The Wolf by the Ears

Thomas Jefferson wrote the words that changed the world. All men are created equal. Then he walked back into a house run by people he owned.

That is the paradox at the heart of America’s birth, and on our nation’s 250th birthday, I do not think we should look away from it. I think we should look straight at it.

Jefferson knew what he was. He once described slavery like a man holding a wild animal: “We have the wolf by the ears, and we can neither hold him nor safely let him go.” Justice on one scale. Self-preservation on the other. He felt the weight of both, and he chose wrong, and he knew it.

I have been ruminating over a talk by Dr. Paul Kengor of Grove City College, where my own son now studies. It is titled America at 250: The Founders & Slavery with Dr. Paul Kengor. Dr. Kengor makes a case that most of us were never taught. The founders were not blind to the evil of slavery. They named it. Washington called it a practice he longed to see abolished. Madison called it “the most oppressive dominion ever exercised by man over man.” Every leading founder, the historians tell us, acknowledged that slavery was wrong and that the enslaved were fully human.

I believe him, but I want to ask a question Dr. Kengor did not ask.

If they knew, why didn’t they stop?

The Wisdom That Was Not Enough

The founders were brilliant men. Kengor is right to praise their brains as much as their brawn. They read deeply. They reasoned carefully. They built a republic on human wisdom sharpened to a fine edge.

However, human wisdom, by itself, was not enough to free a single soul.

The Apostle Paul saw this clearly. “We do, however, speak a message of wisdom among the mature, but not the wisdom of this age or of the rulers of this age, who are coming to nothing” (1 Corinthians 2:6). The rulers of this age. The brilliant men. Paul says their wisdom, apart from the Spirit, comes to nothing. “None of the rulers of this age understood it, for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory” (1 Corinthians 2:8).

That is a sobering word. You can be the smartest man in the room and still miss the thing that matters most. You can write “all men are created equal” and not yet see the man in chains outside your window. Knowledge is not the same as sight, and sight, real sight, comes only one way.

The Sixth Sense

Here is where the parable becomes personal.

You know the story of the two wolves. Two natures war inside every one of us. One is fed by the world. One is fed by God. We choose, every single day, which one we feed.

For a long time, I spoke of the good wolf as our better self. I do not think that goes far enough anymore. The good wolf is not merely our better instincts. The good wolf is the Holy Spirit, alive in the believer, warring against the flesh.

At birth, you received five senses to perceive the physical world. The old saint F.B. Meyer called the Spirit a kind of sixth sense, the God-given capacity to perceive what the eye cannot. “The spirit is our capacity for God,” Meyer wrote. “When it is brought to life, we move on to new levels of experience; we touch reality.”

The Apostle Paul says the same in 1 Corinthians. “However, as it is written: ‘What no eye has seen, what no ear has heard, and what no human mind has conceived’ (Isaiah 64:4), the things God has prepared for those who love him, these are the things God has revealed to us by his Spirit. The Spirit searches all things, even the deep things of God” (1 Corinthians 2:9-10). Not reasoned out. Revealed. “What we have received is not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, so that we may understand what God has freely given us” (1 Corinthians 2:12).

The founders had wisdom. What everyone needs is the Spirit. Wisdom can name a sin. Only the Spirit can break its grip.

The Gap Between Knowing and Doing

So, return to the question. If they knew, why didn’t they stop?

Because knowing was never enough. A man can hold the right conviction in his mind and still feed the wrong wolf with his hands. Jefferson proposed law after law against the slave trade, and one of them failed by a single vote. Yet still, when the sun came up, the fields were worked by people he owned. The conviction lived in his head, but it did not reach his life.

That is not an eighteenth-century problem. That is my problem, and it may be yours. “I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do, this I keep on doing” (Romans 7:19). Paul was not describing a Virginia planter. He was describing himself. He was describing every one of us who has known the right thing and done the other thing anyway.

We flatter ourselves that our own goodness would have been louder. Maybe, but I have known exactly what love required in my own home and chosen comfort instead. I have known the good wolf’s name and fed the other one because it was easier that day. We are all given a Helper that we do not always heed.

The Seed They Planted

Now hear the grace, because grace and truth belong together. Grace is a granted period, time officially allowed to come into compliance, an extension offered as a special favor. That is what God gave the founders. Time.

The founders failed to live the words they wrote, but they wrote them, and the words outlived their failure.

“All men are created equal.” That sentence became the ground under every fight that followed. Frederick Douglass stood on it. Abraham Lincoln stood on it. At Gettysburg, Lincoln reached back “four score and seven years,” all the way to 1776, and dated the nation not to a king but to that promise. He said he would rather die than surrender it, and he did.

The seed was planted by men who could not yet make it grow. That is how God so often works. He plants truth in imperfect soil and waits. The founders sowed a principle they could not honor. Lincoln’s generation reaped it in blood, more than six hundred thousand dead, one life lost for every six set free. Do not let anyone tell you the price was small, and do not let anyone tell you the seed was worthless because the hands that planted it were stained.

The Question for Your House

So here is where I turn from history to your kitchen table.

You have inherited things you did not choose. A family line. A set of habits. Wounds handed down from people who loved you imperfectly. You did not plant them, but you are the one standing in the field now.

You cannot free your household by willpower or wisdom alone. The founders proved that. What you need is the sixth sense, the Spirit of God, brought to life in you, quick to discern good from evil, the way your eyes discern light from dark. You need the good wolf fed until He fills the house.

So which wolf are you feeding this week? Not in theory. This week. In the words you speak to your spouse. In the ten minutes you either give your children or scroll away. In the sin you keep confessing but will not surrender.

Deuteronomy gave the charge long before Jefferson lifted a pen. “These commandments that I give you today are to be on your hearts. Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up.” (Deuteronomy 6:6-7). Not perfectly. Faithfully. Start where you stand and let the Spirit do what your wisdom cannot.

If you want a place to begin, I would love to put The Family Wins Devotional in your hands as a gift. Fifteen minutes a day in the Word, together, asking the Spirit to open eyes that human wisdom leaves shut. That is how the good wolf gets fed. That is how a house gets built.

America is 250 years old. The founders left us a promise they could not keep. Lincoln’s generation fulfilled it with bloodshed. Let’s be the generation that respects the promise, honors the sacrifice, and carries both forward for another 250 years, not by our own strength, but by His Spirit, starting under our own roofs.

Happy 250th birthday, America. Let’s celebrate and feed the Good Wolf together, in unity. We have America as a gift from God to reconcile to Himself and each other. “All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation” (2 Corinthians 5:18).

Feed the Good Wolf.