Ellie Garcia was one of the nineteen children murdered at Robb Elementary School in Texas last week. She died about a week before her tenth birthday.

Her father shared a photo he took in January of his daughter praying. He wrote, “I love you baby girl and I love the way you pray.” He also posted a TikTok video she made recently, where she said, “Hey, guys. I just wanted to give you a little catch-up. Jesus. He died for us. So when we die, we’ll be up there with him. In my room, I have three pictures of him.”

Now Ellie sees her Savior face to face.

In stark contrast, a ten-year-old boy in Florida was arrested Saturday evening for threatening in a text message to attempt a mass shooting. Detectives interviewed the boy and developed probable cause for his arrest.

In such troubled times, how can we raise more Ellie Garcias?

Let’s consider this story as a cultural parable: a severe lifeguard shortage is delaying public pool openings from coast to coast. Philadelphia has enough lifeguards to open only eighteen of the city’s sixty-five available outdoor pools. Chicago needs hundreds more lifeguards. The shortage will likely cause a large decline in swim lessons, which could lead to increased drownings.

Clearly, we need spiritual lifeguards to keep us from spiritual drowning. As we will see today, we have a binary choice to make. The wrong choice imprisons us, while the right choice liberates us.

Option one: “We belong to ourselves”

Alan Noble is one of the most perceptive evangelical cultural analysts in America. He has written for the Atlantic, Vox, Christianity Today, the Gospel Coalition, and First Things.

His latest book, You Are Not Your Own: Belonging to God in an Inhuman World, has received praise from Tim Keller, Michael Wear, Karen Swallow Prior, and Tish Harrison Warren among other leading evangelical voices. I had not seen his explanation of our cultural moment anywhere else and found it both biblical and empowering.

Noble views our root problem as “a particular understanding of what it means to be human: we are each our own, we belong to ourselves.” He quotes the influential claim of John Rawls that “freedom consists in pursuing our own conception of the good life while respecting the rights of others to do the same.”

However, Noble warns that if “we belong to ourselves,” there can be no common good, only “billions of private goods.” Since we have no objective means of validating ourselves with reference to objective truth or morality, we are constantly chasing the validation of others.

Some have given up, according to Noble, choosing an “alternative space to pursue existential justification” through social media and video games. Some choose marijuana, psychiatric medications, or other drugs and substances. But the prevalence of “deaths of despair” (suicides, alcohol-related deaths, and drug overdoses) and the epidemic of depression driven by feelings of inadequacy illustrate the pain we cannot resolve through self-reliance.

Option two: “You are not your own”

Noble then pivots to the good news: you are not your own. As Paul noted, “Your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God” (1 Corinthians 6:19). As a result, “You are not your own, for you were bought with a price” (vv. 19–20).

When we submit our lives to the One who made us and knows what is best for us, we experience a significance we can find nowhere else from no one else. Jesus sets us free from bondage to sin and self, the constant quest to be enough and to do enough.

There is now no image for us to maintain because we were made in the image of God. There is no identity for us to discover or create because our identity is found in Jesus’ love for us.

Noble notes that we are then free to live in light of God’s existence, goodness, and providence, trusting that he will make of us what is for his highest glory and our greatest good. We serve others because we wish to serve them whether they serve us or not. We have no need to justify ourselves before others because we are justified by the God of the universe.

We extend grace to others because we have received grace. And we do our best in the power of God’s Spirit and trust the results to him. Noble quotes T. S. Eliot, “For us there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.”

(For more, please see my reflections on Dr. Noble’s brilliant book in my personal blog.)

The key to spiritual dynamite

Paul said of Jesus, “Him we proclaim, warning everyone and teaching everyone with all wisdom, that we may present everyone mature in Christ. For this I toil, struggling with all his energy that he powerfully works within me” (Colossians 1:28–29).

Struggling translates a Greek word meaning to “fight, compete, do everything possible.” While Paul is giving his very best to help people know Christ, he is not alone in this fight: with all his energy that he powerfully works within me could be translated “with all the supernatural energy of Christ that is right now powerfully [dunamis, from which we get “dynamite”] energizing me.”

A saying often attributed to St. Ignatius or St. Augustine captures Paul’s testimony: “I will work as if everything depended on me; I will pray as if everything depended on God.” Said more briefly: as I work, God works. As Oswald Chambers noted, “When we choose deliberately to obey him, then he will tax the remotest star and the last grain of sand to assist us.”

