way they talk and the pressures that they feel.

A good example of this would be, it's a conversation we were having before we got started, Jimmy brought this up to give him credit. You ever been through the kind of the mommy blogger phase where you have these women who write about their parenting or about their housekeeping or about whatever it is, but they kind of present this expectation of successful moms and successful wives look like this.

And they create this level of, unless you're doing it this way, unless you're educating your kids in this way, unless you're feeding your children in this way, unless you're exercising in this way, unless you're cleaning your home in this way, you are not a successful mom and you are giving your children and your husband less than what you should be giving them.

And I would say that is right there, a pressure that is put upon us by the culture and has nothing to do with your spirituality, but it's easy to mesh those two together.

So I do CrossFit. True confession. Dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun. There it is.

Humble, humble brag.

I, I, I rarely bring it up because I know that, man.

I will tell you this right now. I mean, if you meet Justin in person, you would never know he does CrossFit. I mean, people kind of laugh when he says that. They're like, you do?

That's right. Um, so at the, at the box, right. And for those out there who are like, what in the world is he talking about? CrossFit gyms are referred to as boxes. I didn't come up with it. I'm just using the language, but at the box right now, it's new year.

And so there are a number of things going on. And I would imagine that of all the people that go to the gym where I'd go, hardly any of them are Christians, right? So these are just people doing these things because they think it's a good thing to do.

And there's, you know, dry January going on. Like people who generally consume quite a bit of alcohol are like, yep. Not drinking for the month of January. I'm a layoff of it. There's nutrition challenges, right?

Like whether it's paleo or keto or. You know, macros or whatever you want to do. There's nutrition challenges. There's like a rowing challenge, like meters and calories. You can log on the rower over the course of the month of January.

I mean, it is just all over the place and it is, it's hilarious because I like CrossFit, I like fitness and all, but the general perception, even around the CrossFit gym amongst, I mean, I'm just going to say it, like people that do not care about God, it is like self-justification and self-righteousness every place.

And it's like, well, you know, if you're serious about fitness and if you're serious about nutrition and if you're like really want to take care of your body and all these kinds of things, or if you want to just get better at CrossFit, then you need to be doing all this stuff.

Like that's the implicit vibe that's just permeating the whole joint right now. And I go in and I just do my thing and work out and they laugh because like the pastor's the guy that's not doing dry January or whatever.

And I'm like, look, I'm really not interested in Nazarite vows. You know, it's just, it's just not where I'm at. And so like this is everywhere. I mean, John, you were talking about the mommy blogosphere.

I'm talking about CrossFit. We can talk about the church in a minute, but the point, the point is it's all over the place.

Well, I, you know, unfortunately I made the mistake. I told myself I'd never do this. But, you know, I told somebody I was doing keto and, uh, and so I was out to lunch with them and I happened to have chips and queso I'm like, oh boy, you know, that's too many carbs.

And if you're on keto. So he literally asked me, he goes, yeah, I was talking to my wife and I realized she's doing keto too. And I told her, let's get you some chips and queso. And she's like, well, that's not keto.

I said, well, John, John, John did it yesterday. Well, he's not following keto.

That's right.

He's not following the laws of keto.

He's a sinner.

So when it comes to keto, apparently I'm an antinomian when it comes to the laws of keto.

You absolutely are.

Yeah, that's right. So I, I think what we need to point out here is kind of perhaps the obvious that one, don't hear what we're not saying. And what we're not saying is you are just a fantastic legal scheme of a person if you are trying to lose weight or become healthier, or perhaps become more disciplined in a specific area of your life, that is not at all what we were, we are saying you know, even the apostle Paul says, you know, physical training has value and it is of some value, you know that it is, it is good.

You know, it is good to eat healthy foods, to exercise, to do these things. However, I think because of our natural propensity towards living a legal lifestyle, and what I mean by that is seeking to justify ourselves, our behaviors, our thoughts, our actions, our words with how we live our life, our behavior, so on and so forth.

