Posted September 29, 2026
I saw a review yesterday of journalist Gabe Bullard’s new book, Against Convenience: Embracing Friction in an Age of Endless Ease, so I downloaded the book to my Kindle. It turns out, this is just what he doesn’t want me to do.
Bullard notes some of the ways we choose convenience over community:
He encourages us to choose “friction,” to do things that create and/or require community even though they are less convenient. After reading his book, I have the sense that I am supposed to agree. But the truth is that I have all the community I want, and I don’t want to take the risk that is the cost of more.
My response to Bullard’s book illustrates the fact that it is one thing to say the right thing, but another to do the right thing at a sacrificial cost. This fact is more relevant to our nation and to our souls than we might think.
Americans famously declared in 1776 that “all men are created equal.” This assertion was highly useful to our quest to rid ourselves of Britain’s monarchy, but that quest was motivated less by philosophy and more by politics and economics. The more onerous England’s taxation became as the British sought to pay for their recent war with France, the more committed to democracy we became.
Thomas Jefferson authored our famous statement on human equality and publicly opposed slavery, but he also enslaved more than six hundred people over the course of his life and fathered at least six children with one of them. In her book This Land Is Your Land, Yale historian Beverly Gage writes that by the end of George Washington’s second term as president, there were about three times as many people enslaved at Mount Vernon as in the entire city of Philadelphia.
Northern states decried slavery as slaves became less important to their industrial economy; southern states defended it as slaves became more important to their agrarian economy.
I am thinking of church members who agreed with my stance on abortion until their daughters became pregnant and abortion became a convenient “solution” for them. It’s easy to disagree with euthanasia until our elderly parents are suffering and infirm.
Evangelicals rightly say that lost people need to hear the gospel. But if we must risk rejection to share it, we discover if we truly believe what we say. Pastors tell their people that pornography is immoral. But if they think they can view it in private without public consequences, they discover if they truly believe what they preach.
I face this daily tension between public morality and personal immorality just as you do. Ordination and seminary degrees do not confer sacrificial integrity.
The opposite can be true, in fact.
If you assume Christlike character on my part because of my profession, I might agree that I must be right with God since I spend my days serving God. Any private thoughts, attitudes, or actions to the contrary are therefore less consequential, or so I can be tempted to believe.
But oncologists sometimes get cancer, cardiologists sometimes get heart disease, and marriage counselors sometimes get divorced. What we know does not automatically become what we do.
In the same way, reading this Daily Article can be dangerous for your soul if it inoculates you with enough spirituality to keep you from getting the “real thing.” That’s because the only true path to sacrificial integrity is a personal relationship with the living Lord Jesus by which he does in us what none of us can do for ourselves.
This was Paul’s experience. After admitting that “I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing” (Romans 7:19), he asked, “Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?” (v. 24).
Then came the victorious answer: “Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!” (v. 25).
Jesus, the only sinless person who ever walked our planet, is ready right now to manifest his character in our lives (Romans 8:29). The One who defeated every temptation he faced will empower us to defeat every temptation we face (Hebrews 4:15–16; 1 Corinthians 10:13).
The key is walking with Jesus out of desperate reliance on Jesus. Not just for a few minutes in the morning and a few hours on Sunday, but all through every day. Talking with him about every challenge and opportunity we face; bringing every temptation immediately to him for his help; asking him to continue his earthly ministry through us as his “body” (1 Corinthians 12:27) and trusting that he will.
Such dependence on our Creator is how he intended us to live in his creation. We were never supposed to separate the spiritual from the secular, segregating God to Sunday and our “religious” activities. As Eugene Peterson noted, “Self-made and self-sufficient people live in a fantasy world, empty of the reality of God.”
Charles Spurgeon was therefore right: “Whether we like it or not, asking is the rule of the kingdom.” As Dwight Moody observed,
“Real true faith is man’s weakness leaning on God’s strength.”
Will you choose such faith today?
“To pray is to accept that we are, and always will be, wholly dependent on God for everything.” —Tim Keller
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