Why young men are joining a more “muscular” church

Imagine you’re the public relations director for a denomination whose churches require members to:

• Attend services that can last five hours.
• Stand the entire time.
• Fast, sometimes for up to forty days.
• Consider other forms of physical discipline, including cold plunges.
• Declare and defend biblical morality regarding marriage and sexuality.

Now consider that this denomination is growing so quickly that some congregations have tripled in size over recent years, the number of converts has increased 80 percent since 2019, and new churches are being started across the US to accommodate all the growth.

Welcome to the Orthodox church, a denomination that traces its origins to the apostles and has remained consistent in its creeds and practices for millennia. One Orthodox priest explains the recent surge of interest in his denomination, especially among young men: “Orthodoxy is challenging in the physical sense too, and it requires a lot . . . they live in a world where it’s instant gratification and just take what you want, what you feel you want, what you think you need. Orthodoxy is the opposite of that; it’s denying yourself.”

A religion professor who studies Orthodoxy identifies it as part of a phenomenon called “muscular Christianity.” A priest in Salt Lake City agrees: “It’s a tougher form of Christianity . . . I think a lot of men have embraced that and realized this is a form of self-denial with real results that actually brings peace and joy to the heart like nothing else.”

Had it rained before the Flood?

I was reading in Genesis 7 recently and asked myself a question I’d not considered before.

The Lord instructed Noah to “take with you seven pairs of all clean animals, the male and his mate, and a pair of the animals that are not clean, the male and his mate” (v. 2). They would spend the next several months shut up together on a floating barge. Noah would have to feed these animals across this time.

I wondered: Were there lions on the ark? If so, how did Noah (and other creatures a carnivore might like to eat) cohabit with them?

I have no idea if lions were actually there, or if the lions we know today descended from cats on the ark, as some suggest. While cats would obviously be less threatening, my question involves more than a single species.

Some theologians also speculate that it had never rained before the Great Flood related to Noah’s ark (Genesis 7:11–12). We are told in Genesis 2 that prior to the creation of Adam, “the LORD God had not caused it to rain on the land, and there was no man to work the ground, and a mist was going up from the land and was watering the whole face of the ground” (vv. 5–6).

Hebrews 11:7 also reports: “Noah, being warned by God concerning events as yet unseen, in reverent fear constructed an ark for the saving of his household.” The “events as yet unseen” obviously included the Flood to come, but perhaps the phrase includes rain itself.

Whatever we think about lions and rain, we must admit that Noah was remarkably faithful and holistically obedient to the Lord. Scripture says of him, “Noah was a righteous man, blameless in his generation. Noah walked with God” (Genesis 6:9). When given instructions regarding the ark and its preparations, “he did all that God commanded him” (v. 22).

If Warren Buffett gave you investment advice

I tell Noah’s story to highlight this fact: We were made for obedience to our Maker. Our Father created us with a “God-shaped emptiness,” and one way we fill it is by knowing and doing the will of our Lord. As the Orthodox priest noted, this is “a form of self-denial with real results that actually brings peace and joy to the heart like nothing else.”

Why did God make us this way? Is he a tyrant who demands our fealty for egotistical reasons?

Actually, the opposite is the case, for two reasons.

One: God’s will is “perfect” (Romans 12:2).

His will is an expression of omniscience far beyond human intelligence (Isaiah 55:8–9). As a result, obeying his will is always best for us.

If Warren Buffett agreed to be your investment advisor, would you take his advice? If Scottie Scheffler were to give you a golf lesson, would you do as he suggested? After my spinal fusion surgery two years ago, my surgeon gave me very strict, nonnegotiable directions regarding my recovery and physical therapy. Rather than chafing at his “tyranny,” I was grateful for his compassion.

Two: Obedience to God’s will positions us to experience his transforming grace.

Our God is “holy, holy, holy” (Isaiah 6:3; Revelation 4:8). In Hebrew literature, emphasis is made through repetition. We might say he is “holy, holier, holiest,” but the three-fold repetition makes the same point. In other words, God is the holiest being that can exist.

As a result, to experience his presence, we must seek to be holy by virtue of our obedience. Our Father knows we cannot ever do so perfectly (Romans 3:23), which is one reason his Holy Spirit dwells within us (2 Corinthians 3:16) and works to make us more like Jesus (Romans 8:29).

But we must cooperate. As we work, he works. When we seek obedience, the Lord will empower our feeble will and frail efforts as he draws into his transforming presence.

And there we experience his best and share his best with our fallen world.

“There are only two kinds of people in the end”

Oswald Chambers observed:

God nowhere tells us to give up things for the sake of giving them up. He tells us to give them up for the sake of the only thing worth having, viz., life with himself. It is a question of loosening the bands that hinder the life, and immediately those bands are loosened by identification with the death of Jesus, we enter into a relationship with God whereby we can sacrifice our lives to him.

I’m reminded of C. S. Lewis’s observation in The Great Divorce:

“There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, ‘Thy will be done,’ and those to whom God says, in the end, ‘Thy will be done.’”

Which will you be today?