Because we are so prone to that, what we can do is we operate from this platform that if others are not living like I am, or they are not carrying out their life in ways that I am, we begin to look down our nose upon them and say, well, you know, they're not living as healthy as I am and you know, don't you realize that your body is a temple and why don't you, why don't you take care of your body like, like me, and it's like, well, I can't even begin to address that at this moment, but I mean, let's just, let's just perhaps quit poking fun at, you know, eating, eating butter and candy, but more so look at kind of the, the ways that we as Christians kind of lay it on thick, particularly in January.

And so we're all on Twitter and fairly active on, on Twitter. And something that I noticed on Twitter was for like a solid three or four days after New Year's, it was like everybody was getting on Twitter, at least the people that, you know, I saw on my timeline.

And it was, oh, this is the Bible reading plan that I'm choosing to do.

And sure.

And this is the Bible reading plan that I'm choosing to do. And the interesting thing to me was, well, that's great. Um, well, one, why in the world do you need to tell the world that that is what you're doing?

Number two, it's, it's just like, that is a good thing, but, but guys, let me just throw this out to you. How do we, I guess, from a, a reform perspective or a kind of status forward perspective is the language we like to use that, uh, Christ has won our salvation once and for all based upon his perfect life, death and resurrection, not our own merits.

So, so how do we view these things without being so prone to the shame and the guilt and the self-judgmentalism that we put upon ourselves when we look and we're, we're, what is it? It's almost February and perhaps we're already behind in our Bible reading.

What, what do we, how do we view these things? What would you guys say to that person that's perhaps struggling with that at this moment?

I might want to make a couple of observations that are higher level, I guess, maybe before answering that question, but I don't know if that's useful for us. I mean, John, do you want to answer that question directly first?

I'm happy to do it.

Yeah, no, go ahead. I'll, I'll respond to whatever you say.

Sure. So one anecdotal piece, and then a couple of observations. I was having a conversation with some of the guys at, at my church recently, just because New Year and everything else. And Jimmy, I saw some of the things, same things that you did on Twitter.

And we were all talking about the reality of, you know, the Bible reading plans and the, honestly, the yokes that people put on themselves this time of year. And it's, it's like, you know, there are all kinds of things that are good.

Like we've said, I mean, a Bible reading plan is good. It is certainly not bad. It's not necessary though, you know? And so reading our Bibles is a good thing. Uh, but do we have to use a Bible reading plan in order to do that?

Absolutely not. It's a wisdom call. And so what a lot of people end up doing is they, they place themselves under a yoke or they, they set a goal that is just unattainable. It's not realistic given their bandwidth and their limitations and everything else.

And so you're basically walking into something that you're going to be behind on day 10, you're going to be despairing on day 24, and then by day 33, you'll have given up, you know, because it's, it's just so over your head, you know?

So one thing we discuss even with respect to the Bible reading piece is, you know, less can be more and let's think about this in digestible pieces and segments of time, and that's just a common sense kind of wisdom thing, you know, Martin Luther, even about prayer.

I mean, he said that prayer should be brief and frequent, you know, like that's a very liberating thought for so many people, like instead of resolving to resolve to pray more is great, but you might not want to start with half an hour, you know, in the morning, you might want to just think, Hey, well, maybe 60 seconds could be good and then move from there.

So those are just some common sense kind of pastoral things that we talk about in my context. I've got a couple of bigger observations that I want to make, but I'm gonna throw it over to you, John, for a minute.

Yeah, I would bounce off. I mean, those probably are the two resolutions that most people go to that are spiritual. It would either be giving more money, more time in prayer, more time in the word, or the third one would be memorization of scripture.

Scripture memorization. And to be clear, again, none of those things are bad.

Yeah.

Wonderful.

Well, I'm going to throw a wrench in there and say they can be, and most often they are.

We're meaning in and of themselves, they're not inherently bad.

No, but, uh, you know, just like a, just like a hammer in and of itself, isn't bad, but can be used to crush someone's hand, you know, or a gun in and of itself. And yeah, so I'm going to probably say something that, you know, I'm going to say this, I'm going to say, I'm not trying to be a shock jock and I'm definitely want you to hear me through.

So you're new to Theocast. Let me finish my argumentation here. There is a theory out there that you, the process of having a conversation with God praying, or number two, the process of your eyes reading over the text does something spiritually for you.

