It is estimated that global cybercrime will reach $10.5 trillion by 2025, an amount larger than every economy in the world except the US and China.

For example, Los Angeles Unified, the second-largest school district in the US with more than 640,000 students enrolled, was hit with a ransomware attack a few days ago. Such attacks on schools and universities are on the rise.

Cybersecurity threats are also escalating against the US water industry, the US healthcare system, and industrial infrastructure, including electricity grids, oil and gas facilities, and manufacturing plants. Uber Technologies said yesterday that it was investigating a cybersecurity incident that forced the company to shut down several internal communications and engineering systems.

The Justice Department announced charges Wednesday against three Iranian individuals alleged to have launched cyberattacks against the US and global critical infrastructure. The individuals are still at large and believed to be in Iran. The State Department is offering a $10 million reward for information on the three men. The Treasury Department has also announced sanctions against ten individuals and two groups affiliated with the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, alleging that they have carried out ransomware and other cyberattacks since at least 2020.

You and I cannot see a cyberattack, only its effects. Therein lies my point today.

What our daily mantra should be

As I noted yesterday, “secret” sins are one of Satan’s most effective strategies for hindering the advance of God’s kingdom through God’s people. Sins known only to God nonetheless grieve the Spirit who alone can empower us to do eternal good.

Human words cannot transform human hearts. The Spirit alone possesses the power to bring us to repentance and faith (John 16:8) and to make fallen people into God’s new creation (2 Corinthians 5:17). It is only the Spirit working through us that can do anything of eternal significance.

Consequently, our daily mantra should be, “Not by might, nor by power, but by my Spirit, says the Lᴏʀᴅ of hosts” (Zechariah 4:6).

However, Satan knows this fact as well and counters the work of God’s Spirit through God’s people by leveraging three cultural factors:

• We are consumers who have been taught by brilliant marketers that the world exists to meet our needs.
• We are fallen people plagued by the “will to power” to be our own god (Genesis 3:5).
• Unlike the Catholic concept of penance for sins in this lifetime and purgatory for them in the afterlife, evangelical Christians focus on the immediacy of God’s forgiveness and grace when we confess our sins to him (1 John 1:9).

Satan plays to all three factors with “secret” sins we think we can choose to commit and then confess without consequences. No one but God knows, we say to ourselves, and he forgets all he forgives (Isaiah 43:25). But we should remember that Satan is at war with a God he cannot attack directly (Revelation 12:9), so he attacks his children to hurt their Father (1 Peter 5:8). The best way to hurt me is to hurt my kids or my grandkids.

As a result, Satan’s evil character will not allow him to offer us a temptation that does not produce greater evil than the good it promises. There are no exceptions to this rule.

Three facts about “secret” sins

Here are three facts about “secret sins” we should remember:

One: “Secret” sins lead to debilitating “secret” guilt.

When God forgives the sins we confess, Satan then afflicts us with guilt for committing the very sins he tempted us to commit. Guilt is also how we punish ourselves for failures God has forgiven and forgotten. It can be debilitating in our lives, leading to a second factor:

Two: “Secret” sins cause us to feel we are unusable by God.

When we are engaged in “secret” sins, even after we confess them, Satan whispers to us that we are hypocrites if we share our faith with others when we are not fully living up to it ourselves. This is one of the main reasons more Christians do not share the gospel more publicly and persistently. It affects our willingness to serve the kingdom in other ways and steals our joy when we do.

Three: “Secret” sins, even when confessed, cost us reward in heaven.

The Bible promises, “Blessed is the man who remains steadfast under trial, for when he has stood the test he will receive the crown of life, which God has promised to those who love him” (James 1:12). Every time we fail the test we forfeit such a crown. God forgives the sins we confess, but the rewards we would have gained for refusing to commit them are lost forever.

What’s the solution?

Satan knows the sins we can resist in our strength and doesn’t waste his time with them. So, we can know that every temptation we face is one we cannot defeat without God’s help. However, part of Satan’s tempting strategy is to entice us to fight temptation in our ability. He drags us into the quicksand an inch at a time until we are in too far to escape.

What is the answer, then, to “secret” sins?

Developing the reflex of responding to temptation immediately by taking it to God in prayer. Such a reflex positions us to be “filled” and empowered by the Spirit in ways we would not have experienced otherwise (Ephesians 5:18). It draws us closer to our holy Father and makes us more usable in his kingdom.

As the Renaissance scholar Erasmus noted, Satan hates nothing so much as for his evil to be used for good.

Here’s the bottom line: Yielding to temptation makes us weaker. Refusing temptation makes us stronger.

Will you be stronger when this day is done than you were when it began?

Denison Forum

The news broke this morning that freight rail companies and unions representing tens of thousands of workers have reached a tentative agreement to avoid a strike. Following all-night talks, the agreement now heads to union members for a ratification vote. While the vote is tallied, workers have agreed that they will not strike.