Consequently, here’s the simple but transforming question: To whom will you belong today?

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President Biden and First Lady Jill Biden visited Uvalde, Texas, yesterday to place flowers at a memorial for the nineteen children and two teachers who were murdered at Robb Elementary School last Tuesday. In related news, the Justice Department announced it will review law enforcement’s response to the mass shooting.

This review comes amid reports that some police officers apparently violated protocol by choosing not to risk themselves as the shooter was murdering children and teachers. The timing of this news was noteworthy, coming the day before America honors the men and women who died across our nation’s history to protect our freedoms.

Our greatest president’s greatest speech

On Memorial Day, these heroes are often described as giving “the last full measure of devotion.”

Our nation’s greatest president authored these words as part of what many consider his greatest speech, brief remarks we call the “Gettysburg Address.” Abraham Lincoln spoke on November 19, 1863, four and a half months after one of the fiercest battles of the Civil War took place in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. The conflict led to more than fifty-one thousand casualties. My wife and I visited the battlefield several years ago and were deeply moved by the memory of what happened on its now-hallowed ground.

On that Thursday, the president called those assembled “to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they here gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

In the words of his speech, let us consider:

The strength of their courage 

As “these honored dead,” those who fell at Gettysburg typified the expression, “All gave some; some gave all.” Like them, more than one million Americans have made the courageous decision to risk themselves and then to die on our behalf.

The depth of their sacrifice 

By giving the “full” measure of their devotion, they paid the ultimate price to serve our nation. Each person we remember on this Memorial Day did the same for you and for me.

The cause for which they died 

President Lincoln memorialized those who died in the cause of “government of the people, by the people, for the people.” Their sacrifice reminds us that freedom is not free, that the price of our freedom has been paid in the blood of our military heroes and the grief of those who loved them.

“Politics is not going to cure that”

Now it is our turn to “highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain.” It falls to us to do all we can so that “this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom” and that our democracy “shall not perish from the earth.”

Such “resolve” takes many forms: military, economic, political, and cultural among them. But most of all, it requires a spiritual commitment mirroring the commitment we remember today.

The historian Christopher Dawson defined culture as “an accumulated capital of knowledge and a community of folkways into which the individual has to be initiated.” To help initiate Americans into such a healthy “community,” Heritage Foundation President Kevin D. Roberts recently emphasized the role of faith and civic virtue in the American democratic experiment.

Roberts pointed to Alexis de Tocqueville, the nineteenth-century French scholar who affirmed the virtues inherent in American democracy. However, Roberts noted that de Tocqueville “never could have imagined that we would stop going to church, that we would have each year, as Pew Research Center documents in its studies of religiosity, fewer and fewer Americans who even claim a religious affiliation.”

According to Roberts, “Politics is not going to cure that. The handful of schools who inculcate a serious faith in their students can help cure it. But ultimately, you and I will fix that as evangelists living out the Gospel Commission.”

“Righteousness exalts a nation”

God’s word states, “Righteousness exalts a nation, but sin is a reproach to any people” (Proverbs 14:34). The Hebrew word translated righteousness refers to “things done justly, blameless behavior.” Such action exalts (“advances, elevates”) a nation.

This is a fascinating declaration since the Hebrew word translated nation (goy) typically refers not to Israel but to the Gentiles. It thus applies to every person on earth, whatever our ethnicity or background (cf. Galatians 3:28).

By contrast, “sin is a reproach to any people.” Reproach is the opposite of exalts—it refers to “shame” or “disgrace.” This is true of “any” people anywhere. As one commentator notes, “A nation’s political health depends to a great degree on the moral integrity of its people.” And as President George Washington observed, “reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.”

“Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lᴏʀᴅ”

On this Memorial Day, how can you and I “take increased devotion to that cause for which they here gave the last full measure of devotion”?

By taking “increased devotion” to the One whose Spirit and word empower us to be a nation worth such sacrifice.

Would you ask God to help you choose and emulate the “righteousness” that “exalts a nation”?

Would you ask his Spirit to help you stand against the “sin” that “is a reproach to any people”?

Would you honor the sacrificial courage we remember today by the sacrificial submission of your life to your Lord on behalf of your nation (Romans 12:1–2)?

“Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lᴏʀᴅ” (Psalm 33:12). Let’s do all we can to help our nation be so “blessed” to the glory of God.

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