And it's almost mystical where as long, I may not be understanding what I'm reading or even worse, I'm misunderstanding what I'm reading. And then I think it's actually benefiting me. I think is dangerous because what happens is people put so much hope, energy, and time and dedication and resolution into spending more time in prayer and more time in Bible reading, and when they're actually finished, they don't have a better understanding of truth and they aren't having an increase in faith, which is what prayer should do, but they're having a better grasp on their self righteousness, and I would say their faith becomes weak because of they're not seeing answer to prayer.

So the struggle I have with these little laws that the Bible actually doesn't set up, so to use Jimmy's language, is that if not done correctly, you could actually cause more damage. And from my experience, I mean, I'm walking through somebody right now that's having that circumstance.

He's growing up in a large, massive Baptist church and he comes to Bible study for the first time and his mind's being blown because he's like, I've never read or understand the Bible that way before, as an example.

I know you guys are probably ready to jump all over that, so go for it.

The Danger of Legalism in Spiritual Disciplines

I think those are helpful thoughts, John, and Justin, I think I know the observation, the high-level observation you're going to make, and I want to make the same one, but I'm going to yield to you because I love you, and so I'm going to let you have it.

But before I...

Hey, that's how to look smart, because even if he doesn't have that observation, now everybody's going to think he had it. I like that, that's good.

Yeah, but I think where the really large danger looms in this is that, particularly when it comes to our own spirituality, is that when we all of a sudden take the driver's seat of defining what it means to be spiritual and what it means to not be spiritual, we do one of two things.

We either lay down these little L laws and we accomplish them, and we think more highly of ourselves than we ought. Case in point, and this is a hypothetical situation, would be in 2020, I would like to read the Bible cover to cover, front to back, and so great, not a bad thing.

I mean, do it if that's really what you want to do, and we read it cover to cover, and then we get to the end of the year, and if our posture is, well, I read the Bible cover to cover, and now I'm just that much more spiritual, well, you just kind of gave yourself a law, you set the bar, and then you jumped over it, so I'm not really sure what was accomplished there other than you read the word of God cover to cover, which, okay, great.

Or the other thing, what can happen on the opposite side of that spectrum is this, is we say, I am going to read the Bible cover to cover in the year 2020, and then before we know it, it's July, and we're like barely getting through the first five books.

And so now all of a sudden we're so behind. We've got all these, I mean, literal unchecked boxes on our bookmarks in our Bible, and all of a sudden this heaping of self-shame and guilt and self-judgmentalism is brought upon because we begin to ask the questions, well, if I really love the Lord, would I not have followed through on this commitment, would I not have done this more, would I not have, you know, well, God's people pray, and I didn't pray as much as I wanted to pray, so what does that say of me?

And really what these little L laws tend to do is they just kind of rip out, they either rip out our assurance from underneath our feet, where it's not the Spirit of God doing that, it's ourselves and our legal bent, or what it does is it props up the self-righteous man, the old man that lives within.

So, Justin, I'm going to pass the ball to you because I'm pretty sure I know what you're going to say, but I'm just really excited about it.

We're excited to announce that we have a new free e-book available at our website called Faith vs. Faithfulness, A Primer on Rest, and we the hosts put this together to explain the difference between emphasizing one's faith in Christ versus emphasizing one's faithfulness to Christ, and how one leads to rest and how the other often to a lack of assurance.

And you can get this at theocast .org slash primer, and if you've been encouraged by what you've been hearing at Theocast, we'd ask you to help partner with us. You can do that by joining our Total Access membership, that's our monthly membership that gives you access to all of our material that we've produced over the last four years, or simply by donating to our ministry, and you can do that by going to our website, theocast .org.

We hope that you enjoy the rest of the conversation.

I think you're exactly right in what you just said, that these little laws and the way that we do this tends to produce either self-righteousness or despair. I think you're exactly right about that. There are two big observations I want to make.

I mean, the first one, this is just something that I've noticed, and it's prevalent. When I look around at the resolutions that Christians make, hardly, if ever, do any of the resolutions made have anything to do with deeper participation in the corporate life of the church.

It's just an interesting thing, and it's all very personal stuff. So it's really good. I mean, we want to be clear. It's really good to personally resolve to read the Bible. It's really good to personally resolve to pray and those kinds of things.