Why is this news important to you?

The Association of American Railroads trade group estimated that a strike would cost the American economy $2 billion a day. According to the Associated Press, railroads carry cars, coal, chemicals, grain, imported goods, and other products and raw materials throughout the country. A shutdown, even if brief, would delay critical shipments and ripple across the economy.

A railroad strike would cancel commuter trains, cause energy prices to rise, disrupt deliveries of produce, meat, and building supplies, and add to inflation.

I do not know a single person who works for a railroad. Before this morning’s news broke, I had no idea that a railroad strike could impact me personally. But problems we cannot see are no less real. Because we don’t know they exist, we don’t respond to them until they grow so large we must.

As a result, our unseen problems can be the most dangerous problems we face.

Therein lies my point today.

“No creature is hidden from his sight”

Yesterday we discussed the power of private character. Today let’s focus on the alternative: the peril of private sins.

This topic became urgent to me when I read a verse in the book of Ezekiel that arrested my attention. The Lord said of his sinful people: “I have been broken over their whoring heart that has departed from me and over their eyes that go whoring after their idols” (Ezekiel 6:9a). We cannot see the “heart” of another person or the images their eyes see, but God can: “No creature is hidden from his sight, but all are naked and exposed to the eyes of him to whom we must give account” (Hebrews 4:13). His heart is “broken” by such “secret” sins.

In addition, what God sees in a sinner’s heart and mind will eventually be known to the sinner: “They will be loathsome in their own sight for the evils that they have committed, for all their abominations” (Ezekiel 6:9b). And to the rest of us: “Nothing is hidden that will not be made manifest, nor is anything secret that will not be known and come to light” (Luke 8:17).

As a result, our response to sin should always be immediate and courageous: “Thus says the Lord Gᴏᴅ: ‘Clap your hands and stamp your foot and say, Alas, because of all the evil abominations of the house of Israel, for they shall fall by the sword, by famine, and by pestilence” (Ezekiel 6:11).

Why Satan loves to use “secret” sins

Let’s take a moment to unmask Satan’s strategy behind “secret” sins.

Our enemy wants us to commit adultery, but if we refuse, he tempts us to view pornography with the justification that at least we are not committing adultery. If we will not view pornography, he tempts us with lustful thoughts with the justification that at least we are not viewing pornography. This is because he knows that, as Jesus warned us, “Everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart” (Matthew 5:28).

If you are thinking that this paragraph does not apply to you, beware: Satan will then tempt you with other sins with the justification that at least you are not committing sexual sins.

Why does the devil love to use “secret” sins? Because he knows what they do to us: “desire when it has conceived gives birth to sin, and sin when it is fully grown brings forth death” (James 1:15). And he knows that any sins, known by others or not, are enough to grieve and “quench” the Holy Spirit’s work in and through our lives in the world (Ephesians 4:30; 1 Thessalonians 5:19).

Oswald Chambers warned: “Even the very smallest thing that we allow in our lives that is not under the control of the Holy Spirit is completely sufficient to account for spiritual confusion” and “can only be conquered through obedience.”

“Secret” sins and public religion

Paradoxically, Satan is pleased when we commit “secret” sins while maintaining public religiosity. When we persist in private sin while preaching sermons, leading Bible studies, attending worship services, or writing or reading articles like this one, we are tempted to believe that our “private” sins are not harming others or we could not be engaged in such religious activity.

However, because the Holy Spirit cannot fully use a person who persists in unconfessed sin (cf. Romans 8:6–8), our spiritual activities have little effect on the larger culture. Our salt “has lost its taste” and our light is “under a basket” (Matthew 5:13, 15). Neither can then fulfill their transforming purpose in the world.

The lure and prevalence of “secret” sin help explain the truth of A. W. Tozer’s observation: “If the Holy Spirit was withdrawn from the church today, 95 percent of what we do would go on and no one would know the difference. If the Holy Spirit had been withdrawn from the New Testament church, 95 percent of what they did would stop, and everybody would know the difference.”

How strong are your batteries?

You have perhaps had this experience: the power goes out at night, so you hunt for a flashlight. You find one in a drawer and turn it on, but the bulb barely glows in the dark. You replace the batteries, but the flashlight still doesn’t work. It turns out that the contacts between the flashlight and the batteries are corroded with disuse.

Only when you clean out the corrosion and replace the batteries can the flashlight dispel the darkness it was created to defeat.

When the batteries are weak, the darkness is strong. When the batteries are strong, the darkness is weak.

Is the spiritual darkness of our day growing weaker or stronger?

