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May 13, 2026

This edition is sponsored by Aspen Group

Hello, fellow wayfarers … Why teaching the same biblical book twice in 20 years changed me … How our misunderstanding of George Washington shows us our misunderstanding of America … What when you’re born tells you about how you’ll react to a new technology … The reader who originally suggested a "Desert Island Playlist" feature asks me to create an "only Amy Grant" Desert Island Playlist … This is this week’s Moore to the Point.

What I Learned Teaching the Same Book Twice—20 Years Apart

After finishing a year teaching through the Book of Hebrews at my church, I stumbled upon some of my old notes I hadn’t seen in almost two decades—from the last time I spent a year teaching through that book, back in 2007. I was struck by how radically different the two sets of notes were, almost as though they were by two completely different people. And then I realized that was exactly what had happened. The Bible is still the same, but I am different. That realization shook me into thinking about how the Bible actually works.

In looking through those 2007 notes, I realized I disagree with almost nothing there. I was convinced then, and still am, that the Book of Hebrews is a brilliant key to interpreting the rest of the Bible. I am still convinced that the book gives us a brilliant argument for the superiority of Christ—over the angels, over the Devil, over Moses, over the priesthood, over the sacrificial system, over the tabernacle, over our own temptations.

But what I noticed in those old notes is not so much what I was arguing for as what I was arguing against. I had recognized the call to avoid drifting backward, but I saw that mostly in terms of two primary problems: doctrinal error and moral laxity.

Reading through my notes now, I can see that what I thought would hold people back was lacking the right theological concepts about who Christ is and what he did and being pulled toward the temptations of the world. Even more fundamentally, I seem to have concluded that the chief problem the book (and I teaching it) was facing was too much confidence and complacency in the hearer—presuming on the grace of God, for instance, without seeing the warnings of a God who is a consuming fire.

I still agree with all that, of course. Hebrews offers sophisticated theological reflection and warns repeatedly that it is "a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God" (10:31, ESV throughout). That’s all there. What I missed, though, is the major problem the book addresses, which is not too much confidence but too little. I was basically right that the people this book addressed wanted to slide backward, but what I couldn’t see was why.

The original hearers of this book were disillusioned and exhausted. Their pull backward—to the old systems they once knew—was not primarily about their cognitive worldview or their desire to sin with more impunity. It was about the fact that they were shaken. They were disappointed by grace because it didn’t seem to "work." Everything around them seemed shaken, and what they wanted was stability—something that could last. That sense of disillusionment was earned, by all the evidence they could see, and the writer of Hebrews doesn’t deny that.

As the writer of Hebrews notes, the Bible tells us that God has crowned humanity with glory and honor, placing everything under their feet (Heb. 2:5–8). But look around: Even the things that seem to be in our control don’t stay that way. Everything is shaking—and we’re pulled toward hopelessness, leaving behind what’s not working to try to find what will.

For some people, that means an endless search for novelty. These are the people who move from one spiritual or psychological or ideological fad to another, always thinking that this time they will get the results they want. For others, losing hope means retreating to nostalgia—trying to find what worked in the past to re-anchor there.

But ultimately, those paths to stability also shake apart.

When I first taught through Hebrews, I understood doctrine and discipline. I did not understand disappointment and disillusionment. I understood that I was to be on a pilgrimage homeward, but I’d never felt what it was like to be homeless. I had a stable religious community—the same one into which I’d been born and raised. I knew all our past history, I was in many rooms planning our present reality, and I spent my days training our future leaders. I thoroughly belonged, and I knew I always would. My life would move from a Southern Baptist childhood through a Southern Baptist adulthood to a Southern Baptist heaven at the other end of it all.

That was true not only of the church but also of the world. No matter how much I talked about culture wars, they too were a source of stability. We knew who the two "sides" were, and though the issues might change a little, those categories would always hold.

And then they didn’t.

The entire world seemed to undergo tremor after tremor. What was conservative in 2007 was considered "radical left" a decade later—and vice versa. Some of the people whom I thought had wrong ideas turned out to have a better commitment to some of the basics—human decency, moral character, the importance of a democratic constitutional republic, and so on. And some of those whom I thought voted the way they did because of their Christian worldview turned out, it seems, to have held the faith because it supported who they voted for, so they were able to exchange their worldview like currency at an international airport.

Every institution has gone through shock. Virtually every denomination has been rent apart by larger global cultural forces—but also by internet trolls and those who want to pacify them. In almost every category—from political parties to congregations to family dinner tables—old alliances are broken, new ones struggling to be born. And lots of people respond to all this with either a search for something new or a retreat to the way things used to be.