And something is off if our resolutions as believers do not include deeper participation in the corporate life of the church, because those are things that God has promised to bless in his word in a unique way.

When the church gathers, God shows up to minister to his people. And that is not true in the same way when we sit down privately to read or pray. Not that those times aren't important or significant. Of course they can be.

But the gathered church is a thing in the New Testament. And so one of the things that we would want to exhort people to as pastors, I know, is, hey, resolutions are fine, but let's just make good ones and reasonable ones and wise ones.

And so they should, if we're going to make them as Christians, they should include the church.

Yeah. To add to that, Justin, I would say as just a pure, simple illustration, I'm going to resolve to do such and such, which then I'll spend less money, which then will give me more money to do whatever it is, give to the church or whatever charity it is.

But that's not a bad resolution. It's a great resolution. But just to, I think, to even needle down even to more what you guys are saying, the church makes resolutions to mostly deal with sin issues in their lives.

So I struggle with such and such sin. Therefore, I'm going to resolve to do this and this so that I'll overcome and refrain from doing that sin or I lack in this area of fruit of spirit. So I'm going to do such and such to resolve, to make sure.

And the answer to that, both of those, is that it's not more personal effort you need, but to embrace the means that God's already given you to establish either the overcoming of that sin or to establish that fruit in your life.

And this is going back to the illustration of prayer and Bible reading. Is that if you aren't using prayer the way it's designed to be used, and if you aren't reading the Bible the way it's supposed to be read, then you're actually causing damage.

You aren't actually being—you're going to be digressing. You're not going to be increasing, because it's going to create either, one, a false sense of hope because you're putting it in the actions of what you're doing, or number two, you're going to come up with wrong doctrine, which is even more worse than a false sense of hope.

So just to give you a great example of this is that if you are struggling with sin, the church is designed to be there for one, to confront you, to comfort you, and then third, to support you as you progress through that and as you struggle against that sin.

So anyways, just to kind of pile on to what you guys were saying.

Yeah, and if I may add to that, let me just say this, and I'll just spill my own guts by saying the worst sinner, the worst self-righteous person, the worst, most prone to heresy person that I know lives with inside Jimmy Buehler, because left to myself trying to, quote unquote, resolve myself to be more spiritual, I'll either fail and fall into this state of self-misery and doubt, or I'll, quote unquote, succeed and become this self-righteous jerk that begins to lay on these little L laws on everybody else.

Because what I begin to do is I begin to say, well, this worked for me. You know, this is what I'm hitching my wagon to, and y 'all better get on with me because this is what it's like to be godly, or C, as John has said, I begin reading scripture in such a way and at such a rate, but I'm misreading it.

I'm confusing things or I'm not reading it with the faithful men and brothers and sisters who have gone before me throughout history, who have rightly divided the word of truth. And so I'm just going to my closet, reading it by myself, doing my own thing, disregarding what others have said about this, and then I just begin to spill my guts here, there, and everywhere.

And then it's just, well, I may or may not just be spitting out heresy. And so I just want to be so clear that what you're saying, Justin, I believe is right on, is you said exactly what I thought you were going to say, which is great, that we shouldn't be divorcing our quote-unquote resolved lifestyle or our resolutions from the greater gathering of the church, which I think is so important.

Justin Perdue. And the means of grace, right? I mean, that's the big thing, which John already touched on, and you have too. I don't want to cut you off, man. You good?

Justin Perdue. No, no, I'm good.

You go.

So on Twitter, toward the end of the year, I know I put up something to this effect, and I saw some other guys and gals putting up things to this effect. As 2019 was drawing to a close, many were acknowledging all of the failure that happened in the calendar year of 2019 in the lives of Christians.

And it's important that we do that, right? So all those resolutions that we made for 2019, on many of those, if not all of them, we failed to meet the bar that we had set for ourselves. And so some people were a little bit punchy in the way they said it.

You know, here's just condolences to everyone who has failed in all of their resolutions for 2019, and as we're rolling into 2020, more failure awaits. And as punchy and maybe absurd as that may sound to some people, it's actually healthy for us to talk in these terms, to remind ourselves that we will fail to meet the terms of all of our own resolutions.