Denison Forum

Kenneth W. Starr, a former federal judge and US Solicitor General, died yesterday of complications from surgery. Judge Starr served as president and chancellor of Baylor University and dean of the Pepperdine Law School. He argued thirty-six cases before the US Supreme Court and served as Independent Counsel for five investigations, including Whitewater and President Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky.

I was honored to be his friend. We met when he came to his post at Baylor in 2010 and stayed in contact across the years after. He was gracious to appear on our Denison Forum podcast; I was privileged to interview him for an Institute for Global Engagement event earlier this year at Dallas Baptist University.

He combined brilliance, sincerity, transparency, and humility like few people I have ever known. In my review of his 2021 book, Religious Liberty in Crisis: Exercising Your Faith in an Age of Uncertainty, I called his work “an indispensable guide to defending religious freedom.”

Judge Starr is survived by his beloved and brilliant wife, Alice Mendell Starr, to whom he was married for fifty-two years, and by their three children and their families.

“The rock on which modern Britain was built”

History is often made by exceptional people like Judge Ken Starr whose names are known to history.

More than twenty-six thousand people filed by Queen Elizabeth II’s coffin in Scotland yesterday before it was transported to London and spent last night in Buckingham Palace. A procession including King Charles III, Prince William, and Prince Harry will accompany it today as it travels to Westminster Hall, where it will lie in state for four days ahead of the queen’s state funeral on Monday, September 19.

The reason for such a national outpouring of grief and affection is simple: as Prime Minister Liz Truss observed, the queen was “the rock on which modern Britain was built.”

In other historic news, Francis Scott Key penned the words of “The Star-Spangled Banner” on this day in 1814. Two years earlier on this day, Napoleon entered Moscow in an invasion that eventually failed and cost his army more than four hundred thousand men.

On a happier note, after Albert Pujols hit his 697^th home run, moving into sole possession of fourth place on Major League Baseball’s all-time home runs list, he gifted the ball to the fan who caught it and then signed two more balls for him. In other sports news, baseball great Ty Cobb’s dentures are going for more than $11,000 at auction. Neither Pujols’s home run ball nor Ty Cobb’s false teeth would be valuable if they were not associated with such historic figures.

However, history can also be made by people whose names are unknown to history.

The US has reached the historic milestone of one million organ transplants; each donor, while unknown to the rest of us, changed a life with their gift. A political leader in Idaho protested a planned “Drag Kids” performance including children “from ages 11–18,” leading to the event’s eventual cancelation. And a nurse saved a three-month-old baby who had stopped breathing during a flight Thursday night. Whatever the little girl grows up to accomplish will be an extension of that nurse’s compassion.

Traits that “were once considered normal”

Watching news coverage of the death of the queen, syndicated columnist Cal Thomas observed: “One is struck by the adjectives used by reporters, commentators and people interviewed outside Balmoral Castle and Buckingham Palace: sense of duty, virtue, integrity, service. What astounds is that these and other character traits the late Queen exhibited were once considered normal and worthy of being taught to children, but today stand in sharp contrast to what is modeled and accepted.”

He added: “One commentator said the Queen’s death is the symbolic end of the Greatest Generation. We pay lip service to the virtues that made the greatest generation great, but no longer promote them, whether it is in public schools, social media, or the wider culture.”

What is being said of Queen Elizabeth II could be said of Judge Ken Starr as well: both were known publicly for traits that were deeply personal. Their exemplary character and humble commitment to service were grounded in the sincerity and depth of their faith.

The queen was tutored as a young girl by the Archbishop of Canterbury and called Jesus “an inspiration and an anchor in my life.” Ken Starr’s father was a Congregationalist minister; the judge’s often-repeated maxim, “Truth is a bedrock concept in morality and law,” came from his family and from his personal faith.

“The true measure of all our actions”

C. S. Lewis noted, “Integrity is doing the right thing even when no one is watching.” But here’s the point: someone is watching.

Our names may never be known to history like the queen and the judge, but someone knows us as personally as anyone knew them. The people we live, work, and go to school with matter just as much to eternity as a queen or a federal judge. If they do not follow Jesus, we are the only Bible they may read, the only sermon they may hear.

This makes our personal integrity, or lack thereof, a kingdom issue of eternal consequence.

We cannot expect the people who know us to follow Christ if we do not. We cannot expect them to embrace biblical morality if they do not see that morality reflected in our daily decisions and actions.

By contrast, if Jesus is our first love, the passion of our hearts and king of our days, those who know us will see him in us and be drawn to his transforming love.

The writer of Hebrews encouraged his readers to “remember your leaders, those who spoke to you the word of God. Consider the outcome of their way of life, and imitate their faith” (Hebrews 13:7). When those who know you “consider the outcome” of your way of life, will they want to imitate your faith?

Queen Elizabeth II said, “The true measure of all our actions is how long the good in them lasts.”

What will be the “true measure” of your actions today?

Denison Forum