What was different this time around in teaching Hebrews is that the first time I thought I was standing in the place of the book’s author—warning people to "hold fast to the hope set before us" (6:18). This time, I also taught as one being addressed—one who, like Abraham, was going out "not knowing where he was going" (11:8). I was too much inside the camp to imagine what it would be like to even start to "go to him outside the camp and bear the reproach he endured," precisely because I knew cognitively but not experientially that "here we have no lasting city, but we seek the city that is to come" (13:13–14). I knew the force of the argument for the superiority of Melchizedek over Levi, but I passed right over the radical nature of the last sentence of the book: "Grace be with all of you" (v. 25).

This time it hit me harder that the major theme in this book is the contrast between the visible and the invisible: "Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen" (11:1). And it always has been. Hebrews’ list of fathers and mothers of the faith was about not heroic virtue but a different way of perception. The things we can see are not the things that are most real, and the things that are most real are not those we can see. The visible was patterned after the invisible, not the other way around.

Now as then, the disillusioned should not conclude that faith doesn’t "work" because we don’t see stability and belonging. It never worked that way! All those commended for their faith "died in faith, not having received the things promised, but having seen them and greeted them from afar, and having acknowledged that they were strangers and exiles on the earth" (v. 13).

Twenty years ago, I could talk about how God must remove all the things that are shaken "in order that the things that cannot be shaken may remain" (12:27), but I had never been shaken. And I couldn’t then imagine what it would be like to be the person on the verge of giving up because somehow he expected faith to be predictable and stabilizing, without ever knowing that around him is a cloud of witnesses who all experienced the same thing—that we all share the same "founder and perfecter of our faith" (v. 2). There must have been people who did feel that back in 2007, but they were like angels of whom I was unaware.

The Bible didn’t change. I did. And that makes me think about how the Bible speaks to us. It doesn’t conform to our expectations. Instead the Word calls us and shapes us, guiding us through the whirl of a wayfaring providence to find us on the other side with yet more words, those that are new every morning.

Maybe, if God permits, I will teach through Hebrews again 20 years from now. I don’t want to know everything that will be shaken between now and then. What I know is that the voice calling from the Bible will still be speaking, and only on the other side of everything in flux will I really see that "Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever" (13:8).

Does Our Country Have Daddy Issues?

Maybe you grew up in the kind of home where your mother took you to church on Sunday mornings while your Dad slept in or waited outside in the car for church to be over, listening to a ball game. Many who came from that sort of background say, "He was a really good dad, just not much of a spiritual role model." This week I was wondering: Is the same true about the man we call the father of America?

Almost every personality in American life and history evokes a polarized response. Very few political leaders—living or dead—have virtually unanimous approval. But George Washington does. Everybody loves Washington. We revere him as the general who led us to independence. We respect him as the first president of the new republic.

And if you’ve spent any time in a certain kind of evangelical Sunday school room, you’ve probably seen the painting of George Washington kneeling in the snow at Valley Forge, praying. But it never happened. Or at least, there’s no evidence it did, and it would have been somewhat out of character for the man who essentially never used the words Jesus Christ in any letter or public statement, the Anglican church member who attended once a month or so.

But in this 250th anniversary year of the United States, does that matter?

On the podcast this week, I talked with H. W. Brands, one of the most prolific historians in the country. He is a professor at the University of Texas and has written definitive books on everyone from Benjamin Franklin to Franklin Delano Roosevelt. His new book is American Patriarch: The Life of George Washington.

When we hear the word patriarch, most of us Christians or Jews think immediately of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob—the patriarchs of the Bible. The Bible didn’t whitewash these flawed, complicated men. Why can’t we have the same sort of nuanced honesty about Washington?

This conversation turned out to be about much more than history. We talked about why charisma matters, how moral authority is gained and deployed, and what it means to cultivate courage. In this one figure, we see someone who spent his entire life trying to live up to an ideal of character—and then, when he had more power than anyone in the new republic, walked away. That was not because he was humble but because he was finished.

Brands and I talked about why Washington’s faith looked nothing like what many Christians today want it to have looked like, how his views on slavery were shaped—and constrained—by a system far more complicated than we usually acknowledge, what it means that the father of our country had no biological children of his own, and why Brands thinks of Washington as a kind of Moses figure—leading the people to the Promised Land but belonging to a world that was already passing away.

We also talked about what’s missing now. In an era when trust in institutions is collapsing and character in leadership seems almost quaint, Brands makes the case that what set Washington apart was an inner directedness—a vision of who he wanted to be that was not subject to the whims of the crowd. I asked him whether someone like Washington could survive in politics today. His answer is direct and not especially comforting.

If you’re interested in what it looks like when authority is earned rather than performed—and whether we’d even recognize that kind of leader if we saw one—you will like this conversation.

You can listen here, or you can watch on YouTube here.

A Hitchhiker’s Three Rules for How We React to New Technologies

Reading Nigel Toon’s new book How AI Thinks, I laughed when I came across a chapter epigraph quoting Douglas Adams, most famous for his Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, on a set of rules he made up to describe our reactions to technologies. Here they are:

"Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
"Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
"Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is agai