And so we're driven back, even the little L laws, right? So obviously the big L law in scripture, the first use of it is to drive us away and outside of ourselves to the Savior. But even the little L laws that we sometimes shackle ourselves to, they also stand in judgment over us because we can't even meet that standard.

And so it's not bad that we realize this and we realize that, yeah, last year was full of failure, this year will be full of failure, and just like last year, Christ will be enough for me this year. His righteousness and His merit in my place and all those things.

And then here's the great part about that is that if we realize that and we own that in the church, then we can begin to make resolutions that can be helpful because we can make resolutions and do them and pursue them in freedom, not in this kind of bondage sort of way.

It's like, oh good, I can work at that and I can do that and I can choose to do that good thing that maybe isn't necessary, but it's good. And I can pursue it in freedom and enjoy.

Yeah.

So do you guys, who's the most famous person in Christian history to be known for resolutions?

Jonathan Edwards, baby.

Yeah, man.

Have you guys ever read Jonathan Edwards' resolutions?

It's been a while.

Yeah.

Well, there's one of them in there that says that he resolves to be the most spiritual person that he knows at any time, which I think is funny because in contrast to Jimmy, because Jimmy just said, I'm the most wicked person I know at any time in the room.

And of course, Jonathan Edwards wrote that when he was very young, but the ambition behind it, which is, the other thing you're going to notice in those resolutions is that you'll never find anything about Christ or the gospel in there, which is interesting.

So not to, I mean, my name is Jonathan Edwards, not to pick on him, but I am.

Going to pick on him. And the thing is, not only did Jimmy say what he just did a minute ago, but if we read scripture, the apostle Paul, obviously at multiple points, talks about his own sin and how he's the chief of sinners, he's the foremost of sinners, how he doesn't trust in any of the righteousness or the godliness or whatever that is in his life.

He's looking to the righteousness that's been provided only through faith in Christ. And so I think whenever we start, I know we talk about this stuff all the time, but whenever we start doing this measuring game, it's just bad.

And it's bad whether we're talking about our spirituality or even sometimes when we're talking about diet and, well, I'm going to abstain from more stuff than you, and so I'm more disciplined than you.

It's just no good. Jimmy, jump in, man.

Yeah, well, what I was going to say, there's a member at our church who once wisely pointed out that at the end of a sermon, to not have a something to do has been so freeing for her because she said for the majority of her life, that has kind of been the cycle is that the end of the sermon was not Christ, but rather what she could be doing for Christ, and she had begun to see in the past couple of years that when sermons had ended like that, she would constantly come back the next Sunday, either really high on her own horse that she had somehow accomplished that which the preacher called her to, or really low and dismal and almost wanting to reject the table, if you will, because she felt so unworthy.

And it can be so cumbersome. And again, I know we mentioned this earlier, John mentioned earlier, when we think about mamas, young mamas in particular, and I don't know how many of that demographic listen to our podcast, but I just want to say to the young moms out there, we as men, we are married to young mamas, and we recognize the difficulty that you face and the pressure that you face, that you cannot escape any platform of social media without feeling some sort of mom guilt, that you're going to see one of your friends or an acquaintance who is, quote unquote, momming better than you, or they're really feeling the season of Advent, or they're really doing this really well, and you're not doing it so well.

And so I think we would just want to say as your brothers in Christ, that it's okay, none of that matters, please do not.

It's not real either, half of it.

It's not, exactly. It's not real. It's kind of the cliche, and teaching high school students, I say this to them all the time, that social media is the great comparison of what I feel on the inside to what I see on others' outsides, and all it does is it brings crushing shame and guilt to you.

So I think one of you wanted to jump in there, so I'll be glad to pass it.

I'm going to jump in really quick and then kick it over to John. Because of, like you said, Jimmy, I know you're married to a young mom. I am too, and I see what my wife does and what my wife battles.

And I see her struggle to try to find time to get a shower in the course of a day. And that's when I can get very defensive, not only of my own wife, but of women in her position, when all of this nonsense in the evangelical world starts getting spewed this time of year about all the rigors and the disciplines and everything.

And if you take Christianity seriously, and if you're really passionate about Jesus, then you're going to be reading this and doing this and keeping up with this, and that kind of thing crushes people, like our wives and like many of the women in our church.