Hello Soldier,

The Christian Soldier: Intro

I became a Christian before I became a soldier.
The order matters. It took me most of my adult life to understand why.

December 1999. The Bryan Police Department arrested me and two other guys I still called friends from high school. I was in my second year of college, at my second school, my first year at Blinn. Seventeen hours in a cell. I could not go anywhere. It was miserable.

What I remember is not the fear. It is the other two. They seemed clueless. Unbothered. Like this was just a thing that happened to guys like us, and would keep happening, and that everything was fine. It was NOT WORKING OUT. I said to myself, "We're in ****ing jail."

I sat there and knew, internally, that something had to change. I had no plan for changing it.

Then a guy from Ghana named Richard made friends with me. Warm personality. Infectious smile. He invited me to a Bible study. One day I actually showed up.

They opened to the story where Jesus tells the fishermen, “Come, follow me, and I will make you fishers of men.”

I thought, who is this Jesus guy?

From that moment on, I was hooked.

What changed, and what I only learned to name later

My life changed fast, and not gently. I stopped partying. I rejected pornography. I stopped using recreational drugs. God began empowering me to clean up my life.

I want to be precise about what that was, because most people stop the story there. That is the first half of repentance. Turning away from sin.

The second half is the part that gets skipped. The Greek word is metanoia, and it includes turning toward Christ in faith. So I leaned full bore into Jesus. I read the Bible and Matthew Henry’s commentary. I prayed five minutes at a time, because five minutes was what I had. I watched the televangelists of the day: Rod Parsley, Creflo Dollar, Charles Stanley.

Then I went looking for a church. I started at a family-oriented Catholic parish in College Station. I switched to the student-heavy one and asked the priest my questions about Mary. He gave me the standard answers. Eventually I found Grace Bible Church and knew I was in the right place.

The uniform came after all of that.

Two oaths, one life

I am writing a book called The Christian Soldier. Here is the problem it addresses.

Ask what a Christian is, and the answer includes allegiance. A Christian is someone who recognizes their sin, puts their faith in Jesus Christ as personal Lord and Savior, and follows Him all the days of their life.

Ask what a soldier is, and the answer includes allegiance, too. A soldier signs up to serve in the United States Army and defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic. Said plainly, you sign your life away to serve the ends of the United States government.

So the Christian soldier carries two total claims on one life. One belongs to the Holy Trinity and to advancing the interests of the Kingdom of God. The other belongs to a government that can send him to die in a place he cannot pronounce.

Most people resolve that tension by quietly pretending one of the two claims is smaller than it actually is.

I do not think you have to.

The title is not mine

D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones wrote The Christian Soldier, an exposition of Ephesians 6:10-20. Thomas Watson, one of the Puritan heavy hitters, published The Christian Soldier, or Heaven Taken by Storm. Paul gave them both the material. The armor of God is one of his most martial passages, and you know it will be included.

But Lloyd-Jones and Watson were using soldiering as a metaphor for the Christian life. I'm standing on the shoulders of giants, but military strategy and tactics require approaching from different angles. George Marshall will be included, too.

I want to write about what it actually means to serve in the Army as a Christian. Real formations. Real orders. Real discipline. Real soldiers standing in front of you at 0600 who do not care what you believe until the day they suddenly, urgently do.

There is a prior question underneath all of it, and I am not going to answer it in an introduction: is it right, is it ethical, for a Christian to serve in the military at all? That deserves a serious answer instead of a bumper sticker. It is coming.

What I will give you now

Paul Tillich spent a career on the difference between fear and anxiety. Fear has an object. You can name it, face it, and fight it. Anxiety has no object, which is exactly why it eats people alive. The soldier's problem, and the Christian's problem, is that the choices that matter most get made under both at the same time.
You probably haven't heard of Tillich, but, like many philosophers. They write at the top of the mountain, that trickles down through the clouds of the academy, and eventually a wide dispersion of the initial seed blooms into trees of action, activity, and growth. That's called the flow of ideas. Ideas shape behavior. Start at the top.

Service. Courage. Faith. Love. Professionalism. Those words are cheap in a slide deck and expensive in a hallway at 0600.

Which brings me to the only question this book is really built on, and the one I would ask you to sit with until the next issue.

What is required of you?

Exponential Advisors LLC is an investment adviser registered with the Texas State Securities Board. Registration with any securities authority does not imply a certain level of skill or training.